I fully agree it’s worth waiting for the thrill of the deal.

The Chia crash was great. A local dude I found on Facebook marketplace bought a whole array worth of drives and never got around to even opening the packages for them.

I scored a great local deal on a PC last week, but unfortunately the only weak point of it is the 16GB of DDR5. So I guess for a while I’ll just be chilling with equal amounts of GPU and system memory. Luckily I’m not a gamer and rarely limited by the system memory.

I think a bubble pop may be closer than people think. Several F500 company CEOs are at least calling it a bubble now, but admittedly still 100% on board the AI hype train.

This comment is both higher effort and funnier than the post itself.

An old PC is the best NAS, even if you choose a dedicated NAS box it’s likely that you’ll want to “upgrade” to an old PC in a year or two. Unlike premade NAS boxes you have full control over the software and can modify the hardware as needed. You can undervolt/underclock to save power too, so the main difference is only the physical space it takes. Having the ability to run docker containers and VMs on the same device is incredibly useful, and you’ll get significantly faster transfers despite the drastically lower cost.

What’s wrong with IONOS? Their VPS prices are some of the best out there and reliability has never been an issue for me.

This is absolutely not my experience. Usually the libertarians I talk to are first and foremost contrarians who don’t want to appear politically mainstream but also usually haven’t thought too hard about politics before.

Thank you for clarifying that this removes the requirement to spend the money where it was allocated. This answers my question and could indeed be worse than a shutdown.

Most MAGA Republicans would rather a shutdown than giving in to Democratic points. The alternative wasn’t Democrats getting one or two of their points in the budget in exchange for it passing, the alternative was a government shutdown.

I fully agree that when the Democrats have power they do absolutely nothing with it, but in this case I fail to see how they could have gotten any of their points in.

So although passing this budget was obviously terrible, how is it worse than no budget at all? No budget followed by a government shutdown would be the ideal case for Trump and Elon to take yet more power from Congress. The Democrats aren’t in any good position of power right now so expecting the budget to include any of their priorities is unrealistic.

Amap doesn’t support English unfortunately. Neither does Baidu. So it’s about as useful in the US as Google Maps is in China.

Edit: Apparently as of late January 2025 it supports English. This is SO USEFUL for foreigners visiting China, it was so annoying to navigate before without being able to read Chinese characters.

Exactly this Russia still has elections and an “opposition”. You can still be in control without necessarily being in the presidential position just as Putin was while Prime Minister after running out of terms.

Let’s just hope that we don’t use that position to terrorize other nations further than we already have

Unfortunately that’s not how a large portion of the population sees it. To many the economy a president inherits matters more than the state they leave it in.

With the Trump appointed supreme court it definitely won’t hold up, but maybe it could delay whatever meaningless charges he can come up with long enough for another election. If we’re lucky enough to have another real election that is at least.

I wish they’d book Four Seasons Landscaping again. That was hilarious, a good indicator of the chaos and incompetence which followed.

This also is under the assumption you’ve met your deductable for the year already which for many HDHP can sometimes be hard.

Their access to news is controlled and for some topics all available news is what we’d call propaganda. Particularly anything about Japan or the Taiwan issue. Most people I know there realize this to an extent but without any other information do still believe the core idea even if skeptical of details.

But at the same time I’d argue there’s no such thing as a population that’s not propagandized. In the US the big news corporations only will present views favorable to their profitability and continued growth. Sure they disagree with eachother, but it’s still always a pro-business view. State news from Russia is (I’d argue rightly) not available on many US platforms to discourage it’s influence for example.

As a portion of median income it’s still far far better than the out of pocket costs in the US (just like pretty much every other country on earth)

Brain worms for everyone!

The writing has been on the wall for a while now. All retirement planning I’ve done is based on the assumption that SSA won’t be around by the time I retire. The fact that we can’t even remove the taxable maximum to retain some degree of financial solvency is proof enough.

I think the most likely course of action is that we will get some portion of our contributions back, but not the full amount. I just hope that they don’t raise the retirement age so much to try to retain the illusion of being able to get a full payout. I’d rather get a fraction of my contributions back at 67 than need to risk living to a much older age but receiving full benefits.