He blew a microphone on stage when it stopped working in the lead up to the 2024 election. He’s got some instincts from somewhere.

Depending on how much you have set aside it can work, if you don’t have anything set aside and break a leg in a freak accident you can get stuck making massive payments on $20,000+ of medical debt and set yourself back several years. I’m sure it’s gotten more expensive now too, that was 6 years ago, and while I don’t have the debt any more, I also have complications from the surgery that still bother me that I feel like I can’t afford to get fixed.

That said, a high deductible plan can also leave you screwed, and doesn’t save you as much money as they act like it does. The pricing is different for insured vs uninsured patients, and your insurance company has basically negotiated the rates higher so you think they’re more useful than they actually are.

Started moving to Element/Matrix this weekend when I attended a protest and wanted to have some kind of communication, but also wanted to leave my primary phone at home. I was using a de-googled android fork and an e-sim, but being a data-only e-sim, I couldn’t use Signal due to the phone number requirement.

Annoying to have try to get contacts to get another app, but at least it’s decentralized and comes with the option of being self-hosted once I’m ready to tackle that.

I have a bunch of different zigbee models, but my overall favorites are the Sengled Zigbee plugs. They have power monitoring, which can be really useful for automations.

For example, my computer monitor makes an annoying high-pitched squeal when in standby mode, so I have it and my PC on separate Sengled smart plugs and if the PC plug is drawing low enough wattage for 10 seconds that I can be sure it’s off or asleep, my automation turns off the monitor smart plug, and when the PC plug wattage jumps back above the threshold, the monitor plug gives power to my monitor again.

Obviously that specific use is a bit niche, but the ability to know when not-smart devices are using more or less power and run automations accordingly can be really useful.

There are other brands besides Sengled that have power monitoring, but I’ve found theirs to be pretty reliable, just make sure you get the zigbee plugs, because they also make wifi plugs that look basically identical to the zigbee model.

I would imagine they mean something like jellyfin/plex, which don’t necessarily get you away from torrents. Unless you want to go the slightly more legal route of ripping DVDs and Blu-rays and re-encoding everything for yourself. I say “slightly more legal” because while you are legally allowed a backup or archival copy of your own media (in the US), you still usually have to violate the DMCA to break encryption so you can rip your archival copy.

Problem is that even if he choked on his burger and coke at lunch, and had dinner with the devil, neither of the next two in line could pass a civics class either.

Duels are outlawed these days, but we seem to be bringing back old ideas every day lately, so maybe? I for one, think a dueling space to go with the new ballroom at the White House sounds period-appropriate.

They’re probably gonna “90 days” this until the midterms, and then use it as a punishment if the democrats get a majority in congress so they can blame Democrats for higher prices.

At the very least heavy regulation to prevent unfair practices. Humans will pretty much always optimize the fun out of everything.

Take competitive video games for example, where once something becomes the meta, it’s used and abused until it gets nerfed. But people still play hundreds of games with whatever the most optimal meta is, even if it takes the fun and variety out of the game and makes it boring.

Pretty much every economic system ends up the same way, people figure out the most optimal ways to exploit whatever the system is, take the fun and fairness out of it, and ruin it for anyone who doesn’t want to play by the meta. In an ideal system, there’s strong regulatory systems in place (for example the FTC and the CFPB) that work to balance things and make sure the system works for everyone. But the people who like to optimize the fun out of things have decided they’d like the regulators out of the way so they can go crazy with their exploitation.

Remember their names for Nuremberg Trials v2. All their talk about immigrants bringing crime, and yet they’re all soulless, assholes who lack a shred of empathy, and have convinced themselves they’re “taking out the competition.” Crime is fine with them as long as it’s their friends doing it.

As an aside I’m trying not to legitimize their twisted, racist views of immigrants, so I hope that’s clear in how I wrote this, but I’m also aware that I’m tired and should be asleep, so including this aside in case I didn’t make that clear. Immigrants belong in my country as much as I do (probably more than I do in many cases), and we should be working to treat them better, not worse.

Yeah, but then we have president JD. What we need is for Vance to snap, strangle Trump, get caught by Mike Johnson who he then uses his special anti-pope magic on to keep him quiet. Then in the power vacuum, America discovers we didn’t need a president this whole time, and we spend the next few years getting to know ourselves.

It’s the fantasy political thriller rom-com that could save the American movie industry.

Neither is his friendship with Epstein. Apparently half the country wasn’t paying attention in 2016.

I don’t see anyone saying this yet, but the Epstein files were sealed by a court order for Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial. They weren’t unsealed until January of 2025. Biden couldn’t have released them without violating the court order that sealed them - and possibly giving Ghislaine’s lawyers a slam dunk to get her off with a mistrial.

The DNC had a fundraising advantage over Trump leading up to the election in 2024. Honestly that whole “Kamala and the DNC has a 1 billion dollar war chest” a few weeks before the election probably hurt them more than it helped.

Money enables things, and financially it’s an asset, but culturally, it’s a liability - and always should be.

Not one of those gun people, but I still support the 2nd ammendment to some extent (down to ban AR-15s and other “scary-looking” guns simply because they are often used by mall-ninja types who do mass shootings). But I think most responsible gun owners are refusing to give fascists a reason/excuse to accelerate or escalate things (for the record, none of MAGA qualify as “responsible gun owners”). I know things are terrifyingly bad right now, but guns/violence are only going to make the current situation worse faster - at least for now. We do seem to be charging full-speed into a situation where they’ll be helpful and useful, which is terrifying. But with as much as it might feel like an “easy fix” to nip things in the bud now, it’s more likely to give fascism even more power and fuel for their propaganda.

So, I never believed the “Golden Dome” was going to actually be a thing, but wasn’t the contract for that supposed to be going to one of Elon’s companies? Is the project just off now? And follow-up question: is anything (short of scrambling some nearby jets) preventing Elon from “landing” a Falcon Heavy Rocket on the White House?

I wish I was joking, but he doesn’t like the straight line border on the map. He wants to “get rid of that artificially drawn line.”

I take one taco, and then go tell Mike Johnson that there are free tacos and where to get them.

Yeah, check lists in Notes could really use some improvement for sure. Honestly, just now looking through the Github for the Android Nextcloud Notes app it looks like there’s a good deal of technical debt that has been stacking up over time from trying to bring more modern features to what started as a minimal text-only notes app.

There is a way to enable “grid view” in the app settings for the more post-it view that shows the first part of the contents, but doesn’t seem to show on notes with markdown formatting, so anything with a list doesn’t show a preview.