Am therapist, haven’t had as much of this as I’ve had as much of just general existential anxiety lately

This is a part of that of course, but people seem to just generally be anxious that the world/society is going to be destroyed relatively soon, whether through war, global warming, pandemics, economic crash, etc.

It’s a challenge

Moving to a rack is nice, I love my rack. If you’re in or near a city I suggest keeping an eye on Craigslist and ebay (search by distance nearest and lowball ones that have been sitting for months) because it’s not uncommon for nice racks to go real cheap as long as you come get them. I got my rack realllll cheap ($40, 42u, fully enclosed with massive pdu) because it’s a 90s ibm rack and it’s welded steel so it’s like 450lbs. Moving it was a nightmare but it’s real sturdy and I’m never moving it again now that it’s in my basement

For my goals in the short term I have to replace a sas cable that caused a crc error on one drive, it only happened once per smart data but still want to get that done asap. I also have another drive that’s beginning to show some smart issues; it’s on the same sas cable so it may be related because the errors didn’t increase (they all were related to an unclean shutdown, confusing things) but it’s old anyway so better safe than sorry I guess.

Medium term I want to finally upgrade my ups. The one I have now is not a rack mount which is part of what led to the unclean shutdown. It’s also a bit undersized. I have a generator for my house so I don’t need something massive but the one I have is 450va and several years old so with the tired battery I only can get about 5m of runtime. It’s more than enough to cover the transfer from power cutting out to generator power but I want something that’s a bit more reliable in case of generator failure. This is pricey though because my array is pretty huge so it’ll probably be held off unless I find a good deal on a dead one that has cheap batteries available

I also want to put the rack on its own circuit. This is something I should do asap because it’s cheap, just gotta find time and rearrange my panel a bit because it’s pretty full. This would be the other part of the unclean shutdown as the outlet would be in a much better location and I could also install a locking outlet

Would also be nice to pick up a super cheap monitor locally, like something for $15-20 from a pawn shop or Craigslist or something for the rack. Earlier this year I had nginx crash on my server and the webui became inaccessible, I had to drag my nice and kind of large desktop monitor down to the basement to solve the issue, would be nice to just have a shitty small monitor on the rack for that

Speaking of nginx I keep meaning to setup some kind of reverse proxy or mdns for all my dockers so that I can just do whatever.whatever instead ipaddress:3993 which makes my password managers barf but I’ll probably just be lazy and edit my hosts file

Longer term I want to add a secondary low power server that can run something like pfsense to handle my routing, then turn my current wireless routers into access points because they kind of suck as routers.

And of course the array could always be bigger, especially if drive prices fall

I will probably realistically only do the drive and cable replacement, the circuit thing since that’ll be like $40 and a half hour of work, the monitor if I can find one, and maybe the hosts file thing. If I run into cash (unlikely) or a crazy deal (you never know) the ups would be my next priority but there’s a million other things going in life (deductibles just reset for health insurance, hooray)

Pretty simple, he funds a “moderate” (read: right leaning basically republican who will obstruct regularly) democrat who will play the game for money, will say the right thing, play the role, and openly lie. Even if the funding is traced back to him a great deal of voters don’t pay all that much attention to nuance, they pay attention to headlines

So watch out for a bunch of democrat challengers with a shocking amount of funding following the fetterman playbook: initially appears as an “Everyman” with unclear politics (unless you dig), maybe says some promising sounding stuff about income disparity, cops being too much, the climate, or whatever’s the hot topic at the moment during the election, wears a hoodie! Then gets elected, has a fairly uneventful year, then starts to shift hard right when they need them to.

It has a huge chance of being successful, it’s worked many times. And when it works again what the fuck are you going to do about it? The incumbent has an inherent advantage once installed because people don’t pay attention, recall elections basically never ever happen, there is no accountability for them whatsoever so they will do whatever they want

He doesn’t need people to switch registrations. He just needs the currently registered voters to continue to be mostly low informed and the help of the media to keep them that way

I will try this out, thanks!

Any idea if playlists can directly work in external but non Jellyfin apps like finamp or kodi with Jellyfin for kodi? If not can playlists be saved/exported for use in those contexts?

Do you have any kind of basis for that aside from your intuition?

https://chinalaborwatch.org/the-dark-side-of-the-glittering-world-a-report-on-exploitation-in-toy-factories-in-china/ this article is in chinese so you’ll have to machine translate it but at a minimum you can scroll down to see images of workers stuffed into crowded lines, falling asleep on the job, with somewhat miserable conditions, to make dumb plastic shit you’d see in a us checkout lane (frozen miniature toy, lol toys, dude perfect toys).

Thankfully there don’t appear to be any children or truly abhorrent conditions but it doesn’t appear to be anywhere near a good place to work either

you’re fooling yourself if you think cheap plastic shit is made by robots. robots cost a shitload of money. slave labor is like $4 a week

Voice assistants have been great in my experience for smart home stuff. Dunno about ai bullshit

Few examples:

Come home in the evening with a bunch of groceries: “turn on the lights” is handy. I don’t see great and yet I’m irresponsible and will walk into a dark house with way too many bags in my hands

Cooking: again, hands busy. Change lighting, set timers, play music, etc

General laziness: sitting on the couch and decide to watch a movie, set a scene for optimal lighting. Granted this one is easily handled by using phone or just standing up, but voice is easier

Solid mic choice and placement avoids the repeat myself issue, for the most part. Can be an issue mainly during cooking tasks where there can be a lot of environmental noise and loud music playing. But worth the occasional snag, imo

Or maybe he just didn’t give a shit about any of that and was just really pissed off at health insurance companies, felt that all representation had failed us, and the only solution left was violence

But people will read an article that has barely any info and jump to wild conclusions based on pure speculation to categorize him on one of the “teams” rather than assume he is one of the vast amount of politically apathetic individuals that make up america.

so tons of the right wing will move to paint him as a leftist, because it’s simple with the lack of info available and the current rhetoric surrounding the event, because it is advantageous to them. the left wing will move to distance themselves because there is info available that casts doubt on his being a leftist and again it is advantageous for them to distance.

And while both spend time shitflinging away responsibility for this person, who never claimed either side, it will deflect from discussing the very real issue he exposed with his act: the health care system in this country is so fucked up that when it drives someone to murder an executive a huge amount of people cheer them on

just get a clamp one?

This will depend wildly on what you are planning to put onto it

That said I have a 2 cyber power 825va (I think that’s the model, not sure). It’s like 450watts each iirc. I got them 2 for 1 for about $120 new. One has my server/nas, for which it’s grossly underpowered (maybe 7-10 minutes of runtime, at best), and one powers basically everything else critical in my rack (modem, switch, poe switch, etc) and powers that longer but still not as long (my primary switch is a business switch that was pulled from an ewaste place for nothing, like $15, but it’s got 48 gigabit ports and 5 10gb ports! But it also uses a shocking amount of power).

They work great for my use case. I live in a rural area with a horrendous power grid so I lose power about once every 6 weeks. As a result I have a (very pricey, can’t recommend unless you lose power a lot like me) whole house generator with automatic transfer switch. When power drops out the generator kicks on and switches the house over to generator power which takes about 45-90 seconds, so I really only need these to keep my gear on for that period. Beyond that it’s generator monitoring and if the fuel supply for that is running low network gear is shutdown to conserve power

In a perfect world where I was financially independent I would probably upgrade the server one to at least a 1500va to ensure my storage pool could fully stop and everything could shut down even if power was lost

But most ups will work with monitoring in one way or another. APC and cyberpower work with the apc daemon (probably others) which can easily be implemented into all kinds of software and has support in mac, Linux, windows

Determining battery life depends greatly on load. Rough calculation with power supplies of gear connected, better calculation with something like a kill-a-watt or multimeter and taking a reading for a little while under load, add it all together and add 20-30% to be safe. APC, cyberpower, etc have calculators for this

Buying used can be okay but you do have to be comfortable changing the battery. Additionally there is the risk of something being wrong with it of course, they’re not bulletproof. They’re usually pretty decent though, the bigger thing is that they’re just really expensive to ship, even without batteries

They’ll continue to “care” about it because it’s ultimately about courting evangelicals, who very reliably vote and are often swayed by that issue alone

I would not be surprised if this was the case or if they paid slightly more when all was said and done. Billers aren’t cheap

Remember this when they talk about how they give a shit about small businesses

You deleted it your post, you coward, but you said this was too long so here’s the summary.

Insurances have created a web of confusing regulations that give them a million reasons to take back tens of thousands of dollars sometimes years after paying you, the only real way to protect yourself from that is to join a massive healthcare network who has leverage of their size to push back against the insurer, but joining a healthcare network as a mental health worker means earning peanuts because our reimbursement rates are nothing compared to physicians so we have to work independently to actually earn money.

As a result we take on all the risk, we shoulder the financial burdens, we do the unpaid administrative work, all for an average of 70k annually as contract workers (no benefits with that salary so consider that we also have to pay for health insurance, retirement, time off, etc). And that clawback can’t be written off as a loss on your taxes by the way, whether it’s $1000 or $40,000

You do but at the end of the day target or starbucks won’t randomly take back 3-12% of your gross income. They also pay you consistently. I like my job but there are a lot of times I get real fucking frustrated at a period where my pay is super low for an extended period of times. Insurance companies are also assholes about paying. To be fair most of the time they’re on top of shit but sometimes they’re not and there’s nothing I can do about it. Sometimes they’re weeks behind on payments and it’s just like, oh well, that sucks, hope you have savings! But if I’m late submitting billing to them they will often raise a stink about. and this can absolutely be one of the things that later becomes an issue during an audit that results in them clawing back a payment. 0 sympathy if I am overwhelmed but if theyre overwhelmed? Tough shit, I’m getting no pay that week.

The last time this article was published I almost posted a reply to this but didn’t. Now I have time so I will. The denied claims are tragic, obviously, and this behavior is insidious. But something this article only touches upon at the end is what this system is really designed to do: extract previously paid monies from providers

This is such an important issue. I get why they lead with denied claims, because to the average person that is the issue that impacts them. But the above issue destroys mental health care systematically by burning out providers, slashing their income, and shuttering practices. And United is the worst, for sure, but they are not the only offender

What the article describes is what happens, generally. Something in the insurance providers “system” gets flagged. So they audit on their end. Then they may audit on your end. Or they may not even need to. They may find that an error in their system resulted in them paying you for months of sessions that someone wasn’t actually covered. Now they want their money back. They want it all, now. Or they do what United does, they audit you, and they find something that justifies not paying. They almost certainly will because the regulations are extremely complex.

Now you have a hell of a decision: do you spend a ton of time appealing? Remember: many outpatient mental health practices in the us are independent because attaching to a healthcare network means losing 50+% of your income. So if you appeal it means you’ll spend 5-10 hours a week on phone calls and paperwork, for free. Not to mention if it’s in reaction to an audit you may need an attorney so now it’s costing you money, and a significant sum at that.

Do you give in? If you run a medium sized practice and this included a handful of clients you could be on the hook for 20, 40, $50,000 or more. Do you even have access to that? Would a line of credit like that cripple your business?

Do you penalize your staff? You’ve already paid them, do you tell them what’s going on and ask them to pay back the funds? (no, this is unheard of, they’re all not making terribly much money usually)

Do you penalize your clients? In some cases this is genuinely what the insurance company expects you to do. If it’s a case where the policy was not actually active and they paid out in error but didn’t catch it for weeks or months they will claw back their money, guaranteed, and tell you to bill the client $3800 or whatever.

I had a client who was on permanent disability and they didn’t process his disability paperwork for some reason. By the time this was caught by his insurer it was 4 months after the time it should have been. 15 sessions had occurred, they asked for 1767.90 returned immediately. Now what am I supposed to do, demand he turn over two entire disability checks? Turn him into collections when he can’t pay because his (subsidized) rent alone takes up over 60% of his income and destroy his already wrecked credit? I’m here to help him improve his mental health, not destroy it, fuck that. So now I eat that 2 grand. What am I supposed to do? How do I balance that? That’s a 3% pay cut in a day because once again it’s put upon me to subsidize my clients care when the system fails.

I run a lean practice. It’s only me and occasionally I’ll bring on one supervised staff who is in post grad that I give a very fair fee split too. I still keep a secret savings account of 15,000 for clawbacks.

The reason is because I’ve had colleagues with medium practices, roughly 10-12 people in the group, go out of business because they get hit with a 40+k clawback that they simply weren’t prepared for. Or they just burn out dealing with that shit. Or they stay in business but now they no longer accept insurance at all, have ridiculous policies ($125 missed appointment fees! 48 hour notice required!) and inaccessible to anyone who makes less than 150k/yr

Then overnight a practice with 12 clinicians is gone and the community, which is desperate for clinicians, has 10 or so scrambling for new jobs and the 1-2 who ran it considering just getting a manager job at target or something. Then my inbox gets that many more emails even though my psychologytoday says “not accepting clients” because my waitlist is already months long.

Don’t even get me started on commercial rental prices

pfsense running on whatever hardware that doesn’t use too much power

I think it probably has a lot more to do with the fact that pro Israel pacs gave him 250k. You’re just viewing the corruption in realtime

You can also use komf alongside komga/kavita to just scrape metadata automatically upon import. A bit finnicky to get going (a tampermonkey script is required to give it accessible setting on the komga page) but works very well and even has a gui for identifying results and selecting the correct option if the auto scrape fails similar to jellyfin

For the actual reader part I just use komga as a server and read through Mihon (one of the tachiyomi forks) on my ereader mostly. occasionally I’ll use paperback on my iphone (although recently I’ve been trying Tachimanga, which is basically an iOS tachiyomi fork). Loads library, can sort by tag/library/date added, reads most things very well, can sync read status with the komga server (and/or manga updates or whatever), etc.