ultracrepidarian

When you look at the eight prototypes as art, what do you see?
— Read on www.vulture.com/2018/01/the-border-wall-is-a-national-monument-to-trumps-nativism.html

Best idea I’ve seen in ages.

Damn, what a year.

Even before COVID-19, our home was wrestling with the division of chores, emotional labor and of course money. This comic brilliantly lays it out. Here’s a single pane from the middle:

Seriously, go read the whole thing. It’ll change your mind.

Analog and digital. Doing bike maintenance.

Trying the Sunlit app to post.

Expensive mistake that their site encourages: only the models (typically the ‘plus’ ones) with Intel CPUs can run Docker and the much-improved btrfs. My DS1817, despite having 10gigabit Ethernet and eight drive slots, cannot and that’s an expensive and frustrating mistake.

Their site ellides this when shopping so, caveat emptor, and save yourself money.

So you’re online and you wonder how your network is doing. How do you measure it? I’m here for you.

• Fast.com is my go-to for quick checks. It measures using only Netflix connections so bypasses some ISP fuckery with DPI and slowdowns. Elegant UI.
• Speed.cloudflare.com is the best by a long shot. Detailed and capable of saturating my 400mbit downlink.
• Green官方版下载 is decent but uglier.
• Speedtest.net is ad laden.
• Sourceforge.net/speedtest is ok and used to be my favorite. Lots of ads now.

As explained in my series of gigabit posts, making a fast, reliable network takes time and effort, and these sites don’t magically make it happen. However, having a way to measure your changes is super helpful, and I probably use these weekly.

Via the excellent Adventure Journal, McKibbin’s essay is gripping, terrifying and must-read. Please. There is very little time.

I expect sustained extreme temperatures of this magnitude to produce widespread human health, wildfire, and electrical power supply impacts. Some of these impacts will undoubtedly be amplified by the ongoing pandemic. This will be an event to take quite seriously.

Dangerously intense, prolonged, and humid heatwave for most of California : Weather West

My most-trusted forecast / climate source. It’s going to be really, really bad. I really wish I had bought a couple of Powerwall batteries, so we could keep our food from spoiling if we lose power.

This political choice is also a moral choice. It is a choice of whether or not to value fairness. Either the incentives of everyone in society are aligned, or they are not. In America, they are not. In fact, they are the opposite: the incentives of the rich, who live through stocks and the accumulation of corporate power, are in fact opposed to the incentives of the vast majority of people, whose existence is reduced to nothing more than labor income to be minimized as much as possible. An economy devised to prop up stock prices is an economy devised not to encourage widespread public wealth, but rather the concentration of private wealth. That is a choice. That is the incentive structure we have built in this country. The mystifying government response that allows a crisis of unemployment and sudden poverty to happen and then refuses to solve it even while doling out trillions of dollars to business is in fact just American capitalism working as we have designed it to.

The Disconnect Between the Stock Market and the Real Economy Is Destroying Our Lives – In These Times

Brilliant post, start to finish. Highly recommended. Found via the reliably-excellent Eschaton.