My server has also not been liking the heat over the past month

Though in my case it’s because drive 3 is sitting in a slot that is possibly not getting enough airflow. It’s consistently running a bit hotter than the other drives in the system.

I really should get around to moving it to a different slot.

It is currently unknown whether the two are related:

The shooting appears to have stemmed from some sort of dispute, though the motive is unclear and no arrests have been made at this point in the investigation, WABC reported.

It’s very unfortunate regardless. Especially considering the two people shot were teenagers, one of them apparently shot in the head.
I hope it wasn’t a hate crime, but I fear that it might have been

(Note: This was still a developing story when I wrote this comment. We might know more later)

So that sounds to me that Americans should use a VPN to pretend they are accessing the website from Europe

I’m finding this all quite ironic

I’m no fan of Musk, Tesla or FSD, but this headline is quite sensationalized.

This is the video of the moment they are describing, and I would not call that “driving into oncoming traffic.” It’s driving on the wrong side of the road (which is not good), but there is no cars coming in the other direction while it is doing it.

The hobbies are photography and videography, and it depends a bit on how frugal I am being.

If I limit myself to buying new stuff? Not a whole lot. Maybe a camera body or a few lenses.
But if I shop around and get stuff second hand, then I could buy so many lenses and cameras that I’ve been meaning to try out.

Usually I do the latter

But being based in the United States it is still subject to American laws, and that comes with the risk of potential American spying and embargoes. Software from any American entity (be it coorporation or non-profit) comes with that risk.

That is not entirely a fair equivalence though.

A road is built once and after that it exists. Its a matter of maintenance and upkeep to make sure the road doesnt deteriorate over time. But even if you neglect that, the road will still exist… only now with potholes.
There are many places around the world with shit roads like this.

Public transit requires staff pay, fuel costs, upkeep, etc besides the initial investment and maintenance. If that money doesn’t exist the busses don’t disappear, but there will be noone to drive them. Same for trains and other modes of transit.

So when public transit has funding issues they are more immediately noticeable than when the road authority has funding issues.

In that case it wouldn’t be “good enough”. But I don’t think this is such an all-or-nothing situation.

Don’t let perfection stand in the way of good enough
It may not be the holy grail, but moving away from Meta-owned Whatsapp is already a pretty significant improvement

Not all of them.

I have a non-official chat group with some colleagues, and a chat group for the neighbourhood that are not likely moving just because I am refusing to use Whatsapp. It would just result in me missing out on those chat groups.

Currently I just have both installed, and that is also how I try to convince people to install and try out Signal.

But my goal is not to move to Threema, my goal is to move away from Whatsapp.
Signal fits the bill while expending far less social capital convincing people to use it.

Then by all means keep that momentum going.
I’m just looking at this from a Dutch perspective, where Signal is seeing by far the most growth.

Yeah, but Threema has basically no momentum behind it at all at this point.
I’m putting my social capital behind the option that currently stands the most chance of beating out Whatsapp

After Trump was elected and inaugurated, Signal has finally been gaining some steam here in the Netherlands.

It’s still an American company, so it’s not ideal. But it’s still significantly better better than letting a tech giant like Facebook have control over the most commonly used chat app.

WhatsApp needs to go and Signal is the most likely way in which we can achieve that. We can worry about the American elephant in the room later.

Which is entirely optional. You can install nice looking bollards that fit the scene (Noone complains about the bollards in Amsterdam looking ugly) or are integrated into other street furnishings (e.g. flower pots and planters)

So they are just openly arresting political opponents now. America is really spiraling down the drain fast.

Somehow I don’t feel easy with Europe buying American gas at this point. Trump could simply shut down the gas supply on a whim just like Putin did in 2022, and then we’d have another energy crisis on our hands.

America is an unreliable trading partner.

Instead we should be doing everything in our power to build down our gas and oil dependencies as fast as possible. And in the meantime we should be very picky about who we buy gas from.

Lobbying is just a group of people representing the interest of that group to their representatives. A gay rights lobby group would also be lobbying the government if they advocate for better rights for LGBT people.

The issue isn’t so much the fact that lobbying is a thing, but rather the methods (read: bribery) that some lobby groups engage in.

I have 24TB on my own server, and another 1TB (split halfway between me and my boyfriend) that comes with a Proton account I pay for.

The 24TB was about € 200 per drive, built out over several years.
3 x 8 TB + 1 x 8 TB for parity makes about € 800 total. The other hardware was leftover computer hardware I had lying around, so in total I think the server cost me about € 1000,-

I pay € 180 / year for Proton for two people, which is € 7,50 per person per month. That includes a mail server, 1 TB cloud storage (500 GB per person), VPN, password manager, etc.