fizzle

I cant dispute that, but I domt think its really true of driving. I think most of the world drives on the left? Much of the world certainly does. That means you change gears etc with your left.

Yeah the internet is cooked.

Im trying to invest more time in off-line things.

I have hundreds of burned discs that work fine.

I’ve heard this a million times.

I certainly never bought the cheapest discs. It’s been a decade but I think it was verbatim usually.

Sure that’s a weakness but it seems likely these kinds of techs will be plausible solutions even if only in isolated cases.

Yeah for me it was the Thai kid submarine fiasco. He offered a dumb idea in a life threatening situation and when it was rejected by professional underwater cave diver rescue guy Musk accused the guy of being a pedo.

Unrelated but… having lived through the 00’s I always found writable CDs and DVDs to be such a shit unreliable tech. It always seemed like discs might work ok with some drives but not others, or just stop working after a few weeks, and they really didn’t seem tolerant to even minor scratches. Just awful.

That would’ve been my guess. Other commenters seem less pessimistic though?

Even if you can find some kind of cable to plug this somewhere… drivers ?

I used to think Musk was ok.

I didn’t know anything about him other than he was investing in EV’s which I felt the world desperately needed, at a time when it felt like big oil was squashing the uptake.

I think any accountant and lawyer does this to some extent, if I’m honest.

There’s no obligation to take on any client. If a client has a problem to be solved but very little money, of course we’re reluctant to get involved. If it’s a situation where a potential solution is “you should call the tax office and tell them XYZ.” then that’s really just a polite way of telling them you don’t want to get involved.

Lawyers will work in a similar way, but are more likely to truncate their advice to “You should call <whatever regulator> and ask them what to do”.

I’ve often heard of lawyers explaining to potential clients that the costs in pursuing their matter would be unreasonable given the likelihood of success.

It’s not really altruism, although I’d like to think that I do my best to help people when I can. It’s really just a natural way of avoiding doing a heap of work for someone who can’t afford to pay you. Additionally, if you can make the client feel like you’ve helped them instead of just rejecting them then they will be more likely to recommend you to their friends and family who may be a better fit.

Yeah I completely agree. This exact issue kind of triggers me, and I did draft a longer diatribe complaining about exactly this, which I didn’t post.

I have an assortment of bikes including e-bikes, all of which I love equally. They’re truly amazing machines.

If you purchase a $200 k-mart commuter, and a $400 wheel hub motor and battery from temu, then perch a 12 year old precariously in the saddle that’s not an e-bike it’s an unregistered unregulated electric motorbike. This type of set up can easily achieve 50km/h with the majority more like 60km/h and some exceeding 80km/h.

The bikes just aren’t built for this kind of stress, and the people riding them don’t have a reasonable understanding of the risks. They scream around on bike paths weaving around kids and babies in strollers.

The current rules here in west aus (as I understand them) merely allow pedal assist up to 25 km/h. Critically, that means the bike can allow you to switch between modes providing more or less assistance, but no throttle. Additionally a lot of the temu bikes require you to move the pedals but do not require you to provide any effort - the pedals moving is more like a switch that allows the motor to engage.

The basic problem is that existing legislation just isn’t sufficient. Guilting parents isn’t enough. There needs to be better laws, and they need to be actively policed.

I can’t speak for everyone but I wouldn’t apply that kind of pricing structure to someone who couldn’t afford it or wouldn’t get any value from it.

I’m an accountant and tax consultant.

Suppose a client contacted me, they’re semi-retired with very little income, they need to resolve some business affairs from years ago in order to collect a pension or whatever. I’m going to tell them the hackiest workaround to achieve their goal, and tell them how to do it themselves, hopefully without really having to charge them even for the consult.

On the other hand if someone wants to sell their family farm for several million dollars and wants to know the tax ramifications, they’re going to get the “particularly complex area” pricing, full written report, and so on and so forth.

Hmm. An interesting point and a good consideration - maybe a reason not to make this recommendation to others. In my own case I’m not concerned.

I’m using 1tb SSDs. They’re pretty cheap now. I don’t think they suffer from any of the problems you’ve described?

I couldn’t find any information about longevity offline vs online. In daily use SSDs do seem to be more reliable than HDDs, particularly as they get older.

The other thing is my strategy is something like 4-3-2, so the offline is an additional final hail mary. The chances that I would require it and it would have failed in the month or so since I updated it are infinitessimal.

Finally there are practical considerations. My offline copy resides in a physical safe in our house, and is unencrypted. If I were to die suddenly, this would be the most accessible copy of important documents, family photos, et cetera.

It’s not a perfect system but it’s “pretty good” and I’m hoping I don’t die suddenly so there’s that LOL.

Nah.

The printer / multifunction I have right now is pretty magical. It just works. It’s a solved problem.

I think the problem is that the cheaper ones are hostile.

“We really recognise the tremendous opportunity that ebikes can offer for getting anyone, including younger people, from A to B, independently,” McLean said. “[It] is a really, really positive thing that connects them to education, to work, to social things and communities as well.

“There’s lots of benefits that go along with them, but when we have really high powered ebikes and people driving them dangerously and without helmets, then they certainly pose a significant risk.”

Seems like a pretty balanced take honestly.

My psychiatrist said that the empirical evidence shows its only mildly “effective” for comparatively few people.

I tried it consistently for a few months. Not effective at all for me.

LOL, numbness barrier my ass.

Everyone knows he had deep ties to a paedophile ring and is heavily implicated in many crimes including rape, murder, and trafficking. No hyperbole required.

Yet there’s no consequences for any of it.

This monkey video is just today’s episode of awful, awful behaviour from the worst human ever conceived elected by the worst among us to be the most powerful man in the world.

I’m not judging you but this just seems so uncomfortable to be.

I sleep in these cool long john pant things. when I wake up I put a shirt on and potter around for a few hours in that outfit doing my own thing before the kids wake up. Only then do I get dressed for the day.

Everyone has their own routine I guess.

Do you take your shoes off for that or just walk inside?

Yeah shoes off. It’s a pain in the butt.

However, you often wear shoes that are easier to take off / put on.

Also, you just learn to really check that you’ve got everything before you put your shoes on.

As others have said, sync isn’t backup - if you inadvertently delete something then it will get deleted everywhere.

I’ve been using borgmatic (config interface for borg) for many years.

A long while ago I switched to catch and release for media. Curating a large collection just took too much effort, and backing it up was too impractical. Like you probably have 200gb of movies, 20gb of photos, and 20mb of personal documents. These categories have different risk profiles - for me an offsite air gapped backup of movies would be excessive, but personal documents absolutely isn’t. It’s just an important consideration when designing a backup system.

That said, 200gb isn’t that much, and restic / borg will de-duplicate your archives anyway. Just something to keep in mind.

A low powered PC in someone else’s apartment satisfies the second location requirement. Will DNS be a problem?

An alternative is to get 2x external drives. Keep one in your house and update it whenever, then take it to your sister’s whenever you visit and swap it with the one left there.

I’m not an expert but my partner is from SE Asia.

She’s quite judgemental and inflexible about this. I’m not condoning her views but they might provide some cultural insights.

Shoes on inside is perceived as rude. It’s particularly awkward when you go to someone elses house and they ask you to leave your shoes on. Taking your shoes off is tied up with hygiene and reverence and respect and being asked to disregard that is being asked to… diminish yourself in some way.

People in our orbit tend to wear footwear you can just slip on and off. That doesn’t mean sandals or flip flops. You just tie off your laces at the “right” length and you can slip them off without untying, and slip them on by, at worst, putting your finger in behind your heel to pull them into place. Some shoes just don’t work in this way, and these are reserved for longer outings like work et cetera.

We do have several communal pairs of slippers for use exclusively in the tiled area of our living room. They’re just really cheap practically disposable open toed slippers. The kind you get in hotels.

We have toddlers and, thankfully they seem to be excluded from the shoe-rules.