What?

The house I’m sitting in right now is made out of bricks, with the roof being a untreated wood frame covered in ceramic shingles. No hydrocarbons involved (except for the insulation but that came a good sixty years after initial construction). There are other construction methods besides the American “just wrap it all in vinyl” approach that aren’t necessarily more expensive, such as covering the outside insulation layer with clay/mortar.

The problem isn’t air moisture, at 60 % air RH wood is like 10 % humid and won’t rot. What causes wood to rot is pooling water, something that’s easily avoided by decent house building.

How far do things have to go before “humble empathy” towards those actively supporting the US regime becomes inappropriate? Gas chambers? War against Canada? Nuclear war?

The stakes have never been higher, and personally I’m not willing to humbly give the benefit of the doubt to someone who literally voted for Hitler. They are either dumb as a fucking brick or more likely (according to Trump’s polling) they are actively seeking harm against their own neighbors and relishing on the fact that the regime is gleefully committing as many human rights violations as it can get away with.

We’ve done the “just forget about it and move on” strategy, and it led to Trump being reelected even harder. Maybe when this is over (whenever that is) we go back to the tried-and-true strategy of fucking shaving everyone of these wastes of breath down to the bone to expose their crimes.

Dry wood will last centuries without any oiling. Which is good news for timber frames because those are left untreated. As long as your house is water-tight, the frame will be fine because wood rot simlly can’t metabolize in typical indoors humidity evels.

What we typically protect wood from is water, mechanical wear, UV, and stains. But even a furniture piece will not always get treated on internal parts where wear and wood expansion are no concerns.

With what money? NPPs only get built on public funds, private equity cannot make the economics viable due to the multi-decade amortization. It’s fine on public debt but breaks down if you have to pay shareholders for billions of euros of loans over 20 years which amounts to so much money the cost is uncompetitive with fossil fuels + renewables. Private equity has been trying to make private nuclear power for 20 years now, mostly with SMRs, with little success and nothing to show for it up to now.

If Belgium ever builds a new NPP, it will be because the government voted on a multi-decade funding plan, which is not guaranteed to happen when the left wants no nuclear and the right wants fiscal austerity. Until then there’s nothing that Engie can do but wait.

That’s routine as well. Plenty of Russian oligarchs are personally sanctioned in that way. Not that I’m saying ICC prosecutor and Russian oligarch are remotely comparable targets, but the method isn’t new. The shocking thing is who the US is now targeting.

TBF work was done to keep it sound until 2025 and it was possible to extend the operational life further (basically you can just keep throwing hundreds of millions at them every 10 years for a long time to come).

What’s fucked up is that in the last few years a bunch of maintenance wasn’t done because the government said “no for real though super pinky promise we’re not extending the contract again they will definitely be shut down in 2025 it’s the law”.

So now Electrabel/Engie is rightfully super pissed because this flip-flopping is going to cost us billions just to keep the existing reactors running. And they have zero guarantee the greens won’t come back into a government coalition in 2029 and fuck the schedule up again.

I mean, that’s hardly a confirmation. The US has always used its power like this with its enemies, just ask Iran Cuba or Russia how they’re doing on international trade.

The new development is that all of Europe is now classified as an enemy, yet we’re fully incapable of not sucking on Amazon and MSFT’s teat.

Poor sound balance is 95 % bad downmixing.

Going from 5.1 channels to 2 the media player should first bump up the center channel (the one for dialogue) a fair bit. But they don’t because they use the coefficients from some manual from the fucking 1990s or whatever calibrated for expensive-ass headphones. Some players (e.g. Kodi) do have an option to amplify the center channel.

The second issue is overly large dynamic range which is inappropriate in noisy environments or when someone may be sleeping nearby. That’s easily solved with an audio compressor. My receiver has a “night mode” that does exactly that.

Every streaming service should have both of those as easily toggleable options on their media players, but for some reason they don’t. IDK if it’s stupidity on their part or if their licensing contracts disallow “tampering” with the media or what it is but it would solve 95 % of audio balance complaints.

It’s because the ~*~tech~*~ sector fundamentally relies on different economics than most engineering companies, and that has investors absolutely bricked up.

What investors being sold by “tech” companies is infinite ROI. Sure, [YouTube/Twitter/Uber/whoever] has never been profitable more than a few quarters in a row (if that), but think! They have virtually no fixed costs! That means if we just inject a few more millions in R&D we will finally reach the threshold where we can scale deployments to hundreds of millions of users who will be paying us MRR! Hosting costs are virtually nothing and at that scale R&D is basically free as well! And if push comes to shove, we can reduce costs to nearly zero by firing all the engineers! The economies of scale are practically infinite, they say.

It’s the rare instance where capitalists actually care about long-terms gain a bit too much. The tech industry tends to be single-mindedly chasing monthly user counts first and revenue second or third. Then at some point reality catches up, the accountants start getting their way, the product starts getting enshittified, and the users leave for something else. Did the product actually turn a net profit over its lifetime? Who knows, who cares. Everyone who made those early business decisions has long since cashed out.

Where the markets are unbelievably irrational is that this frenzy has spilled over into industries where the the sales pitch for infinite economies of scale doesn’t even make theoretical sense. Tesla sells physical products, so why are they worth more than every other automotive company combined? OpenAI operates at an enormous loss because LLMs are just expensive to train and run by nature, so they cannot be profitable under the current business model at any scale. Yet here we are. Just because it’s labeled as “tech”, investors are throwing our retirement funds into it. And any time the markets are being irrational, there’s a risk that investors wise up to the bad fundamentals and the whole thing comes crashing down.

In Europe we’ve been spared some of the worst of the craziness. Although venture capitalism is alive and well in the software sector, I would wager that European companies tend to have stronger fundamentals on average (but that’s just a gut feeling, I’m not an economist).

Vanishingly little of the hordes of little hands who immediately crumbled to Trump actually answer to him. And those that do are still supposed to uphold the constitution first and foremost.

Resistance has always been an option, Americans are just almost unanimously choosing not to exercise it.

Suse has been trying pretty hard with Harvester. KVM-based, VMs-as-k8s-pods which leverages all existing k8s tooling, as well as the same multi-cluster federation as RKE2.

Seems pretty great from afar, though it’s very much under active development.

I know people in that predicament and they’re, charitably, helpless little babies when you tell them to read two paragraphs of documentation on how to run one command in a Linux CLI.

Fundamentally nothing out there really caters to the needs of resellers. Your average resale company couldn’t automate a backup job to save itself from bankruptcy if it doesn’t come with a neat GUI, a 24/7 support contract, and preferably a Microsoft or oracle logo somewhere in the corner to inspire confidence.

Like I jest but there are Microsoft outfits and FOSS outfits and there is essentially zero professional overlap even though they both sell IT products/solutions. The disconnect is a mile wide. Which translates to wildly different business models where the FOSS people have been running shit in containers for 15 years while the Microsoft slaves are still licensing their monolithic solutions by the CPU Core and doing weird-ass shit like buy 4-core xeons because it’s more economical with these archaic licensing models.

So sure Proxmox/Suse are certainly very happy with their sales number right now but anecdotally I’m not seeing the migration frenzy that one would expect under such intense price gouging. Broadcom correctly identified that it will take years for these super corporate structures to steer away from “the way we’ve always done things” and in the meantime that’s untold millions in additional short-term profits.

It’s the same cycle since the '70s. Whether it’s COBOL or VB.NET or vibe coding, the premise hasn’t changed.

There’s three broad categories of code:

1. Monkey code (random applets that are almost entirely business logic and non-critical)
2. Actual code (most things)
3. Crazy shit like kernel or browser code.

I can see vibe coding, situationally, lower the barrier to entry of (1). But also that’s no different from COBOL or VB.NET which both promise “MBAs can now write code”, which conveniently never extends to maintaining said code. And vibe coding doesn’t help with that either, ChatGPT is an awful debugger.

Your boss thinks ChatGPT will help with (2), but it either won’t or only very slightly as an advanced autocomplete. For any problem-solving that requires more specific domain knowledge than can automatically find its way into their tiny context windows, LLMs are essentially useless.

… So I’m not worried. Today’s vibe coders are yesterday’s script kiddies.

This can be hard to implement and avoidable through “creative accounting” (e.g. living off daddy money with no declared income) so as a hybrid/additional solution fines should turn into penalties over repeat offences.

Some countries use points licensing where your driver’s license will simply be taken away if you have too many recent infractions on record.

Companies should also be prevented from doing certain kinds of business if they repeatedly break the law. We have legal frameworks for this, we are just refusing to apply them due to politics and corruption.

Learning Vienna Convention road signs takes a few minutes for the basic principles, an hour or two for the really arcane signs such as “watch out for carriages” and “levy ahead”.

The system is superior to the North American hell system by a huge margin, not least of which because it allows me to drive to Spain or Czechia without needing to study their traffic laws and learn the local language. The signs will be very similar and their meanings otherwise easy to intuit.

Now let me blow your mind: you already do this in NA. But you stopped at yield signs and stop signs. Their shape is immediately recognizable and parseable even if you don’t speak English or even if they are covered in snow (that’s on purpose). Now just imagine every sign is like that instead of the designers giving up and writing some text on a yellow rectangle. “Road work ahead”? Bitch, just put a schematic road worker in a red triangle instead of making me read shit at 90 km/h, this ain’t book club!

That’s a broad topic where I would avoid making generalizations. It’s a matter of tradeoffs.

The key indicators I’d look at are, in no particular order:

• Cost. Does cloud hosting provide economies of scale that dramatically reduce operational costs?
• Risk. If your cloud provider hikes prices or turns out to be based in a hostile fascist dictatorship, can you easily switch to another offering?
• Liability. For better and more often for worse, companies love delegating business because it relieves them of liability if someone cocks it up. It’s a harsh reality that some SMEs have IT infrastructure that looks fine and inexpensive until they find out the hard way that their “IT person” doesn’t know what a firewall is.
• Accounting. Companies strongly prefer OpEx to CapEx due to the way modern accounting incentives, and cloud hosting is tailored to that.
• Practicality. If you want your email to sync to your phone abroad, you’ll need a cloud (though it could be a private cloud, but then I’d recommend a VPN which is more secure but less practical).
• Security. Does the NSA looking at all your files matter? For governments I would hope it does buuuuut…

Either way it goes, be mindful of blind spots. Companies often don’t (IMO) properly assess the risk of locking themselves into walled gardens due to short-termism. But at the same time IT gremlins such as myself tend to underestimate the costs we represent, not just as salaried employees but as people who might cock something up or leave behind us an undocumented mess that will costs hundreds of thousands to rebuild a few years from now.

It won’t be ugly for most of them. It’ll be fucking peachy. There will be no revolution.

“The revolution will be painless if the left allows it to be” well the left has made its choice and every minority will be left to rot in the concentration camps because demonstrably americans have utterly buckled to the mere implication of potential violence.

Hopefully America will be like Russia, violent and authoritarian with severely declining quality of life and a broadly politically apathetic population.
Alternatively - and increasingly likely - it will be like Nazi Germany and the fascists will make up for declining quality of life by engaging in increasingly doomed military campaigns.

Either way the ones who could have done something to stop this will be the least affected while everyone else gets crushed under the boot of fascism. But at least they will have the moral high ground of never resorting to political violence.

Building a service-based industrial economy would be good for capitalism.

Unfortunately Trump does not serve capitalism. He serves fascism. And fascism requires factories that can be reconverted for a wartime effort once the immigrants and the queer start running out. That’s the fundamental lifecycle of fascism.

Americans are sending us all on a path leading straight to WWIII and nuclear Armageddon if they don’t fix their shit but everybody’s too pussy to spell it out as if this demented ape doesn’t have unlimited control of the most powerful army on Earth and enough nukes to end civilization several times over.

I wouldn’t say “no chance”. Last summer Trump was a few inches from being a chunkful of splattered History.

Of course the idea that the population could take the US military full-on is ridiculous. But resistance doesn’t have to take the shape of traditional warfare, and anything would be better than the current overwhelming apathy that is the response to being governed by literal Nazis.

I can’t help but notice that your comment is highly upvoted, with one down vote at the time of writing. I also notice that whenever someone comments something like “Americans deserve Trump and everything that is happening to them” their comment is usually around 50 % downvoted.

Regardless of your opinion on whether a people can collectively be held responsible for the actions of the majority, it looks like a lot of Americans on this website need to reevaluate their own cognitive dissonance.

(Also what the fuck is up with the comment at the top of the chain. That is literally hate speech and could get you fined in my country).