From what I can tell, TX and CA both pay in more to the fedgov than they take out. The Southeast takes out a lot more than it pays in though.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/donor-states

“Stars can live for millions to trillions of years until they run out of fuel. The most massive ones go out with a bang in an explosion called a supernova.”

Urk.

I usually use my laptop but sometimes my phone. Both work fine. Phone is a low midrange, I guess, Moto G Stylus 5g, 2023 model. Laptop is an old 15 inch Thinkpad. Add a cheap plug-in or bluetooth speaker since better sound will make a big difference.

I’m sure we’ll all receive some trickle-down benefits.

This thing is 1.5 hours long. Any indication of what it is about?

start to turn over

Why “start to”?

Now the abductors know where to look. :(

Like drug addiction, the best time to stop is before it starts.

The whole concept of an app immediately signals privacy invasion. That’s what apps do.

I’ve met some cool people through craigslist personals (back when they had those). Reddit still has them fwiw.

I’ve been doing debian upgrades without significant issues. With debian 13 I find I’m getting some deprecation messages from python and I have had to make some small code patches to fix them. I see that as more of a python issue than a debian issue.

I didn’t figure out that the person was a priest until someone explained about holy water.

Aha maybe you are right.

Took me a minute to figure out that the gun is an infrared thermometer. At least I hope it is.

I also have to ask how a privacy focused backup service can possibly lose any individual file. They really shouldn’t know how many files you have. They have to know much data you’re sending so they can charge you for the traffic and disk space, but they shouldn’t know whether it’s one giant file or a million small ones. It should just be a big lump of encrypted bits from their perspective.

Oh. borgbase.com looked ok to me a while back, fwiw.

I’ve never heard of IceDrive. What is it and what does it have to do with privacy? Explaining that would make your post more informative. I’ve been using Borg Backup and it’s been fine as far as I know. But yes, test your backups.

I would like to know whether the excess child mortality is something to actually worry about, let’s say if I had kids. There is a chance of my kid being eaten by a leopard but here in the urban US, it’s unlikely enough that it’s not one of the hazards I take special precautions against. Again, it comes down to the likelihood, which means what is N. If you don’t know N, then describing a related number as “staggering” is just a bluff. Let’s presume “child” means age < 18, and my kid is currently 8. What is the likelihood of his not surviving childhood, compared to other countries? To find that, you need N, or something computed using N, such as life insurance premiums.

It’s editorialization but less of a bluff to describe global warming as staggering, since it can be backed up with evidence of real impact that it has on everyone, where it is going, and that it needs interventions if it isn’t too late for those.

By comparison, look at the freakouts about kids being abducted by strangers. It happens and it makes headlines, but it’s very rare compared to abductions by relatives, for example. I’m very glad to have not been overprotected from this when I was a kid. Being able to go out by myself when I wanted made me independent in a good way, imho.

The child mortality difference sounds to me like a consequence of the well known suckage of the US healthcare system, but wrapped in “think of the children!”[0] breathlessness. If it’s disproportionate I’d like to see data indicating this.

And yes, COVID affects children[1,2], another example of crazy US COVID policy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/242894/covid-19-leading-cause-death-children-young/

[2] https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/long-covid-is-now-the-number-one

You can still get extremely distorted news even if your news sources don’t tell actual falsehoods. It’s enough for them to shade and slant the truth, and present it selectively. To some extent you can identify corrupting influences and then look for sources that are less affected by those influences, but eventually you can only vet the news by comparing it to the real world.

The US had some really terrible COVID policies about masking, school ventilation, etc. Other countries were often better, sometimes worse. And now we’ve got RFK Jr running the asylum.

Anyway, as you say, excess deaths are relative to other nations, so I need to know the baseline. That’s N, and yes it matters.

At the moment it seems to me that the US has worse overall health and shorter life expectancy than, say, EU countries, but not by huge margins.[1] That’s for all ages and income levels. Not good, but not something that makes me immediately want to move, and I feel more threatened by other things like accelerating global warming.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/money-cant-buy-life-the-richest-americans-die-earlier-than-the-poorest-europeans/

I’ve been self hosting but various projects have moved to codeberg. I like Savannah as it’s more old-school but it’s a bit selective about projects.