Also check that the switch is rated for motors. A lot of the switches I’ve seen have separate power ratings for resistive (lights) and inductive (motors) load, because of the power-factor or inrush spikes. https://www.getzooz.com/zooz-zen15-power-switch/ is Z-wave, but specifically for high-current motors.

Average spending is not a good metric for addictive behaviors - spending/consumption tends to be extremely concentrated in a small fraction. My go-to example for this is alcohol where, in the US, 10 drinks/week is the population average, but also enough to get you into the “top 10%” or “heavy drinker” bin, where the average consumption of that bin is 74 drinks/week. In both alcohol and gacha, a huge fraction of the population don’t pay anything.

I mean, even if the article’s $30/month average spend is entirely within their 20% “problem” spenders, it would only be $150, but it’s a little easier (for me) to see where $150/month gacha habit could be a problem for young people already on the financial edge. Not the fundamental problem that skyrocketing rent and stagnant wages are, but more in the last-straw sense.

There are still “favors” to be done.

Everyone who survives will be immune.

That’s the whole logic. It was awful enough with Covid’s 1% mortality. Measles only kills about 0.1%. Bird flu kills 90-100% of infected birds and 50% of infected humans. And there’s plenty of lasting/permanent deficits short of literal death. They’re psychopaths.

Back in the day, I set up a little cluster to run compute jobs. Configured some spare boxes to netboot off the head-node, figured out PBS (dunno what the trendy scheduler is these days), etc. Worked well enough for my use case - a bunch of individually light simulations with a wide array of starting conditions - and I didn’t even have to have HDs for every system.

These days, with some smart switches, you could probably work up a system to power nodes on/off based on the scheduler demand.

You can configure HA to use an external database, so you could (presumably) config two instances to use the same DB. Not sure how much conflict that would cause for entities that are only attached to one of those instances, but it seems like both should have the same access to state data and history. Could probably even set one instance up with read-only DB access to limit data conflicts, although I imagine HA will complain about that.

Even with an external database, HA still uses its internal DB for some things, so I don’t think you’d ever get identically mirrored instances.

Remember the Arab Spring? Massive protests in multiple North African countries, mostly peaceful regime changes. Those protests were hundreds of thousands of people - less than 1% of most country populations. Most of those nations were still going about their daily business like normal. Complaining about the awful government. Complaining about the disruption of the protests.

It’s really had to get people out of their daily routines.

In the US, there’s the extra issue that a significant part of the population are actually happy with recent events because they think it’s going to work out well for them, personally. Some of them think that the chaos is exactly the overthrow of 4 decades of terrible government they’ve been hoping for, and they don’t care what comes after.

If you make it to Medicare age, it gets a lot less stressful. eg: my folks have had 4 knees replaced with very little out-of-pocket cost. There’s still supplemental insurance, but Medicare, not the profit-driven insurance company, determines what gets covered, and they mostly listen to doctors. There’s always edge cases, where some treatment might not be covered, but I feel like those are uncommon.

One way or the other, my ultimate health care plan is 9mm.

Rich McCormick (R-GA) held a town hall over the weekend, and his constituents definitely tried to hold his feet to the fire. I suspect his peers have learned from his lesson and won’t be holding any constituent outreach until the chaos is safely over.

I’ve always understood 2 as 2 physically different media - i.e., copies in different folders or partitions of the same disk is not enough to protect against failure of that disk, but a copy on a different disk does. Ideally 2 physically different systems, so failure/fire in the primary system won’t corrupt/damage the backup.

Used to be that HDDs were expensive and using them as backup media would have been economically crazy, so most systems evolved backup media to be slower and cheaper. The main thing is that having /home/user/critical, /home/user/critical-backup, and /home/user/critical-backup2 satisfies 3 copies, but not 2 media.

3: RAID-1 pair + manual periodic sync to an external HD, roughly monthly. Databases synced to cloud.

2: external HD is unplugged when not syncing

1: External HD is a rotating pair, swapped in a bank box, roughly quarterly. Bank box costs $45/year.

If the RAID crashes, I lose at most a month. If the house burns down, I lose at most 3 months. Ransomware, unless it’s really stealthy, I lose 3 months. If I had ongoing development projects, a month (or 3) would be a lot to lose, and I’d probably switch to weekly syncs and monthly swaps, but for what I actually do - media files, financial and smart-home data, 3 months would not be impossible to recreate.

All of this works because my system is small enough to fit on one HDD. A 3-2-1 system for tens of TB starts to look a lot like an enterprise system.

I have 8 Z-wave devices now, including a couple “long range” devices. With the first couple, I would sometimes have trouble with the farthest, battery-powered device dropping out of the network occasionally, but that hasn’t happened as I’ve added more devices. I fought with pairing the initial devices - clicking the right series of buttons at the same time as telling HA to look for devices to join - but all the recent devices have just has a QR code - scan it into HA, and the device just shows up when I turn it on. I don’t know how much of this difference between new and old is my learning curve vs better product support, but I am really happy with my Z-waves now.

Z-wave rather than wifi so I know they aren’t phoning home.

TY. Looks like the T6 is pro-only. Googling around, it looks like ventilation control may be one of the things that separate their pro-level T6/T10 from their DIY-level T5/T9. That’s disappointing.

Does the Honeywell T6 give you separate control of temperature and fan? That is, can you turn air circulation on/off, even when the temperature wouldn’t trigger heating/cooling?

I’ve been watching pm2.5 in my house, and the HVAC filter does a pretty good job of keeping it down if I run the fan, but that fan takes a lot of energy, and I’d like to turn it off when the air is pretty clean.

I’ve gotten the impression that the major gains in the 5xxx line are from DLSS and frame generation going from 1:1 extrapolated frames to 3:1, and it looks like this review was just comparing straight rendering.

I feel like ‘normal’ politicians are more beholden to old-guard oligarchs, because those are the ones that brought their parents and grandparents to power. The people who’ve been funding them through their whole, 50-year careers. Those oligarchs have generally learned to avoid the public eye, including politicians that attract public scrutiny.

Donald Trump doesn’t care about relationships, heritage, or established trust. He just wants money and flattery, right now, in great volume, and that makes him uniquely susceptible to new money tech bros.

First time you do something is always harder. OpenAI just didn’t think it was 1000x harder and thought they’d have more time to cash in.

Myself, I think that being able to throw billions of dollars at hardware, and their focus on next-quarter results discouraged them from putting in the human effort to analyze and optimize their process. It turns out there were some fantastic optimizations to do.

Yeah, I considered E2EE. Even set up PGP keys in Thunderbird and installed https///mailvelope.com . For E2EE to really be viable, your correspondents have to comply, and none of the people I email with have any interest. I even email with someone on proton, and they always reply to me in the clear.

I bit the bullet this month & bought a domain so I can assign mail handling and change providers without changing my email address. Currently using https://purelymail.com/ because they’re $10/year for as many addresses & domains as you want “within reason.” It’s apparently just one guy with some AWS instances, but it was very straightforward to set up.

It’ll push everyone to move their data centers and IT cores overseas.