Replying to myself to correct a number in my above statement.

The 16.4m number was total automobile sales in the US, not just by domestic manufacturers.

The domestic manufacturer sales total is roughly 7.6m, which means the spend for 100 days of war in Iran could instead have been a ~$20k tax credit for a new, domestic auto purchase.

So yeah, it's not cheating - it's just a matter of priorities on the government's part.

How is it cheating?

The US government could do the same thing if they wanted.

They do it all the time for other industries (i.e. farmers - especially the corn/ethanol producers, energy producers, housing, etc.). They'd just need to change their priorities and reallocate budget money.

For example, it's estimated that the US war in Iran cost ~$1.5b/day. There were ~16.4m cars sold by the four main domestic US automakers last year.

If we assume that war lasts 100 days at that average spend rate, instead of participating in that war, the US federal government could have given everyone who purchased a car in 2025 a $9k tax credit.

Local municipal fiber installs are the Achille's Heel of the legacy ISPs who have neglected to reinvest and modernize their own infrastructure.

I live in an 80+ home neighborhood that is 0.5 miles outside the city limits. For 10+ years, the only real ISP option in my neighborhood was Comcast.

The real kicker was, AT&T's fiber internet stopped 0.5 miles down the road at the city/county line. Of course Comcast knew that, so every year or two they'd raise prices and force us to play the revolving ":threaten to cancel in order to get a promo price game".

A few years ago, the local utility board announced a county-wide municipal fiber internet plan. Magically, within 2 months of that announcement crews were in my neighborhood installing AT&T fiber so I switched to them and got the 12-month promo pricing - 1Gbps synchronous inet for $60/month ($80/month after the promo ends) and some other perks.

I encouraged all my neighbors to dump Comcast. I even mentioned it at the annual HOA meeting. Of course, as soon as the promo pricing ended, AT&T started raising their rates $5 every 6 months.

9 months after the AT&T promo pricing ended, the municipal fiber went live my neighborhood. $65/month for 1Gbps synchronous inet. No promos, no extra fees, no bs. Guess who switched and told all their neighbors about it. I've seen a lot of the utility board trucks in the neighborhood running lines to houses in the past year.

This.

Literally just migrated two of our three host servers from VMware to Hyper-V Cluster this past weekend. The third will follow soon. Once that's done, we'll start on the next site and migrate the three hosts there.

Hyper-V isn't great and lacks some of the bells and whistles vSphere has, but the environment at work is a fairly simple setup and is almost entirely a Windows server shop. As such, Hyper-V covers the basics and gets the job done.

Since Broadcom decided to quadruple our licensing fees last year, this was an easy choice. Count me in the "never again, Broadcom" camp.

And this is what happens when you consider grammar/English a "BS filler class"...

My employer is currently in the process of migrating off VMware due to Broadcom's licensing bs. Our costs nearly quadrupled overnight.

We looked at Nutanix, Proxmox and Hyper-V. Each has some shortcomings compared to VMware, but each of them are significantly less expensive or free so that's a win.

Nutanix might be the most comparable option to VMware\ESXi\vCenter, but their storage integration has some things that wouldn't have been ideal for us. If they can quickly improve their storage integration and compatibility, I suspect they'll pick up a lot of former VMware customers.

Since since we're a relatively small shop and primarily in the MS ecosystem already, we went with Hyper-V. It'll get the job done for us, even if it doesn't have all the bells and whistles VMware did.

To be fair, picking up an entire fair while moving is much more difficult proposition than picking up a fare. One of those endeavors is likely to fare far better than the other affair.

This is fairly spot on. In this case, medical providers nor even the for-profit owners of said facilities aren't the root cause.

Ask yourself who has the most to lose in the US if we switched to government run healthcare system like most other civilized countries. It's not the healthcare providers. If anything, we'd need more healthcare providers and facilities with socialized healthcare.

Know what we wouldn't need as much of? Insurance companies.

Thanks to them, US citizens are stuck with insane, unregulated basic healthcare costs that cannot be afforded without insurance.

That didn't happen by accident. Over the past few decades, they've rigged it from every angle (legally, politically, and financially) to the point where basic healthcare is financially crippling even for middle-class households, especially with children. Major incidents and/or long-term care scenarios are essentially bankrupting events for middle-class households without insurance.

People shouldn't NEED insurance to cover basic health care and medication for things like colds, flu, minor injuries and treatments of common illnesses like asthma, etc. The basics should be affordable out-of-pocket with insurance only being needed for major events, trauma, etc.

That's the core problem.

Clear lines of sight between any of the neighbors' houses and yours and less than 500m distance?

Make friends with the neighbor, offer to split their fiber inet costs and setup a point-to-point WiFi bridge. Could probably be done for less than $2k out the door.

Something like a UniFi UBB-XG kit should work well if the distance is less than 500m. We've used a few of them at work for sites where running physical lines was cost-prohibitive due to parking lots, crossing streets, etc. They've worked well.

If the line-of-sight is clear but distance is greater than 500m, you're getting more into UniFi's WISP hardware, but even then you can get a pretty cost-effective setup for cheap. They have multi-gigabit kits rated for > 15km links.

A guy I know has a farm with a lot of acreage and wanted security cameras around the property. He setup a kit with a solar panel, a car battery, an 5/8-port POE switch, POE cameras and the UniFi WiFi bridges to each camera location and it works great.

He saved tens of thousands of dollars doing it that way vs trenching fiber lines to all of them.

I realize it's a tradition around here to armchair quarterback without actually reading the articles and usually while only half reading the summary, but sometimes you really should read them before commenting. Otherwise, it just outs you as the uninformed blabber you are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It is entirely possible that they were relatively synchronous position with the jetpack pilot for a reasonable amount of time.

The point about the pilot hopefully having higher priorities than taking pictures with a phone while on final approach still stands though.

Or actually take a real stand and stop buying bug-riddled games that should never have been released in such a state. Stop giving studios who charge $50+ USD for unfinished garbage and eventually the game industry would learn to stop doing that.

You're conflating need with want.

A lot of people definitely want it, but nobody *needs* it.

Since it is just a want, not a need, a constitutionally guaranteed right, a requirement for the continuance of life or any other sort of actual necessity, it is hard to justify pirating it as anything other than a "But, but, I want it! Don't tell me no! Waaahhh" scenario. All the standard proposed explanations and justifications I've ever seen in discussions about this topic in general inevitably amount to some version of that.

For example, you want to watch great new show #942 but the company that put the time, effort and money into producing it in order to get paid by selling the rights to it didn't make it available in your country? Sucks to be you, but too bad. That's the breaks. Either move to a country where it is available or simply deal with it like an adult who realizes that life doesn't always work the way you want it to and move on.

For example number two, you want to watch great new show #942 but you cannot afford the price the company is asking for their product? Sucks to be you, but too bad. Either focus on making good life choices in an effort to increase your ability to afford the asking price or find a less expensive way to fill your leisure time.

Their Harmony remotes are also good. I've been using them for 10+ years.

Being the family "tech and AV" support guy, I've setup mini home theaters (TV + blu-ray player + 2.1/5.1 sound + satellite/cable TV box + streaming device, etc.) for several family members. I always asked if they had any interest in a Harmony remote since they're juggling multiple remotes at that point. They all declined and proceeded to create legal sized sheets of hand-written instructions for all the manual remote juggling required to switch between the various media sources.

I wait until their birthday or Christmas comes along and gift them a mid-level Harmony and set it up for them. When I check back with them after a few months, they love it and wish they'd gotten one from the outset. One family member even had me setup additional Harmony remotes for their other TV rooms.

Regardless of what Google does or doesn't do correctly regarding their own certs, Symantec has nobody to blame but themselves for this one. They deserve what they're getting because they played fast and loose with the rules to make a buck.

There's a middle ground here. People who genuinely could not evacuate themselves for whatever reason is a different story.

The GP's point about people who were capable of evacuating but stayed and ended up needing to be rescued and causing easily avoidable risks to the emergency responders is valid. Those people are extremely selfish and stupid.

If everyone who could evacuate did, it would have freed up a significant pool of resources that could have instead provided faster, additional aid to the people who had no choice.

In fact, I'd think that if you do indeed have a relative who could not leave for some reason, you'd be first in line to be royally pissed off at the idiots who could have evacuated but chose to stay and thus tied up resources that might have allowed your relative to be rescued sooner.