The network gear I manage is only accessible via VPN, or from a trusted internal network…

…and by the gear I manage, I mean my home network (a router and a few managed switches and access points). If a doofus like me can set it up for my home, I’d think that actual companies would be able to figure it out, too.

…which implies the existence of integer women, real women, complex women, imaginary women, rational & irrational women.

Travel expense reimbursement — though many companies have a “no receipt required if under $xyz” policy.

Debian (i3 on laptop, headless on homelab).

But apparently my coffee is Arch.

How do we get everyone angry.

This is the problem — taking away my coffee makes me angry, but I’ll be too tired to do anything about it.

Add to that photo editing (as much as GIMP is great…). I would guess DAW and video editing would fall under that category, too…and good luck finding many AAA open source games.

the private business can do what it wants.

“Noooo not like that…”

While “the system” is absolutely at fault for this, lifestyle creep — and changing finances — is very real.

For example, if you can almost afford a house, and your rental is modest, you’re probably not spending all of your take-home. But if you make just a little bit more it might make financial sense to buy a house, stretching your budget to the max. Short term this really hurts, but long term may end up being a savvy decision.

Opting for a hefty mortgage can be risky, but can also pay off in the long run — especially in a place like California where property taxes are basically fixed at time of purchase.

Come see the vise grips inherent in the system! Help! Help! I’m being drill pressed!

You can roll your own saline nasal rinse, but it takes a little care to get the salinity just right. And best to boil the water first in case of brain eating amoebas (seriously — not common, but very, very bad).

I’m holding out for Aperture Science, if for no other reason than that their AI has a dry, dark sense of humor.

IIRC Torvalds uses Fedora.

(Debian for me.)

Same, an R4 with an i5 4670k I built in grad school. It’s my ham radio computer now, as happy running Debian as the day I built it.

UN-Verified

Unfortunate abbreviation…

I keep hearing about grocery prices, but no one has any explanation of what Biden was supposed to do about it that he wasn’t already doing, or how Trump will handle it better.

Completely agree. I think it’s a “you break it you buy it” situation with voters.

And it’s not based in reason — Biden’s administration was staring down the barrel of a recession, and yet here we are, having completely avoided it. That’s a pretty successful navigation of the economic hand that Biden was dealt, if you ask me. But at the end of the day “groceries more expensive” = “we need someone else in the white house” for a lot of voters, I guess.

Way more than two options here.

I voted for Harris, and I encouraged others to as well. And I think the Democratic leadership royally fucked up here.

The polls kinda sucked in the end, and I think one reason is that folks were embarrassed to admit they were voting for Trump. That to me says that they voted for him not because he’s a racist sexist pig, but in spite of this.

But the polls did afaik get that the economy was hugely important. And the Democrats failed here both in current policy (groceries got more expensive over the course of Biden’s term), and in proposed policy messaging. No one cares about home buyer credits if you can’t afford groceries. (And no, I don’t think Trump has a plan to lower prices aside from shady back room deals that will ultimately cost us big — but voters want something new…)

To be clear, I voted for Biden, I voted for Harris, and I’m pretty scared about the future. But the Democrats need to learn something from this or it’s same story in four years. Maybe the lesson is “we can’t count on the left in this country to vote for us by default,” and maybe the lesson is, “for the love of God raise hell if the cost of living goes up, and do it in a way that appeals to the lowest common denominator.”

Open to discussion, but since 2008, the Democrats have won every election where the leadership didn’t “put their finger on the scale” in the primaries/picking the candidate. Obama, Obama; Clinton arguably shouldn’t have been the nominee and Sanders should have; Biden was (?) properly primaries; Harris was picked — obvious pick, but still, not primaried.

Or the other reason, that the US is too sexist to elect a woman. It’s depressing either way of course.

The Democrats, in hindsight, fucked up with the economy and/or the messaging.

Did inflation happen because of the groundwork that Trump laid down in his term (not to mention global pandemic)? Sure — but did inflation get really bad under Biden? Yes, absolutely. That doesn’t make it his fault, but it makes it a problem that the Democrats probably needed to address more aggressively, an all-out attack on rising cost of living.

At the start of the pandemic, for me to carry $100 of normal weekly groceries home from the supermarket was a real challenge, but I could do it. Now, I carry $100 no problem, with a toddler on my shoulders. The money doesn’t really matter to me, but from what I’ve been reading, it really mattered to a lot of voters. Again: I think his will be worse under Trump (if it does get better, it’ll be due to some shady tax rebates to supermarkets or big ag or something, IMHO).

So while the Dems are talking about first time home credits and whatnot, Vance is out there lying about the price of eggs — but it’s a lie that “feels” right to a lot of people, and anecdotally, has some truth to it in that inflation/cost of living increase is real. Nevermind that the R policy is…what, exactly? But they say they’ll fix it, and they point out that Dems are currently in power, and that’s enough for a lot of people.

We have one kid, one one the way, and then it’s time for a Balls Voyage party (or snipped but still equipped, if you prefer).

Whatever you do, do not touch that one BNC cable. Just trust me on this.