OptimistPrime

I'm reading The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. It's my first Sanderson and I'm a little over 300 pages in. It's been on my TBR for a few months and finally decided to take it on.

This is awesome. Did you build it? Where are you going to put it? Do you have more pictures of the complete library box?

Chim Chim chiminy, Chim Chim chiminy, Chim Chim chiree

I got a French press and used it for awhile. I'm extremely lazy though and got tired of having to clean the coffee grounds out of the screen. That's something I didn't consider before buying it. I switched to a chemex that I like much better. Yeah, there are disposable filters but it works better for me. If I were starting over, I'd probably just get some kind of pour over thing that fits over my mug. That would take up less space than the chemex.

Proxmox is what I've been farting around with. Finally cleared off enough old hard drives to play with truenas. That action forced me to move the router and modem into my office, which involved figuring out which coax outside my house went to this room. Just last night I figured out, or more honestly, found the right YouTube video, that held my hand through the process of giving truenas a static IP. Earned dopamine is nice.

I've been feeling the same way the last couple of weeks. I finally got so fed up with the toxicity of Instagram that I uninstalled it from my phone. And since finding Lemmy, I've disengaged and deleted my Reddit account. So I'm trying to figure out what to do on this Internet now. And it really feels like how I used to use it. I'm finding niche blogs and sites that people post on Lemmy. I'll add them to my bookmarks so that I can remember to visit them again. I'm actually reading the articles and not just jumping straight into the comments. It's like going back in time 12 years. And I don't know if this is just in my head, but I feel like I'm regaining some of my ability to focus and increasing my attention span that's been atrophied over the last decade. I just spent most of my weekend building and playing around with a new homelab server... Something I would have done years ago but would have been nearly impossible to do if I was stuck scrolling through the dopamine machine that is Instagram and Reddit.

If you're dissatisfied with the results you get on Google or you're looking for websites that might not be in Google's search results, I recently came across this site: https://www.marginalia.nu/. The search engine touts itself as focusing on non-commercial content. It really makes me nostalgic for the old Internet... Back when you could find some random person's blog about something really specific. They weren't trying to get monetized or fit into some SEO algorithm. They just wanted to spread their passion for growing different varieties of butter beans, free of charge and subscription.

In case anyone hits a paywall, https://12ft.io can get around it. I also just learned that the Calibre software for ebooks has a news function that can download ebook versions of different publications. The New Yorker is available for download.

Articles like this make me sad because they tend to show the futility of what individuals can do. I try to reduce single-use containers and recycle where I can. But like the lady who tries to eliminate her family's trash for a year, she was demoralized to learn that her plastics probably weren't being recycled. And the ones that were, likely wasn't having much good in the grand scheme of things. So what can individuals realistically? I try to use reuse-able grocery bags. The end of this article references a study done that claims reusable bags can have greater environmental impacts. I suspect there's some nuance to that that's being left out. This article talks about that same study and says (I'm paraphrasing here), "that the results table given by the study only draws attention to the worst environmental indicator for each material, rather than providing the whole story of how the bag performs in all categories. Ozone depletion was the biggest environmental impact for cotton bags. Taking into account just that factor, a cotton bag would need to be re-used 20,000 times to equal a regular plastic bag. But in many other categories, cotton was the preferable option." I think this kind of science reporting happens a lot. Nuance can get left out.

I think all individuals can do is use common sense. Reduce the single-use things. Reuse things when they can.

That's so awesome. I've been thinking about converting my lawn to clover, if nothing else to just not have to mow it as often. How often do you mow yours?

• A Secret History
• A Gentleman in Moscow
• The Martian
• 11/22/63
• Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
• East of Eden

I can't dispute that. I hear people claim that in my country too. But I just wonder how they can know that for a fact. Like okay, maybe they've seen a service provided by a private entity for X amount and a comparable service provided by the government for Y amount more. But how can we know what's going on behind the scenes? Is the company being subsidized by the government? Is the government charging more for this service to offset and lower the price of some other service? Or is the government charging us more for the overhead of having thousands or millions of customers where on the other hand, it can charge a company to lease the infrastructure for less for the reduced overhead of only having that company as a "customer"? I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud. I just question where the motive comes into play for private companies. Their motive is to make money. Do they have us in their best interests? They can cut costs and have huge failures like what happened in Texas with their power grid. But then there can be huge government failure too providing these services like with what happened to the water system in Flint, MI. I'm not really educated on either of these so it's possible I'm totally misrepresenting these. And I'm not claiming that there isn't waste, abuse and corruption in government either. At the end of the day, public and private entities are run by people. But anyway, thanks for indulging my stream of consciousness.

I'm not the person you replied to and this isn't well thought out. Just trying to think this through myself.

How would something like an electric company offer competitive cost or quality? There'd have to be at least two options serving an area in order for there to be some kind of competition. So do each of those companies build their own infrastructure, power stations, power lines, etc? So a neighborhood would have two sets of power lines? That seems wasteful and would get pretty ugly as more competitors came in. So maybe instead the government builds the infrastructure and the competing companies lease the usage of the infrastructure. But then what are the companies going to offer as a competitive advantage? I don't know. They need to make some kind of profit in order to justify their existence. And they have to pay for the usage of the infrastructure. And they don't want to lose money. And let's assume the government doesn't pick favorites and charges each of them the same. So we end up paying them more than what it costs them to lease the infrastructure. So why can't we just cut them out, i.e. cut out the middle man, and pay the government directly. I guess this all just assumes that there's nothing extra an electric company can offer on top of the electricity being supplied.

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