With 25 GbE, even 10, I’d be tempted to PXE boot client systems. Maybe still have a local PCIe SSD for windows game files.

Dunno how that would actually work with Windows, but it was fun when I did it for beowulf nodes. Setting RPis to netboot is a little involved, but you can create an OSMC image and give all your TVs a consistent ‘smart’ interface. You don’t even need 10GbE to be pretty functional for the Pi, but my experience is that WiFi is not fast enough.

You can’t use house #1 as the collateral for both the mortgage on house #1 and house #2, because the bank is smart enough to know that you don’t actually own house #1. If house #1 has appreciated significantly from the purchase price, or you have paid off a good chunk of the mortgage, you may have enough equity to take a loan (eg home equity line of credit / HELOC) on that equity to get down-payment money for a second house. That’s generally a slow process, unless you happen to own property in a market bubble.

And when the hosting company gets bought, a whole new bunch of people will suddenly be in control of all your content, public and private, deleted or not, complete with copyright (even if limited), and all the freedom to immediately change TOS.

You definitely might use the same backpack or tote to go out to the range as to go on a weekend trip. Drive to a hunting holiday with friends, then use the same bags for a trip to Disney with the kids. If you’re going somewhere, you use the bags you have.

I’m a big fan of Backblaze’s failure statistics. https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data

Annualized failure rates go from 0.3%/year to 3+%/year, even just looking at the drives they have million+ hours for, and I’d rather be at the lower end of that 10x range.

2023, McDonald’s net income $8.5B on $25B revenue, or 34% net profit margin.
2009 net income $4.5B on $23B revenue. 20% profit margin.

Over the time period that you picked, their profits - the money that they don’t pay to either workers or farmers - nearly doubled as revenues barely changed.

HA doesn’t require 4/4/32, that’s just the hardware the HA people sell. (which, given that your phone may be 8/16/128, is hardly “robust”). Generally, the Home Assistant crowd kind of target an audience that’s probably already running some kind of home server, NAS, or router, and HA can probably be installed on that device.

Theoretically, there’s no reason the HA server couldn’t be installed on your phone, except then your smart home functions would only work while your phone is in the house and not sleeping. Kind of defeats the point of a lot of it, unless you’re just thinking of smart home like “remote control for everything.” Regardless, much smaller niche for an already-small market, and apparently not a priority for the dev team.

If you’re going to have any non-linux clients, samba will be an order of magnitude easier. MacOS handles nfs pretty well, but Windows just wants SMB

A 2024 Maverick has a wheelbase of 120" and curb weight of 3600 pounds. In 1991, Ford’s compact pickup, the Ranger, had a wheelbase of just 108" and curb weight of 2800 pounds. “Small” trucks have gained a foot and half a ton. The Ranger itself is now a 5000 pound behemoth that outweighs the 1990 F-150 by 1000 pounds.

Back in the day, corporate taxes were like 25% of federal revenues. After Trump’s tax cuts, it’s down to 10%. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1edSi

High corporate tax rates encourages companies not to have profits - pay their revenues out as wages, research new technologies, build infrastructure. Do useful shit with their gains rather than just sit on big bags of cash.

Interesting, though: the highest insurance rates are in the midwest - Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas. No one lives there, so the risk pool is smaller than big states like CA and FL, and you can’t send firefighters to divert a tornado. We’ll see if that holds up to climate change, bigger CA fires, and more frequent FL hurricanes.

I bought my first car on credit. After my last payment, I diverted that money into dedicated savings for the next car. Kept me from lifestyle creep and paid myself interest instead of the bank.

The computers are, by far, the most reliable parts of a car. They’re not subject to mechanical stresses or wear, and the real-time/embedded operating systems are far more fault resistant than desktop/phone OSes. The computers also mean that you can buy a $20 OBDII scanner and have the car tell you what’s wrong with it. Maybe an extra $10 for an app that will decode most of the manufacturer-specific codes. The difference between those $30 diagnostics and the $10,000 system the dealer uses is mostly that the dealer system includes all the manufacturer codes and step-by-step directions for fixing each fault.

I would rather spend (modestly) more time checking my own than less time standing idly with nothing to do but watch some kid checking out my goods. It feels better to be an active participant. Where it breaks down for me and my 12 items is when all the self-check lanes are clogged with people trying to ring up a full cart of groceries, who still haven’t figured out how to work self-checks, who are encumbered by a baby in one arm and a phone in the other hand, or who just can’t move all that well.

Managers using the presence of self-check as an excuse to understaff the actual checkouts makes all of those problems worse, and makes the checkout process suck for everyone.

I’ve never been in a coffee shop without an automatic/one-touch espresso machine. The last one I tried - a place that roasts their own beans and offers a range of classes and Specialty Coffee of America certifications - I asked if they could make me a “bad” espresso, and they basically said, “Nope, you’re gonna get whatever the button gives us.”

Some of that turn is physical plant. Kitchens, especially, are built to serve human forms, where tech solutions to food prep would rather be stand-alone boxes. It’s a far harder problem to make a robot that uses a restaurant’s existing grills, ovens, and deep fryers than it is to make a box that turns out perfect french fries. It’s a riskier proposal for a restaurant to replace its fry station, where a human can make fries, onion rings, egg rolls, or whatever new fad hits tiktok, with a fries-and-rings-only box with less than 10 years commercial proof. Generative AI, for all its faults, is just code that runs on a computer you already have, or maybe in a cloud service with zero physical footprint. Relative to replacing your barista with a vending machine, trying ChatGPT for a quarter or two is practically zero risk.

Also, is this legal?

Legal? Defintely: it’s at most a civil disagreement between corporate-preople. If it were anyone other than Elon, I’d be sure that the contracts included some kind of termination clause that lets Tesla do this, possibly by still paying Disney+, possibly by paying Disney a termination fee. Because it’s Elon, I’d say there’s probably a lawsuit incoming, just as soon as Disney Legal’s printers finish the gold leaf trim on 1000 page filing.

I’ve registered on Schwab’s developer site, which has listed ‘individual trader api’ as ‘coming by the end of 2023’ as long as I’ve been aware. They do have a slew of active professional APIs, but those are contract-dependent and not fit for (my) purpose.

I got forcibly migrated a couple months ago, and also expected them just to migrate TDA’s API to their own system, but I’m losing faith in their ‘end of 2023’ promise. I haven’t been able to get any more detail on their timeline/progress, although the developer portal is responsive. It’s frustrating. There’s nothing magical about Schwab’s website, fees, trading, or account services, so if I can manage my frustration and restore my data access by migrating, I’m open.

The options my own search has turned up are Alpaca and Interactive Brokers. Alpaca seems pretty sketchy; still in the ‘startup’ phase. IBKR seems legit, but isn’t one I’d heard of before. I was hoping someone on social media might have had great experience somewhere and be ready to share. Or even that some brokerage might be watching for the opportunity to advertise, even on a community with barely 100 monthly users.

As long as it’s actually a TDA account, the API will work. They’re transitioning all those accounts to Schwab, though. Once they transition your account, you no longer have TDA account, so no TDA credentials to authenticate with the API.

I have an inch-high stack of platters now. Kind of interesting to see how their thickness has changed over the years, including a color change in there somewhere. Keep thinking I should bury them in epoxy on some table top.

For extra fun, you ca melt the casings and cast interesting shapes. I only wish I were smart enough to repurpose the spindle motors.