“Enjoy the once in century experience of empire collapse from the first row, go sightseeing to ‘once grand but now little more than decrepit and fast fading façades’ and return home with a warm ‘at least it’s not us’ feeling (return trip might be from El Salvador) unlike the poor sods who live in the place”

They’re gonna Ratchet Effect the shit out this!

Well, that’s definitelly going to solve the fall in Tourism problem in the US /s

The EU is now talking about doing what the US was already doing more than a decade ago when Snowden Revelations came out.

And don’t get me started on things like the relative ratios of “death by police” and percentage of people in prision (to mention just the things related to the use of force in policing) between America and Europe.

The EU is at least a decade behind the US in creeping autoritarianism and a lot of that shit has been imported from the US (including the new style far right, which amongst other things was set-up with money from American billionaires which Steve Bannon brought to Europe years ago very openly to “create far right parties” and is ideologically fed by American money using social media which for example paid Cambridge Analitica to use Facebook to fuel Brexit).

In this turn of the Wheel of History, the equivalent of Nazism is spreading out from America.

Personally I’ve been boycotting travel to the US or even just with a transfer in the US since the PATRIOT act.

Already over a decade ago I very purposefully chose Canada (highly recommended, by the way) for a month vacationing in North America rather than the US.

The writting has been on the wall for this shit ever since they allowed the TSA to start confiscating traveller’s mobile phones and computers way back in Bush’s day - the main difference with the current administration compared to the previous ones is that they’re open about what they’re looking for.

Mate, I’m not the person who answered your original comment.

I just saw you making claims about somebody else making fallacious statements when in fact it was you who started with a big fat fallacy and then bitched and moaned about how they were the ones being fallacious when somebody else countered it by pointing out that at least one of the points of “evidence” that you yourself presented for Mr. Krugman’s “pretty good track record” (whatever the fuck such vague and ill-defined expression means) was in fact a Swedish Central Bank Prize For Economics In Honor Of Alfred Nobel, which is commonly misportrayed as a genuine Nobel Prize - even by Krugman himself - when it is no such thing.

Of all the things to use to claim somebody has a “pretty good track record”, him having something he himself calls a Nobel Prize which is not in fact a Nobel Prize actually weakens that point rather than strengthens it, as it casts suspicion on his honesty.

As it so happens for a while I had a lot of exposure to Mr. Krugman’s opinions - on and after the 2008 Crash, when I in fact worked in the same Industry as he did - and in my opinion he was often full of shit and all over the place, at least back then, and a pretty good illustration of the caricatural Economist “who has predicted 10 of the last 2 downturns”. One could say that he likes to throw shit at the wall, wait to see what sticks and then claim he was a genius for spotting it.

I’ll repeat myself: had you not started with an Appeal To Authority in your original post and absent all those words of praise for the person making that point, just let the logic of the point speak for itself, you would have been better off.

Since you went for an Appeal to Authority as the very first paragraph of your comment, a response that trashes that person’s authoritative credentials is logic in the very context you created and thus not an Ad Hominum.

Without that first paragraph on your post you would’ve been right to claim Ad Hominum.

Well, yeah, automated ultra-fast untiring shameless liars are far more efficient than merelly human politicians at swindling people.

The mouse driver is already part of the OS in Window and Linux.

That shit you complain about is the Adverts Delivery & Private Data Capture application.

The way one designs hardware in is to optimize for the most common usage scenario with enough capacity to account for the peak use scenario (and with some safety margin on top).

(In the case of silent power sources they would also include lower power leakage in the common usage scenario so as to reduce the need for fans, plus in the actual physical circuit design would also include things like airflow and having space for a large slower fan since those are more silent)

However specifically for power sources, if you want to handle more power you have to for example use larger capacitors and switching MOSFETs so that it can handle more current, and those have more leakage hence more baseline losses. Mind you, using more expensive components one can get higher power stuff with less leakage, but that’s not going to happen outside specialist power supplies which are specifically designed for high-peak use AND low baseline power consumption, and I’m not even sure if there’s a genuine use case for such a design that justifies paying the extra cost for high-power low-leakage components.

In summary, whilst theoretically one can design a high-power low-leakage power source, it’s going to cost a lot more because you need better components, and that’s not going to be a generic desktop PC power source.

That said, I since silent PC power sources are designed to produce less heat, which means have less leakage (as power leakage is literally the power turning to heat), even if the with the design having been targetted for the most common usage scenario of that power source (which is not going to be 15W) that would still probably mean better components hence lower baseline leakage, hence they should waste less power if that desktop is repurposed as a NAS. Still won’t beat a dedicated ARM SBC (not even close), but it might end up cheap enough to be worth it if you already have that PC with a silent power source.

When I had my setup with an ASUS EEE PC I had mobile external HDDs plugged to it via USB.

Since my use case was long-term storage and feeding video files to a Media TV Box, the bandwidth limit of USB 2.0 and using HDDs rather than SDDs was fine. Also back then I had 100Mbps ethernet so that too limited bandwidth.

Even in my current setup where I use a Mini-PC to do the same, I still have the storage be external mobile HDDs and now badwidth limits are 1Gbps ethernet and USB 3.0, which is still fine for my use case.

Because my use case now is long term storage, home file sharing and torrenting, my home network is using the same principles as distributed systems and modern microprocessor architectures: smaller faster data stores with often used data close to were its used (for example fast smaller SDDs with the OS and game executables inside my gaming machine, plus a torrent server inside that same Mini-PC using its internal SDD) and then layered outwards with decreasing speed and increasing size (that same desktop machine has an internal “storage” HDD filled with low use files, and one network hop from it there’s the Mini-PC NAS sharing its external HDDs containing longer term storage files).

The whole thing tries to balance storage costs and with usage needs.

I suppose I could improve performance a bit more by setting up some of the space in the internal SDD in the Mini-PC as a read/write cache for the external HDDs, but so far I haven’t had the patience to do it.

I used to design high performance distributed computing systems and funnilly enough my home setup follows the same design principles (which I had not noticed until thinking about it now as I wrote this).

Yeah, different hardware is designed for different use cases and generally won’t work as well for other use cases, which is also why desktops seldom make for great NAS servers (their fans will also fail from constant use, plus their design spec is for much higher power usage so they have a lot more power waste even if trottled down).

That said my ASUS EEE PC lasted a few years on top of a cabinet in my kitchen (which is were the Internet came into my house so the router was also there) with a couple of external HDDs plugged in, and that’s a bit of a hostile environment (because some of the particulates from cooking, including fat, don’t get pulled out and end up accumulating there).

At the moment I just have a Mini-PC on my living room with a couple of external HDDs plugged in that works as NAS, TV Media Box and home server (including wireguard VPN on top of a 1Gbps connection, which at peak is somewhat processor intensive). It’s an N100 and the whole thing has a TDP of 15W so the fan seldom activates. So far that seems to be the best long term solution, plus it’s multiple use unlike a proprietary NAS. It’s the some of the best €140 (not including the HDDs) I’ve ever spent.

Stuff designed for much higher peek usage tend to have a lot more waste.

For example, a 400W power source (which is what’s probably in the original PC of your example) will waste more power than a lower wattage on (unless it’s a very expensive one), so in that example of yours it should be replaced by something much smaller.

Even beyond that, everything in there - another example, the motherboard - will have a lot more power leakage than something designed for a low power system (say, an ARM SBC).

Unless it’s a notebook, that old PC will always consume more power than, say, an N100 Mini-PC, much less an ARM based one.

True for notebooks. (For years my home NAS was an old Asus EEE PC)

Desktops, on the other hand, tend to consume a lot more power (how bad it is, depends on the generation) - they’re simply not designed to be a quiet device sitting on a corner continuously running a low CPU power demanding task: stuff designed for a lot more demanding tasks will have things like much bigger power sources which are less efficient at low power demand (when something is design to put out 400W, wasting 5 or 10W is no big deal, when it’s designed to put out 15W, wasting 5 or 10W would make it horribly inefficient).

Meanwhile the typical NAS out there is running an ARM processor (which are known for their low power consumption) or at worse a low powered Intel processor such as the N100.

Mind you, the idea of running you own NAS software is great (one can do way more with that than with a proprietary NAS, since its far more flexible) as long as you put it in the right hardware for the job.

I think that if you look around (just look at things like ChatControl, ICE in the US and the support for the Genocidal White Colonialist state of Israel in most of the West) we in the “developed” West are fast moving backwards and becoming more like Russia - more surveillance, more authoritarianist use of force, more corruption, more racism, more imperialism, a more oligarchic economic system, more concentration of power, more inequality.

Even in a perfect World were common Russians accepted it with open arms, I’m not so sure an occupation of Russia by Western nations would ultimatelly end in them “developing” towards Western Standards rather than in Western nations finishing regressing towards Russian Standards.

If I understood it correctly, per that legislation and given how the technology works, adult sites would have to block everybody coming to them from a known VPN exit point, not matter where the user actually is (because a site can’t really tell were a user actually is when they’re behind a VPN) to comply with it, meaning that it would impact everybody everywhere in the World using a VPN.

De facto Wisconcin’s legilslature is trying to imposed their will not only on those who live in Wisconsin, not only on those who live anywhere in the US but on those who live anywhere in World.

Basically Marxism says that to reach Communism one must first have to go through the Revolution Of The Proletariat where amongst other things they Sieze The Means Of Production.

Whilst Communism itself needs not be authoritarian, no nation has actually ever been Communist and all nations over the years claiming to be “Communist” were just nation that took the Marxists path to Communism and never went the authoritarian stage of the Marxist path to Communism.

This generates a lot of confusion in those who learned about Communism mainly from Propaganda (from either side: that in places like China is no more honest than that in places like the US, just with a different spin).

True.

That is however a pretty hard and time consuming change, so to me it makes sense that in the meanwhile we take steps to reduce the harm caused by the system still in place, not least by cracking down hard on Corruption and Conflicts Of Interest and closing the legal loopholes that allow certain politicians to stay within the Law whilst purposefully using today the power they have been delegated to do favors for others who have promised them monetary payback for it tomorrow.

If you’re drowning now you don’t put all your hopes on the ship that might be coming but isn’t even visible yet.

Looks like somebody has been promised by one or more large Tech firms a very highly paid non-executive board membership, millionaire speech circuit engagement or gold plated “consulting” gig when their time in the Commission is over…

Mind you, by now that kind of exchange of “favours” is tradition for the members of the EU Commission.

Them making their own space actually lets us much more easily reduce our exposure to them - without their space we get them everywhere and each of us have to ban such users individuals to avoid their poison, whilst if they’re congregated in a server we can just ban that server and/or its forums.

In terms of the NAZI bar metaphor, this is more like the NAZIS setting up their own bar and congregating there rather than trying to take over other bars - everybody else can very easilly avoid even looking at the NAZI bar, much less going there and listening to them spreading their ideology - yeah, by default the sound of their activities does leak to the street, but in Lemmy we’re the ones who can chose to close the door, not them.

Compare that with, for example, how the Zionists captured news@lemmy.world and even up to a level the server itself, by seeking moderation and admin positions there: subverting an existing large traffic forum and the biggest Lemmy instance is way much more pernicious than what the other kind of NAZI are doing by setting up their own - easily avoided - corner.