I’m the parent of a trans kid, I am not trans myself. We moved from a deep red state to Minnesota a few years ago, for reasons like yours, my sister and her wife made the move as well.

I can’t tell you what the experience has been like for my son. I can tell you what it felt like from my perspective. The state we lived in is where our friends and family lived and mostly all still live. The state government was constantly coming up with new threats. Attempting to criminalize medical treatment for our kid. The school was… “Tolerant” but all of the actors didn’t act when presented with the harassment my kid dealt with.

Everyone around us went about their lives as though nothing was happening, as my spouse and I felt the weight of a state government that ignored us at best and at worst seemed actively malicious.

The weight we didn’t realize we were carrying constantly was enormous and it lifted quite quickly.

It was hard on all of us, making new friends as an adult (and in a relatively rural community) feels impossible at times. But I don’t fear our state government.

There are resources in the cities for transplants, even if you make the choice willingly it’s still a traumatic experience. You have to decide if it’s worth it.

I live in a fairly conservative area that’s working class.

People intuitively understand when you describe how much capitalism sucks because they’re living it.

If you say “capitalism sucks”, you are going to get reactionary thought and action. You have to say things in a way to engage their experience and understanding without tripping the propagandized brain worms.

If you can do that, you’ll find that they’re primed to reject capitalism, they just don’t know it yet.

“These rich fuckers don’t give a shit about us, but they have no problems helping each other out.”

“Everybody’s boss is the same, they want you to work harder, more hours, and do it all for less money. They want us to be able to barely survive.”

“The only way we can make them change is to all work together. They’ll screw over each one of us individually, but if we’re together they’ll know it’s actually them who needs us.”

It’s almost like the entire economic system requires every business to exploit their workers as much as possible to remain competitive.

If you find yourself thinking “I agree, things are really bad, but outright conflict would be so much worse!”

You might be right, in the short term perhaps.

But if you think about the staggering body count that has already built up, from police killing people and walking away without punishment, from our money supplying tools to murder countless children overseas, our governments overall mindless support of business and money over people?

I don’t want any sort of conflict, I don’t want any lives to be lost, but it seems like they’re intent on killing us regardless of how we feel about them.

This is a shitty leader.

Praise in public. Correct in private.

Not that I even agree correction was warranted.

I’d rather let a junior engineer loose in my codebase. At least I know their intent and where they live.

Some of us turned down Lockheed and Raytheon.

Incredible art. Any time I see marble look like cloth, it blows my mind.

As to the physics, the amount of material holding up the hammock is likely much more significant than it appears. Not to say it isn’t delicate, I’m sure much side to side movement would break it quite easily, but the vertical strength is probably significantly more than it seems, it’s sort of like a bridge with a truck on it…

I can’t tell you that a baofeng is gonna outperform any of these radios. I can tell you that I’ve got two of them, a programming cable, a mag mount vhf/uhf antenna, a nagoya antenna, and an antenna I made out of some leftover Romex and a painting pole. All this was well within that budget.

I can also tell you that I, not without some antenna placement experiments, can consistently activate a local repeater from around 15 miles. And have been complimented on audio quality on multiple occasions.

You are not going to find an ht with a rubber duck antenna that’s going to perform the way you’d like. You will need to try out some different things.

Save yourself some heartache and get an sma to BNC adapter for the radios you wanna play with some antennas on and some whatever your antennas have to bnc adapters, get a few antennas instead of another ht, and just try stuff out. Or hell, throw $16 bucks at a gt-5r, they’re clean transmitters now, the build quality is surprisingly good (on mine anyway) and even if it’s hot garbage you didn’t spend a fortune on it.

You will always wonder if you’re screwing things up, you just get better and faster at diagnosing the issue through practice.

Off lease corporate thin clients with fresh ssds. You can get something that runs off a laptop power supply, will handle more than you’re going to throw at it, and they’re insanely cheap.

I moved to one from a pi when I got serious about home assistant.

I also run a stack of networking utilities on my OPNSense router.

Jellyfin has been a bit more difficult to transition, I’m still running it on my wife’s gaming computer. I’ve pre transcoded most of our collection, but not all of it. I need to find something very cheap but also capable of handling the odd 4k transcode.

The problem with windows 8 is that with the initial release they wanted everything to be a mobile OS, even your desktop.

“Metro Design” lol

But it seemed decent for tablets and phones.

The door monitor mostly helps when a kid walks off leaving it open thinking they closed it.

The freezer temperature monitoring has saved the contents several times. A breaker had tripped once and I didn’t notice, it let me know that I needed a generator during a power outage, and one of the kids snuck an ice cream and left the lid wide open.

So yeah, it’s been useful. It’s not needed 99% of the time.

Nothing needs to be, but I do like to monitor door status and temperature for my fridge and deep freezers with home assistant.

Kissinger lived to be like a million.

It’s not the actual tech, generally speaking, that people are upset about. Although your Luddite reference is probably more accurate than you intended.

The Luddites weren’t anti-tech, they were anti- the damage it was doing to the people who did the work.

Most people who hate these new technologies aren’t mad at the tech itself, they’re mad at the quality that’s produced when the only concern is lowering costs and the extractive infrastructure built around it. A monthly fucking subscription for heated seats. This exists now.

The alternative to this is the galaxy brained take: “THESE PEOPLE HATE HAVING A COMFORTABLE ASS WHILE DRIVING”

That’s the most hilarious thing about being good at being an engineer it seems. I’m more than 10 years into my career at this point and I spend more time correcting other people’s work and outlining the technical work that needs to be done than writing things myself these days.

Home Depot ad earlier literally said “Earn your Sunday”

Anyone can learn to code well enough for a corporate environment.

As the repo owner, you can put in place PR guardrails to help you manage the workload it puts on you. You can enforce pre-commit linting and code formatting, mandatory PR templates, size limits on PRs, etc and these can limit the chunks of work you’re sent by this person.

This is part of creating a culture of good code, enforcing code standards and contribution behaviors comes with the territory as you move up the chain in your career.

Another part unfortunately, even if you’re not a supervisor is having sometimes tough conversations with contributors it’s just part of the deal.

“Hey Bob, I just wanted to connect with you. It seems like you’re having kind of a tough time keeping up with our standards (producing code that’s usable for our team, or something said tactfully like that), is there something more that I can do to help you? Or is there something specific you’re having trouble with? I just want to help you be the most successful that you can be, because the more successful you are, the more successful our team as a whole is.”

If you have a discussion or two like this and it’s not working out, then maybe you need to talk to Bob’s supervisor/manager directly about the issue. Sometimes people don’t even realize what’s going on.

It seems to me at least that it comes through in general executive (dys-)function.

I often can’t pay attention to what I want to, even if it is incredibly important, and I care a ton about it. Decision making is awful, except under very specific circumstances: everything on fire at work and you need a solution yesterday? Done. I’ve got the solution and handed out roles, fires out. I need to eat something and there’s a fridge full of food? I will stand there with the door open till it spoils.

I have a very important thing at work that needs to be done and should only take an hour or two? This documentation I’ve been thinking about writing for three years that noone else asked for has finally found its time in the sun!

Gotta make a phone call for literally anything? Huh, my battery’s completely drained because I watched 736 YouTube shorts in a row that I couldn’t enjoy because of the pit in my stomach about a friendly 30 second call to the pharmacy.

Comcast et al have taken (literal) billions of public dollars to expand rural broadband service.

Instead of laying fiber, they used that money to change the definition of broadband.

If corporations are people we need to be able to institute the death penalty for them too.