I often wonder how much of the toll is used to fund the road maintenance itself vs funding the structures to collect tolls like the toll booths, the collections, technology, billing, and all the employees.

This is probably the best answer based on the stuff that I’ve heard.

During the first term, a local talk radio show had a woman on who grew up in a cult. She was born into it. She described her own story about how she learned what was happening and eventually got out. IIRC, her parents cut all ties with her, as that was the way of the cult. Anyhow, she described the process of “deprogramming” someone and it is basically along the same lines of what you describe.

Sadly, it’s easy to “mass convert” people to cults, but deprogramming is a one on one conversation over a long period of time.

There’s already some good discussion here. A little less drastic is a soft succession. It’s already happened and is happening. The blog articulates it much better than i could, but the essence is that the US constitution already has been interpreted to give state laws a sort if priority over feseral laws. Additionally, states can apply financial pressure to the federal government.

Near rhe end of the blog he ponders whether this could result in a shell fedwral government.

I’m loving all the Canadians in this thread.

If you’re a kind person, there’s always something to apologize for. I was taught a long time ago that it was OK to apologize, but that you should add " for…" to the end and if it still sounds OK then you should say it.

“I’m sorry for hurting your feelings.” “I’m sorry that you don’t enjoy the meal that I prepared for the family.” “I’m sorry your face looks like an anus.” “I’m sorry that you’re too stupid to understand that I’m not complimenting you.” …and so on. This took an unexpected turn.

PS: I’ll apologize in most confrontations as a way to de-escalate the situation.

I came here to say the same thing except that I have a pi locally and one at a relative’s house. I back up to the local pi and a nightly cron starts rsync to pull my local copy.

I chose this so that i could control the rstnc start time, bandwidth and stop time but also so I could leave the remote network vanilla with no open ports, etc. With bandwidth limiting, it may take a few days to catch up from full backups, but a differential is same day.

Be sure to use a RO filesystem or overlay FS on the Pi card. I’ve had them go corrupt.

PSA: ForkServer in Firefox 141: No More Restarts and Better Performance on Linux

I use OSMAnd+. The searching is the biggest problem, so I will contribute to StreetComplete in an effort to improve the areas in which I travel.

When I do need a location that isn’t found in OSM, I’ll grab the coords from LatLong.net and copy/paste them into OSM. When I get to the destination, I’ll pop open street complete and fill in details in the hopes that next time will be better.

Not MENSA, but came to the unfortunate realization that I’m on the skinny side of the intelligence bell curve late in life. For me, I was frustrated that I could not easily relate my thoughts and ideas to others. I’d just get a blank stare or worse. I figured that I was dumb and everybody else knew something that I didn’t. So I kept quiet and kept all my thoughts to myself.

Many years later, I tried again to voice my thoughts and ideas, but would use lots of examples and references to areas where my listener may be familiar. That seemed to work.

It was only when I started talking about my feelings to others when I realized that things in my head work differently. I’m able to absorb information faster and deeper but also extrapolate those learnings to other unrelated areas.

My mantra is “plan to be hacked”. Whether this is a good backup strategy, a read-only VM, good monitoring or serious firewall rules.

It’s a VGA connection and, yes, my primary concern is resource usage. I’m running 2-3 VMs on it so that I can easily migrate the VM around.

I had plain old top and it was boring. I did not know how many alternatives there were.

I’ll also have to check out cmatrix.

This is an excellent idea!

Generally, no. On some cases where I’m extending the code or compiling it for some special case that I have, I will read the code. For example, I modified a web project to use LDAP instead of a local user file. In that case, I had to read the code to understand it. In cases where I’m recompiling the code, my pipeline will run some basic vulnerability scans automatically.

I would not consider either of these a comprehensive audit, but it’s something.

Additionally, on any of my server deployments, I have firewall rules which would catch “calls to home”. I’ve seen a few apps calling home, getting blocked but no adverse effects. The only one I can remember is Traefik, which I flipped a config value to not do that.

I’ve had the same thought. It’s defeatism. I was told that protests help bring like minded people together to organize, share ideas and implement plans to change things. A person can’t change things but many people can.

What if just being there helps you feel hope again?

When filing paperwork, like in those hanging file folders, the papers should be placed into the folder with the paper’s left margin up. This way, any stapled pages can be flipped through as a bunch rather than individual pages. Also, the most important text tends to be left justified, such as the return address. Apparently this goes counter to every accountant’s training, but I’m sticking to it.

How do you feel about mandated helmets for children?

I was hacked years ago. I was hosting a test instance of a phpbb for a local club. Work blocked SSH, so I opened up telnet. They either got in from telnet or a php flaw and installed password sniffers and replaced some tools (ps, top) with tools that would hide the sniffer service they installed.

After that, I changed my model. My time lab is for learning and having fun. I’m going to make mistakes and leave something exposed or vulnerable and hackers are going to get in. Under this new model, I need to be able to restore the system easily after a breach. I have a local backup and a remote backup and I have build scripts (ansible) so that I can restore the system if I need to. I’ve had to do this twice. Once from my own mistake and one from hardware failure.

Same. I have spent way more time troubleshooting a pipeline than it saves. I like the idea of automation but laziness prevails.

Similar story. I was in elementary school and fell off the monkeybars and landed flat on my back and knocked myself out, surrounded by kids. I woke up later and everyone was gone, so I got up and went back to class. I got detention for being late. When my parents asked why I “skipped class” I said that I didn’t know and was grounded for not telling the truth.

I did other dumb things, mostly around bodies of water (cliff diving, rip currents). I’m surprised that I’m not dead. As an adult, I’m afraid of everything.

For my own curiosity, how do you perform a build? Is it all done in pipelines, kicked off on change? Do you execute the whole infra build each time you release an update?