Tons of people dislike Harry Potter. I'm def one of them. Mentioning you're a fan gets an instant eye roll from me.
Transphobia etc aside, it's a shit series. Even for children, there are plenty of better fantasy books to read. I loved things like the Hobbit and Narnia as a small kid. I read things like Lord of the Rings and Dune when I was like 13-15.
I test and do QA on impossibly huge industrial electrical systems for things like steel mills. Some of them are 100 feet long, with individual cabinets all bayed together and fed from buswork which we fabricate ourselves. I also do some field work installing, repairing, etc.
However, the most boring part of my job by far is verifying bills of material during my QA portion. This involves physically looking at every part number of every part in the system (sometimes thousands of parts), and verifying it is the same number. Sometimes it takes days
I live in Pittsburgh and there are literally no cops on duty from like 3-5 AM or something. We haven't had a police chief in years, and I never see cops unless there's a violent crime or a car accident or overdose. You can kinda do whatever you want in terms of traffic laws. I've never even heard of someone getting a traffic ticket in the city, and most times if you're actually goin the speed limit you're a hazard that isn't following the flow of traffic. Completely different story in the suburbs outside the city.
It kinda rules not gonna lie.
There is nowhere in america that $420k is "middle class"
Even in the highest COL states like New York and California, middle class tops out under $200k
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/03/21/income-you-need-to-be-middle-class-in-every-us-state.html
Sure
I built it out of old PC parts when I upgraded my desktop. I wanted to go full AMD for both the CPU and GPU for the new build so I used the old mobo and got an Intel i3-10100 open box along with a few other random parts like a small nvme drive for a cache drive. I got four 8TB drives to start from a few places, one of them being Mac bid.
Then I found an absolutely massive heavy duty 48u server rack on Craigslist for like 50 bucks. I cut it in half with an angle grinder so it would fit under the steps and gave the other half to my fiance for his music production gear in our studio. I took din rail home from work and drilled & tapped holes in the rack to support it since the top frame was now missing. I put some din rail on the sides to mount my old NUCs and ran game servers on them for a while.
I have a rack mounted UPS on the bottom, the NAS above it in a rosewill case that can take up to like 16 spinning drives I think. I have a 10gb/s fiber connection for loading steam games as fast as the disk can spin. Games really don't have many loading screens nowadays so it works great for storing smaller games that load you in once or twice. The real complicated massive games I still store on my NVME on my desktop.
On top I have my networking equipment. Eventually I'm going to get a full router and NVR with cameras to watch things like birds and the front entrance. I also have a pi-hole.
I have a KVM setup that easily lets me navigate my desktop from the living room and play games in there. It works great. I mounted a remote start button on my living room wall, so now I can turn my PC on, login, press a keybind in hyprland that runs a script I wrote. This will turn off both PC monitors, change sound over, and launch emulationstation-DE which is a front end for all of the emulators, steam games, pirated games, whatever. So now the desktop is doing all the heavy lifting in terms of its CPU/GPU for the game, storing the game on my NAS in the basement, and broadcasting it in 4K / 60 FPS in my living room while I use a controller with zero latency. All on Linux. If 15 year old me who was using Ubuntu could see my setup now he'd geek out. A side note is I love Arch Linux now, and never want to use anything else. But it took me a while to find my way.
This turned into a bit of a tangent about my homelab as a whole, but the OS for the NAS I use is unRAID. The flexibility is unparalleled. You can throw whatever random drives you find in it and they're protected so long as they're the same size or smaller than the parity drive. On the NAS itself I run an *arr stack, Plex, a torrent client, etc. I also use it to download YT videos and have a private collection of things like concerts. Quite a few people use my Plex. My parents are even on it now and they're getting into their 70s.
Really though, the NAS is primarily storage first and foremost. But it's been chugging along for years and is pretty crucial in doing a lot.
I learned a ton about Linux building a few servers. A simple NAS can be a great starting point.
I have my NAS mounted as an NFS format. Since I use Linux on my desktop and server, the storage pool integrates seamlessly into things like my file browser and terminal. And don't underestimate having "basically unlimited" storage capabilities. I have thousands of old games stored on my NAS, I play them via emulators or on steam.
Or they'll just call your ID a fake. It's racism through and through.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/24/us-citizen-detained-ice-real-id
I'm at a hotel right now and every single coffee cup is wrapped in plastic. It's just like.. why? There isn't even a logical reason for it. If anything it costs more to individually wrap paper cups. Is it to appease germaphobes? You don't even put your mouth on that part, and the lids are unwrapped.
PEX has a lifespan of 50+ years. Copper pipes have a lifespan of about 70. Both are permanent solutions.
They have pros and cons. Both can freeze, but only copper pipes will actually burst. PEX never will. PEX offers way better flexibility and less joints, and easier connections (you literally just crimp it).
It's your house but I wouldn't be so quick to knock PEX. I did a whole new bathroom with it. Only thing I'd say to stay far far away from is CPVC. Avoid that shit like the plague as it's basically a ticking time bomb
This is defeatist bullshit, sorry. I'm actively building my future with my future husband by renovating a 130 year old home, and traveling the country doing industrial control wiring work. We have a dog and a roommate and friends and family we see frequently. We both love music, art, food, cooking, traveling, living in the city and seeing bands, friends, getting drinks and dinner and being social. I will walk my dog far up and down the river and to different parks and trails. I exercise and my mental and physical health is miles better than it was when I was a depressed 22 year old ten years ago.
Don't get me wrong, sometimes life fucking sucks. I've lived it. I still have to push myself really hard to achieve the goals I want and sometimes that involves working 14 hours in a pickle line getting sprayed with hot itchy shit at a steel mill in bumfuck nowhere Arkansas to make money so I can come home and build us a new kitchen for example.
I understand not everyone's circumstances can permit this type of thing. But there's a whole world of possibility and opportunity that involves waking up at the ass crack of dawn every day and working with your hands.
I'm obviously with you on this issue, but the US will skirt around any labor laws that are the norm globally that it can.
It's also one thing that SpaceX engineers are working 20 hours at their desks or occasionally going on site, etc. compared to the work I do which is more physically exhausting manual labor and sometimes outside in 100 degree heat all day. Both obviously shouldn't be happening.
The longest I've worked is about 17-18 hours in steel mills or back in the day on industrial solar farms for grid power. The solar work also played real loose with things when it got up to 120+ degree heat and we weren't able to work so they'd send us back to the hotel to come back later for night shift. So imagine working like 6am to 12 or 1 pm, going back to the hotel to "sleep", coming back after the sun set at like 8 pm, working until 2 or 3 pm the next day. That happened all the time.
This is more of a problem with heavy industry in the US than it is a SpaceX specific issue however.
Trump sucks for a million other reasons but this is objectively such a good thing for my region (Pittsburgh) and the business I work in. US Steel was for sale no matter what and the American companies like Cleveland Cliffs and Nucor that were trying to buy it were offering around half the price per share as Nippon, and probably a quarter of the investment while maintaining US steel's longstanding flippant policy towards environmental concerns and keeping old outdated dangerous machinery and equipment.
Nippon is investing billions into this region and US Steel. The new technology of steel mills is safer, cleaner, and better. There is way more automation taking people out of dangerous and hazardous roles in the mills
Really I'll be busy af with overtime, service calls for installations, our sales will skyrocket resulting in more jobs. Also Japanese companies tend to invest not only in the business, but things like public transit, improving our terrible roads, housing, etc.
I did not understand why Biden blocked the deal for "security concerns" and I don't give a fuck that trump was opposed to the deal on the campaign trail to win votes. I was very happy to hear the news as it will pretty dramatically affect my livelihood and career.