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Cake day: September 12th, 2023

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  • After ramping up production, McDonough said Rivian is excited to expand the Rivian brand internationally, with plans to launch R2 in Europe and other global markets.

    Umm, yeah, maybe not a great time for a US company to try and break into Europe.

    I actually quite like Rivian, and in different times I’d probably be a potential customer, but not now. American products are now on the “avoid if possible” list.

    I won’t be able to totally rid my life of them of course. That will take a long time, but I certainly won’t be adding any.








  • It requires unanimity of the other members, Hungary was protected by PiS in Poland (who are also corrupt authoritarians) until they were voted out, there was then a short window of a couple of months where the EU squibbed their chance, then Slovakia replaced their chad Prez with Fico who is also a corrupt authoritarian and the opportunity was lost.

    What they can do is get all the preparatory stuff done and wait to see if Slovakia replace Fico, or (very unlikely but not impossible) the challenger to Orban manages to win. If neither happens then giving Fico a bigger bribe than Putin does is the last resort.



  • Given the TOR part is kinda the point of tails you may wish to expand on what exactly a “tails like live os without tor” looks like.

    The standard Mint iso will boot into a live session with no persistence, click on network icon to join tge wifi and away you go. You can setup a script to install stuff that isnt on the stock build (pretty sure firefox is there but a vpn config for example).

    Without a use case description that sounds like what you’re asking for.

    I’m sure the other distros that offer live usbs will be the same.


  • When you search google it fingerprints your browser then attachs that to the other information it amasses from tracking your other activities from other websites.

    By not giving them the search content you reduce what they know.

    Scenario a) you search up particular health issues on google, for the US say “how do I know I’m pregnant” then you go to an online pharmacy (Walgreen is the big US one I think) and order “plan b” (anti pregnancy drug). Google doesnt even need to know from walgreens what you ordered it will infer a pregnancy test and/or plan b then from later activity

    Scenario b) you use proxy and thus google knows nothing of your search, then you go to walgreens, for all google knows you ordered makeup or hayfever tablets.

    Scenario a is or will be illegal in some US states - best not to leak it.

    Not a perfect example, i can poke holes in it. The point is searches are usually sensitive info, keeping them out of the hands of the most egregious activity collator keeps more privacy then if you don’t. The proxy buries your senstive search in with thousands of others that can’t be attached to you




  • I agree, all of those are good approaches which is, presumably why VdL has made several announcements about defence spending in the last week (€800bn euro or something today - only saw headline havent read it yet).

    Europe does have petroleum (although technically EU doesn’t) both Scotland & Norway have a fair bit so they don’t HAVE to buy Russian or American, and Australia & Canada are definitely still allied. Middle east are dodgy but most of them aren’t part of the fascist conspiracy.

    The problem with the last point is the same reason it’s hard to get a soldier in a war zone to quit smoking, if you’re imminently likely to get shot, worrying about lung cancer down the line is hard to focus on.

    I think we definitely need to push hard to decarbonise, but not at the expense of being dead before getting there. Particularly not when the US is actively seeking to reverse its climate change efforts and recarbonise.





  • Theoretically the major cloud providers like MS have redundant geographically dispersed servers that mean there should only be an outage if the individual user can’t reach the internet.

    In practise however those promises are hollow for a number of reasons, cost usually. Legal issues like GDPR also impinge (EU data being allowed to be in the US has been blocked by the courts the other day for example). In addition there’s a long list of other configuration reasons which almost always come back to cost indirectly.

    Theoretically an ideally configured cloud solution is far superior to on-prem.

    In the real world, not so much: corners cut, pennies saved by non technical managers not understanding the ramifications of their choices & etc

    On prem is certainly better in the real world if you’re big enough to afford proper redundancy and to hire and keep good techs.

    Many many firms can’t tick those boxes though and so you get to imperfect world optimisation where what is good for coy. A is bad for coy. B