Not saying 6 figures isn’t an insane amount of money for a speaking fee, but Obama was getting $400,000 in 2017. Obama is arguably a better speaker, and Melania doesn’t get as many gigs as Obama did (there was a period in 2017 when he did 3 events within a couple months, which caused quite a bit of outrage on the right about his speaking fee), but 6 figures isn’t all that unusual for former Presidents/First Ladies (Michelle’s is reportedly around $200,000).

Hopefully they’re living their best lives at home while he’s out traveling the country being awkward at doughnut shops.

Watching Trump’s press conference from Mar-a-lago the other day, and hearing his excuses for why he isn’t out on the road campaigning, it struck me that the narrative that he’s moping around depressed that he’s losing isn’t the whole story.

He’s got Vance out pretending to campaign, while he and his buddies are sitting around coming up with plan B. He’s probably had calls with dozens of Republican governors and is getting teams of “alternate electors” together (the Stephen Miller interview on Ari Melber’s show made it pretty clear that they still see that as a perfectly legal strategy). Donald may know “it’s over” but that just means he’s going to get more desperate and we’ve already seen what desperate Trump can do with 2 months of prep, I’m not looking forward to seeing what he can do with 5 months.

Because good people - the people who would make the best leaders, aren’t narcissistic enough to believe they should run for president. They’re happy helping in whatever way they can, but they generally don’t have the audacity to think they have any business trying to run for the most powerful position in government. Partially because they’re humble, but also they aren’t in it for power, they just want to help people.

There’s definitely a conversation to be had that the role of president should be one of humility and neighborliness, but there’s a group of voters in America who just want somebody who can throw their dick around on the world stage and intimidate the rest of the world like a pro wrestler. And most politician types try to be both the helpful neighbor and pro wrestler, but end up seeming fake and not very genuine because usually both the macho and the neighborly aspects are an act, and they just want power.

When those of us who actually bothered to vote for Biden in our primaries this year, Kamala was on the Ballot as well. And while I can’t speak for everyone, I voted with the understanding that Biden probably wouldn’t live to complete a second term, and my vote was as much for Harris as it was for Biden. Harris was democratically elected as Biden’s replacement if something happened to him. It’s valid to say the circumstances were a bit unexpected, but we still voted with the understanding that she was almost certainly going to have to step up at some point.

Just don’t literally eat Elon, unless you want to overdose on ketamine.

It would make his whole “shark vs electrocution” rant a moot point if he can’t swim at all, which sounds very on brand for him.

Sex-ed is now just Ezekiel 23:20 “There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.” (NIV)

Technically their beloved KJV is a bit less graphic, “For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.” But that gets funny in a different way since “asses” as a more common use these days.

In some ways it makes sense if one or more candidates are people we know very little about, just to give us all time to get to know them, and to give them time to reveal more about who they really are. But when we already know as much about the candidates as we do this year, 3 months is more than enough.

Katie Porter isn’t doing anything now that she lost her Senate bid to Schiff, and has made some fans even in conservative circles for her whiteboard explanations and takedowns of pharma CEOs and pentagon overspending.

I know a bunch of people say Kamala needs a white man for VP, but I’m not sure that tracks logically, sexists aren’t going to suddenly be okay with a woman just because she has a man as VP.

If you want to fight voter apathy in later years, getting young people tuned in and engaged is probably the best way to do it. Sure, there’s always the chance they still might not show up now, but showing you are listening to young people still helps solidify your party as worth supporting and can lead to stronger support when they get older and are more likely to find the time to get out and vote. 22 year olds don’t stay 22, and the recent trend of people not becoming more right-leaning as they hit middle age might be in part due to Obama and others making young people feel heard 15 years ago. Saying “young people don’t vote, don’t listen to them” is short-sighted at best.

Alternatively, this could be a good opportunity to educate people on how much of a presidency is the cabinet rather than one person. Run ads highlighting the people actually responsible for things in Biden’s administration. Make the narrative more about Biden’s team and contrast them with Trump’s chaotic mess of a cabinet.

No matter which old man gets elected, there is a solid chance the next president dies in office of age-related causes. Showing that we’d be in good hands if/when that happens, and that there are people paying attention to catch things Biden might miss could go a long way towards reassuring people.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love a different candidate, and voted for someone other than Biden in the primary in 2020, but I also don’t trust the DNC to pick a replacement without making things worse. At least the Biden campaign has been admitting today that the debate went poorly, rather than pretending it was fine.

I work night shift and use blackout curtains and earplugs to improve my sleep during the day. Rather than cranking the volume on my alarm so it’s loud enough to consistently wake me up, I use Home Assistant to turn on some smart bulbs as my alarm. When I started, and even now if I have to be up extra early, I also have an audible alarm set to go off a few minutes after the lights come on - just in case the light doesn’t wake me up, but at this point my brain has gotten used to waking up to the lights, and I usually wake up and turn off the other alarm before it goes off.

Another useful automation for me is I have a buggy Samsung PC monitor that has all sorts of annoying issues; like not consistently waking from deep sleep which requires a hard power cycle to correct, and when it is asleep there’s some weird high pitched whine that beeps when the standby light flashes. I use a couple of smart plugs with power monitoring and monitor my PCs power draw to turn the power to my monitor on and off at the wall depending on if the PC is on.

Also the possibility that the son knows his dad is a dick, and knows one of the best ways to stick it to his old man is to donate some of his own nepo-baby money to something that is in direct opposition to his dad’s donations.

“Can somebody please find Ja Rule, get a hold of this motherfucker so I can make sense of all this? Where is Ja?”

I once heard someone make an argument that has stuck with me (as someone who very much grew up in that world) the Religious Right’s ideas about gender roles is a kink. The whole wives being submissive to husbands, and dressing a certain way, etc. Which would be fine if they didn’t force their kink on their kids, and everyone else. But instead they have decided that their kink is the only right way to live, and insist that anyone who doesn’t share it is sinning and must be made to conform.

Not sure exactly how good this would work for your use case of all traffic, but I use autossh and ssh reverse tunneling to forward a few local ports/services from my local machine to my VPS, where I can then proxy those ports in nginx or apache on the VPS. It might take a bit of extra configuration to go this route, but it’s been reliable for years for me. Wireguard is probably the “newer, right way” to do what I’m doing, but personally I find using ssh tunnels a bit simpler to wrap my head around and manage.

Technically wireguard would have a touch less latency, but most of the latency will be due to the round trip distance between you and your VPS and the difference in protocols is comparatively negligible.

Maybe I’ll try and give it another go soon to see if things have improved for what I need since I last tried. I do have a couple aging servers that will probably need upgraded soon anyway, and I’m sure my python scripts that I’ve used in the past to help automate server migration will need updated anyway since I last used them.

I think that my skepticism and desire to have docker get out of my way, has more to do with already knowing the underlying mechanics, being used to managing services before docker was a thing, and then docker coming along and saying “just learn docker instead.” Which is fine, if it didn’t mean not only an entire shift from what I already know, but a separation from it, with extra networking and docker configuration to fuss with. If I wasn’t already used to managing servers pre-docker, then yeah, I totally get it.

That’s a big reason I actively avoid docker on my servers, I don’t like running a dozen instances of my database software, and considering how much work it would take to go through and configure each docker container to use an external database, to me it’s just as easy to learn to configure each piece of software for yourself and know what’s going on under the hood, rather than relying on a bunch of defaults made by whoever made the docker image.

I hope a good amount of my issues with docker have been solved since I last seriously tried to use docker (which was back when they were literally giving away free tee shirts to get people to try it). But the times I’ve peeked at it since, to me it seems that docker gets in the way more often than it solves problems.

I don’t mean to yuck other people’s yum though, so if you like docker, and it works for you, don’t let me stop you from enjoying it. I just can’t justify the overhead for myself (both at the system resource level, and personal time level of inserting an additional layer of configuration between me and my software).