Trainguyrom

Korea wasn't legally considered a war for bullshit political reasons for far too long and as a result veterans and families of veterans were denied benefits they should have received after giving some or all for the country now fucking them over

For similar reasons in my current independent contractor role I'm limited to working less than 32 hours per week, presumably to prevent claims of being misclassified as a contractor.

Now as for why I'm an independent contractor and not a full time employee that's down to freaking corporate politics following being laid off, leaving for another role and then being begged to come back because they needed my expertise and organizational knowledge (I've been heavily trained to pick up the torch for an employee who's retiring in 2 years, which with the amount of undocumented nonsense and organization-specific decisions it would take a solid 2 years just to get anyone trained up on everything and I'm the only one with the technical and organizational knowledge in the organization right now) so in short they'd greatly reduce costs by bringing me on full time but the CFO won't approve the job offer (and that's literally the only stakeholder holding it back)

When I started my career in IT I consciously started keeping a variety of backup careers in mind, and I intentionally keep my expenses where I could simply swap careers and make it all work financially.

Probably my most viable backup plan is to move into banking or finance. Decent money available there, still tickles the part of my brain that loves understanding numbers and processes while also working my brain entirely differently than troubleshooting network problems. Data science, HIT and HRIT are also options in considering if I want to stay in the realm of IT, but that depends on how burnt out I get really

In my personal life I've been picking up more off-screen hobbies to help stave off burnout among other reasons. I'm hoping career-wise I can promote myself into management before I get too burnt out, but you never know

The heck are you talking about? The baseline security config in Debian is far better than most distros out there, and QubesOS is really only realistic for folks with the threat models of those in C-suites or targets of nation state hackers. Seriously what makes your threat model so severe that you need better isolation and security than what Debian provides (which is already far above average) yet you'll still post about it on forums?

One could argue that reduced maintenance costs are a value from the cloud providers. E.g. when my AWS VM dies I can get a new one back in <10m (faster with automation). When my self-hosted server dies I need to have planned for that with a warm spare and someone needs to physically be connecting new hardware

Yes this is absolutely a value proposition that CTOs/CIOs/IT Dept Heads need to be considering. You're not just paying for the VMs and storage, you're also paying to outsource all of the hardware and some of the configuration work, however you still need admins to manage all of the VMs and configs. If that labor savings is actually enough to cover the immensely increased cost of cloud resources over local/colocated resources that you own (the infrastructure costs are pretty minimal in comparison) than awesome, more power to you.

I really think the biggest value is putting all of your baseline compute in hardware that you own, whether on-prem or colocated, them if you need bursts of resources place that in the cloud. With hardware you own you can spin up temporary VMs, you can keep legacy VMs around, you can fling data around with impunity. These are all tasks that have real costs in the cloud that they will happily bill you for.

But your owned hardware is a set quantity, so if you are rapidly hiring a thousand people or bringing in a new organization or have publicly facing services seeing immeense growth or anything like that and need more capacity immediately, you can't. It can easily take weeks to bring more servers online even in a rush job, meanwhile the cloud can hand you capacity immediately. That's the value of the cloud that's being missed

At the scale of one of the top websites by daily active users, owning your own infrastructure is absolutely cheaper than just throwing it on AWS. At a more realistic smaller scale where you might exceed the bandwidth available for your own hardware, there's also the option of a hybrid setup where your content is mainly hosted on hardware that you control and then it automatically scales out to AWS or similar when demand spikes.

There's really tons of ways to make web apps and server infrastructure cheaper than just renting it from a cloud provider, but many orgs lack the vision and drive to do so and just fork money over to [insert hyperscaler here] and watch their app go down when that hyperscaler goes down. I really question this mentality especially when the same organization has constant discussions about not liking how large their cloud provider bills are

I hate to say it, but I almost appreciate the honesty that comes from multiple different alphabet soup brands selling the exact same item often with the exact same photos. Additionally, unbranded items aren't always poor quality.

I've actually got some unbranded Christmas light strings I bought because I just wanted to put some lights on some columns at my wedding and wanted to spend less than $100 doing so, and those light strings have outlasted every commercial Christmas light string I've purchased. Heck I have a couple of those strings which have been on for 3+ years straight.

Most unbranded items are made by factories that do OEM and ODM work for actual brands that we've all heard of, so they know how to make quality products and they can get more ongoing orders if they make products that are worth restocking. Sometimes you get burned but far more often than not I end up with something that's relatively decent quality and fullfills the need I have for the item

I mean it would be very space efficient to build such a space on some of where the parking lot is. A smallish parking space is 8'x16' so take 3 spaces, assuming each pod needs an exterior space of 4x8, stacked 2 high you can easily fit at least 32 pods in just 3 parking spaces with enough space leftover for hallway and a communal kitchen or something. They already have a public bathroom and shower facility so they'd only need the sleeping space and some communal recreation space that they can keep open 24/7 for their students staying in the pods

Hilariously I thought it was nuns at first glance

Just some good ol Fediverse fun. Don't forget there was also that period of retro meme templates, and everyone was posting like peak circa 2009 memes

I do genuinely wonder if some amount of vaccine skepticism comes from a place of just not wanting to get a shot.

I've never tried the Proxmox over Debian method, I just know it is an officially supported install method. Good on you for getting that far though!