That alternative would replace Ohio’s current system for drawing congressional and legislative maps, which relies on elected officials, with a 15-member panel of Ohioans without close ties to politics.

Honestly, I feel like if districts are gonna be drawn, it’d make more sense to just choose some algorithm and have a computer do it.

Like, if you want to have non-partisan oversight of the algorithm selection, great, but I’m not at all sold that partitioning up the election map requires anything beyond a simple, mechanical process.

reads further

Fed up with politicians manipulating maps to ensure reelection, a crowd of Ohio voters took a key step toward offering a redistricting alternative on the November ballot.

The commission would draw maps that “correspond closely to statewide partisan preferences of the voters of Ohio.” Unlike redistricting proposals approved in 2015 and 2018, this requirement is explicit and mandatory.

If you divide up electoral districts to try to clump similar voters, you kind of guarantee that you’re ensuring re-election. In fact, from past reading, that’s what gerrymandering tends to do. It isn’t primarily that politicians try to get an edge for their party overall. It’s that they try to ensure that they have safe seats without serious competition, even if that ensures that politicians from the other party also enjoy the same situation. Think of an oligopoly, where companies divide up territory or something like that, and each has a monopoly. Like, if you’re going to mandate that under this district-drawing system, what you’re functionally doing is minimizing the power of the public in elections relative to that of incumbent politicians.

kagis

Yeah.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/07/biggest-problem-with-gerrymandering/

Biggest problem with gerrymandering

Researchers found tactic, widely used in 2020, made little difference in partisan numbers but yielded safe seats, less-responsive representatives

Basically, what gerrymanderers principally aim to do is to reduce how much a politician in an electoral district tends to need to care about what their electorate wants, by eliminating realistic challengers.

kagis

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/gerrymandering-competitive-districts-near-extinction

One of the most consequential outcomes of this redistricting cycle has been the continuing decrease in the number of competitive congressional districts. Under new maps, there are just 30 districts that Joe Biden won by less than eight percentage points in 2020 and, likewise, just 30 districts that Donald Trump won by less than eight points.

All told, there are now fewer competitive districts than at any point in the last 52 years. If the good news is that both parties emerged with reasonable opportunities in coming years to win control of a closely divided House, the bad news is that they will fight that battle on the narrowest of terrains under maps artificially engineered to reduce competition.

In the end, a closely divided House remains up for grabs, with reasonable opportunities for both parties to win control in coming years. However, barring unforeseen political shifts, most voters will watch that fight from the sidelines due to maps that artificially reduce competition. If Americans hope to reverse the long-term decline of competitive districts, reforms to create fairer, more independent map-drawing processes will be essential.

That’s a good deal if you’re an incumbent politician who wants to be in a position to make use of political influence without being at political risk. But it’s the worst deal you could get in terms of your own influence if you’re a member of the voting public.

Ted Linscott, the retired bricklayer from Athens, said Appalachians tell it like it is: “When we see BS, we call BS and the way our districts are drawn is BS.”

I’m not saying you’re wrong there, dude. But being happy about this proposal is kinda, well…I’m gonna need Gary Larson to help me out on this one.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/6a694b63-9618-4b6a-a685-a26f1be54bb9.jpeg

Video of the accidental ascent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ys0DOsZmr7g

Apparently it’s an American English-British English difference.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/on_sale

1. (British, Australia) Available for purchase.

2. (US, Australia) Available for purchase at reduced prices.

I’d assume you, given that you asked.

That’s not incompatible with what they said. They’re saying that the rate of wage increases over the last year outpaced inflation. They also ran below inflation during the COVID-19 crisis.

COVID-19’s impact started in 2020.

looks at graph in article

Okay, though it looks like inflation only took off in early 2021.

They’re saying that from June 2023 to June 2024, real wages increased. But they also decreased for about two years prior to that, from a couple months into 2021 until about halfway through 2023 – you can see the dark blue line being below 0 for that period (or, equivalently, that the medium blue line was above the light blue line). Halfway through 2023, it then rises above 0, and has been above since that point. But the period of time that it was decreasing (a bit over two years) was about twice as long as the one year that it’s been increasing, and during that decrease period, was decreasing faster than it increased over the last year. So they’re rebounding, but they won’t be where they were immediately prior to the crisis.

“For whom”, and it’s an average.

That’s true, though IIRC there are two planes, and I think that one of them – and the more-numerous one – is a variant of some multirole fighter.

kagis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kh-47M2_Kinzhal

Launch platform

• MiG-31BM/K
• Tu-22M3M
• Su-34 (reportedly)
• Su‐57 (planned)

Looks like two confirmed, another possible, another eventually (though I can’t imagine using the rare, intended-for-another-purposes Su-57 if they could use the others).

Ah, okay, gotcha.

So, there are a couple issues:

• I’d guess that Russia is able to prevent a surface ship from approaching Russia in any ocean unless someone can fight an offensive air and naval war to get control of that ocean.

• I’m guessing (you said “container ship”) that the idea might be to use a concealed civilian vessel that then unloads some kind of surprise attack. While disguised military ships have been used to conduct armed warfare before, the last time I can think of an example was British Q-ships in World War I; I’m not sure that this is still legal.

• Turkey has closed the Turkish Straits to warships due to the conflict, so technically no warships are supposed to pass, from either side. I’m I believe that it violates the convention governing this to either tell Turkey that the warship isn’t actually a warship or if Turkey knows but preferentially lets warships through. That being said, I guess theoretically Ukraine could assemble such an attack using a ship somewhere far away from Ukraine.

• My guess is that if Ukraine had a lot of long-range cruise missiles, they’d probably be using them in their own theater of operations, as they’re pretty short on them.

• I don’t think that Russia is using strategic bombers for the glide bombing attacks, so whatever the benefits of hitting them, I’m not sure that it would be a counter to the glide bomb attacks. kagis Yeah, this has the (much more numerous) Su-34 being used:

  On or just before Thursday, an air force Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bomber lobbed a single FAB-3000 bomb with pop-out wings and satellite guidance at a multi-story building Russian intelligence had identified as a staging base for Ukrainian troops in Lyptsi, 10 miles north of Kharkiv in northern Ukraine.

putty

I mean, Windows can do the thin client side fine. I’d personally somewhat-prefer to use Linux for that, but that’s not really my sticking point. I’m normally keeping my software, data, stuff like that on the server, and just running two remotely-connected terminals and a web browser on my client. Virtually all the software can run on the server. My problem is Windows on the server side; like, it’s just not reasonable to use a Windows machine remotely via a command-line for anything other than some very basic administrative tasks, and using a GUI remotely once latency goes up or bandwidth down is just painful.

I’m not saying that that’s an unreasonable policy for companies to have, but I will bet that only a very small portion of individuals normally do that for personal smartphones.

APC Back-UPS 850.

I’d guess that those maybe don’t use the same protocol as an APC Easy UPS. There’s a (widely-used) Linux software package, Network UPS Tools, which can talk to the APC UPSes that I’ve seen in the past.

https://networkupstools.org/stable-hcl.html

It has Back-UPS devices listed in the hardware compatibility list as well as devices from many other manufacturers, but I don’t see any reference to an “Easy UPS”.

Right now when updates get applied to the NAS, if it gets powered off during the update window that would be really bad and inconvenient require manual intervention.

You sure? I mean, sure, it’s possible; there are devices out there that can’t deal with power loss during update. But others can: they’ll typically have space for two firmware versions, write out the new version into the inactive slot, and only when the new version is committed to persistent storage, atomically activate it.

Last device I worked on functioned that way.

you might lose data in flight if you’re not careful.

That’s the responsibility of the application if they rely on the data to be persistent at some point; they need to be written to deal with the fact that there may be in-flight data that doesn’t make it to the disk if they intend to take other actions that depend on that fact; they’ll need to call fsync() or whatever their OS has if they expect the data to be on-drive.

Normally, there will always a period where some data being written out is partial: the write() could complete after handing the data off to the OS’s buffer cache. The local drive could complete because data’s in its cache. The app could perform multiple write() calls, and the first could have completed without the second. With a NAS, the window might be a little bit longer than it otherwise would be, but something like a DBMS will do the fsync(); at any point, it’d be hypothetically possible for the OS to crash or power loss or something to happen.

The real problem, that I need an nas for, is not the loss of some data, it’s when the storms hit and there’s flooding, the power can go up and down and cycle quite rapidly. And that’s really bad for sensitive hardware like hard disks. So I want the NAS to shut off when the power starts getting bad, and not turn on for a really long time but still turn on automatically when things stabilize

Like I said in the above comment, you’ll get that even without a clean shutdown; you’ll actually get a bit more time if you don’t do a clean shutdown.

Because this device runs a bunch of VMs and containers

Ah, okay, it’s not just a file server? Fair enough – then that brings the case #2 back up again, which I didn’t expect to apply to the NAS itself.

I’d guess that those OSes may not permit arbitrary software without administrative privileges to initiate shutdowns. That’s the case on Linux.

I’m assuming that your goal here is automatic shutdown when the UPS battery gets low so you don’t actually have the NAS see unexpected power loss.

This isn’t an answer to your question, but stepping back and getting a big-picture view: do you actually need a clean, automatic shutdown on your Synology server if the power goes out?

I’d assume that the filesystems that the things are set up to run are power-loss safe.

I’d also assume that there isn’t server-side state that needs to be cleanly flushed prior to power loss.

Historically, UPSes providing a clean shutdown were important on personal computers for two reasons:

• Some filesystems couldn’t deal with power loss, could produce a corrupted filesystem. FAT, for example, or HFS on the Mac. That’s not much of an issue today, and I can’t imagine that a Synology NAS would be doing that unless you’re explicitly choosing to use an old filesystem.

• Some applications maintain state and when told to shut down, will dump it to disk. So maybe someone’s writing a document in Microsoft Word and hasn’t saved it for a long time, a few minutes will provide them time to save it (or the application to do an auto-save). Auto-save usually partially-mitigates this. I don’t have a Synology system, but AFAIK, they don’t run anything like that.

Like, I’d think that the NAS could probably survive a power loss just fine, even with an unclean shutdown.

If you have an attached desktop machine, maybe case #2 would apply, but I’d think that hooking the desktop up to the UPS and having it do a clean shutdown would address the issue – I mean, the NAS can’t force apps on computers using the NAS to dump state out to the NAS, so hooking the NAS up that way won’t solve case #2 for any attached computers.

If all you want is more time before the NAS goes down uncleanly, you can just leave the USB and RS-232 connection out of the picture and let the UPS run until the battery is exhausted and then have the NAS go down uncleanly. Hell, that’d be preferable to an automated shutdown, as you’d get a bit more runtime before the thing goes down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outbursts_of_Everett_True

The Outbursts of Everett True (originally titled A Chapter from the Career of Everett True) was an American two-panel newspaper comic strip created by A. D. Condo and J. W. Raper that ran from July 22, 1905[1][2] to January 13, 1927,[3] when Condo had to abandon it for health reasons.

Some of it was before 1924, and some after. The stuff after won’t be tied to the starting date; copyright will be on each strip independently.

The title claims here that the strip shown was one of the last ones, from 1926, so I’d expect that it probably is not in the public domain.

northern ice sea…north of st petersburg.

The Baltic Sea?

and to remote in.

This is the approach I use with laptops domestically, and I think that there’s something to be said for it. Like, the laptop itself doesn’t store important information. A remote server does. The laptop is just a thin client. If the laptop gets lost or stolen – which I’ve had happen – I revoke the credentials. No important information is lost, and no important information is exposed.

Whole-disk laptop encryption has improved things too from an exposure standpoint (albeit not a loss standpoint), though I don’t use it myself (don’t want to spend any battery life on it). I assume that smartphones have some form of reasonably-secure storage hardware, but I don’t know if it involves encryption.

What I found irritating – and this is years back now – was an employer who didn’t care if I took a laptop in or out or what information I stored on it (as long as it was a work system), but who refused to provide remote access to the network, so I couldn’t just keep the important information on the work network. I mean, I get if they want to have some sort of isolated DMZ and require an externally-accessible server to live there, not provide VPN access in to the general network, but not having the ability to have remote network access to work systems at all is just incredibly obnoxious.

I think that some of it is that Windows is not phenomenal to use remotely. Yeah, there are solutions, but they aren’t great if you’re on a high-latency, low-reliability, or low-bandwidth link. I try to use console Linux for as much of my stuff as possible. That whole ecosystem was designed around thin-client, remote use.

I don’t think that there’s any realistic chance that Ukraine can make use of ships in the Black Sea. Russia built their military to contest the US in the Pacific – they’ve got a lot of long-range anti-ship weapons. That surplus capacity is why they’ve been blowing anti-ship missiles on land attack. I’d be pretty confident that Russia can keep a Ukrainian warship from surviving in the Black Sea. Where Ukraine’s pulling off naval attacks, it’s using either small, very-low-profile boats or even-lower-profile, mostly-submerged USVs. Russia apparently doesn’t have the sensor capability to reliably pick those up (and I imagine that Ukrainian strikes on radars probably also complicate that).

I have wondered about maybe Ukraine using larger UUVs that surface to launch a weapon. Such a UUV would have to be something that could be transported on a trailer, so there are some size limitations. But it might permit for a more-capable platform than the small USVs that are currently being used.

I don’t know what kind of anti-submarine-warfare tools Russia has available in the Black Sea, but if they aren’t able to detect the existing USVs, I would assume that they aren’t going to be doing better with UUVs.

EDIT: There’s a reference to a Ukrainian UUV project in progress here; it says that Russia is improving their ability to detect the existing Ukrainian USVs, so UUVs are becoming more important.

Links:

• Portal

• Portal 2

• Enderal and Steam Store

• The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask

• Secret World Legends (no dedicated Wikipedia page; apparently this is a remake of the earlier The Secret World)

Yeah, I’ve have a few games that I’ve really enjoyed the bands from.

This is kind of diverging from the topic, but…one of my annoyances in video games is that that there are a number of video games that I play to the point of getting tired of the music, but don’t have the option to buy more music tracks for. There are mods for Stellaris to add more music tracks – people clearly want more music – but even though Paradox is a game publisher that specializes in putting out games with huge amounts of DLC, they don’t sell additional audio for the game, which just seems bizarre to me. I really wish that Fallout: New Vegas had commercial DLC radio packs in the same genre, but nope – though there are people who have made enormous free “radio” mods for the Fallout series, like Old World Radio and Old World Radio 2 for Fallout 4, so there are clearly a considerable number of players who’d like more music to be available.

This doesn’t work for games that you play through once and are done with, but I kind of wish that when a band creates audio for a game that one spends a lot of time playing, that the game developer would at least provide the option to buy more audio from the band for it, as long as it fits. The amount of developer time required to incorporate additional audio tracks seems very limited, and if the band is still producing audio in the same style, it seems like it’d be a sensible fit.

What’s even odder is that it’s become extremely common for game publishers on Steam to go the opposite direction and sell access to the game’s soundtrack to play independently of the game. So they’re basically acting as a music vendor already. That’s also very low developer-effort. But they very rarely have DLC to add more audio from the band back into the game.

Cities: Skylines is the only game that I can think of off the top of my head where the game publisher sold additional DLC music.

I don’t understand why either game publishers or music labels wouldn’t love that kind of relationship. If you’re a music label, have a bunch of IP, I’d think that getting royalties from your audio getting wider play is almost always worthwhile, and if it’s in a game, it’s not competing with non-game use; if anything, it probably promotes it. From a game publisher’s standpoint, the cost to incorporate more music in many games is minimal, so the risk is very low. From a player’s standpoint, it makes the game more-playable; the music doesn’t wear on you.