Oh man, the fucking sass in the comments of this post. You’re all so passionate about these things.

… And almost all of the arguments are whataboutisms. It’s a fucking race to the bottom with everyone.

All I’m going to say is that not voting is not a valid way to protest. That’s excluding yourself from the process, and letting others decide for you. Just go vote. I’m not going to tell you who to vote for, just go do it. Have your voice heard.

I realize this years vote for Americans will very likely turn into a competition of who is less bad of an option, but you need to still go out and cast a ballot. Please just do it. Please!

Basically non-existent. All of the flagship phones I’ve seen are 2x2 at most which caps out at ~800? Ish Mbps on wifi 5/6? Something like that? I don’t have the numbers in front of me.

Simply: it’s less important to see 1Gbps+ numbers on your mobile device. Many can’t even process data that quickly, aside from maybe a speed test. So there’s a point of diminishing returns where you’re just eating your battery in order to process data as fast as possible, and it makes no observable difference to your online experience.

The main thing is that since wifi is half duplex, reducing the background noise on the WiFi, you’ll get faster response times, because you’re waiting less time for the wifi channel to clear so you can send/receive data. Lower ping = faster network response, which makes it feel faster. You only need 100-200 Mbps of bandwidth to satisfy most data needs for devices, and the only benefit to more bandwidth is when downloading files/apps/games, when you’re simply waiting for the data to make it from the server to your device, and it’s a large amount of data.

I only have 100mbps of internet bandwidth at home, and anytime I go to another location and use the WiFi, even if it has more bandwidth, it almost always feels more sluggish, because I’ve optimized everything I possibly can, within my network, to reduce response times for requests. This is most obvious with the 13th gen i7 I use for work. It’s an incredibly responsive system, and I regularly need to take that system with me to go to work on a site (I work from home, with occasional on site visits required), and the sites I go to may have fiber which has significantly more bandwidth available, but lacks the optimizations I’ve implemented at home, and it still feels slower. Between the increased latency from a busier wireless network, and the lack of on-site DNS at many of the locations I go to, I notice the difference quite readily.

Keeping devices per ap low, and optimizing common sources of slowdowns like DNS response times, it’s possible to make almost any “broadband” connection feel fast.

Thanks, that LCOE reference shows that nuclear is on par with several other technologies.

It thoroughly disproves the point that it is more expensive “by a large margin”. At most it’s a bit more costly than some things, but it’s also not far off from some other options, so it’s definitely not expensive… At least not by a large margin.

Your comment is valid, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

I wouldn’t say that nuclear is the best option, nor cleanest, nor safest. Like anything, it’s all circumstantial. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes other options are simply better.

From what I’ve seen, nuclear is the best for base load on a grid scale. Basically: the load that the grid continually has, is well served by nuclear. To my understanding, most nuclear generation is fairly slow to ramp up and down, compared to other technologies, so keeping it at a relatively steady level, with minor adjustments and changes through the day as required, is the best use case for it. It’s stable and consistent, which is to say it doesn’t vary based on external factors, like the weather, where solar/wind are heavily influenced by external factors.

It’s entirely on a case by case basis.

You took the words right out of my mouth.

I haven’t personally used Debian with WiFi like this. I’ve used Debian and Debian based distributions on laptops and I’ve used those to connect to WiFi, but I’m not a full time Linux user.

Since I work on the IT/support side, most of my support tools only run correctly on Windows. Sure, there are client/user side tools for Linux/Mac/Windows, but the technician tools are frequently Windows centric; so most of my stuff is installed with some flavour of Windows.

Most of my knowledge is out of date, but I seem to recall that you can save settings in the wpa supplicant for the network, and set the network manager to default to that wifi connection (ESSID/BSS) when it is in range/available. This was all done in config files, but I’m equally aware that a lot of the Linux networking subsystems have been pretty dramatically changed in the past ~5 years, so I doubt the settings I would have used for this, still exist.

I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help here. I just don’t have the long term experience with the issue.

I have an old laptop with Debian installed, and I can fire that up for testing and play with it… What version of Debian are you running? I want to make sure the version I have installed isn’t so out of date that the testing I do won’t help at all.

That system is just sitting on a shelf doing nothing, so it won’t be a problem to pull it out and tinker with it for a while. I use a lot of Debian based stuff for servers, usually I’m using rasbian or Ubuntu, but AFAIK they’re all very similar.

Well, there’s also a lot of factors when it comes to things feeling sluggish.

For short periods of time, due to necessity, I’ve run very simple setups of just the service provider modem, and that could get me to around 10-15ms ping on a DSL line. After all my tweaking, I was running a modem line card (hwic) in my Cisco router, with a firewall and premium wifi. Which dropped response times by upwards of 10ms to ~5ms or so. I’ve further increased the responsiveness of my connection running a pair of raspberry pi systems which were set up as DNS caching relays using the bind DNS server.

The bandwidth never changed. But it felt a lot faster.

The next point was the firewall that I had in place was set up with QoS to limit the bandwidth of any one system, and manage the fair distribution of the available bandwidth among the devices on the network. This did less for making it feel fast, and was more for making it feel consistent. No matter what was happening on the network, there was always some bandwidth available for whatever else I wanted to do.

Most all in one wifi routers can’t do a decent job of QoS, so if someone decides to fire up a download at the full internet bandwidth, everything else slows to a crawl.

I’m kind of an odd case though. I’m a professional Network administrator, and my home network is often better run than my client’s networks.

It’s downright unusual if I need to restart any of my network equipment to fix a problem. I get frustrated when I have to call my ISP to fix a problem. Usually by the time I call, I already know what the problem is, where it is, and what needs to be done to fix it. So their usual script of restarting the modem and blah blah blah, does exactly nothing, because I’ve already run through more diagnostics than they even know about. It’s a pretty rare case when I can tell them that I have x problem and need y solution, and they’ll actually listen. When they do, it saves a lot of time for both them and me. When they refuse to listen, I usually just humor them for about 15 minutes, at which point either they’re doing what I want them to, or I’m yelling at them for making my life difficult and asking to speak to a manager. I don’t easily suffer fools that think I don’t know what I’m doing. I always try to keep my cool because they’re just doing their job, and I don’t want to make trouble; by the time I’m yelling, it’s because they’ve made trouble for me, or spoken to be like I’m an idiot who can’t tell the difference between an ethernet cable and a telephone jack.

I’m way off topic at this point. There’s plenty of factors that weigh into whether a connection feels sluggish or not, of which, only one is bandwidth… When you dogpile all your network services into one device, like they do for a wifi router (which is a router, firewall, switch, access point, DHCP server, and frequently DNS relay), it tends to negatively affect its ability to do any of those things well.

It is not.

And there is no large margin.

Referencing several sources that consider a vast array of power generation technologies, from offshore wind to biomass, terrestrial wind, solar, gas, coal and nuclear, and nuclear energy has high start up costs and it’s also not the cheapest per megawatt of power. It’s basically middle of the road on most of the stats I’ve seen.

Solar, by comparison, has had a much higher LCOE as recently as 5-10 years ago. Most power construction projects take longer than that to plan and build, then operate for decades. Until the last few years, solar hasn’t even be a competitor compared to other options.

Beyond direct cost nuclear has been one of very few green energy sources, the nuclear materials are contained and safely disposed of. Unless there’s a serious disaster, it’s one of the most ecologically friendly forms of energy. The only sources better are hydroelectric, and geothermal. The only “waste” from nuclear is literal steam, and some limited nuclear waste product. A miniscule amount compared to the energy produced.

Last time I checked, all of the nuclear waste that’s ever been produced can fit in an area the size of a football field, with room to spare. For all the energy produced, it’s very small.

Yet, because of stuff like Chernobyl and Fukushima, everyone seems to hate it.

I live in Ontario, Canada, our entire power infrastructure is hydroelectric and nuclear. I’m proud of that.

Nuclear isn’t the demon that people believe it is.

Well, I would want to see capital gains and dividends be included in the gross revenue calculation. If they bring in money, it is income regardless of where it comes from.

Yup. I didn’t mention this because it feels a bit too much in the weeds to be helpful.

Bluntly, 2.4 GHz should be abandoned by pretty much all WiFi, only standing for the last remnants of legacy support, and for IoT devices that refuse to use 5Ghz. Everything of substance (phones, laptops, computers… Even TVs and STB’s) should be on 5Ghz+

I’m also a fan of zwave, since it’s usually in the otherwise abandoned (for consumer devices at least) 900mhz range.

I’m very strict about the RF airspace in my home. What operates on which bands and what’s in use for which technology.

There’s a ton more that can be said about it, but I need to get back to what I was doing. Have a great day.

I haven’t found one. Many YouTubers are more interested in specs, reviews, benchmarks for a specific make/model of device, not talking about broad concepts like wireless strategy, placement, roaming, RF characteristics, etc.

I studied many online documents, took several networking courses, referenced physics information about electromagnetic transmission, I even got certified as an amateur radio operator to know all I do. A lot of one-off searches for information. What helped me with that was going through, in detail, just about every configuration option on a Cisco aironet wireless controller. They expose almost every option and wireless specification for the administrator to configure. It’s far more advanced than anything from ubiquiti, or any other vendor. Most of the settings are fairly benign and probably should not be changed, so I get why that stuff isn’t available for most, but some stuff is rather useful to be able to change. I just went through it, option by option, until I understood what every setting, protocol, and option changed and how it affected wireless coverage and performance.

I’ve been working on my knowledge of these systems over the past decade. I have probably forgotten more than I remember at this point.

As a network specialist, I have a very different take on this. Why does your wifi at home suck so much?

You’ll almost always get faster bandwidth on cellular, unless you have fiber to your home it’s hard to compete with the available bandwidth on a commercial network, unless you’re in an underserved and over-populated (device-wise) area, your cellular speed should, in most cases, far exceed your available bandwidth at home, but your home WiFi shouldn’t suck. You should get, or at least approach speeds up to 1Gbps (or whatever your internet is capable of) on wifi.

A huge problem with it that I’ve observed is that people treat wifi like a huge truck, they just dump everything on it and that’s it. It’s not a big truck, it’s a series of tubes… Wait, that’s another thing… What I’m trying to say is that wifi is half duplex, like… a walkie talkie. Only one person can talk at a time. With WiFi, each “person” (device) that “talks” (transmits) can do so at incredible speeds, so the channel is free sooner… Unlike with a walkie talkie, when Timmy just won’t let go of the talk button… You can’t hear anyone when you hold that button Timmy. Let it go when you’re done talking.

Anyways, networks have a lot of stray, not useful (in terms of data throughput) traffic on it. Usually broadcasts (stuff sent to everybody) that should be sent to only a few devices. So there’s a kind of static in the background that takes away from your bandwidth. The more devices you have, the more background noise there is on the network.

This is a problem when smart devices are all wifi based. There’s ZigBee and zwave and others, but there’s a large number of “smart home” devices which are WiFi. Imagine installing 20 lightbulbs which are all smart wifi bulbs, onto a network. That’s a lot of static being added; and that static will reduce your wifi speeds.

That’s just one example of many. More devices = slower wifi. Thus my motto with WiFi and devices is: use a wire when you can, use wireless when you have to. A good example of this in practice is… When was the last time you moved your TV? You know, the smart TV with Netflix and everything built in… Exactly. So why is it on the WiFi? It never moves, there’s no need for it to be wireless. That’s an easy example of, why not just run a wire to it once, then never think about it again. Copy and paste to desktop PCs which are on wifi, and set top boxes, etc.

Switching from wifi smart/IoT devices to ZigBee or zwave will also help…

The other point I would make is: throw out your all in one router. Yeah, the WiFi router you bought from Amazon/best buy/radio shack/whatever. Throw it right in the garbage. Buy something that doesn’t suck. An easy option is ubiquiti. Put wireless access points in and use ethernet to connect them to the network. No mesh bs, or anything. You’ll improve your wifi signal and wireless devices will be able to load balance across them. I have a space that’s about 800 (ish) sq ft. I have two access points. One covers the space easily… I still have two. Why? Because load balancing. So when someone is pulling a lot of bandwidth on an access point, the other is right there, in range, ready to take everything on that needs more bandwidth than the small amount left after that one demanding device has taken what it needs. The situation is great, I never have WiFi related slow downs and all of my devices can easily consume all of the available download from my ISP, and my firewall/router/gateway, does the load balancing for the internet connection.

“But it costs so much!”, I hear you say. Well, how much do you spend per month on your internet service? $50? More? And you don’t want to spend even $100 on a router, which will last years when you’re spending $50/month on service? What kind of a fool are you? You’re getting what you pay for. The $65 Netgear wifi router is going to struggle. Especially after a little while. Ubiquiti has put out several, recent, and inexpensive options recently for home use. There’s the UDR, UX and UCG-Ultra for starters, ranging from $150-$200 (ish). You don’t need the $400+ UDM Pro. Add a small switch and a couple access points and you’re up to maybe… $500? That’s the same as 10 months of internet. So for less than one year of what you spend to get access to the internet, you’ll have a system that doesn’t suck and will probably last 5+ years. If you factor that out, it’s less than $10 a month. Cheapskate. You spend more than that on coffee in a week. Shut up.

TL;DR: your shit sucks. Do better.

I don’t care if it’s ragebait, bluntly, anyone who gets into a relationship with someone who has children, and you’re “not the step-parent type”… Break off the relationship and dig a hole. Go lay in it and let the earth retake you. You’re more valuable as fertilizer than as a person.

What about making the highest tax bracket immutable.

Basically, anyone earning more than that amount, for every dollar of earnings above that amount, taxes cannot be exempted, refunded or otherwise redirected.

Say that tax bracket is 500k/yr, and some rich fuck earns 2M. They must pay the tax, whatever percent of tax that is, on the final 1.5M of earnings. So if it’s 50% taxes, they must pay $750k, plus whatever taxation is applicable to the first $500k. They can’t skirt it by putting that money into a tax shelter or by donating it to the corrupt charity that they run.

The “for the children” arguments are almost always misleading.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s stuff that’s genuinely “for the children”, but the vast majority of the time they’re doing something for the children it’s not.

Bluntly, the core of the argument for a lot of the online stuff for the children is reported as protecting them against would be child molestation or dangers of some similar variety. In tiktok’s case, here’s a platform that has huge potential for revenue due to its popularity, and has an established user base. I’m certain that many of the so-called upper class/elites/capitalist pigs/owners of the country, are salivating at the prospect of getting a piece of that. It was said, in the open discussion for the bill to ban tiktok, that they want to “make” tiktok “better”. Not better for the people using it, better for the people who could profit from it. Several of these shit heads have already, formally and publicly stated that they have an interest in acquiring the platform, because the bill says: tiktok will be banned unless it sells to an American owner. So the only way for tiktok to operate in America after the bill is passed, is for them to buy it.

The legislation isn’t for the children. The legislation is the people who actually hold power, making the government do a thing so they can reap the rewards.

They want to profit off of the children. Because mind raping them at a young age into a life of consumerism and spending, while earning money for that privilege, is a capitalists wet dream.

You’re probably right. It’s the same way that circumcision is so common in other places. It’s so assumed that you almost have to tell them not to do it, or they’ll just go ahead and do it… Except in most civilized countries you need authority to do a thing, so the question is always asked if that’s what the parents want. They don’t have to ask about it, it’s basically assumed that they want it, and the doctors need to ask so that they have legal protections in case something happens.

Whelp, that’s barbaric.

I was considering saying something about the law maybe being to restrictive, and that if people with vaginas want to have the procedure, they should be allowed to have it if they choose to, but in every other case, it’s banned, but the whole thing about the clit really turned me around on it.

Cosmetic surgery to reduce the labia is a thing, and such surgery should be entirely voluntary for the individual it will affect, but just hacking and slashing to the point where it’s common to cut away the clit is just… No.

Ban ban ban ban ban. I don’t even have a vagina and fuck that. It’s shameful enough that anyone performed that kind of mutilation, don’t backslide into ignorance by lifting the ban on it.

Reasons.

The fact is, most companies are fine to let an existing system run rather than replace it with one that has a cheaper consumable thing, provided they can still get that consumable and the cost of replacing that system is high.

Basically, corps would have kept buying and using CFCs because replacing the refrigeration system is too costly.

Not only was an alternative found that was cheaper and safer and almost as good (as effective), but scientists and engineers put in the effort to find ways to adapt existing systems to the new working fluid. All for significantly less than replacing the system.

Not only was a replacement found, but it was made economically viable for widespread deployment in a very short timeframe; not just having a short development time, but also a very short duration to deploy the new solution to an existing system.

You’re right, that it was cheaper and everything, but most of the time changing the working fluid of a refrigerator/air conditioning unit, will require that the system is replaced. They worked around that. Additionally, you’re correct that it was industry that made the change and pushed it to their clients.

I just want to make sure we recognise the efforts put in by the scientists and engineers that enabled the rapid switch to non-CFC based cooling systems. It’s still an amazing achievement IMO, and something that required a remarkable amount of cooperation by people who probably don’t cooperate often or at all (and are, in all likelihood, fairly hostile to eachother, most of the time).

IMO, that’s still one of the best examples of global cooperation that anyone could possibly point to. Rarely do we have a problem where there’s almost universal consensus on the issue and how to fix it. In this case, there was. That level of cooperation among the people of earth is borderline unparalleled; the only other times we cooperated this well that people would know about are usually negotiations done with the barrel of a gun. Namely the world wars. One group said that we’re going to do a thing, another group said nope. It was settled with lives, bullets and bombs, and nearly every person alive was on one side or the other… Except Sweden, I suppose… And maybe smaller countries that didn’t have enough of an army to participate. (I’m sure there’s dozens of reasons, but I’m not a historian)

Without guns, bombs, or even threats, just a presentation of the facts and a proposal for a solution, everyone just … went along with it.

To me, that’s unprecedented.

Bullseye.