Impotent as in helpless against our oppressors, I’m sure you’re really good at sex :p

This really is one of the calmer, better reasoned takes I’ve encountered online recently, thanks for sharing it. There’s something I’d like to expand on more than debate though. Really more about my own fixation on that propaganda than anything. Even the oligarchy and obvious corruption are themselves symptoms of the worship of wealth that drives our civilization. Even if every decision maker were replaced with a benevolent humanist the systems we’ve built exist to make number go up, not quality of life. Our morality, our cultural values, our very perception is constructed around the idea of more being better and the inevitability of the process of coercive extraction through which we’re all meant to compete in consolidating our hoards at one another’s expense. We’re strung out and impotent (yes, all of us) and addicted to intensity of experience itself. Red team/blue team were arbitrary divisions to capture tribal identity long before MAGA or even KKK coalesced as focal points, and I don’t think it’s wise to approach them as a root cause or core issue. The “MAGA” that wants you dead is a freakish abberation amplified and presented to you because of the utility that has to the status quo. It’s an essentially nonexistent bogeyman, a narrative counterpoint to the transwoman scheming to make your kids gay. A division, an escalation, a distraction. KKK was likewise not an organic groundswell of hatred but carefully orchestrated political theater. I highly recommend looking into their history, these things are often much clearer from a distance. We are all victims of propaganda, like Garfield tshirt says “you are not immune”. Even the miserable billionaires with every material luxury and still no contentment. Especially them, in a sense. They’re certainly the least connected to humanity and most thoroughly processed of us. I spend a lot of time on the street and can promise 1/3 of the country does not want you dead. The vast majority of us all want the same thing, and it’s lot more like a hug and a sandwich despite all efforts to the contrary.

I kinda lost whatever point I may have been trying to make, but thanks for the opportunity to ramble. Going to cut it off here before I start going on about AI as a way for capital to replicate human output convincingly enough to directly manufacture consent, and the consequences of atomization and the escalation between engaging in more and more granular subcultures on heavily monitored platforms and just each engaging with the machine directly, and 9/11 being used to establish a near-omniscient surveillance apparatus and covid being used to force its adoption, and how… I need to touch grass.

Maybe they’re just as impotent and upset as you are. Maybe this is hell?

We’ve been there before.

Caligula, Henry VIII, Hitler, it’s known plenty. This shit’s cyclical and imo getting pretty old. Wish we could learn from it.

You are entirely correct. What Cloudflare does is also valuable and tricky to replicate though, so people reeeally want to deny it

Know DNS isn’t the most glamorous bit of infrastructure, but quad9 have been doing good work for a long time. This is exactly what I’d expect from them and why I trust them. Glad to see it.

Clearly you should turn it into a gift for me, that’s generations newer than the headless laptop I’m using now lol. Fr tho, find someone who’ll appreciate it. Way too nice a rig to languish as a 3rd server/media box

I haven’t had access to grid power in over 10 years and am pretty familiar with this stuff as part of day to day life. I do now have solar. Really don’t think me and everyone else I know have been getting this consistently “lucky” for this long across such a wide range of devices. The 11-15v a nominal 12v battery system normally experiences is not a huge amount of fluctuation, and I have yet to encounter a 12v device that couldn’t take it. On the contrary, I’ve tried much dumber stuff and gotten away with it. There’s a 9v piano keyboard and a 19v computer monitor wired straight into that same battery. The only time I’ve actually killed something is by reversing polarity. Voltage too low=won’t turn on, voltage too high=gets hot, and all these years of wiring up random scavengings to see what happens have taught me most gear is surprisingly tolerant/resilient

e: for SBC stuff, automotive USB charger makes a great 5v rail. My “homelab” was at one point a pi 3b and a 5v Buffalo wifi router running dd-wrt plugged into a cigarette lighter

Hey, I have a lot of appreciation for the infrastructure you maintain so don’t take this the wrong way: you’re very confidently overcomplicating this one all over the thread. People run nominal 12v stuff direct from battery all the time and it’s fine. It’s the norm in RVs, boats, and off-grid housing. There’s usually quite a bit of wiggle room. The router I’m using right now won’t actually cut out until ~8v and sees almost 16 during my ancient lead acid battery’s eq cycles. It’s completely fine and has been for years. Not industrial or automotive grade by any means, a low-end Netgear from the thrift store.

You also state “while there is DC power the battery in a UPS isn’t used”. Assuming you mean AC that’s still not quite correct, it’s always being charged at least a little and tapping it for DC is perfectly fine.

That’s my advice to op, and a setup I’ve run before: replace the 12v battery attached to their existing UPS and wire the router/any other 12v devices right to it. A UPS is just a nicely packaged battery charger/inverter/transfer switch. Wiring them to larger/cheaper batteries that don’t happen to fit their casings is also entirely viable, as is running either of their outputs to a load panel. Sky’s the limit :)

Don’t forget about the cellular baseband modem, with low level access to those things you can neither detect or control from within your operating system!

i <3 tech