Dells IME just suck. YMMV. Compared to the T480 it’s more portable and lighter.

The Carbox X1 Gen7 is probably a decent choice, but it will depend on the specs - get at least an i5, and max out the RAM to 16GB - you can’t add it later, so make sure to buy one with the 16GB.

The sales people are cons, but the idea has merit but not to make money. You’re probably not going to rent it out for a profit.

Where it has merit is if you do the research and understand specifically that the concept can work for you, and take the timeshare off someone else in the secondary market it can save you a lot of money, but only in specific situations.

There are good and bad systems and locations. You want to optimize on those.

You also have to be someone who will go on week long trips multiple times a year and have a life that let’s you either lock the dates in firm 9 months to 13 months out (depending on system) or can go in 30 days or less to what opens up last minute.

And you have to want to go to resort locations like Myrtle Beach, Orlando, Las Vegas, Smoky Mountains, Hawaii, Breckenridge, Branson, Williamsburg or California.

Oh, and you’ll want to be ok with 3 star locations without daily maid service.

The upside is you can often stay in 2 bedroom suites with full kitchen and laundry with pools and hot tubs and arcades and mini golf in various amazing locations for about 1,800 dollars a week or less. Sometimes much less. If you’re comparing 2 hotel rooms at today’s prices that can be very cheap for 7 days. The average say Hampton Inn is close to 200 a night per room, so at the higher end of 1,800 you’re still 1k less for the week.

And I’ve hit sales in the less demanding seasons for as little as $550 for the week. But of course if you’re looking at Hawaii in season you might be at the higher end of 4k for a week cash, and technically the sky is the limit. This is where knowledge and planning comes in because you can pay for a week in say Florida for 1,600 every year, but trade that week with one that in Hawaii that goes for 4,000 much of the time. You just have to beat everyone else to the trade which is what the planning is for.

I am not a salesman just a so far happy “owner” going on a lot of trips this way by “sams clubbing” my vacations and paying ahead for some.

If you do want to learn realistic costs and nuts and bolts - tugbbs.com can teach you a lot for free.

I mean people also say you’ll grow up from being a liberal so lol. I presume it has a lot to do with why you have a particular political position and if you’ve actually thought it out at all.

I find it fascinating that you have no preference between the candidates. Do you really think it won’t matter which wins?

I hoped so in 2016,but then we saw what happened after that.

I think we all have some things that we either don’t talk about to maintain relationships. Of course usually thats respected by both sides.

Do they care that you call them out? Do you dislike doing it? If neither happens it can be useful for people to realize they’re not necessarily holding a position that “everyone does”. It’s useful to be taken out of your bubble I think, and to see “regular people” can have different positions, and maybe try and understand why they do. It might change someone’s mind.

If course if they or you get worked up by the discussion and no one is getting anything out of it, no one is even ‘agree to disagree’ and it’s just causing everyone stress… Then you need to clearly lay out that you don’t like those sorts of comments.

If they ignore you, then you need to decide how much you want the relationship. You could say “I’m serious about these comments. If you don’t want to stop then you need to decide how much you want to see or interact with me. Because I am willing to just avoid these discussions, but I will not keep hearing these comments, and will stop coming.”

Idk the Republicans seem to really want fascism.

I don’t know how important this is to users of Vivaldi, and I don’t know how good Vivaldi can make their blocker by middle of next year, but this may force me to Firefox. Or maybe someone makes a local proxy like in the old days to do ad blocking Idk.

Probably just so you don’t accidentally waste time unknowingly rereading a book.

This seems like something the optimize charging tool could manage though. Starting the day at 90 percent or 80 percent or whatever is crazy to me - why am I going backwards to needing to babysit my phone when it’s charging, and why would anyone want to charge their phone when they want to be using it vs when they’re asleep?

Gaming - too much hassle for me, and I just wasn’t even using my PS4 much. I don’t know if I’d call it outgrowing it exactly though… this one is borderline to me.

What I have outgrown is cable news like CNN etc. Or they went way to clickbait for me. Maybe both happened. Similar with the NYT, they keep getting things wrong that they just shouldn’t and then the more history I read the less I really trust their reporting. The more boring the news source, like AP, the more likely it is to be accurate from what I can tell.

Similar things happened with certain influencers / podcasters. As I learned more I just found they were continually making the same mistakes on things that they should have known better / learned better by now. Sam Harris was a big one, and I narrowly avoided the beginnings of Brett Weinsteins Dark Horse and now it’s completely off the rails.

Certain “nonfiction” authors followed the same path - as I got older I realized how made up the Ancient Aliens thing was, I think I bought in hard in my late teen years and then when I was 25 I had an epiphany that it just has to be crap or more people would believe it, and when I re looked at the “evidence” I was like - oh, well if you just go by the book, sure it sounds compelling - but if you search alternative explanations all of a sudden you’re like, oh yea, that is far more plausible.

Consumer Reports happened about a decade ago. The reason was I always was a little annoyed by their biases that they didn’t really make clear. What really killed it for me though was comparing laptops primarily on screen size. Looking back now, it’s a little less ridiculous than I initially thought, but to not have separate Mac and Windows categories let to the Mac winning over the windows competitor when the Mac was like 3x the price. This all seemed like a crazy result to anyone who knew anything about computers, especially like in 2014 when for something like 95% of the population, the Mac would not run 99% of the software they could possibly want to run, or know about. A great build quality, performance and size doesn’t matter if the computer doesn’t do the computation you need.

In the last 3 years non anime TV shows - mostly because of a mix of already been done better, no FOMO with streaming, and because of all the channels etc no water cooler talk about the 3 shows that were on last night / this week / whatever dragging me to be up to date. Now that there’s so many choices, I don’t have to take “mildly entertaining” as my bar for watching a show, it’s way way higher now. And as the individual shows get longer on streaming for many - it’s harder to set aside 55-90 minutes depending on show. Even 42 minutes is harder as more is going on now for me. I think the only reason I do more Anime is it’s ~20 minute chunks, and I have less experience with it (for half my life I didn’t know it existed, and for the next quarter it was kind of hard to come by) so I am just starting to get more picky about the shows and the “this was done better before”. Konosuba for instance is IMHO a worse version of Slayers series in a lot of ways.

Magazines - I just got tired of both trying to keep up, the rising costs, and then the increase in ads so there was so little there there, along with what to do when I was done with the weeks / months issue? I get a lot of that kind of content now from online anyway.

Physical books - similar. Unless I want to get a collectors edition for the object, the content is much better as an e-book IMO, cheaper, less paper waste, less piles of stuff taking up space etc. I’ve really come back around on the novel contents though - lots of bang for you buck in time vs dollar spent, way more variety in stories than ever get made into TV shows, can be stored locally easily on the device so you’re not burning data like with streaming… Easy to keep place with a decent app, easy to read for 3 minutes or 3 hours.

Well, what you could do is run a DNS server so you don’t need to deal with IPs. You could likely adjust ports for whatever server to be 443 or 80 depending on if you’re internal only or need SSL. Also, something like zerotier won’t route your whole connection through your home internet if you set it up correctly, consider split tunneling. With something like zerotier it’ll only route the zerotier network you create for your devices.

This is so hard to specify because it really depends on a lot of factors. It’s usually more like there are specific models that are really worth getting, or pricepoints or brands depending.

Like, I don’t think cordless drill/drivers that are sub $100 are really worth it if you’re ever going to do more than screw into pre drilled or pre made screw holes. But a Bosch (blue), Dewalt, Milwaukee, Makita, etc are all pretty good. They’re just usually over $100.

You’re right about blenders - I never had a use for Oster blenders, but a BlendTec in 2008 changed my life (well, not really, but did do things that I have uses for at least).

Ohh, pressure cookers - I don’t want to risk it exploding, so I avoid the $70 and under crowd. Actually, I went Kunh Rikon which is pretty expensive, but also really hard to screw up (like 6 layers of safeties), and easy to get refurb parts for seals and such.

Lots of safety equipment - there’s all sorts of … “fake” in that it won’t actually work stuff at super cheap prices. I’m thinking like laser safety glasses or chain saw safety pants. Mid range is def worth it there.

Dishwashers IMHO. I’ve used cheap ones before and they clean poorly and are extremely loud. Depending on your house, you won’t want to be in the next room to them. OTOH, Bosch higher end ones, like the 800 series, cost a pretty penny, but are darn near silent and actually live up to the washing claims - shit just comes clean in them. I’m usually surprised in a good way. Oh, and that third tray for silverware - I’m never going back to the basket (though lots of brands have that now).

Stand Mixers - especially if you want to get into bread or attachments for grinding things. I strongly recommend the Bosch Universal Plus. That thing is like a power tool for the kitchen. We’ve abused it for over 10 years and it’s not slowing down. I know many people online who have had them for 30 years.

Vacuums - look into Sebo.

That’s usually actually down to technique - you need to fill “normal” blenders in a specific way to have enough liquid on the bottom to make the vortex.

You have to be very careful with KitchenAid mixers - I think the 700Pro is the only currently made one that’s worth very much - the gears strip out in most of the cheaper ones, and all of them made from like 2000-2014 or so. At least if you mix anything in there you couldn’t do about as easily with a hand mixer that’s $20 on Amazon.

Some of it is also going to be experience using it.

Like I have Rada and Cuisinart and Wustoff knives. The Rada is super cheap, and very sharp and holds an edge well. But its handle is pretty uncomfortable, and god forbid you’re trying to chop a large cabbage in half, you’ll hurt your hand on the top it’s sooo narrow. But I can hit it with something and it’s going to cut that cabbage the easiest because it’s a narrow blade. The Cuisinart were a gift long ago, and really were just overpriced worse Rada. They have thin blades and don’t hold an edge as well as the Rada. The Wustoff have the most comfortable handles to hold IMO, and nice thicker backs that make them hold up to lots of abuse - you can chop bones and such without worry. They also hold an edge pretty well, but also sharpen nicely. People also seem appreciative of Wustoff so you get some status when using them FWIW.

I actually think there are things that the cheap versions can work as well as the expensive ones, but in such a PITA way that you’ll infrequently use them. Cameras are one of these things - pretty much any camera can take a picture, but try a low end Motorolla phone camera vs a mid range OnePlus or high end Samsung / iPhone and you’ll have so much more frustration with the Motorolla you’ll get a different phone to get a “camera that works”. Same with ILC - you can get a Canon 4000D and it’ll be capable of taking better technical shots than the high end smartphone. It’ll just require quite a lot of skill. Put it next to a high end Canon R5 and you’ll see how the quality of life improvements and everything else will make it a lot more fun to use.

Some are expensive for filtering reasons. It can take some engineering to build HEPA or similar filtration along with seals that actually have the filters work, plus managing motors or filter designs that aid in the high speed airflow needed for a vacuum.

Sure, but I’d also avoid Shark at all costs because they’re not really made to be serviced. Also bagless, which generally suck in a bad way. I’d suggest something like a Sebo model with the electric brush head. Easy to service, last a very long time, use bags which are just cleaner and avoid needing to think about cleaning out dust storage areas to keep airflow up, and have great canister options.

I would guess America is so wildly diverse, like most countries, that there’s no real “Average American”. Sure, median income isn’t great and recent inflation has screwed with poorer people all the way through to probably upper middle class.

However, I don’t think there’s “one reason” for people being / feeling poor. It also depends on what you mean by “life changing”.

Anyway - I’d say there’s are very poor people. Some of this is generational poverty, some of it is no family support, some of it is addiction, some of it is mental illness, some of it is bad choices. A social safety net would really help here. For whatever reason the US is against much of one.

There’s working poor, where supposedly the value they bring to a company isn’t sufficient to pay a living wage. I guess elsewhere this is government forced to be a higher minimum wage way more than in the US. This I think is also leading to lots of apathy now in service workers, which means atrocious service at most places, which is finally starting to impact people higher up the income chain. Though it’s usually scoffing that no one is doing a good job anymore.

Middle class people get squeezed by inflation a LOT, and children are incredibly expensive. As you get into middle middle and upper middle classes there’s also the spending problems. This is either driven by lack of or failures of public options, so people are paying for home schooling / private schooling, paying ever more out of pocket to get access to medical care at ever higher rates, and really any service needed can be astronomical or else often worse than doing nothing unless you know a guy. There’s also all the credit card debt that with higher interest rates are squeezing people even more. Some of this is unnecessary spending running out of control, but some of it is lack of wages keeping up with inflation mixed with many things having way more ongoing costs than they used to. Either they have planned obsolesce (Back in the 90s no one had to buy a new landline phone, or wireless phone every 2 years), they have subscriptions (again, in the 90s you bought a car or a radio, you bought a computer, you bought a game, whatever - it lasted with no ongoing payments), and many things just don’t last at all. Then there’s the interest in experiences - which is a transient thing, so you’re always paying for a new one. I’d also say there’s a huge burden on everyone related to college - and it is getting less obvious by the year if that hit in loan payments “forever” is worth the supposed economic boost. My parents grew up when college was like $8,000 max for 4 years and room etc - you could work your way through it, and the boost to lifetime expected earnings was pretty easy to overshadow the effort or loan if any needed. I might have been the last generation to get through with $20k in debt from 4 years, which while I’m still paying on isn’t enough to overshadow the earning benefits. Today (and for the last 15 years or more) it’s more and more for a 4 year degree, while the expected positions aren’t going up in pay very much at all. But if you do go to college that’s going to hit you and your parents for a long time also.

As you get to upper middle and upper class - upper middle is scared shitless by the inflation, wage increase demands, etc that might cause them to fall out of that class, so they can feel “poor” even though they’re far from it.

TL;DR: there are a lot of poor Americans, and many who are “doing OK” either drowning in debt or just feeling insecure even if not technically poor.

syncthing will work with pretty large amounts of data, unless you mean having the storage space on each device is the “won’t work” issue.