volkadav

I mean, not to snarkpoast on main, but all of this has happened before re:

> The massive sudden shift in the commoditization of human workers and turning them into faceless labor resources that can be inhumanely disposed of with a keystroke

Look up the treatment of labor during the industrial revolution. Similarly then large competitive advantages in automation lead to concentration of power in the hands of those that (not to spill the beans on where I'm going with this) controlled the machinery and means of production by way of access to capital. Collective bargaining of some form by labor was (and I would maintain, still is) a reasonable response, as is state regulation. Not to literally use the M-word* here but ... these problems aren't new, and solutions have been explored in the past (not that they were or are perfect!). As is typical in tech, we could stand to learn a bit from history when considering paths forward from the present. History may not repeat verbatim but it sure as hell rhymes.

idk, just my two cents as someone in the technical trenches who happened to fall in love with an historian. :)

* Marxist/ism. The communists certainly had/have their problems, as did Marx's analysis itself, but he wasn't wrong about there being some society-scale Problems with unfettered capitalism.

On the bright side, at least it's in the PR text and not the code? (... yet?)

Sheesh.

Sadly, today I received notice from Hetzner that indeed the prices on the older CX22 are going up.

Product previous price €3.95 New price as of 1 April 2026 €5.39 CX22 (HEL1) all prices incl. 20% vat

Doesn't seem to apply to older/deprecated gen instances. I've got a CX22 there for personal screw-around projects and it's the same £3.95/mo (pre-VAT) afaict. So maybe not much help to folks ordering new or running on the current gen as the older kit isn't something you can order now, but a small boon for us laggards.

I'm pretty sure the original 10+k/yr/employee for good ppo coverage is a radical underestimate, for what it's worth, though I guess "way more than ten" is technically part of the "ten+" range, haha.

The last time I had reason to look at full market-rate price for a family of four for a good PPO (Seattle market, circa five years ago, large tech company), it was around 3300 USD per month, or over $39k/yr. That was for cobra coverage, so a combination of what I would have normally paid and what the employer would've (about one third us and two thirds them when I was employed by that corp). I can only imagine it's gotten more expensive since then; we left the country three years ago.

I saw them on the menu at a chippy food cart at glasgow comicon this summer, so they exist here. I did not order one, but they were for sale. :)

Sorry to focus on just one aspect of your (excellent) post, but do you have recommendations for reading up on A*/SAT beyond wikipedia? I'm mostly self-taught (did about a minor's worth of post-bacc comp sci after getting a chemistry degree) and those just hasn't come up much, e.g. I don't see A* mentioned at a first glance through CLRS and only in passing in Skiena's algorithms book. Thank you!

Trip report of size one, fwiw: I have a JetKVM device at home and it's been super handy in my small homelab (half dozen or so older dells and lenovos). I haven't experienced any problems with my device. It seems solidly built, the software works well and is receiving updates, and the price was very fair from what I recall. One feature that I thought was particularly a nice touch was that you can store OS images on it and have it show up as storage on the target machine (though some of my older gear doesn't seem to want to boot from it for whatever reason -- which I suspect has more to do with decade+ old workstations that last got a firmware upgrade when Obama was president than anything JetKVM is or isn't doing).

Overall, I'd recommend them. :)

I can't say as to what it might've been like 80+ years ago, but years back I was with a friend on a trip through a PX and there was a rotary display (perhaps like you might see used for postcards in other contexts) with rank insignia and other small uniform bits for fairly low prices (single-digit dollars iirc, though this was 20+ years ago). Even if they had to pay out of pocket or deal with an irritable quartermaster, the urge to give a small remember-me-by token to a friendly (and let's be honest, beautiful) face when facing down imminent chaos and barbarity is probably strong. Similarly, I recall hearing of troops throwing their coins to kids along the embarkment route in the UK as they headed to Normandy; after all, where they were going they wouldn't need them.

doctors and nurses have enough power to demand fixed professional(0) wages that "unskilled labor"(1) does not. no one _wants_ to make $2/hr(2) and to have to rely on the generosity of the general public for a living; in other words, it isn't the waitstaff having special privileges but rather the opposite case of them lacking better protections.

(0) which is to say, much higher (1) a propaganda term if there ever was one. work one shift as a waiter and tell me it take no skill afterwards! (2) $2.13 barring state-level increases over the federal minimum, to satisfy the pedants