You’re assuming I’m using my domain to send spam or am operating the e-mail server myself. That’s a pretty wild assumption.

Further, I don’t live in the US nor do I have assets in the US, so that act means shit for me.

You can pay a company that hosts e-mail to do it for you, and pretty cheap too.

Which I do.

Like the registar, one can change that provider too, and if do that I get to take the e-mail address with me as well as all my e-mails (all data is fully exportable), unlike with Google were the e-mail address is theirs, not yours.

Try again.

Literally the worst that can happen to me if I’m really really unlucky is end up tied down to a single provider, same as you.

There were already 100s of registars back then (and as of 2024 there were over 2000) along with a standardized process for moving a domain to another registar, all regulated by an international regulator, ICANN.

Given that ease of migration is guaranteed by ICANN, making the market highly competitive, the only real risk that this entire system end up “consolidated” is if ICANN is totally subverted, a pretty tall order considering it’s in the interest of every single country in the World and millions of businesses (who also have domain names) that it is not, so that’s highly unlikely.

Meanwhile Google is just one and has always been just one. From the very start there was NEVER any perspective of there being more than one provider of gmail addresses so there was NEVER any perspective of being able to move away from Google and still keep your e-mail address if Google screwed you in some way. As for all your e-mails, those were always freely accessible to Google and they could always do whatever they want with that data.

In simple terms, you chose to be Google’s bitch and hope that they don’t screw you over too badly, whilst I, maybe, if I’m really really unlucky and an entire international system for domain name regulation is subverted against the interests of all countries in the World and most businesses, might one day at worst end up in the same situation as you.

I’m afraid your face-saving risk “analysis” on this is hilariously bad.

Not the previous poster.

A simple ESP8266 module from AliExpress is less than $4 (an ESP12F module - which is the FCC certified one with most I/O ports available - is $2), can be programmed with Arduino, has WiFi and that is more than enough for wireless home automation peripherals that are not supposed to do lots of processing (it will still easilly fit a REST interface for automated control and even a web interface for user control alongside it).

That said, in order to power it unless you can somehow draw 3.3v from the device it’s attached to, you actually need more parts and that’ll add up to more than $4 unless you’re doing it with batteries (and design and assemble your own voltage regulator circuit which is not that hard and is cheap, or maybe get a slightly more expensive ESP module that comes with voltage regulation) - this works fine if your device sleeps most of the time and just wakes up once in a while to check some data from a server holding instructions for it. For an always one device, best IMHO to use a 3.3V wall power adaptor, which will cost at least $6 from AliExpress.

The power considerations apply exactly the same for ESP32s.

Exactly.

My first personal e-mail way back in the 90s was with my ISP. Then I changed ISPs and saw the problem with that. So I moved to Yahoo.

Some years later, in the 00s I just decided to get my own, paid for, Internet domain and have my e-mail there, even though I could’ve carried on using Yahoo or get Google Mail (very popular amongst techies back then) for free. The main reason was that I realized I must made sure the e-mail address was MINE, not actually owned by somebody else with me allowed to use it under their conditions.

Twenty years later and guess it was pretty wise to not have my e-mail in the claws of “Definitelly Do Evil” Google.

Experience using and living with Tech, mainly once your understanding of it reaches the level of understanding systemic elements, naturally informs ones choices in Tech, and that often means chosing something else than the mass marketed “popular” stuff that’s designed to lock you in, sell you stuff or sell your attention to others and eavesdrop on you and sell your data.

It’s a general trend as far as I can tell all over the West.

I saw the steady empoverishment already back when I lived in Britain in the 2010s and am seeing it right now living in my native Portugal.

It is especially obvious by all the stores that closed and never opened again or did open and then closed again not long after, the more away from city centers the more common.

The realestate bubble that really took of after the Zero Interest Policies that were chosen as “temporary” measurs to “recover” from the 2008 Crash (and were never fully undone) is eating the parts of the Economy which are not Rentierism and concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands (of those who own the most assets, i.e. the Owner Class) and doing so via multiple pathways:

• Businesses which before could survive and generate a steady trickle of income now can’t because rents (which pretty much doubled in the last decade) eat up too much of revenue to the point of wiping out all profit.
• People are having to allocate a higher and higher fraction of their income (which has been going up below inflation, because salaries aren’t increasing as fast as living costs) to housing, have less money to spend on anything other than essentials. The steep increase in consumer debt has for a while compensated for that, but that’s reaching its limits again (just like it did pre-2008).

The other side of the coin is visible in the rise of the Far-Right - as people feel more and more squeezed, the Owner Class funds parties which “explain” the pain as being caused by foreigners, be it “immigrants” (in the words of the farthest Far Right) or “foreign interference” (in the words of the more Neoliberal Far-Right, especially in larger countries which in my experience tend to have higher levels of nationalist delusions of grandeur) - the implicit message is always one scapegoating foreigners to dismiss the responsability of those who by far have and had for all these years the most power and hence shaped things to be as they are now: the very much local power elites and the politicians who are either themselves part of it or willingly act as their minions.

(This is why, for example, Britain ended up with Brexit)

This trend was already visible and the increasingly shitty state of thing was already painfully predictable a decade ago for those paying attention to Economic subjects, but naturally that’s not most people and the Owner Class very purposefully bought most of the Press (were they could, hence why places with a huge Press ownership concentration like the UK and US being even worse than most of Europe) and used it for Propaganda purposes such as spreading the above mentioned “it’s the fault of foreigners” messaging as most people increasingly hurt and got angry, so those doing the pillaging were free to do it as much as they want and kept doing it and even accelerating (as Economic growth slowed down, they went from mainly eating up the gains of Economic growth to increasingly taking away existing wealth from the rest)

That, right there, is how much America has been made great again.

Keir Starmer will go down in History as a supporter of XXI century Nazis and their Holocaust.

Next to Starmer doing anything and everything in the service of ultra-racist Fascists actively committing a Genocide that’s becoming a modern version of the Holocaust, Chamberlain just looks like somebody who made a minor mistake.

I’m making the bet that if the government changes, I will have time to adapt. (Yes, I could be wrong.)

The thing with data is that once it’s out, it’s out.

If tomorrow whatever you do today starts getting deemed a perversion or even a crime, the data related to you doing sent out today will at the very least put you at the front of the list of people to be investigated for it.

Best to have as little as possible about me and my activities (no matter how innocent) out there in an easy to access form, IMHO. If I have to trade a bit of convenience for it, so be it.

I’m an European (specifically from an EU country). I was born still in a Dictatorship, before the Revolution which brought Democracy, and I grew up hearing the stories of Censorship and the Political Police arresting people for criticizing the local Dictator.

I don’t know who your “we” is, but it sure as hell ain’t me or most of my countrymen.

A mandatory Government app on your phone is the kind of thing that rings alarm bells in people’s minds around here because it stinks of Dictatorship and is a wet dream come true for a Political Police.

I lived elsewhere in Europe, so I can understand that people in countries which have long been stable and Democratic (say, The Netherlands and all of Scandinavia), have no memory of Authoritarianism and think that the Authorities only ever act for the greater good (which is why, for example, Swedes have zero concerns about every single payment they do ending up in a database), but pretty much everbody from Southern and Eastern Europe have either direct memories or heard the stories of just how bad the Authorities can be and just how bad it is to let them know what you’re doing.

Clearly, if you’re really from Europe (and not just a paid propagandist or troll), you’re not from one of those countries which freed themselves from some dictatorship or other recently enough for most people in that country having themselves or their parents been alive during the dictatorship days.

One thing is some kind of passive ID, be it in a card or in digital format, another very different thing is software running on your devices which is capable of automatically reporting to the authorities everything you do.

As the US is showing right now, it doesn’t take much to go from absolutelly legit activity - say having an abortion - and innocent apps with some kind of “phone home” ability - say something to help women track their periods - doing no harm to anybody, to extreme prison sentences (for murder, even) and said apps being used to catch and prosecute women for it.

Anybody who has even just heard the stories from their parents and grandparents about whatever the version of the Stasi in their country used to do in the Dictatorship days would be profoundly against any “report to the authorities” software even if it’s sold by politicians as “think of the children”.

If this is not the most crooked EU Comission ever, it’s a pretty close second.

The problem with Economics is that most Economists are first and foremost Propagandists, the most “important” the positions they hold, the most likely that’s the case: nobody gets made head of a Central Bank, a permanent commentator in the Press or gets a gold plated job at a Think Tank, for defending scientific theories which go against the interests of the power elites of a country.

So whilst there’s quite a lot of Science in Economics (especially Behavioural Economics), the most visible, highly paid, loudly praised in the Press, award-winning (most notably with the “Swedish Central Bank Prize for Economics in honor of Alfred Nobel”, commonly portrayed as a “Nobel Prize” for Economics) “Economists” are so distant from any Scientific Principles that they’re pretty much anti-Science.

Unsurprisingly, with the prestigious, most well paid and most visibly positions in it being dominated by greedy charlatans working as paid minions of the powerful, the discipline has a very bad name.

Way to find out that being the hero of your own story doesn’t give you plot armor.

deleted by creator

FYI, the actual circuit properly designed is stupidly simple:

• The 5V and Ground power lines come in from USB on dedicated pins
• Since that’s a USB-C connector you need 2x resistors for it CC lines (they let the USB Host on the other side know that something is connected to it and wants power of a certain maximum current, and to figure out the orientation of the cable since it can be plugged in two orientations)
• To light the LED you need the actual LED and a resistor that limits the current that goes to the LED (since LEDs themselves don’t limit it and without external current limitation they’ll just light up very brightly and then release some “magic smoke” and stop working)

That’s it.

Now, assuming R3 and R4 are properly connect CC line resistors (though WHY THE FUCK are the two lines of R3 routed on the other side of the board!!?), the only two other things needed are R1 and D1, nothing else.

Instead, there are way too many extra components, most notably this thing on the middle, supposedly a microchip (judging by the “U” code, can’t see the actual writting in the device), maybe a voltage regulator but what would be the point!?

Worse, all 3 legs of that U1 device are wired together. If we’re really really lucky, they go nowhere. Otherwise at least one ends up connected to a Ground line (ultimatelly coming from USB) and the other to a power (most likely the 5V from USB) - in other words, it’s a short circuit of the power from USB. Not, just not good, but actually a seriously bad “I’ve never touched electronics in my life” mistake: there is literally no topology where the 3 pins of a 3-pin component are wired together like that, since electrically that’s the same as not having it there at all (so even if connected to something else than 5V + GND, at best that component would never do anything). This is like something you figure out in the first hour of learning Electronics.

This shit is not just a little bad, it’s incredibly bad and probably a danger to connect to anything over USB.

True.

It’s only JUST for the actual victims and their direct descendants to punish and get compensation from the aggressors and those supported them, nobody else.

That’s it.

That’s how far the Principle Of Justice sides with them.

For even those who were once victims, to hurt and take things from people whole unrelated to that past aggression is NOT JUST. In fact the Principle Of Justice now sides with those they hurt and harmed - in this situation it is they who are the agressors and the others who are the victims so it is they who should be punished and compensate their victims.

For people who bare no relation even to said past victims other than being born into the same ethnicity to hurt and take things from others is way, way worse. These people are pure aggressors in every sense of the word, the worst of the worst and per the Principle Of Justice deserving of the harshest kind of punishment. That they’re leveraging Racism to try and get cover from the past victimization of other people who share nothing with them other than ethnicity for their own victimization of others is just them adding a cherry of hypocrisy on the top of the shit cake of their evil-doing.

I’m a Generalist (mainly because I’m challenge-driven) - even in my own professional area (Software Engineering) I’ve worked in all sorts of domains over the years, and I’ve also really went down deep in other very different directions (Embedded Systems in Electronics, Acting, 3D modelling, plus countless “just playing around” areas into which I did not spend years of my life).

In my experience, the “problem” of starting to do something that you don’t really know well is that it takes at least a year of constantly doing that kind of thing, more often two to even start doing it properly.

Oh, yeah, in the meanwhile after the initial “zero to hero” stage you’re quickly in the phase were you ride the peak of the Dunning-Krugger curve on that subject, thinking you’re really DOING IT. If you do persists doing that kind of thing you eventually figure out that you actually know very little of it - this cartoon is exactly somebody at that later stage: done it long enough that they have figured out how amateurish they still are and can now genuinelly judge their playing around for what really is and how much it really costs (the level of awareness of that cartoon character is of somebody entering or in the domain expert stage).

Even knowing how it goes and being very aware of the different speed of growth of the “confidence in one’s knowledge” and “actual knowledge” curves (which together yield the Dunning-Krugger curve), this still happens to me EVERY TIME I go down a new knowledge domain.

So why do it?

Well, if you like challenge and learning, the first couple of years of doing something are a lot of fun: lots of challenges, smaller and simpler projects quickly yielding the rewards of achieving something, a strong felling of progression because you’re learning a ton of things (which later will seem small, but when you do learn them, they feel like big improvements) all the while you feel you’re achiving a lot (the upside of the Dunning-Krugger effect is that results which are basic and amateurish for domain experts, feel like great things to somebody ridding that overconfidence part of the curve).

All this to say that, IMHO, you don’t really derive any monetary value earlier on (it might feel like it’s returning something but if you do the Maths versus other options, you’re lucky to break even on it even if you count your own time as being worth nothing) and you’re not actually learning all that much early on (you’re going to be wasting lots of time and resources doing the wrong things and going back to redo what you did and at best your work yields something slightly flawed and you kinda just accept it and live with the problems) but it certainly FEELs like you are learning a lot.

Personally I recomend it for the fun of it if you have the kind of personality that enjoys learning and the challenge of doing new things, not so much for saving money when doing it yourself vs paying others for it.

It’s the same principle that anchors the idea that you can fix any plumbing problems at home yourself.

Well, that’s the thing, it’s not “their own”, it’s just people who happen to share the same religion as these shit-stains.

Jews in Israel aren’t even mostly descendants from people who were impacted by the Holocaust - most Jews who moved to Israel came from Russia and the Middle East, not Western Europe.

More broadly “All Jews are the same” is always Racism, not just when used to claim there’s some kind of problem with all Jews but also when used to claim there’s some kind of quality of all Jews or that somehow the victimization of some Jews magically made victims of other Jewish people who were not the victims, are not family of the victims and didn’t even know the victims.

This all started with:

A nomadic life can be cheaper than a sedentary one.

To which the previous poster added an example.

I’m pointing out that there are many other common contexts were things don’t at all work like that.

By that “logic” of yours whenever a Western newspaper publishes a story about something that happened elsewhere in the World, it’s “goalpost moving”.

I think you’re confusing your own “I don’t give a shit about people not like me” mindset with the mindset of the entire audience here.