Private equity used to buy distressed firms then build value to sell. The new norm is buy anything and suck it dry then let it fold in on itself and take the money elsewhere.

For example, the firm that bought Red Lobster leveraged everything their brand had to sell (cheddar bay biscuits in the grocery store). The individual stores which sat on company-owned land had their budgets re-configured to “pay rent” to the overlord which now owns everything including the land.

The costs of advertising and company image maintenance were passed down to the stores as fixed costs that local managers had to account for in their budgets without impacting the owners of the name.

No surprise that very few locations can turn a profit in that environment but the leeches at the top aren’t hurt by store closings.

Private equity acquisition today is simply buying something of value to slurp it’s blood then discard the husk.

I have read and worked through most of the O’Reilly animal books - perhaps this is before your time. Perl, C, C++, Java, etc… Yak, Camel, animals galore. I still have most of them buried in a closet somewhere.

This was before you could just google or (gasp, CGPT) your answer. You had to read and learn how to do something then try, practice and refine until you had a solution.

To this day I really prefer to enter a new language with a manual that has an index and examples. I could not have learned shit with nothing but Discord and (today’s) google to help.

I’ve only ever had 1 Shelly go out on me and it’s still installed. It’s a 2.5 that stopped speaking wifi. It was set to detached mode to keep some hue bulbs powered. Now the physical switches are no use but it still works so I just left it for now.

Oof, that was a slog - I burned out and started skipping around Thread. Also lemmy

I had never heard of Shinobi, had do duck it to find out what it is. Sorry I don’t have any help to give you but you mentioned unifi - you know that you can now add onvif cameras to Protect, right? That’s what I use for my NVR.

They integrate fine with HA - I have several PoE and one wifi and no problems. For NVR I use unifi now that they will let you add onvif cams. For day-to-day reference to video streams I prefer viewing events in HKSV via Scrypted.

If I dig down into the drawer with several layers of old iPhones I can find my palm pilot at the bottom right next to the Treo that replaced it.

I am embarrassed about how often I do this just because I can. My love of advanced cheese polymers with spicy/crunchy has surely packed the nooks and crannies of my gut with wads of micro-plastics but I just can’t help myself around queso.

Single serving crock pot is (to me) otherwise known as the queso pot!

Get a bag of tortilla chips

Throw a block of velveeta in the pot and cover it with Ro-Tel

Turn it on and get all melty

Stir until combined

Open your bag of chips and put yourself into a cheese-coma.

You’re going to have to get out of the house and interact with people, whether that is at work or some other group function. Some people use bars/clubs for that, others use church. Some engage in sports or gym, some join a book club. Seek out situations that force interaction with others and be open to it without making it weird by seeming needy.

Another poster suggested a Russian disinformation campaign, I would suggest a more home-grown hate faction that was grown from the poll-watcher contingent. They culled and sifted lists of people that were most likely to “spoil the vote” and had nothing else to do do but harass people.

You list an education qualification in your post which has nothing to do with your stated intention. Yes, you’re learned and probably smart but why do you want to be a sysadmin?

Have you ever coded anything? Do you want to learn that? Do you want to use your humanities degree to be a caring supporter of stupid system users? Are you even aware of the credo of the bastard operator from hell?

Sorry…saw your post and just wanted to take a piss…you’ll be fine if you want to do that but it’s probably not just like “installing linux” on a computer.

Non-alcoholic wines exist and would work just as well for deglazing but probably won’t be as good on the flavor front. Most people would say that the alcohol evaporates out during cooking because it has a lower gas temp than water. Here is a study on that statement.

no…just no! I refuse to succumb to the sad place I retreated to after the 2016 fail - that is not our future, that is not going to happen! I can not let myself imagine this future and you shouldn’t either.

I’m. sorry for your thread but in actual fact there is no older tech that is cooler than any modern tech - we get better tech because we get at the same tech as time goes by. Sorry, but your premise is flawed.

My wife likes AnyList so I use it too. If you’re looking for privacy-focused group lists I would suggest Home Assistant to-do lists (assuming you’re running Home Assistant already).

When I couldn’t find anything that seemed to work for me I decided to go with a “hands-free” approach. My alarm will arm-home when everyone has been home for 15 minutes. It arms-away when everyone is gone. It disarms when someone gets home. If armed-home and an exterior door is opened with presence detected inside by that door it disarms. I haven’t had a mis-fire since I started it.

lol - that won’t work for me, I live in Texas and that means my light would always be deep, dark red. Cool concept though.

As I replied to another who suggested ESPHome - I don’t want a bunch boards and wires stuck everywhere and unless I am misunderstanding it I’ll need to get into 3d printing to make enclosures for stuff. I can see going there some day but no room for a makerspace in this house until the boy moves out.

You don’t need to unlock your phone to fire an event in HomeAssistant. My iPhone needs to be awake but will still scan and run shortcut while locked.