Republicans have been foaming at the mouth about these elections for the past several months and are taking every opportunity they can to cast democrats as “stupid, crazy, communists”. From what I can tell, this is just a more mild form of it, disguising it as public education. There was no reason for him to even mention these races but he did so anyways, likely to stoke controversy.

There is nothing here indicating that people were actually calling about the NYC mayor or Virginia governor races, but just elections in general. The politician is the one who mentioned these races, likely to throw shade on the opposite party.

Local elections are extremely common off cycle and they tend to be poorly advertised unless elections commissions and other organizations actually put effort into them. Often times, the first time many people see a ballot for such elections is on Election Day.

Yup, that’s very true just pointing out that it’s not completely stupid that people might think they might have an election today, since it’s the default day such things occur, and contact a representative about it. Ideally, we should be encouraging people to take part in the civic process instead of casting derision on them with various snarky comments, which is what this politician did and what most comments here are doing.

There are thousands of jurisdictions in the U.S., with plenty of elections going on, beyond the big ones in the news. My city always has something to vote on each year so I’m not surprised about some people thinking they are missing out on something. I’m actually surprised there aren’t any elections going on in Kentucky, do they have all city/town/county elections sync’d up with state/national races?

It’s tricky to make a recommendation as pretty much all the home lab stuff that people typically run can be done so on a potato, which is why RPis are so popular.

An N100 would definitely be a step up from the pis and meet your stated needs. They are super popular, in a multitude of formfactors so should be able to find something you like. But you may get the itch to upgrade further if you expect to expand or experiment extensively. Like any hobby, it’s generally easy to justify to yourself that you need to get that “next cool/better/faster/prettier thing” so such an itch may be unavoidable no matter what you get.

Instead of worrying about performance, as pretty much any modern miniPC should outclass a Pi, take a look at the specific form factors that are available. Do they have the expansion, networking you need? Can you stick this thing somewhere out of the way and not worry about it taking too much space or making too much noise? Are you comfortable with their level of support/warranty? Expect garbage/non-existent support from most of the miniPC specialty brands out there, which includes minisforum which I recommended in another comment. If you outgrow it, are you comfortable with it being e-waste/have a means of repurposing it?

While N100 is great for what it is, especially at a $200 budget, it can be limiting with its fairly small core/thread count if you expand beyond a handful of applications.

OP mentioned tinkering with multiple Linux flavors. A higher end cpu, with more cores and threads, would allow them to virtualize multiple instances on top of whatever other workloads they have and potentially not break a sweat while the N100 could struggle. While such an upgrade would be more expensive, price for performance will likely be significantly better if you can make use of it.

I’ve had good experience with the Minisforum MS-01, while it’s more than your $200 mentioned, it’s been worth every penny. Plenty of power for most homelabs and lots of nice features for future proofing (10gb, Ethernet, plenty of storage options, small but still usable pcie expansion slot) in a small form factor.

I’ve pretty much retired all my RPis at this point and my old Synology NAS is now just storage only with the MS-01 doing all the actual work.

Really don’t have a reason to migrate away from it for many years unless it died. Even then, you can create a promox cluster with them trivially to provide some redundancy.

They also have the a1 and a2 options for AMD but the a1 doesn’t have the same feature set and a2 is pretty expensive if you don’t need the extra power.

It’s what turns it from a children’s book into a horror story

My sister is a manager at a Dollar General and they get orders all day, everyday for single cheap items like this (soda, candy, chips, etc). While some of it is probably add-ons to other orders, many are not.

One thing you can do is apply a wash (basically diluted paint) over the laser etched sections, and wipe away the excess. This will allow you to color the etched sections that might look better then the printed version.

I wouldn’t be concerned about that. Businesses are strongly discouraged from badmouthing former employees unless you did something explicitly terrible or criminal. Worst case scenario is they would give no comment if given as a reference.

That’s the company’s problem, especially for a larger one. If a large company can’t handle having two people away at the same time, be it temporarily or permanently, that’s a problem with their staffing practices and not you or the other employee.

50% of the aircraft is composites. The leading edge of the wings is aluminum while I believe the rest is composites.

https://www.planespotters.net/airline/Scoot

The average age of their 787-8 fleet is 7.8 years and 787-9 is 8.8 years so not brand new. Being a low cost carrier I suspect they don’t invest too much in maintaining their paint jobs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz for a specific example. While he committed suicide before it was resolved it does show the kind of hammer that can be brought down from accessing public info

No issues requesting a missed pickup here. It can be quite common if they get overloaded, i.e. after a holiday weekend. It’s probably far more costly to do verification on every instance but they may look into it if it becomes a common pattern.

What the industry desperately needs is some distributed payment platform. Maybe you sign up for a subscription clearinghouse for $50/month. The service then distributes your subscription funds to the dozens of different news websites you visit, in proportion to the amount of time spent on or stories read from each.

This is basically what Apple News+ is, which includes quite a large set of newspapers and magazines and their back catalogues.

Also, various libraries will include some sort of mechanism to access a small set of news subscriptions as part of their digital offerings.

As for Libby/OverDrive, you aren’t restricted to your local library. Try looking into other libraries in your region as many libraries will allow you to get an account online which you can use for this. Just note, if you do have multiple libraries associated with OverDrive, kobo doesn’t really support that and will only use the one you log into on device.

I have a Kobo and much prefer it over kindle. While they have a bookstore, it’s not intrusive like Amazon, and it’s super easy to load books over usb (I use Calibre but I’ve also just directly copied books over).

There are also a multitude of android based e-ink devices which are much more open and configurable but they tend to be more expensive and not as smooth of an experience if all you care about is reading.

Very much so. The longer the line, the more your eyes move and the easier it is to lose track of where you are. It can be worse when you move to the next line, as you lose your frame of reference from the previous line on the other side of the screen.