Just as a warning, this post is liable to be deleted due to Rule 3. I had an earlier hardware post that I commented on deleted for this reason earlier today.

And when the musicians don’t want to be performers!

I’m pretty sure that the world would have a lot of problems, since everyone would want to do the same things I would, which isn’t really what the world needs…

In broad terms, you don’t buy insurance because it has a positive expected return.

You buy it to hedge against risk, to spread risk out.

Let’s say — completely pulling numbers out of the air — that there are 10,000 houses in a town. On average, one of them burns down each year.

What the insurer does is take money from all of those people, pool it, and pay out to the one person who gets impacted.

You buy insurance and pay maybe, I don’t know, 1/5000th the price of the house per year. In the long run, you’d expect to come out behind on that, since that’s more than 1/10,000th the price of the house.

But…people don’t necessarily value things linearly.

In the absence of insurance, the person whose house burns down is out a house, which he may consider to be really bad. He may not consider 1/10,000th the price of a house a year or 1 in 10,000 possibility of losing his housing entirely to be equivalent.

If you’d rather have a predictable expense that you can plan around, that’s what insurance provides for.

There can be some other benefits — like, an insurer has time to evaluate relevant factors, like to determine things that might reduce fire risk and to say that you have lower rates if you do X, Y, and Z. An individual probably doesn’t have the data or time to do that. But it’s really the risk mitigation that’s the driving force behind insurance.

In general, you want to take the highest deductible you can afford to take on insurance. If you can afford to cover a $5k unexpected expense, then you want a $5k deductible, so that in the event of an incident where insurance pays out, you pay the first $5k. That way, you’re not paying for risk mitigation that you don’t care about, on that first $5k. Your rates will be lower.

If you can afford to cover an unexpected expense at any level, then you may well not want insurance at all, since you don’t need risk mitigation.

Why am I not surprised to hear APC is crap compared to Eaton?

Keep in mind that this isn’t my personal experience talking here. I also don’t know if the user in question is correct, or if it might be specific to some portion of the respective brands — both make a wide range of UPSes, from inexpensive to pretty pricey. But I did remember reading that, and it did seem potentially germane to OPs problem, so…shrug

Someone with a multitester or oscilloscope or something and some of those units could probably examine further, see what the actual behavior is for a given model.

My UPS (APC)

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/117oa9i/why_is_eaton_ups_so_much_more_expensive_than_apc/

Why is Eaton UPS so much more expensive than APC and Cyberpower?

In what ways is Eaton so much better that it can demand nearly 2x the price?

UK person here, so not sure how it differs country to country, but every APC UPS we’ve had has excelled in utterly trashing the batteries. Where I have to change batteries in an APC every 18-24 months, an Eaton will go five or six years without killing them.

There’s some further discussion talking about how the APC units hold the charge voltage at a high level, and the Eaton ones, once the batteries reach target voltage, bring it back down and only bring the charging voltage up occasionally for brief periods to maintain the charge in the battery.

Man, I’d forgotten about that. I do recall really enjoying that relative to other PE stuff.

https://www.weareteachers.com/parachute-games/

Parachute day in P.E. class is the best. Watching that parachute float up and down is mesmerizing. Running around a parachute is great exercise. And working together to keep all the balls on a parachute during a game of Popcorn encourages cooperation.

It answers the question as asked. If you want something else, I think that it’s reasonable to ask you to qualify your question.

I was originally going to use for my important documents

Not quite what you’re asking, but if your concern is avoiding data loss, if you haven’t already, I’d set up a backup before I started setting up a RAID or similar setup.

uncensorable

I don’t really see the point from a censorship standpoint. I mean, if a moderated community or instance is seeing posts being removed, whoever wants to post there is probably not going to have a good time there in the first place. Like, you probably want to be in a different community or instance that doesn’t take issue with whatever the content is that’s being posted.

EDIT: Oh, maybe I’m misunderstanding. You’re trying to archive the Web and then publish activity about that to ActivityPub, rather than archive ActivityPub and create a Web interface?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv06KicxKdc

Biologist: Norwegian lemmings are different to other lemmings and to other voles in that they are very, very aggressive.

BBC Narrator: Like the Vikings, these Nordic inhabitants are bloodthirsty, hairy berserkers.

It wasn’t called “the broccoli haircut” then, but it reminds me a lot of some haircuts from around 1990-ish, and WP says that that it’s just a revival of some 1980s/1990s styles (though none of the WP examples look that close to the broccoli haircut to me, or quite like what I’m thinking of). I don’t find it objectionable. It feels a little disconcerting to see so many people that look like they’re out of the 1980s running around all of a sudden, I suppose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broccoli_haircut

During the early and mid 2010s, the permed undercuts of the 1980s and 1990s underwent a revival.[10] The trend was inspired by hairstyles popular during the New Romantic movement of the 1980s, such as mullets and shags.[6] By 2018, possibly having been popularized by rapper Little T (Joshua Tate), the hairstyle had gained recognition in the UK as the “Meet me at McDonald’s haircut”.[2] The hairstyle achieved media exposure after a school in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk banned pupils from possessing the style.[11][12]

During the COVID-19 lockdowns of the early 2020s, many younger Gen Z boys in the UK and United States experimented with new hairstyles at home before the barbers reopened. In 2020, Dillon Latham, a then-15-year-old TikToker, posted a clip of himself getting a perm in the style of the broccoli haircut, which prompted its early spread among teenage and tween boys. It soon became more a trend in 2021 after being worn by TikTokers such as Noah Beck, Bryce Hall, Harry Jowsey, and Jack Doherty.[5][4] That same year, it became an Internet meme and a subject of scorn online, beginning with a 4chan thread that coined the phrase “Zoomer perm” to describe it.[13]

The broccoli haircut was especially popular by 2022 and gained further attention online in 2024 when a photo of American actor David Corenswet on the set of James Gunn’s 2025 film Superman showed him with what many online described as a broccoli haircut, which was mocked by social media users.[6] GQ’s Alex Nino Gheciu argued that the broccoli haircut had reached its peak by 2024.[5] Also in 2024, Marie Claire’s Samantha Holender called the haircut “the TikTok tween boy hallmark”.[4]

EDIT: What I’m thinking of looks more like this “taper fade French crop”:

To my eyes, at least, looks pretty similar.

Gotcha. Yeah, the stuff in fstab is just a convenience; it’s equivalent to running a bunch of mount commands at boot. You might be able to just run “mount” again without the '-o remount" option. I was just listing that in case you were seeing some kind of errors in trying to manually mount it.

Nah, that’s good. What I mean is, if it’s in /etc/fstab, it should be possible to manually mount it without a reboot. Have you tried manually remounting it after power comes back?

Does anyone know how I can resolve this issue?

I don’t know why you’d need a reboot to remount the thing. Are you just not familiar with how to add something to /etc/fstab and mount it manually and are relying on some kind of auto-mounting system that only happens to run at boot, or is it giving some kind of error?

If an error, what happens when you do:

$ sudo mount -o remount /mnt/the-mount-point

?

I was going to mention that, but also that while I’m sure that it’d handle power loss while it’s unmounted the filesystem I don’t know what happens if the backing storage goes away while it’s in use.

Lego itself is also a Europe-originating product. I don’t know where their manufacturing facilities are, though.

checks Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego

Moulding is done in Denmark, Hungary, Mexico, China, Vietnam and the United States. Brick decorations and packaging are done at plants in the former three countries and in Czechia.

So “all over”, I guess.

EDIT: You don’t seem very enthusiastic about Lego. I’ll say that I have fond memories of Lego, though over the decades they’ve kind of shifted towards licensed stuff that is less-appealing to me. I understand that some of their spin-off licensed products, like some of the Star Wars Lego video games, are considered to be pretty decent, but personally I liked their generic “Space”, “City”, “Medieval”, “Technics” building blocks stuff. Kind of the Erector set of a later generation.

Hmm. Well, a few Europe-originating companies whose products I see used or recommended here in the US, though I don’t know for sure where all of their manufacturing facilities are located.

• Bic is a pen manufacturer that makes inexpensive ballpoint pens. French.

• Eaton makes a lot of computer power-control and management hardware, stuff like uninterruptable power supplies, power distribution units, stuff like that. Irish.

• I haven’t used Victron solar/battery/inverter products, but they seem to be regarded as pricey but well-made on Reddit, and I’ve seen people consistently recommend them. They’re Dutch.

• My favorite cheese is probably Red Windsor, a sweet dessert cheese that has white Cheddar with marbled port wine. For whatever reason, no creameries in the US seem to make something comparable. It’s the product of a creamery in the UK, Long Clawson Dairy.

EDIT: Hmm. Reading their Wikipedia article, apparently Eaton is actually mostly American, but it sounds like they moved their headquarters to Ireland for tax reasons, so I don’t know if they’d legitimately qualify.

EDIT2:

• Beyerdynamic is a German headphones manufacturer that makes my favorite non-active-noise-cancellation headphones that I’ve used over the years, the DT 770 Pro; they’re pretty sturdy headphones that have good passive isolation. That being said, Wikipedia says that they were just acquired by a Chinese company last year, so…shrugs. It does say that they intend to keep making most of their products in Germany, though. And that reminds me of another:

• Cherry makes well-known computer keyboard keyswitches with swappable keycaps, but they’re apparently closing their German production facilities down and shifting production to China:

  https://blackout-news.de/en/news/end-of-cherry-production-in-germany/

  Cherry, the internationally renowned peripherals manufacturer from Auerbach in the Upper Palatinate region of Germany, is ceasing its German production after 60 years. Cherry became particularly famous for its iconic keyboards, which are expected to continue being manufactured in the Far East. Production in Germany, however, is no longer profitable, according to management.

  All of my mechanical keyboards other than my buckling-spring keyboards use Cherry keyswitches.

Some kind of gay fox.

Like V for Vendetta?

looks extremely confused

Oh. “Gay fox”/“Guy Fawkes”.

Gasoline ($0.10 per gallon instead of $2)

Places that have gasoline at those kinds of prices are going to be state-subsidized.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-gas-prices-worldwide-from-0-09-to-15-65/

The only country there listed as making it to or below $0.10/gallon is Libya, which is $0.09/gallon.

In oil-rich countries like Libya and Iran, fuel is heavily subsidized, making it cheaper than bottled water in some cases.