rusty

Someone with too many irons in the fire. Network engineer by profession, photographer, 3dPrint designer and operator, some times hermit, gamer and streamer, ham radio operator, grandfather and great uncle. Sometimes I dabble in home automation, light programming and writing (not published.) Curious about many things, and just knowledgeable enough to know that the best way to improve that knowledge base is to share it with others.

Personal Blog: https://rusty.beresourceful.net
alternate personal blog: https://rusty0101.wordpress.com

Last Notes

2026-05-14 06:09:15 UTC

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I'll readily acknowledge that I'm not as well versed on the economy of the UK as many others may be, but I do tend to suspect that you're not contending with a leadership that is trying to hide it's incompetence by making every department that could show the world his incompetence, into less competent organizations than he is himself. I hope that's not what is happening in the UK. There need not be an abundance of this situation in the world.

2026-05-02 07:41:37 UTC

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As for the FF setup. Since Covid19, I've found myself skipping fast food places more and more. And not being greeted by either a smiling face, or someone who's emotional state tells me just exactly what sort of an experience I should expect this visit, isn't encouraging me to come back. Given that I've seen a whole lot of 'newer' fast food shops that I wasn't seeing before. I suspect some business owners are looking at this 'greeting' phase as a way to give the new place a leg up.

2026-05-02 07:37:29 UTC

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The logic on it being the fastest is that in traditional checkout lanes, where you have a separate queue for each cashier, you stand a better than average chance of being behind someone with a full art/troly, or in a lane with some issue at the cash register needing help, and just standing there waiting. In the single queue distributed, you are in a queue where as soon as _any_ station open, the next in queue goes to there. Breaking down all of them is 'unusual.'

2026-05-02 07:31:06 UTC

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I don't know the exact equivalents in the UK, but if the Dollar Tree (where arguably nothing's just a dollar any more) equates to Poundland in the UK, I would note that it's unlikely that the latter will ever have a self checkout option.
The positive for 'self Checkout is that it takes advantage of a single queue feeding multiple checkout stations. The only other time I can recall seeing such was at a post bank when I was stationed in Germany. It is the fastest way to check out.

2026-05-02 07:28:00 UTC

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One of the things we saw with increases of Minimum Wage in the US was a dramatic increase in the number of 'self Checkouts at stores, and kiosk self order placements at fast food resturants.
Arguably the self checkouts have been a mixed blessing, stores in high crime rate areas see many more "missed" items in self checkouts than otherwise.
A advantage for FF places with self orders is a significant reduction in the number of 'That's not what I ordered" issues.

2026-03-29 11:59:04 UTC

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Something he is running into, is that while he is attempting to make it harder for opponents to vote, if you look at the "red" states (states that vote largely republican) that are holding special elections to replace state offices (senate, down to mayors of cities) a surprising number of those appear to be turning against him. This suggests that when the MidTerms happen, the loss he sees may not be a change in Minnesota or CA, but in Florida, TX, and other red states.

2026-03-22 18:36:56 UTC

Hmm. Apparently someone else wants people to create accounts to report problems in apps. Wonderful. Thank you @npub1dug…kxeq. That behaviour is a bit of a pet peeve with me. So you don't want to know that people have very much enjoyed a feature that some dev decided to eliminate from Gnome-Sudoku. Congratulations, you get to know that I don't appreciate it, and get to work out what that might be.

2025-06-05 07:04:05 UTC

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Part of the reason that the state of Minnesota has set up universal free lunch and breakfast for students has been recognizing that universal free meals cost less to administer than tracking meal eligibility based on public assistance involvement.
I don't know about the UK, but the school lunch program in the US came out of WWII, and the military telling schools that the single most important thing schools could do for students educational development was to feed them.

2025-05-16 06:51:21 UTC

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In related finacial observations in the USA, For the past couple of decades, the IRS Legal teams have been targeting lower and middle income taxpayers, for 2 reasons. The budget for the IRS legal teams has been being reduced and when asked, IRS representatives have reported to Congress that it's less expensive to investigate the poor and lower middle class than it is to investigate the wealthy. The return may be lower, but people unfamiliar with tax law are less likely to challenge.

2025-04-18 08:03:51 UTC

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As a bit of a follow-up, Apparently it's been 10 weeks since China has bought any LNG from the US. That decision was made _after_ trump imposed his first set of tariffs on China. So yeah, free trade works.

2025-04-14 09:15:40 UTC

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My view on the global scale is that in the long term, the world will get along just fine without our significant involvement. In time perhaps we will regain a positive reputation, which will depend largely on how we ultimately respond to this situation.
I'm a bit reminded of the USA as a collection of disassociated unions as depicted by Heinlein in his book Friday. The rest of the world in that book seemed better off, Though Europe may not have benefited.

2025-04-14 09:09:19 UTC

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To be clear, I'm looking at this from a Middle of America US perspective. For me the world using the US Dollar as a standard of exchange is not critical. It's a nice indication that our country and finances have been reliable, but when that fails (as I think it has) I think it should no longer be the standard.
Pumpkinhead is the Headless Horseman to our Ichabod Crane. The character that we (as either IC or America) are warned about the dangers of, which destroys us in our folly.

2024-10-16 06:45:57 UTC

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A big part of the problem with reducing the price of non-green energy sources is that at some point the cost of production will be higher than the price offered to the consumer. Even with a significant buffer in the system at this time, it's possible that it will remain profitable for a while. The real difference is that costs of green energy are mostly installation costs with some maintenance, and line loss, where fuels requiring mining or drilling, have ongoing production costs.

2024-09-25 05:46:21 UTC

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It kind of brings up another question. Are there a collection of Academics that are multidisciplinary, not because they are enthused about all of the various subjects they are working on, and simply because their true passion is in a field that is not conducive to a publish or perish environment, say the study of viscosity in Pitch, and they are working in all of the other fields (be that 1 or 100) simply to be able to publish and be able to continue their preferred study?

2024-09-25 03:44:29 UTC

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But I might be jaded here.

2024-09-25 03:44:01 UTC

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I'm not sure that 'willing' is the correct option here.
It is my impression that Academic publishing is more of a necessary evil of the Academic community, than as a means of putting food on one's table that it is to a writer outside of the academic community.
The recognition earned through having one's name in the bibliographies of other's papers is of greater individual value.
That doesn't change a publisher's view of the value of the writing, just who's going to get paid.