I’m talking about the average consumer, who in average doesn’t really care about things like this around here. It’s quite common to favor domestic products over imports, specially at the grocery store, but even if you tried it would be pretty difficult to fill in your cart with just US products around here as there’s just not too many products available.

Cars around here tend to be either Japanese, Korean or European. Tools are mostly from China (or somewhere in east) or European (you still can see DeWalt tools here and there, I have few too but they’ve been around for years). With all kinds of appliances it’s the same picture.

What I’m trying to say that even if you don’t give a damn about US, your Joe Average still have very few US originating things around their houses. Farmers used to have quite a lot of John Deere around but that has changed too over the last few years and while you obviously still see the green ones around they’re lot less common. Should all US originated products vanish from the stores overnight very few people would even notice.

it’s just practicality.

I have “enough” years under my belt with Linux and I still prefer Mint on majority of my “daily driver” type machines. I already spend my working hours messing around with all kinds of different systems, figuring out problems, installing new ones and so on and I’m old enough that tweaking system just for the sake of it isn’t really what I’m after anymore. I just want something which doesn’t crap the bed, stays out of the way and lets me run whatever software I happen to need. At least for me Mint checks most of the boxes and the ones it lacks it’s pretty trivial to beat it back into submission.

And at least in here the selection on groceries and other commonly purchased goods doesn’t even have much options from the US. Sure, there’s things like Coca-Cola, but they’re produced domestically too, so it depends on how strictly you want to avoid anything related to USA.

Maybe the most common US originating household item around here is a Briggs & Stratton engine on a lawnmower. And of course CPU’s and GPU’s inside computers and gaming consoles. But there’s just not that many physical products around in the stores you even could buy.

Digital goods are obviously more common as there’s very few actually viable alternatives for Meta, Alphabet, streaming services and so on for your Joe Average.

MAFN (Make America Finish Now)

As a Finn, no thank you. You’re free to visit and study on how actual democracy works (with it’s flaws obviously) and implement it on your side of the pond however you see fit. Maybe even get our government involved to send some ambassadors to help you with that. But that’s it, we’re quite happy as we are.

This is the one I’m waiting the most from the LLM hype. It would be a massive benefit for companies around the world (mine included) if they could just dump their documentation in all shapes and flavours into a model and have it parse standardized documents for you.

But the generic OpenAI/Copilot models aren’t reliable enough just yet, hallucinations and made up data just doesn’t go with that. I’m not even sure if those models are ever capable on such task alone, maybe it needs additional component which checks the facts from originals or something to make it actually useful.

I haven’t dug in to the details about this deal, but what I’ve gathered doesn’t seem all bad. Joint operation with US to benefit both countries, where Ukraine brings in their resources and the US brings in capital to actually make something useful out of it.

And sure, I don’t like how the deal was more or less force fed and the initial draft was an insult to the Ukraine, but at the end there’s at least a silver lining. Plus now there’s US incentive to not allow any land for Russia as a lot of those resources are in currently occupied areas. Some might argue that it was even a good deal, at least considering how twisted the power balance was on negotiations where Trump and his circus seemed to be willing to throw all western principles out of the window.

But in the long run, I really hope that EU can get their heads out of their asses and actually do something instead of endless discussions. EU, with Ukraine, would be a pretty significant global power if they choose to be.

I can place a pretty hefty bet that this thought has not visited Elmos head.

You can get conductive epoxy, but I think it’s more expensive than a new controller. But maybe something like that, graphite or iron dust mixed in epoxy? That would most likely need some trial and error to get proper mixture.

The Trump plan included a ton more land than Crimea alone (actually pretty much exactly the areas Russia claims to be theirs) plus a freaking nuclear power plant which Ukraine should just give to the US to make profit out of.

Quite a deal maker and negotiatior this orange pensioner.

“There is nothing to talk about. It is our land, the land of the Ukrainian people,” Zelenskyy said.

That’s pretty much it. At first you get slapped on the wrist and if you just treat it as a cost of doing business without any changes you’ll soon find out that it’s not a one time fee, nor that it stays the same. I think with GPDR the maximum (one time) fee was up to 10% of companys turnover (not gross profit). With Apples ~390 billion revenue that would roughly round up to 40 billion per fine.

And even if you have endless supply of money there’s still options to shut the whole business down if it’s deemed illegal. It might be a damn slow process, but if you just stubbornly try to fight it with lawyers and money it just doesn’t work.

US will not succeed in spinning this as something positive if they help Russia occupy part of Europe

On that you’re correct. But what they can at least try to do is make Ukraine look bad or difficult/subborn/whatever after rejecting their “peace offer”.

It’s not that much about choosing a side. Europe has been sleeping on their defences for decaes and should US just pull all their hardware and troops back home tomorrow there’s no immediately available replacements on that. And that’s a sad state for the whole continent. So it’s not about honest opinion but, as everything between countries is, a political question on how badly some countries depend on US defences.

I have no doubt that should US side with Russians it would be widely condemned in global west, but I don’t think global south or China really give a damn. But Europe almost as a whole need to get their shit together really fast and so far, even if the movement seems to be into the right direction, it’s been really slow to show up any actual results.

Well, that is also a possibility, but the end result doesn’t change. Either way it’s possible to spin that so Ukraine would look bad. In the normal sensible world that wouldn’t fly, but with the global circus we’re experiencing it seems like anything goes.

Putin is willing to make a deal with Trump in which he cedes invaded land that he doesn’t actually control?

That might work for him, at least until Russia can build up a few new tanks and artillery units. More likely they make all kinds of outrageous claims and when Ukraine (rightfully) rejects them Russia can claim that Ukraine doesn’t want peace.

Or the fools hope option: Cracks in Russia start to show. Money is tight, there’s no workforce, no resources to cover up any kind of losses on the battlefield and so on, so they’re starting to push on whatever peace treaty they can before the whole country collapses.

Good point, will do. Currently I’m just focusing just on the lights themselves. Dimming even with a off-the-shelf constant current module would most likely be enough so I could set it once for suitable level and leave it at that, but of course it would be nice to extend into more adaptive lights while I’m working on it anyways.

Other what I’ve been thinking is if I should go full RGBW and just set colour temperature and intensity as a whole to something nice, but that would mean more wires and more complex setup as a whole and I’m not too sure if that’s worth the effort. It’s sauna after all, not a disco.

Noniin, ei pitäisi yömyöhään yrittää muistella mitään, kiitos korjauksesta.

Tuosta nyt varmaan saa parikin filosofian maisterityötä tehtyä, mutta itse näen että maanpuolustuksellinen turvallisuus ja yhteiskunnan hyvinvointi/toimivuus siviilipalveluksen kautta tähtää molemmat tasan samaan maaliin. Meillä kun on paljon muitakin potentiaalisia uhkia kuin suora sota Venäjän kanssa. Luonnonmullistukset aina isoon aurinkomyrskyyn asti ilmeisimpänä, mutta ei siitä nyt niin kovin montaa vuotta ole kun mm. Kainuussa oltiin keskellä talvipakkasia ilman sähköjä pari vuorokautta myräkän katkoessa puita linjoille ja noissa tilanteissa tarvitaan yhtälailla auttajia paikalle.

Tällaisissa “pienissäkin” murheissa koko yhteiskunnan valmius hoitaa hommat takaisin raiteelleen on kokonaisuuden kannalta aika merkittävä asia. Ja toisekseen meillä ei pienenä maana ole kertakaikkiaan resursseja siihen, että puolustusvoimat tai mikään muukaan instanssi voisi toimia pelkästään palkkatyöläisillä jos koko maan toimintaan tulee joku merkittävä häiriö, oli sen aiheuttaja sitten missä tahansa.

Ja jos nyt maanpuolustus terminä on liian raskas, niin sen voi toki korvata vaikka ‘yhteiskunnan turvaamisella’, sillä ei ole niin merkitystä. Realiteetti nyt kuitenkin on se, että jos mitä tahansa isompaa yllätystä tapahtuu niin meidän täällä pitää keskenämme pitää pakka kasassa. Nato ja muut liitot toki auttavat varsinkin sotilaallisten uhkien kanssa, mutta loppukädessä tämä koko yhteiskunta on meidän suomalaisten käsissä ja ainakin minä olen sitä mieltä että sen turvaamisen eteen kannattaa tehdä töitä.

In our company we (at least IT department) get to choose our own bags (within reason). I have some generic lenovo backpack they had laying around when I started and it’s decent enough. Maybe a bit smaller side on what I’d like, but it carries my laptop, headset, random cables, power supply, notepad and stuff like that just fine. And it doesn’t have any kind of visible logo on it at all, unless you count the Think® colour scheme on zipper tabs.

And it’s also a security thing. Should someone steal my backpack it does not have any logos to pinpoint which company it belongs unless I’ve left my lanyard in the pocket with my rfid-tag. And of course if you open the laptop it has AD forest name on there, so it’s pretty trivial to figure out, but at least I’m not advertising ‘steal my things if you want access to this company’ everywhere.

Siemensiltä ne taitaa tulla. Ja se vekotin on tosiaan “melko” iso, suuruusluokkaa pieni rivitalo pyörimässä vartaassa. En nyt yhtäkkiä löytänyt mittoja että olisin muistikuvan varmistanut, mutta se on useita metrejä halkaisijaltaan ja pituutta kaksinumeroinen määrä metrejä (edit: muistelin OL3:n roottoria). Ja toleranssit on sellaisia, että sen koko ropelin pitää pyöriä jatkuvasti ettei se väänny oman painonsa alla mutkalle.

Ilmeisesti nyt koronan jälkimainingeissa tuotantoketjut ovat edelleen vähän solmussa ja tilaukset venyvät, normaalisti tuommoisen (edelleen muistikuvan varassa) saa n. vuodessa, mutta viimeisimmän varaosan kanssa oli mennyt yli 5 vuotta. Jotain hämminkiä jossain kuitenkin on kun noita paukkuu “jatkuvasti”. Ydinturvallisuuteen noilla ei onneksi ole vaikutusta, mutta meidän kuluttajien lompakkoon sitäkin enemmän.

Ja sehän ei siis ole vain jäykkä sorvattu akseli mihin on hitsattu siipiä kiinni. Koko roottori itsessään on melkoinen insinööritaidonnäyte lämmönvaihtokanavineen ja kaikkineen, joten tuommosia ei edes teoriassa, saati ydinvoimaa varten tyyppihyväksyttynä, saa ihan joka kyläpajalta.

Varsin järkevän oloinen lista kokonaisuudessaan. Siviilipalvelus kun nykymuodossa on lähinnä rangaistus varusmiespalveluksen väliinjättämiselle, mutta jos nyt puhallettaisiin pilliin niin tässä maassa on ihan hemmetisti hommaa tehtäväksi, että yhteiskunta pysyy edes auttavasti toimintakykyisenä varsinaisen “kovan” maanpuolustuksen lisäksi ja siihen rakoon tuo ohjelma osuu kyllä juuri eikä melkein kohdalleen.

Samalla hoituisi “kätevästi” myös tasa-arvovinouman korjaaminen kun maanpuolustusvelvoite laajennettaisiin kaikille sukupuolille ja aseellisen palveluksen rinnalle nostettaisiin karkeasti yhteiskunnan kannalta samanarvoinen siviilipalvelus.