Damn straight Mr. Lahey

I appreciate your response both in quality and in tone. Thanks for that.

To be clear, I never meant to imply that the US gets nothing out of NATO. It is clear that we do for the reasons you mentioned and countless others. I was simply saying, in much the same way you did, that EU nations allowed that situation to exist because spending less on defense was good for them domestically in an economic sense. It was not a good decision beyond the short term from a security perspective unless the US could be guaranteed to be a righteous actor forever and that is obviously not something that can ever be guaranteed. Treaties and alliances are great. Dependence is not.

It is true that some countries have taken action to distance themselves from the US under Trump. It is also true that many of the citizens of the EU want their governments to take more action on that front. As an American, I would rather the EU lead the world in most respects as I trust most of their governmental systems to represent their people better than ours does.

Still, money rules the world and the US has a lot of it. Greed is a powerful motivator and I would bet that it is going to entice a lot of European politicians to make unpopular deals with the US and it’s corporate representatives under the next administration. Despite the EU as a whole better representing it’s people there are still too many instances of their governments manipulating or outright ignoring popular sentiments for me to believe that something like sidelining the US is within the realm of possibility, even if most of their citizens wanted to do so.

As a last note I would add that I believe eliminating reliance on the US is something the EU absolutely should do as much as possible. It is the only reasonable answer to the insanity taking place in our government. Nothing I’ve said should discourage action towards that goal. I’m just trying to be realistic about how I see that playing out.

You’re not wrong to feel that way and you’re not wrong that it is a common opinion, specifically among Europeans. That said, I don’t think your politicians are nearly principled enough to stick to that stance. Some of them say it now because people want to hear it but the moment it becomes less awkward to do so they’ll go back to relying on America for all sorts of things that you don’t want them to. Hell, many of them won’t even make an attempt to distance themselves now, or worse, actively praise many of Trump’s actions.

The ones that make a fuss now won’t go back because of American exceptionalism but because it is economically in their interest to do so in a myriad of ways. This is why Europe has been content to rely on American military assets for so many decades. It was never a particularly good idea but it was economically expedient. The same is true of American media, tech companies, and financial institutions. It’s easier to let someone else have a bit of control in order to simplify things and politicians love simple sounding solutions.

Maybe I’m wrong and this is the moment that the EU usurps the US for good. That’s probably the best case outcome. I just don’t think there’s enough agreement between European nations on what needs to happen to get to that point in order for it to become a reality.

Quit using reddit. Some of you guys complain so much about the platform but you keep crawling back to it like an addict in a back alley. Just give it up for good. You already know you should.

Same. When I first started down that path I kept finding posts about how it was impossible to set up and maintain but it’s been pretty painless for me. I basically had no clue what I was doing and I figured it out just fine.

That’s certainly what it looked like to me. Not so much “I want to be here” but “my people didn’t tell me what to do after the medals”. He looked like a confused old man shuffling about.

If their offense had shown up that might have mattered

Yes, they can track anyone with their current resources, but their revenues are all tied to active users. If that drops significantly then they lose money they need to run the tracking programs. We gave them the popularity they needed to get to this point. We can take it away again if we want to.

We probably won’t, but we could.

I think dumb is a better word. Russia has a crazy amount of coastlines.

I don’t think I can

43C is 109F, which is what the headline says.

The numbers vary from study to study. The one cited here says 67%.

https://www.investopedia.com/living-paycheck-to-paycheck-youre-not-alone-67-percent-of-people-are-in-2025-11812027

For real. Most people live paycheck to paycheck, including people who make $100k+ a year. They just have bigger bills. Living within your means is one of the most essential adult skills there is. It’s also lacking in most adults.

If you hate tiktok so much why are you being exposed to it on a regular basis? I have never once opened a tiktok link intentionally, probably for similar reasons that you dislike the service, but that hasn’t been very hard to do.

I haven’t been on reddit in 3 years and the conservative sub was like that for years before I left

There are certainly things you can do with a server at home that would be off topic for this community, right?

I don’t want to hear about hosting CSM but anything else is fair game imo

If you click through some of the options on this page: https://jellyfin.org/contribute/

It links to a donation option here: https://opencollective.com/jellyfin

If you use it weekly it shouldn’t be free to you, certainly if you use it more frequently than that. Give money to the projects you depend on or they will disappear.

Copy/paste from another comment I made a while back:

Look into docker containers in general. If I was going to start from scratch in your position this is what I’d do:

Install a Linux distribution on the computer you plan to use for self hosting. This can be anything from a raspberry pi up to a custom build but I would recommend starting with something you have physical possession of. I found Debian with the KDE plasma desktop environment to be pretty familiar coming from Windows. You could technically do most of this on Windows but imo self hosting is pretty much the only thing that a casual user would find better supported through Linux than Windows. The tools are made for people who want to do things themselves and those kinds of people tend to use Linux.

Once you have a Linux distribution installed, get docker set up. Once docker is set up, install portainer as your first docker container. The steps above require some command line work, which may or may not be intimidating for you, but once you have portainer functional you will have a GUI for docker that is easier to use than CLI for most people.

From this point you can find the docker installation instructions for any service you want to run. Docker containers have all the required dependencies of a given service packaged together nicely so deploying new services is super easy once you get the hang of it. You basically just have to define where the container should store it’s data and what web port you want to access the service on. The rest is preconfigured for you by the people who created the container.

There’s certainly more to be said on this topic, some of which you would likely want to look into before you deploy something your whole family will be using (storage setup and backup capability, virtual machines to segregate services, remote accessibility, security, etc). However, the above is really all you need to get to the point where you can deploy pretty much anything you’d like on your local network. The rest is more about best practices and saving yourself headaches when something breaks than it is about functionality.

I think part of the reason some of those people live that way is because they don’t think through the effects of everyone else living their lives that way. Perhaps the stat boost to INT would give them the ability to follow that course of action to it’s logical conclusion and therefore choose to live differently?