With the Group of Seven (G7) meeting in the UK this week it is interesting to look at the relative sizes of the economies of these countries. The part I always find interesting is that Russia isn’t even in the top 10. As a country it’s GDP is somewhere below Italy and South Korea.
Not content will killing hundreds of Texans and causing hundreds of billions in damage to the Texas economy, the failing, flailing Texas energy providers are sticking it to places like food banks. Yes, really.
For a while the UK had the distinction of the highest Covid-19 death rate, but the US has taken the lead. But this race isn’t over yet. Half of the US is unvaccinated and there is a good chance of more significant waves of Covid-19 in the unvaccinated population.
Perhaps I’m a bit obsessed with the recent “Big Freeze” Texas winter blackout. So many things about it are wrong at so many levels. A good, short, technical article on the subject that pulls no punches. Everyone needs to understand this bit:
“Those that did get power also received shockingly high electricity bills, rising into the five figures. That’s the result of, in part, the state’s Public Utility Commission setting wildly high prices for energy producers in an effort to get more juice on the grid. The commission offered producers $9,000 per megawatt hour in an effort to entice more production as the grid began to sputter. In comparison, the study notes that prices preceding the freeze were $30 per megawatt hour. The sky-high prices stayed in place for days even after enough power plants started to come back online to meet demand, resulting in $16 billion in excessive charges to customers or roughly $1,700 per household in Texas. (The whole event cost ratepayers $47 billion, a bill electricity customers will be paying off for decades.)
To summarize: while people were freezing to death in their houses a massive ripoff was underway, to the tune of $1700 per Texas household. By the same people who caused the outage. From Gizmodo:
From The Atlantic. Long, but with some really good bits.
I am a strong believer in backing up my files. Unfortunately I’m not as organized about it as I would like. It doesn’t help that my main desktop machine is a Raspberry Pi 4 running Ubuntu and my wife’s is a Windows 10 PC that has been in constant operation for literally decades. I also found some old backups of my kids files on an old USB drive.
i decided to spin up my old Shuttle Linux box as a NAS, or really just a place for my backups. It has an old 2 TB HDD that is perfect for the job. I started by rsyncing my home directory from the Pi over to the Shuttle. Then I could use one of my old USB HDD drives for backing up the NAS. I have a couple of 1 TB USB HDDs I was using for backups and then there is the 4 TB HDD I was using for the Pi before I went to SSD.
My plan is to put everything on the NAS, with rsync scripts to automate the backup of home directories. Then another rsync script to save the NAS to the USB HDD, just to be safe.
Only hitch was the Windows PC. I just cleaned it up with a new install. There are a few 3rd party rsync applications, but wasn’t crazy about them. I used to use Cygwin. Is that still around? Maybe. Then I read about this Ubuntu on Windows, in a sort of VM, I suppose. Gave it a try and was quicker and easier than just about anything I have ever tried to do on windows. Now I have rsync, and everything else. Pops up a nice little bash shell window like a native Windows app. No more need to mess around with PowerShell either.
Knowing the phrase “40 Acres and a Mule”, I always assumed that part of the Civil War reparations to freed slaves. I just looked this up on wiki today and learned that this was promised but never delivered.
Steven A. Guccione 