Mullvad vs The Great Firewall. Mullvad doesn't just use QUIC obfuscation. It also has the Shadowsocks protocol as well. However neither of these is foolproof, and if the government even suspects that you are using a VPN, your connection will be terminated. The blog post is a bit too complimentary. It's an arms race – let's see who wins.
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It’s Never Too Late: Practical Tips for the Over-50 Encore Career Seeker. This ronin thinks 50 is still very young. You're as old as how you think.
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Good riddance, Tim. I can certainly understand this fellow. Clearly there was a change in how one viewed Apple after Steve Jobs was no longer around. We stopped being amazed at new products. We just hoped they wouldn't suck. And we hoped we would finally get what was already available on competitors devices, am I right? Tim was the operations guy, not the vision guy. Remember when Steve Jobs said “A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them”. That's the kind of guy Apple needs to helm the company.
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Why we should vaccinate wild animals. This seemed at first like a whack-o notion, but think about it. What would it be like if we didn't have to worry about rabies, which is truly nasty, and basically incurable? As long as we don't go overboard with this concept, it could make sense. But if vaccinations are anything like they are for humans, you're never going to practically vaccinate animals. There's just no way.
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Some Electricians Think Building Data Centers Is for Sellouts. This article sounds like a persuasion article. It wants to make prospective datacenter builders think twice. I am still in the camp that as much as the public hates datacenters, they love AI more, and will put up with building more datacenters. I strongly doubt that the world can go back to the old days.
Thank goodness the appellate court killed this law, which would enable kids to change their sex without informing parents. What a loony state.
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Downtown Portland theaters still aren’t drawing pre-pandemic crowds. Gee, wonder why.
The other Portland’5 theaters have all had steep dropoffs. Attendance at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall last year was down by 28% from its peak seven years earlier. The 300-seat Winningstad Theatre is drawing half as many people as it did in 2018.
“People are willing to come back and see commercial shows,” Lembo said. “They’re less willing, for whatever reason, to come back and hear the symphony.”
The same goes for other nonprofit arts organizations. The Oregon Children’s Theatre shut down operations last year as attendance fell and it lost the support of the Kaiser Permanente Educational Theatre program. That left a big hole in the Portland’5 schedule that Lembo said it’s still working to fill.
Who wants to risk going downtown anymore?
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Residential proxies are valued by web scraping companies like Bright Data and OxyLabs. Having access to them costs money, and I've often wondered how sites that offer residential proxies convinced regular folks to allow their home networks to be proxies for web scraping services. Who would agree to such a contract? Well now I know how they do. It's through people's Smart TVs. Of course!
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I link to this article not because of its content, but because of the special web design that explains things so well. I wish many educational websites would use a format like this to explain math or science concepts. Really spiffy.
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I saw this blog post about AI's PR problem. It's because college students blame AI on why they aren't getting paid as much with their bachelor's degree. The author cites this blog post doing a more detailed comparison of salaries. Here's what he said:
These were corrected for the difference in cost of living, and the CPI(2025)/CPI(2000) is about 1.87.Median usual weekly earnings of workers with a high school degree only:
2000: $968
2025: $980
Median usual weekly earnings of workers with a bachelor degree only:
2000: $1,587
2025: $1,580
Median usual weekly earnings of people with a bachelor’s degree or higher:
2000: $1,705
2025: $1,747
Now, FRED is not really the place to look to get accurate salary stats. You need to go to the BLS site. Here's what it says:
So the actual 2025 weekly median salary for bachelors degree for men only is actually higher: $1,833. For men who go on to get an advanced degree, it's $2,298. The FRED website that looks at only the high-achievers with only a bachelors degree (ninth decile) shows a median salary of $3,421 in 2025! It was only $1623 in 2000, and that was equivalent to today's $3,035.
So what this suggests to me is that AI is not holding everybody back.
The easy jobs are paying as well (because AI can do it just as well or better). But if you are trained to do more complex tasks, you will stay get paid well. The low-hanging fruit jobs are gone. Hope you paid attention in school.
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