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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • The hardest thing to throw away was the mystery power cables/bricks. Even though everything I own has its power cable with it and labeled with no exceptions, and even though I haven’t touched the mystery power cable for 10 years, I still felt like I’d discover its purpose the moment I got rid of it. Hasn’t happened yet, but I’m still anxious.

    I keep those but convert their use to replace disposable battery powered devices.

    All those spare USB wall warts you have are 5 volt and at least 1 amp DC power supplies. Anything you have that takes 3 AA or AAA batteries is a 4.5v supply. Almost all of them can tolerate the extra .5 volt. Clip the mini-USB/micro-USB/classic iPod/lightening connector off the cable and run those (I usually solder them) to your device. Now you can plug it into the wall and never have to worry about batteries again.

    6 volt DC wall warts can be used to replace things that take 4 AA or AAA batteries.



  • You obviously didn’t read the book, because Galt actually innovated (book describes essentially a perpetual motion electrical generator). Musk is a salesperson who is particularly good at getting funding, as well as hiring people who know what they’re doing

    Two things wrong with this:

    1. Galt tells us he created the machine. If you were to ask Elon Musk, he would tell you he created Tesla, which isn’t true. Musk neither founded, nor did he complete Tesla from start to finished all by himself. Galt is portrayed as creating his machine all by himself, which again, calls into question its truthfulness.

    2. Even if Galt created it all by himself, he did so build by a society that allowed it to happen and empowered him to do so. As soon as he perfected his machine on the back of a society that gave him the opportunity, transportation, safety, education, materials, and the populous needed to carry it out, he privatized his gains and disappears from society.

    They’re labeled as destroying public goods because the government sees all private creations as some form of “public good,” but they merely practiced the ultimate form of “take their ball and go home,”

    This is a great example of Rand’s bad teen fanfiction. The classic hero protagonist with plot armor is invincible. Galt’s Gulch never experiences a hurricane, drought, invasion of foreign military, pandemic disease, or any of the other grand scale crises that humanity encounters. It’s residents are unrealistic epitome of self-sufficiency. Yet Rand presents this as the ultimate utopia.

    it’s pretty easy to assume than John Galt is some kind of important figurehead, when he’s actually just the first in a larger group to exit a corrupted society.

    A group that left a corrupt society, and is successful without itself being corrupted? Can you point to one place in human history that this has ever worked long term? The pragmatic realty of this would more likely play out like the small real world examples we’ve seen where a New Hampshire town tried to turn itself into a Libertarian paradise a la Galt’s Gulch.

    I get why Rand’s message is attractive. It paints a world that individual merit is the soul metric of achievement and demonizes everything and everyone that doesn’t follow this model. Its just not even close to being realistic across any culture or long lived society throughout our entire history.






  • I admit I haven’t read Fountain Head or Anthem. That still sounds like reading 400+ pages of Rand to get the same point she’s trying to get across. If others want some better storytelling surrounding her message, it sounds like yours is the better path. For those that just want to rip the bandaid off, the Galt speech by itself is the shortest path.

    For those reading the Galt speech, Elon Musk might be a close contemporary example of Galt. He’s a rich industrialist that benefited from other’s labor and the society structures that gave him protective laws, safe food/water, an educated workforce, a welcoming to immigrants, and all of the things that let him succeed. As soon as he succeeds he puts all his energy into destroying those structures because he sees himself as the main character and everyone else unworthy of his ‘genius’.


  • Eh, I thought the opposite. I thought John Galt’s speech was absolutely skippable since the point had already been thoroughly made by that point.

    I’m not sure what you’re proposing. I’m saying skip the rest of the 1000+ pages and JUST read the 48 page speech if you want to know the point of the book. You seem to be saying, “read the first 500 pages, and then stop reading the book once you get to the speech”. I agree with you that the speech is mostly redundant at that point however my method skips right to the point while yours would require the reader to suffer through 500+ pages of cardboard characters with vapid storytelling.

    What am I missing from what you are suggesting?







  • Curious how you calculated that? What system load is it based on? Idle? Max?

    Very much an estimate because OP didn’t mention what generation DL360 they had, how many CPUs, drives, etc. So I assumed 120W continuous 24/7/365 consumption which is pretty low. Assuming 22 cents per KWh for midwest, 33 cents/KWh for Boston and 44 cents/KWh for California.

    OP is likely drawing much more than my estimate.