Installments of this type are not very helpful, as they proliferate the notion that the so called "debt" of a nation in its own currency has to be repaid or is in any way bad.
The goal of a nation with a sovereign currency should be to keep prices stable while advancing wellbeing in general. Often, this means spending new money, which is framed as debt and said to increase inflation. In reality, new "debt" can both increase or decrease inflation, depending on how the money is spent. There is no direct correlation between increasing the pool of money and inflation.
If money is spent on a product that currently has low demand due to a crisis, prices won't be increased and there won't be inflation. If money is spent on a product with high demand, then prices will increase and inflation will worsen.
Example: after COVID, construction was down 30% in Germany. Government could have stepped in and spent new money to use the available labour, but instead it remained unused. This way, the labour went to waste, and construction companies, like many other companies, had to charge more for the same services because there was less demand in total, which causes inflation.
Just as a side note because you mentioned it in relation to DOGE: the US government cannot go bankrupt in its own currency. As long as prices are kept in check, there is no reason not to create more money. The fact that the US has to pay interest on it doesn't change that. If the government decides to spend more money than it takes in, the money is simply created by the central bank (through the detour of bonds). If you are interested, read up on Keynesian economics and Modern Monetary Theory.
I'm far from understanding economics but my understanding is that Modern monetary theory is a somewhat fringe theory that gained some advocates especially before post pandemic inflation while Keynesian economics is although maybe a bit modified from the original largely accepted as part of the base of mainstream economics. They are very different. Also vast majority of countries have central banks and spend more then then save, it's hardly specific to the US (although the US gets cheaper rates because of its position)or a major concern (at least if the debt to GDP percentage doesn't grow too high, or if you're Japan).
Ill fill in the blank - pushing it to far_________ inflation goes up
You meant to add " and in particular if other countries start refusing it because it has the same value as toilet paper, except the dollar will leave your butt stained of black in, when used for bathroom purposes,"
The Us is an outlier in this regard. Other countries have had major inflation and currency collapse. It's why predictions of 'US debt collapse' never come true although it is a real risk elsewhere.
If the US is an outlier.... then it's fine for the US to continue down this path?
Like in this supposed age of a US government spending crisis the dollar is extremely strong compared to other currencies. Where is the hyperinflation? How many decades will we need to wait?
Exactly. There was a time when the British pound was the world's reserve currency (coinciding of course with British global hegemony). Fast-forward to today and the UK's GDP per capita[1] is lower than the poorest US state's[2].
Japan has been at it for several decades. The US seems to have a debt of 120% of GDP, and Japan of 250% of GDP, so I guess you're still good for a few decades more?
MMT'ers act like they've discovered some new concept. MMT is not economics; its political spin, propaganda, down playing the harsh realities of economics (not just "late stage capitalism" or whatever the kids call resource constraints nowadays.)
MMT isn't a set policies. It's a description of how money works, when you have fiat currency.
Government is a source of money. Taxation is a sink. Too much money in the system you get inflation, not enough deflation.
When you can print money taxation is just a way of controlling the amount of money in the economy almost by definition because you don't need tax to fund yourself when you can create money. Bonds just provide a stable financial instrument rather than a source of funding because you can literally just print money if you wanted to.
The constraint on money is mainly inflation, and government debt and tax is used to control the money supply.
Odd that you think "late stage capitalism" describes resource constraints. It's really more a term to describe the bizarre economic consequences of increasing degrees of financialization turning every sector of the economy into speculative theatre.
MMT is an elaborate way of describing the process of taxing investment capital away from existing capitalists such that the state can invest it itself. You may complain that the state would invest that capital poorly (others would counter that private VCs already do it poorly), but the essential economics of it is dead simple.
We're expecting the amount of data to double every year for the next couple of years. That would require a lot of storage hardware and maintenance cost, don't you think?
We are expecting the amount of data to at least double every year for the next couple of years. That would mean that in 5 years, we'd have to manage more than 500 16 TiB hard drives in our office :D
We don't really have that many constraints, despite that it should be cost efficient and save us from loosing all our data.
Some good points! There are, however, also changes that you do not want to propagate to your teammates or production unless you are 100% sure that they are the final solution to the problem you are trying to solve. Sometimes, the complexity of a problem is so high that you have to experiment with the code.
When those changes include non-reversible database migrations, for example, it is better not to integrate that code into "mainline" before you've settled on a specific implementation.
I can recommend the Rasperry Pi for self-hosting, if you pick one of the more recent models with more RAM (3 or 4 with 4GB of RAM at least). You just need to keep in mind that the availability of your website is not quite as good as if you were hosting in a datacenter.
Regarding security: you might want to have a look at cloudflared. This is a (free for small projects) service by Cloudflare where your server (Raspberry Pi) connects to cloudflare, and all HTTP traffic is proxied through Cloudflare. This has multiple advantages:
- you don't need to open a port on your router that forwards to your Pi, which is good for security and simplicity (some routers don't even have this option)
- you get all the cloudflare protection with the click of a button, including HTTPS with automatic Cloudflare certificates, DDoS protection, etc
- you don't need DynDNS to point to your dynamically changing IP
I think people self-host with their ISP to get away from centralized choke-points such as Cloudflare. Unless you're fine with having Cloudflare have yet-another-datapoint.
Another option is to use a VPS + nginx + a wireguard VPN.
Your home web server can establish a VPN connection to the public IP of your VPS, meaning you still don't need to worry about dynamic addresses changing or opening ports on your router. This is essentially what a Cloudflare tunnel is.
Granted a VPS isn't usually free. But some places like Oracle Cloud do offer free-tier compute, as well as fly.io.
Oh interesting, so you only drop a public key onto the VPS, and you forward TLS to the VM at home instead of terminating on the VPS. That's a neat idea.
So with your statement, "I still don't want to trust a VPS provider", is this more about having your secrets or file contents leaked? Because even in your design, if the VM is compromised, then so are your users. At some level you still have to trust that the provider isn't malicious or vulnerable.
If my VPS is broken, I don't lose any secrets, and it does not permit any additional access into my LAN or VPN.
For plain HTTP, of course all traffic would be easily intercepted and readable.
For HTTPS, I guess an attacker might compromise the software and IP tables configuration on the VPS and run a MITM attack to decrypt it.
So yes, I am putting a bit of trust on the VPS, for my specific use-case, the most sensitive information they'd be able to access if they went through the trouble of decrypting HTTPS, was getting access to my music-player :)
I am thinking though, that at that point.. well, even if I hosted at home on my own ISP directly, I still need to put that same amount of trust on my ISP, since they could MITM me as well I think.
Good point. You are not dependent on Cloudflare, though, you can use other similar services or open the port on your router if it supports it. And if you pay for it, you can get an SLA so that they can't mess with you by terminating your project.
I would still consider it very nice of them to offer this free service that let's you break free from your dynamic IP, crappy router and at the same time giving you protection that you couldn't set up yourself.
I think many people just want to be able to make their device available from the internet - this type of liberty is not really important for many people.
If you self-host with your ISP, then isn't your ISP also a choke-point? If your ISP decides to block you for some reason, you have to change ISPs or possibly your location if there is only one good ISP at your location.
Anyone know what the best practice is to guard against corruption on your SD card or your SSD if your home power goes out and your Raspberry Pi power-cycles unexpectedly (outside of just getting a UPS?)
I've had a previous RPI SD card get corrupted this way and I've been hesitant to do anything useful with home-hosting on one since I had that problem.
Get an SD card specifically labeled "high endurance." They're a tad bit more expensive, but do work.
Corruption has always been an issue with using standard SD cards as a boot system. It's just something these cards were never meant to do. I run multiple Pis at home, one of them as a scraper/site hosting/MariaDB/Wireguard. Power outages would almost always corrupt the file system, and a few times, damage the SD card. Once I switched to high endurance cards, I haven't had a problem.
I have a datalogger based on RaPi running since around 2 years. It writes every 5 minutes more or less 25 bytes to a file on a standard SD card.
I have frequent black outs (and maybe brown outs, too, but never investigated this), and I never had problems with FS corruption.
The only things I can think of do involve a ups. There are battery banks that support pass through charging but I’m not sure if you’re supposed to use that constantly. A low capacity power strip style ups seems like the next best. Or don’t use a pi at all - if you have an old laptop that you don’t use, that could be the server and it has its own built in ups.
Sorry I don’t know that I’m being helpful here. I had the same issue and just ended up with an ups - but I also ended up plugging my networking rack into it (router, cable modem, switch, nas) as well. We’ve only had one real outage since I set this up, but it kept my network alive for 90 minutes or so and then the power came back up.
Enable read-only overlay for your rootfs and make your /boot readonly. Just use raspi-config, and go into performance options.
There are some gotchas - everything you write after that goes to a tmpfs. Meaning it starts cutting into your available RAM. So this overlay is only really useful if you are using the high-memory variants like the 4GB/8GB RPI4. With the 1GB Pi variants, this gets painful.
Alternatively, You could setup a cron job to reboot every night thus clearing the tmpfs.
Do remember to disable the overlay (and make /boot rw) every few weeks to apply updates.
I have a Toradex Colibri with 4GB of eMMC formatted with ext4. As part of a system test I've been cutting power on it every 12 hours for two years now and haven't lost a byte.
I run much heavier networking equipment (enterprise routing/switching + rack server) but I also host at home using cloudflared on a slow DSL connection. It works very well and the CDN's caching helps with my low upstream bandwidth.
You aren't tied to Cloudflare in the sense that there are other CDN services to choose from, each with their own pros and cons. With the servers on your own infrastructure you can choose the provider you like and easily switch between them. I also have ports forwarded for services that I don't want to proxy.
I have a few personal things hosted on IPv6-only just for giggles. A few years ago those things would almost never be reachable. Now I can reach them at most places. I at least have IPv6 on cellular connectivity all the time.
Let's say that I am considering this too, have looked a bit into it, but I am not a network engineer, and haven't done it yet, so I am not sure how good that advice is ?
I guess this depends a LOT your ISP, and especially the router they gave you, how much IPv6-only friendly are they ?
Yes, you can buy your own router, but this come with even more complications and potentially negotiations with the ISP.
Constantly keeping the battery at 100% can be an issue, but modern versions of macOS allow you to limit charging. There are also utilities that work on older OS versions (they just issue an SMC command to achieve the same thing), like this one: https://github.com/zackelia/bclm
I did this for a bit. The main issue was that air intake on my older model was through the keyboard, so clamshell mode was inadvisable - not sure if that’s true of the newer models and M1 should run cooler.
If you’re wiping it and installing Linux it’s like any other server, but if you’re running macOS you’re open to a wider spectrum of vulnerabilities that wouldn’t normally apply (desktop software). Your apps could also have vulnerabilities that expose access to personal credentials, etc (e.g. filesystems, apple id) depending on your setup.
You can insulate yourself a bit with tunnels/proxies to expose specific services (e.g. cloudflare, ngrok).
I had a lot more peace of mind buying an old, cheap computer, raspberry pis, and eventually NUCs.
Python is simpler than Java. This might not be a very important factor in software engineering of large products, but it is very important for prototyping.
Also, a lot of research in ML is done in Python, and there are quite a lot of startups doing ML, so Python is a natural choice. Same for data science.
Simpler is very subjective. Java is a good language for large enterprises is because its so standardized. Almost anyone at various levels can pretty much pick up and start contributing.
Python, has so much syntactical sugar that it can get really messy.
Is it? Sure, some basic code probably is. But there is much more magic happening in Python than in Java, even with Spring’s dynamic class creation and whatnot.
A Harry Potter fan-fiction where Harry is a master of rational thinking and decision making. The plot is incredibly clever and exciting, and at the same time you learn a lot about how to think properly, but also a bit about science in general.
In the first chapters, I find Harry a bit annoying sometimes, but I beg you to ignore that and continue a bit, it gets so good!
"it polluted my search results with geographically relevant search results"
Oh my! Perhaps they also polluted the search with search results relevant to your search term?
If you want to be completely anonymous on the web, use other means of browsing it. You can't visit other websites without them knowing where you come from if you are unprotected.
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