We’re hoping that happens, and you don’t get stonewalled by idiots. We’re cheering for your efforts.

To be fair, we have our own share of problems, including, but not limited to, hardline conservatives pulling similar crap, and even the odd Canadian Trump supporters, which always confused me.

We’re coping okay. Hopefully it doesn’t get any worse.

I hate to say it, but, these things don’t change a lot, or quickly.

IP blocks, or “large groups of IP addresses” are assigned to regional internet registries, or RIRs which then hand them out from there. There’s a couple RIRs. I think five in total? ARIN covers North America, and has, by far, the most IP addresses given out.

There’s also RIPE, in Europe, APNIC, for Asia and the Pacific areas, including China and Australia, AfriNIC, which is basically all of Africa… If that wasn’t obvious. And lacnic, which is South America.

Large IP blocks can, but rarely ever do, get transferred between RIRs.

But wait, it gets more complicated. IP addresses allocated in one region could be used anywhere in the world. The vast majority are not, and it’s important to note that because of global routing, you can’t have a block smaller than 256 addresses allocated in the default free zone (DFZ). The DFZ is the part of the internet that doesn’t have a “default gateway”. All routes are advertised, and by those advertisements are learned by others. The routers in the DFZ only have so much memory, and there was a crisis a while ago when the memory of most of the routers in the DFZ were dangerously close to being full… That was around when ipv6 was first switched on. The routing memory is extremely fast, because it needs to be. Looking up a route in a table with a million+ entries takes time, but that time needs to be so short that latency is effectively mitigated. So that memory is some of the fastest used in tech at times, notwithstanding newer technologies.

I’m off topic. Anyways, my point is, ARIN is big. They have a lot of IPs. However allocation doesn’t and shouldn’t imply usage. A large number of addresses are allocated for US military use that are basically unseen in the internet. There’s a few infamous /8 blocks of around 16.7 million addresses that don’t get advertised and can’t be used by anyone besides the US military. I forget which branch of military owns it. They’ve owned it since the internet started giving out allocations (more or less) and today one of those /8 blocks is worth billions, with a cost of about $50 per IP.

So yeah, the US has a lot of IP allocation, they also have a large amount of unused IP addresses.

I’m not even American, I find my thoughts defaulting to this.

Stop giving them ideas.

To be fair, squirrels are pretty interesting.

As a Canadian, we’re feeling it too. I’m sure it’s not as significant as what you’re all feeling.

It’s weird having a half deranged megalomaniacal neighbor, where they’re fine most of the time then occasionally go completely off the rails.

Ahh the United States of America. What a fascinating planet.

We should really be counting English literate people, since nobody here is talking, and literacy is more reading/writing.

Literacy is pretty broad too. It doesn’t imply that it’s your native language, nor if you can speak the language (whether you can do that very well or not).

Literacy is going to be a bonefide requirement for most of the internet, with some exceptions, like text to speech and speech recognition stuff, people with disabilities who may not be able to see properly or at all… Stuff like that.

I’m also a remote guy and I see both sides as well.

The critical assumption you’ve made in this example is that a large majority will choose to be remote, so there won’t be anyone in the office for the in-office people to work with.

I don’t believe that’s as much of a problem as you seem to imply it will be. The problem with the argument is that it’s all assumption and opinion based. To my understanding, there hasn’t been any reliable data produced on what percentage of the population wants in-office and/or remote to be permanent.

Relative to that, you’d also have to take into consideration for populated the company is, and how many people would actually be in the office, before making a determination whether it would be a ghost town or not.

Additionally to that, not everyone wants in-office work for the social aspects of it. Some people’s home life is too chaotic so they prefer in-office, to separate themselves from the chaos of home, and focus on work. It’s not a desire to connect that drives them to the office (pun might be intended here), but rather a lack of outside distraction from their home life while they try to “earn a living”.

There’s also the consideration of who is at home all the time. A homebody spouse, such as a stay-at-home mom/dad, may appreciate having space from their spouse to get things done, as they appreciate the space away. Having such separations can be very healthy and beneficial for relationships, which can also play a role IMO.

The fact is, not everyone is doing it as a social and/or company culture thing. The percentages of people who want it for company culture vs the people who want to for personal reasons, is also an unknown metric.

So in all, at present, we don’t know how many overall people want remote/in-office work, and we don’t know what their motivations for making that choice are. Without that data, it’s difficult to make a value proposition about a decision.

Company owners don’t really care about the metrics, since, during COVID and mandatory isolation, everyone was WFH, and productivity was overall increased. Whether that was because people now had 24/7 access to their work systems, or because people were overall happier about it in average, and were simply more productive due to that, is anyone’s guess.

I appreciate the comment, but there’s a lot more in play than simply socializing and company culture.

I’m not new in my career, when I started, my training was a couple of days on a full-day teams call with my direct manager, where he showed me the ropes of how we do what we do with the tools we have.

I think it was 3 or 4 days for me, until I had grasped enough of the basics to properly adapt to their way of doing things.

Within a week or so, I was pretty much up to speed. Like with any job, there’s specifics that I learned as I went, but I got the broad strokes during the first week.

I imagine anyone that’s green will need more mentorship that I did. I’m fairly senior in my position, so many times I’m on the other side of mentorship. It’s been a while since I’ve been green.

My work does a weekly “meeting” that’s specifically just a hangout for everyone in the company, just to hang out and talk about whatever.

It’s like a social hour every week, so we can get to know the boss and eachother.

I’ve worked at the place less than a year and there’s been two in person social events so far with everyone, and at least three with my team additional to that.

The culture of the company is clearly important for them, and I’m happy about it. They do what’s needed, and losing an hour of productivity every week isn’t as important as giving everyone the opportunity to connect with eachother.

I was informed by Google music, when they shut that down and forced everyone on Yt music, that all my uploaded data would be erased.

I downloaded it all and sorted it into my personal music on my PC.

May I ask what app you’re using there? I don’t see that on Yt music on Android… At least, I can’t find it if it’s there. Maybe I’m blind.

I’ll have to look into this. I appreciate the heads up. There’s a few things I’d like to put on my library if I can.

Yt music for me because I needed more Google drive storage. I just couldn’t get around it anymore and had to get more (long story explained elsewhere). Anyways… The recommendations are generally trash but it’s free and ad-free with my Google one thing, which I share with my family, so there’s like four or five of us getting it for the cost of one subscription. It’s one of the lowest tier subscriptions too.

I also know the Plex/radarr gambit, and it’s been wild to say the least.

I swear that if there was a unified online video platform, the same way that music is distributed, where it doesn’t matter if you’re on Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime video, Netflix, Paramount+, whatever, you just get all the content regardless of platform and the platforms are affordable, then I’d turn all that shit off. It’s not worth the headache.

Music companies are fighting with very little piracy as a result of their openness with people like YouTube music, Amazon music, Spotify, Apple music, etc… Specifically because no matter which one you get, you have pretty much all the music ever. It’s packaged slightly differently per service, but it’s all there. Sure, it still happens, but it’s pretty rare IMO. I hear more and more stories like yours so over, and very few where anyone feels the need to start warehousing music data.

There will always be a market for high fidelity/physical music, and there will always be a few that want their own copies of the music to have, and some of those may get that through piracy, but the fact is, it’s way down from the days of Napster, when just about everyone was doing it.

I’ve long thought that the video media companies should take a page from the music industry and just open up the licensing, but they’ve gone the other way on it. IDK. Seems dumb.

They’re still fighting with piracy and shit, so…

I did/do. I share gdrive stuff with friends and family for all sorts of reasons, bluntly, I don’t trust most cloud storage providers, and I certainly don’t trust them any more than I trust the big G… Not saying that the big G is without flaws, but I haven’t seen any major data breaches from them that were handled poorly, unlike a lot of other providers. Meanwhile, they’re one of the biggest online entities, making them prone to getting attacked.

As far as security of my data from bad actors on the internet, the big G seems to have it where it counts for security…

There’s obvious problems with them willingly sharing data to other organizations, but that’s a risk regardless of who you give your data to.

And please don’t start with the self hosted stuff. I can’t even begin to describe how tired I am with trying to get people to use anything that’s didn’t ship pre-installed on their phone. I have a handful of friends that could navigate a FOSS file sharing system, and a large number more that would need to have their hands held through the whole process every time they accessed it, which bluntly, I don’t have time for.

Plus, everyone in my circles already has a Google account for one reason or another, so they already have some idea how to use it, and access controls are made easy by that fact. I really don’t want to have to set each of them up with an account and guide them through the process of accessing it and everything. They are used to Google drive at this point and I’m not going to change that, since it took so much damned effort to get to a point where it’s actually functional for everyone.

I get stuff like spreadsheets shared with family where they can input stuff like their bills and stuff (for tracking payments and trends), and sharing pictures and video, to keeping backups of important files. I can build a FOSS file depot for that, but once I move everyone over to it, I need to spend even more making it redundant with offsite backups and shit…

I’d rather pay the $5/mo and just not worry about it. I’m on one of the lowest “Google one” plans and I don’t see a reason to upgrade or change what I’m doing. I work in IT, I manage enough already, both for my work, myself and for my family. I don’t want to add to that burden because “big G bad”.

Most of the people around me have long ago given all their data to Google, Meta, Twitter, tiktok, etc (or some combination of those). I don’t think they care about having more data in the “cloud”.

Plus, I can share my Google one benefits like YouTube premium, and YouTube music, with my family, so individually it works out to maybe a bit more than a dollar each per month. It’s truly not a bad deal.

That’s the only pinch as far as I can tell. Some of the people who prefer face-to-face communication, are the bosses. So they force everyone into return to office for their own comfort/convenience/preference…

Those that prefer WFH be damned I guess.

The problem is, you can’t really say no to the boss, you either comply, or find a new job. Not everyone is in a position where they can quickly/easily find a new job that suits them better.

In my experience, the highly skilled long-tenured staff tend to lean towards WFH, but it’s not an absolute. Plenty of skilled people who prefer in-office work… My point is that a disproportionate number of long-tenured workers are finding new jobs when RTO policies are put in place. There’s a lot of highly skilled workers in the market looking for WFH positions. Easy pickings for anyone wanting to hire for remote jobs.

Obviously a lot of the people who prefer in-office aren’t really looking for anything right now, so the job market is kind of crazy. WFH jobs are snapped up and in-office jobs are posted for weeks or months… Simply by allowing people to WFH, a company can pick up some highly skilled talent pretty easily.

As an aside, WFH has saved me upwards of $5k/yr on gas, parking, wasted time on the road, maintenance on my vehicle… It’s quite remarkable.

Fair enough. All the business owners I’ve met have said something to the effect of “my way or the highway” about it. So I personally just aligned myself with a job where the bosses “my way” is the way I prefer.

In my case, work from home.

My current job doesn’t even have a physical office. We’re all work from home. I like it.

I got YouTube music and YouTube premium because I needed more Google drive storage.

Loved isn’t the word I would use.

It’s adequate for day to day background noise that isn’t ad-filled garbage and music I hate.

Honestly, I think this is the biggest reason that music subscriptions are popular.

Nobody cares enough to curate their own music collection anymore, even if it’s entirely legal, it’s just too much damn work for most people.

Unless you have a special interest in music, eg, audiophiles, then it doesn’t matter enough to spend any time on it. As long as you can listen to what you want, when you want, who cares?

Important to note that they don’t stay in FLAC after being uploaded.

Also, I’m pretty sure you can’t do this anymore.

Honestly, who cares what Drake uses on his iPhone…

Wait, what?

Ohhhhhh… Nevermind me.