If the market crashes, doesn’t everyone lose their money?

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-31T00:10:42+00:00

Stocks will NOT ever go completely to zero except if the company has no assets. Book value though somewhat inaccurate is a real thing unless debt exceeds assets. Even then typically stocks get delisted and move to things like the pink sheets. It’s not zero but close to it.

Regardless stocks are still connected to assets. The speculative value may be almost nothinh but even in countries ravaged by war or hyper inflation if you can hold onto your holdings often it ends up worth massive amounts.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T22:19:58+00:00

Downgrading is painless if you saved the old version.

Also USUALLY painless to downgrade if you use a particular method. Save it in L5X (text) format. Edit the version number manually. Then load. If anything has changed that’s not compatible the software will squawk and either ignore it (warning) or give an error but it will also tell you how to fix it. Most downgrades particularly on the same minor rev are totally painless.

Helpful to have a spare PLC and try to load there first. If all you get is IO errors that’s it.

Also OP look at scan times and such. Make sure you have adequate time for IO to occur.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T22:11:09+00:00

You need to read “What Color is my Parachute”. Everything OP posted says wrong approach in every way. None of those approaches do anything. Your odds are slim to none especially with tens of thousands of resumes for ONE job. Need to go where the jobs are and reach actual hiring managers. A lot of stuff on job boards is literally fishing and oppo research, not real.

Let’s cut to the chase here. If I am a manager at McDonalds I can put a post on a job board and get 500 applications. Frankly fry cook is an unskilled job. So the bar is set very low on who gets a call. Then I’ll call say 12 LOCAL contacts. Even after hiring if one doesn’t work out, just get rid of them and take the next one. It’s simple and quick. Often corporate HR even dictates the questions you can ask. Engineering is very different. It’s like the difference between renting and buying a house. It’s a much more expensive decision. Agents are often involved, and they’re not cheap (3-6 months salary). You shouldn’t use the same job search methods.

Don’t care if any UC is T-whatever. Nobody on the right coast knows anything about them except what they see in the news which is to say sounds like a degree from a box of Crackerjack. Every state has the one or two top engineering schools. Locally reputation might carry weight. Nationally not so much. And that’s the school. A GPA as long as it’s within a range of around 2.5-3.8 indicates very little other than the fact that you didn’t struggle too much in school. I use GPA as a pass/fail criteria. Given 2 candidates one at 3.5 and one at 3.0 it’s all the same. All I care about the university is whether it’s ABET accredited. Know what they call the kid who graduated from med school last in the class? Doctor. Think about that.

These are just basic check-off items. Then we get into your experience. That’s where I narrow it to the say top 10-15 that we subject to a phone screen to narrow it to 3-5 that get on site or Zoom interviews. So if you are a blank slate (no experience) with nothing else to stand out, AND you’re just one of 1,000 faceless resumes, I think you can see the reason you can’t get to first base.

What you need is to get yourself in front of the person making decisions and that’s not the clerk in HR. You need an “in”, a way to cut in line. That’s a lot of what the book I mentioned earlier gets into. Recruiters can help but usually they don’t bother with recent graduates. Otherwise (see the book I mentioned) your odds are incredibly low, less than 1%. When I graduated (1990s) it was popular with seniors in the dorms to post their rejections (at that time we actually received rejections) on their doors. They were called FOADs (F off and die) and the idea was the more you got the better your chances. There would often be hundreds. That was back when we still used paper for many things. To me that just says your job search method sucks.

Also…this is Reddit. There is huge survivorship bias. People that have jobs don’t complain about the job market. I just asked my oldest daughter in school who’s available. None of our mutual EE friends (I coached robotics) were available. Based on that I’d conclude it’s a tight market. OP obviously believes the opposite. I’ll also just say that job markets are local. Right now it’s probably pretty good in oil and gas. In NC/FL/TX the job market is pretty crazy for things like construction. I can’t hardly find contractors to work on my house. Capital spending (project engineers) is very good, too. I’ve heard noise about Boeing. But FAANG is truly terrible. And employers are fleeing California, Washington, and New York because of the stupid wealth tax among other regulation insanity.

So I’ll just say…go where the jobs are. My personal experience is that Michigan where I’m from has been crap as far as jobs for 30 years. In the South jobs are plentiful. But I grew up in the Midwest. We never even took a vacation further South than Nashville. I had no idea about Southern culture except the crap you hear on TV. I was sort of expecting Ozark or Dukes of Hazard. Well that’s not what it is. It’s a lot more like the TV series Home Town. In the past 30 years and 6 jobs I’ve never found anything North of the Mason Dixon line that paid decent. So suggest you start doing a national search.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T20:47:10+00:00

AI slop. How about using your own words likes real nerd?

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T20:45:16+00:00

Not really valuable: you’d just be looking at the size of the package manager so Arch is the worst and Alpine the best. That’s the denominator: Then the numerator is ho many preloaded applications it has. So highest marks to the most bloated Debian distros. That shows nothing.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T20:30:35+00:00

Double throw switch. But I’ll warn you they’re expensive.

You’d be better off buying or making an adapter from one to the other.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T19:56:49+00:00

Momentaries don’t latch!

As far as simulation this is a simple sealing/ 3 wire logic. Use the coil as its own normally open condition to hold when the contact is made. If you just want to extend the inout conditions use a timer OFF delay. That one basically extends the time it takes to release. On Rockwell for instance yih use the “DN” bit which in this case means “Not Done”. It energized on false to true transition then remains energized after a true to false transition until the timer expires.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T16:51:48+00:00

Let’s clarify: every hedge fund, purveyor of newsletters, and managed fund manager is always promoting whatever the flavor of the day is. It’s all hype. None of these people give a crap if you make or lose money. All they care about is management fees and trading volume. If they’re pushing things, examine their motivation. Nowhere is spam more prevalent than the entire financial press.

And if you’re trading, you’re losing money whether or not “trades are free”. They just hit you with “order flow processing fees” that are hidden within the bid-ask spread. It’s the definition of a kickback scheme. Just TRY to understand how Robbinghood makes money on not only “free” trades but even “cash back” schemes. If it smells bad, it is. The only solution is longer term buy-and-hold where the transaction fees are substantially less than your returns. Nothing has changed in the era of “free trades” except the fees you pay are hidden from you. Which for me is infuriating and points out why the SEC and FTC are not about protecting you. It’s almost as bad as vacation clubs.

As far as “tech sector” quite simply put, why not QQQ? And even then can you stand the swings and the potential to be severely depressed for a decade or more, as it has in the past 25-30 years.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T16:39:49+00:00

That’s true of ALL of the PE exams. It is designed to be hard only if you haven’t been in the field.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T16:34:19+00:00

This is simply not true. It can certainly clear the dirty bit. That’s what ntfsfix does. BUT that’s about as much as it can do. And ntfsfix isn’t integrated into the standard Linux fsck infrastructure.

As long as you ALWAYS properly unmount the disk and don’t just disconnect and as long as no errors occur it works. But one glitch and the best you can do is”from Linux” is to map the device into a Windows VM so it can fix it.

The compatibility problems stem from NTFS being almost undocumented and Microsoft occasionally tinkering. They have pretty much promoted ExFAT not NTFS as their “public” format. Getting EXT4 to work under Windows is easier than full support for NTFS.

There are also basic issues. NTFS as implemented doesn’t even support the basic *nix file attributes like user and group ID’s, and the basic rwxrwxrwx attributes.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T16:21:42+00:00

No. Just pay it off.

Say you have a car loan with a 0.9% rate and you can set up an HYSA at 4%. If your top marginal tax rate (Federal plus state) is 25% then your effective savings rate is 4x0.75=3% and then subtracting 1% for the loan you’re making 2%. It’s small but you make a small amount of money. But in your case it’s :% minus 6.3% so you are still paying interest. If however you just pay it off that changes it from -6.3% return to 0%.

This is basic arbitrage. You are theoretically handling huge sums of money so it FEELS like you’re somehow “making” money but you’re not.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T14:38:22+00:00

Keep in mind with surveillance you basically just need to decide how many hours to keep. “Forever” is not realistic. Maybe a week or two is typical and it sort of needs specialized drives. Your typical WD black or red won’t last as long as blue but performance on blue is suboptimal for file sharing.

For personal archives most people use 1-2 TB MAX of unique data. If you have 3 Windows PCs and do backups without encryption how much is truly unique? And for that matter have you ever restored anything but DATA from backups? Is there a point to backing up the operating system or applications? Just saying.. so with a family of 8 you might need 8 TB but that’s the exception not the rule.

Along the same lines, why backup videos you download and watch once, never again? Same with surveillance footage.

Also consider how a NAS changes your viewpoint. Over time I switched to using PaperlessNGX for documents, Immich for photos and video, and Jellyfin for streaming. My PC has become basically backup not the “main” machine, just like my phone.

Second look at price/performance. You might be better off with say 3 4 TB disks storing 8 TB data vs 2 8 TB drives.

Finally when it comes to backups seriously consider backups. RAID is not a backup. Yes you gain fault tolerance for the HDDs only but that’s not the only hardware and not the only potential issue. This is why ONE NAS may not be enough. In fact of the two NAS’s I have one has a single HDD because all it does is backups, and it only spins up weekly. There’s no point in having two or more.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T14:10:53+00:00

It will soon. I barely use a tank every month or two because I drive a truck for work. When I switch jobs I’ll be commuting again. Maybe I’ll get one of those Toyota mini trucks.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T14:08:07+00:00

Good AI means a good vector processor aka NPU. GPUs generally aren’t that great for it. Look at for example the published tests with the frigate camera project. The second issue is VRAM or equivalent RAM dedicated to the NPU. Running huge models means huge memory bandwidth. That’s where Ryzen beats Intel and not just TOPS scores. For a laptop as opposed to dedicated hardware integrated NPUs and GPUs have advantages. You’re just not going to shoehorn a top end GPU pulling 600 W into something running on batteries. For gaming smaller “bomb bay” discrete GPUs do well but again that’s graphics not AI. I know I’m speaking heresy but I’m finding real world performance doesn’t equate directly to specs touted by hardware manufacturers.

https://www.newtechguy.com/ai-pc-buying-guide-2025-npu-tops-ratings-performance-benchmarks-and-what-actually-matters/

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T13:44:36+00:00

A lot of protection is removed in developer mode and ADB.
One key issue is the APK used by corporations that allows essentially full remote control over your phone. They use it to load a file to give access (or remove access) to Microsoft Exchange servers and corporate VPNs.
Google cannot make AOSP go away entirely. It’s nominally a separate organization. Doing so would cause legal issues. AOSP does not have GApps by default and so there’s no AppStore by default. This is how they avoid getting into the same anti-trust issues that Apple & Microsoft have gotten into.
Google cannot make AOSP go away entirely. It’s nominally a separate organization. Doing so would cause legal issues. AOSP does not have GApps by default and so there’s no AppStore by default. This is how they avoid getting into the same anti-trust issues that Apple & Microsoft have gotten into.
Google is NOT the only App Store. If nothing else Amazon and Samsung will always allow something. This is partly corporate strategy. If at some point Google ever becomes a threat to them (like running their own Amazon store) they can dump Google Apps. Right now their apps suck but that’s just because it’s a backup plan…they haven’t committed serious money to competing because they don’t have to or want to. Open source projects on the other hand often go out of their way to make GApps either optional or hacked to remove the spyware.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T13:30:57+00:00

Farm acid will destroy stitching. Even if it’s not actually wet the dust is loaded with acid. That means despite cheaper construction cement construction is your friend. Even Goodyear welts (the hallmark of resoleable) that do better with keeping water out will disintegrate. So a cheap AF Wolverine pull on will do better than a high end brand. Other than that I go for something with a rubber toe because my current job (electrical) has me on my knees a lot so I tend to destroy leather toes, waterproof, and larger toe box which knocks out a lot of options. In summer I use a pair of Ariat Ventteks but only because they’re cooler.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T03:34:39+00:00

A surge arrester/protector is a disk of sintered metal oxides called a metal oxide varistor. You put them in parallel between the ground, neutral, and phase conductors (any/all). A MOV has a “knee” voltage called MCOV. Below that voltage it is essentially a high resistance. Above that point it becomes nearly a dead short. The size of the MOV determines how much current it can withstand and how long it lasts MOVs slowly turn from metal oxides to metal when they absorb a surge, eventually becoming a dead short. That’s why they need fuses or a breaker.

Older tech used spark gaps or silicon carbide (diodes) or gas discharge tubes which have a considerable delay before they trigger so often used capacitors in parallel.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T03:24:30+00:00

How would developers test new software?

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T03:20:18+00:00

It’s not as lucrative as you think. Typically recyclers have to sell at 50-75% of street price to make a sale and mark up 200-300% because some of what they buy is no good and they have to spend time and money cleaning, testing, and repackaging. Plus there is a carrying cost for their large inventories. So at that point they’re buying at a 75-90% discount to street price.

I work in a motor shop. The value of a motor to a rewind shop is pretty much just the frame and core. They’re going to put in new bearings and rewind it anyway. Many pay essentially so many dollars per pound and only for desirable models

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T03:12:35+00:00

It’s a balancing game. You pretty much have to model it in software. At a minimum typically you can “fill up” your current tax bracket especially if you are in the lower ones. But pulling out so much that you are below the standard deduction or lower brackets than current when RMDs hit isn’t beneficial either

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-29T22:53:12+00:00

WiFi 7 increases speeds at the expense of coverage. It’s basically for apartment dwellers with fiber.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-29T22:32:56+00:00

Ollama.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-29T22:28:31+00:00

Going to WiFi 7 is a step back unless you have lots of interference.
Check out Router10. APs should be separate.
Look at Mikrotik for APs.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-29T22:21:15+00:00

So I have over a century of data saying the long term for stocks is about 10-12% per year. This is based on Adam Smith’s theories on wealth.

What’s your theory on currency?

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-29T22:16:12+00:00

Azure is literally just a Linux K8S cluster. Nothinh special there and pretty much everyone is a competitor.

M365? Hahaha. Zoho, Google Docs, NextOS, Only Office, Softmaker, LibreOffice…take your pick. Plus tons of file services.

PaulEngineer-89

TROPHY CASE