activescott's Notes

Rosewill HEARTH NAS PRO | Server Chassis | Supports up to 12 x 3.5" Hot Swap HDD and 6 x 2.5" SSD | E-ATX Compatible

Until recently, the government rarely asked the justices to decide cases on the emergency/interim/shadow docket. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama sought such action only 8 times in 16 years. But in the last decade, the Court’s definition of “emergency” has grown to include almost any lower-court ruling the justices feel like weighing in on. While these shadow docket orders are not final in a legal sense, they often are in a practical one — say, when the Court allows the president to deport an undocumented immigrant or fire thousands of civil servants.

Combine this with a president who believes everything is an emergency — during Trump’s first term his administration sought shadow docket relief 41 times — and you have a recipe for the sort of arbitrary, unexplained exercise of power that led Americans to declare their independence from the Crown in the first place.

Currently the Court is considering emergency appeals from Trump regarding whether he can build a new White House ballroom without going through Congress, and whether he can make it harder for Americans to cast their vote by mail (the way Trump himself votes).

Requiring officials to give reasons for their actions is the foundation of liberal society, the sine qua non of modern representative government. It’s what separates a constitutional democracy from an authoritarian regime. Indeed, it’s right there in the Constitution: The Great Writ — habeas corpus — is based on the principle that if the state wants to detain you or deprive you of your liberty, it must first bring you into open court and provide the precise reasons why.

In an incident from another case last fall, a veteran federal district judge, William G. Young, blocked the Trump administration from canceling millions of dollars in grants by the National Institutes of Health. Apparently, Young had failed to intuit the meaning of an earlier shadow docket ruling by the Supreme Court, which involved the canceling of grants by a separate agency while offering almost no actual reasoning. For this crime, the judge endured a harsh public scolding by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

“Lower-court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them,” Gorsuch wrote.

Young, a Reagan appointee and judge for 47 years, apologized in open court. “Never before this admonition has any judge in any higher court ever thought to suggest that this court had defied the precedent of a higher court — that was never my intention,” he said. “I simply did not understand that orders on the emergency docket were precedent,” he added. “I stand corrected.” (Never mind that the justices seem unable to agree even with themselves on this point: In his smackdown of Young, Gorsuch wrote that a Supreme Court decision is a “precedent that commands respect in lower courts,” but only five years ago Justice Samuel Alito had said emergency docket rulings are not precedential.)

Great review of the Jonsbo N6 NAS Enclosure/Case.

N6 is the latest member of the Jonsbo NAS case series, designed for NAS but not limited to NAS.

The case features a structure that separates the motherboard into upper and lower compartments, offering versatile configuration compatibility, and has a clear and concise internal layout.

Motherboard：ITX / M-ATX

More prosaically, you can use Sanoid to create, automatically thin, and monitor snapshots and pool health from a single eminently human-readable TOML config file at /etc/sanoid/sanoid.conf. (Sanoid also requires a "defaults" file located at /etc/sanoid/sanoid.defaults.conf, which is not user-editable.) A typical Sanoid system would have a single cron job but see INSTALL.md for more details:

The court’s conservative justices found in an emergency opinion that the states sued too early and that the administration could proceed with planning for restrictions on mail-in ballot voting while a lower court weighs the legality of these new guidelines. 

The three justices in the court’s liberal minority said they would have kept the lower court’s hold in place, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson calling the majority’s ruling a “Kafkaesque nightmare.”

nip.io and sslip.io are a DNS (Domain Name System) service that, when queried with a hostname with an embedded IP address, returns that IP address.

nip.io and sslip.io have been in operation for over ten years. We have become so popular that our servers receive over 20k queries every second, so mainstream that Google Cloud Platform, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM, AMD, and many more refer to us!

Beef is so expensive right now because drought, high grain prices, inflation and rising interest rates made cattle farming a costly endeavor in recent years. To deal with rising operating costs, many U.S. cattle farmers reduced the size of their herds — and some got out of the business altogether. As a result, the U.S. cattle inventory is the smallest it’s been since 1951.

Tariffs add another wrinkle. President Donald Trump has instituted wide-ranging tariffs throughout his second term, many of which included beef and other agricultural products imported into the U.S. Trump rolled back some food-related tariffs in November.

The cost of tariffs are typically passed through to consumers.

• Inflation drove up input costs, which haven’t receded, making it expensive all around to care for livestock.

• Drought conditions continue to impact pastures in cattle regions, which can force producers to spend more on feed.

• Record-high prices can be good for farmers selling cattle. But anyone looking to expand their herd is paying those same sums.

• High interest rates mean producers are paying more for operating loans, which many rely on to run their businesses.

Tariffs will have a definite impact on consumer prices that could last for years. The beef industry relies on both imports and exports, and it’s no simple task to find new markets and reroute global supply chains. Prices will rise in the short-term while producers decide how to adapt to the new conditions. And long-term, it’s unclear whether tariffs will leave producers better off or worse, which would have consequences for prices.

“For beef valued around $7 per kilogram, that difference can exceed $1.80 per kilogram in tariff costs,” the report said.

Beef prices in the U.S have soared in 2026 due to a reduction in the nation’s cattle herd from years of drought, high feed costs and herd liquidation. The size of the herd is at its lowest point since the 1950s.

To solve this, Dalio said the U.S. needs to carefully employ a three-part strategy to get the budget deficit down to 3% of gross domestic product.

First, Dalio said the U.S. government needs to reduce its spending. Second, he said tax revenue needs to be raised. Finally, the New York native and Harvard Business School alumni said lower interest rates were needed.

“All three need to happen concurrently so as to prevent any one from being too large,” Dalio said. “If any one is too large, the adjustment will be traumatic.”

Dalio cautioned against ramming through these adjustments by “force.” For instance, “it would be very bad if the Federal Reserve unnaturally forced interest rates down,” he said.

Dalio said it’s important to to take steps now, while the economy is healthy. An economy in recession requires increased government spending, he said.

Dalio said the exact timing of a debt crisis can be swayed by variables ranging from military conflict to political change. On its current trajectory, the U.S. could enter such a crisis in as early as one year or as late as five. “My guess, which I suppose will be a bad one, is that it will come in three years, give or take two, if the course we’re on is not changed.”

To prepare, Dalio recommended investors are underweight debt assets, such as bonds.

As much as 10% to 15% of a portfolio could land in gold, as well as “a bit” of bitcoin, the hedge fund founder said.

Mamdani has defended the tax as a fair way to generate $500m in annual revenue in a city with vast socioeconomic inequality. The surcharge - which several other cities and countries have in different forms - has won the support of Governor Kathy Hochul, who previously was hesitant to raise New Yorkers' taxes.

The mayor ran on a campaign platform of affordability, pledging to raise taxes to cover services like universal child care, and free and faster buses. His pledge to increase taxes has sparked backlash from some of the city's wealthiest residents who claim it will discourage people from buying homes and investing in the US's largest city.

Representatives for Mamdani's administration did not attend Tuesday's hearing, which angered some in attendance.

A spokesperson for Mamdani told the BBC the administration asked to push back the hearing while it dealt with the legal challenge, but the council declined and officials cannot testify on the matter while it's being litigated.

Jason Haber, who runs the American Real Estate Association, said the list of names and addresses threatens people's safety.

But Morris Pearl, a former managing director at investment firm BlackRock, said the idea that people were choosing not to invest in the city because of the tax was "absurd".

"The whole point of being rich is you can live wherever you want," said Pearl, a chair of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy Americans who advocate for taxing the rich.

"Someone who owns a residence that is not their primary residence that's worth more than $5m has the ability to pay more than most New Yorkers do."

Across the world, some countries and cities already experiment with similar secondary home taxes.

In France, homes are subject to an additional charge that varies across the country, with a 60% local tax surcharge for homes in Paris. The tax has generated billions of euros in revenue.

The city of Vancouver in Canada has an Empty Homes Tax on residences that are vacant or under-used for more than six months of a calendar year. The tax - 3% of the property's value - began in 2017 to help improve housing affordability.

Research from Canadian think tank C. D. Howe Institute found the tax has raised as much as $194m in revenue in eight years, and has reduced housing vacancies by as much as 21%, but has done little to bring down the average cost of rent.

In San Francisco, California, residents in 2022 voted for an Empty Homes Tax, which required owners to pay between $2,500 to $20,000 for apartments that are vacant for six months or more.

But like in New York, the tax faced fierce opposition from real estate and landlord groups in the technology hub, and after a group sued, a judge found the tax unconstitutional. It remains in limbo as the city appeals.

Pearl said the New York City administration's decision to launch the tax with a list of wealthy residents may not have been the most diplomatic choice.

"I do think that the mayor himself - I have suggested that he sort of unnecessarily antagonises people occasionally," Pearl said.

But, he added, "I'm with him on the policy."

Robert B. Barnett, Jr. firm.

They have a real-estate practice too.

Still, until now, most of Stripe’s large acquisitions have been related to helping people collect and manage incoming cash. Buying OpenRouter looks like a move to the other side of the ledger, too: expense management, beginning with AI expenses.

This acquisition “is Stripe’s deliberate attempt to embed itself into the middle of capital flows in the AI era,” said PitchBook’s research analyst Franco Granda.

It’s joining an unusual assortment of companies also entering token expense management. Databricks developed its own AI gateway. Rippling just launched one focused on employee AI spend and ROI. Ramp just launched one, also for AI expense management. And the list goes on.

Imran's thing

Arango ingests fragmented enterprise data and builds a graph-native context layer that your AI agent, app, and workload queries directly.

Maybe sama should focus on research instead of pins ads and porn. 

Nice write up of the concepts in the video and repo.