I mean, let’s be honest here: This was going to happen regardless of whether we elected a rapist nazi to POTUS.

If you start caring about nazi hate symbols then you need to get rid of a LOT of the active military… and apparently democrats in Maine.

To me, Communism is a lot like Libertarianism and Anarchism. It SOUNDS fun on paper but once you start thinking through the implementation, it gets REAL bad. The go to for Libertarianism is “how do orphanages work”.

Communism? If you are in a managed economy where everyone contributes to society to the best of their ability… how do you decide who gets to do what? Who is a janitor and who is a scientist or philosopher? Aptitude tests only go so far because, sure, the people who score the best get to be scientists. What about the people who… don’t? Who is a janitor who spends time in the “muck” and who is in food service and who is in construction and so forth?

And the existence of Entertainment makes that even messier. How do you decide who gets to be a singer? Okay, maybe that one is easy if we ignore the existence of autotune. What about a model?

And… if you are the kind of person who believes that sex work is work… how do you pick who gets to be a sex worker?

While I am a firm believer that most (all?) attempts at Communism very rapidly became coopted into authoritarianism, if not outright fascism, it is very much worth looking at WHY that tends to happen.

And maybe get why so many of the true scotsmen who like the idea of communism tend to be REAL quick to describe ourselves as Socialists or even Democratic Socialists

1. Poe’s law?
2. Endlessly sucking off cheney and mao in hell?

Yeah. The US definitely was horrifically evil long after other Global North countries had decided to chill but we were far from the only people running on the genocide and enslavement of the Global South.

In a lot of ways, the US was late to colonialism and took it WAY too far and commit atrocities for it. The USSR/Stalin was late to (there is probably a better term for it but I can’t remember it) peasant revolutions and took it WAY too far and commit atrocities for it… and then ended up being a global power that extended said reign of terror to anyone sharing a border with them.

Communism inherently couples both the economy and the government.

In theory, capitalism can be decoupled since it mostly depends on laissez-faire governance. Communism inherently requires a planned economy and centralized control of such.

There is theoretically nothing stopping said leaders of a communist regime from being elected through a democratic process. But much like democracies tend to favor capitalism and (lower case) libertarian ideals, communism tends to lend itself to dictatorships because… you have a centralized control of all aspects of society.

dot ml 'bout to crest the horizon like the riders of rohan.

And newer planes all have windows where the tint is controlled by the crew (so as to minimize conflict between passengers) which… I still like to look out while stretching my legs near the bathroom but pretty sure staring out a ridiculously tinted window at some clouds isn’t what people think of when they hear “window seat”.

Like… I kinda agree that “window seat” doesn’t actually mean you have a window these days. I would argue that they should be renamed but “wall seat” is going to just make people realize why aisle seats are the best choice… and I like my aisle seat so piss off.

Its actually a very common problem. Gun nuts all think they are John McClane and need to keep one in the chamber at all times. They remove the magazine but never properly run the action and yeah. Its especially a problem with glocks because disassembly actually involves squeezing the trigger.

Responsible gun owners are only slightly more common than good guys with a gun.

Awww, who’s a good boy.

Yeah… be incredibly careful about shoving something with metal bristles into your charging port.

Maybe once a year I get a bit of gunk in my port (hey-oh!). Samsung (presumably all usb c androids?) are generally really good about losing their shit and yelling at you to remove the cable immediately and clean your port.

So when I get home? I just get one of my flossers (for teeth) that tend to have a cheap plastic toothpick attached to it. Works perfect, no liquids, and very minimal risk of damaging the port.

And plenty of people use chatgpt instead of google. Not really sure what point you think you are making but…

Only to people who are actually paying attention to a lot of politicians and likely looking exactly this up.

For the majority of the public? it is just “good public speaking”.

A lot of people in graphics design et al are contractors. They get hired for a job, do it with their own resources, and then move on. Those folk tend to need to provide their own software.

Aside from that? Companies DO provide software. But, at least in my experience, early career staff decide they actually NEED matlab or some other super proprietary nonsense and take it upon themselves to get the tools they “need”. Which results in their manager having to have The Talk about why you don’t do that in an actual company and how they are REALLY lucky you are the one that saw them because that is a fireable offense.

Let’s say you are a graphics designer. You use Adobe Illustrator and you pirate it. You work for Innertrode either as a contractor or a full time employee. You make their new logo.

Adobe’s legal team are bored. They see that new logo. They know it was made with Illustrator because of some of the visual quirks/tools (or, you know, because it is anything graphical so of course it uses Adobe). They know that Innertrode doesn’t have a license. So they call up Lumberg and say “what the fuck?”.

Lumberg then calls the person who was in charge of the new logo and they point at you.

If you are staff? You were given training not to pirate anything. It is all your fault. Innertrode buys a few years of a license and apologizes and fires your ass and makes sure to tell everyone they know about you. Or you are a contractor and you signed an agreement saying you had valid licenses for everything and they just give your contact info to Adobe and move on.

And Adobe MIGHT just want to shake you down. Or they might want to make an example and sue the fuck out of some people.

Also… it is a lot of hearsay for obvious reasons, but there are very strong rumors that some of the more prominent cracks tend to add digital watermarks for the purpose of automating this.

I used a boox for maybe 7 or 8 months? I do not recommend them.

There is a native ebook reader. It is… real bad. And the book management is similarly really weak. Great for throwing a quick PDF on there, not so much for having a “library” as it were where you don’t necessarily want to have to remember which was book 3 of the series while you are on a plane. Not sure if the Calibre support got better to help with this (I know the Calibre devs recently made a huge effort to support non-Amazon devices) but when I used it it was all about you building your own folder structure.

But mostly it is designed around taking advantage of being an android tablet with an e-ink display. So just use the actual kindle app and so forth. Which, on paper (hee hee), is really cool. In practice, you rapidly realize that the kindle et al apps are designed with a fast refreshing display and most of the UX is built around holding a phone in your hands and not gripping a good sized tablet on its edges. LOTS of accidental page skips and font shenanigans.

Also, the android it runs is fairly out of date which is a pretty hefty security concern.

And there is a LOT of “mysterious” traffic going off to servers in China. How much that bothers you is… up to you.

Switched to a kobo and incredibly happy with that.

There are two layers to this (actually a lot more but)

What you are describing is mostly supply chain. It is the idea that the package manager’s inventory should be safe. And that is already a nigh impossible task simply because so many of the packages themselves can be compromised. It seems like every other year there is a story of bad actors infiltrating a project either as an attack or as a “research paper”. But the end result is you have core libraries that may be compromised.

But the other side is what impacted OP and will still be an issue even if said supply chain is somehow 100% vetted. People are inherently going to need things that aren’t in a package manager. Sometimes that is for nefarious reasons and sometimes it is just because the project they are interested in isn’t at the point where it is using a massive build farm to deploy everywhere. Maybe it involves running blind scripts as root (don’t fucking do that… even though we all do at some point) and sometimes it involves questionable code.

And THAT is a very much unsolved problem no matter what distro. Because, historically, you would run an anti-virus scan on that. How many people even know what solutions there are for linux? And how many have even a single nice thing to say about the ones that do?

And this for a $60 perpetual license program that i should buy anyway because it’s for work

Just to pile on: NEVER pirate stuff you use for work. Audits are a thing (especially if said software company gets suspicious for whatever reason) and you WILL be thrown under the bus at a moment’s notice and put on an industry wide shitlist because you are just too much of a liability after you get caught once.

Pirate for fun and hobbyist use. The moment you are getting paid, go legit.

For a (first) NAS, I generally discourage this.

Office liquidation desktops are great for home servers (if you aren’t paying for power). But they generally are very limited on storage. Limited bays to install hard drives and limited SATA ports. So you rapidly end up with drives just sitting on the bottom of the case and real jank pcie boards to extend your storage.

Which then becomes a HUGE issue when you have a drive failure. Because now you need to actually identify which drive is the failed one which involves reading off serial numbers and, depending on the setup/OS, making sure you get the order right when you plug them back in.

Whereas a 4-bay NAS generally has dedicated hardware and hot swap bays which make this trivial. You might never actually use the hot swap capability, but it makes checking which drive is the bad drive fairly trivial.

Also, a good 4 bay NAS is REAL easy to unplug and put in the trunk of your car during a disaster. Don’t ask me how I know.

I don’t have direct experience with them, but my understanding from youtubes is that the ugreen NASes are specifically designed for you to just ignore their OS and install your own (so truenas or proxmox).

Hardware tinkering is more limited but… there is very much a question of how much of that people actually do.

Raspberry pi: No. Or, at least, not without doing something to make sure you have a real storage backend and aren’t just running it off an SD card. The wear on SD cards is exaggerated and largely minimized if you use an OS that is configured to be aware of it but you are also increasingly relying on a ticking time bomb.

Mini PC/NUC? I am a huge fan of these and think they are what most people actually need for stuff like home assistant, adguard, etc. Just understand you are going to be storage limited sooner than you expect and you can oversubscribe that CPU and memory a lot faster than you would expect.

My general suggestion? Install proxmox on the mini PC and deploy on top of that. If/when you decide you want something more, migration is usually pretty easy.

And if you just want a NAS? It is really hard to go wrong with a 4 bay NAS from one of the reputable vendors (which may just be ugreen at this point?) as those tend to still come out cheaper than building it yourself and 4 disks means you can either play with fire with RAID5 or not be stupid and do RAID1.