Yeah, that was definitely the rationale. Satoshi added the message, “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” to the first Bitcoin block. In the early days, most of the community were Tea Party, Ron Paul, Paul Ryan, “abolish the Fed” types. There was a lot of anti-Fed propaganda floating around at that time. There was a big overlap with gold-bugs and Bitcoiners, and Bitcoin’s “mining” decay curve was inspired by gold’s.

I’ve never noticed idolizing of Texas or Arizona for their weather. I hear Hawaii has mild summers compared to those states.

I’ve lived in both cold climates and hot climates. It’s pretty much the same, but the seasons are reversed. I.e. it’s very uncomfortable to spend too much time outdoors in winter in cold climates, and very uncomfortable in summer in hot climates.

Also, it’s more energy intensive to heat than it is to cool (at least with the most common HVAC systems). And warmer climates are more productive for food.

Yeah, I’ve been experimenting with YaCy, and discovered they have a PageRank-like algorithm, but it uses a lot of resources, so they don’t recommend using it and it’s turned off by default. Haven’t tried turning it on myself. Looks like the maintainer is focusing on YaCy Grid, meant for organizations, not general decentralized search.

General strike with clear, specific demands would work. Easier said than done, especially since most workers in the US aren’t already organized; but it would probably work. It would probably even work if all current major unions striked (a lot of union members are “conservative” though, so if it was seen as political rather than practical, it could break solidarity).

Pocket guns are harder to shoot accurately because of the short distance between the rear and front sights, and recoil is worse. But yeah, should be fine. I really like the compactness of my P938 (discontinued now). P365 is probably also good (higher cap).

The page uses canvas, and Librewolf blocks some canvas functionality by default for privacy reasons. You should see a little icon to the left of the url that you can click to allow the site to run correctly.

1. It’s always better to spend the money of others.
2. It doesn’t appear that bribing congresspeople is all that expensive. IIRC, it only took $60k to bribe that one congressperson who got caught.
3. Just the threat of financing primary challengers appears to be enough to control Republican congresspeople. He’s probably privately doing the same with some Dems too (offering not to finance challengers; he’s already said he will finance challengers to all Democrats).

For me. I think everything is physical, and there’s always a cause and effect. There is no magical non-physical consciousness. A combination of your genetics, experiences, and environment determine the “choices” you make/actions you take. Free will is an illusion, IMO.

Communism is a stateless, classless society, and more like a utopian end-goal to strive for. But, yeah, parties that label themselves communist tend to be of the authoritarian type. Failure of certain strategies and implementations doesn’t mean an entire ideology is bad. Democracy failed with Rome, and wasn’t implemented on a large scale again for ~1800 years; and I think most people consider democracy a pretty good system now.

Yeah, that’s what I mean, the workers could go in the factory, produce the goods, and sell them, if the company did not use violence. It’s not clear where the factory came from in this hypothetical. The community could’ve built it, it could have been abandoned, or the company could’ve claimed they “owned” it (which is not possible in the society, so it would be seized).

Don’t know what sillage tarp is; if it’s not compostable, I wouldn’t use it. I don’t think just covering would kill the grass in time. Maybe it would, but it seems like if grass can survive a longer time under snow cover, it would survive under a tarp. I don’t think anything would grow well just in compost and woodchips (I’ve heard some things do, but plants usually do need actual mineral soil). 4 inches of woodchips seems extreme for annual beds.

Could just till with a tiller or double-dig (hard work) and mix some compost in. Some grass will still probably come up, so will have to hoe every so often. After the first growing season, there’d be much less grass. And you can start using a no-till method.

Well, it’s unlikely the entire world will turn anarchist all at once, and the modern supply chain is global, so the anarchist community would trade for what they need from outside the community. Or they may choose to go anarcho-primitivism I guess. I think some remote indigenous tribes we have now could be considered anarcho-primitivist. The most successful anarcho-socialist community would probably be the Zapatistas.

The company would need violence. There’s no reason for workers to work in a factory for less money than their goods are sold for, and there’s no reason for the company to pay workers more than the goods are sold for. Without violence the workers could just produce and sell the goods themselves and ignore the company.

Lol. This comment sent me down a rabbit hole. I still don’t know if it’s logically correct from a non-physicalist POV, but I did come to the conclusion that I lean toward eliminative materialism and illusionism. Now I don’t have to think about consciousness anymore because it’s just a trick our brains play on us (consciousness always seemed poorly defined to me anyways).

I guess when AI appears to be sufficiently human or animal-like in its cognitive abilities and emotions, I’ll start worrying about its suffering.

Global South basically just means underdeveloped/developing nations.

Capitalism results in the rich, mostly in developed countries, extracting resources for low prices and exploiting desperate workers for low wages in developing countries. The developing countries get little in return. Some of these countries have been able to muster some protectionism to mitigate so much transfer of wealth out if their country (such as China). Developed nations have purposely kept some developing nations destabilised to maximize exploitation.

I think the term fits fine. The surpluses go to the owners of the means of production (barring “state capitalism” I suppose). These surpluses are actually the true value of the workers’ labor that the owners take, which is why I think capitalism is immoral, but that’s not really related to my point. The system incentivizes the owners to maximize these surpluses, which means paying the workers as little as possible, and charging customers as much as possible. I.e. the system incentivizes greed.

Social democracies are absolutely better than unchecked capitalism, but it’s my opinion that they’ll never be able to stop from regressing (they have been, as I understand it). Because of the owners’ place in the hierarchy and outsized wealth and influence, they will always be able to push governments to their benefit, and then it just keeps snowballing as they gain more wealth and influence. Admittedly, very strong unions can counteract this, and were responsible for them becoming social democracies in the first place.

Great. Now we have barred-out LLMs.

I actually think it’s more targeted toward the Andrew Tate and Fresh and Fit follower types, and the propaganda does appear to be working on younger men, who are rapidly becoming more “conservative.” They’re extremely insecure in their masculinity, and think the subservience of women would be affirming.

Of course, it actually just hurts everyone, barring the people that benefit from keeping the working class divided.

If you’re running a lot of stuff on the same server, I agree with others that you’d want to use containers or VMs to avoid possible dependency hell. I prefer containers so I don’t have multiple OSs using RAM. I’ve never used Proxmox, but if I understand correctly, it’s an OS specifically built for running containers and VMs more easily, so I’m guessing that’d be a good choice. I personally just use Ubuntu LTS or Debian, Docker, and SSH to administer my servers, because that’s what I’m familiar with.

A cheap used Desktop PC off Craigslist or whatever should be fine. Desktops are more upgradable and configurable. You’d want to make sure the CPU and Mobo support however much RAM you’d want. Ext4 is fine if using a single disk; ZFS for multiple disks with redundancy. Preferably, a smallish SSD for the OS disk, but not required.

*arr stack for pirating: https://wiki.servarr.com/

Jellyfin for serving media. You may want something like the cheapest Intel Arc GPU for transcoding if you’re going to serve HDR video to low-spec devices.

Nextcloud for basic file sharing. NFS for high performance file sharing with Linux machines, if needed. Syncthing for syncing files if you need that.

Immich for something similar to Google Photos, if needed.

Also if they can’t afford that, surely they have state medical insurance

Ha! No, depending on the state, there are tons of barriers, means-testing, work requirements, mandated classes they might not be able to attend (due to childcare/lack of transportation), etc.

Even after the ACA, ER visits are still all the healthcare many people get.