Perhaps you can find inspiration from Daryl Davis, who convinced 200 Klansmen to give up their robes.

https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes

I heard something on a radio show during Covid on how to talk to people who have “gone down the rabbit hole”. It was discussing MAGA as a cult. The guest on the show was a woman who was raised in a cult in the 70’s and she “got out” and spent her time talking with others in the cult to help them to break free. I can’t find a reference to the show, but I think it was Carrie Miller hosting.

My takeaway was that you can’t come at people and tell them that everything they know is wrong and you will show them the way. They’ll fight you. You need to deprogram them similarly to how they were programmed into the cult. Small bits, here and there to slowly guide them to questioning their beliefs. Once that happens, show them how to research and seek out information and let them know that they will be safe.

If someone found a link to the podcast/radio show, I’d be super happy.

I think what we’re dealing with, in part, is a collective action problem. There’s a lot of people who want to do something but either don’t know what to do or don’t agree on what to do. It’s one way that a minority population can stay in power.

What an individual can do is miniscule compared to a crowd. Also, some people are willing to break laws to make change and others are not.

Do you think this would make enough people mad enough to get their representatives to do something about it?

This is getting off topic from the original post, but I did hear an interview on NPR of a few ways to lift the 2 party system. The only one that I can remember now is that each state would need to pass a law to allow the state to split theIR electoral votes. IIRC, Maine and Oklahoma(?) do this. The result is that if a state has 5 electoral votes, they would split the electoral votes amongst the candidates. If I remember the example right, Maine sent 2 votes for Trump, 2 for Harris and 1for someone else.

Initially, this would weaken the state’s country-wide impact, but as more states vote in such a system, it would allow independent candidates to secure a foothold. I imagine that if all states did this, the net effect would be to have the 2 parties that we currently have soften their stance on things in order to secure votes that would normally have been lost to the independent.

I very much enjoy online shopping and am not nostalgic for driving all over town to find a part or thing only to settle for something that’s a partial match for what I want and much more than I wanted to spend. If a local retailer happens to have what I am looking for, I’m more than happy to purchase it in store, but almost always know exactly where it is in the store and how many are in stock.

If by “no, not even now”, you’re referring to how the incPliny US administration is basically Ronald 2.0, I’m right there with you.

• Let’s Make America Great Again
• star wars
• even the assassination attempts

I didn’t realize how badly I want to do this until you said (wrote) it.

No outrage, just a reminder to encrypt, VPN or whatever to protect yourself from surveillance.

I don’t like your phrase, “incompetence of those who designed the backdoor”. I was not in the room, but in my mind, the execs said “build a back door for the govn’t” and the engineers said “you can’t do that JUST for one party” then the execs said “do it anyways or get fired, we’re getting fistfulls of cash to do it” and the engineers said “I enjoy feeding my family, it’s your company anyways” and did it.

Similarly, I have a cuckoo clock. I could watch the internal mechanism for hours.

I had to double check that I didn’t write this because those words could have literally come from my fingers.

I’ve run the gamut with these apps and none seem to really work I’ve even tried a few paid ones. These days, if you’re not in my contact list or you don’t provide caller ID, I don’t answer.

I’ve been doing street complete for over a year now and didn’t know how much I would enjoy it. It’s also doing something for the community of people who use open street map data (usually hobbyists or folks looking for an alternative to the privacy violating giants). I feel proud of my work when I see my contributions on OSMAnd+ or when I post a picture of a place and somebody can use that data to contribute to the map.

Perhaps I’ve been naieve.

This has been happening for a while. Most starter homes in the US are townhomes, detached townhomes or small single family homes in a denser neighborhood. Through the years, the building code has changed bit by bit to make those homes unaffordable. It’s similar to how you can pay half the price for a car in Mexico; there are much less mandated safety features. In houses, there are new energy codes (good for the environment) additional safety features like fire sprinklers and other similar things. Additionally, labor is more expensive, appliances and building materials are more expansive.

On the other side, you have people who have lived in their house for decades. The house (actually land) value has increased steadily and maybe they’ve kept it up, remodeling or putting in an addition. Now their kids are all moved out, they’ve retired and they’re ready to downsize, but the house they bought so long ago has appreciated and selling it to downsize would trigger a huge tax event on the appreciated value. They’re better off (financially) to keep it, pushing new buyers to look elsewhere.

It’s a complex problem intermixed with policy and also all the corporations mentioned elsewhere who have learned to profit from the broken system.

I have local incremental backups and rsync to the remote. Doesn’t syncthing have incremental also? You have a good point about syncing a destroyed disk to your offsite backup. I know S3 has some sort of protection, but haven’t played with it.

I have tailscale mostly set up. What’s the issue with USB drives? I’ve got a raspberry pi on the other end with a RO SD card so it won’t go bad.

This reminds me that I need alerts monitoring set up. ; -)

I’ll have to check this out.

I attended some LUGs before covid and could see something like this being facilitated there. It also reminds me of the Reddit meetups that I never partook in.