I know most people find it unrealistic that underpaid sweatshop-style manufacturing could ever be moved to the US, but considering the rate at which social safety nets, employee rights and unions are deconstructed, the idea might not be that far-fetched. Already many people work two or more jobs to make ends meet, jobs such as waiting are already grossly underpaid and borderline degrading in many cases, and people are still eager to do that work because the alternative would be for them and their families to go hungry or homeless. Who’s to say sewing cheap dresses 12-14 hours a day is such a bad pospect in comparison?

Well, Nvidia plans to move manufacturing to the US, and Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche has pledged a 50 billion investment in US facilities, so there are at least some ass-kissers.
What happens after these announcements remains to be seen.

Going great so far - as the work week has started a day late, today’s practically already Wednesday!

It’s finally warm enough to work outside most of the day, so that’s what I’m doing. Loving it. Behind the PC monitor I see mountains, a small forest and the dogs wandering around in the garden, trying to secretly dig holes where they think I can’t see them.

On a personal level, I find myself (finally) growing increasingly indifferent to various things that I can’t influence. If the world stays its current course, there’s a good chance I’ll lose some of the luxuries in my life, but in the grand scheme of things we’ll likely still be okay. Let the world burn if it wants to - I’ll save the rest of my sanity for the problems that affect me personally if and when they arise.
This mindset brings an immense sense of freedom. I’m much happier already.

Besides that it’s a pretty normal week, just busier than usual as there’s a lot to do in the garden and around the house. I still need to fix the holes in the lawn, get rid of a metric ton of weeds and paint some walls. It’s a lot of work but totally worth it.

and people like me are why Linux has even gotten to where it’s at today.

Not true. There are tons of nice developers out there. And I for one wouldn’t want to work in a team where an attitude like yours is prevalent.

You know, downcasting and/or insulting people just because they don’t live up to your personal standards is a pretty shitty thing to do.

To answer the question in the title: my money’s on an old white man with homophobic and misogynistic tendencies.

FWIW - as a person guilty of sometimes not texting back: most of the time it’s not because I don’t want to talk to that person, it’s because I don’t have the time and/or energy to write something worthwhile, make a mental note to text back something witty ‘later’, and you can probably guess where this is going.

Apologies for butting in here, but this brings up an IMHO very important point:

The general public HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE that the Fediverse exists.

If I may be so bold as to add: …and they like it that way.

When it comes to online stuff, most people are lazy, very very ignorant and anywhere inbetween politely indifferent and openly hostile towards any attempt to educate them. They want to look at cat videos and pr0n, collect likes for their food pics and chat with their grandkids. The technology behind all that is a nuisance, not a tool.
By and large, I think those people can’t be helped, because they’re happy with the status quo. If anything, you’re the enemy for wanting to take away their beloved Tiktok and WhatsApp.

That means our largest efforts - self-hosting, the Fediverse, … will probably always be a bit of a parallel universe to the Internet at large.
This is sad for humanity in general, but it makes enshittification of those services both technically more difficult and (due to its small size and enshittification-resistant populace) less commercially viable.
And small doesn’t equal insignificant.

So what I’m saying is, we shouldn’t see the Fediverse etc. as a replacement for everything, but as a safe space for refugees. And that’s what it excels at.

I run my own mail server since sometime late last century, and it’s gotten progressively more difficult over the years. Not setting up the server, that part is easy. Hardening it is a bit more work. But what’s making it nearly impossible is the big players’ anti-spam (or should that be in quotes) measures.
My mail server checks all the boxes it should - TLS, SPF, DomainKeys, DMARC, a domain name that’s been around for decades, same hostname and IP address for years, never been on any block list, … yet still e-mails relayed by it are tagged as spam for increasingly ridiculous reasons: it’s a residential IP (actually it’s not), the PTR record doesn’t match the A/AAA record (yes, that server has multiple jobs and multiple host names - not that unusual), the domain name is suspicious (same owner and tech-c for decades, same IP and SPF records for years), … if I didn’t know better, I’d suspect that MS, Google etc. just use their spam filters to make life difficult for anyone outside their oligopoly. But that’s probably just beause I’m a cynic.

I’ve tried meeting new people but it’s not the same.

Give it time. New friends are made by spending time with strangers until they’re not strangers anymore. If the new people are nice enough, and you get to hang out with them for a while, some of them will probably turn into friends. You’re already on the right track by getting to know new people.

Welcome! And I hope you did take that nap. It sounds like it’s been well-deserved. Always remember, the most important person in your life is you, so take good care of yourself. You’re the only you there is.

Currently walking part of the Camino Primitivo and alternating between “what kind of utter idiot does this to themselves” and “holy fsck is this great”.
It’s my third Camino and I know the drill by now, and still I manage to surprise myself. It also immensely helps me clear my head and leave everything else behind for a couple weeks, which is my main reason for doing it.

Still now I’m looking forward to arriving in Santiago, recovering there for a few days and then flying back home. I’ve started missing my family (including the dogs!) and friends.
This spring and summer look like they’re going to be super lovely, and I can’t wait to put the finishing touches on the garden, sit there with other people, share a drink and watch the doggies chase each other and try to dig holes where they think we don’t see them.

“Give a man a cleaning rag and he will stare at it helplessly. Give him a pressure washer and he will clean everything as far as the cable will reach.”

The other day a Swiss newspaper published a study that a temperature increase of 4°C would probably cost us (on average) about 40% of our wealth globally.
Mind you, that was a single study that had to make a lot of assumptions about the coming decades. But working with these ballpark figures and assuming the 40% hit will be distributed evenly, most middle-class people will probably manage somehow, though they definitely won’t be middle-class anymore by today’s standards. The rich will likely be inconvenienced (more indoor golf halls and huge water bill for the pool) but generally fine.
As for those just getting by somehow…

Good point, and I agree that the “it’s too late anyway” rhetoric was probably just an easy excuse, though it looks a lot like it’s actually too late now to stop or even reverse global warming.

This should of course not be an excuse to forgo damage control, but I think the situation has changed. Whether that encourages you to fight harder and try to save what’s left, or just give up and have fun while it lasts is entirely up to you…

This rant hat got me thinking, and I feel like many points you make should in fact be considered more.

Thank you for taking the risk of sticking out your neck and stating this in public.

I honestly have no idea. The one time I tried asking it a question, it asked me to log into my X account, which is about as far as I got.

The world keeps getting weirder and weirder, and it’s the bad kind of weird. Can somebody please have the tangerine bollock committed to a mental home, or at least tell our government to grow a pair and stand up to his bullying for a change?

I’ll say. I’d have expected him to be using Grok, not ChatGPT.

Home ACs are just wasteful.

I don’t know, ours eats 400-500W to cool the entire ground floor, which is a fraction of what the solar panels produce on a sunny day, and a fraction of the surplus energy we have no choice but to sell the utility company for a pittance.
In spring and autumn it can also heat the inside and has a COP of between 4 and 5 then, so much more efficient than a regular electric heater and probably more environmentally friendly than if the central heating would burn more oil - the circulation pump alone uses close to 400W.

Of course we could live without it (people have lived in the house without an A/C before), but it’s much more agreeable like this, not to mention that it allows us to use the winter garden as an office in summer, which has a great view over the garden and allows us to keep an eye on the dogs. There are many much less sensible ways to use that energy than the A/C.

Back to the battery, some EVs can be used as battery storage (vehicle to house, vehicle to grid or vehicle to load). Maybe one of those would make it more viable to have both an EV and storage space for your harvested sun? Not mavy EVs can do it at present, but it may pay to keep an eye on new models.