Right, but there will be contractors and whatnot involved in the process, and there is certainly commercial equipment used in the process.

Eh, I don’t even care who owns PayPal, I avoid it because it’s annoying. Zelle is less annoying because it’s through my bank, but I honestly just want regular ACH.

You don’t even need to support a Trump supporter to be a Nazi, you just need to mention something not great about his main competitor.

• “Biden could’ve done better at…” - Nazi
• “Harris ran a poor campaign.” - Nazi
• “My coworker liked one thing Trump said.” - Nazi (you too because Nazi bar)
• “My coworker doesn’t like Harris’ position on…” - Nazi

I’ve never voted for Trump in my life, and I even held my nose and voted for Biden in 2020. I didn’t vote for Harris in 2024 because I realized Trump would win my state by 20+% regardless, so I might as well support a third party.

So I guess I’m a Nazi. Well, it was a good run, I guess I need to go punch myself in the face because that’s what I do to Nazis…

And if I don’t like Visa or MasterCard, I can use Discover or American Express. In fact, I don’t like MasterCard (got caught sharing data with Google), so I switched to other cards (probably just as bad, but it’s about sending a message).

Lol. That said, there are multiple companies involved in producing that tap water. So somebody is profiting from that glass of water, it’s just a lot less than the bottled stuff.

AWS

You can choose a different service for your own hosting needs.

The same is true of PayPal. I’ve been banned for years (not sure why, maybe my account was compromised?), and it’s never been an issue, I just pick a different payment method. I use Venmo occasionally, but Zelle also works for most uses, or I can bring cash or a check.

I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation where I only have a single payment option.

Correcting misinformation isn’t defense of the entities involved. You can hate eBay (or any entity) and correct misinformation about them. There’s no conflict there.

The issue with your driver analogy is that the driver has to make a conscious decision that their convenience is worth more than a human life. I don’t think anyone would disagree that the driver is evil.

Likewise for your Nazi example, the choice to arrest and deport people because of their religious, ethnic, or cultural affiliation is evil. That should absolutely go without saying, as should killing people for convenience or profit.

Corporations are rarely in that situation, and if they actively choose to kill people, the decision makers should join the driver and Nazis in prison.

wealth tends to snowball

As it should. And snowballs tend to burst on impact. Look at GE or Sears, they used to absolutely dominate, but they imploded because they couldn’t adapt to the competition.

That’s how it’s supposed to work, innovators profit massively from the value they create, and when they stop innovating, they fail.

The problem is that large businesses rarely fail and get bailed out. We should’ve had a ton of banks close in 2008, but instead their execs got golden parachutes and failing businesses just consolidated into even larger entities. The message that sends is that companies can get away with murder, as long as they are “too big to fail.” The problem there wasn’t the cheating (it was a problem, don’t get me wrong), but the lack of consequences. We should’ve seen execs being carted off to jail, having their assets confiscated to help make restitution for their crimes. But instead we rewarded them.

This isn’t a failure of capitalism, it’s corruption in government.

Once you reach a certain size, you can modify the rules of the game.

And that’s the problem. My point is: don’t hate the player, hate the game. Demand better representation, and real consequences for corruption.

I’m guessing if you looked into Google/Alphabet, you could find dozens if not hundreds of crimes committed that helped them get the market share they have, and most of those likely went unprosecuted or had ineffective penalties. Likewise for other large orgs like Microsoft and Amazon.

Yet everyone seems to blame the corporations and not the government. You blame Disney for our terrible copyright laws, yet Disney didn’t pass or sign that law, they merely lobbied for it. The problem isn’t Disney, the problem is Congress.

, if the weeds are killing the crops that feed your family… what is the difference?

Weeds killing your crops is a symptom of the problem, which is the lack of maintenance of the garden. The weeds didn’t kill your family, your lack of preventative action did.

Likewise, corporations taking advantage of an ineffective government isn’t the problem, the ineffective government is. Fix ththe gardener and the garden will prosper. But a bad gardener is worse than no gardener, because nature at least finds a way for crops to survive without anyone plucking the weeds.

All companies are evil.

Disagree. Publicly traded companies are amoral, so whether they do something good or evil depends on what’s profitable.

Healthy competition tends to make “evil” actions unprofitable. Google doesn’t have healthy competition, hence the current situation.

These companies aren’t the bad guys in the same way that weeds in your garden aren’t “bad.” If you don’t want weeds to take over, make sure there’s sufficient competition and incentives so desirable plants crowd them out, and stay on top of the handful of weeds that take root. We’ve neglected the garden for decades and allowed some truly nasty weeds in, but that doesn’t make the weeds “evil,” that means we were poor gardeners.

And self hosting can also be cheaper, unless you’re a huge consumer of the service. How many people watch enough Netflix to make the sub cheaper than buying the media instead? We cancelled Disney Plus and bought the few series they like and we’ve already saved money.

Economies of scale are absolutely a thing, but I think there’s a sweet spot where self hosting can be cheaper for a lot of people.

Depends on the butt, I’ve seen some nice algorithms.

Did the same in my area. The roads are good, but the businesses are either missing or outdated. I probably added 100 over the last few months.

It’s kinds fun! When I go out, I check OM and see what’s missing, take some pictures, and then go edit a bunch of stuff that night. It doesn’t take long, and I feel like it’s worth my time.

Mine is okay, but maybe I just have high standards. I’m using redis and postgresql, so I’m probably about as optimized as I can be. Page loads in like 2-3s, but I wish it was faster.

If there was an alternative to Nextcloud that could replace Google Docs and wasn’t written in PHP, I’d switch. I don’t need much, I just want to access documents and spreadsheets in the browser.

But Nextcloud is good enough.

I’d take $5M of government funding and make similar progress. Yo DOGE, call me.

I want this, but with high quality news sources. And then sort such that topics are distributed.

Information > misinformation

Butt nicotine? What kind of weird stuff you into?

No worries. Hopefully you have things sorted.

Usually the DHCP server is the same as the router, so if the router is offline, you can’t access it anyway. Right?

Or are you saying you’d plug in directly with a patch cable?

Could you explain more about your network setup?

2 is usually install, using a live version of Linux kinda sucks.