sailingbythelee

joined 1 year ago

It's true that it is pretty hard to maintain a job while living in a tent.

I work with homeless people. It is obviously true that many have mental health and addiction issues. It is also true that many could work if they had to. And, it is true that there are often alternatives to living in an encampment. The homeless shelters tend to empty out in the summer and lots of people move into the encampments, because why not? They can spread out more, have their own space, they don't have to get up at a certain time, and in some encampments in parks the view is pretty darn nice. Also, someone comes around to bring you food and water and takes away your garbage. Lots of people donate camping supplies, too. This means that the encampments are larger than they need to be if the available shelter spaces were used to maximum capacity.

So, Ford is partly correct. The encampments do not need to be as large as they are. He is also correct that some of the million people on welfare could work. Unfortunately, it is hard to sort those who really need help from those that are just lazy, which means that the truly needy continue to suffer.

At the same time, the government needs to get back in the business of building affordable housing and providing gainful employment for people with very low skills and motivation who can't hack it in the private sector. In the old days, those people would have provided farm labour or manual road/rail/canal building, but all of that is now mechanized. So, instead, we let them rot on welfare while they get weaker, sicker, and more depressed. We really need to get back to requiring some form of work from those receiving public welfare. It doesn't have to be hard labour, but is has to be something other than sitting around doing nothing and getting depressed.

Samsung and LG are both South Korean.

[–] sailingbythelee@lemmy.world 16 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Is JD Vance required to wear the same outfit as Trump, except with a shorter, less girthy tie?

[–] sailingbythelee@lemmy.world 32 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I think it depends entirely on the integrity of the cremator. I have a good friend who does pet cremations. He cremated one of my pets and told me that he had a hell of a hard time getting the bag of ashes into the box I gave him. I laughed and asked him why he didn't just pour some out so the bag would fit more easily. Who would know? Who would care if there were a few grams missing? Especially if the reason was that the client-provided box was too small. But he was genuinely shocked and said he would never do that.

[–] sailingbythelee@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

Not really. The term "content creator" is corporate speak. Google's ad-based business model has a binary classification: content and ads. It's not an inaccurate term, but using it implicitly endorses the corporation's binary world view.

[–] sailingbythelee@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

Sure, but there was a very long debate about the implications of Brexit with both sides getting a comprehensive airing. I'm not defending Boris. Boris is an asshole and a corrupt, clownish demagogue, but the Conservative Party is more than just Boris. The people of the UK voted for Brexit in a refendum and kept the Conservatives in power for 14 years, including twice AFTER the Brexit referendum. Heck, the 2019 election was practically a second referendum on Brexit and the Conservatives got their largest landslide victory since Thatcher was PM. Boris may be an asshole, but the people of the UK have to own Brexit.

[–] sailingbythelee@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (7 children)

Is Tusk similar to Boris? I mean, obviously Boris presided over Brexit which was a real fuck-up. Then again, was Brexit really Boris's fault? What with the referendum, democracy and all that good stuff. It seems to me that the people of the UK made their own bed in that regard.

[–] sailingbythelee@lemmy.world 36 points 1 week ago (9 children)

That dude has a good sense of humor. He seems like a good leader.

[–] sailingbythelee@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

When I say "clever", I dont necessarily mean it was a good move toward their long-term goals. I mean that it was ingenious and skillfully executed, requiring the coordination of many parts, and displaying deft trade craft.

Frankly, arguing whether "ethno-fascist Zionists" or "Muslim fundamentalists" are worse is kind of pointless. Neither is high on the list of things I support.

Most Israelis are not "ethno-fascist Zionists" any more than most Gazans or Lebanese, or even Iranians, are Muslim fundamentalist theocrats. All of those populations are caught in bad situations that were set in motion decades ago. On balance, if forced to choose a side to support, I would support Israel, like most other Westerners. At least they have a functioning democracy and largely adhere to Western values. The Israeli religious right wing is extremely problematic, of course, but it looks to me like they are headed for defeat in the next election. We can't say the same about Hezbollah or the Iranian theocracy or any of Iran's other proxies.

The bottom line is: FUCK ALL RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM. Doesn't matter whether it is Muslim, Jewish, Christian, or Hindu. They all suck.

[–] sailingbythelee@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Well sure. Modern war is all about adaptation. Exploding pagers were never going to be a knock-out blow, just a clever psy-op. One among many, I'm sure.

[–] sailingbythelee@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Good point. I should have qualified what I said by saying that the Israeli operation may have the effects I listed. But, as you say, it might backfire and have the opposite of the intended effect. I guess that is always a risk with these types of operations.

 

So, I went out with my daughter to look at laptops for back-to-school and the store was dominated by Windows machines with Snapdragon X Elite chips at very reasonable prices. The energy efficiency, battery life, and quietness of these laptops is amazing. Also, I notice they all have these new NPU chips for AI, which I'm ambivalent about.

I'm a Linux-on-Thinkpad man, so I checked online and was happy to see that Lenovo is offering Snapdragon-based Thinkpads now. With these new developments, maybe it is finally time to upgrade my old T540p.

Has anyone here had experience yet running Linux on a Snapdragon-based laptop?

 

Good day, friends. Since catching the self-hosting bug, I've set up a couple of Proxmox home servers with a bunch of services I enjoy.

Now I'd like to set up a server and local network on my sailboat so I can self-host servarr, pihole, and other services while traveling. The tricky part is that everything on the boat is 12V and I would rather not use an inverter, if possible. Also, it needs to be ultra-low power so I can leave it on at all times and not to deplete my batteries too much.

Criteria:

  • ultra-low power
  • Small form factor
  • runs on 12V
  • 10 TB of storage plus ability to make full local backup
  • Capable of hosting servarr, audiobookshelf, freshrss, etc. via docker
  • HDMI output
  • Full local mirror/backup of the entire file system, including the media library.
  • We will have two laptops and two Android phones to access the server, so the server doesn't need to run a desktop environment.

I'll have a mobile wifi router and a cellular signal booster (or maybe Starlink eventually) for internet access. Since internet bandwidth will be limited and expensive while traveling, I don't want to have to re-download a massive media llibrary if the storage media fail. Thus, I want the media library to be mirrored or fully backed up or synced locally.

What hardware and Linux distro would you use in this situation?

 

Hello fellow self-hosters. I'm currently self-hosting the servarr stack, including jellyseer, radarr/sonarr, prowlarr transmission, and jellyfin. It works great.

I now want to expand my system into ebooks as well. I have readarr already set up, but it is too complicated for my wife. I've also tried calibre, which is great for ebook management,and Kavita, which is a lovely ebook server and reader. But I'm looking for something like "jellyseer for ebooks" that shows what's currently popular and makes it easy for the user to make requests and have those requests sent to an automated backend for downloading. Additionally, it should work well from a phone, and it would be ideal if it could download from Library Genesis.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

 

I recently purchased a used PowerEdge R420 rack server with a Compellent SC220 Storage Shelf. I currently have four 3.5" HDDs in the R420 and ten 2.5" HDDs in the SC220. The R420 server previously had TrueNAS installed, so all of the hard drives on both the R420 and the SC220 are formatted with ZFS. I'm now running Ubuntu on the R420 using ZFS.

The server I'm replacing is an old gaming PC running Manjaro and BTRFS. It has one SSD with the operating system and two 4 TB HDDs set up as RAID0. I've been using the RAID to store media downloaded via the Servarr stack.

So, my goal is to create a large pool out of all of the HDDs (except the one running the OS) on the R420 and SC220, and then migrate the media data on the two 4 TB RAID0 drives on my old gaming PC over to R420/SC220 pool. I would then move my Servarr stack over to the R420 as well. Ideally, I'd also like to physically move the two 4 TB HDDs over to the R420. Presumably, I would have to reformat the drives to use ZFS rather the BTRFS and then integrate them somehow into the ZFS pool?

Anyway, I'm not sure of the best procedure to accomplish all of this, so I would be grateful to hear from anyone who has any experience or insight. Thanks in advance.

 

There is a longstanding myth from the Second World War that the Allies killed hundreds of thousands of civilians by the sudden and shameless aerial bombing of Dresden, a beautiful city remarkable for its history and culture. That the bombing was a shameful war crime against innocent civilian German non-combatants was told by Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. He personally survived the bombing, present in a nearby POW camp. His tale, endlessly repeated as though true, seemed an unjustified blot on Allied war history. But like historians of the period, Vonnegut lacked access to the official East German records. He had not heard the contrary stories of other survivors unwilling to risk offending communist authorities perpetuating damaging propaganda about the West.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 provided German historians access to previously restricted East German records relevant to the Allied bombing of Nazi targets in Dresden, Germany. Frederick Taylor, a bilingual scholar, read several German accounts, yet untranslated into English, that dispelled the myth. He began a three-year investigation, reviewing new sources and having insightful consultations with German historians knowledgeable about the fateful day of the bombing on February 13, 1945. His book is a significant achievement, providing new insights and critically important data. The historical record corrects the myth that must now be put to rest.

Taylor found that Dresden was “by the standards of its time a legitimate military target.”[1] After an examination of official records and all other available sources, including a review of the official count of bodies and ashes of incinerated victims buried, he thinks the fairest estimate of the number of deaths due to the bombing is in a range between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand. This documented and verifiable number corrects the propaganda that soon gratuitously added a zero. Nevertheless, the loss of life in Dresden was a terrible result of war:

None of this is to minimize the appalling reality of such a vast number of dead, so horribly snatched from this life within the space of a few hours, or to forget that most of them were women, children, and the elderly. Wild guesstimates — especially those exploited for political gain — neither dignify nor do justice to what must account, by any standards, as one of the most terrible single actions of the Second World War.[2]

Taylor’s book is timely as questions are being raised today about how the law of international warfare might apply to combatants who intentionally hide in, behind, and under civilian populations. For example, Hamas risks civilian lives by placing its military headquarters and armaments in residential areas. Photographs now show Hamas positioned military arms and tunnels under civilian hospitals. When they fired unguided rockets from a pre-school or residential buildings, they claimed that the retaliatory response by their enemy with a precisely targeted guided missile strike, was an atrocious war crime against civilians.

Taylor finds the loss of life and damage to property due to the war against Germany abhorrent. He does not blame the Allies. Just as evil perpetuated by the Nazis was ended along with horrific loss of life, so it appears that the evil committed by Hamas against Israel will end along with a sad and grievous cost to human life. There is a stunning difference, however. In World War II, the Allies struck by surprise. By contrast, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have dropped leaflets by air to warn civilians below of what was coming, urging them to move to safer areas. The IDF is at war with Hamas, not Palestinian civilians.

The current situation in Gaza provides a telling contrast to the bombing of Dresden. It should provoke the Arab world into shame and condemnation. There is no justification for Arab silence in the face of Hamas’s cowardice, now on full display before the world. Hamas claims the IDF killed doctors, when the facts are that the IDF brought doctors to Gazan hospitals to help save lives. The brutality of the situation is plain: Hamas has taken the Palestinian population of Gaza hostage—not just 240 Israelis and migrant workers. The report that Hamas killed some Palestinian civilians moving south to safety rings true because Hamas values the propaganda value of civilian deaths. The death toll is further inflated by counting military casualties. Hamas hopes to be saved by an international outrage and intervention that believes the lies. But the Gaza’s Palestinian blood is on Hamas’s hands. Their barbaric, inhumane acts have been shamefully exposed, while their spokesman objects to the subhuman identity and lack of sympathy that Hamas deserves. Israel’s primary war aim is and ought to be the completely destruction of Hamas, leaving it buried forever along with the sad collateral damage for which Hamas alone will be responsible.

Taylor’s story of Dresden reminds us that the United States and its Allies were unwilling to negotiate a truce, observe a ceasefire, or even a fighting pause as a path to peace with Nazi Germany. The Nazi threat was so evil that it had to be completely eradicated so that the Nazis could neither govern Germany nor win the war. Victory in war against Nazi Germany meant the Allies had to make difficult moral decisions, like the necessity of bombing military targets hidden within civilian areas despite the cost in human life. It was a cost well familiar to the Americans, as 81,000 American soldiers died fighting in the Ardennes in December, 1944.[3] War was hell then and war is hell now. Hamas must be stopped. Its naive, unemployable apologists on campus should be warned that Never Again means Never Again.

 

CNN reporting on some interesting survey results from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah. Seven hundred and fifty adults were interviewed face to face in the West Bank, and 481 were interviewed in Gaza, also in person. The Gaza data collection was done during the recent truce, when it was safer for researchers to move about.

 

Never invade Russia in the winter. Never fight a land war in Asia. Never go for a third term as Prime Minister in Canada. It makes the electorate hate you. I don't complain much about his policies, but Trudeau is screwing his own party over and now we might end up with the Trumpiest of Canadian politicians as PM.

 

Good day, everyone. I took the plunge into self-hosting in the last couple of weeks and set up a server running Linux Mint. I installed the media streaming stack composed of Jellyfin, Jellyseerr, Radarr, Sonarr, Jackett, Bazarr and Transmission according to this excellent guide: https://zerodya.net/self-host-jellyfin-media-streaming-stack/

Before installing it on my server, I tested it on my Linux Mint laptop and it worked perfectly. I also run NordVPN and had no issues running the streaming stack with my VPN running on the laptop. I then installed it on my server (running the exact same version of Linux Mint) and it runs fine UNTIL I turn on my VPN and then I get an "Internal Server Error 500" from Jellyseerr. Jellyseerr is still able to list the requests I've made, but can't display the Discover sections that list popular movies and shows unless I turn off the VPN.

The one difference between my successful laptop test setup and my final server setup is that I'm also running Pi-Hole on my server, so perhaps the problem is related to that? I installed the Pi-Hole using the official Ubuntu installer on the Pi-Hole website.

Anyway, I'm new to self-hosting so I'm not sure if I've provided the necessary details. Any help getting this setup to work with my VPN is greatly appreciated.

 

Monte McNaughton has resigned, making that three resignations and forcing a cabinet shuffle. Nothing to do with the unfolding Greenbelt scandal, of course. /s

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