Maoo [none/use name]

  • 0 Posts
  • 69 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 17th, 2023

help-circle

  • I recommend installing a Linux distribution that requires a hands-in approach like Gentoo or Linux from scratch. If you don’t have an extra computer you can do it on a virtual machine on the computer you do have.

    The process will require you to use the various incantations and rituals of using the terminal. As you do so, learn what they do by googling them or using their man page.

    For more practice, write a shell script or otherwise choose a task you want to do using the terminal like browsing through your files or searching for a file whose name matches a pattern and so on.




  • Maoo [none/use name]@hexbear.nettoMemes@lemmy.mlWhy would socialism do this?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    8 months ago

    There was no issue re: nuance in your statements, they were just nonsensical and revealed a lack of understand the basic ideas of the topic. This trend has continued with this reply.

    The DDR was socialist. However, it was state socialism, which in my opinion is not ideal and not something we should strive to replicate.

    The framing of socialism as ownership of the means of production goes hand-in-hand with control over the state. It’s how it was originally formulated by Marx, Engels, etc. The term “dictatorship of the proletariat” is stated in the same breaths and texts and concepts. There is no such thing as non-state socialism in this conception, the only conception that is relevant to this discussion.

    This is something a person would know if they had ever read even a basic summary of this topic.

    Yes, the means of production were “owned by the people,” but the state tasks itself with protecting the people. And therein lies the problem with state socialism - the state is easily commandeered by a corrupt minority who then uses the governmental apparatus to run an authoritarian regime.

    You’re even using the liberal NGO lexicon for this description! Vague generalizations about authoritarianism and cute little stories with no grounding in reality.

    We should be able to recognize the imperfections in prior socialist attempts, without immediately calling it “capitalist NGO propaganda.”

    It’s not hard to identify a poor understanding when you have, you know, actually learned about these things. And interacted with thousands of people just like you and know why they parrot such nonsense. If you had an informed or valid criticism that would be something to talk about, but we are not in that situation. I think we are looking at a graduate of Reddit University, with all the intellectual humility that implies.



  • The USSR was a communist country. A normal use of that term is that a country communist is one that’s run by a communist party.

    If you mean it didn’t achieve communism, well duh communism is a hypothesized society achieved through socialism where the state ceases to exist. No socialists, including the people of the USSR, would think that their nation-state has achieved communism as that’s oxymoronic. They would think of it as a transitional socialist state.




  • Gentoo is good for learning. It’s not really a privacy or security-focused distribution per se. It promotes you being comfortable with the command line, configuration files, networking, unix-ie things, and of course compiling programs. If you’re tired of the compiling there is basically no downside to switching to Arch as a “one step up” distribution.


  • The side walls are actually very important for the structural integrity of shipping containers. If you cut holes in it, it absolutely needs to be reinforced or your new roof line is going to sag over time. They’re built as cheaply as possible to accomplish their exact task, which is holding a bunch of crap and being stackable, and the side walls provide both tension to hold together the frame (basically a box) and to provide rigidity to both floor and the top. I reeeally hope y’all reinforced the areas around windows.

    You can do a bunch of things to shipping containers to make them viable, but it’s far more expensive in materials and time than just building with more raw materials. You can remove the toxic coating but you have to have a whole human do the labor for that and do is safely, otherwise that human is paying for that decision with their health. The materials and labor for that aren’t nothing.

    When you look at what is actually used from the container in order to create a house, it’s really not that much. Basically just framing of questionable stability and some corrugated metal siding, possibly the cheapest and easiest part of building a house. I can personally frame up something container-sized in less than a day, easy peasy. Siding and drywall are also easy. The harder parts are everything the container doesn’t provide: foundation, vapor barriers, plumbing, electrical, a good roof, any specialized need for insulation, efficient ventilation / heating / cooling, making sure safety elements are up to code.

    In terms of mobility, I would not recommend moving a container home that has been substantially modified unless it’s been upgraded for exactly that. They can only be safely moved using the corners to distribute the weight, hence the special container arms at shipping yards that grab the corners. If you put a custom roof on there or otherwise make it so you can’t grab those corners, there’s a good chance the whole thing falls apart unless you’ve reinforced it to be mobile using yet more investment.


  • No, the problem with housing is that it is a financialized commodity that is engineered to go up in price faster than wages because it’s an investment. Not just for individuals, but for real estate companies and banks that gamble with the loans. Zoning laws are a symptom of this, but even if you basically get rid of them (as happens in various places in Texas), the same trend applies.

    Those construction companies (really, real estate companies) all get big loans to build those apartments and they do so with an expectation of per-unit profits, often with unrealistic targets unless property values increase even more, and often targeting richer people. When they fail to rent enough at that price point, rather than decreasing rents (which would spook their lenders), they just leave units vacant until they can hit that price point. There are half-empty “luxury apartment” buildings dotting every major city due to this.

    The most anyone can point to for the impact of zoning is that prices to rent tend to go up slightly slower.

    Your local government is also likely funded by property taxes that are pegged to property values, which is why they never do anything sufficient to handle this issue.


  • They have too many downsides. Most of them aren’t actually reusing containers because they’re usually too small and they’re coated with toxic materials that prevent mold and pests from living in them. They look large enough at first, but this is before you have to install a floor and walls and a ceiling with insulation all around and plumbing and electrical, etc. In addition, if you want to add windows by cutting into the sides, you’ve just undermined the structural integrity of the thing, as it’s premised on being exactly that (stackable) box. So then you have to reinforce the crap out of it if you want windows.

    Putting all of that together, to safely put together a reasonably livable container home, you’re basically just using it as an aesthetic piece, as you’ve had to buy the shell new and then spend the rest of your budget trying to make it actually work as a home. It’s cheaper and better to build a small home with commodity materials unless you really, really want that aesthetic.



  • Different distros are better for different things. For example, some require give you more control over the OS but are more difficult to learn, or require learning more things at once. Others will be easier to try out but may make choices on your behalf that you don’t like - or distribute software in ways you don’t like.

    Linux from Scratch will have a fairly steep learning curve. Nothing wrong with that, but you’d want to prepare yourself to be cool with things breaking or not making sense for a while.

    Puppy Linux is minimalist, which is something people usually only want after they’ve tried out something else that’s not minimalist. I would recommend trying out something more general-purpose and try out different desktop environments and applications first.





  • Maoo [none/use name]@hexbear.nettoLinux@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    If it’s a desktop/laptop, I recommend Pika, which is just a nice frontend and scheduler for borg backup. If it’s a server, I recommend borgmatic.

    The nice thing about borg is that it does all of the things people usually want from backups but that are kind of frustrating to do with scripts:

    • Encryption so they’re private and can be uploaded to cloud storage safely.
    • Compression so they aren’t too big.
    • Uses snapshots with deduplication so that they don’t take up too much space.
    • Snapshots happen on a schedule.
    • There’s a retention policy of how many snapshots to keep and at what interval (1 snapshot per year for the last 4 years and 1 per month for 12 months, for example).
    • You can browse through old snapshots to retrieve files.
    • You can restore from a snapshot.
    • Ignore certain files, directories, and patterns.

    It is surprisingly difficult to get all of that in one solution, but borg things will do all of the above.