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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • Or even if they showed up outside of an electoral context. The green party has some local elected officials in a few places across the country, none of them very close to me so it’s hard to inform an impression of them.

    But it doesn’t seem like, at least outside of those few folks, that the green party is very interested in any aspects of politics besides running in elections. If Jill Stein was criticizing Biden or Harris for the last four years, trying to get them to move to the left, or organizing groups of people to accomplish anything other than voting every 4 years… Her rhetoric points towards making real systemic change, but her actions suggest someone only invested in being a presidential candidate within the status quo. And the green party keeps nominating her for some reason. That doesn’t seem like what a serious party or candidate would do, or should be doing.





  • Yeah don’t listen to Dave Ramsey. I remember hearing him speak on TV as a kid and something just felt off about him, but not quite as bad as Suze Orman.

    I don’t think he’s a scammer, and some of the stuff he says is perfectly sensible and useful, but he (a boomer) also gives advice that isn’t how he got rich, to millennials and co, who will never ever get rich following it. Structurally that makes him pretty out of touch, and suggests anyone who listens to him should do so critically.

    That’s putting aside that he’s also kind of just telling people to do capitalism harder, and everything that comes with that.










    1. I’ve learned a number of tools I’d never used before, and refreshed my skills from when I used to be a sysadmin back in college. I can also do things other people don’t loudly recommend, but fit my style (Proxmox + Puppet for VMs), which is nice. If you have the right skills, it’s arbitrarily flexible.

    2. What electricity costs in my area. $0.32/KWh at the wrong time of day. Pricier hardware could have saved me money in the long run. Bigger drives could also mean fewer, and thus less power consumption.

    3. Google, selfhosting communities like this one, and tutorial-oriented YouTubers like NetworkChuck. Get ideas from people, learn enough to make it happen, then tweak it so you understand it. Repeat, and you’ll eventually know a lot.


  • It’s a question of the most stable thing to use to mediate value for exchange of goods and services, right? Fiat currency is just the choice of “the state” as a stabilizing force. Certainly it’s better than trusting the scarcity of rare metals, but eventually “just trust the state” will become a problem, and we’ll need to think about rebasing currencies. In theory, computational complexity isn’t a bad choice, but nobody has come up with a solution that actually functions well as a currency.

    But I agree, the finite planet has nothing to do with any failings of fiat currencies, and only makes sense as a failing of the “number must go up” mentality endemic to capitalism.


  • I don’t think anyone intends public funds to be quite that sticky; public education is itself a public good, and having once attended a public school really has nothing to do with developing a product 20 years down the road.

    Also, writing open source code can support a viable business. Not every example has been successful, and some have been sold to hypercapitalist owners who wanted to extract more profit, others have failed to keep up, but Canonical is doing alright with it, Red Hat did for a long time, among others. Plenty of bigger tech companies also employ people to write open source software, despite it not being the company’s main business, React, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and so many other projects. Those engineers definitely aren’t working for free.