I disagree. He’s done enough that calling him a Nazi feels accurate to me. Or at least enough of a Nazi sympathizer that I totally support not doing business with him.

What I get frustrated by is justifying hurting the people that have his cars. Having a Tesla does not make one a Nazi sympathizer. You could maybe make the case that buying one today might, but even then I don’t think it’s justified attacking people for having a car.

If you want to be an extremist about it, hurt the dealerships and the company. Don’t go after people who are almost certainly not that different from you. The people keying cars just want to feel smugly superior to someone and feel morally justified for being an asshole, they don’t want to make anything better for anyone. If that’s how you act, you’re just a fascist with a slightly different ideology.

It’s not locked in such a way that only Tesla can do it, but it can be hard to find places that will service them. Especially smaller shops just don’t want to go through the hassle of figuring it out, and figuring out how to order parts and such, at least where I live.

Basically, it is going to depend on the shops near you and while Tesla doesn’t seem to actively prevent it I think they make it enough of a hassle for other shops that it may be true in some places that you can only rely on them for repairs.

It’s easier to shop for protocols and standards instead of brands. If you get a Zigbee dongle from Sonoff or SMLight and set it up with Home Assistant, 99% of devices marketed as Zigbee will work and you’ll know for a fact they don’t have Internet access and can’t really do anything that would be bad for your network security because that’s just not how the Zigbee standard works. This is where I would recommend starting.

If you plan on getting a lot of things, or think you might eventually, I would recommend getting both Zigbee and Zwave. There’s also Thread now but I don’t have much experience there yet. These are the standards that smart devices can use, with low power, to communicate without needing direct wifi access or anything. Each has their drawbacks in terms of how many devices you can use and their range. Again, this recommendation is only if you plan on going big at some point, but if you get zwave devices where you can, and focus on Zigbee for things like lighting, you’ll be able to blend the standards together and have less chance of running into interference or device limit problems. But here I’m talking about when you get over around 50 devices, if you don’t plan on doing that then it’s not really a concern.

When it comes to research, I would recommend reserving research time for the devices that have to be wifi. If you want cameras, for example, you’ll want to make sure you pick good ones that can be blocked from external access and properly secured. If you want to control a garage door or an appliance or something big like that, there’s much easier and cheaper ways than getting a smart appliance.

Smart home stuff is unfairly maligned. You just need a few basic rules and some hobby time.

• Don’t buy wifi stuff.
• If it needs its own dedicated app, don’t buy it.
• Don’t buy smart appliances. If you want to smart up something expensive, get a cheap smart outlet or a cheap sensor that does the job.
• Use an open source platform like Home Assistant, not Google or Alexa or whatever.
• When you find something it can’t do that you want it to do, write some Python code and make it open source. You’ll get so much love from the community for the simplest things. Also the occasional person that angrily wants to know why your free thing doesn’t support his hyper specific use case but you can safely ignore that.

There’s a LOT of people that don’t understand inflation at all. They think something along the lines of, “I worked myself through college making $5/hr and it was hard and I didn’t get to buy all the things I wanted but it was fine. These lazy entitled people want several times that much for the same work?!”

So it’s not just basic math but basic economics and a basic understanding of reality that are sorely lacking.

Oh I’m a data hoarder. Just with 12TB right now. The trouble is I have to double everything to expand the NAS at my friend’s house that I’m doing encrypted off-site backups to…

I swear I saw an article a while back of someone who set up a multi-SD card reader with an obnoxious number of SD cards as an external drive. I can’t find it now but I think that’s the only way I could afford that much storage.

I’m picturing the US flag but instead of stars it’s corporate logos.

I mean countries have always done that, just not quite this stupid but also often very stupid. People in Japan call their country Nippon, not Japan. People in Germany call their country Deutschland. There’s a ton of countries that English just straight up changed the names of for reasons varying from some form of probable racism to misunderstanding that they never bothered resolving.

I’m not defending this move, it’s dumb as hell. Just pointing out that “dumb as hell” isn’t new.

The other poster gave you a lot. If that’s too much at once, the really low hanging fruit you want to start with is:

• Choose an active, secure distro. There’s a lot of flavors of Linux out there and they can be fun to try but if you’re putting something up publicly it should be running on one that’s well maintained and known for security. CentOS and Debian are excellent easy choices for example.

• Similarly, pick well maintained software with a track record. Nginx and Apache have been around forever and have excellent track records, for example, both for being secure and fixing flaws quickly.

• If you use Docker, once again keep an eye out for things that are actively maintained. If you decide to use Nginx, there will be five million containers to choose from. DockerHub gives you the tools to make this determination: Download number is a decent proxy for “how many people are using this” and the list of updates tells you how often and how recently it’s being updated.

• Finally, definitely do look at the other poster’s notes about SSH. 5 seconds after you put up an SSH server, you’ll be getting hit with rogue login attempts.

• Definitely get a password manager, and it’s not just one password per server but one password per service. Your login password to the computer is different from your login to any other things your server is running.

The rest requires research, but these steps will protect you from the most common threats pretty effectively. The world is full of bots poking at every service they can find, so keeping them out is crucial. You won’t be protected from a dedicated, knowledgeable attacker until you do the rest of what the other poster said, and then some, so try not to make too many enemies.

Correct, horse battery staple.

When I was little, long before I had a reason to want it to be true, I had this theory that the Secret Service, which is obviously not a secret, was called that because they had a secret mandate: If the President ever gets really out of pocket and goes for dictator powers, it’s their job to execute him as a traitor.

Anyway, I doubt it’s true, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.

I agree but I feel like you’ll almost never get honest feedback, and companies never seem to do anything with the feedback they get. I mean if you’re firing someone, you’ll probably get a list of grievances that are exaggerated because they’re upset. If someone is quitting, they might hold back to not burn the bridge so to speak. The only time I had an exit interview was also the worst job I ever had, and I doubt they did anything as a result of me telling them, “Hey, when you tell someone they can’t take their legally mandated break, and then write them up for not taking that break, it’s kind of a demoralizing dick move.”

Using different apps for password management and for 2fa is good for your security and good for redundancy. If your vault is compromised, you don’t want your OTP info compromised with it. I personally use Aegis.

That said, Aegis is still an Android app and while I have a backup of it’s data, I think I’m still out of luck if my phone breaks until it gets repaired or replaced. I’ve been trying to figure that one out, because it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of good options with desktop support.

I genuinely believe it comes down to the moral question of: is inaction itself an action. Or maybe are you responsible for the results of not making a choice just as you would be if you did make a choice. I say yes.

That’s the neat part: Convicted felons ARE excluded from most public service jobs like being a teacher or a mayor. It was widely believed that this included the presidency until the Supreme Court decided it somehow didn’t.

I love the other comments you made, but I want to point out one other thing: How did those privileges come about? That is, what were the conditions that led to the government taking the power to grant companies de facto monopolies?

In some cases, it was an unintended consequence of political conditions. For example, private insurers came to rule our healthcare system because of a cap on income to raise funds for WW2. In order to get around this cap, employers offered non-cash benefits and the rest is history. Libertarians love this one, it’s pretty cut and dry that a form of socialism shot itself in the foot.

However, there are many other cases where it was an unintended consequence of regulation written in blood. An easy and popular example is the FDA. Making food and adhering to food regulations at scale is definitely something that requires so much up front capital that it has been favoring existing corporations for quite a while, leading to a relatively small number of companies controlling a huge portion of the food supply. But that regulation came about because companies large and small, unfettered and unrestricted, were adulterating the food or cutting dangerous corners to maximize profit. The solution can’t just be less regulation, those same companies will continue to dominate but now with the ability to outright feed us poison while buying or otherwise destroying any competition.

This has happened before. GUI tools were going to mean less developers with less cost, but it didn’t materialize. Higher level languages were going to cause mass layoffs but it didn’t really materialize. Tools like WordPress were going to put web developers out of business, but it didn’t really. Sitebuilders like Wix were going to do it, too, but they really haven’t.

These tools perform well at the starter end, but terribly at the larger or enterprise end. Current AI is like that. It can help better than I think people on here give it credit for, but it can’t replace. At best, it simply produces things with bugs, or that doesn’t quite work. At worst, it appears to work but is riddled with problems.

I genuinely believe AI isn’t over hyped in the long run. We’re going to need solutions to fix our current way of work. But I feel confident it’s still further away than the people investing in it think it is, and they’re going to be paying big for that mistake.

Can’t afford affordable housing, it would destroy the real estate market.

TBH, if insurance companies started pushing for climate change policies it would probably make those policies less popular. If there’s an industry less trusted than Big Oil, it’s Insurance.