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Cake day: December 20th, 2023

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  • One thing many people have surprisingly low comprehension of is that people ≠ government.

    Regular Israeli civilians did not partake in the war, did not cause the apartheid, and did not steal the land. They were born there, or went there on a promise of entering a friendly Jewish community - not of murdering people.

    When the latest Hamas strike happened, this has played into the hands of Israeli government and military command. They got yet another excuse to bomb the hell out of Palestine. Some civilians were scared enough to support the “retaliation”, many others vehemently opposed and denounced it.

    In any case, deporting all Israelis is clearly not a solution now. Israel is their home. Imagine that your birthplace originally belonged to another country, and they wanted to take it back, sending you out wherever. Would it be reasonable to oblige, to leave your home and your entire life behind, forever?

    This is catastrophic when it happens to Palestinians, and not much better should it happen to Israelis.








  • No worries, answer anytime :)

    Since LXC works on top of the Linux kernel, anything that works with it can be easily used as an image. For example, you can just throw any distribution .iso into it, and it will handle it as a container image. Proxmox does all the interim magic.

    Say, you want to make a container with programs running on Debian. You take the regular Debian .iso, the one you use to install Debian on bare metal or VM, feed it to Proxmox and tell it to make an LXC container out of it. You specify various parameters (for example, RAM quotas) and boom, you got a Debian LXC container.

    Then you operate this container as a regular Debian installation: you can SSH/VNC into it and go from there. After you’ve done setting everything up, you can just use it, or export it and use somewhere else as well.


  • Proxmox can work with VMs and LXC containers.

    When you need to always have resources reserved specifically for a given task, VMs are very handy. VM will always have access to the resources it needs, and can be used with any OS and any piece of software without any preparations and special images. Proxmox manages VMs in an efficient way, ensuring near-native performance.

    When you want to run service in parallel with other with minimal resource usage on idle, you go with containers.

    LXC containers are very efficient, more so than Docker, but limited to Linux images and software, as they share the kernel with the host. Proxmox allows you to manage LXC containers in a very straightforward way, as if they were standalone installations, while at the same time maintaining the rest behind the scenes.


  • What exactly is proxmox?

    In layman terms, it’s a Debian-based distro that makes managing your virtual machines and lxc containers easier. Thanks to an advanced virtual interface, you can set up most things graphically, monitor and control your VMs and containers at a glance, and just generally take the pain away from managing it all.

    It’s just so much better when you see everything important straight away.




  • The expenses are mostly upfront though. I’ve spent like $400 on a relatively fancy NAS and two 3TB WD Red CMR drives five years ago, and since then, there was that.

    Of course, depending on your use case, there could be extra expenses as well, some of them recurring:

    • Bigger drives
    • Backup storage (I already had a place I could back up to)
    • Domain name and DNS records (if you expose it to the public Web with a URL; you can otherwise just use a VPN tunnel to access NAS from outside the home network, which is free unless you do anything fancy)
    • Some kind of paid software (if you don’t enjoy the perfectly good collection of open-source apps)
    • Etc.

    Now, for the streaming alternative:

    • Netflix Standard: $18/mo
    • Spotify: $12/mo
    • Total: $30/mo, or $360/yr. Just these two services alone.

    Your NAS system will pay off in a little over a year (maybe two years if you go all in with huge drives, fancy NAS configs, extra expenses here and there), and it’s smooth sailing from there.

    My unit works for 5 years already with no maintenance, is still fully supported by the manufacturer, and I don’t expect to replace it in a few more years.




  • The thing is, there’s no need to rebuild the world from the 1850s.

    We already have the required machinery and energy. We can make use of what we have, even fossil-powered, to speed up the green transition. Our only goal is to keep it going at a growing pace.

    As per agriculture, there are sustainable solutions that I addressed in my other response to you. There are green fertilizers, and there are also genetically modified plants able to produce their own pesticides. There are also innovations in logistics and food sharing initiatives to make less food rot without use.

    We have the knowledge, we have the energy. What we lack is the political will to shut down those standing in the way for their own gain over our collective future.


  • Electrical power + water = rocket fuel. You don’t have to use kerosene to launch to space - not that it’s the highest priority anyway.

    Why do you equate renewables with primitivism? What exactly stops you from building a skyscraper in a renewable-powered world? We do have green steel, concrete and glass. Besides, most use cases do not require skyscrapers in the first place, and they are seen as undesirable by many urbanists.

    Now, yes, switching to sustainable lifestyles is not without compromise here and there, especially on the first stages of green transition. We have to put our effort into this, and there’s no way around this. But with rational organizing, we can end up making something so much better!

    • Properly developed public transportation minimizes time and comfort losses associated with this mode of commuting, while making streets and air cleaner, freeing up plenty of space for pedestrians and buildings.
    • Comfortable high-speed rail minimizes the need for planes, enabling high-speed travel without all the airport controls and inconveniences and with plenty of amazing vistas.
    • Locally sourced seasonal varieties bring back the sense of excitement and allow you to explore so much more than just apples and oranges - there’s a trove of underdeveloped cultivars waiting for their time to shine!
    • Plenty of said cultivars are not particularly demanding; also, green fertilizers (for example, microbiological ones, alongside good old manure and compost) are available and can be produced at any scale you need without the need for fossils.
    • Easily repairable (user-repairable wherever possible) tech removes financial and organizational anxieties about breaking your devices. Something broke? Just…take spare parts and an hour, and it’s good as new.
    • Clothing can always be torn and reassembled in new creative ways! This opens up endless possibilities for creativity, and if you personally don’t like it, I’m pretty sure a local atelier will be happy to help you.
    • Community is key to urban living! With more interaction between you and your neighbors and the culture of common responsibility over shared resources, you can turn any “box” into a sprawling place people love to live in. We need to combat the individualist culture to make it work, though.

    In this age of sustainability, there’s no issue in having a smartphone, or laptop, or whatever you write this on. In fact, right now there are tech brands oriented at sustainability, long-term support, user repairability and more. Fairphone, Framework, you name it!

    We can build our tools, appliances and toys in a post-fossil fuel world. And we can make use of the materials we’ve already extracted to make it even greener.


  • In the 18th century, we had the technology of 18th century. We did not have photovoltaics, electrical wind and hydro, batteries. We do have them now, and as things stand, renewables are already cheaper than the alternatives.

    Energy-wise, we can sustain much, much more people.

    And even agriculture can accomodate for more people than we have now. With modern green agricultural technologies improving the efficiency of green farming, as well as wider accomodation of vegetarian diets and alternative protein sources, we can provide food for much more people with much less fossils.

    Besides, better logistics and organizational measures can lead to less food perishing before it reaches the consumer, and less of the perfectly good food being thrown away.


  • Except we live in 2025, and we have modern green technology enabling us to do a lot of things differently.

    We can get our power from renewables, and newest sodium battery/pumped hydro/thermal storage techniques are brilliant and more eco-friendly than ever. We now have modern green fabrics, hydrogen steel, etc. etc. We now have greener agriculture technologies, as well as efficient biogas collection and utilization. You can even make some polymers, like polyethylene, out of that alone!

    We have what it takes to reverse course. But following that path means upsetting fossil giants, while also investing heavily into the infractructure. And right now, it is easier for politicians to ignore the passive crowd than it is to ignore their sponsors. We need to tilt that balance.