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  • You've got some excellent replies to this question already. I want to add something a therapist told me about therapy that I've found helpful.

    Therapy isn't about fixing everything that's "wrong". It's mostly about identifying coping mechanisms we developed during childhood which no longer work for us as adults. Different techniques are used to help clients start opening up to doing therapeutic work or starting it in earnest. The goal though, regardless of the technique, is for the client to know themselves better and use that knowledge to build better emotional and social tools. To replace the coping mechanisms we've outgrown with better ones.

    A comparison I've made is that therapy is like working with an occupational therapist. What's "best" is conditional and is often usefully defined by what we find difficult or limiting. The best way to pick up something we've dropped varies person to person. The important bit is having healthy ways of picking it up again (with or without direct assistance).

    Therapy ought to focus on self-understanding which helps us function in reality. In my experience most modern therapists advocate for this even if they aren't forward about it.

    Any therapist who councils you to capitulate to narcissists or ignore your disability should be reported to the relevant licensing authority for negligence at a minimum.

  • I've found it's the movement and change of context that helps me. Taking a walk, going for a ride, or even just moving to a different room helps my brain kick out of one of these ruts. Dancing is a high energy option that I'm not always ready for but, when I am, it's very cathartic. 🙂

    ADHD is a spectrum (as is all neurodiversity) but one of the neurochemical commonalities between people who meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD is disregulation of norepinephrine. Getting on meds that work and engaging a therapist who can help develop better emotional tooling and coping mechanisms can be life changing. One of my coping mechanisms is changing the scenery. Norepinephrine is a precursor for a whole bunch of essential chemistry so engaging other systems that need it seems to help other areas.

    Everyone is different but I've found that if my brain is stuck then my body is usually stuck as well. Unstick the body and, after a while, the brain wants to follow.

    When nothing sounds satisfying and I have no gumption whatsoever I can introduce something locally novel in an attempt to kick things into gear again. Executive dysfunction can make choosing from options tough (or temporarily impossible) but, on not-the-worst days, I can at least stand up and start walking aimlessly until I start to feel different. Walking outside tends to help the most.

    It's nothing strenuous or fitness focused. Just a leisurely stroll around the bedroom, yard, neighborhood, etc. After a bit I usually feel like doing something. Even if that's just more walking at least it beats mean mugging the wall until I want to cry or sleep. Usually I end up doing something I wanted to do earlier in the week though.

  • I agree that city-owned grocery stores won't solve the food affordability problem on their own. I do take issue with this statement though:

    Grocery stores aren't particularly profitable in the scheme of things.

    That's bullshit. 🙂

    Kroger posted ~$150,039,000,000 in revenue, ~$33,364,000,000 in gross profit, and ~$2,164,000,000 net profit for 2025. They posted a gross profit margin of ~22% and a net profit margin of ~2%.

    That's pretty profitable. Profitable enough for the CEO to walk away with ~$15,400,000 of it. That's not as profitable as economic abortions like FAANG but I'd argue nothing should be.

    Even if it weren't: we don't have to make farming cheaper or control the entire supply chain. The issue is primarily top-down. Not bottom-up.

    If, after we enforce the paying of livable wages, a crop is too labor-intensive to be economically sustainable then we ought to either subsidize that expense because we collectively agree that's the best option OR stop mass-producing the inefficient food.

    Capping C-level salaries to a reasonable percentage of the company's lowest paid worker and capping profit per-item based on total cost to create, process, house, and distribute each item to retailers would be much more effective means of lowering the cost of groceries nationally.

    Corporate logistics, especially for perishables, already have all of this information and more. It's how they know how much they can gouge the consumer (or what price to set if colluding in price-fixing schemes).

    City-owned grocery stores don't solve the whole problem. No single solution can. It's a good beginning for the effort though. Starting with the top-end of the stack, where most of the waste occurs purely due to corporate and individual greed, makes sense and sets the stage for addressing other systemic issues within that industry's supply chains.

    The cookie variety concern also seems misplaced to me. Though you didn't list it as a blocker. Just a problem these kinds of solutions can't solve.

    I agree. I don't see why a municipal grocer would need to match the variety offered by the private sector though. Their aim is to provide consistent access to safe and affordable staple food stuffs. Not help Nabisco weasel into additional market segments so numbers go up and make investors happy. The municipal grocer should only care about making their laborers and shoppers happy. We don't need cookies for that! Though I'd bet putting a handful of options from locally-owned bakers on the shelves would help.

  • You're correct.

    Check out "The Separation of Church and Hate" by John Fugelsang. It's an almost comprehensive teardown of Christofascist ideology using the words of Jesus directly. No extras and no oulled punches. It's excellent. The author is a comedian and while the content is serious and presented well it's dressed up as an easier read than I expected.

    I grew up Christian in the American South. I left religion in college and faith generally a few years later. I was initially compelled to leave organized Christianity exactly because it demanded exercising cruelties which Jesus clearly opposed.

    Fugelsang's book gathers all of the major contradictions between Jesus and modern right-wing Christianity then dismantles any justification for each one just by quoting Jesus. I'm recommending this book to every reasonable person I know as required reading for the present moment. Not just in the US but the world over.

    Fascism respects nothing and if it takes root in a land with the means to export then no shore is necessarily safe harbor.

  • An surprise, I'm sure, but a welcome one.

  • Eyes don't normally do that. I think you should squirt see a doctor.

  • Yes but, also, no.

    You already seem familiar but, for the uninitiated playing along at home, Wikipedia's entry for Simulation Theory is a pretty easy read. Quoting their synopsis of Bostrom's conjecture:

    1. either such simulations are not created because of technological limitations or self-destruction;
    2. advanced civilizations choose not to create them;
    3. if advanced civilizations do create them, the number of simulations would far exceed base reality and we would therefore almost certainly be living in one.

    it's certainly an interesting thought. I agree it shouldn't inform our ethics or disposition toward our lived experiences. That doesn't mean there's zero value in trying to find out though. Even if the only positive yield is that we develop better testing methods which still come up empty: that's still progress worth having. If it nets some additional benefit then so much the better.

    I'd argue that satisfying curiosity is, in itself, and worthy pursuit so long as no harm is done.

    That all still sets aside the more interesting question though. If such simulations are possible then are they something we're comfortable creating? If not, and we find one has been built, what should we do? Turn it off? Leave it alone? "Save" those created inside of it?

    These aren't vapid questions. They strike at the heart of many important unresolved quandries. Are the simulated minds somehow less real than unsimulated ones? Does that question's answer necessarily impact those mind's right to agency, dignity, or self-determination?

    The closer we get to being able to play god on a whim the more pressing I find such questions. That's not because I wring my hands and labor anxiously at truth or certainty for lack of better idols. It's because, whatever this is, we're all in it together and our choices today have an outsized impact on the choices others will have tomorrow. Developing a clearer view of what this is, and what we're capable of doing in it, affords future minds better opportunity to arrive at reasonable conclusions and decide how to live well.

  • I'm not confident you're participating in good faith here but, on the off-chance you are; I'm not sure I take your point.

    Can you substantiate your initial claim? "The floor on confidence in knowledge is now basically nothing" seems too broad a statement to meaningfully defend.

    Even if we assume you're talking about US 8th graders you'll have to be more specific. The US has seen degraded academic performance across the board but the degree varies by State (and often again by County).

    What's "necessary help" is up for debate as well. There's a hint of something I can agree with here though. I do agree that, for certain vocations, it's important for individuals to have firm graps on the fundamentals. Programmers ought to be able to code without IDEs and Mathematicians work problems without calculators. I don't agree that the common use of good tools by those professionals results in the brain-drain bogeyman you seem to be shadow boxing.

    What am I meant to be alarmed about, exactly?

  • An exquisite typo.

  • This is an affront to Starfish everywhere.

  • I'm using wiki.js right now. It's the best tool for the job right now but still lacks some niceties that would elevate it to an enterprise-level solution. I took a look at outline. Seems nice but it's Open Core, not truly open source, and their pricing for business and enterprise licenses while self-hosting are insulting. They also go on the SSO wall of shame.

  • Yeah, I've been watching this guy on youtube, pretty funny. I wonder if he's right about the Coast Guard being called Beach Boys.

  • 😐😑🙄⬆️

  • Another consideration is that expertise in a domain highlights ignorance. I've known experts who refuse to dabble outside their expertise because they're keenly aware of how much they don't know and feel they'd be doing a disservice to the requester if they agreed to help out. Better to leave it to the right experts.

    That's a certain kind of person. I'm not like that. I don't mind breaking things so long as their mine or it's agreed to up front. Some people are more anxious about these things though. I'd guess none of us know the fellow, so it's all speculative anyway, but it's possible this angle is the source of refusal.

  • Absolutely. VMs and Containers are the wise sysadmin's friends. Instead of rolling my own ip blocker I use Fail2Ban on public-facing machines. It's invaluable.

  • That sounds pretty good to me for self-hosted services you're running just for you and yours. The only addition I have on the DR front is implementing an off-site backup as well. I prefer restic for file-level backups, Proxmox Backup Server for image backups (clonezilla works in a pinch), and Backblaze B2 for off-site storage. They're reliable and reasonably priced. If a third party service isn't in the cards then get a second SSD and put it in a safety deposit box or bury it on the other side of town or something. Swap the two backup disks once a month.

    The point is to make sure you're following the 3-2-1 principal. Three copies of your data. Two different storage mediums. One remote location (at least). If disaster strikes and your home disappears you want something to restore from rather than losing absolutely everything.

    Extending your current set up to ship the external SSD's contents out to B2 would likely just be pointing rsync at your B2 bucket and scheduling a cron or systemd timer to run it.

    After that if you're itching for more I'd suggest reading/watching some Red Team content like the stuff at hacker101 dot com and sans dot org. OWASP dot org is also building some neat educational tools. Getting a better understanding of the what and why around internet background noise and threat actor patterns is powerful.

    You could also play around with Wazuh if you want to launch straight into the Blue Team weeds. Education of the attacking side is essential for us to be effective as defenders but deeper learning anywhere across the spectrum is always a good thing. Standing up a full blown SIEM XDR, for free, offers a lot of education.

    P. S. I realize this is all tangential to your OP. I don't care for the grizzled killjoys who chime in with "that's dumb don't do that" or similar, offer little helpful insight, and trot off arrogantly over the horizon on their high horse. I wanted to be sure I offered actionable suggestions for improvement and was tangibly helpful.

  • You can meaningfully portscan the entire internet in a trivial amount of time. Security by obscurity doesn't work. You just get blindsided. Switching to a non-standard port cleans the logs up because most of the background noise targets standard ports.

    It sounds like you're doing alright so far. Trying not to get got is only part of the puzzle though. You also ought to have a backup and recovery strategy (one tactic is not a strategy). Figuring out how to turn worst-case scenarios into solvable annoyances instead of apocalypse is another (and almost equally as important). If you're trying to increase your resiliency, and if your Disaster Recovery isn't fully baked yet, then I'd toss effort that way.