Are you fully conscious but trapped in the body of a guinea pig?

The difference is putting them on because you actually understand the problem you’re trying to treat lol.

So amazing, the amount of incredible science we’ve been able to do with the Voyager program.

4,000 years ago, we were doing trigonometry, but just 200 years ago we were still putting leeches on people and not washing our hands before doing surgery.

Also, we sent people to the moon and got them back using less computing power than a smart watch.

Had no idea this was a thing, very cool!

If you’re very comfortable with containerization, networking, and security practices, plus you are a pretty decent full stack web dev, sure.

It’s pretty trivial to set up a separate business internet line from your local ISP. Depending on the volume of traffic, a basic load manager and reverse proxy, combined with strong firewalls and container safety would be sufficient for most SMB needs.

You don’t need much power to host a basic website. Setting up a local box with a low-impact distro, Docker, and some solid control-plane MGMT software should be plenty to host several dozen SMB websites.

There are a lot of technical and even legal considerations though. Do these small businesses need a web app on their site? Do they need a storefront? What about member-only content locked securely behind an authentication layer? Does your local ISP have rate limitations? Does your city/state/country have restrictions on offering business services like that? What is your liability if your setup gets hacked and your client’s data is stolen/exposed?

Ultimately, you have to answer the question: Why shouldn’t those businesses just go with an easy pre-made hosting solution like Squarespace, Wix, etc? Not saying there aren’t good answers to that, but from a business perspective, the businesses will want to know that.

As with anything in business, ask yourself, what are you able to offer that they can’t get easily somewhere else? I used to work for a tiny MSP that offered in-house data backups. Our clients paid a good chunk of money to have us backup their data to our own servers. I didn’t say anything at the time, but our clients could have gotten much more secure and faster backup services for cheaper using something like Backblaze or Synology’s S2 cloud backups.

Don’t find yourself unable to clearly and concisely explain to your clients what you can give them that they cannot easily get somewhere else. If it’s purely the principle of the thing, that’s totally valid, but make sure that’s what you’re selling to them, and also what they are looking for.

Well yeah, gotta be open to those sweet defense offense contracts. All those brown people on the other side of the world ain’t gunna kill themselves!

If the government collapses, you’re gunna have much worse things to worry about than taxes.

IMO, there are three “levels” of economic hardship:

1. Severe recession: Where the economy shrinks, many small/medium businesses go bankrupt, unemployment hits around 7-10%
2. Legit depression: Numerous core institutions in most or all sectors of the economy go bankrupt. Even highly skilled people cannot find work and are reduced to charity, begging, or stealing. Unemployment hits 15-25%
3. Total economic collapse: All major institutions in all sectors fail, or cease having any legitimacy. The country’s currency becomes worthless due to either hyperinflation or governmental collapse. All people except the super wealthy elite, become destitute.

The last time the US experienced the second level was the Great Depression, where during the depths of the dust bowl and the depression, unemployment hit about 25%

If you genuinely think we are in for anything worse than level 2, you should flee the country now, or buy a gun and stockpile ammunition, food, and medicine.

Realistically, level 3 isn’t going to happen. Level 1 very likely will, level 2 I would give a 5% chance personally, but that is based only on vibes.

Have some savings in cash, a few hundred bucks mostly in small denominations should be alright. Don’t do more than that.

Buy cheap bulk foods. Beans, chickpeas, lentils, raw oats, rice, four, potatoes. Buy several of those big 24 packs of bottled water. Most large retailers have them for 4-6 bucks a pack. You need A least 5-6 bottles a day to stay minimally hydrated. That’s roughly 4 days of water per 24-pack. You should have at least a week of water per person.

Other folks here have good advice. Connect with a local community. If not your direct neighbors, then a group that meets nearby. You need other people for support. If you’re in a really bad place, they will be the last line of dependable aid.

Quit your vices. Cigs, alcohol, excessive caffeine, and junk food all cost a lot of money, aren’t healthy, and will make you much more vulnerable to economic upsets. It also allows others to take easier advantage of you, because of your desperation to get a fix.

Dang, that’s too bad. Hopefully one day!

I love localsend.

Works on Linux, Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac. It is basically an OS agnostic Airdrop.

It’s FOSS, so you can go to the Github and build from source for OpenBSD, but I have no idea if that would work.

Here’s an entire chest filled to the brim with all the fucks I give:

Happened even faster than I thought lol.

Double wield those penguins, babyyy!!!

It was free at my college, at least, way back in the day. Honor system, they probably charge now.

As an IT person, I’m consistently amazed at what people will do on their work computers if allowed.

People log into all their social media accounts, save credit card info for online shopping, save personal passwords, make doctors appointments, etc.

As for weirdest? I was working on a woman’s work PC years ago and her desktop was filled with a bunch of boomer-style pro Trump memes. She was logged into her Facebook account on the PC and was downloading them onto her desktop and then presumably posting them to FB. It was stuff like, “I’m a proud Trump girl!” With a picture of a Minion in front of an American flag. Classic cringey boomer stuff.

Another weird one: In college, I once saw a girl using one of the library color printers to print an entire recipe book. Like with full color pictures and everything. The whole thing looked like it was several hundred pages thick, absolutely huge. The library had a sign right above the printers that requested students not print more than 20 pages in full color, so RIP to their toner on that one lol.

Yeah, lots a poor choices on that job. I was a young guy who didn’t know anything, the other guy had a reputation for doing some stupid stuff I found out later.

The company was sketchy as hell, all kinds of crazy stuff happened on a weekly basis. Let’s just say I’m happy I’m in IT now lol.

Was working with a guy taking turns driving one of those large, extendable forklifts.

We were lifting multi-ton concrete blocks into place on a makeshift wall being used for a large ice salt depot for front loaders.

I was standing up on the wall, helping the other guy guide the blocks onto each other. He set one of the blocks on the others and we both noticed that it was slightly uneven, the guide groves weren’t perfectly matching up, so the block was crooked.

No problem, he backed up a few feet, and then slowly and gently guided one of the forks against the crooked block, trying to push it on one side to straighten it out.

Neither of us noticed that the crooked block was wedged against one of the other blocks on the back side.

He keeps pressing with the fork, slowly pushing harder until, bang!! a sound like a gunshot goes off. I flinch and jump backwards, not sure what just happened. The other guy yells, “Get Down!! Cover your head!!”

I throw myself against the interior wall of the depot, grab onto my hardhat tightly and crunch down in a ball, glancing around trying to see what just happened.

A second or two later I hear a faint but heavy, “thud.” The pressure from the fork shoving that concrete block while it was wedged against the other blocks had caused a chunk of concrete about the size of a bowling ball to break off and explode into into the air, probably 80+ feet.

The thud was it hitting the ground about 50 feet away. It made a nice little crater in the dirt. Would have certainly killed me if it had come down right on my head. Definitely got some pucker factor from that one.

If this is a magical entity, then I would just tell it to give me $100 for every $1,000,000 I use for charitable work that doesn’t directly benefit me.

If I give away $1,000,000 100,000 times, that’s 100 billion dollars of charitable work. And my net worth would “only” be 10 million dollars, certainly wealthy, but not idiotically wealthy. Plenty for me to invest and have doctor money levels of passive income, but only by giving away the vast vast majority of the money I get.

Or I guess I could just ask the entity to cap my net worth at 10 million dollars, and only give me that money when I have given away some arbitrary amount of money it gives me, like 500 billion dollars or something, Idk.

…“I’ll tell you what I’d do, man”…