• 11 Posts
  • 519 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 5th, 2023

help-circle



  • Sorry, yes it’s extremely labor intensive in that the labor is difficult. However the number of people it takes to grow the amount of food needed has decreased dramatically over the last century. This results in the labor of a tiny fraction of the population being able to feed the rest. I don’t have problems with farmers retiring early. I don’t have problems either with reforming farming to overstaff the labor intensive parts of it, so that people don’t get broken. It’ll still require a very small proportion of the total labor available.


  • … or they actually start acting communist and redistribute wealth so that the soon-to-be retiree generations can weather the storm.

    This is the direction I hoped they’d go. And let me clarify something. I think that there are vast gaps between the financial side of economics and the real economy. In other words, prices and financial capital do not accurately represent what’s happening in the real economy and the error is significant. When I think of the real economic cost of taking care of the basic needs of seniors I don’t see the problem some economists assert when looking at the financial side of things, typically dressed as “every X working people will have to support Y retirees” where X/Y is really low. For example farming is so absurdly cheap in terms of labor that very few people can feed everyone and have a third of it get thrown in the trash. The one component that is more labor intensive is healthcare but I don’t think it’ll need an apocalyptic increase in labor to handle.

    Of course even then the economy might still shrink due to the decreased total labor as population shrinks. That part could be unavoidable without significant productivity jumps driven by technology, automation, etc., but on that I also do not subscribe to the traditional doom economist view. There are counterexamples where population has been decreasing and the real economy has maintained stability.




  • Purely on the product side, if I decide to buy it, I wouldn’t buy it for myself. I’d buy it for friends and family who are not that tech literate. Either to make my life easier to give them self-hosted services, or ideally for themselves to be able to do so. I want this product to be a non-shitty, open source “Synology,” from a firm I can trist to support it for a very long time. Doesn’t have to have that form factor. And I’m totally fine with an ongoing subscription. I’d like to be able to say - hey friend, buy this from ACME Co-op and sign up for their support plan. Follow the wizard and you’ll have Immich, Nextcloud, etc. A support plan might include external cloud HTTP proxy with authentication and SSL that makes access trivial. Similar to how Home Assistant’s subscription (Nabu Casa) works. It could also include a cloud backup. Perhaps at a different subscription rate.


  • I don’t know enough to say what the structure should be but this should not be possible:

    But it doesn’t protect you against more insidious forces like the founders selling to private capital

    It implies that the founders have more voting power and ownership than the rest of the people in the org. In my mind, everyone should have an equal vote, which should prevent a sale on the whim of the founders or another minority group. If a sale is in the cards, a majority of the people in the org should have to approve for it to proceed. And this shouldn’t be advisory but a legal barrier to pass.

    If I were to start a firm today, I’d be looking into this because not only this is the kind of firm I’d like to work in, but I think so would quite a few people in software. And those aren’t the dumb kids.

    I can also say that as a customer, the few worker co-ops I’ve able to buy things from give me a much more trustworthy impression than the baseline. They just behave differently. Noticeably more ethically.


  • I probably would. However it has become increasingly obvious that the flaws with solutions so far have been in the organisation. Not so much the particular hardware or software. If I’m going to buy something I’d like some hope that it’ll be there in 5 or 10 or 20 years. So please if you go serious with this, look into worker-owned organizations because I’m tired of dodging profit-maximizing traps and pretend-non-profit landmines. If the people building and supporting the thing aren’t the ones deciding what to do with the revenue and profit, you’re the only one doing it and you’re going to make mistakes that will hurt them and us. And then you become a landmine to dodge.





  • The software support hinges on SoC vendor support. You can only support it as long as the SoC vendor supports the SoC. Afterwards you can provide quasi support, for the upper OS layer only. Critical modem vulnerability past that point? SOL. I’m not aware of the current vendor support across brands but the last time I checked QC offered ~3 years and I think that’s from introduction of the SoC, not when it shipped in devices. I don’t know if anyone who sells their SoC offers longer support. It’s sad stuff.





  • This is the way. I’m up since Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on this machine. Platform swapped from AMD Phenom, to Intel i7, to AMD Ryzen, now with a bigger Ryzen. SSDs from a single SATA, to NVMe, to a 512G NVMe mirror, to a 1G NVMe mirror. The storage went from a single 4T disk to an 8T mirror NAS, to 8T directly attached mirror, to 24T RAIDz, to 48T RAIDz. I’ve now activated the free Ubuntu Pro tier, so if Canonical is still around in 2032, this machine can operate for another 8 years with just hardware swaps on failure.