[-] xapr 51 points 1 week ago

What specific policies should I be demanding of our politicians to make housing affordable again?

  1. Ban corporate ownership and excessive individual ownership (ex: > 10) of homes.
  2. Remove most barriers to building lots of new and higher density housing (ex: four-story multi-unit buildings) except legitimate safety and ecological concerns.
[-] xapr 76 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Instead, punishment for ALL crime should be proportional to the perpetrator's annual income. That's how they do it in Finland (and it seems also some ~~other~~ Scandinavian countries), for instance. They have had at least a couple of instances of over $100k speeding tickets, for example. This makes incredibly SOOOO much sense that it will never happen in most capitalist countries.

Some references: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland-home-of-the-103000-speeding-ticket/387484/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-businessman-hit-with-121000-speeding-fine

[-] xapr 38 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

What in the world? Discussing jury nullification is against the terms of service of lemmy.world? I'm so glad I decided to skip getting an account there. SMDH

[-] xapr 48 points 4 weeks ago

To list one no one else has mentioned yet: Sorry To Bother You

5
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by xapr to c/selfhost@lemmy.ml

My environment is a (freshly installed) Debian server with ZFS pools. I would like to store files in ZFS and share them using Samba.

My question is which is better from efficiency, effort, and security (for the host) perspectives? Running it natively on the bare-metal Debian host, running it in an LXC container, or running it in a VM? Why do you think one way is better than the others? I'm pretty familiar with VMs, but don't have much experience or knowledge of containers.

This is what I'm thinking at the moment, but I would appreciate any feedback:

  1. Natively: no resource overhead, medium admin overhead (manual Samba configuration), least secure(?)
  2. LXC: small resource overhead, least admin overhead (preconfigured containers and/or reproducible configs), possibly more security than native(?)
  3. VM: most resource overhead, most admin overhead (not only manual configuration, but also managing virtual disk [including snapshots, backups, etc]), most secure
[-] xapr 46 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Here's another good one: The city of Long Beach, California spends close to that much every year to do the same thing to protect mansions built on a sand bar (the Long Beach Peninsula) that are about 50 feet from the water line on a good day. They just keep constantly moving sand from one end of the beach to the other end a couple miles away. That's city money. The article below has some details, but only refers to the city saving $100k to $300k a year by bringing the work in house. The figure I've heard is more like $500k a year. I imagine it's actually higher than that, even. They have dedicated big earth movers, a built facility to store and maintain them, employees dedicated to it, etc. Do the math. This is probably happening all over the country and all over the world.

https://www.presstelegram.com/2022/12/19/long-beach-moves-its-own-beach-sand-to-protect-peninsula/

328
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by xapr to c/youshouldknow@lemmy.world

I learned about this many years ago and the difference after I started using only SLS-free toothpaste was night and day. I used to get canker sores (mouth ulcers) any time I would bite the inside of my cheek, hit my gums with the hard parts of my toothbrush, etc., and this completely stopped a while after I switched to SLS-free.

SLS is Sodium Lauryl Sulfate, by the way, and it's a detergent. From what I understand, the only reason why it's added to toothpaste is to make more foam when you brush. But the SLS-free toothpaste I use makes plenty of foam, so I have no idea why they add it. It's one of those things about the modern world that makes absolutely no sense. The ads and packaging should say in big letters: "now with even more canker sores!"

Unfortunately, the vast majority of toothpastes on the market (at least in the US) have SLS. I can only seem to find SLS-free toothpaste in natural food/supplement stores. It's extra difficult to find toothpastes that are SLS-free but that keep fluoride too. The difficulty (and price? I haven't compared) is completely worth it to me though.

TL;DR: The SLS (Sodium Lauryl Sulfate) in most toothpastes is unnecessary and (edit: CAN cause) canker sores (painful sores in your mouth and gums). If you have this problem, you will likely benefit from SLS-free toothpaste (some still include fluoride) that you can usually find at natural food stores.

[-] xapr 56 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Upvoted for the news that these treatments are speeding towards approval. However, the point that no one knows how these new treatments work seems silly, given my understanding that no one seems to know exactly how antidepressants in general work either (or at least they didn't until recently?), even ones that have been used for decades, like Prozac.

Here's a quote from an article from 2021: I've been making references on this blog for years about how we don't even know how antidepressants work

160
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by xapr to c/youshouldknow@lemmy.world

You should know that the issue with many communities on other Lemmy instances that you subscribed to showing a "subscribe pending" status has mostly been resolved.

I looked in my subscribed communities list, found all the pending ones, opened them, unsubscribed (clicked the yellow "subscribe pending" button) and resubscribed. After that, I refreshed the page and I was now fully subscribed to them, regardless of which Lemmy instance hosts the community.

The only exception, unfortunately, was with kbin communities. All the kbin.social ones still showed subscribe pending for me even after following the same procedure. Still, this is a big improvement over having a bunch of half-subscribed communities.

I know that the pending status didn't have much of a negative effect on my end because I would still get those in my subscribed feed, but I hoped for the communities' subscriber numbers to fully reflect the actual number of subscribers.

[-] xapr 36 points 1 year ago

AI, climate change, and nuclear weapons proliferation

One of those is not like the others. Nuclear weapons can wipe out humanity at any minute right now. Climate change has been starting the job of wiping out humanity for a while now. When and how is AI going to wipe out humanity?

This is not a criticism directed at you, by the way. It's just a frustration that I keep hearing about AI being a threat to humanity and it just sounds like a far-fetched idea. It almost seems like it's being used as a way to distract away from much more critically pressing issues like the myriad of environmental issues that we are already deep into, not just climate change. I wonder who would want to distract from those? Oil companies would definitely be number 1 in the list of suspects.

[-] xapr 36 points 1 year ago

Interesting, I haven't personally had any run ins with Hexbears, but everything I've read from them in non-Hexbear communities has generally looked fine to me. Sure, they argue hard and in detail when it comes to anything political and they can also be a little edgy, but I haven't seen any of them be assholes, abusive, argue in bad faith, etc. So far I have appreciated their contributions. It probably helps that I generally agree with (many of?) them politically as far as I can tell, but despite that, if I saw them being assholes I would make notice because I don't believe in defending the people in your team even when they're doing wrong. I would be more likely to call them for taking the wrong approach instead. Do you have any example threads that demonstrate what you're describing?

8
submitted 1 year ago by xapr to c/sdfpubnix

I don't know if it's just me, but I've been unable to comment on any lemmy.world communities for several days now. I have even verified that lemmy.world was up and running, but it didn't help. I presume that there's some federation problem, likely on their end. My solution for now will have to be to unsubscribe from all lemmy.world communities and look for alternatives elsewhere, unless anyone has any better ideas.

15
submitted 1 year ago by xapr to c/linux@lemmy.ml

I have an issue with some servers at work where I have been unable to determine the best course of action to address it based on pre-existing knowledge within my team or web searches. Does anyone have suggestions for the best place to ask RHEL-specific questions? I don't want to presume that it's OK to post such nitty-gritty technical questions here.

[-] xapr 36 points 1 year ago

I recently switched myself, my wife, and my mom from old Moto X4 Android phones to slightly newer, but not current iPhones (X, XS, and 11 Pro). It's been a few months now (maybe 3 or so?). Honestly, I'm not that happy with them. I think I'll stick to it mainly for privacy, security, and environmental reasons - iPhones are supported with security updates for way, way, way longer than the vast majority of Android phones. Like two or three times as long, in some cases. This offsets the price factor, maintains security for longer, and reduces electronic waste by making the phones viable for longer. By my calculations, I actually come out ahead with iPhones with regard to price. I like that iPhones let you remove most, maybe even all the built-in apps that come pre-installed. I also like that they give you an actual indication of your battery health.

Having said that, many other aspects of iPhones have been a hassle or just plain sucked:

The keyboard sucks. Poor editing, poor layout without a number row, not able to turn off the stupid app bar or whatever they call it on the top row.

The messaging app sucks. First, don't forget that it's Apple's intransigence now that's preventing iMessage from being interoperable with Android, and I say this as someone who has come to dislike and avoid Google as much as possible. I hope that the EU forcing them to make messaging interoperable will yield some real improvements with this. Second, the messaging app doesn't show dates and times on messages by default. I have to pull each message to the side to see this info. Third, there appears to be no search function within a message thread, what a pain. Finally, I also found out that iPhones aren't able to do anything whatsoever with certain common attachments from text messages. I had messages received from Android phones with AMR files in them (audio recording files). The iPhone was completely unable to open them, I couldn't find even an app that could open them, and the damn phone wouldn't let me forward the text message to an email! I ended up having to go back to the Android and forward the text to email in order to be able to open the attachments. Completely unacceptable.

The connectivity with PCs sucks. They allow you to see your photos (only the photos and videos, nothing else) when connected through USB, but it barely works. My photo transfers fail most of the time, and it seems to be impossible to let my photo manager delete the photos from the phone after transferring them. Yeah, iTunes is supposed to work, but you can't manage two different phones with different iCloud accounts on one Windows login. Besides, iTunes itself sucks. Their replacement app for this, Apple Mobile Devices I think it was called, only supports Windows 11, not Windows 10.

The offline PDF storage and reading sucks. I was going to an event that I knew was going to be away from mobile networks and prepared for this by jumping through all the hoops (I'm not kidding) that it took to actually download PDFs locally to the phone so that they were available offline. These PDFs held the map and event guides. I get there, offline, and try to open the PDFs that I painstakingly had downloaded offline. Well, wouldn't you know it, the damn built-in app for reading the PDFs needed internet connectivity! Thankfully it wasn't a life or death situation, but still, how frustrating and disappointing.

The official community support site sucks. The impression I've had in researching the issues above is that someone will give some incredibly lame answer that doesn't really resolve the issue and instead papers it over, that answer will be marked as the correct answer, and it's end of story. You need to find discussions on other unofficial forums for real discussions of technical issues.

This is all I can think of for now. There's probably more, but you get the idea.

[-] xapr 60 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

In the old days, a friend of mine would carry some paper(?) stickers(?) (labels?) that said something like "I park like an asshole" and superglue it to one of the windows of someone parked like this.

If you wanted to be nicer, you could get some proper pre-printed stickers (most online print/sticker shops should have them) and place them. Wouldn't cause any damage but would maybe make them think about it a little bit.

I also saw a post recently where someone replaced all the tire valve caps with bright orange or pink little dick shaped caps. This would cause more inconvenience and embarrassment, but not be damaging or dangerous.

[-] xapr 75 points 1 year ago

There are right-wing instances of Mastodon (gab, truth, and others), not to mention many Pleroma ones, as well as Lemmy (exploding heads, and probably others). It's just that they get quickly defederated by everyone else for various valid reasons (usually hate and abuse, sometimes even child porn), so you don't get to interact with them much. They just get stuck in their own bubble.

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xapr

joined 2 years ago