Lettuce eat lettuce

Always eat your greens!

  • 7 Posts
  • 506 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • 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.





  • 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.



  • The star pitcher on my little league baseball team threw a high and tight fastball that hit the batter in the face. Completely crushed the kids nose.

    Total accident obviously, but it was pretty horrific. We were all around 12-14 years old. The kid was screaming and rolling around on the ground while his parents and the coaches all tried to keep him from thrashing and keep a towel on his face to slow the bleeding.

    The kid who was pitching was fucked up from it, started crying and stormed off the field, said he would never play baseball again. He felt horrible about hurting another kid.

    I can’t imagine how much worse it would be if you accidentally killed somebody. These kinds of accidents are so brutal because nobody did anything wrong, just supremely bad luck.





  • A lot of people in France seem to think it would be morally just to support resistance fighters, even if it can be proven they actually did murder Nazis, because said Nazis were contributing to the deaths of many people by fighting for the German war machine and Nazism.

    I think those French people have a deficient understanding or appreciation of the necessity for the rule of law. More likely, I think they’re just running on their own emotions, which is bad thinking.

    If Nazis are indeed guilty of these crimes, what the resistance fighters did is execute vigilante justice. While some might feel that what they did was justified, what’s not justified is the act of vigilante justice itself; that is, the decision to take the law into your own hands. That is morally wrong on its own and constitutes a major threat to society.

    If they did it, they should absolutely not go free; no matter how much I or anyone else approves of the fate their targets met, the fact of the matter is that they should have met that fate at the end of a fair trial, not a resistance fighter’s bullet. If you open the door for vigilante justice in one case, you open it up in all cases. It is categorically incompatible with any justice system.