The fiction of the last 30 years is revealed to those with eyes to see.

All this time the capital class and their lackeys have been saying “Russia is a our superfriend now and China wants to be democratic so we are helping them by using their slave labour and don’t you feel guilty for questioning our supremely good intentions here!”

And meanwhile it’s the same old global power struggle, but you can make SO MUCH using slave labour, it was just too tempting to send every bit of our labour - even our high tech - over to their factories.

People can help you, but there is a way to ask, and learning how to ask is part of learning the OS. We are fascinated by problems actually.

The problem is that people come and say things like “I tried to setup a fleegbat server and it doesn’t work!” and so for the helper it becomes a process of pulling the information out of the asker in a long and painful process of interaction and we just move on. Users who say things like “here is the error message I’m getting when I try to start up my fleegbo server, anyone understand this?” get way better help.

Those who really want to learn it come to understand these things, those who just want to do something neat and not work their ass off will complain that it’s too hard.

Those who do the work are rewarded in many ways. I drove a dump truck ten years ago, now I make twice what I used to, working with people who aren’t racist sacks of shit. They were my motivator to learn, I was tired of being among pigs every day.

I will be one of many saying this: if you want to self-host you need to learn Linux. It can be done, but this is not like taking a pottery class and you don’t really get to show anyone, the only people who will understand are people who are also able to do what you do. It’s rewarding on many levels, but pleasure and sociality are not among those rewards. :>

I must be the fortieth to advise you to install Linux.

When the first NES came out I was over there with my C64 and my shoebox full of disks with games I hadn’t tried yet like, lol suckers.

I wish I had seen this, there might have been a moment when we could’ve shifted some parental money from Nintendo to Commodore with the right campaign, and kept the Amiga going…