Ourgon

I've self-hosted more or less everything from the get-go back when I was working at a telco which provided me with a 4 Mb/s fixed line back in 1996. One of the first things I did was change to a self-hosted mail server with my own domain, the rest quickly followed. Just to name a few, used daily:

- Proxmox to run all mentioned services

- Software router to bind them all together (OpenWRT in a container)

- Database services (Postgresql, Mysql, Redis) used for many of the mentioned services

- Backup services (rsnapshot, custom backup scripts)

- mail services (Exim, Dovecot, Spamassassin, greylistd, dovecot-managesieve)

- web-related things (first Apache, then lighttpd, then nginx) running:

- "Cloud" (first Owncloud, then Nextcloud) with functional equivalents of e.g. Google Docs (Nextcloud Office), Google Reader (Nextcloud News), Google Meet (Nextcloud Talk, Jitsi Meet), Gmail (Rainloop app in Nextcloud, Roundcube), Google Maps (OSM app in Nextcloud), Calendar etc.

- Wiki (first Twiki, then Mediawiki, now Bookstack)

- Media (mpd, Airsonic, Jellyfin, Peertube, Pixelfed)

- version control (first CVS, then Subversion, then Gogs, then Gitea)

- Search (Searx and Recoll)

- big-tech proxies (Invidious, Nitter, libreddit, Spodcast, searx (see Search))

- Video surveillance (Zoneminder)

- Remote application/desktop service (X2go, NoVNC, now experimenting with Kasm)

- P2P services (Transmission, IPFS, MLDonkey (when needed))

- "Chat" services (first Prosody, then ejabberd, then back to Prosody)

- Timelimit service + app on my daughter's phone to keep her screen time in check, I can remotely give her more time when required

- a "stable" and "development" build server (Debian running in containers)

- ...and a lot more

Basic services are divided over a few containers - base, mail, auth. Most services run on a single container - serve. Some get their own container because they are only started irregularly (bookcook, the bookkeeping service) or they should be separated from the rest - p2p, session (remote application/desktop services). I tend to shun docker, preferring to tailor services to my own needs. Currently the only services using docker are Kasm Workspaces [1] and some linuxserver.io instances which I'm experimenting with.

[1] ...with the database (postgresql) and cache (redis) services being redirected to the 'base' container which runs all database services

Depends on which one you're using, mine contains a Radeon HD 4670. There is a lot of NVIDIA on the PCI bus but this does not seem to be an obstacle to the thing running flawlessly:

   00:00.0 Host bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 Host Bridge (rev b1)
   00:00.1 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 Memory Controller (rev b1)
   00:03.0 ISA bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 LPC Bridge (rev b3)
   00:03.1 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 Memory Controller (rev b1)
   00:03.2 SMBus: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 SMBus (rev b1)
   00:03.3 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 Memory Controller (rev b1)
   00:03.4 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 Memory Controller (rev b1)
   00:03.5 Co-processor: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 Co-processor (rev b1)
   00:04.0 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 OHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev b1)
   00:04.1 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 EHCI USB 2.0 Controller (rev b1)
   00:06.0 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 OHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev b1)
   00:06.1 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 EHCI USB 2.0 Controller (rev b1)
   00:08.0 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 High Definition Audio (rev b1)
   00:09.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 PCI Bridge (rev b1)
   00:0a.0 Ethernet controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 Ethernet (rev b1)
   00:0b.0 SATA controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 AHCI Controller (rev b1)
   00:0c.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 PCI Express Bridge (rev b1)
   00:15.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 PCI Express Bridge (rev b1)
   00:16.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 PCI Express Bridge (rev b1)
   02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV730/M96-XT [Mobility Radeon HD 4670]
   02:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV710/730 HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 4000 series]
   03:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR928X Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)
   04:00.0 PCI bridge: Texas Instruments XIO2213A/B/XIO2221 PCI Express to PCI Bridge [Cheetah Express] (rev 01)
   05:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments XIO2213A/B/XIO2221 IEEE-1394b OHCI Controller [Cheetah Express] (rev 01)

This is a 'Late 2009 27" iMac', running the internal display as well as an external 1920*1200 24" monitor through a DP->HDMI cable. Everything works, including the silly IR remote control thingy (tested using the IR blaster on my phone).

If ever you get tired of Google - and for those who get tired of Apple or Amazon or whomever they have entrusted their digital photo archiving needs to...

Any of the personal cloud things - Nexcloud, Owncloud, Seafile, Syncthing and others - can be used to sync files - and with that photos and videos - from mobile devices to some server somewhere. This can be the server-under-the-stairs, your NAS at home, a wall-wart with a Raspberry Pi and a drive taped together, a VPS or a commercial entity offering these as SaaS. You can keep using your phones with or without Google, that is up to you. If you run the stuff yourself you'll need to install and configure the parts which make it work, if you use a commercial instance you just have to install the relevant app and tell it to sync your data. You can do this in parallel to using Google Photos, just to make sure you have a backup in case Google wants just that one extra piece of personal data to allow you to access your photos which makes you give up on them. Just one more piece... and one more please...

Who gets to define the group and who gets to define what is good or bad for the group? Who gets to decide who is in the group and who needs to be cast out? Who gets to speak for the group?

Have a look at the history of politics and pay special notion to those strands which centre around grouping people, whether that be "proletarians versus capitalists", "those_who_belong_to_my_religion versus those_who_do_not", "those of our nation versus those from elsewhere" and now this "those who belong to my identity group versus those who do not".

Also have a look what most of these group-centred ideologies have in common, namely the identification of a specific scapegoat group which is blamed for all the woes - including those caused by the application of the group-centred ideology - which beset the in-group. In Bolshevist Russia is was the Kulaks [1], in Nazi Germany it was the Jews, in theocratic Iran it is "the great Satan" (i.e. the USA and its allies) while in this new "woke" cult it is the "cis-gender heterosexual white man".

The problem with all these group-centred ideologies is that groups do not have a voice, only individuals posing as the group do. Those individuals can gain a lot of power and as such either tend to get corrupted or are drawn to the role of spokesperson because they already are corrupt. Group-centred thinking works well on a small scale - family, small neighbourhood, etc - but it often fails when the members of the group no longer personally can know each other since that makes it possible for the corrupt spokespeople to make their play.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/kulak

While I agree to most of the glued/soldered/planned obsolescence criticisms related to applethings I do feel the need to point out those "obsolete" macthings tend to run Linux just fine. I should know, writing this on a 'late 2009 27" iMac' which I got for free due to its video card being broken (which it is no longer, 8 minutes in the oven at 195°C is all it takes) running Debian. While it is also possible to get more recent versions of macOS to run on these things this is not nearly as easy nor useful as running Linux which just supports the hardware without any qualms. Apple does not want you to use older hardware so they don't build macOS for machines which are perfectly capable of running it. Installing unsupported versions is made possible by monkey-patching the release in a rather hit-and-miss fashion, often leaving parts of the hardware (bluetooth, sound, wifi) without or with sub-standard support. All this while Linux runs flawlessly on the same hardware.

I wish more linux laptops had the build quality and support of macbooks

I'm glad my "Linux laptops" are very much not like those macbooks with their glue and solder and "no user-serviceable parts inside (and we really mean it)"

This isn't a rant from an Apple fan, this is a rant from a laptop fan. ThinkPad's aren't good laptops despite what the guy with the pocket protector says. They are flimsy and feel cheap. They still have 20th century tech (eraser mouse, c'mon!). They are my grandfather's laptop.

The good thing with those machines is that you'll be able to keep on using your grandfather's laptop while those whose grandfathers opted for macbooks are left wanting. I'm using a T42p from 2005, apart from putting in an SSD I have not changed the thing. It was, and still is, a perfectly useable tool.

Drop Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Tiktok, NYT, WaPo, Fox and all those other creators of permanent anxiety. Take up farming, buy a plot of land and build your own house, create something. Realise that:

- the climate has always been changing and it always will but humans and most other species survived. It takes an extinction level event to make a big dent in the biosphere

- social inequality is far less now than it has been in earlier times when people often lived or died at the whim of some aristocrat

- there is no shortage of workers, only a shortage of people who want to do a given job for a given reward

- there have always been 'billionaires' and there will always be since having a lot of resources makes it easier to gain more resources. Some billionaires do interesting things with their resources, others lie on them like Smaug. As long as there are enough resources left for the non-billionaires I don't care about them other than doing my best to not feed them if I can

- the media is rubbish. Don't criticise the media, be the media. Corporate media doesn't bite the hand that feeds it so just avoid them (see above).

- corruption is everywhere and has always been, it is not for nothing that Utopia was named so - it does not exist. Just like I try not to feed the billionaires I try not to feed corrupt institutions, occasionally breaking a law or two instead of giving in to their demands. That means they have a stick to hit me with if and when they want but knowing that they always will be able to find that stick means it doesn't make any difference to me

Eventually we will but it will take a shake-up of the market by an outsider who does not have an existing business based around cars priced at current levels. Electric cars are far less complex than ICE-based vehicles so there is no real reason for them to be more expensive. The current excuse for their high prices is the cost of the battery pack but battery prices have been on a downward trajectory for a long time now. Eventually a newcomer will find the lure of selling an EV for half of the lowest priced competitor too large to ignore and the rest will be history. That newcomer will be derided by the existing sellers and the media which depends on advertising income from those established actors but that attack won't succeed if the increase in price-performance is large enough.

That is the theory, now look at the practice of proprietary software/services and see if the theory holds. It clearly does not, one of the bigger problems with proprietary IT is the lock-in caused by undocumented data formats, services which do not allow bulk data extraction and similar obstacles.

Proprietary vs. open is like renting vs. owning without the legal protection offered to renters. If your data is locked in some proprietary format you're beholden to the proprietor who can - and often does - abuse his power by raising prices, adding intrusive 'features', selling access to your eyes and more. No EULA is going to change that since those agreements can be changed more or less at will.

In other words keep your EULA, I don't want it.

Selling that excess power is possible, as is buying some extra panels - there is enough space for at least 36 more on just that single roof. For now I choose to add panels - and batteries in the not too distant future, once the market is flooded with used EV-batteries - and continue on my course of decentralising the 'net using 'old' hardware - not a single new product is used in any of my computing endeavours. Most of it is either dumpster-dived and repaired, bought 2nd hand or acquired through places like Freecycle.

There is a big difference between "introspection" and "revisionism". The '1619 Project' clearly falls in the latter category and as such deserves to be denounced for the fraud it is, as does its author. As to it being published as an "essay project", the NYT themselves presented it as [The 1619 project is] a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American Slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding.

The gray old lady would never have published this. The current incarnation of the NYT is related to its predecessor in name only.

Pull the thing out of the house and let it burn outside. It is a relatively small battery so outside it won't do much harm, this in contrast to what it seems to do in that room. Tossing it in the pool is also possible but given the small size that'd be a waste of pool water which would need to be replaced. Just let it burn outside. Use a rake, broom or whatever other long thing at hand to pull the thing outside.

After the stack has taken what it needs there are 35 solar panels left on the barn roof. Excess heat is used to heat the upper floor, given that it is well-insulated it needs no additional heating. Problem, solved.

I made a rack out of some dumpster-dived supermarket shelves, lumber, a couple of truck air filters and a forced draft fan. The thing doubles as drying cabinet for produce (mint, mushrooms, fruit etc.) by having the equipment in the top half of the rack followed by an air flow divider and 8 rack-sized metal-mesh-covered drying frames. From top to bottom the thing contains:

* HP ProCurve 2910al-24G J9145A 24 port Gigabit switch (managed switch, €47)

* HP DL380G7 with 2xX5675 @3.07GHz, 128GB (ECC) RAM and 8x147GB SAS drives (€450)

* NetApp DS4243 (24x3.5” SAS array, currently populated with 24x650GB 15K SAS drives (4 as inactive spares), €400)

* the mentioned airflow divider

* 8 drying frames

It is managed through Proxmox on Debian and runs a host of services including a virtual router (OpenWRT), serving us here on the farm and the extended family spread over 2 countries. The server-mounted array is used as a boot drive and to host some container and VM images, the DS4243 array is configured as a JBOD running a mixture of LVM/mdadm managed arrays and stripe sets used as VM/container image and data storage. I chose mdadm over ZFS because of the greater flexibility it offers. The array in the DL380 is managed by the P410i array controller (i.e. hardware raid), I have 4 spare drives in storage to be used as replacements for failed drives.

The rack is about 1.65m high, it looks like this (here with the old D-Link switch (now deceased) and minus the DS4243 array which now sits just above the air flow divider):

https://imgur.com/a/M4Lbf1K

In the not-too-distant future I’ll replace the 15K SAS drives with larger albeit slower (7.2K) SAS or SATA drives to get more space and (especially) less heat - those 15K drives run hot. After a warm summer I added an extra air intake + filter on the front side (not visible on the photos), facing the equipment. This is made possible by the fact that cooling air is pulled through the contraption from the underside instead of being blown in through the filter(s).

I chose this specific hardware - a fairly loaded DL380G7, the DS4243 - because these offered the best price/performance ratio when I got them (in 2018). Spare parts for these devices are cheap and easily available, I made sure to get a full complement of power supplies for both devices (2 for the DL380G7, 4 for the DS4243) although I’m only using half of these. I recently had to replace a power supply in the DL380 (€20) and two drives in the DS4243 (€20/piece), for the rest everything has been working fine for close to 4 years now.

On the question whether this much hardware is needed, well, that depends on what you want to do. If you just want to serve media files and have a shell host to log in to the answer is probably ‘no’, depending on the size of the library. Instead of using ‘enterprise class’ equipment you could try to build a system tailored to the home environment which prioritizes a reduction in power consumption and noise levels over redundancy and performance. You’ll probably end up spending about the same amount of money for hardware, a bit more in time and get a substantially lower performing system but you’d be rewarded by the lower noise levels and reduced power consumption. The latter can be offset by adding a few solar panels, the former by moving the rack to a less noise-sensitive location - the basement, the barn, etc.

As to having 19" rack equipment in the home I'd say this is feasible as long as you don't have to sit right next to the things. Even with the totally enclosed, forced-draft rack I made the thing does produce enough noise to make it hard to forget it is there.

You mean the '1619' project NYT, peddling a fake history of your country by a faux historian as The Truth™, making the author the de-facto editor in chief of what used to be one of the cornerstones of solid journalism? The gray old lady is surely turning in her grave for the imposter which claims her name can not be her.

Well, Sketchup itself fits the bill and can be used for free more or less indefinitely. I have used it to design an extension to our house, a 22x12 meter barn, a lean-to for my wife's horses, an octagonal chicken coop and much more. The drawings are accurate enough to use as templates for cutting wood to build trusses.

How to use Sketchup for as long as you need it? The solution lies in using Wine on Linux (or wherever you want to run it) to run Sketchup. Once Sketchup tells you the trial period is over - 30 days for Sketchup 2016, the version I use - you just wipe the relevant Wine directory and re-install Sketchup. Here's a script to automate this whole business:

   #!/bin/sh

   export WINEARCH=win32
   export WINEPREFIX=/home/username/.wine-sketchup
   export WINE=$(which wine)
   export sketchup_msi=/home/username/Downloads/SketchUp2016-x86.msi
   export gecko_msi=/home/username/Downloads/wine_gecko-2.40-x86.msi
   export vblank_mode=0
   export DRI_PRIME=1

   help () {
   echo <<-END
    use: $0 [-r] [-h]
   
    -r: reset sketchup (does a complete reinstall)
    -h: this help message
   END
   }

   sketchup_reset () {
    rm -rf $WINEPREFIX
    winetricks win7
    winetricks corefonts 
    winetricks vcrun2010 
    winetricks dotnet40 
    msiexec /i $gecko_msi
    winetricks win7
    msiexec /i $sketchup_msi
   }
   
   config () {
    winecfg
   }

   while getopts "chr" OPTION
   do
   case $OPTION in
   r)
    sketchup_reset
    ;;
   c)
    config
    exit
    ;;
   h)
    help
    exit
    ;;
   esac
   done

   $WINE "$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files/SketchUp/SketchUp 2016/SketchUp.exe"

in schools, many boys might benefit from some good male role models in these systems

Very much so, the female domination of the educational system is a disaster not in the making but one we're reaping the bitter fruits from. It is not only boys who would benefit from having good male role models, this is just as much true for girls. Unfortunately education is one of those fields where men have been pushed out and are made to feel unwelcome by women. The few men who make it all the way to the classroom often end up hen-pecked and unable to become the male role models needed.

The primary school in my village in Sweden (~450 pupils) has not had a single male teacher for more than a decade now, they pushed the last - very popular - one out with the pretence of him not having 'the correct papers'. Never mind that he single-handedly managed to organise several popular school-wide activities every year, never mind that those activities created a bond among pupils, teachers and parents, never mind that those activities are no longer organised and that tensions at the school have been rising ever since. He was a man in a female-dominated workplace who had to go, who was pushed out by the female head of school.

Come August my then 11yo daughter will no longer go to this school, instead opting for another school in a place much further away which has a more balanced approach.

It is nonsense, e.g. veterinary sciences are heavily female-dominated. Academia is female-dominated except for the STEM fields but even those disciplines are starting to become so. Here in Sweden middle and higher local government is female-dominated. Meanwhile mining, off-shore and garbage collection are male-dominated, to name a few fields which could be termed 'unappealing'.

First-wave feminists had a point. Second-wave and third-wave feminists are just belligerent searchers-for-trouble who have done more harm than good.

Using your own terms of 'marginalised groups' you should actually be fighting for men's rights, not against them as you seem to be doing. Given that the discrimination is especially rampant in female-dominated professions the 'marginalised' group in this case is men, not women. In other words, women in female-dominated professions discriminate against 'marginalised' groups (men) to further increase their domination.

No, I suspect the algorithm takes into account both the sender as well as the content of the message in deciding which comments to push to the front. Reliably 'progressive' senders - especially those which create more 'progressive' engagement - get extra points, this in combination with a 'progressive' message or one critical of any non-'progressive' message seems to be among the deciding factors in what to push to the front. In the absence of 'progressive' senders and/or content the algorithm probably looks for senders who create more engagement over those who don't, adding an extra click barrier between 'progressive' messages and comments which are critical of such.

Popular non-'progressive' senders - Trump and now Musk being the poster child of such - probably get their own comment manager who makes sure there is always some vitriol waiting no matter the message. This does not scale but the Pareto principle makes that it does not have to since there are not that many of such. The same may be true for popular 'progressive' senders where comment managers may make sure there are supportive comments but this seems to be less clear-cut.

How it works is interesting in itself but it is not the reason why these 'algorithmic feeds' have gained the nefarious reputation they have. The real problem with this type of technology is the way it allows the proprietor of the service to present its users a tailored view of whatever content the service offers. The way this view is tailored depends on what the proprietors' aim is:

Twitter uses algorithmic feeds to present its users with an ideologically driven view of whatever is being discussed, this can easily be seen by reading the first comments on contentious issues where they nearly always push some 'progressive' comments to the front, even when those comments are clearly less popular with users than whatever other comments follow. Comments critical of 'progressive' issues often require one or more extra clicks to be made visible. Sometimes this leads to the first page being devoid of comments, requiring a click to access whatever comments are present where those comments are nearly invariably critical of the 'progressive' issue being discussed. This does not happen when there are positive comments on those 'progressive' issues since these are presented directly on the first page.

TikTok and Youtube also use algorithmic feeds to channel users but their algorithms seem to be tailored to keep users on the site/app for as long as possible.

You're implying that Fox is special in producing wall-to-wall alternate-reality stuff that turns out to be false or deliberately misrepresented. The reality is that CNN is going down because they have been producing, to use your term, wall-to-wall alternate-reality stuff that turns out to be false or deliberately misrepresented. From Russian Collusion to Hunter Biden's laptop, from uncritically parroting COVID-related panic porn to similarly uncritically parroting race and gender baiting activists and everything in between, CNN is going down because their specific flavour of alternate reality is rapidly going out of vogue. Fox is on the ascendant because they have been railing against whatever CNN (and MSNBC and ABC and CBS and PBS and NPR and the NYT and WaPo and...) pushed forward. If all those latter actors were to disappear Fox would suffer since their brand gains its popularity in part from opposing them.

The real question is what they thought would happen. Launching a for-pay venue hosting the same people hosting the same type of content which has driven their viewership into the ground on cable - or, to be more precise, on airports all over the western hemisphere since that was about the only place most people ever were exposed to CNN - was a sure-fire recipe for failure. Those who planned this and executed upon those plans were either desperate or so wrapped up in their own bubble that they could not see the reality of CNN having lost nearly all credibility.

Host your own mail server, it takes less than a day of work per year to keep things running smoothly and you always know where your data is hosted. Use a smart server for outgoing mail - your IAP most likely mandates this by blocking port 25 outgoing - and configure your MTA correctly to make sure your mail does not get bounced by Google or Microsoft (the most likely culprits to do so in my experience). Use Dovecot as MDA and access your mail from whatever IMAP client you happen to like - Claws mail, Thunderbird, K9, etc. Use Sieve [1] to filter your mail into separate folders, including a spam folder for messages marked as such by SpamAssassin which is used by the MTA to check for such.

What I use:

- MTA: Exim, greylistd + SpamAssassin for spam filtering

- MDA: Dovecot with dovecot-sieve for filtering

- MUA on Linux: mutt, claws-mail

- MUA on Android: K9

- MUA on web: Rainloop as a Nextcloud app, Roundcube standalone

I've been doing this for more than 25 years and never had any significant problems. I get far less spam in my inbox than I see in the Gmail account I registered back when that was a new thing and which I only use for testing purposes. If I am to believe the naysayers on this forum and elsewhere it is impossible to host your own mail but my experience shows they are simply wrong.

Just get a SBC, install a mail stack (MTA + MDA, Sieve, SpamAssassin, some form of greylisting if you want to use that) on it, hook it up to your residential connection, get a domain name and start experimenting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language...

The "Free World" has become markedly less free since the fall of the Berlin wall. Part of this is just the result of the fact that was deemed no longer necessary by those in power to portray the image of being "The Free World" now that the cold war was over, part of it is due to the fact that the enemy-shaped hole left by the demise of the Evil Empire was filled by things like "globalism" and "climate disaster". Globalism created the conditions for the rise of China as the up-and-coming superpower, the climate scare created the conditions for the WEF "Build Back Better" [1] strategy which is to usher in that globalist world where "you will own nothing and you will be happy" [2]. Then the SARS2 pandemic hit - oddly enough just a few months after the WEF finished practising for just such a scenario in their "Event 201" program [3] - which severely restricted freedom all over the world, markedly so in states which were deemed to be the poster children of "The Free World". Many leaders started using the rhetoric of "The Great Reset" and "Build Back Better" [4], some leaders of "The Free World" openly proclaimed their admiration of the Chinese approach [5], many others were inspired by the Chinese "social credit score" system and forwarded plans to create similar systems in "The Free World" under the guise of "Pandemic preparedness". Many if not most of those schemes ended up being shot down in the parliamentary process but is has been made clear that the freedoms which were once seen as inviolable in "The Free World" - from ownership rights through freedom of speech to freedom of association and freedom of movement - are seen as a detriment to their ideas of how society is to progress by a number of influential people.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/to-build-back-better-...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s...

[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/8-predictions-for-the... - notice that the WEF removed the page related to this quote: '1. All products will have become services.' leads to 'Sorry, but we can’t find the page you were looking for' while other links still work

[3] https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/

[4] https://yewtu.be/watch?v=YkcaeaD45MY

[5] https://yewtu.be/watch?v=eqnmfNiaM-Y

Same here, both with Firefox as well as when using wget. The downloaded data is not recognised by the file command as anything other that data.

Before I started using Linux I used OS/2. The system had many idiosyncrasies and was quite ramshackle in a lot of ways but it did multitask quite a bit better than Windows. Its main problem was the dearth of good software, a problem which was "solved" by the addition of WinOS/2 which enabled you to run Windows 3.1 applications in OS/2. It ran most Windows software quite well, often better and faster than "real Windows". Did this solve OS/2's problems, though?

It did not. All it did was tell OS/2 users about the world of Windows software. When Microsoft finally launched a slightly less horrid version of Windows most users migrated to it, leaving OS/2 but a footnote in history where it concerns desktop use.

Enter the current situation: Windows is a horrid mess, it consists of layers of plaster upon plaster upon jury-rigged interfaces built on quicksand. For those who are used to the way things work on Linux it feels like an enormous step back, like having leaden shoes and gloves fitted for no good reason. This problem is supposedly "solved" by the addition of WSL which enables you to run Linux applications in Windows. It runs most Linux applications quite well even though performance is lacking in many ways. Does this solve Windows' problems, though?

I notice that you did not answer my questions, instead going for an ad-hominem. This is not a sign of the strength of your ideological position, it is the type of reaction which can be expected when confronting religious dogma.

Instead of cherry-picking that single example I gave you could try to actually refute Heller's - and Schellenbergers's, and Lomborg's and many other's - position on the 'climate apocalypse'. Realise that the more ad-hominems you throw, the less chance you have of convincing sceptics of your position.

OK, so if it is that easy, show us where Heller is wrong instead of mentioning someone else who wrote a book. Heller's videos offer many individual facts which could - or could not, depending on who is right - be refuted by pointing at the correct [1] data. One of Heller's main claims which he keeps on coming back to is that it was a lot warmer in the '30s than it is now. This seems to be corroborated by the list of temperature extremes for the USA [2]. This point alone gives credence to Heller's accusation of climate alarmists making use of tailored views on climate data by only showing historical data which shows an upwards trend, hiding the fact that those data show a local maximum. Given that Heller has been at this for a long time I would expect someone to have taken his statements to task by showing where he is wrong. I have yet to come across a refutation like that but I've seen plenty of supposed refutations in the style of the one above using vague assertions of 'lies' and 'it does not add up'.

Show us, where is Heller lying and what does not add up? If you can point at someone who actually refutes Heller's claims that would suffice as well but make sure to point at the actual correct [1] data-backed refutation, don't just say someone wrote a book. Until such a time I will believe my own observations based on historical data which do not seem to indicate a climate 'emergency' but which do show climate change, no matter which part of history is studied.

[1] where 'correct' stands for 'actual', not 'corrected to fit a narrative'

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_territory_tempe...