My Uncle once told me that the most important thing you can learn is where to find more information.

Yep.

Though I’m sure that person exists here on Lemmy somewhere :D

I feel seen!

In all honesty, I’ve been doing something somewhat similar for the last 2 decades or so. Originally I was building my archives because I was often away from internet access. Now, though, it’s just become habit.

I started with basic first aid and medical texts and whatever other books and reference texts I found interesting. To that I also archive proprietary software and the source code and releases for the open source software I find useful. Add to that ISOs of the distributions I tend to use and I’m at roughly 3TB. I could probably cut that to 2TB if I remove the older Ubuntu and NixOS releases. I’m over 30TB if you include CD and DVD rips.

About the only thing I am missing from my current archives would be a clone of the Ubuntu and NixOS repositories for all of the “glue” dependencies that no one ever thinks of. After that you would just need the hardware to build out the network.

You’ll need to be more specific I’m afraid. Lemmy isn’t a single site, but rather a bunch of sites all talking to one another in the same “language”.

Is your homeserver, lemm.ee communist? No clue. I do know lemmygrad.ml is. My homeserver, lemmy.sdf.org, leans from libertarian to liberal to marxist depending on the particular subject or user.

Each cat their own rat.

Depends on what the thread was about. If it’s a technical thread, and if you have something to contribute that might help someone in the future with that issure, go ahead. Most of the rest of the time, it’s just bad form.

Matrix or XMPP. Personally I’d go with Matrix. World’s on fire and Matrix is encrypted by default.

S&P 500 is still up 5% over the last 12 months. Up 95% over the last 5 years. Any action on a shorter timeline than that is emotionally driven and should be largely ignored. Unless you’re day trading of course. You’re not, right?

That said, ya. We’re probably heading into a rough time.

We’re looking at negative GDP growth according to folks smarter than I am. 2 quarters of that and it’s probably a recession.

Additionally it looks like foreign investors are leaving the US Treasury market kicking up yields and foreign governments are getting uneasy about purchasing US made weapons or relying on US security guarantees which, again, reduces GDP both directly and indirectly.

2028 can’t come fast enough.

Depends on your threat model, but you’re probably fairly secure from remote unauthorized access right now.

Given that I’m American, I would put the *arr stack behind a dedicated VPN container like gluetun and set Gluetun up using a “no logs” VPN.

For remote access, Tailscale can probably get around that double NAT. If you have it on your devices as well as your server, you won’t necessarily need to expose anything publicly.

If that’s not an option, you could set up an external VPS to run a reverse proxy (Caddy perhaps) and use the Tailscale connection to connect the VPS to your home server. There are fully self hosted ways to do this (Headscale comes to mind), but Tailscale is how I personally would solve this.

They are, among every thing else tobacco related.

They are, to the tobacco industry, what TTI is to power tools. Among the companies they own are Philip Morris (Cigarettes, Cigars and pipe tobacco), US Smokeless (dip, snuff and whatnot), and NJOY (vaping).

Don’t know about booze, bullets and bread, but there does seem to be alot of folks taking up smoking again. Altria stock has shot up like a rocket over the last 12 months.

Most law enforcement in my area already does use a form of encrypted coms. Have been for the last 25 years. As for my opinion on it, I can see both sides.

On the one hand, police com traffic often contains details about people’s most painful or vulnerable moments. On the other hand, there has been a real problem with law enforcement conduct for some time and the darkness that encrypted com traffic allows for some real shady shit to go down unnoticed. It’s the exact same arguments, for and against, for civilian use of encryption.

In the case of police in my local area, the com traffic is supposed to be recorded and made available on request. Never tried going after it, though.

They load. I have to specify http:// to get it to work though.

Fair. Shame the joke ain’t funny though. Personally, could use a good laugh right now.

Somehow, I don’t thiink that is what caused them to start laughing at us.

Person investing account got drained during my last family emergency, so none.

401k? Haven’t checked, but probably about 15% since the last time I checked on it, right around the time Trump took office. Probably lost around 2% over the last 12 months based on the S&P 500. Looks like I’m probably still up somewhere between 50 and 90% since I started with my current employer.

Advice? Don’t panic sell. Odds are pretty good the market will be back up eventually.

If you’ve the spare cash handy now might be a good time to invest in individual companies with a solid track record of paying out dividends. I generally aim for dividend yields in the 5 to 10% range, but there might be some good bargains right now with higher yields. Just make sure they haven’t announced that they are suspending dividends or going out of business or something.

I’ve never done it myself but this may be what you’re looking for.