Throwawayaerlei

Is that really a lot in the scheme of things? I don't have CFL backlit LCD TV info handy since they've been supplanted by LEDs, but I looked at Best Buy (a big US seller of these sorts of things) and found a popular $500 65" and their most insane 98" $15,000 Samsung ones, 190 and 360 watts respectively.

I'm old and by my family's standards 65" diagonal would be questionable at best, so I checked in the vicinity of 48", 43" and 50" only gets you down to 120-5 watts. Add probably not very many watts for whatever's supplying the signal and it doesn't sound like a big deal, although of course everything adds up.

Real, intelligent people for customer support (well, the last time I needed any, which was years ago). You are paying for the service and it's not cheap although also not expensive compared to normal things you also need like Internet service (using US prices). GMail is normally "free," you are the product, and customer support and caring about customers is simply not in Google's DNA. Which we can see in too many of their paid services.

The real protection is to get your own domain which Fastmail of course supports, so you can point it at a different email provider if worst comes to worst, like ajross's plausible proposition that:

"[...] I'd put the odds of Fastmail failing entirely as a business rather higher that those of any single user having an unresolvable 2FA glitch with a gmail account. In the world of real data and not anecdata, Big Tech is incredibly reliable."

"not going out and getting better vaccines for narcissistic reasons"

Not narcissism but the loss of face, which also means a loss of power. Which is the only thing Communists care about; compared to that the loss of a few million lives is nothing unless that also brings about a loss of power.

"If by being open and liberal (in the non-political sense) one risks being banned then essentially it's punishment (or the threat of punishment) for defection and the outcome is for everyone to end up being governed by the censors."

Except there's a whole lot of the Fediverse that doesn't work by this "free speech is fascism that must be banned" principle. You can even find huge lists of such nodes in the huge blacklists maintained by this loose community.... And it's quite refreshing to communicate without worrying about every word you say.

It's an outside of the Fediverse problem which therefore cannot escape it, but with solutions that work both outside and inside it.

There are others, Pleroma was explicitly designed to be lightweight for small nodes, written in Elixir and thus running on the battle tested Earlang ecosystem BEAM VM. Also have heard and run across a few instances of Misskey which runs on node.js. Both use Postgres and I see from the install instructions the latter also uses Redis. Have heard of others as well but have no idea at all about them, a search on the above two backends will find you more.

You've also got some choices in front ends, I know Pleroma supports several. I strongly recommend not using Soapbox for a variety of reasons unless you really like its UI.

"I've also seen instances blanket-blocking anything Pleroma, because "all the bad people come from Pleroma". I've even seen it called evil software because it affords more customization of filtering, rewriting, and federation."

And God help you if you use or let your users have the option of using the Soapbox Front End (FE) on top of Pleroma.

You should be careful about such "I'm sure" statements. "Right wing" Fediverse is very tolerant in moderation, that which results in bans, the only big issue is how much, if any pornography to allow and that gets fierce arguments. The big issue users might run into is harassment, but there are fine grained controls that allow you to trivially ignore or block such people going forward.

Other issue which may not matter so much if you're "a fascist capitalist pig" is that your instance will likely be blocked by left wing Fediverse nodes. This can get silly, there are blocklists that often cite as cause nothing more than the software "right wing" nodes use, or in one case written by a particular developer. Too much of the Fediverse is that tribal.

For a concrete example, look at how TERF spinster.xyz federates with "right wing" nodes and is blocked by many left wing ones, including all the ones I could look up just now with a Google search.

I use scare quotes for right wing because many of these sites are politically neutral or thereabouts.

One other thing to factor into this good picture you're making of the situation: at each step in greater transmissibility of variants and sub-variants for Omicron a given isolation or here Zero COVID policy becomes harder. That said, Xi/the CCP/PRC kept it up for almost a year after the first variants of Omicron started getting detected all over the world. Per Wikipedia the first ex-Africa case was in Hong Kong....

Against classic Wuhan it's pretty much accepted the two big PRC vaccines are less effective than the best two Western mRNA ones. This might not play out the same for variants, since these PRC ones are of the inactivated whole virus type, likely expose more proteins to the adaptive immune systems than spike focused ones.

My understanding is that Xi and the CCP he controls simply didn't prepare for this besides administering without mandates the PRC's two major indigenous vaccines which appear to be subpar in general. Although as inactivated whole virus ones in theory they could stand up better to variant mutations by presenting more proteins to our adaptive immune systems than the spike focused ones, see how in early testing Bharat Biotech's Covaxin showed activity against the nucleocapsid protein.

But building capacity in real hospitals or facilities that can do the basics of for medium serious cases that for example require supplemental oxygen? Nothing I've read of, just austere isolation facilities to support Xi's Zero COVID policy. Now we can be sure Xi and company are focusing on managing the fallout from the policy's end that was forced on them, which only tangentially will have anything to do with limiting the population's morbidity and mortality.

I run a desktop workstation with a UPS, its lead acid batteries are not infinite and don't like staying discharged, so at times shutting down quickly and cleanly is very important. The more I hear, the happier I am that I moved to Linux a decade and a half ago, and this general topic is a major reason I'm planning to go back to Debian after using Ubuntu LTS for my last two versions.