NaibofTabr

Would this mini pc be a good homeserver

For what purpose?

umm…

Yeah their whole shtick has been mimicking American corporatism et al since before the 80s. Aint working out for them.

There absolutely was an effort in Japanese businesses to imitate American businesses in the 1980s, but it was also very much a two-way street and it’s important to keep this in mind. Some of the toxic work culture elements that exist in the US corporate world today were imported. Also keep in mind that learning about other businesses was more difficult at the time because the Internet wasn’t a thing yet. Computers were barely getting local proprietary networks in very few, leading-edge businesses. If you wanted to learn about business operarions in another country you’d have to buy physical media (newspapers, industry journals, commentary books) or visit in person. It was slow and expensive.

Ultimately a lot of what you’re referring to tracks back to Theory Z which was also called “Japanese Management”.

In fact there has been a lot of cultural crosstalk between Japan and the US, going back a long time. For instance, baseball

Baseball was introduced to Japan in 1859 and is Japan’s most popular participatory and spectator sport. […]

The Japanese government appointed American oyatoi in order to start a state-inspired modernization process. This involved the education ministry, who made baseball accessible to children by integrating the sport into the physical education curriculum. Japanese students, who returned from studying in the United States captivated by the sport, took government positions. Clubs and private teams such as the Shinbashi Athletic Club, along with high school and college teams, commenced the baseball infrastructure.

When the digital electronics revolution came in the 1970s, Japan was both a competitor and a partner for the US. In the 1980s Japan’s economy rivaled the US. Frankly, a lot of it did in fact “work out” for them, though it’s difficult to separate the economic success from the electronics industry boom (how much of the rapid development of electronics was dependent on the corporate culture that had developed during the previous decade? how much of the business success was a result of the demand for the electronics products? how much of the demand was created internally by the businesses themselves? how would you even go about drawing lines between them?). The exploding popularity of video games (a side effect of the electronics revolution) resulted in a massive cultural export from Japan to the rest of the world, including the US.

And really the rabit hole goes way deeper. I highly recommend this video: Kawaii: Anime, Propaganda, and Soft Power Politics. by Moon Channel

So what you said is true, technically, but it is really a half-truth which projects the idea that the relationship was somehow one-sided, when in reality it was very much not.

And don’t you worry, the AI, the advertising partners and anyone who pays for data access can still see all of it anyway.

There’s nothing functionally communist about the government of China.

Encrypting the connection is good, it means that no one should be able capture the data and read it - but my concern is more about the holes in the network boundary you have to create to establish the connection.

My point of view is, that’s not something you want happening automatically, unless you manually configured it to do that yourself and you know exactly how it works, what it connects to and how it authenticates (and preferably have some kind of inbound/outbound traffic monitoring for that connection).

Ah, just one question - is your current Syncthing use internal to your home network, or does it sync remotely?

Because if you’re just having your mobile devices sync files when they get on your home wifi, it’s reasonably safe for that to be fire-and-forget, but if you’re syncing from public networks into private that really should require some more specific configuration and active control.

My main reasons are sailing the high seas

If this is the goal, then you need to concern yourself with your network first and the computer/server second. You need as much operational control over your home network as you can manage, you need to put this traffic in a separate tunnel from all of your normal network traffic and have it pop up on the public network from a different location. You need to own the modem that links you to your provider’s network, and the router that is the entry/exit point for your network. You need to segregate the thing doing the sailing on its own network segment that doesn’t have direct access to any of your other devices. You can not use the combo modem/router gateway device provided by your ISP. You need to plan your internal network intentionally and understand how, when, and why each device transmits on the network. You should understand your firewall configuration (on your network boundary, not on your PC). You should also get PiHole up and running and start dropping unwanted inbound and outbound traffic.

OpSec first.

In comparison with other city-builders Wandering Village isn’t very deep. There isn’t much in the way of complex systems. The art is nice though and it’s fairly relaxing to play.

Timberborn is a lot more involved and there is a lot more depth to population management and economics, and it’s pretty fun when you get to the level of reshaping the ground to suit your purposes. My favorite challenge is to arrange to keep the whole map green through a drought.

Wandering Village is more like a story or adventure game with city-builder mechanics, so it kind of needs a proper narrative arc.

I played this through shortly after the release and it is really enjoyable, but once you’ve built and stabilized your town and used all the space there’s nothing else to do. You can keep walking through the world but it’s just an endless series of repeat biomes and there’s no more growth potential so none of the side quests are of any interest.

Adding some endgame content might really help this.

There was no period without warfare or economic stability in Palestine.

I mean… there was time to build a bunch of modern residential buildings, hospitals and businesses (the things Israel is currently blowing up and bulldozing) and for people to live their lives without having to be armed 24/7. It literally has not been open warfare (at least for a little while), and yes there was some economic stability, enough for local Palestinian businesses to develop, for a semi-functional civilian government to form, and for civil services like hospitals and schools to be established. It hasn’t just been a warzone for 100 years.

The uber wealthy have set the conditions for conflict based entirely upon greed.

Same as it ever was…

Palestine has been in perpetual war for sovreignty since the end of WWII.

Yup. Even longer, actually: Timeline of intercommunal conflict in Mandatory Palestine

1881

The first wave of Jews arrive in Ottoman Syria in the First Aliyah after Zionism itself began some time in the 1850s

Eventually leading to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and ongoing conflict

Basically the violence has been constant, with occasional breaks to reload.

The Pax Americana is probably responsible for the relative stability of the '90s and '00s - there was still violence, car bombings and rocket attacks &etc, but not open warfare. That’s obviously ending now.

My guess is that the period without warfare allowed Palestine to develop some economic stability and power of its own, which Israel perceived as a long-term threat. Combine that fear with greed and expansionism and you get the current attempt to erase Palestine.

Aside from that, it also raises some interesting questions about sovereignty of spacecraft if there’s not a lot to stop an adversary from rendezvousing with the satellite to hijack, sabotage, or exfiltrate data.

Definitely a possibility

If you wanted to disable it, all you’d have to do is tow it somewhere that it’s own antennae couldn’t maintain communication with ground stations.

If you got really good with remote-operated orbital rendezvous, you might be able to actually connect to the thing and steal data… but probably it would be easier to just intercept radio traffic.

Getting rid of waste heat is a huge problem in space. Vacuum is a great insulator because there’s no material to conduct heat away from an object.

The idea of space being “cold” has more to with pressure (or lack thereof) rather than temperature, because ideal gas law:

If you suddenly expose a pressurized container full of heated atmosphere to vacuum, you get a massive pressure drop and therefore also a massive temperature drop.

You can’t do this to cool a computer system in space - you would need a constant supply of some fluid or gas that you could just dump into space that would take the heat out with it.

VPNs as a technology might not be illegal but circumventing the firewall certainly is.

Unless you are very vocal and high profile person no one will black bag you in a country of billion people, lol.

This is a bit of a misunderstanding about how things work in an authoritarian system. Sure, you might fly under the radar for awhile, but if you call attention to yourself (say, by getting caught trying to bypass the government firewall) and you are not high-profile, then it is very low-effort to make you disappear. Few will notice, and those that do will stay silent out of fear.

If you are more high-profile you still get black-bagged, you just get released after, with your behavior suitably modified.

Naomi Wu no longer uploads to YouTube.

Depends - how many family members do you have that the PRC might use against you? or who would miss you if the PRC black bagged you?

And there are hundreds if not thousands of them, plus a lot of automated tooling.

futuristic technology

throwing a wrench into the US industry right now is a pretty good deal.

This is the part I don’t really get - they’ve spent decades working to control these resources, and I can’t really see what benefit they get from this that offsets that time and effort.

Manipulating the flow and the prices makes sense. Cutting it off entirely just to participate in a dick-measuring contest with the US really doesn’t make any sense. Nations are already looking at moving their supply chains especially for electronics after all the COVID disruptions. Encouraging those nations to go looking elsewhere for the entire supply chain just loses you business and influence, no matter how much short-term cost you inflict.

This is kind of interesting… China has been working on monopolizing sources of raw materials for awhile now, and putting them on the market cheap so that they become the de facto supplier, making it difficult or impossible for any other sources to be developed.

But… there are other sources of things like lithium and cobalt, it’s just been cheaper to buy it from China so everyone does.

Cutting off the supply will cause some slow-downs and a bit of chaos in the short term but what will happen is local sources will suddenly become worth developing. What this does is effectively burn a big piece of China’s economic power… I wonder what they’re getting out of it right now? The impact won’t last very long.