Randall’s done several about climate change, more back when climate change denial was more widespread

https://xkcd.com/1321/ Cold https://xkcd.com/1379/ 4.5 Degrees https://xkcd.com/1732/ Earth Temperature Timeline https://xkcd.com/2500/ Global Temperature Over My Lifetime

Or just check the tag for “politics” on explainXKCD. Randall’s endorsed political candidates before as well as generally shown a general libertarian and later left-leaning bent

Oh also this one relatively recently was pretty fun

https://xkcd.com/2515/ Vaccine Research

I’m not OP, just a rando chiming in

Blocking VPNs isn’t really possible. You can block known IP ranges but ultimately there’s so many ways to encapsulate and encrypt traffic that no solution is 100%. I have specifically worked at places in which those in management positions are interested in sniffing DNS queries to “see what people are up to on company time” and those happened to also be the employers that were doing sketchy things that may or may not have been legal

I’ve seen a grand total of one influencer make a good argument for a VPN and that was Alan Fisher saying “have you observed your work skirting regulations that they shouldn’t be? Are you potentially reviewing legal materials on your work’s WiFi that your place of work might prefer you didn’t know about? To help avoid retaliation, you might need a VPN such as one from today’s sponsor…”

More like they operate a tollroad to the playground and are concerned about why there’s so many trucks of wood chips costing them much more to maintain the road to the playground. And OP freely admitted they’re taking truckloads of woodchips from the playground.

Except the analogy also doesn’t work because ultimately piracy isn’t taking, it’s just copying and sharing copies. There isn’t really a good analogy without directly describing digital distribution and piracy. Maybe an analogy involving a solar farm and a transmission company? Except that gets into technical details that are just as technical as just explaining it as it is

We are swiftly reaching a time where boycotting companies run by people you disagree with will negatively impact your ability to function. Consider abandoning this type of purchasing in the future.

Oh no please don’t boycott! The current boycotts are actually costing companies money and we can’t have people learning that boycotts can actually work!

Personally, I don’t trust 13th/14th gen chips period. I’m sure I’m overreacting but I’ve simply seen too many dead computers due to Intel’s CPU bugs in last 12 months that no amount of microcode updates will make me feel comfortable selecting one of those processors, especially when it’s my own money on the line

Generally desktop hardware is surprisingly power efficient, especially with lower-midrange components. Right now my home server is running on an ewaste HP Elitedesk.

For software, I’d really go for a config that uses ZFS over EXT4 for the data storage. ZFS is so battle-tested that anything you might find you want or need to fix or change, someone else has already documented the same situation multiple times over. Personally I went with a config like Apalrd’s with using proxmox for a stable host OS with good management and to create the zfs pool, then a container running cockpit for creating and managing the shares.

Currently that server has a 800GB Intel Datacenter SSD for boot and VM storage, and 2x 4TB HDDs in a ZFS mirror for NAS storage, an with a i5-4590 it’s running 6 Minecraft servers via Crafty Controller, Jellyfin, the Samba shares and I’ve spun up other random servers and VMs as desired/needed without trouble. Basically all of the services which run 24/7 are in LXCs because running Debian VMs on my Debian host seems too redundant for my tastes.

LLMs have been trained so heavily on Linux documentation that you can even have it hallucinate a Linux terminal at you!

The “support” most importantly includes security updates. You better bet every hacking group has been working at finding fresh zero days for Windows 10 and is stockpiling them to start hammering any PCs that can’t be upgraded this October