Maoo [none/use name]

Disengage

Removed by mod

Wrong

Wrong

Wrong

Wrong

Wrong

Wrong

Wrong

It’s me. I’m the gadget.

Using a USB device might work well for this! You can do basically exactly what you want but your whole OS is on a USB drive. You’ll get native performance for everything except disk read/write. If you use a fast device with a fast USB interface you might not even notice.

There are a few that are nice.

QEMU-based options work well. Boxes for GNOME uses this.

My backup option is always virtualbox with guest additions installed.

The article suggests they just openly bought materials to produce this stuff lol.

Though it would be cool if they did “steal” it, IP is bullshit and particularly when used to forward unequal trade relationships internationally, depressing wages and creating US-centric systems of control. Using common ideas to create cool new stuff and circumvent US sanctions would be a good thing.

In case the things I’m saying seem alien, international IP rules were set up to favor colonizer nations at the expense of colonized nations, as there is an advantage to maintaining monopoly control over technology when the relationship you want with other countries is purely to extract their labor and natural resources. It is a means by which to prevent the redevelopment of countries ripped apart by colonial activity, as this would threaten domestic profits.

It is also a race against the other impact of protectionist policies, however: preventing that tech export to China is actually going to subsidize China creating its own tech, as they’ll only be able to attain it through domestic production. This is how imperialist powers developed their own industries: the British Empire, for example, forced India to destroy its own fine textiles industry, export cotton, and import British-made textiles. Export and running of textile tech to India was explicitly banned alongside flooding the market with British factory-made textiles.

The US is using the only weapons it knows how to use - ones intended to limit others’ ability to develop - but they will often backfire because China is not in as weak of a position as the countries the US usually bullies and/or tries to destroy.

Why do you want to do this? If it’s just to try out different distributions, I would suggest using per-distro virtual machines or USB drives instead.

The core issue is ignorance and and poor abilities at investigation. School fails so many people. And, societally, most people seem to feel they’re entitled to opinions even if they know nothing or very little about a topic, which helps keep them ignorant and unable to critically investigate topics and sources.

Finally, the “trust in institutions” issue. These institutions should not be trusted, they have been overtaken by capitalism. Healthcare is profit-driven and the tendency is towards poorer science that covers up dangers and inflates benefits. In addition, people have no sense of agency over the state (they’re correct about that), so a feeling of understanding can temporarily substitute that.

The question is what to do about it. Well, individually, you can do very little. You can try to convince people through argumentation, like you mentioned, but this is very difficult. The example of vaccines makes it clear that this is someone that bought into these ideas without critically engaging. They probably did so for a number of reasons, including societally-ingrained hubris, peer pressure, personal experience, personality, politics, and the production value of whatever got to them first. Your task is to sow doubt (ask challenging questions) and try to rebuild from shared understanding.

The best way to combat this, more generally, is not as an individual, but as a member of an active organization that combats all of this at once, and with a plan for how to do so adequately. This would best be a socialist org, as the thing you’re fighting is actually the discursive mass media and education aspects of capitalism. e.g. on COVID’s origins, the common understandings and claims in the West are simplistic and unscientific, and only exist for political reasons, to scapegoat why a given country did so poorly at handling the pandemic, to isolate China in a new cold war. You could become an expert in the science, follow geographic phylogenies and the terminology of epidemiology, but you don’t really need to: you really just need media criticism skills, which is all about politics, economics, and being a big nerd.

Gotta purge the right people

Read Das Kapital Volume I by Karl Marx

Organize with socialists, make use of mutual aid. Provides an IRL version of what you’re seeking here- uou are in no way alone. This is how most people live and it is by systemic design.

There’s a lot of power, and value, in making local irl connections so that when you need help or just to talk to people, you’ll know that you have options. Also, some options take time, so getting on top of them now will pay dividends. Examples include food stamps and subsidized housing. Finally, lefties sometimes like to help each other get better jobs.

Of course I can also suggest ways to live cheaply, but there is a hard limit under this economic system and you might already be there.

Also please feel free to DM if you want to talk about anything.

With chagrin

Lucky ducks