Buelldozer

Tech Aura. If you have it you understand. If you don’t then you watch in awed frustration as the computer that refused to work 10 seconds ago suddenly starts behaving when I.T. touches it. As an aside you know your I.T. are real wizards when stuff starts working just because they walked in the room or answered the phone. :)

I’m so old that when I started there wasn’t any choice. It was command line or go outside!

just so we can give everything a public address

Giving everything a public address was the original intent! NAT didn’t even exist prior to '94 and it was (and is) a massive kludge.

I’m interested in what you’re thinking with this.

But I am curious to hear why it is specific to US politics.

You’ve already gotten the biggest reason but another one to consider is that there are other large countries trying to force the world to become multi-polar. Those countries spend a LOT of time, effort, and money making sure that every possible negative aspect of American politics and culture is brought to light as much as possible.

The Russian troll farms and China’s 50 cent army don’t sleep. They’re always active and always looking to push negative coverage of the United States. They simply won’t allow a focus shift because they are paid to keep that spotlight shining bright at all times.

Shit, I want news to be boring again.

The news has been full of wars, drugs, and domestic unrest since at least the 60s. In the 70s we added rank political malfeasance and conspiracy theories and here in the 2020s its more of the same. The big difference makers are the 24 hours news cycle and the rise of social media.

If you limit your social media time and stay off aggregators like Lemmy and Reddit you’ll find that it’s possible to (mostly) go back to the way it was.

As an American I too am oversaturated with US politics. It’s been this way for a decade now and I fear its never going to end.

Cloudflare has a ton of services in their “free” tier and there’s a lot of confusion in here because people toss around “Cloudflare” without specifying which service they are actually talking about.

If you are using Cloudflared (notice the d) with your own LE Cert then you are probably fine.

The term VPN is pure marketing bs. What is called VPN today used to be called Proxy Server.

Perhaps if you are only talking about the consumer level stuff advertised on TV. Otherwise I can assure you that “Virtual Private Networks” are a real thing that have absolutely nothing to do with Proxy Servers.

On down the comment chain you mention "…our computers would not see each other and would not be able to connect to each other via that service. " as some kind of test of whether a thing is a VPN or Proxy Service but what you’re missing is that this is a completely common and advisable configuration for companies. In fact Zero Trust essentially demands configurations like this. When Bob from Marketing fires up his VPN to the Corporate Office he doesn’t need access to every server and desktop there nor does his laptop need to be able to access the laptops of other VPN users. They get access to what they need and nothing more.

Hell the ability to access the internet via the tunnel, called Split Tunneling, is also controllable.

It’s that ability to control where the tunnel terminates that allows consumer VPNs, like Proton, to be used the way they are.

So while private individuals absolutely do use VPNs as an ersatz replacement for Proxy Servers they are nowhere near the whole use case for VPNs.

Surprisingly the rear axle is driven! I had to look this thing up to find out WTF it was.

https://www.soflocustom.com/inventory/custom-lifted-apocalypse-hellfire-1c6pjtag4tl152463/

Impractical as heck but cool looking.

That dedication is how you know they actually use Slackware.

Same here.

Why are you not using the shiny new sudo-rs? You some kind of luddite? Get with the times Grandpa!

You can blame Reagan for a lot of things but not this and frankly even if it somehow was all his fault the Clinton Administration could have undone it.

The economy was already in trouble by the end of Lyndon Johnson’s final term in 1969. The Nixon Administration implemented some large changes trying to fix it but was unsuccessful. The Carter Administration also tried with very limited success. It wasn’t until the 1st Rise of Tech in the 80s during the Reagan Administration that things managed to get moving again. The Clinton Administration caught a lucky break with the 2nd Rise of Tech in the 90s so the streak got extended to right about 2001.

The amusing part is that Johnson, Nixon, and Carter bear no blame for the economic woes while Reagan and Clinton deserve no credit for the economic successes. They just happened to be the guy in the Oval when things happened.

Its a good chunk of the reason that everyone from Wall Street to the US Federal Government is trying so damn hard to make AI happen. They want a 3rd Rise of Tech, or something like it, in order to re-float the economy.

For example, I’ve noticed that some websites start throwing captchas at me or even just straight-up refuse to load with 403: unauthorized errors because I have my router set up to load-balance across two Internet connections. (At least, that’s my guess as to why it’s happening.)

I maintain several multi-wan commercial setups and they don’t have this problem. I obviously don’t know what your setup is but I’d guess something is wrong with how its handling flows / connections. Once a connection is established between your edge and an internet resource that flow should remain “stuck” to whatever wan port it started with and it sounds like that isn’t happening.

As an American I fully agree. I’ve completely had it with our politics infesting everything, everywhere, all the time. For everyone’s sanity it needs to stop. More communities need to have and enforce a “No US Politics” rule. No Trump, no Elon, no AOC, no Bernie, no State Senator from bumblefuck Alabama or Los Angeles, California. None of it. Just.Fucking.Stop.Already.

but breaking down what’s different I can’t pin anything concrete down.

One big difference is scale. The 2000s Internet was primarily centered around single(ish) interest forums with relatively low user counts. The entire Lemmy-verse, which is itself quite tiny in 2025, is still WAY larger than nearly any of the 2000s era forums ever were.

Another other big difference is why the user base is online. The majority of them aren’t participating to discuss a shared interest anymore, they are doing it for general entertainment or to earn money.

Those two things explain nearly all of the change. Way more users congregated into a handful of websites with many of them, including the sites, attempting to get rich doing it.

The 2000s web was a much smaller number of users spread across a zillion websites / forums with nearly all of the users and site operators doing it without money as a motivator.

MySpace was social media and had none of the toxicity.

Usenet was Social Media and it had allllll the toxicity.

Try reading MY comment. You are talking about a central element of the movie GATTACA from 1997. I know it’s old and many younger people haven’t seen it so I provided a link to the Wikipedia article about the film.

This issue was widely discussed, at least in American society, almost 30 years ago. The film is still heavily referenced in any discussion involving bio-ethics and genetic manipulation.