Imnebuddy

The FFmpeg team is pretty based: https://xcancel.com/FFmpeg/status/1775178803129602500

I appreciate they know the value of their work and criticize companies for their ridiculous exploitation and underpayment of open source devs, as well as claiming open source libraries as their own work.

Creating a mesh would make sense in your instance. I recommend following this video.

The Great Firewall serves as a protectionist policy to encourage Chinese citizens to use China's own platforms to help build China's technological sovereignty while also filtering out a lot of reactionary crap. The Chinese people use VPNs to access YouTube and such all the time. I recommend watching Ben Norton's video on his experience living in China as he does talk about the Great Firewall and its purpose.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/07/10/why-are-there-no-slums-in-china/

What is the “hukou” system and what does it have to do with socialism?

One unique characteristic of China’s urbanization process is that, although policies encouraged migration to cities for industrial and service jobs, rural residents never lost their access to land in the countryside. In the 1950s, the Communist Party of China (CPC) led a nationwide land reform process, abolishing private land ownership and transforming it into collective ownership. During the economic reform period, beginning in 1978, a “Household Responsibility System” (家庭联产承包责任制 jiātíng lián chǎn chéngbāo zérèn zhì) was created, which reallocated rural agricultural land into the hands of individual households. Though agricultural production was deeply impacted, collective land ownership remained and land was never privatized.

Today, China has one of the highest homeownership rates in the world, surpassing 90 percent, and this includes the millions of migrant workers who rent homes in other cities. This means that when encountering economic troubles, such as unemployment, urban migrant workers can return to their hometowns, where they own a home, can engage in agricultural production, and search for work locally. This structural buffer plays a critical role in absorbing the impacts of major economic and social crises. For example, during the 2008 global financial crisis, China’s export-oriented economy, especially of manufactured goods, was severely hit, causing about 30 million migrant workers to lose their jobs. Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when service and manufacturing jobs were seriously impacted, many migrant workers returned to their homes and land in the countryside.

Beyond land reform, a system was created to manage the mass migration of people from the countryside to the cities, to ensure that the movement of people aligned with the national planning needs of such a populous country. Though China has had some form of migration restriction for over 2,000 years, in the late 1950s, the country established a new “household registration system” (户口 or hùkǒu) to regulate rural-to-urban migration. Every Chinese person has an assigned urban or rural hukou status that grants them access to social welfare benefits (subsidized public housing, education, health care, pension, and unemployment insurance, etc.) in their hometown, but which are restricted in the cities they move to for work. While reformation of the hukou system is ongoing, the lack of urban hukou status forces many migrant parents to spend long periods away from their families and they must leave their children in their grandparents’ care in their hometowns, referred to as “left-behind children” (留守儿童 liúshǒu értóng). Though the number has been decreasing over the years, there are still an estimated seven million children in this situation. Today, 65.22 percent of China’s population lives in cities, but only 45.4 percent have urban hukou. Although this system deterred the creation of large urban slums, it also reinforced serious inequities of social welfare between urban and rural areas, and between residents within a city based on their hukou status.

https://archive.ph/aghlG

In 2024, home ownership in China is 93%, where in the US it is 65%.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/07/10/why-are-there-no-slums-in-china/

How does the Chinese government deal with homelessness?

In the early 2000s, the issues of residential status, rights of migrant workers, and treatment of urban homeless people became a national matter. In 2003, the State Council – the highest executive organ of state power – issued the “Measures for the Rescue and Management of Itinerant and Homeless in Urban Areas”. The new regulation created urban relief stations providing food rations and temporary shelters, abolished the mandatory detention system of people without hukou status or housing, and placed the responsibility on the local authorities for finding housing for homeless people in their hometowns.

Under these measures, cities like Shanghai have set up relief stations for homeless people. When public security – the local police – and urban management officials encounter homeless people, they must assist them in accessing nearby relief stations. All costs are covered by the city’s fiscal budget. For example, the relief management station in Putuo District (with the fourth lowest per capita GDP of Shanghai’s 16 districts and a resident population of 1.24 million), provided shelter and relief to an average of 24.3 homeless people a month from June 2022 to April 2023, which could include repeated cases.

Relief stations provide homeless people with food and basic accommodations, help those who are seriously ill access healthcare, assist them to return to the locations of their household registration by contacting their relatives or the local government, and arrange free transportation home when needed.

Upon returning home, the local county-level government is responsible to help the homeless people, including contacting relatives for care and finding local employment. For a very small number of people who are elderly, have disabilities, or do not have relatives nor the ability to work, the local township people’s government, or the Party-run street office, will provide national support for them in accordance with the “method of providing for extremely impoverished persons”, which is stipulated in the 2014 “Interim Measures for Social Assistance”. The content of the support includes providing basic living conditions, giving care to impoverished individuals who cannot take care of themselves, providing treatment for diseases, and handling funeral affairs, etc.

This series of relief management measures ensure that administrative law enforcement personnel in the city do not simply expel homeless people from the city, but must guarantee that they receive proper assistance, in terms of housing, work, and support systems.

I was able to get some Linksys E8450 routers for cheap (~$40 each) on eBay a couple years ago, but they are more expensive atm (but $70 each, which is cheaper than a lot of other options). They require a bit of work to get OpenWRT installed, but it's not bad once the work is done (I have received nearly 400 Mb/s when I am close to the wireless connection sometimes, which is what my internet is capped at). I have used them as a mesh with one as a main gateway and the rest as access points with additional Ethernet ports. They do have the OKD issue fixed now, too, and they're also Wi-Fi 6. I'm looking into getting a Banana Pi BPI-R3 or R4, though I am not sure how well they are with mesh specifically, but have seen a few forum threads of people having some issues with mesh on these specific routers. I hope to switch to fast roaming (wired backhaul) eventually.

As long as we don't have nuclear war and America suffers from dedollarization, I believe the world will do much better. Death to Amerikkka and its hegemony.

"I have never really understood exactly what a 'liberal' is, since I have heard 'liberals' express every conceivable opinion on every conceivable subject. As far as I can tell, you have the extreme right, who are fascist racist capitalist dogs like Ronald Reagan, who come right out and let you know where they're coming from. And on the opposite end, you have the left, who are supposed to be committed to justice, equality, and human rights. And somewhere between those two points is the liberal.

As far as I'm concerned, 'liberal' is the most meaningless word in the dictionary. History has shown me that as long as some white middle-class people can live high on the hog, take vacations to Europe, send their children to private schools, and reap the benefits of their white skin privilege, then they are 'liberal'. But when times get hard and money gets tight, they pull off that liberal mask and you think you're talking to Adolf Hitler. They feel sorry for the so-called underprivileged just as long as they can maintain their own privileges."

---Assata: An Autobiography

The center one is the same as the top right. I think the center is supposed to say "nothing works, I'm not sure why" to match the pattern with the rest.

https://github.com/exander77/proton-bridge-android

There is a way to do it locally on an Android device using Termux.

I hope there will be native Linux support, even if it comes a few years after it is released. CrossCode is supported on various platforms, and it even has a web version for its demo.