Why should Instagram, a FREE social networking site where you share pictures and videos be a utility?! There are countless ways to accomplish the same thing, including email and text, both of which are also (thankfully) not utilities.
Some people don't care for Realtek nics, you can spend more to get Intel if you want. You could put more ram, or storage, or whatever if you're going to do more than routing. Ryzen might be nicer, but they don't have a cheap CPU with integrated graphics right now, and it's not worth paying $100 more to get one for a router, IMHO. If you can find a motherboard with IPMI for cheap, that'd be nice, but I can't, so I just use a spare monitor and keyboard when I need to.
There's small x86 router boards around, and they're cool, but if anything goes wrong, your options are limited. If anything in this fails, you can get the part replaced at your local computer store, even if that's BestBuy.
I typically use whatever I have laying around. Right now I've gone atypical since I currently have a 10 gbps symmetric connection and my leftover hardware isn't quite fast enough to route it.
Get a mini x86 device as a wired router on which you can run any number of OSes (openwrt, debian, *sense etc.) and a separate AP (ruckus unleashed devices work well).
I was getting hand fatigue from my laptop keyboard and decided to look into split keyboards. I tried a variety of Kinesis keyboards but I didn't like the build quality or inconsistency in features between models. I ended up settling with the Mistel MD770 which is a compact split keyboard in a traditional QWERTY layout. I found that was all that was really needed. I still use my laptop a ton, but I switch it up just enough with the split one to keep fatigue at bay. This goes the same for using a trackball with my left hand and a mouse with my right.
At the end of the day the solution for me is to move in different ways and to build strength to combat fatigue. The trouble to adapt to Dvorak or curved, exceptionally ergonomic layouts isn't worth it for me, nor is the cost.
I do wish it was a little better in layout, but it's not too bad. I have been impressed with it so far for the price. My biggest gripe is I wish the effort for flashy RGB lights went into key lighting instead. I still hunt and peck sometimes at night.
TLDR: Capitalism is a form of government historically and in the present. Even if it was not (as suggested by right-wing libertarians like Ayn Randt), anarchism stands against all power over others (read authority/domination/privilege/exploitation) not just government.
"Property is theft" is a famous quote by Proudhon [0], who was the first person to coin the term "anarchist" to describe a desire for Freedom & Equality as complementary goals which should never be opposed. By this, he means that profit is always derived from someone else's exploitation downstream: for example, as computer people, even by working "ethical" jobs, we still widely profit from the exploitation of miners and factory workers in the Global South who produce our devices, and from the pollution and climate change (that also mostly affects the Global South) derived from that. It's also worth noting, as we've seen at the height of the COVID lockdowns, that the people the most essential to society (food/health, logistics, maintenance/construction workers) are also those who get the smallest share of the pie.
Private property is the State religion that makes it possible to have homeless people yet millions of empty dwellings, and that core tenet of capitalism is enforced by the Nation State and its police/military forces [1]. This, despite the fact that many jurisdiction (including the law in France since the liberation in 1945) explicitly allows authorities to requisition empty dwellings to prevent civil disorder ("trouble à l'ordre public"). Capitalism relies on early indoctrination (via childhood education) and a great amount of physical force/threats in order to perpetuate itself. Why do we have to pay to live? Because if you don't pay rent, some psychopaths with guns are gonna knock down your door and kick you out.
Would there be equality without a centralized government? Sure, some influential person could employ a militia (as already happens despite our having a central police [2]), but:
- the scale of that would be fairly limited to crush popular unrest, compared to a Nation State's forces
- without a central State to indoctrinate since childhood (preparing us for competition in a cruel world) and ensure millions of people live in misery (and have to take the job) it would be harder to mount such schemes
- the incentives would be more balanced: if we can live decently and quietly (as most people desire), what interest would i have to attack someone else's community for a corrupt overlord?
- power would be more balanced: in many parts of the world (including France), the State has a legal monopoly on justified violence which makes community vulnerable by not having a right to arm and defend themselves
Both outcomes are possible if we abolish the State from one day to the next (anarcho-capitalism and anarcho-communism). However, given the history of capitalism and the sheer amount of national force it took to set that up (eg. armies colonizing foreign countries, public schools to teach the young to fuck other people before they fuck you and that "copying is cheating"), i would argue that tearing down such centralized structures may bring us closer to our tendencies for empathy and mutual aid which are common throughout animal societies. [3]
Overall, anarchism is focused on distribution of power, responsibilities, and resources: in society at large, in the family, in the workplace, in interpersonal relationships... It's not focused on "rights" as a legal construct but on the practical power you can yield as an individual. Sure, in a capitalist society we are all "free" to own a castle just like we are all "free" to get decent healthcare: but if we aren't given the practical means to achieve this "right", it's entirely meaningless.
Or, as Bakunin put it: "liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.”
To finally answer your question, i'm not morally opposed to making a profit in this profit-driven society in order to survive. I'm also not morally opposed to cooperatives making a profit in order to build a parallel economy. What matters to me is the next step: how to build a society based on needs and desires, not profit. Or, as the old anarchist saying goes: "To each according to their needs, from each according to their capacity".
On a high-level, you need money because everybody else needs money: the carpenter needs to pay the peasant, who needs to pay the plumber, who needs to pay the baker... Workers cooperatives, when they have a sense of revolutionary purpose [4], can be a trojan horse that extracts money form our overlords in order to build material autonomy that can lead to the irrelevance of profit. Money is an abstract layer of indirection, and at each step leaks into the pockets of the owners.
Having lived for quite a while in communities where money is irrelevant [5], I personally feel that in order to achieve our goals, it's much more efficient to base the discussion on actual needs and how to build concrete autonomy [6] rather than center the talk about monetary goals in which we can loose sight of what we were trying to accomplish in the first place.
I hope to have answered your question.
[0] If you're interested in cooperative economy and don't read what he has to say about women and the jews, his writings are sound. Fortunately the more recent anarchist movement (since the last quarter of the 19th century) has evolved to be fundamentally incompatible with misogyny and racist sentiment and to be on the frontlines against such power structures (see for example the rise of anarcha-feminism since the 1930s).
[1] The military is not just a construct against foreign invasion, as seen throughout the history of the workers emancipation movement and the many times armies have been called to bloodily suppress strikes and other forms of popular uprising. Although since the second half of the 20th century, modern Nation States have developed "counter-insurgency" techniques in which the military becomes a last resort, and focus is placed on both propaganda and cooptation on one hand, and more vicious political repression on the other hand (targeted assassinations, legal proceedings, mutilation by police forces, etc).
[2] In the squatting scene, that's not unheard of. Bigger landlords often have ties to different strains of mafia. In other spheres of life, you could probably read about Pinkerton (the history as well as modern occurrences such as Amazon's anti-union campaign), about the Coca-Cola murders in South America, or about companies such as Ikea mounting their own intelligence agency.
[3] See also the recent HN threads about Kropotkin and his studies on mutual aid.
[4] Unlike recent straits of workers coops who have been coopted by capitalism (so-called social economy) which is only concerned about working conditions and not about broader social questions.
[5] We do use money to interface with some segments of society, but in a squat/Commune you can as an individual live without money if you don't have any, and still find purpose and access to resources. Also worth noting, some interactions with neighboring structures is not necessarily based on money: it's not uncommon for a local market/bakery to give away "dying" foods, for neighbors to help out one another on construction work, etc.
[6] Autonomy is not independence. Noone is truly independent, and autonomy accepts and accounts for inter-dependence relationships.
I was worried by the size of this reply that it was some kind of copy-pasta at first. That doesn't seem the case. I am genuinely interested in digesting this and giving you a thoughtful reply, but it will take some time.
I solved this problem with dim lamps and no other lights. When the sun goes down my natural light goes away, and the lamps are just the right brightness. Much easier and no fiddling with automation.
I feel this way as well. In fact every time I have tried to remember the "most beautiful equation" I had to think of it in the context of the unit circle and work it out by assigning pi to x. Otherwise I don't get any wow out of it.
I agree with you for the most part. I can see the appeal for flipping certain switches, like something I tend to turn on/off at the same time everyday. Otherwise I try to simply have less things to turn on/off!
Sure, the expanded but still measly unemployment insurance (the other UI :)) along with one-off pandemic checks is much less than an 1000/month UBI, and yet turned what was ready to be to a far worse recession than the 2009 one until something we quickly bounced back from, got higher real wages for the bottom 50% (or so), and got a bunch of a healthy strikes.
We truly made lemonade out of life's lemons, turning 2020 and 2021 into better years than 2019 or poorer Americans.
It's beautiful that this happened, and yet it's super frustrating had we done the same thing in 2010 or so, we could have prevented much of the lousy growth and other malaise of the past decade.
So yes, pretty dramatic efffect from just a little bit of cash printed into the right hands. (As opposed to regular monetary policy which is far more complicated in its effects, and doesn't seem to work very well at all.)
