Regular (monthly) investments are available to nearly everyone. Investing is perhaps even easier- no points to pay with mortgage and investments are liquid and highly portable.
Yea, but you can't live in your annunity fund. With a home, can rent it out. You can use it to start a home business. You can help out family members in need. You can work on your vechicle on the driveway. (Just read a housing rental agreement. A 42 page agreement. The agreement was so restrictive, the renters would only be able to sleep in the over-priced, code ridden, chit box. They literally had a clause in the lease that restricted opening the hood of your vechicle for more than 10 minutes in their carport. No quick trouble shooting on that old vechicle. You are forced to roll it on the street, and then risk a municipal ticket?
I still think a house is a good investment for most poor, and middle class people.
I'm so dissalusioned, at this point in my life; I would just like to see areas where you can pitch a tent, without the fear of racking up tickets.
I hate to be that guy, but I forsee a lot more homeless in the near future. I'm just asking for a few fields, and some restrooms. A safe place where people could go after an deviating life event--like a nervous breakdown, or the loss of a key job. A place where you could save a few bucks, so you could get back into the system.
>In the end - apparently average Joe can use Linux today for browsing internet, viewing pdfs and doing Libre Office stuff just as well as on any other operating system (Windows, OS X)
Certainly true. Setting up friends and family helps them understand it's easier than they may believe. I find that most people have a view of Linux that is based on what Linux was a number of years back.
There are many (dozens) distributions that are easy to use and relatively stable. When I first had an interest in Linux I set aside some time and invested it to transition into Linux. It ended up taking less time and being easier than I thought it would be. I offer anyone with an interest in Linux to help them set-up Linux on any system they desire, unfortunately, most people want an out of the box system.
A couple thoughts:
It does get a fair amount of media coverage. John Oliver did a segment on it, it has multiple NYTimes articles, big articles in the Washington Post and the New Yorker, and all the usual places. It's not really "unknown" unless you don't read the news much.
I feel like it's not talked about much outside of the media, however. We talk about burglary a lot. We lock things up and hide valuables in cars. But civil forfeiture just doesn't come up too often in daily life for most people.
Why are people complacent about it? For the same reasons they're complacent about mandatory minimum sentencing. The victims are disproportionately black and hispanic. Whether or not they're actually engaging in illegal activity, they often have ties to drugs/prostitution -- perhaps through a relative, roommate, friend or colleague. The victims may also be poor (the population most likely to be unbanked and, ironically, have large amounts of cash around). They're often profiled to be people unlikely to go out and get a lawyer or navigate the system to get their property back.
Thanks for the perspective, you made some good points.
I was surprised to see there was a move towards forfeiture reform and then it swings back to business as usual. Even more surprised that, "it's not talked about much outside of the media."
Perhaps it's just one of those things we think will 'never effect' us and if it does there is not much you can do if you end up in a forfeiture situation.
Do most people setting up a Chromebook to run on Linux wipe ChromeOS or use crouton?
If anyone has had luck with a fully functioning non/ChromeOS let me know what distribution you prefer. Currently I am also considering GalliumOS / NayuOS.
I've read some mixed reviews about using crouton and was curious if it's better to use crouton or to install/flash Linux?
It seems as though crouton could break with ChromeOS updates.
I have mine dual booted with arch and it works pretty well. If I'm just passively browsing I usually go to chromeos, anything else I reboot into arch (I figured that'd be annoying at first, but with how quickly both OSes boot its not at all an issue.) They have a pretty extensive guide on the arch wiki as well as device specific guides which could be helpful with other distros too:
To get Linux Mint's Debian Edition running on a chromebox. I went that direction because I'm used to Debian on servers, but Mint does a fair amount of work to get a functional/nice desktop.
I did upgrade the Chromebox to 8GB memory and a 128GB SSD. I also had to upgrade the kernel to get a video driver that was stable on the built-in Intel HD graphics.
I've used crouton as my main OS before. It was a while ago but I was running Ubuntu 12.10.
Crouton works just fine with ChromeOS updates it doesn't break anything. Personally I ran into some performance issues as well as native hardware compatibility issues (eg you can only adjust volume in ChromeOS.)you also might not enjoy having to boot ChromeOS before you can get to your Linux environment.
For making a fully functioning desktop, Gallium looks the most promising for your needs.
I wiped and installed Linux directly. Booting was annoying because it always wanted to recover. Then one day it failed to sleep, ran the battery dos, and lost the "legacy boot" setting leaving me with only the option to recover, wiping my system.
I recovered ChromeOS and gave the machine away.
If I had to use Chromebook hardware, I'd use crouton.
Prohibition has many causes. The international treaty / 'Single Convention' was the first international treaty to prohibit cannabis.
The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 is an international treaty to prohibit production and supply of specific (nominally narcotic) drugs and of drugs with similar effects except under licence for specific purposes, such as medical treatment and research. As noted below, its major effects included updating the Paris Convention of 13 July 1931 to include the vast number of synthetic opioids invented in the intervening thirty years and a mechanism for more easily including new ones.
I am a Linux user and am considering trying BSD. What would be the best entry point for BSD?
Is UbuntuBSD a good option to start with?
I have Thinkpad T400.
Thinkpads are generally well supported. UbuntuBSD is a very new project and it probably lacks some polish that you will find on other BSDs.
I've used both FreeBSD and OpenBSD and for me the split really depends on what you're after. Recently though, I've been using OpenBSD mostly. The install is dead simple (assuming you're not after complicated multi boot setups which require some fiddling). It may look arcane as it's just a script with no fancy GUI bangs but it get the job done very well.
I haven't installed FreeBSD recently, so I wouldn't be able to compare unfortunately.
In any case, both projects have extensive documentation that is a couple of levels above your average Linux distro doc. Make sure you consult it before hitting IRC / mailing lists with questions and you'll be fine.
Each BSD is often associated with a specific use case but I've found that they work just fine for desktop usage.
Every time I get ready to make a bootable USB for BSD I somehow get hung up on exactly what to do. One thing about Linux that is great is the relative ease of setting up bootable iso. Could you point me to some sort of tutorial that could speed up my transition from Linux to BSD?
Are you looking for a bootable iso to have a live system to play with, or just prepare the install media ?
If it's for a live system, I'd recommend setting up a VM on your current host, and do the install in there.
For the install media, the OpenBSD FAQ lays it all out [1]. As the OS supports multiple platforms, there is information that you do not need (sparc, sparc64, ...). To install on amd64 from a bootable USB, download the installXX.fs from a mirror (where XX is the version), verify the checksums and run :
dd if=installXX.fs of=/dev/sdX bs=1M
Beware of tutorials -- very often, they are valid for a given version of OpenBSD and may fall out of date.
Section 9 from the OpenBSD FAQ is called "Migrating to OpenBSD", so I guess it's a good start.
If you don't want to read the whole FAQ first, then read just enough to install the base system. When you've achieved that, read the afterboot and packages manpages, and again enough of the FAQ to proceed with the other tasks you want to do (configure networking, the firewall, ...).
As this is a laptop, PC-BSD could be a good choice which is FreeBSD tuned to desktop usage. Plain FreeBSD is also not a bad choice. The other major BSDs have clear niches while FreeBSD is probably the best supported, most popular and is strong in the broadest range of areas. I wouldn't bother with something obscure like Ubuntu BSD unless you're actually keen to help out with improving it. I'd find the opposite more interesting: some sort of BSD/Linux.
