litchralee

I'd say the qualities of the average American park leaves much to be desired, when compared to NYC Central Park, San Diego's Balboa Park, or SF's Presidio.

In suburban areas, the municipal park tends to be a monoculture of grass plus maybe a playground, a parking lot, and if lucky, a usable bathroom. Regional parks are often nicer, with amenities like pickleball courts or a BMX park, though asking for benches (not rocks or concrete verges, but actually bench seats) and shade might be a stretch.

My point is that the USA has fewer parks and public squares than it ought to. I don't mean just a place to go jogging or to push a stroller along, but a proper third space where people actively spend time and create value at. Where street vendors congregate because that's also where people congregate. A place that people -- voluntarily, not by necessity, eg a train station but not to catch a train -- would like to be. A destination in its own right, where even tourists will drop by and take in the air, the sights, and the social interactions.

Meanwhile, some parts of the USA actively sabotage their parks, replacing normal park furniture with versions that are actively hostile to homeless people, while alienating anyone that just wants an armrest as they sit down. Other municipalities spend their Parks & Rec funds on the bare minimum of parks, lots that are impractically tiny. Why? Because a public park can be used to exclude registered sex offenders from a neighborhood, leading to the ludicrous situation where whole cities are an exclusion zone. Regardless of one's position on how to punish sex offenses, the denial of housing and basic existence is, at best, counterproductive.

So I reiterate: the USA might have a good quantity of parks, but not exactly good quality of parks. People will socialize online unless they are given actual options to socialize elsewhere. And IRL options would build value locally, whereas online communities only accrue to the benefit of the platforms (eg Facebook, WhatsApp) they run on.

Even with NA (low/non-alcoholic) beverages, it'd be nice to have third places that don't come with an obligation to spend money.

To be clear, I'm not asking for places that ban spending money, but there are third places like parks (eg NYC Central Park) that are destinations in their own right, but one can also spend money there, such as buying stuff and having a picnic on the grass, or bringing board games and meeting up with friends. Or strolling the grounds astride rental e-bikes. Or free yoga.

Where there's an open space, people make use of it. But we don't really have much of that in the USA, that isn't tied up as a parking lot, an open-space preserve (where people shouldn't tred upon to protect wildlife), or are beyond reasonable distances (eg BLM land in the middle of Nevada).

If you're using SLAAC for auto IP assignment, then the resulting EUI-64-based address would be essentially static, based on the premise that your MAC address and local subnet prefix don't change. Privacy extensions night get in the way, as well as Android's randomized MAC feature, but those are adjustable.

At the very minimum, give the readers a chance to understand the context of the question: https://hachyderm.io/@dalias/115418530488528338

It very much depends, I think. Ham radio was really helpful to me during 2020 because it was a social activity that was compatible with distancing requirements, and is a great way to talk with people afar. As in, other continents but also local folks as well.

Fishing, watercraft, and woodworking all have different prerequisites, like a nearby body of water or the space for equipment. They also require some logistical planning, like fishing licenses, how to identify and prep fish, and where to source wood. These things are often easier to learn if you know someone who already partakes in the activity.

But for civil advocacy, that one has no tangible result that you can put in the living room, earns no awards or points, and puts you directly in the public spotlight, ugly as it may be. And yet, despite all that, it has the potential to impact the greatest number of people in the most accessible way. Paraphrasing a Greek proverb, to commit to this endeavor knowing full well that it will never serve to yourself a benefit, that is a sign of a great and virtuous citizen. Such actions speak loudest.

All the activities I've listed are activities that hone personal development, and can be passed on to another generation, just in case you wanted even more engrossment. I'd say the greatest challenge is just getting started, taking that first step, whatever the activity may be.

Mistakes will be made early on, but this isn't amateur aviation or bomb disposal where the consequences are dire. Sometimes you just have to send it and keep at it.

!homelab@lemmy.ml can easily become very involved.

But for other activities, fishing, watercraft (motorized or not), woodworking, ham radio, and civic advocacy (ie public transport, housing, anti-corruption). All of these can easily be a lifetime's worth. All but the last one do require obtaining equipment, but the best part is that the equipment is often readily available on the used market.

One thing which isn't immediately apparent, even to Americans themselves, is that the large American political parties are less equivalent to individual political parties elsewhere, and are closer to "uneasy coalitions", like those found in Europe involving multiple parties trying (and maybe failing) to form a government. That makes it harder to draw broad conclusions like "USA Democrats would be right-of-center" because progressives and "DINOs" (Democrats in name only) within the party would be left-wing or right-wing, respectively. Logically, the same applies to the Republican party, although ranging from right-wing RINOs (Republicans in name only) and "moderate Republicans", to the far-right factions of the party, like neo-Nazis and MAGA.

With that said, what you're describing sounds similar to social democracy. Not to be confused with democratic socialism, which is generally further along to the left than social democracy, with the goal to reform the state (or specifically, individual US States) away from private ownership of the means of production and away from capitalism. When Bernie Sanders of Vermont says "I am a socialist", his positions align well to European social democracy, even though he originally described himself as "democratic socialist".

For an example of democratic socialism activities taking place in the USA, consider that the state of Virginia purchased a 35 mile (56 km) freight railroad west of Alexandria, in order to stop paying rent to privately-owned Norfolk Southern railroad and to enable expansion of the existing state-sponsored Amtrak commuter train service serving that region. The acquisition was both cost-effective and still preserves freight train access, but now it's the state that controls what goes on those rails, much like how they regulate the weight and dimensions of what travels on the public roadways.

But I must reiterate that the precise definition of political ideology is less important than community-building, since that's how ideology becomes reality. If you can find a party whose well-stated values you support, then do what you can to help them achieve their goals. That's going to be more valuable than taxonomy.

Concrete example of threat modeling: if someone found out I was using Signal, for any reason at all, would that cause problems for me?

If yes, then Signal is not a good option. If no, then Signal may be appropriate. Why? Because in their documentation, they explicitly state that while messages are confidential, the fact that you're using Signal cannot be hidden, and so they don't make that guarantee.

Tbf, can't the other party mess it up with signal too?

Yes, but this is where threat modeling comes into play. Grossly simplified, developing a threat model means to assess what sort of attackers you reasonably expect to make an attempt on you. For some people, their greatest concern is their conservative parents finding out that they're on birth control. For others, they might be a journalist trying to maintain confidentiality of an informant from a rogue sheriff's department in rural America. Yet others face the risk of a nation-state's intelligence service trying to find their location while in exile.

For each of these users, they have different potential attackers. And Signal is well suited for the first two, and only alright against the third. After all, if the CIA or Mossad is following someone around IRL, there are other ways to crack their communications.

What Signal specifically offers is confidentiality in transit, meaning that all ISPs, WiFi networks, CDNs, VPNs, script skiddies with Wireshark, and network admins in the path of a Signal convo cannot see the contents of those messages.

Can the messages be captured at the endpoints? Yes! Someone could be standing right behind you, taking photos of your screen. Can the size or metadata of each message reveal the type of message (eg text, photo, video)? Yes, but that's akin to feeling the shape of an envelope. Only through additional context can the contents be known (eg a parcel in the shape of a guitar case).

Signal also benefits from the network effect, because someone trying to get away from an abusive SO has plausible deniability if they download Signal on their phone ("all my friends are on Signal" or "the doctor said it's more secure than email"). Or a whistleblower can send a message to a journalist that included their Signal username in a printed newspaper. The best place to hide a tree is in a forest. We protect us.

My main issue for signal is (mostly iPhone users) download it "just for protests" (ffs) and then delete it, but don't relinquish their acct, so when I text them using signal it dies in limbo as they either deleted the app or never check it and don't allow notifs

Alas, this is an issue with all messaging apps, if people delete the app without closing their account. I'm not sure if there's anything Signal can do about this, but the base guarantees still hold: either the message is securely delivered to their app, or it never gets seen. But the confidentiality should always be maintained.

I'm glossing over a lot of cryptographic guarantees, but for one-to-one or small-group private messaging, Signal is the best mainstream app at the moment. For secure group messaging, like organizing hundreds of people for a protest, that is still up for grabs, because even if an app was 100% secure, any one of those persons can leak the message to an attacker. More participants means more potential for leaks.

When I see E2EE and XMPP mentioned, I think of this blog post by Soatok, outlining some very odd cryptographic choices in XMPP + OMEMO: https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/

I would very much like to see a richer playing field than just Signal for private messaging, but it's a tough nut to crack. For exactly which aspect that turns me away from XMPP for E2EE, I think this nails it down:

you only need check whether OMEMO is on by default (it isn’t), or whether OMEMO can be turned off even if your client supports it (it can).

When the competition is Signal, these sorts of details matter a lot.

When doing comparisons of the nature posed by the title, it is all-important to establish the baseline criteria. That is, what does the landscape look like just prior to implementing the titular policy?

If starting from the position of the present-day USA, then it is almost certain that free-at-time-of-service universal health care would cause the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to rewrite their projections for medical personnel jobs, in very much an upward trajectory. After all, middle- and upper-class people that already had decent won't somehow need more healthcare just because it's free, but people who have never seen a doctor in their adult life would suddenly have access to a physician. More total patients means more medical staff needed, both short-term and long-term. The latter is because the barrier to annual checkups is all but eliminated, which should also yield better outcomes through early detection of problems and development of working rapports with one's physician.

If, however, the baseline situation is a functional but private-payer healthcare system in a place with a low Gini coefficient -- meaning income is not concentrated in a few people -- then it's more likely that healthcare is already accessible to most people. Thus, the jump in patients caused by free healthcare may be minimal or even non-existent. It may, however, also be that free healthcare would benefit different segments of this population through access to a higher standard of quality care, if removing the private-payer system results in dismantling of legacies caused by racism, colonialism, or whatever else.

After all, that's one of the tenants of a universal healthcare system: people get the treatment they need, with no regard for who they are or what wealth they have (or not).

Let me make sure I understand everything correctly. You have an OpenWRT router which terminates a Wireguard tunnel, which your phone will connect to from somewhere on the Internet. When the Wireguard tunnel lands within the router in the new subnet 192.168.2 0/24, you have iptable rules that will:

• Reject all packets on the INPUT chain (from subnet to OpenWRT)
• Reject all packets on the OUTPUT chain (from OpenWRT to subnet)
• Route packets from phone to service on TCP port 8080, on the FORWARD chain
• Allow established connections, on the FORWARD chain
• Reject all other packets on the FORWARD chain

So far, this seems alright. But where does the service run? Is it on your LAN subnet or the isolated 192.168.2.0/24 subnet? The diagram you included suggests that the service runs on an existing machine on your LAN, so that would imply that the router must also do address translation from the isolated subnet to your LAN subnet.

That's doable, but ideally the service would be homed onto the isolated subnet. But perhaps I misunderstood part of the configuration.