Jubajaj

9:55 PM

Quickly expanding cashflow with clothing stores before I focus on SAAS.

This should take another 5 days to viably test the idea/prices/designs etc, then I'm back on the SAAS train with 1 extra clothing brand bringing in cashflow on the side.

If that works, gonna diversify to other clothing types, increase LTV, perhaps pay graphic designers to create new cool shit (or do it myself w/ new fonts + 123rf.com stuff).

Anyway, cashflow/quick testing first ASAP, then SAAS (long-term game), then multiple SAAS.

If new clothing brand works, should have a 7-8 figure snowball effect brand.

If not, no worries, I'll just make multiple SAAS + try to get snowball effect on that.

What does it cost to get rich?

This review contains spoilers.

Genre: Survival drama TV show #television #capitalism

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Capitalist rhetoric claims competition, free markets, and hard work are all it take to make a fortune fair and square, and that those left behind have only themselves to blame. In gory detail, Squid Game explores the cost of that competition and shows how, no matter one’s personal character, acquiring wealth in a capitalist system is necessarily unethical.

The organizers of the game make its participants a promise: Unlike in the real world, where they have little chance of getting out from under capitalism’s crushing boot, they each have an equal opportunity to win. At first, the promise seems genuine. When a player is caught cheating, the game overseer executes him and his abettors without a second thought. And the first game they play — “Red Light, Green Light” — has a pretty fair set of rules.

But the pretense of fairness breaks down quickly. None of the players had been told they would be brutally murdered should they lose. And it’s only when the survivors express the desire to leave that the prize is literally dangled above their heads, its message clear and vicious: the more people die, the more money you stand to win.

The game’s creator absolves himself of responsibility, noting the participants agreed to the terms. He conveniently ignores that as a money-lender, he is guilty of contributing to the pressures that led players to accept the terms in the first place — and that his recruiters leveraged their hopeless circumstances to convince them to join.

By the time players get to the bridge game, it’s overly clear the entire endeavor is not, as advertised, a respite from the capitalist system, but rather a microcosm of it. The only way to win is by making the right connections, ruthlessly eliminating and backstabbing the competition, and getting extremely lucky.

In the end, the last man standing is neither the savviest nor the most able individual. He could have been any one of the others who died. And his reward, a glowing pot of money, has come at the cost of hundreds of lives and his own humanity. What were the alternatives? To die or not participate at all — the latter an arguably worse fate as shown in the only episode, entitled “Hell,” that takes place entirely outside the games. In real life, though, not participating in capitalism is rarely an option.

In Squid Game, like in Parasite, the lower class fight each other for the scraps of the rich, who got rich by profiting off of them. The system is purported to be fair, but has perverse incentives and primarily rewards luck and exploitative behaviors. To merely fight for one’s survival is to actively participate in the demise of others.

Even though the winner was arguably the nicest person involved, he understands his despair does not wash his hands clean of the blood spilled in the pursuit of that victory. Consequently, he can’t bring himself to use the money. Spending it would be tantamount to spending those lives once more.

Seeds are historical record, cornerstone of fertile present and seer of unwritten future. Seeds are nodes in a complex web of growth and renewal, a process connecting us to ancient lands and storied ancestors. Seeds are shards of frozen time, representing an embedded constant in our lived experience. Their necessary vitality spreads across all cultures and civilisations. In a very practical sense, seeds are life.

As you may have inferred, I have seeds on my mind of late. A crypt chill bites at the treeline, it'll take a few days for this old house to adjust to the dropping temperature. Like its occupants, the house must re-acclimatise to the encroaching frosts and damp mists. For now I've retreated to the comfort and refuge of wool blankets and cups of tea. Turning to the windows, I can see that all but a few plants lie dormant. The last purple flowers of the Aster are wilting, the deciduous tree's have long shed their reddening berries and are now dropping their golden leaves. The dense canopy and verdant understory have retreated, revealing a dark warren, a wooded expanse watched over by looming evergreens.

The forest is hollowing itself out for Winter, exposing its core. The land slows its rhythm in accordance. When you inhabit a space so intimately, this shift in landscape conjures pressing thoughts of the future.

We maintain a small but healthy seed selection here on the flat mountain. Mainly a mixture of heirloom packets bought when we started growing, alongside a miscellany gifted by friends and family, or stolen from other forests and gardens. This selection is now bolstered by our first harvest and the crops that we allowed to fully mature. It's always advisable to allow some of your plants to go to seed this way, in order to be stored and sown anew.

Regardless of origin, these seeds share a common bond. All have been sourced from plants that grow well here in Sweden. The concern seeping into the background of all things is the unpredictability of what might grow well here in Sweden in the future. This has gotten me thinking about the importance of building a more comprehensive and inclusive seed bank, diversifying our existing collection with a range of currently less viable varieties. Think of this as a particularly seed focused form of prepping. One way of bracing for potential climate shifts.

One aspect of this has been to look at the products we buy from the shop and explore what we can replace or off-set those with. Here we need to balance our needs with the amounts that we can reliably produce. To this end I'm researching alternative plants for flour and oil, and I plan to experiment over the next few years with some of these. Ideally I'd like to expand to a community scale model, where staples like flour and oil are produced collectively from a diversified range of crops, rather being than reliant on a single source.

My communal roots are in anarchism, so I don't have much belief in apolitical or alternative farming movements that only reproduce capitalist relationships on a smaller scale. I also have very little belief in the classic survivalist fantasy of individualist sustainability. This is partly why I also don't believe the 'going solo off-grid' model scales up as any kind of wider solution. Which is not to say that we can't learn a lot from individuals and communities who're going off-grid, and using the opportunity to explore all sorts of applicable self-sufficiency practices.

Ideological approaches aside. Global instabilities made it hard to source certain seeds last year, which is a difficulty I expect to see repeated in time. Pandemic disruption played an exacerbating role, but an unreliable seed market is also one of the million problems tied to our exponential rate of ecosystem destabilisation, mass soil degradation and vital species decline. But right now I'm in too good a mood to expend those topics any more thought. After writing this post I'll return to reading 1,200 year old poetry beneath my aforementioned blankets. Warm, content and distracted.

As my mind drifts back towards seeds, I remind myself that I have no idea what's coming next. Whatever awaits us, I suspect that a resilient and locally accessible seed bank may become an increasingly important feature of our future communities, in the event we are forced adapt to mounting pressures of food insecurity.

#journal #ecology #notes

#000785 – 22 de Outubro de 2021

O Belmarsh Tribunal decorre, em Londres. A liberdade de expressão é o último fôlego de uma civilização que se afunda, e que foge da verdade.

Learn how to ensure NordVPN is activated at system startup on a Ubuntu system.

This short article explains how it's done. The solution is particularly helpful when running a headless server; once the process described below has been completed, the script will require no user input during subsequent reboots.

We begin by writing a very simple script, nordvpn-connect.sh and saving it to ~/bin.

#!/bin/bash
#
# ~/bin/nordvpn-connect.sh
#
nordvpn connect United_Kingdom
exit 0

Next, create a file nordvpn-connect.service and save it to /etc/systemd/system. Add the following text to the new file, remembering to replace [user] with your own user name;

[Unit]
After=network.service

[Service]
ExecStart=/home/[user]/bin/nordvpn-connect.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Next, run the following commands in sequence;

sudo chmod 755 /etc/systemd/system/nordvpn-connect.service
sudo chmod 755 /home/[user]/bin/nordvpn-connect.sh
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable nordvpn-connect.service

Having enabled the service, the script associated with nordvpn-connect.service will be run every time the computer boots. NordVPN will automatically connect with no need for any input from the user.

Reboot the computer and type nordvpn status at the command line. All being well this should confirm NordVPN is connected.

#security #technology #ubuntu #vpn

Quite by accident I've discovered that @writeas__ supports syntax highlighting for HTML and CSS.

Can anyone advise what other file types are supported?

#technology #writeas

Jawoll.....

I am making a personal, and desperate, plea to you. I also intend it to be an encouragement, if you will receive it. We are mishandling a gift so reprehensibly that the only possible outcome is a complete devolution of human life as we know it, and what we are now in fact seeing!

Most of us reading this have been handed a very special gift. A gift that represents a symbiotic connection with God Almighty and ourselves. A collaborative effort between God and ourselves on the most personal level possible. Without this collaboration life itself would not exist. Every single person ever born, or will be born, is a direct result of this relationship between God and man!

If you are a parent then you have been handed a life, or better, lives. These lives can be molded and guided by us personally, and for whatever purposes, we deem fit. But it is the outcome of that molding that determines their personal future and their impact on all people they interact with.

The act of procreation, without perversion and pure in form, is the creation of a living human being, made in the likeness of God, spiritually, and the likeness of the parents, physically. It is the union of the biological body and the spirit that forms mankind into the uniqueness of its being. The moment we procreate on a biological level, when sperm and egg unite into a unique person, God breathes into it the life force of the soul and its essence, the spirit.

All people have been known by God before the creation of the world, and their essence held in reserve for that special moment between a man and woman, their parents. In this act of co-creation between God and man an important event has taken place. The Bible tells us that the purpose for marriage is the raising of Godly offspring. We have taken part in an event that has birthed into the world the image of God, wholesome and pure. In this state of innocence the infant, is as yet, uninfluenced by the corruption of sin transferred in his flesh by the parents, handed down generation after generation since Adam and Eve. It does not comprehend anything let alone right from wrong, good from evil. It is pure, unadulterated and waiting for the parents to begin molding and guiding it into the Godly offspring that pleases God, our creator.

If you are a parent, the greatest thing you will EVER accomplish with the life God gave you is your child! Second only to a restored relationship with God for your own life, is the raising of a child into its own personal relationship with its creator. God wants a life of purity for the person He and the parents created, meaning all of us. Only when we get that right can we guide the child into a righteous life, into Godliness. Your greatest accomplishment will require your greatest effort, and faith that moves mountains! You are not alone, God is there to see you through all of it.

This is why it is so important in the Bible, particularly as depicted among the Hebrews, to be able to have children. To be married and without child was seen as a curse, as God’s refusal to breathe life into the biological union of the parents. They understood the importance of a child in God’s eyes and looked forward to joining Him in the creation of a new life.

But what about those who are childless, whether by intent or otherwise? The Bible actually tells us that it is better to be unmarried than to be married. If you are in the correct relationship with God, unmarried or married, and childless then you are in the enviable position to devote your life, without distraction, to serving God and His Kingdom. There are so many ways to do this, because we are all so unique, just as God intended. If your heart is for children then consider lovingly becoming involved with children who lack a mother or father so that the child will receive the knowledge and love of God, and a proper balance of masculine and feminine understanding, and their powerful importance. So many children now live without God’s love present in their family, or worse, a lack of family, that you will have no problem finding children to help, guide and love.

For you who have, or are considering, destroying the life that God has created inside of you, please prayerfully ask yourself this question, “How better can a woman live her life than the raising of a Godly person?” God’s ways are often hard to understand from our comparatively minuscule perspective. Trusting Him is where the questions are answered and wisdom gained!

In the raising of this child, this most monumental purpose for our lives, let us not hand the responsibility to others. The blessing was handed to us, to place that blessing with others is to despise God’s gift to us. Do not let the world raise what belongs to God and you. Instead submit to God’s will so that you and God can raise the child together. Education is one of the primary responsibilities of the parents. Public and most private schools, and classmates, will re-create your child from the image of God into the image of the world, fallen and destined for destruction.

Be careful, there is a fine balance between protective and isolation. The child needs to be cautiously exposed to what the world really is as part of their education, but the world should not be allowed to define what the child sees, the parent should be the guide, living shoulder to shoulder, carefully explaining to the child God’s perspective of the world, while living what we teach before them. Through all of it you also will be growing and maturing. Being a Godly offspring never ends for believers! As they grow they will be properly prepared to fend off the efforts of the world to woo and pervert them, making them sons and daughters of hell, just as they are. Misery truly does love company.

But, you say, it’s too late for me, my children are grown and already walk in the ways of the world, what can I possibly do? It is never too late while we have each other in this life. A parent who has earnestly changed to a life of humble righteousness will be noticed by their children. Talk with them, rebuild relationships on the firm foundation of Christ and His kingdom. In this way, like you, they may desire to seek out the truth, and in kind be saved out of what is lost.

One personal note: I have raised children to adulthood. At the risk of sounding like most parents bragging-up their kids, they have exceeded my expectations, which I set comparatively high. They are truly wise servants of God! My secret? I had no idea how to raise children when the first one came along, so I turned to the only place I trusted, the source. I decided that the Bible was the perfect parental instruction book, and it sets forth the example we are to follow. Our heavenly Father raises up those who are His, I would copy His parenting of me in order to parent my children. I couldn’t be more proud of them as a co-parent with God!

From Outside Babylon

My longest serving manual focus lens is the Pentacon 50mm f1.8. It's a close-focussing beauty.

#oct21 #photography