Voroxpete

One thing that’s really worth paying attention to in this whole tariff saga is that the notion that Trump can just outright defy court rulings simply does not hold up to reality.

The Trump admin is lawless, absolutely. They do not respect the spirit of the law, and in many, many cases they have outright violated the letter of the law as well. But there is shockingly little evidence of them actually violating court rulings. They say they will. They threaten it all the time. But they never follow through on those threats. Abrego Garcia is back in the US. They’re still trying to make the man’s life a living hell, because begrudgingly abiding by court rulings isn’t even remotely adjacent to respecting the law, but the fact remains that they could - theoretically - have just flat out refused to bring him home. They did not.

Trump’s original tariffs are no longer in effect. Companies are collecting refunds. When the Supreme Court eventually (or at least, most likely) rules that these new tariffs are also illegal, they’ll be handing out refunds for those too.

None of this is to suggest that the Trump admin is not recklessly and maliciously engaged in a constant path of carnage through America’s laws and institutions. If that’s what you read from this, go back to grade five and actually learn what words mean. But what it does tell us is that some version of the rule of law does still exist in the US. Those doomers who constantly claim that “It won’t matter what courts do because Trump will just ignore them” are wrong. They have been proven wrong time and time again. He will try to evade the law, he will try to recklessly break it and hope that the justice system will be too slow to stop him before he gets what he wants, he will try to weasel his way out of and around the law, and in many cases he can rely on a Supreme Court captive to right wing interests to simply rewrite the law on his behalf. But he has not yet broken the nation’s institutions to the point that the law no longer exists. If you believe that, and more importantly if you continue to spread that belief, you are doing the fascists’ work for them.

Never willingly hand your enemy a victory. Always make them fight for it. When you cede ground out of fear and despair, you’re helping the people who want to hurt you.

At work we use Meshcentral. It requires you to host your own server, but it’s very powerful, and very reliable. We’re managing something like 400 remote systems with it currently. We also use Netbird as a secondary access layer (I prefer it to Tailscale for the simplicity of setting up ACLs, and the really easy deployment).

For most home server usage though, I wouldn’t bother with Meshcentral. It’s a lot of overhead if you’re only managing a couple of systems. If you really need remote desktop (why do your servers even have desktops?) use RustDesk instead.

RustDesk really is fantastic. No shade to any of the other solutions suggested in this thread, but 99% of the time when someone needs take desktop access, RustDesk is exactly what they need.

So, they had multiplayer, and it worked very well, but then they went through a whole bunch of major reworks to underlying systems that broke multiplayer, and they basically went “Yeah, that’s gonna stay broken for a while until we get all this shit done, please be patient.”

Project Zomboid is a blast, especially when you really dig into the options for changing game rules. You can basically craft your own custom zombie apocalypse. You can decide how the virus works, whether zombies are slow or fast, whether they have good eyesight, good hearing, how strong they are, where they spawn. You can change loot rarities, how long it’s been since the outbreak started, when the power gets shut off, etc, etc.

America not only doesn’t have the means, because of the tariffs it can no longer get the means. Manufacturing requires a lot of heavy industrial equipment that - surprise, surprise - isn’t made in the US.

But to say that Trump’s goal is to move production back to the US is almost giving him too much credit. He doesn’t really have a clear idea of what his goal is. Depending on the moment it changes, and the various goals he suggests are all contradictory; each one can only happen without the others. He says he’s imposing tariffs to move manufacturing home, but that only works if the tariffs are set to last a long time. But he also says he’s making deals, and that only works if the tariffs will be removed as part of the conclusion of the deal. And he says that the tariffs will replace taxes, but that only works if the tariffs are permanent, and imports remain at their current levels rather than manufacturing moving back to the US. For any one of those claims to be true, the other two can’t be.

There is no plan here. He just likes the idea of tariffs, because he has only ever understood the world through the lens of power; of dominating or being dominated. Tariffs feel big and muscular, like throwing punches but with money. That’s why he wants them. The rest is just excuses. It’s really all about his crippling insecurity, and the entire American right being in his thrall.

Fair enough. If your family are all tech savvy enough that that’s a good solution for them, then congratulations, and I’m jealous.

Counterpoint: I can access my friend’s Jellyfin servers, and they can access mine, without anyone else in the world knowing what the fuck we’re doing. Saying “It’s necessary” always begs the question “Why did you make it necessary?”

No need to abandon all the user-friendly aspects of a self-hosted streaming platform. Just use Jellyfin. I switched to it from Plex years ago and have never looked back.

Nvidia Shield. The regular version is $150 US and from what I understand it gives flawless playback. I have the pro version which is more powerful, but that’s specifically for running games.

It’s Android TV OS, so app selection is great. You can load Smart Tube Next on there to get YouTube without ads, and there’s a very solid Jellyfin app. You can also use Kodi for local direct playback. Remote is perfectly functional, and you can use an app to rebind most of the keys.