No bother!

For customization, you want a MUD client rather than a standard telnet client. I used zMUD back in the day, but FLOSS was harder to come by back then. These days, I’d go with mudlet.

I never really paid attention to the level gain ratio. I’d look here for that kind of question.

Since people are posting games, I’ll throw in Realms of Despair

$126,500 per person, plus another $20,240 in housing expenses. Plus your $13,850 standard deduction (though if you’re making that much you’re probably itemizing for more). So $160,590 for an individual or $321,180 for married filing jointly. That’s assuming no kids and no other deductions or credits - which is pretty unlikely at that income level.

$160,590 is the 93rd percentile for US income distribution. So yeah, if you (AND your partner, if any) are both in the top 7% income bracket, bad at tax preparation, and don’t hire an accountant, you might still pay tax on the income over that amount. Of course, making that much while keeping the kind of ethics that let you care about anyone other than yourself is a nontrivial endeavor.

Don’t forget that your foreign employer won’t be reporting to the IRS. So if your protest extends to not voluntarily reporting that excess income …

Not everyone that disagrees with a law is in a position to immediately change it.

Not necessarily. There is a foreign earned income exclusion, so if you pay income taxes on it in the country where you’re living you don’t pay taxes to the US.

A less euphemistic term in English is “regulatory capture”

Tell me you’re bi without telling me you’re bi

IT has a level of access to systems that makes management nervous. The fear is that an IT person in financial trouble could use that to embezzle, or be pressured to sell access to a malicious third party.

Common in IT roles as well.

Nah. Replacing the kernel is probably planned for the next point release - it’ll just be GNU/systemd

It doesn’t break apt, Canonical just broke their version of apt just to prefer snaps now.

FTFY

Only reason it wouldn’t work is Canonical killing the .deb package. That was an unforced error. So no, still not a good idea.

Completely different flavor, unfortunately

No, a lot less confrontational.

Even more extreme, actually. I knew one person who was actually, honestly, voluntarily homeless. For years. Living on the street, no car. No obvious mental health issues, had family who would have been happy to take him in, strong social network, active in the community. Didn’t want to be tied to all of the things ownership of stuff brings, and was willing to make the many and extreme sacrifices that entails.

To be clear, this is not the normal homelessness experience. I’ve known too many homeless people, and the right-wing conspiracy theories of middle to upper class panhandlers on every corner are utter nonsense. Ideologically motivated self justifying cruelty inspiring bullshit. Even when homeless people I have known said it was by choice, I usually knew enough about their situation to recognize it as a face saving salve to their pride (a hard thing to come by in the lower rungs of society, and very precious). But there was that one.

For a privacy friendly OS, surprised nobody has mentioned Freedombox

It’s designed explicitly for your use case, along with an easy path to other self hosted services. When you’re ready for more than it offers through the web interface, it’s a full Debian install under the hood - so you can install whatever you need to. Privacy friendly and super stable, with smooth upgrades to new releases and security updates for old versions several years after the new one is available.

As far as hardware, your old computer is probably more powerful than a Pi and can support more drives, but the Pi will be more power efficient. As others have mentioned, if you care about your data long term then backups are a must, so a separate NAS or a Pi with a large drive for backup storage is a good idea as well, whatever OS you choose.

Not a great example. All recent reporting was that the hospital you’re talking about was hit by a Hezbollah rocket, not Hamas. Not surprising that Hamas would assume, after concluding it wasn’t them, that it was the IDF, and it not be an outright lie.

Manikyam may not be as small as your Yorkie, but is the size of an average Golden Retriever. So unless you’re going to start eating large dogs …