Yes, because their ads are served on the same server (googlevideo.com iirc) as the actual videos. Blocking that domain would block the videos too.

https://esc.sh/projects/devops-from-scratch/ is a good resource. Most questions you have (that are more specific) are easily searchable on the internet.

ways to safely connect to home servers over the internet while away

A couple methods include :

• Installing Wireguard on the host machine
• Reverse-proxying with a VPS
• Cloudflare zero-trust tunnel

when it may be better to spin up services on a VPS instead

Most services you probably won’t need a VPS to do, but off the top of my head a couple services which would be better hosted (not saying self-hosting them on your own hardware is bad) would be services which proxy a service. Example SearxNG, Invidious, Proxitok, etc. This is so that traffic can be shared among multiple users, and not linked back to your home IP.

2 things (one of which you mentioned)

• Lobbying
• Makes money for the government (taxes)

Lobbying in the tabacco industry is crazy strong, they have so much money that, much alike to the oil industry, they will keep selling their products no matter the risks.

There’s also the fact that the government makes money off the sales and imports of tobacco products. The revenue is strong enough to counter the money spent on healthcare, etc.

Duckduckgo has started this too. Very annoying.

Edit: just realised this post was from 3 years ago… I don’t know why this popped up lol.

Felt the same for me. Who knows, most likely will surprise me and I’ll enjoy it!

Everyone wants to appear as if they care for the climate, yet deliberately delay their plans for green energy. It’s like you said, we always blame China yet they usually do shit pretty fast. All I hope for is that they invested into proper materials and technology so that this green energy lasts a long time for them.

Although I agree that we do need to transition to green energy, not everyone in Canada can rely on green energy simply because it’s not accessible nor reliable for them (usually in the northern areas of Canada). We need to get the infrastructure down for this type of energy and plan out how to properly create it to further expand how much green vs fossil fuel we will use.

I find it ridiculous that she’s blaming “big oil” on the forest fires. Personally, I really doubt (in the way she’s explaining it) they big oil had anything to do with it, assuming she isn’t just talking about climate change and carbon emissions…

Even if China is controversial, amazing that they’re (somewhat lol) turning to green energy instead of coal.