Maoo

Nazi Germany wasn't left and the USSR, which included more than Russia, was a transitional socialist country lol.

The side walls are actually very important for the structural integrity of shipping containers. If you cut holes in it, it absolutely needs to be reinforced or your new roof line is going to sag over time. They're built as cheaply as possible to accomplish their exact task, which is holding a bunch of crap and being stackable, and the side walls provide both tension to hold together the frame (basically a box) and to provide rigidity to both floor and the top. I reeeally hope y'all reinforced the areas around windows.

You can do a bunch of things to shipping containers to make them viable, but it's far more expensive in materials and time than just building with more raw materials. You can remove the toxic coating but you have to have a whole human do the labor for that and do is safely, otherwise that human is paying for that decision with their health. The materials and labor for that aren't nothing.

When you look at what is actually used from the container in order to create a house, it's really not that much. Basically just framing of questionable stability and some corrugated metal siding, possibly the cheapest and easiest part of building a house. I can personally frame up something container-sized in less than a day, easy peasy. Siding and drywall are also easy. The harder parts are everything the container doesn't provide: foundation, vapor barriers, plumbing, electrical, a good roof, any specialized need for insulation, efficient ventilation / heating / cooling, making sure safety elements are up to code.

In terms of mobility, I would not recommend moving a container home that has been substantially modified unless it's been upgraded for exactly that. They can only be safely moved using the corners to distribute the weight, hence the special container arms at shipping yards that grab the corners. If you put a custom roof on there or otherwise make it so you can't grab those corners, there's a good chance the whole thing falls apart unless you've reinforced it to be mobile using yet more investment.

No, the problem with housing is that it is a financialized commodity that is engineered to go up in price faster than wages because it's an investment. Not just for individuals, but for real estate companies and banks that gamble with the loans. Zoning laws are a symptom of this, but even if you basically get rid of them (as happens in various places in Texas), the same trend applies.

Those construction companies (really, real estate companies) all get big loans to build those apartments and they do so with an expectation of per-unit profits, often with unrealistic targets unless property values increase even more, and often targeting richer people. When they fail to rent enough at that price point, rather than decreasing rents (which would spook their lenders), they just leave units vacant until they can hit that price point. There are half-empty "luxury apartment" buildings dotting every major city due to this.

The most anyone can point to for the impact of zoning is that prices to rent tend to go up slightly slower.

Your local government is also likely funded by property taxes that are pegged to property values, which is why they never do anything sufficient to handle this issue.

They have too many downsides. Most of them aren't actually reusing containers because they're usually too small and they're coated with toxic materials that prevent mold and pests from living in them. They look large enough at first, but this is before you have to install a floor and walls and a ceiling with insulation all around and plumbing and electrical, etc. In addition, if you want to add windows by cutting into the sides, you've just undermined the structural integrity of the thing, as it's premised on being exactly that (stackable) box. So then you have to reinforce the crap out of it if you want windows.

Putting all of that together, to safely put together a reasonably livable container home, you're basically just using it as an aesthetic piece, as you've had to buy the shell new and then spend the rest of your budget trying to make it actually work as a home. It's cheaper and better to build a small home with commodity materials unless you really, really want that aesthetic.

Most of them. They try to "jumpstart" their prodigy by gathering "training" data by employing remote workers that they will massively underpay. They claim that they'll transition to pure AI over time. They... just kinda don't, lol.

Relatable

Regrettably, it does do that

You're not at scale unless you're deploying OpenStack to run a WordPress site.

Keeping in mind that a single axis for progress is reductive: also, don't forget that there have been and will be backslides. For example, European colonialism set back a lot of progressive / alternative cultures, genociding them or converting them to something that better-served the interests of empire (e.g., race rules).

Bespoke: not sharing your source code because you don't want to provide free labor to megacorps.

You can burn em with your burner of course. I haven't burned discs in so long that I can't remember what software I used to use, but there should still be open source, free software that can do exactly that.

If long-term, secure storage is your goal I'd go with redundant, error-correcting digital storage with off-site encrypted backups (don't forget the password!). A proper system like that will survive a tornado (because it's backed up off-site). A home-built RAIDZ2 NAS with one of many off-site backups will work very well. If you don't want to figure out how to build that system, you can also just buy a NAS with a similar level of functionality (I do still recommend RAIDZ2 with at least 6 disks, though).

Blu-rays will eventually degrade, either from scratches or a slow phenomenon where they get little holes in the foil. Even if you keep making copies, you'll run into this problem. Of course, data corruption can also occur for files on a computer, but that's why you use a strategy that keeps ~3 copies of each file around (basically what RAIDZ2 accomplishes) so that errors can be auto-corrected.

There are other benefits to a NAS as well. You can store your own backups of your other devices there as well and have them backed up off-site. You also have the option to share your blu-ray rips over your home network, basically running your own local streaming service.

If you want to share the love, so to speak, the bandwidth of a USB hard drive is actually pretty great.