avidamoeba

This is the answer. You can straight up make things dependent on .mount units that represent stuff in fstab. To add, you can create any number of systemd services that just check if something is "as you want it" and only then "start". You simply make the Exec line "/bin/bash -c 'your script here'". Then you make whatever else you want dependent on it. For example I have such a unit that monitors for Internet connection by checking some public DNS servers. Then I have services that depend on Internet connection dependent on that. Here's for example my Plex service which demonstrates how to depend on a mount, docker and shows how to manage a docker container with systemd:

~$ cat /etc/systemd/system/plex-docker.service
[Unit]
Description=Plex Media Server
After=docker.service network-internet.service media-storage\x2dvolume1.mount
After=docker.service

[Service]
TimeoutStartSec=0
Restart=always
RestartSec=10
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker rm -f plex
ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/docker pull plexinc/pms-docker:latest
ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker run \
        --name plex \
        --net=host \
        -e TZ="US/Eastern" \
        -e "PLEX_UID=1000" \
        -e "PLEX_GID=1000" \
        -v /tmp:/tmp \
        -v /var/lib/plex/config:/config \
        -v /var/cache/plex/transcode:/transcode \
        -v "/media/storage-volume1:/media/storage-volume1" \
        plexinc/pms-docker:latest

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

BTW you can also do timers in systemd which allows doing what you can do with cron but much more flexibly and utilize dependencies too.

Techno-feudalism in action.

Are you sure those are faster? The only obvious slowdown in Syncthing compared to them is the initial file scan. The file transfer saturates the pipes like any other option. If you meant the file scan overhead, then we're on the same page. ☺️

At the same time Syncthing is ultra resilient and will auto-restart and continue syncing no matter what happens to the network connection or the hosts during transfer without intervention. This is why I stopped using rsync for initial transfers. When the initial transfer would take a week over the Internet, using Syncthing and swallowing the initial scan is nice because you don't need to look after it.

Synced many terabytes, over WiFi, Ethernet and the Internet with Syncthing. It works for all use cases, large and small.

The world economy cannot double without destroying the planet's ability to sustain us.

This is something that's often poorly understood. There's no profit in a perfectly competitive market. That is, according to orthodox economic theory, the most efficient market conditions are the ones where no participants make profit. From that you can derive what you said - that innovation is sought for moving a business away from perfect competition by gaining competitive advantage, which is anticompetitive! 😆

The ratio might not be 1:100. It might not even be tilted towards the risk takers. Also some if not most of the examples you mentioned are based research done in universities and defence agencies. That research is typically a much riskier endeavor. That's why the private sector doesn't even attempt it and only shows up to productize or build upon that research once the risk for not turning profit is minimized.

This sounds pretty great. If reliability can be mitigated via software, which it seems it can, then using old parts might even be more environmentally friendly than buying new ones. 🤔

VCs? Regular Cs are enough.

I'm thinking even different drive brands/models.

I suppose using mirror vdevs technically also puts stress on drives during rebuilding, however it should be significantly less than on drives in RAIDz.

It's an extreme example that perfectly illustrates how profit is extracted from employees by the employers. He didn't have any leverage to get a larger share of the profit from his labor, as is the case with most employees. You could call it toxic behavior, and it is, but it's the expected behavior, the behavior incentivised by the system.