As others have said, it's a bit outdated. Being slow is one thing, but having limited software support can be very frustrating.
If possible I would try for a raspberry pi instead, as those have very strong ecosystems (yes, there are problems, but still
it's a big community). A 5 with 8GB would be ideal, but something lower spec (even a 3) would probably still be more capable.
I share via Signal, and with links to my Immich instance (sent over Signal). Certainly susceptible to security problems since yours truly set it up, but what you gonna do...
Yes, the taxation is regressive, but the benefits are progressive. E.g.,
According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, for people in the bottom fifth of the earnings distribution, the ratio of benefits to taxes is almost three times as high as it is for those in the top fifth.
( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States) )
It's certainly not a perfect system, but personally I think it has some merit. And it's by far not the worst aspect of USA tax structure (in my opinion).
Not sure I get why social security being flat with a cap benefits one class over the other.
Sure, once I meet the max contribution then my withholding goes down and my take home increases. But anything in excess of the max contribution doesn't affect social security payouts after retirement
if you put in more, you get out more, and if you're capped in your contributions then you're also capped in your withdrawals.
Is it a paternalistic program? Sure, it's essentially a forced retirement plan. Its implementation isn't perfect, but I'm not sure I'd call it class warfare.
I think an argument is that because many people live paycheck to paycheck, investing simply isn't an option. Many costs in life are somewhat fixed
I buy similar groceries compared to someone who makes half what I make, and compared to someone who makes twice what I make; as a fraction of income it's a huge spread.
What this means is that making twice as much money doesn't mean you get to invest twice as much
you can invest way more, because the difference in income is largely disposable.
I don't follow why the mortgage interest is better for the wealthy than the total mortgage amount?
In the USA afaik it is only the interest which is tax deductible.
I think there's room for philosphical differences here though. One can acknowledge Meta being evil but not advocate for defederation.
The standard federation analogy is to that of email. Google has shown themselves to be evil at times (prone to enshitification at the very least). But if my email provider drops support for any email from gmail.com, well... that's kinda not a good thing.
Obviously ActivityPub is not email, but still, I think it's a somewhat nuanced issue.
And with regards to the EEE issue, I'm personally not convinced of any threat. Slack embraced IRC then killed support, and no harm was done that I'm aware. XMPP always gets trotted out as an example, but I think it's a weak argument at best, disingenuous at worst.
Electricity is pretty expensive where I live, but solar opportunity is fairly good. Selling power back to grid is nowhere near as cost effective as using solar directly.
So, I could see a compelling use case of, "I want my laundry done by X o'clock. Start the wash when it'll be mostly on my cheap solar."
But yeah. I would never buy one unless it supports local-only/VLAN-restricts-internet-access usage.
They appear to also have blocklists independent of "shit ton of traffic." I have a VPN to my VPS (Oracle), which has a public IP (and I'm the only user). I also get whoa pardner'd when going through that VPN.
Perhaps I fall into the "we don't want other people scraping our site unless they pay" category though. I would make sense to just block off all VPS/cloud IP blocks (e.g., AWS, Azure, Oracle, Google Cloud...).
I think parent is hosting on their own physical hardware, just using a VPS for a public IP. I do the same (I use WireGuard instead, but similar idea). The VPS is doing the same thing as Cloud flare in your setup. I'm a proponent of this setup because the only reliance is on a totally generic VPS, of which there are many providers.
I just use one account.