Best of all, they would not have to work for Bezos anymore.

(I tried staying a subscriber to support the genuinely good investigative journalism they do, but Bezos’s changes to it were got to be too much for me to swallow; what finally drove me over was the incredibly congratulatory editorial that the editorial board posted in response to the kidnapping of Maduro from Venezuela.)

No worries! Pronouns in the English language are sufficiently ambiguous that it is easy to make that mistake.

It is a little weird that this had never occurred to you until it popped into your head during a shower, but better late than never!

Hey, now, just because I am an overly paranoid person does not mean that you have to be as well!

Thanks, your comment is an antidote to my paranoia that it is impossible to do anything to address all threats. 😀

Given that your advice is very sound, I have a question: would I gain much by using OpenBSD? The conventional wisdom when I last checked is that it is the most secure unix-like operating system on the planet.

Right, but there is an entire spectrum of plumbing maintenance. I am perfectly capable of plunging toilets, but when a drain fails to work after several attack on my part then it is time to call in the plumber.

I mostly just like building and tinkering with things, and I really like the idea of setting up services that I control that host my own data that I can access from anywhere. I have no real interest in learning about more than the minimum amount needed to do that simply because that is not how I would like to spend my time.

(Lest you continue to have the wrong impression that I am afraid of learning new things: There was a period in my life where I was constantly learning new technologies, programming languages, etc. Eventually I realized that I had demonstrated that I was capable of learning anything that I wanted, and there were so many things out there to learn that I needed to start becoming more selective. At the moment my learning goals tend to be more math focused; currently I am trying to learn graduate-level category theory and measure theory.)

If I really need to master all of the steps that you’ve described before deploying my host on the Internet, then my conclusion is that it is more trouble than it is worth, because my concern is that if I screw up then I will make the Internet a worse place by contributing to botnets.

That does not sound so bad; the parent comment made it sound a lot worse than that.

I admit nothing.

Everything that you mention is sensible, but it seems like it would take so much time not only to set up but to perform the ongoing maintenance you described that it just is not worth the trouble to self-host, which is a significant factor in why I have not taken a shot at it.

Game support.

What game? I used to need to occasionally boot into Windows to play games, but it has been over a year since the last time I had to do this.

The blood of our enemies.

I will eat lasagna every year for Christmas dinner until I am in the grave, and I am perfectly fine with the fact that I was bullied into this by all the Italian ancestors who came before me because lasagna is delicious.

So in other words, you don’t know.

You have got it backwards. The correct analogy would be if the Confederacy won the Civil War by conquering all of the states in the Union except for Rhode Island, but then later claimed that it was actually Rhode Island that was the separatist group and demanded that everyone in the world agree with this.

Hey, now, there are a lot of perfectly good people in the southernmost tip of Chile who do not deserve Russians springing up from the ground!

What would you propose as an alternative?

We will as soon as Elon Musk turns Tesla around and earns his contractual trillion dollar payout as a reward!

I was confused by their response too, but now it looks like they just accidentally clicked the reply button on the wrong comment.

Generally when one refers to a country as being “occupied”, the implication is that the people there are poor off as a result, especially relative to a neighboring country whose land is presumably being considered occupied, which in this case is implicitly North Korea due to the history of how the two countries split. It is therefore not in bad faith to directly ask whether the people there are better or worse off as a result.

You also seem to be hyper-fixated on one possible meaning of prosperous, which is “wealth and GDP”, when there are lots of other means related to flourishing in general. The original commenter was perfectly free to provide an answer along the lines of, “North Korea is the more prosperous country because X.” where X is a list of ways in which the people there are flourishing, and this would have been a valid answer (if not necessarily a correct one).

Alternatively, if they think that South Korea is better off but this does not matter because it is still less ethical than North Korea, then they could have taken the opportunity to be up front about that.

So in short, this question could have been used in all sorts of ways to provide an answer that clarified the commenter’s position. It is a shame that we never heard from them exactly what their thoughts were.