SheeEttin

Seems like a bit of a reach to go from knowing which appliances you use and when, to identity theft and harassment by your landlord.

Besides, I feel like even if your landlord was able to get this info (in the US, utilities are surprisingly protective of account access), they'd be able to do much more just by virtue of having physical access to the property.

The burglary or home invasion angles I can see, but it actually working out like that seems extremely unlikely.

That can also happen if the cable is worn out. They're designed to wear faster than the port, since that's much harder to replace.

I assume you mean flashlight and not a flame.

And integrated GPU counts, so you could use the integrated one for the host and a discrete card for the guest.

Not my Model M.

Yes, I understand there are orders of magnitude of complexity between the two. And no, it's not remotely feasible, like I said, they wouldn't be any good. If anything, I'm agreeing with you that no system of government, or system of economics for that matter, would make it practical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace

It's a parallel. Mao tried to create industry in people's backyards. It took people away from food production, destroyed existing valuable metal products, deforested the areas, and for all that effort, resulted in product with quality so bad it was unusable.

While it would probably also be more like input material production, silicon ingots and wafer slicing and such, I'm sure the quality would equally be shit enough to be unusable. Especially since metalwork tolerances are usually in micrometers at best, but microchips are in the nanometers.

Communist China and Soviet Russia would do it.

They wouldn't be any good, but they'd do it.

They absolutely do fund development like this. But they keep it for themselves until such time that it no longer gives them a competitive edge.

For example, when the US sells tanks or planes to other countries, those export versions have much less fancy equipment on the inside. Or in pure science like cryptography, you can assume that when the NSA publicly approves of an algorithm, they're confident that they can break it if they really need to (either because they inserted a backdoor, have identified a weakness they can exploit, or just have no use for it any more themselves).

I think most people will continue to just use their smartphone and get a Fairphone or something if it matters to them.

Sure. And the number of people who would do it purely because they want to is a tiny fraction of people who do it for pay. To pay those people you need profits, to get profits you need to be special, to be special you can't share your trade secrets.

The distro itself? Idk I usually just write an ansible playbook to get everything to my liking. Run it once on a new install and everything is good.