Free, except for the amortized R&D and construction costs.

how would you know which places to patrol, and when?

This is an extremely regional problem to solve. Where I am, which is a village and exurban-ruural, you would go to the electronics recycling depot and see if they have any choice items. Also you could call the various independent pc repair people to see if they have anything no longer supported but functional for free or cheap.

Also there’s various thrift stores that sometimes have computers cheap.

The closest big city is Vancouver so to curb cruise there I would pick upper middle class neighbourhoods with alleyways, and drive around on garbage collection days. I wouldn’t really dumpster dive unless I knew of a likely source from hearsay.

I have a bunch of old macs here with different distros onthem, mostly Mint, that I have been trying to give away to locals (without being obligated to provide support, which is the stickler apparently). They all run great. One could dumpster dive or curb cruise, or around here, lurk at Recycling.

I find the tagging system in lemmy more useful every day!

I’m sorry, did you just… oh lol never mind. I’m going to harvest this whoosh for wind power.

Not me, I am a damn dirty ape.

Wait didn’t MEC collapse into / get bought by a regular corporation?

To be fair, he focuses on some struggles more than others. In Ministry it’s more about a few activists and one relevant bureaucrat organizing from top down and bottom up, and not really about labourers other than vignettes for context. Character development over plot for KSR, usually.

I thought that it wasn’t handwaved away so much as discussed as being developed by a particularly skilled group as part of promoting a populist freedom oriented crypto, and funded internationally over years by the Ministry but as a minor project that blew up due to network effects kicking.

In that respect I thought it was realistic and while background to the main plot and characters, included as one of the better solutions that together all add up. I didn’t mind it as reference rather than story, but thought “that would be an interesting story in its own right” and since KSR is not a software dweeb and typically doesn’t go there, I would rather read a version by Stross or N. Stephenson.

Realllly not sure how what I wrote was hatred or redditworthy, I must be missing some unwritten code. Maybe it’s a communism vs anarchism thing?

Removed by mod

It will run macOS 11 Big Sur, which isn’t fully out of date yet.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102662 “How to download and install macOS”

You will want to install via USB probably. See "use a bootable installer " on the link above.

I would wipe/install.