NaibofTabr

This is kind of incorrect. The leading cause of death (in the US) is heart disease, followed by cancer:

https://www.voronoiapp.com/healthcare/What-are-the-leading-causes-of-death-for-men-and-women-4775

Obviously those affect both men and women, but men are represented higher in both causes. Heart disease and cancer absolutely have large research groups focused on them, they aren't being ignored by society at large.

You are also right about society not caring, though I would argue it's the system we subscribe to.

How is this different in the context of healthcare for women?

I'm hesitant to fully jump on board with your comment because it's close to bringing the whole 'men too' crowd which often has a note of toxicity to it.

This is irrelevant. The point is either valid or it isn't. Neither you nor the person you're talking to are responsible for the reactions of third parties. Judge the point being made on its own merits.

The argument shouldnt be men vs. women, but people vs. those who exploit us, or people vs. the problem

In an ideal world, maybe. But the health issues in question are relevant to a person's sexual development (male vs. female) therefore it is functionally impossible to remove sex from the discussion.

China’s Export Licensing System (active 1st Jan) is just the first domino.

Oh man, China is finally pulling the trigger on resource control. That is... not surprising, but it is worrying.

Nah, not nearly enough chopped down trees to really capture the spirit of the game.

Sure Jan.

Whatever you do, and whoever you end up working with, document document document. Take notes.

And I mean on paper, in a notebook, something that can't crash or get accidentally deleted and doesn't require electricity to operate.

You're doing this for yourself, not for a boss, which means you can take the time to keep track of the details. This will be especially important for ongoing maintenance.

Write down a list of things you imagine having on your network, then classify them as essential vs. desired (needs and wants), then prioritize them.

As you buy hardware, write down the name, model and serial number and the price (so that you can list it on your renter's/homeowner's insurance). As you set up the devices, also add the MAC and assigned IP address(es) to each device description, and also list the specific services that are running on that device. If you buy something new that comes with a support contract, write down the information for that.

Draw a network diagram (it doesn't have to be complicated or super professional, but visualizing the layout and connections between things is very helpful)

When you set up a service, write down what it's for and what clients will have access to it. Write down the reference(s) you used. And then write down the login details. I don't care what advice you've heard about writing down passwords, just do it in the notebook so that you can get back into the services you've set up. Six months from now when you need to log in to that background service to update the software you will have forgotten the password. If a person you don't trust has physical access to your home network notebook, you have a much more serious problem than worrying about your router password.

Because they want step-by-step guidance and support, and design help, and long-term support, not just a few questions answered.

This is a job. The kind of work that IT consultants get paid for. A fair rate would be US$100/hr, minimum, for an independent contractor.

I'm salty about poorly written, sensationalist greenwashing headlines.

I assume the entire country of Sweden didn't construct this building, or the entire city of Lund for that matter. If anything, the headline should name the architect and/or design company.

And this is basically just using waste material as decoration, about as functional as if you hung it up on your wall at home.

How is America relevant to OP?

obvious whataboutism is obvious

You can just use openssl to generate x509 certificates locally. If you only need to do this for a few local connections, the simplest thing to do is create them manually and then manually place them in the certificate stores for the services that need them. You might get warnings about self-signed certificates/unrecognized CA, but obviously you know why that's the case.

This method becomes a problem when:

1. You need to scale - manually transferring certs is fine maybe half a dozen times, after that it gets real tedious and you start to lose track of where they are and why.
2. You need other people to access your encrypted services - self-signed certs won't work for public access to an HTTPS website because every visitor will get a warning that you're signing your own encryption certs, and most will avoid it. For friends and family you might be able to convince them that your personal cert is safe, but you'll have to have that conversation every time.
3. You need to implement expiration - the purpose of cert expiration is to mitigate the damage if the cert private key leaks, which happens a lot with big companies that have public-facing infrastructure and bad internal security practices (looking at you, Microsoft). As an individual, it is still worthwhile to update your certs every so often (e.g. every year) if for no other reason than to remind yourself how your SSL infrastructure is connected. It's up to you whether or not it's worth the effort to automate the cert distribution.

I've used Letsencrypt to get certs for the proxy, but the traffic between the proxy and the backend is plain HTTP still. Do I need to worry about securing that traffic considering its behind a VPN?

In spite of things you may have read, and the marketing of VPN services, a VPN is NOT a security tool. It is a privacy tool, as long as the encryption key for it is private.

I'm not clear on what you mean by "between the proxy and the backend". Is this referring to the VPS side, or your local network side, or both?

Ultimately the question is, do you trust the other devices/services that might have access to the data before it enters the VPN tunnel? Are you certain that nothing else on the server might be able to read your traffic before it goes into the VPN?

If you're talking about a rented VPS from a public web host, the answer should be no. You have no idea what else might be running on that server, nor do you have control over the hypervisor or the host system.

*A company in Sweden bolts some old wind turbine blades onto the outside of a parking garage