I have already been hearing this called the “plandemic”, that it’s all Biden trying to “sabotage Trump from saving the country”, and they can’t wait for Trump to get into office and “shut down the CDC” so they “stop creating these diseases”.

We are in for a wild ride.

The good ol’ Red Scare.

Second this route.

Since OP wants to replace the “cloud”, which is a loose term but I take in this case to mean one of the Drive or Dropbox services, this would be the most direct replacement.

You’ll still want a NAS or otherwise storage focused server to host it, so you can get or build a NAS first. Use basic protocols like CIFS/SMB,NFS, and/or SFTP at first, and if that doesn’t meet your needs (say if there’s a mobile phone involved) you can go down the path of installing Nextcloud on it for that Dropbox like experience.

That said, this will move responsibility for two important things onto yourself. Failure tolerance and security. The corpus can afford automatic redundancy and failover, and backups going back further than they would like to admit to you. They can still lose your things to some mistake or another, but a dead hard drive generally isn’t one.

For backups, however much storage you want, plan to have extra drives for backups, and have a backup plan in place. If the data is important to you, you will want to be able to survive a hard drive inevitably failing, or a virus or even just a garden variety mistake. It can also be useful to ensure an (encrypted) copy is somewhere else, like a parent’s house or a locking cabinet at an office job. Having two copies at home won’t save you from thieves or a fire, after all.

And security. Don’t expose a NAS to the internet. Just don’t. It sounds convenient until some bug lets a botnet ransomware all your memories and you’ve got to scrub everything and restore the backup, losing anything since the last backup. Instead prepare to learn about setting up a VPN, and granting yourself an encrypted and well secured tunnel for your devices abroad.

All in all, it can be a worthy endeavor, but one that must be taken with care. Files can be important, and I would hate to be the one that offhandedly sent you down a path of losing your data. Learn, plan, and implement with confidence and a backup plan.

It’s not that there is superior heat output, it’s that there is superior heat collection and observation.

Not familiar with the meme directly, taking your attached picture example I can guess why they think it’s better:

It’s trapped closer to them.

Heat, that you recognize exists but usually rises out of reach of an uncapped candle, to the ceiling, is now trapped near the observation area. The pot is trapping it and radiating it much closer to the person thinking they’ve just solved the universe.

It’s observable. Like people who don’t understand the need for vaccines because they’ve never personally seen the disease the vaccine helped beat down, a majority of people struggle to grasp theory, and direct observation is all they understand.

Problem with that….

Whose idea of virtue?

You making a Catholic one? Buddhist? Right or alt-right idea of virtue? Lefty? Conservative values, socialist values? Etc.

Or is everyone going to make their own most virtuous AI and throw them in a virtual gladiator pit to finally decide whose (AI)God is right?