They are raised in an atmosphere of negativity and hate that’s so pervasive they don’t even realize it’s a thing and that there are other options.

I come from a white catholic family and I lived in a properly rural area up through first grade. Like I lived in a trailer and my yard bordered a farmer’s corn field. And we knew the farmer because his land was nice for my dad to hunt deer.

The cynicism, persecution complex, and of course the casual racism & xenophobia aren’t something you are taught. They are just how the world works. It’s an assumed part of the culture and the social dynamic just like religion is.

That shit takes root deep in your neurons, and it takes conscious effort, compassion, and self-reflection to work your way out of it. And even then, some of the subconscious programming and visceral reactions persist and require a level of ongoing mindfulness about one’s right processes and behavior.

Oh is this an excuse to hop on the Mint praise train? Don’t mind if I do!

For me it was smoother than windows to install, it runs much better moment to moment (it’s like the people that made it were worried about making nice software rather than the business goals being pushed by their managers), and most importantly the fact that it is the “beginner” distro doesn’t compromise its capabilities. I am in the terminal all day every day and I use the machine to work on software for embedded Linux systems.

¿Por Qué No Los Dos?

You can just use a graphical file manager in Linux like you might have been used to in Windows. When I open mine I see my windows partition and my USB drive listed on the left side.

I know Mint has one that I use all the time, but I’m not familiar with what’s in Ubuntu out of the box.

Many humans saw it and said “ooh, look at that natural beauty!”

Some humans saw it and said “ooh, look at those resources I can profit from!”

I think the “more to it” might be significantly crazier than the timing thing.

Or ears have unique complex shapes that attenuate certain frequencies and bounce sound around in complex ways depending on the direction they are coming from. And our brains instantly process all that stuff too. It’s why our sense of hearing isn’t just on a flat plane around our head.

Haha exactly.

I remember thinking about science hierarchy or levels of abstraction way back in high school, but I’m glad that (like so many things) xkcd perfectly documented it.

That is the hyperbolic caricature conservatives apply in their head, sure.

It’s a pretty common approach to complicated issues.

We have rocks that do math, transmit electricity, and fly us through the sky.

When you get reductive about the natural sciences it all just boils down to applied physics which is applied mathematics.

But engineering and technology? Applied geology.

(/s because I’m not going to acknowledge that geology is applied chemistry and so on)

The best solar panels are getting at or above the efficiency of converting nuclear heat to electricity (about 1/3) so they probably shouldn’t get that poor efficiency label.

All power is nuclear power when you keep digging, whether rocks come into play or not!

Yeah, our daily stand ups are via Teams (international team too) and it works pretty smoothly.

One oddity I’ve noticed is that when working from home and on (fast) Wi-Fi, it will hang for a moment and say the connection has an issue, but then be fine for the rest of the call. When I’m in the office in don’t think I’ve seen it do that.

I keep a Teams tab and an Outlook tab opened in Firefox on Linux at work, and I feel like I have a better experience than most people using it on windows, which seems crazy.

Eh, I’m not interested in supporting them, but the code is free and open source. I’m using a client written by not-them, to connect to a server run by not-them, and reading federated content from dozens of other servers run by not-them.

Basically, 20 seconds of thought could tell anybody that this is a terrible idea.

IF the thinker is looking for a good overall policy and not just trying to stick more money in their pockets in the short term.

You expect them to cry about the working class affording food when they only have a house for three out of the four seasons of the year?

Oh man, a friend and I were the AV crew for a while in high school in the late 90s. Basically we’d deliver these TV & VCR wheeled stands to the teachers needing them in the morning. If there wasn’t any need, we got to hang out in the equipment room instead of home room.

We got to use the elevators and even wield “the key ring” from time to time.

Yep, I’ll typically use vim or nano for editing existing files, but when in just want to make a quick temporary note or fiddle with some plain text it’s the graphical one that came with the DE.

Is nothing sacred?

At least that’s one use case that Linux will always be awesome for - editing plain text without added bullshit (excepting any keyboard shortcuts you need to learn to save or exit, depending on your editor, lol).

And you can obviously do that on windows with any number of third party apps. But not having the basic clean text editor included in the base OS install just seems wrong.

Trump still got 72 million votes and counting this time. That’s with another four years of Trump scandals, revelations, criminal charges, insurrections, mental declines, and on-video insane statements.

The people who stayed home, or the politicians who failed to motivate them, sure they carry some blame. They could have helped. But they are not the base. The ones who followed Trump from being the outsider who is fun because he’s an asshole/racist like them, to the corrupt traitorous dictator-to-be who they’d like to watch hurt people. Blame them much more.

The steady level of Trump support unfortunately supports the fear that our culture is just garbage. We’re surrounded by it. There are plenty of proud assholes, sure. But so many people will legitimately be pleasant to everybody they meet and seem to function in society, but either believe horrible things or have a thick shell of indoctrination and ignorance around their brain.

Oh trust me, the watching with a mixture of fascination and horror is coming from inside the states too.

I wish you good luck as well. I hear the US is known to fuck around with other countries occasionally. (And that’s not supposed to sound threatening - it’s just a recognition that we fuck with other countries even during “good” administrations, never mind when we have a dictator-loving wannabe in the office)