When the law no longer pretends to serve the people, it loses a big part of it’s social power.

Many people in power today don’t seem to really understand the nature of power.

Nice! Thanks for sharing this analysis.

I thought our primary way of producing new Linux users was sexual reproduction and then indoctrination from birth…

Interesting. I would have guessed that Mint gave ChromeOS a run for it’s money, by now.

Yes. By the porn stats, Linux already crushes ChromeOs. Let’s not take any advice from it.

I’m not sure Grandma and Grandpa would want a steam machine as a replacement for their aging Windows 7 home computer.

Fair. But for my gram, it would have been a slam dunk day one buy. She loved her playstation and only tolerated her PC. She would have called a Steam Machine “my game console that can check email” and would have adored it.

a picture of Reagan with quotes of how Russia is the enemy, and tariffs are bad for everybody.

That’s particularly good.

This seems like a job for a WordPress blog or GitHub pages.

For me, the item from Amazon is sometimes something completely unrelated to what I ordered…

Avoiding Amazon has spoiled me, lately.

YouTube with a custom app seems to be the best way to actually watch your own chosen subscriptions, rather than bent force fed by the Google algorithm.

I’ve heard folks talk about how to get this from regular YouTube, but it’s wild to me that that put up with having to go to all the trouble with the official app.

Nebula is great.

It’s pretty funny to watch a quick “check out our extended content on Nebula” video exit, then just immediately watch the extended content roll along with a thank you message. (Many creators simply add the Nebula exclusive bits directly to the end of the video, on Nebula.)

It makes me feel like a fancy rich person.

Nebula is terrific!

It does take some time to find everything. It’s not (much of) an algorithm, so I just had to explore and start subscribing to things.

What do I do if adult tells me they want to play with hot wheels with me? I say yes.

Fuck yeah. Hot wheels are great.

I hate investing

Mutual Funds / Index funds are your best bet. (Look for descriptive words like “broad”, “mix” or “full market” in the description).

If you can, pick out one named “target retirement YYYY” with YYYY being within a few years of whatever year you will turn 67.

It will automatically follow investing best practices based on your current age - agrressive earlier, and very cautious later.

I’m not familiar with all the details of how it works

Perfect recipe to get ripped off. (Most people I know say that insurance/investment combined products suck. I’ve heard some disagreement whether they’re just a bad deal, or such a bad deal they ought to be a crime.)

I can’t prove anything, but:

• There’s evidence that billionaires are taking much more than they earn, and that we (everyone else) would be dramatically better off without them (whether we tax them away or… Come to some other compromise.)
• Billionaires own most media outlets and social media sites, even those these don’t actually make much money compared to everything else the billionaires own. This makes some people ask why they bother…
• There’s a noticable tendency in billionaire owned media to focus daily on divisive topics. The specific topic changes, but the divisiveness continues.
• There is history of powerful authoritarians investing heavily in divisive propaganda, primarily to break apart and distract groups of people who could overthrow them.

What I have laid out is not proof that today’s billionaires are directing their staff to verbally attack minorites at any opportunity.

But it certainly is something to think about next time a vicious rumor about a minority group comes along.

Edit: Yes. I do understand that neither men nor women are minorities. But there’s still enough differences to allow pushing a divisive narrative, which I suspect is enough reason for certain motivated people.

And to the “could just be a shitty set of incentives” argument. Fair enough. It could be. It’s highly suspicious, but it could be.

Would you accept “under-regulated capitalism” or “capitalism treated as an ideal rather than a tool” as a more specific root cause?

the need to constantly change jobs to move ahead financially also keeps people on unsteady ground with relationships.

That’s a great point.

You’ve summarized the value of current generation AI well.

It excels exactly when the result doesn’t matter in the slightest.

I grew to love Linux because I was hating Windows, I don’t hate Windows because I love Linux. And I don’t want to hate Windows, I wish they were slowly becoming anti-user, but they keep adding (forcing) features that are so unfriendly to the user.

Yes. If Windows was still like Windows XP, I don’t know if I would have ever switched. It used to be fun, not soul sucking.

There’s lots of other reasons I’m glad I switched, of course.

I find the windows update and Linux graphical updater processes identical. They only diverge at the end when the Windows one fails with a mysterious error message and offers to retry or open a troubleshooter that won’t work.