• 3 Posts
  • 109 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • If you need more than 32 GB of RAM, I’m pretty sure you’re no longer looking for a laptop. I mean sure, you can get up to 128 GB on a macbook, but if you need that kind of volume you’re doing professional work on something that is specifically extremely RAM-intensive.

    I didn’t support the apple-mouse, in fact I don’t like it at all, primarily because I don’t like the feel of it. Personally, I use a completely ordinary, cheap mouse with two buttons and a scroll wheel.


  • I really don’t see backing for this take like… anywhere?

    Sure: Linux gives you absolute control, I won’t debate that. I work on a Mac however, and haven’t yet found any guard rails that a simple sudo !! won’t get me passed.

    Windows on the other hand requires you to do all sorts of arcane shit if you want to do anything at all outside of checking boxes in a shitty GUI to enable/disable features.


  • My 2022 macbook pro has a charging port, four USB-C ports (one of which can be used for charging as well), an HDMI port, a minijack port, and an SD card slot.

    I use homebrew for package management, and have yet to be dissatisfied with that.

    This machine also happens to have 32 GB of RAM.

    I don’t know about mouse-support, but I mostly use my keyboard for everything, and have yet to miss having more than two buttons and a scroll wheel on my mouse. With my previous (2012) macbook however, I used a five-button mouse sometimes.

    Really don’t know where you get your info on macs, but you it seems you missed the phone when you were called back sometime around 2010.









  • Great, it seems like we agree on the major points here! I’m not denying any of the major issues of the Afghan war, nor any of the glaring problems with how the whole “nation building” attempt went about. I’m very well aware of the history of the Afghan war, and have seen several of the documentaries you refer to that point out that it was largely known that the Afghan army would likely desert once the coalition left.

    I’m not saying we don’t care.

    That is quite literally what you said in your first comment, and is literally the only thing I’ve disagreed with you on so far (“the world simply doesn’t care”). If you didn’t mean that, then I don’t see anything I disagree with you on.

    Many individual people did earnestly care, and tried their best.

    This is literally the point I’ve been trying to make, but it seems like you keep misinterpreting me as saying the whole invasion was a misunderstood humanitarian operation. I’m not saying that.


  • I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say here?

    My point is that, while flimsy and flawed, there was in fact an education system and a humanitarian system in place that was propped up by coalition forces. This system did fall apart, leaving no system at all when the forces left. And yes, a bunch of Afghanis have every right to feel betrayed. I never said otherwise.

    It’s not like Afghanistan is the only place where schools, hospitals and infrastructure has been financed by western countries. By and large, we spend a lot of money on these things because a significant portion of the population sees it as the right thing to do. Because we care, and want to help people.

    What became very clear in Afghanistan was that you can’t force a population to be a liberal democracy. They have to be willing to fight for it themselves. The Afghan army (on paper) had several hundred thousand men, loads of heavy equipment, and several years to train and prepare for coalition forces leaving. There was a government structure in place. These things instantly folded when the coalition left because, clearly, enough people preferred Taliban to what the outsiders had forced upon them.

    I guess I’m saying it’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. If you stay, you’re an oppressive occupier. If you leave, you’re a traitor that permits a humanitarian crisis to occur.

    The OP here asked “why doesn’t anybody do anything about NK”, and my answer is that we (seem to) have learned that you can’t force democracy and human rights on a country. Chalking it up to “we don’t care” is reductionist.


  • It didn’t go to shit when we left, it was shit from the beginning.

    It seems like you didn’t observe the thousands of people swarming the airport in Kabul trying to get out with the last planes. It also seems like you haven’t picked up on the people crying about how people are being brutally punished for getting an education or listening to music now.

    I’m not denying that shit was really bad while coalition forces were there, but acting like it didn’t get worse for a lot of people when the left is just closing your eyes.

    Regardless, it’s ludicrous to claim that western countries “aren’t doing anything because they don’t care”. It’s not like we’ve spent truckloads of money and thousands of lives over 20 years of trying to get a functioning system in place while preventing a humanitarian crisis because we “didn’t care”. People saw it as immoral to just turn our backs on Afghanistan and let them solve their own problems. The result was largely that we learned that you can’t force democracy and human rights onto someone else, as proven by the almost complete absence of people willing to fight for just that once the coalition left.



  • It’s not that people “don’t care”. We’ve tried intervening with force in e.g. Afghanistan, where the oppressive regime was forcibly removed, and military power was used to ensure that elections were held and the results were respected.

    We have observed, several times, that everything goes to shit when we leave. Not only that, but people generally don’t seem like it when outsiders take over and tell them how to run their country, who should be allowed an education, and that <insert group> cannot be oppressed. So a side effect of the armed intervention is that a lot more people hate you now.

    Western countries “aren’t doing anything” because we’ve both learned from experience that military intervention doesn’t really work, and been repeatedly told by the rest of the world to mind our own business.


  • In my country we have a flat 25 % tax on anything sold to an end consumer (there are some exceptions). It’s often mentioned as the most important tax we have to equalise the economy and finance the welfare state.

    The point is that, because it’s a flat rate, you end up paying more the more money you have. If you only buy cheap groceries, that 25 % isn’t a huge amount of cash, while if you buy an expensive boat or car, it becomes quite a bit. This turns out to be a great way of ensuring that anyone who wants to “live rich” pays a decent amount for it.