You can TRY.
I buy specific New Balance shoes, because they're made in America and theoretically made under some labor laws. I buy my clothing second hand. At least I'm not the one who payed the blood price on them. I try to buy local food, or at least Organic. I ride my bike and take public transportation as much as possible. When I need to buy a power tool, I hit Craigslist and buy an older (and usually better made and cheaper to boot) tool instead of buying new. My computers are bought second hand as well. A four year old Laptop surfs the web, programs, and does CAD work just fine. Etc.
Blah blah, I'm awesome... the point is, you can TRY. If consumers shifted their consumption patterns just a LITTLE bit, it would send a big message. Just look at food. 15 years ago, the concept of an Organic isle in Safeway was inconceivable. Look at chocolate. Fair trade is better than not fair trade. Even buying from the same company, but Organic, means that company is behaving better. People wanted better chocolate, and they wanted to feel like they weren't taking advantage. The market shifted in response.
Or you could just not care, because there's nothing you can do. I think that's the biggest lie we as Humans have to overcome. There is PLENTY you can do. Amazing things happen when folks organize and share effort.
Right after the BP oil spill, I stood outside my house and watched cars go into an AM/PM for gas. Right across the road was a Shell (not that Shell is innocent or anything). I thought to myself "BP just did a Bad Thing, why are people buying from AM/PM? It says 'part of BP' right on the sign!"
Perhaps it was habit? Perhaps it was that the gas was 5cents cheaper a gallon?
This still bugs me to this day. Five cents a gallon, with each person having approximately a 10-15gal tank.. They couldn't or wouldn't spend 50-75 cents to send a message.
There are already a lot of posts saying "where would they go to?". I get that. I do. But we still need to pull our heads out of our (not so) collective asses. There is only one thing that a company fears, and that is a drop in profit. As long as it's profitable to take advantage of us, they will. It's not THAT much effort to be a conscious consumer. People have been doing it with food. They just need to extend it to other things.
There are two ice caps. The one that is ice floating in warming water is melting. The other one is over a land mass, and hence not melting with warming water. The mount of ice on the southern pole is regulated by wind and snowfall. More heat in the system makes more vigorous winds, hence freezing more.
This is not unexplained. You just didn't look.
You do realize you sound crazy.... right? The "green" solar agenda is to shift money to untaxable locations and hide it (I thought that was EVERYONE's agenda), and to divert the world's attention by hating the world and killing everyone?
I... wow. What does anyone say to that? Where did you GET that?
How do you fight a corporation? I'm very curious...
I'm very involved in local politics. I've met my state reps, several times. You CAN fight city hall, you just need enough people.
I'm pretty sure that if you posted nasty things about your local government, the cops would not actually beat you and put you in jail. That's a big bit of hyperbole you have there. Corps don't have armies? Ever heard of the Pinkertons? They did a LOT of head busting back in the day. Well, union busting.
I guess the point here is that you CAN change an organization if you get enough people, if you organize, and hurt them (either votes or money) until they do what you want. At the heart of it both my city government and a corporation are just large organizations.... But the corporation's bottom line is Profit, and the Government's bottom line is Services Delivered. Both have all the benefits of large organizations (economy of scale, etc) and the drawbacks (corruption, slowness, etc)
And yet, no one's really complaining about device drivers. Linux device drivers are fine. You don't see it happening? Uh. It already happened. It is happening. It will continue to happen. I plug stuff in, it works. Except for some printers, because those companies are just dead nasty evil.
We're talking about the desktop here....
Ew... you NEED the
So... an app system full of useless trivial apps that have really stupid permissions to my box.. And on top of that nightmare, you want to drop
No Sir. Just.... No. Ew.
If you're concerned that it's hard to get code into the official debian repositories, that's a conversation we can have. But no, we can't go away from dependency checking toward an app store model. I don't WANT any old stupid app to be in the offical repositories.
As a DM, I don't CARE if my PCs are balanced. I care if they're interesting. If my players start min/maxing, I slap 'em back to the stone age. We're here to roleplay, Damnit. Talking to the innkeeper is just as important as stabbing the orc.
It's my job to keep the players entertained by co-creating a story WITH the players.
Well, I'm about a third through the provided free PDFs, and I have to say that I like the tone so far.
Like many others, I thought 4E turned my beloved Roleplaying game into a Rollplaying game. I thought it lost all flavor or character. Ok, and I wigged out over the refresh times for abilities and spells.... It smelled like an MMORPG, which usually doesn't have much actual RP in it. I moved to pathfinder.
I'm finding this PDF to be an easy read though. (Hey Shadowrun 5th edition guys, you could learn something here.) It's full of flavor text, the rules seem easy and intuitive.... I'd play it.
The rules changes seem nice too. I hate rules. I want to focus on the story and the character interactions. I don't want to spend my time looking up bonuses in a chart. I have NEVER used a grenade scatter table in my life.
After 4E and Piazo doing such a good job with Pathfinder, I.... might actually give D&D 5E a fresh look. Ew. I said it.
Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
