Parents telling their kids they are geniuses isn't an innovation of this century - I'm old enough to have seen the moon landing live and my mother always told us that we were geniuses who could do whatever we wanted. My dad's shrugs and grunts could probably be interpreted more or less the same way, but his generation of men were not much inclined to talk about feelings and potentials.
Almost no one wants to install an OS on a new machine. They want it to be fully (or at least reasonably) usable when they take it out and power it on.
Manufacturers don't want to have to deal with the extra SKUs of different OSes, the customer support that entails and the software investment in any proprietary stuff they preload. And don't say "no one wants that stuff" - to some extent people do want it or at least tolerate it just fine. Among other things the security updates and driver updates are used all the time by regular people and we don't want to exploits just lying around if they can be fixed easily.
Windows and MacOS provide a standard OS that simply does not exist in the Linux world in the same way. The standardization makes it easy for hardware makers and software makers to have a predictable environment.
Without a significant user demand no hardware maker will ever invest a meaningful amount of time or money into a Linux OS preload for mass consumption.
Even a 1000x increase in Linux desktop usage would not be more than a tiny rounding error compared to Windows usage. So maybe it moved things "quite a bit" relative to before, but it is still an effectively zero change.
The US population is not shrinking. And we have always had immigrants in large numbers. I don't understand this "hand over the culture" idea, it smacks of ethno-nationalism to me. Our culture is not particularly special and we have always incorporated immigrant contributions. Christmas as it is currently celebrated with Santa and trees and so on was imported. In 1850 no one celebrated Saint Patrick's Day openly because the Irish were the problem immigrants of the day. Every popular music style owes a huge amount to other cultures including so called "native" forms like rock, jazz and hip-hop. In 1960 there was no Thai food in the US, Chinese was rare outside of cities, mexican and anything spicy was rare outside of the southwest, and even italian was considered a bit weird. Good coffe made well and european style cafes were rare. All of these are now common and considered part of American culture. Suggesting that culture is somehow static and can be "handed over" is a pretty awful sentiment.
I completely agree with the last statement: Generous parental leave needs to be enshrined in law and taxpayer funded.
As others have noted, having good taxpayer funded parental leave increases labor force participation by women, and makes parents more effective workers by reducing stress and increasing employee flexibility. The spending would go into the current network of small providers allowing many peope to start and run businesses that currently struggle to do so.
Having the care available increases the tax base and overall productivity. The businesses receiving the money add to overall employment and economic health. It is a net benefit for the economy and ends up with happier, better families and more profitable small businesses.
Seeing it just as a cost is dumb - the whole "hurr durr, this means tax and tax is bad" doesn't see the productive effects of the spending. It is far more productive than the biggest discretionary spending item, the military budget. Only looking at the cost side of the equation is just dumb. The same goes with single payer health care - yes it would mean more taxes, but the amount you and your employer pay for health care on your paycheck would be eliminated. For the vast majority of people this would be a net of more money in their check. For a few it would be less - those who don't have any insurance and those who may a huge amount and pay a tiny fraction for insurance
By the way, if the tax system actually taxed the wealthy in a sane way we could easily afford something like this. Billionaires don't get a W2 that says they earned a billion, their wealth never sees a taxable event. This is not because of any idea of fairness or balance, it is just that the system has loopholes and the wealthy can exploit them to their benefit.
The scammers are trafficed into prison-like places where they get beaten if they don't bring in enough money. Their families are blackmailed to get them out. The money goes to truly evil criminal gangs. Wasting their time may be fun for you, but it can be a very serious problem for the scammer. This isn't a defense of the scamming at all. Just be aware that the person on the other end of the line (or text or whatever) is not likely to be a willing participant.
@jd has a lower user number than me - there are not that many of those still around.
I signed up on the first day that user IDs could be created, back in the early Jurassic
As an old school C programmer, this comment could not be more correct. C/C++ should be on the trash heap of programming languages. Unsafe data access, craptastic memory management, far too much craptastic legacy code, etc etc. I've spent my entire career working with systems in these languages and know in detail how messed up the whole ecosystem is.
This is one of the very few times since I joined that I've seen a user ID lower than mine. We've both been here for a LONG time!
I also have an HP 4050, I was able to get the gigabit ethernet EIO module for it and it works great.
If this thing only showed me things in a narrow band of areas it thinks I find interesting, how will I ever develop new interests? This just seems like a very dumb idea and not much of an improvement over the Facebook News Feed that is so effective at creating echo chambers. I would rather have a feed that selected from a diverse pool of curated feeds so that I can see the unbelievable variety of human interest and experience. If I find something I like, diving into that feed area would be like falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole.
The more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the drain.
