As long as some little bitch keeps modding down my factual posts

If they went 150% yesterday, and another 150% today, then within a month they will have stockpiled all the RAM in the world.

Without knowing precisely how Explorer is structured, it's conceivable that there may be different dynamically-linked libraries and/or execution points for running the desktop and for the file explorer, in which case just having explorer.exe running in and of itself doesn't mean that new modules have to be loaded if explorer.exe process fires up. The solution could very well be to load the libraries involved in file browsing when the desktop opens.

Just guessing here. There was a time when there was a lot more horsepower required for GUI elements than folder browsing, but this is 2025, and explorer.exe probably uses orders of a magnitude more resources now than it did in 1995, because... well, who knows really. Probably to sell more ads and load up more data to their AI.

All the extraneous bullshit Microsoft added to the start menu is always lurking in memory for performance reasons.

That, on modern hardware, they have to preload a fucking file browser so that it pops up faster is just an indication of what a steaming pile of garbage MS is. They had sweet spots with Win2k-WinXP and with Win7, but their incoherent need to be a whole bunch of contradictory things --- with AI! has led what was a rather iffy OS and UI experience to begin with to become a cluster fuck of incoherence.

I do most of my day to day work on MacOS and Gnome, and fortunately the Terminal services version I have to RDP into is Server 2016, but every time I have to work with Windows 11 I'm just stunned by just how awful it looks and how badly it behaves.

Fear of facts is a sign of cowardice

School issued devices often don't permit installing arbitrary apps, only those on the approved list.

Most iPhone owners didn't buy them outright. They got them "free" with their plan. Consequently out in the real world I commonly see people with old iPhones with cracked screens. They can't afford to replace them, we don't have an Apple store anywhere near here, etc.

The tariff revenues are needed to cover the tax cuts for the wealthy instituted at the same time, so no.

"An employer can only pay the workers what their output is worth, so if your industry is producing things that are difficult to sell, then you're not going to get a good paying job"

You're blaming the victim. If the employer's plan doesn't include paying a reasonable wage then their plan is crap and they need to go out of business so that someone with a better plan can succeed them.

"The experience of Detroit should be a warning to those who believe that this economic law can be avoided; the car makers sold the same stuff year after year whilst Japanese and German producers made ever better stuff."

That's not because they couldn't do better. They chose not to and depended on regulatory capture instead, preventing others from bringing more superior products to the market. Again it's the employer's fault and no one else's.

Perhaps they should stockpile some.

I look forward to cooking on my non-stick lettuce, because I certainly won't eat that shit.

I look forward to the accumulation of non-stick chemicals being so great that instead of absorbing water, the soil just has it pool on the surface.

I look forward to watching insects sliding off plants and just wallowing in the dirty.

I look forward to dying young and leaving a shiny, cancerous corpse.

That's not a thumb. That's just a cancerous growth.

Thoughful point.

No. Most of them suck on those Trump-cum flavored nicotine pouches.