The same people pushing cursive are also pushing privatization and the elimination of higher education for everyone except a handful of the elite.

So right now if you're finding somebody on the left our main concern is to teach critical thinking skills that will create the next generation of voters that don't fall for the usual bullshit. You know what I'm talking about. The southern strategy, woke dei moral panics whatever the hell. The basic tricks that the ruling elite use to kowtow a population.

If we can't pull that off we would at least like to teach the actual history of chattel slavery in America, who Christopher Columbus really was and maybe throwing some stuff about the labor movement. It would also be nice if we could have an economics course in high school that wasn't just capitalist propaganda. I mean when I took mine years and years ago it was literally slotted between health and driver's ed that's how unimportant it was as a learning opportunity. It was literally just nine weeks or so of me being told how great capitalism was and how supply and demand made my life better.

I'm not saying we go full socialist but I would like to teach children about a proper and functional capitalist system, especially things like the need for regulation and antitrust law.

Now if you want to massively increase the funding for public schools that we can have all of the above and your finer points of education sure let's do it. But I have a sneaking suspicion you're not up for that

I think pupils should learn to hand-write. It's a useful skill to have. What I think should be done away with is torturing children with dictations and other non-sense that are basically speed-writing contests _without_ teaching them to type and giving them the option to chose typing over hand-writing.

Meh, what do you need electricity for at home? Lights... Not essential. Charge your bulb of 5 Watt during the day and hope for the best. TV? Talk to your neighbors in stead. Cooking? Gas stove. Or switch your diet. Fridge? Use other ways to preserve food... We could do with a lot less. Take this with a grain of salt. I am not pleading to go that way. It is just one of many ways to live.

you joke but we did exactly this with our gas service. I noticed in the summer that literally 2/3 of our bill was fees, with only a gas water heater running.

Put in a heat pump hot water heater and turned off the gas from March/April to Oct/Nov. They really aren't used to people cancelling service lol.

Yep. I play a game and ask people who their State Reps are. VAST majority of people have no idea.

You get the government competence proportional to your involvement in it.

Same with HOAs. People scream about them but literally never attend the meetings or bother to stand for election themselves.

Sure it is possible in the cities. You may have to drastically change the way of living though.

What laws? Sun shines, no power consumption at the meter, pay less.

Also infrastructure dollars spent on data centers are not spent on more useful projects.

It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game but it is. It is extremely hard to get the billionaires to allow us to spend any money on infrastructure. They do it begrudgingly and in exchange for huge amounts of free money. The last major push for infrastructure in America was in the mid 1980s when the Democrat party compromised with Ronald Reagan giving Reagan all the military spending he wanted in exchange for 1 trillion dollars worth of infrastructure spending to build out much needed cities. If you're over 50 that's why and how you are able to afford to buy a house.

I think one of the things that confuses economists is that the economy shouldn't be a zero-sum game and you're taught that it's not but in practice because of the bizarre political realities it is.

I just really wish that the world could just pick one distro and go with it.

I get that techies like the ability to pick their favorite distro and I get that Ubuntu is gotten close to being the default but in practice it's not.

There really needs to be a consistent way to install and deploy software and a consistent set of tools and libraries for accessing things like audio and video and for programming things like basic UI components.

If Linux could just settle on one distro and maybe two or three desktops (a light one, the heavy one for mainline desktops and maybe one for mobile and tablet) I think it could capture a lot more market share. Sort of like how stuff like ruby on rails and a lot of frameworks get popular because while they might not do things the best they just pick a way to do something and go with it.

Choice paralysis combined with diluting the developer pool creates all sorts of problems at this junction.

And I really really want a good competitor for Windows. Because holy crap Windows 11 is terrible. It is the most user hostile software I have ever seen in my life.

It probably makes more sense given their scale for them to have their own power generation -- solar, wind, and battery storage, maybe gas turbines for extended periods of low renewable availability.

In fact, you could take it further. You could designate town-sized areas for multiple companies' data centers, served by an electricity source (possibly nuclear) and water reclamation and recycling centers providing zero carbon emissions and minimal environmental impact. It would be served by a compact, robust, and completely sepate electrical grid of its own, reducing costs for the data centers and isolating residential customers from the impact of their elecrical use. It would also economically concentrate data centers for businesses providing services they need,reducing costs and increasing profits all around.

With the way lobbying works you just can't do that. Especially with the droughts driving up the cost of beef through the roof.

One thing you could do is single-payer healthcare especially in america. Back when I used to work really shitty call center jobs I need people that would take their antibiotics until they felt better and stop because they were saving them for the next time. That was because they couldn't afford to see a doctor.

There's an old saying, it's cheaper to be a good person.

Very very few people are going to do that. They're going to try another browser and it's going to work just fine in that browser and then they're going to use that browser.

That's because the advanced privacy features aren't in the current builds yet. It's very new stuff that they were using to prevent the kind of fingerprinting that is used to track people.

And it probably will not affect you because even after they roll out the new privacy features you are probably in a database somewhere of existing customers or something like that. The problem is going to be brand new customers getting flagged by mistake.

So the old farts floating around here are probably never going to see the effect, although as I mentioned on another thread I've been flagged before by Sony and was unable to buy anything on their game stores for ages.

It's more likely to affect somebody just starting out. Somebody who doesn't have purchasing history with a company.

This doesn't break the website it prevents you from completing a purchase. Generally speaking if you get flagged for fraud you won't be told. It just shows up as a decline. I had it happen to me trying to buy games for my PS3 from Sony back in the day. I would have to go to Amazon and buy a gift card and then load it because Sony had decided I was an evil Mastermind or something and they would not approve me for purchases no matter what. The card had a zero balance and I have an 800-point credit score.

You haven't seen it because Firefox isn't really doing all that much to prevent fingerprinting yet. They have a bunch of stuff in the nightly builds that will be in production build soon and it's going to be a problem.

How much of a problem will probably vary. Us old farts are probably in a database somewhere already that will allow us to get through. But if you're in your twenties and just starting out then when you go to make purchases it's going to be an issue.

Most consumers won't know what the hell is going on and they will just try it in another browser like Chrome or edge and it'll work and that'll be that. And they will never think about Firefox again.