They exist to present to the public as a viable alternative to renewables and transitioning to renewable energy resources in general.

It lets you tell the public that the scientists will figure it all out so they don't need to make any changes to the way we do things today.

It's the exact same scam plastic recycling turned out to be and for the exact same reason.

Well, I know of exactly two who have hidden tats. One is a tramp stamp, the other is a leg snake. The reason I know is probably because although I do get in front of boards on occasion, I don't inhabit them. I know those folks personally. Were I their coworkers I probably would not know.

Reading the rest of your post, I'm inclined to walk away. The idea that your wife getting a tattoo means instant divorce tells me everything I need to know about you and your value system.

 

Are you trying to instantiate a new law like Godwin?

>"Even if all 1 million downloads turn into real OS installs, it's a drop in the bucket compared to Windows installs."

True. But if even if a small number of those people then show someone else and that other person switches, and on, and on, awareness keeps spreading. That is a great thing.

Generally, I don't care what OS people use (as long as I don't have to support it), but I do care if they are unhappy. Having Linux as an option is really great and works fantastically for a large number of people willing to really try it. The fact that it is free, fast/efficient, has no licensing mess, is more secure, more privacy-oriented, more controllable, more customizable, more open, easier and faster to update, and without forced cloud crud, no AI creep, no ads or nagware, and very little fake/forced hardware "obsolescence" all make it a very compelling option for lots of use cases. Not all use cases, but a surprisingly large number.

>"However, after Microsoft's recent announcement their own updates have broken their own system [slashdot.org] combined with no longer supporting W10, this can only lead to good things."

Microsoft obviously has its own agenda that doesn't mesh at all with what many (perhaps even most) users want now. And it shows. As MS-Windows has gotten significantly worse and more hostile over the decades, Linux/distros have gotten significantly better. Even people who haven't tried it in 5 years are often pleasantly surprised.

I tend to point people to Mint, but Zorin might be just fine, as well (I just have no experience with it).

One of the things I've been noticing lately is that the kind of people who didn't use to get hassled by the cops are now getting hassled by the cops...

Crime keeps going down but we keep putting more cops on the street. People expect them to arrest people. So they're looking for guys they can hassle like yourself.

Recently a municipality had lost a fight to prevent a freedom of information request for flock camera data.

They instantly canceled the program and shut down the cameras.

Remember that Steve Jobs would buy a brand new Mercedes every couple of months so that he didn't have to have a permanent license plate.

The rich and powerful are very concerned about having their movements tracked.

What they are talking about is specifically abuses of the technology that people are on aware of.

The concern is that people are going to use the tech to get information and it's going to be bad information.

In politics there is a concept called a low information voter. This is someone who pays very little attention to politics and ends up with a lot of poorly informed opinions and makes poor political choices because of it.

This is Been supplemented by a new phenomenon call the bad information voter. Someone who has actively bad information and is making decisions on it. The decisions they make tend to be catastrophic.

Llms are bringing that same energy to every other aspect of people's lives. Basically people are awash in extremely bad information. Things that are just absolutely objectively false in every way shape and form. And they are likely to make decisions based on that information that are going to be very terrible.

A proper civilization would recognize this issue and work towards education but we have become obsessed with personal responsibility to the point where we can't even consider the effects on ourselves of other people having that much bad information.

We have all forgotten that no man is an island. Probably should be teaching that poem in schools...

"As I have always tried to tell women, you don't see tattooed women in the board room."

As far as you know. Most women that get tattoos don't get them in places where business attire leaves them exposed.

What is fundamentally unfair is that a man with obvious tattoos can have them disregarded through brute competence and presentation. Women are usually not offered the same path to being judged independently.

But make no mistake. There are tramp stamps in the board rooms. Just like how Chappelle once joked, "I'm sure there are a lot of gay men here... with their wives."

I've downloaded Linux many times in my career. Sometimes it was at work on corporate pcs, sometimes it was to fire up VMs, other times it was to make installation media to build servers at home. Every single time since the mid nineties I've completed the downloads on Windows boxes. I don't think I've ever downloaded Linux using Linux.

That 2% recently becoming 3% is a far more honest measure. You can conclude bugger all from this observation.

>"I need an OS that I can plug a sound card into, start up my machine and it installs the driver and starts working"

Generally, that is Linux. I have installed various Linuxes over decades on hundreds of various machines. For the most part, modern Linux detects all the typical hardware and just configures and uses it. There is no need to "install drivers".

>"I want GUIs for all common tasks and I want it intuitive enough the I'm not spending hours looking up"

Again, that is generally the case with modern Linux. All the good distros can be completely managed through a GUI.

Could you end up with trying to install a not-so-great distro on a machine that has some unusual hardware? And have to take a dive into stuff? Sure. But that is the exception, not the rule, at least not in 2025.

You're drawing a causal line that cannot be substantiated. Saying Christian values led to these changes is just not reasonable. The best you can say is that in the last thousand years Christianity was around, and stuff happened during that same period.

To begin to presume a link you'd have to ignore the centuries where the church propagated violence, murder, greed, and corruption, and also ignore all of the trends towards those values from the millennia before the arrival of the church, and those trends that were concurrent in non- Christian societies.

And apparently the Christian job is incomplete. Child abandonment happens all the time, and boxers and MMA fighters die in the ring at paid events. And considering that capital punishment is still out there, nitpicking that crucifixion is not a thing anymore is pretty trivial. Hanging, the guillotine, and the electric chair all point towards papered over tendencies for blood spectacles as retribution. And although the guillotine has been retired, the last use was 1977.

This stuff is not new and it is not modern. People migrate, and have done so for thousands of years.

What do you suppose caused the Bronze Age collapse?

There's a concept of determinism because of some of the consequences of how physics work. Basically the idea that every decision is already made because if we're made of molecules you can predict what those molecules have to do moment to moment.

Like how your body has already decided to move by the time you do it.

But quantum mechanics kind of throws all that right out the fucking door. My favorite fact is if we try to create a complete vacuum we still have little particles popping into existence out of nowhere and we can't explain it.

Russia can't really force it if they could then the war would be over and Europe wants to keep it all going so they can wear Russia down some more.

So nothing is really going to change in the war will just continue unless and until we get a democrat in the white house again with a clear majority in Congress.

It is incredibly fucked up that the world is just kind of standing by letting Russia do this so that they can wear Russia down and reduce their ability to function as a global superpower. Then again this shit we are letting happen in Yemen and Sudan is even worse. And Jesus fucking Christ if you read the history of what America did in South America during Ronald Reagan...

Yeah you're not really supposed to think about how expensive the drug war is versus just giving people support and addiction treatment.

America especially is really into punitive and revenge-based Justice. I wonder if it will start to fade if religious extremism continues to fade. It's not hard to draw a line between puritanical bullshit and wanting to do as much harm as possible to people who commit crimes or do drugs.