"Fine" being a word with so many meanings that it's nearly worthless. I have got very fine hair myself, which I hate, I'd rather have coarse hair. There are the fine cotton sheets that you have to be careful with in the wash. Fine Woven might have been a thing when weaving was done by hand, but with machines you can indeed make Fine Woven products with crappy fibers and end up with Fine Woven Crap.

I've found belts to be unreliable the last few years. Mostly it's the breaking of the buckle, not the "leather", but I've seen leather wearing out too. Which surprised me because I saw the words "genuine" and "leather" and assume it was old fashioned leather. But no, it isn't.

It's like if they started calling particle board, genuine wood."

I understand the economics that favor conspicuous consumption of short lived products (just witness Apple's short lived items). But customers are complicit also in accepting the short life spans of products they spend good money on. You would expect though that after a history of shoddy products that some of these companies would lose the economic benefits when customers avoid them or avoid paying luxury prices for cheap crap, but it's not happening.

Yup. But give some charity to the locals, and they'll defend your crime family when others oppose you.

No, there are some really evil states out there ready and waiting to get rid of rights, and be even more heavy handed to their resident than the feds. Many don't want local rights, they want the local state capital to have ultimate authority. These are NOT small government states, they want a big and powerful government, only one that they control. You already see this not even well hidden with goofs like DeSantis.

The difference is that in the West the cities grew at a slower rate and so the sinking was more gradual while having time to find other water supplies. Chinese cities grew too fast, finding the exact same problems the West had but in a shorter time frame.. Now they get to deal with the problem if deciding if all the water goes to the new cities or if it continues to go to farmers, because there's not enough to go to both.

It needs to be animated though, with a big throbbing button that screams "Push Me!"

But m'ord, the peasants are grumbling.

Are the peasants armed?

No, m'lord.

Then fuck'm.

But some of the solders were born to peasants, m'lord.

What!? Send those peasant borns off on the crusades!

But m'lord, I am armed as well, and we're all alone in here...

Another reason to not tie all that together into one account. Ie, first off, don't use the cloud. OneDrive is still optional and worthy of a global boycott (I'm shouting at the clouds here and they ignore my shaking fist :-). Don't purchase shit from a Microsoft Account, don't use the Microsoft Store, that should be a no-brainer! Use a separate account for each and every computer (a no brainer), and device (also no brainer but harder for some to understand). The snag are the people who insist on sharing all their files with all their devices, maybe they feel like they have to take the job work and do it on their home devices as well while sitting on the toilet?

Basic security would imply not to use a single point-of-failure password for *everything*. If it's a bad idea to use the same password for the bank that you use for online shopping, then it is also a bad idea to use your microsoft account for anything other than logging into one single computer.

I've got Windows 11 and I don't have a Microsoft Account. I think newer W11 users will be required to get an account though, but maybe there's still a way around it. It's a really bad idea though. Microsoft is trying to copy Apple, but not even Apple requires an Apple account on Macs.

Possible use the account only temporarily, make a local account be admin, then swap over.

The schtick is to abandon federal government altogether and devolve into confederate like states. Refusing to fund federal departments is to make those departments ineffective and thus be easier to get rid of when the public sees them as pointless.

For a long time, Taiwan was also an authoritarian state, ruled by martial law, with intellectuals imprisoned. The harsher periods were relatively short but it remained authoritarians for several decades. It wasn't democracy that causes Taiwan to flourish as it was more productive than China even before the authoritarian period ended.

The difference here is that Taiwan had the support of the richer West, and thus had profitable trade avenues even while having a heavy handed ruler. Other countries that were authoritarian but also anti-communist were treated as friends by the West. Definitely the CIA helped keep dictators in power for cold war reasons. Meanwhile China mostly just had trade with the Soviets which was not an economically robust system either.

Marxism isn't really Socialism except in the strictest sense. Socialism can easily coexist with Democracy. Marxism rejects democracy, and attempts to forcibly create a class-less society with seizure of private property. But properly Venezuela isn't really Marxist, though it has leaders with those tendencies.

Without some sort of heavy handed government, you can't force a company to give their money away to workers without them expecting the workers to do the work efficiently and cost effectively. You can't force companies to be charities. The most you can really do without going full on short-term doomed dictatorship is demand that they treat the workers well, follow rules, etc.

Even in the Soviet Socialist Republics (if that's not socialist then nothing is), companies were to an extent still profit driven. A low profit company meant it was not helping the broader economy, and the bosses of that company would be subject to dangerous scrutiny.

I think many Google employees, especially those who've never worked anywhere else, treat Google like it as a university. And in the early days Google to promote this style of view. The main google buildings are clustered together and the employees treat the entire area as their own, including all the public streets which are NOT google property, which is why you see them not paying attention to stop signs or stop lights (drive extra slow if you're a visitor). They used to allow stude.. employees to work on their own projects. People bring their dogs into work. There are special after-hours clubs, themed cafes in the buildings, tubs full of breakfast cereal, goofy nap time pods, etc. It feels like a college!

Except that it's not a college, it's not a research institute, and the employees are not paying customers like students are. I think this catches some workers by surprise, especially when they get a bad grade... performance review. Then they canceled that "do your own project some of the time" and this discouraged a lot of workers. Now Google is paying big attention to the bottom line, the profits aren't just rolling in automatically, and the "resources" need to earn their keep.

For iPerf - the common use case is not to measure the network performance on the host machine itself, but to measure network performance on the network. Ie, you're a router tester and want to measure throughput. In those cases you want a host machine that is not going to inadvertently affect your tests because it's a slower machine or, in this case, if the porting to the host machine is inefficient.

Microsoft is not saying "don't test us because we'll end up looking bad". They're saying that a non-Windows test application running on Windows is going to give you unexpected results. *Especially* if the non-Windows application is sitting on top of Cygwin. Cygwin is great, but it's sloooow, and mostly obsolete given WSL2. So run the iPerf3 on a linux box directly, Unsure why it isn't just using WSL though.