If by simple, you mean simplistic, then yeah. What you're forgetting is that every time a bomb kills someone's mother, father, brother, sister, wife, son, or daughter, another America hater is born. So there's likely to be an endless supply of irrational leaders, so long as they are put into power by someone bombing the previous leader along with random military targets.

The only regime changes that are ever really positive long-term are regime changes led by the people of a country against their leaders. All other regime changes are statistically more likely to make things worse than better.

Complete 24/7 tracking of you as an individual. They have to have a unique identifier for you and it has to be stored somewhere for this to work.

And we are just letting it happen because why the fuck not? Any politicians it's going to oppose this is also not going to play into our love of moral panics and knee-jerk reactions. Making them completely non-viable.

If you give Windows 11 less than 16 GB you might as well not bother booting it. It is painfully slow and that's why you're not seeing 8 GB Windows laptops even though apple is out there selling in 8 GB laptop that's threatening the entire industry.

And honestly you really really want 32 GB for Windows 11 and 64 GB wouldn't hurt. It's one of the reasons the Damned ram crisis is so bad. Microsoft guzzles RAM for their slop generators and monitoring software. As a consumer if you're stuck running Windows you have to pay for all that in CPU cycles and RAM.

Sure. I was offered a position around DC, as a "Beltway Bandit". Would have made a significant increase in pay. But doing the research showed CoL was way higher, and fighting with traffic, horrifying, less access to the natural world, and in the end, I would be making less money after all expenses. Plus my wife was a VP at her place of work. So it really wasn't all that hard a decision to say "No thanks" - turned out to be the right decision in the end as well.

When I was invited to sign up, They actually asked for my email password. That was some years ago, but that only violated every ToS I ever heard of.

I was never asked about how much I used to make. It was always pretty simple. I'd ask them to make an offer, if interested in me, then respond as needed. If someone mad an insulting offer, I'd just say no thank you. If it was in the ballpark I'd then ask for what I believe would be acceptable. Places would usually accommodate to what I wanted.

Know your worth, people. And if someone tries to lowball you, just thank them for their time, and scoot.

Yup, I was not allowed to ask female candidates anything about family or children. I could get fired if I did.

There were a number of women I interviewed who were aware of this issue, and at some point, they would say something like "I know you aren't allowed to ask, or even react, but I am not having any more children, and will not have my family interfere with my work."

And for a lot of positions, like Team Lead, it is really important to have some idea about family matters, like are we going to have multiple team leads so that the woman can have children and take leave?

Point is, not being allowed to ask questions like that, while on the surface is protecting some sort of privacy, it also makes for a decision process that might favor male candidates in more critical positions.

I've never been in a position where I could take large swaths of time off. Some positions are like that. Even for accidents. Day after I got out of the Hospital for a broken ankle I got calls to come in. I told them I could come in the next day, but they had to understand I was quite drugged up, that I had on a bloody cast that I had to keep elevated.

Hell, the wife intercepted a call from them trying to get me to come in the day of my ankle operation. She's a professional too, but wouldn't tell me until a couple weeks later. She wasn't at all happy. note, that ended up being quite a kerfuffle. Wife was so pissed she was swearing at me, people at work were pissed, mostly at who asked me to come into work - but a little at me as well. One of our photographers grabbed a picture of me in shorts and T-shirt with my cast propped up. I think it might have been for evidence.

But even in more normal times, I'd get phone calls for some emergency while I was at the beach, or across the country. Just part of the territory.

Shit needs to get done, and team leads are often a pinch point.

Final note: I'm sure people in here will chime in calling me a psychopath, maybe a people pleaser. I know right?

And I got a 50 percent raise after 1 year in my present position, and on occasion, 100 percent more on the new rate. (I'm paid per project)

This whole looking at your social media to somehow find out how little money you will accept is just weird.

Employers do check on social media to see if you are disparaging them, like the woman who was fired from GameStop for posting a video ridiculing GameStop, their customers, and their products, finally showing the location of the store safe.

Or the Chili's employee who made a video about how stupid the customers were, for expecting good food and a clean rest room.

Or the Psychologist who made a twerking video while complaining about patients.

Or the nurse who took a dick pic of a well hung patient, then shared it with other nurses, and it made it onto the web (I think it was 4 nurses fired)

Or the woman who was posting her "Office Siren" journey on TikTok - an Office Siren is a woman who wears provocative party dress Club like clothing to work, and to get reactions from men, whether validation or getting men fired. She recorded her interactions with HR after men complained about her trying to provoke and probably get the men fired. Turned out HR and the company didn't like the clothing choice, the recordings with HR, or the unsafe workplace environment.

It isn't just women - I've seen men posting about getting fired for social posting, but it is never as outlandish or memorable.

Are you sure? I mean, really sure?

After all, the link you provided states "Disposable income is the amount of money a household has available for spending and saving after income taxes have been deducted" then goes on to qualify this with "This figure will be the most significant dollar amount because government taxes at the federal and state level are not included in the figure."

You'll note that missing from either of these quotes (or any other rider on that page) is any reference to: adjustments for state funded healthcare; parental leave allowance, or maternity or paternity pay; social security benefits / in work benefits; and so on.

So, I wonder, what is it, in toto, that you think 'Disposable income' covers exactly?

All you do is show your level of ignorance. I've posted nought but facts, and you act like the special child screaming "Neener neener, neener I can't hear youuuuuu!" While holding his hands over his ears. If you cannot understand a launch envelope, and why Spacex even has expendable missions, well there ya go!

If it was only improving, not regressing.

Here's my recent W11 story.

For my Digital radio classes, I picked up a Lenovo Laptop. A decent one. I wanted to have something similar to the class member's computers. So after a couple weeks of dealing with the update problems of class members, I had my first. Despite my disabling OneDrive The update re-activated it, but I didn't know until the next class, when I found out that they moved all of the non-program files with program settings and multiple instance settings and other program related folders to OneDrive. And the programs stopped working. And somehow nuked my local account, which made for an unholy mess. I also needed to create a new way to run multiple instances of a program for people, and had to publish one for W10, and another for W11.

I had to uninstall OneDrive. My first classes were during Windows 7 times. Only took 2 sessions to get everyone running. The last W-11 class ended up taking the entire course devoted to figuring out why the student's computers worked last week, but not this week.I ended up switching to my Mac because the instructor should have a working system.

The whole point is that W11 is degenerating and falling apart. Updates are more malware than malware is. At least the bad guys let your computer function, while Microsoft can leave your computer non functional.

I call it security through bricking.

The next class that recently started is me teaching Linux first, then we'll move on to the digital radio matters. This is what was requested by my students.

I've never bought into poster's security through obscurity claims. There are plenty enough Linux machiners out there, as well as all the Apache servers - and let's not forget all those Raspberry Pis - to make a decent "attack force" for whatever the bad guys want to do.

As for the update process, here is a reason Windows forces their updates, and Linux and MacOS allow you to install them at your leisure. People don't avoid Linux and MacOS updates because the computer works afterwards. Windows? Well this article is all about yet another Windows update trainwreck

Let me restate that. Most of what makes neighborhood streets dangerous is vehicles and pedestrians using the same space at similar times.

Who has priority is largely uninteresting, because ultimately if a car hits you, you're still probably dead whether you had the right of way or not.

Ostensibly, sure, if you got rid of all the cars, streets would be safer for pedestrians, but they would also be a huge waste of space, because pedestrians don't need huge roads to walk. Roads exist principally for cars. The fact that pedestrians have to cross them is just an unfortunate design constraint that's hard to avoid cheaply, and giving pedestrians priority is mostly just feel-good policymaking that doesn't solve any of the fundamental problems.

The only truly safe way to share the space is to ensure that pedestrians aren't in the road when cars are. The best approach, at least in cities, is second-floor walkways, so that pedestrians and cars are never vertically at the same traffic layer. A slightly less optimal, but still reasonable approach is to give pedestrians a separate walk cycle in which the entire intersection is theirs. Pedestrians have priority during that cycle, and cars have priority the rest of the time, and as long as everyone follows the rules, nobody gets hurt.

But none of those solutions work for neighborhood streets, which is why the presence of pedestrians on neighborhood streets without sidewalks and proper traffic control for pedestrians results in the roads being inherently more dangerous than other streets.

The smallest (and only) open weight model that gets Opus or Sonnet level coding performance is MiniMax M2.5, and you need about 512GB of VRAM for that model (with enough room for input tokens). At 128GB you are looking at Opus 4.0 / Haiku 4.5 level models like Qwen 3.5 122B-A1 at Q4 or Qwen3-Coder-Next 80B-A3B at Q8.

I think it's likely we will have small language models that specifically target coding that are at Opus 4.6 quality on 128-256GB of VRAM in the next couple years, I don't think we are there yet.