It really doesn't make sense to use Windows or macOS these days. Hardware now outlasts software by entirely too long. If you want to get the most out of your hardware, Linux is pretty much the only choice.

Most people don't upgrade their hardware because it's faulty or too slow to actually do the tasks they need. They upgrade because Microsoft and Apple intentionally drop support and cripple things. It's downright wasteful. As more and more software becomes web apps it makes less sense to use MS or Apple in business settings.

Well, your buying power would be crippled.

Sure, itâ(TM)s quite possible for two people to exchange offhand remarks about the local weather apropos of nothing, with no broader point in mind. It happens all the time, even, I suppose, right in the middle of a discussion of the impact of climate change on the very parameters they were discussing.

enjoy your enjoyment of 'sound'.

as you get older (GOML) the sound of the sound matters so much less.

there were times that listening to a single speaker fm pocket 'transistor radio' was good enough to enjoy the songs.

have your fun with your rumble and explosions. as you get older, that shit becomes SO much less important, you wont believe how irrelevant all that hype really is.

I have not been to a theater in - 20 years? more? I cant remember.

its been unpleasant for decades. and with home theater, unless you're a teen trying to escape home and get 'privacy' somewhere else, theaters have long outlived their usefulness.

I think I stopped theaters around the time I cut the cable.

all around, what passes for entertainment is just plain rotten and/or boring.

you can keep it.

The thing to understand is we're talking about sixth tenths of a degree warming since 1990, when averaged over *the entire globe* for the *entire year*. If the change were actually distributed that way -- evenly everywhere over the whole year -- nobody would notice any change whatsoever; there would be no natural system disruption. The temperature rise would be nearly impossible to detect against the natural background variation.

That's the thinking of people who point out that the weather outside their doors is unusually cool despite global warming. And if that was what climate change models actually predicted, they'd be right. But that's not what the models predict. They predict a patchwork of some places experiencing unusual heat while others experience unusual coolness, a patchwork that is constantly shifting over time. Only when you do the massive statistical work of averaging *everywhere, all the time* out over the course of the year does it manifest unambiguously as "warming".

In the short term -- over the course of the coming decade for example, -- it's less misleading to think of the troposphere becoming more *energetic*. When you consider six tenths of a degree increase across the roughly 10^18 kg of the troposphere, that is as vast, almost unthinkable amount of energy increase. Note that this also accompanied by a *cooling* of the stratosphere. Together these produce a a series of extreme weather events, both extreme heat *and* extreme cold, that aggregated into an average increase that's meaningless as a predictor of what any location experiences at any point in time.

"Matt Mullenweg regrets an accidental moment of honesty that revealed that the entire WordPress 'community' is a sham."

This asshole wants all the benefits of foss and all the benefits of proprietary systems. He lied for years, telling the public that WordPress was controlled by a community-led foundation. He did that because it attracted developers and users (a shitload of them). All the while those developers and users weren't buying into a community-led project, they were helping Automattic create a crippleware platform.

That he accuses other companies of "free-riding" for taking advantage of a supposedly open platform just shows how clueless he is. He's a spoiled brat who thinks he's entitled to be a billionaire. The guy didn't even make WordPress, he just latched on to the guy who forked it from some other project and then took over as some perverse wannabe cross between Jobs and Torvalds (clearly a failure because unlike Jobs, he has no idea what an elegant product looks like, and unlike Torvalds, he has no idea what elegant code looks like). The only reason it worked is because of the big lie he accidentally spilled the beans on: the open source community propped him up because they took him at his word when he said it was a community-led project.

But it really is that simple. We've known about this for decades. The most developed countries during that time had some form of representative government, and we did what people often do when they receive a horrible diagnosis. We pretended it wasn't happening.

We could have shifted to more renewable forms of energy. We could have stopped all rural and suburban development and lived in cities that used public transportation as the primary means of getting around. We could have made a strong push for urban gardening, reduced our dependency on livestock, and fed our cows antacids. We could have done a lot of things, but they wouldn't have allowed boomers to maximize the pleasure they extracted out of life, so we didn't.

If there was a solution that didn't threaten the interests of the fossil fuel industries, then we would have done it. Nuclear power is certainly something we can do, but nuclear power alone will not save us. If the entire world went all in on nuclear power the same time France did, that certainly would have helped. But there's still steel, concrete, planes, cars, natural gas, and a shitload of other greenhouse gas producers.

Human history is full of examples of civilizations that collapsed because they failed to consider the long-term consequences of destroying their environment. Deforestation, water management, the tragedy of the commons, over harvesting game, etc. Now we're doing it at a global scale and risking the survival of all humanity.

Good luck with "geoengineering" and "high-tech approaches." If we were that advanced we would be doing it.

I'm certainly not going to argue that the war on drugs has been conducted ethically, logically, effectively, or efficiently. But I'll also never argue in favor of decriminalized or legalized meth.

One of the biggest problems with we have with meth is that we have been so undiplomatic with China and Mexico that the former has taken a page out of the opium wars and exports the chemicals required to produce meth and fentanyl to the latter. Our ability to take on the cartels has also been stymied by our horrible treatment of Mexico. As the Chinese found out during the opium wars, prohibition is tough when powerful external enemies want to use addiction to cause you pain.

The above is just one of many factors that must be considered, but I think it just reinforces my point that we can't look at drug prohibition as a binary problem. When it comes to regulating chemicals—any chemical—we need to be very specific. We need to regulate chemicals that are used and get unearthed during hard rock mining, like arsenic. We need to regulate greenhouse gasses that are causing the destruction of this planet. We need to regulate pharmaceutical drugs that are only safe when taken under specific conditions. We need to regulate chemicals that are used in the production of food or as foodstuffs themselves. Likewise, we need to regulate recreational drugs, and the regulation for each recreational drug ought to be specific to that drug. Marijuana prohibition, like alcohol prohibition, has proven to be more negative than legalization (with specific regulations). I cannot imagine a scenario where meth legalization causes less loss of life, less suffering, and less security than prohibition.

Meth is about as common as moonshine today, but it's not nearly as common as alcohol during prohibition.

The meth lab in your condo complex got busted for a reason.

Relevant to the story here:

wiki

I'm not sure if you're seriously recommending a return to alcohol prohibition or if you're using it as a sarcastic counterexample to my point. However, in either case my answer would be that alcohol is still significantly different than meth and PCP in how dangerous it is, how much demand there is for it, and how easy it is to make.

1. As we learned from our first attempt at alcohol prohibition, it's just not worth it. The black market violence ended up being worse than the violence caused by drunks and so many people were willing to defy the law that it was unenforceable.

2. Some people who drink are more prone to violence. Some people who drink will disregard their impairment and drive anyway. All people who take meth and PCP suffer from paranoid delusions, will commit crimes to feed their addiction (or commit crimes due to their psychosis), and cannot function as normal members of society. An alcoholic can satiate their addiction without ever getting drunk. A meth addict cannot satiate their addiction without putting themselves in a multi-day state of psychosis.

3. One has to consider the practical consideration that we live in a (supposed) democracy and banning alcohol would be extremely unpopular while banning meth is extremely popular. This is one reason why federal marijuana prohibition is so galling—it's in direct opposition to what the people want. Demand is also an important factor when considering the practicality of prohibition. There's a much higher demand for alcohol than PCP, meaning there will always be a black market for alcohol whereas the modern black market for PCP is negligible precisely because demand isn't high enough to take the risk of production and selling even for most existing black market sellers.

4. Alcohol is extremely simple to make. Humans have been making alcoholic beverages since at least 10,000 B.C. It's so easy to make that prisoners make it in their toilets. Hillbillies still make moonshine even though they could just go to the liquor store. Beer brewing is a common hobby for middle aged men. The ease of production is a major reason why alcohol prohibition proved to be so ineffective. Meth and PCP both require knowledge of chemistry, special equipment, and obtaining other hard to acquire chemicals to produce. As with pharmaceutical drugs, the difficulty of production makes regulation easier.

Have you ever seen someone on meth? PCP? Consuming those drugs instantly makes a person a danger to society.

Do we need a major reform when it comes to drug legislation and enforcement? Absolutely. But that's much different from "legalize all drugs." Each substance needs to be judged separately and treated as such.

For marijuana, in many places legalization has meant that you can prop up a store and sell it. That appears to be working out okay. Should we allow stores to sell LSD over the counter? Probably not. People generally don't take LSD in massive doses and they don't get addicted to it, but it's such a powerful drug and it only takes a drop to make one fall into a full blown hallucinogenic state. You don't want LSD to be an over the counter drug not because you're worried that people will take it recreationally, but because it could so easily be used for horrible pranks (that could lead to real psychosis). It's dangerous! LSD probably shouldn't be legal, but it's also probably not worth law enforcement's time to worry about this niche drug.

Then there's cocaine and heroin and all that. The idea about the government giving it away is completely antithetical to the next idea about providing addiction services. If you give addicts everything they need to continue being addicts, they will have no motivation to ever stop.

There is probably no perfect solution when it comes to drugs. Extreme prohibition causes dangerous black markets and the violence associated with them. But to swing the complete opposite direction and just legalize everything is just crazy. There's a reason we have a distinction between prescription drugs and over the counter drugs. Even the most nuanced policies won't be perfect, but you can't just treat "drugs" as a single category enforced under a single policy.

I believe you, but that might be one of the saddest things I've ever heard.

I agree that the problem with wages are policies pushed by the billionaire class, but now that they have more political power than ever before nothing is getting fixed. Things are getting much, much worse.

Immigrants have not hurt the American middle and lower classes. Our regressive tax system that gets more regressive every time Republicans seize power is a problem. A complete lack of functional antitrust law is a problem. Private medicine is a problem. Private education is a problem. Urban sprawl is a problem.

All the problems that have contributed to massive wealth disparity are supported and magnified by the current administration.