When other people use HP, it makes me angry. It's like giving money to a powerful mafia; even if I am not the one dealing with the mafia the power others give to them makes them a threat to me.

The more HP succeeds at consumer-hostility, the fewer options I have that are not consumer-hostile. Even Brother will start to look with envy upon the kind of money that HP makes through customer abuse. Someday, new leadership will inherit Brother and see no competitive forces keeping its quality of service high, and it will become HP's mini-me.

Spread the word. Every time you use an HP device, the terrorists win.

In OSS there's a certain desperation for quality code where a lot of bullshit has historically been tolerated.

In the comment you posted at the top of this thread, you talked about servers, desktops, and mobile devices. Now you want the conversation to be only about desktops.

Extreme? Not in my opinion.

Swappable batteries seem to make sense for city cars, otherwise they don't really work out. It would perhaps work better if we built space frame vehicles, but unibody is actually superior for overall user experience, especially in NVH.

On one hand, you raise good points, and on the other hand they don't apply to automotive traction batteries. Battery packs are chassis structural members.

Guess you forgot that we totally fucked up Iran

We have to both be thinking of TNG and later because in TOS the primary interface is physical controls and most readouts aren't screens.

In TNG the primary interface for casual use is verbal, but there are displays everywhere and it's common for people to ask for something to be displayed on them, and the primary interface for technical activities is touch screens.

Israel consistently breaks every cease fire. You won't have to wait long.

Oh, did Naziyahoo stop sending them money?

They expect people to not know, and they are taking advantage of them. You are forgetting that the average person knows how fucking nothing works.

I'll go ahead and accept those percentages, but only with the caveat that this reality is based on the pervasive, dominant paradigm of not questioning authority.

This is a very multi-faceted issue with many overlapping issues compounding it.

It has been repeatedly observed that wealthy nations experience declines in birth rates. And we presently see this happening in wealthy countries across the globe, right now, and we have been seeing it for decades. And it's getting worse.

Your own personal experience is a common story, but doesn't suggest a root cause. It's easy to read an anecdote like yours, maybe attach it to one's own similar experience, and get dismissive and say "women just want it all, and that makes them insufferable, so relationships are done." There really is quite a lot more than that going on, for both genders, and it isn't possible to cover it all in a short post.

But the upshot is that modern-day relationships are really hard to build and harder to keep. They are legal minefields and financial minefields. A failure of a relationship can be utterly life-destroying (not just emotionally, but socially and financially and legally). It is as if our governments and culture don't want there to be relationships, and so have built a world that is outright hostile to them.

The opposite is true, the world by and large wants there to be marriage and family. The hostility largely arises from profiteering, and from a repeated pattern of "well this possibility is bad so lets mitigate it with this solution (which sounds nice but winds up being even worse)".

When we see people walking away from all this, we result to scolding and shaming and trying to deny their access to whatever they are turning to instead, hoping the raw misery of not having their needs met will drive them to plunge right back into the minefield, and somehow not step on a mine. It's not going to work. It can't work. Until we are ready to take a serious look at how we are the problem (and by "we" I mean everyone and everything that is being justified as not the problem, a huge can of uncomfortable truths that we vehemently reject), this breakdown is only going to get worse.

Addiction and dependence ARE dangerous things and given China's very high sensitivity to the dangers of emotionally charged groups with charismatic leaders, I can see why they would reject this even apart from a desire for there to be more babies. But this measure is not going to get the birth rates up, it will just take away another coping mechanism that people want.

Because around half the country either doesn't believe that's happening or is in favor of it happening, and "their" side is in control.

Read the 13th and tell us which one we are

A lot of people seem to think that if someone's telling them they love them, it must be true. I don't think they were raised to think.