Geographical mobility used to be much easier. In the age of credit scores and limited housing, it is extremely difficult to find a landlord who will admit you without a job, and much harder to find a job that will hire you without already being local.

Well, credit scores as we know them have been around since the 60's...so, not really that new.

There's PLENTY of housing....just depends on what part of the US you are in.

I see houses for sale all the time where I live (New Orleans area)....it may be scarce in NYC or west coast urban areas....but that is not the whole US.

In other parts of the US, there are homes...GOOD jobs, and cost of living is much less.

And those are regular W2 jobs.....if you jump into 1099 contracting....you can work wherever and very much often....remote.

I've done both....and if you have any job experience, you can get jobs before you moved.

I've never moved before having a job in that area....

Not so easy once your kids have friends and school in Seattle.

As a child, I had to move with my parents a number of times as Dad progressed through his career....

Hell,, military brats do it all the time still....but it wasn't that long ago this was pretty common....grow up, leave the nest....it's ok and natural....

I guess you must be single or young....Reasons not to leave your area: owning a house, family, friends, not wanting to pull kids from school during critical times (or mid year), established connections, and a lot more tech jobs in Seattle than 99% of the rest of america, outside silicon valley? "Sell your house" and then you pick up a house that is also overpriced but pay much higher property taxes. Income tax is *zero* in Washington...Also, this is actually Redmond, not Seattle proper.

When did people get to be such pussies about moving?

Hell, when I grew up, this was a common thing....you moved to where the best job or new opportunity was.

Fun? No.

PITA? Yes

But families did it as a matter of how life is/was....

I remember as a kid moving a number of times

...as my Dad career progressed.

I myself have moved....

Do people today believe that as grown adults they STILL have to live near Mommy and Daddy?

Friends? Well hell, there's a TON of ways to stay in touch that weren't there when I was young....you only had phone calls and snail mail growing up and if they were real friends....you stayed in touch.

Today it's a piece of cake to keep in touch.

When I grew up, most people I knew hit the road at 18yrs or so and often it was to a different state for college and jobs....no one had to stay in same town as Mommy....but then again, we never too "Mommy" out on job interviews like they apparently do today...

So....I know this sounds strange this day in age..BUT you could do what they did in the "olden days" of say 20+ years ago and...

...MOVE TO WHERE THE JOBS ARE....

Simple really.....believe it or not, people used to do this type thing without a 2nd thought....

I guess if this is true....

Then I regularly shorten my neighbors lives (and mine) whenever I fire up my log burning offset smoker for BBQ.

I don't generally have any complaints....quite the opposite reaction in general (I share and offer to throw things on for them too, since it is large and I often have extra room).

Not disagreeing with your argument, but even if all of that could be fixed, fundamentally any anti-cheat that isn't going to be defeated relatively easily needs some sort of privileged access to stop you modifying the game or running other software that interferes with it in some way. That necessarily requires a degree of access to your system that is dangerous, so anti-cheat software will rightly be told where to shove itself by any operating system with a security model worthy of that title.

I don't see the Linux community ever accepting that it's OK to deliberately undermine that security model just for anti-cheat, as a matter of principle. With so many games even at the highest levels already running very well on Linux, I doubt it will ever be a big deal for most Linux users, even keen gamers, to play the 90+% of titles that work and skip the few that insist on more intrusive anti-cheat/DRM measures either.

It sure would be nice to reach a critical mass where the games companies actively catered for that market, though, instead of mostly relying on tech like Proton to make what is essentially a Windows game run OK.

Shouldn't that make Windows unacceptable? /s

Unfortunately, there is another possible explanation for the emphasis on TPM that is much more sinister. It's possible that Microsoft and its allies are making a concerted effort to lock down desktop clients in the same way that the two major mobile ecosystems are locked down, to kill off general purpose computing and reduce the desktop PC to a machine that can only run approved apps and consume approved content. It already happens with things like banking apps that you can't run if you choose to root your phone to arrange the privacy and security according to your wishes instead of the vendor's or OS developer's. It already happens on open source desktops, where streaming services will deliberately downgrade the quality of the content they serve you when on the same plan you're already paying for they'd serve higher quality streams to approved (read: more DRM-friendly) devices, and where a few games won't run because their anti-cheat software behaves like malware and the free platforms treat it accordingly.

I am worried that we may be entering a make-or-break period for the survival of general purpose computing with the artificial demise of Windows 10. If the slow transition to Windows 11 as people replace their hardware in the coming years means almost everyone ends up running Windows or macOS on desktops and Android or iOS on mobile devices, there won't be enough incentive for developers of apps and creative content to support any other platform, and all the older versions that didn't have as much built-in junk and all the free alternatives will be reduced to irrelevant background noise because they won't support things that users want to do any more. Your own devices will force updates, ads, reboots, AI-driven "help", covert monitoring and telemetry, any other user-hostile junk their true masters wish upon you, and there will be nothing you can do about it.

Governments should be intervening on behalf of their people at this point because the whole system is blatantly anti-competitive and user-hostile, but most of the Western nations are either relying on the absurd valuations in the tech sector to prop up their otherwise precarious economies or watching with envy while their more economically successful allies do that. So our best hope is probably for the legacy platforms to hold out long enough for some free platform(s) to reach critical mass. And frankly, there aren't many realistic paths to get there. Our best hope might be for Valve/Steam to show that many of those Windows 10 boxes in people's homes can now play most of the same games if they shift to Linux and possibly run some of them better than on Windows as well.

I'm not sure online sales were ever part of Walmart's core competencies; I suspect they contracted all that stuff out to third parties.

The reason I suspect that is that one of my relatives bought a product from Walmart.com and needed to return it, so she called the number listed on the front page of the Walmart.com web site (and dialled it correctly; I later double-checked the call record on her phone against the walmart.com web page), and the representative who answered put her on hold, then forwarded her to a scammer who tried to trick her into allowing him to TeamViewer in to her computer remotely. When she refused, he got increasingly abusive and eventually hung up on her.

So whomever Walmart was contracting for online support, they were at least bribable, and arguably criminal.

I think anyone saying that the shooter clearly belongs to one party or the other at this point is lying. And I've seen plenty of it on both sides, including you, right now.

If you can't see the shooter is FAR LEFT...then you are either willingly blind or not listening at all.

His notes, his relatives telling his history, FFS he's fucking a gay furry guy trans.....

If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck....

They'd better be giving these refrigerators out for free, or at an insane discount that they plan to make up for via ad revenue. Otherwise, there's no reason for that feature to exist.

That is a good post except for one thing. Charlie Kirk's killer isn't "left"

I guess you haven't been watching the news for the days AFTER the shooting.....this guy might have been raised "right", but he left that awhile back, was shacking up with a furry, trans guy....and both had pushed back on their families showing extreme hate for anything remotely conservative....hell the dude wrote shit in his notes, his texts and even on his bullet casings....

The left tried pushing the shooter was maga right off to bat, but that has long since been disproved.

It's gotten so far that some Republicans are trying to back away because they realize that those laws being used to censor "the left" could easily be used to censor them for the exact same reason. The big fun being to see how the Supreme Court will allow the censorship but then twist themselves into knots trying to deny the same rights if a (D) gets to be President.

The LEFT was ALREADY doing this....especially during the Obama and Biden admins....Obama using direct federal power/branches directory, like the IRS.

Biden, with DOJ going after people they didn't like and directly pressuring Social Media to deplatform people and cut banking abilities... Look I don't agree with recent Reps suggesting HARD to have people lose jobs/censored, but it is different than direct federal manipulations with actual branches actively doing things, behind the scenes, etc....those backdoor communications with Twitter and FAcebook are far different than someone on the FCC saying bad things about Kimmel....but they didn't force ABC to can him....

Never mind the other deaths like January 6

Jan 6ths...really?

Let's see....1 person was killed that day at the Capitol...the lady trying to climb in a window show and killed by a guard.

That's your example??

No...something in people, beliefs or lack thereof have been the problem.

We've had guns freely available in the US for a LONG time.

Remember it's only been since the mid 80s since we had background checks....since I believe 1986 that would could'n't buy a modern NEW full auto machine gun.

Hell, I remember in the 70's, you didn't have to go to a "Gun store" to buy a gun, they sold rifles at places like Western Auto, and your local hardware store.

It wasn't long ago you could order a gun via a catalog and have it mailed to your front door without any kind of background check.

And we didn't have the "mass" shootings like you see today....

There were a few, yes, but FEW and far between...no one was shooting up schools all the time or the like.

We have more gun control today than ever...and the problem seems to be getting worse.

It isn't the guns....it's broken people. What's the coincidence?

More broken and single parent homes. Raising generations to not properly value the human life....

Let's try to figure out what changed in PEOPLE since the 80's and earlier....