somewhereoutth

May I recommend Linux Mint, specifically the MATE edition.

It is Ubuntu based, but without much of the crap, and continues the classic Gnome 2 desktop.

When in SF I used to cycle through an underpass that was often used as camping by homeless people.

One day I saw a little girl (10?) and her younger brother standing next to a tent, staring right at me as I went to my 6 figure job.

No child anywhere should be homeless.

The far left are just as problematic as the far right, but the clear and present danger we are facing now is not from the far left - it wasn't them who stormed the Capitol.

Edit: perhaps someone can explain to me the clear and present danger from the far left?

or as I heard somewhere: Boeing... the sound made by bits of airplane hitting the ground.

I dug into the hash key thing - of course the US Mac has a 'hash key' as SHIFT+3. However the UK Mac (from 2015 anyway) replaces it with the £, requiring SHIFT+ALT+3 (or something like that) for #. This was mind mindbogglingly annoying for software dev.

Except of course that a lot of the 'anger about immigration' in the way you put it is thinly disguised racism or xenophobia. It is quite hard to separate these (on both sides of the debate), and so have a sensible discussion on what a good policy on immigration should be.

Can I call out JavaScript for using backticks for a clean distinction between templated and untemplated strings:

- no strange leading character(s) (per C#, VB, Python, Scala, and now Java)

- templated strings are actually distinguished, so don't have to worry about accidentally running into template literals in normal strings (unlike Groovy, Kotlin, Ruby)

- the distinguishing mark appears at the end as well as the beginning, for slightly better legibility.

- Swift is quite nice in that the backslash is already an escape character for normal strings, so no issue with accidental use, but {} would have been a better choice than () as the former are rarer in normal strings.

> inflammatory ... more angry ...

I did not conflate the two. The wording in the OP definitely suggests a concern about hating as opposed to being against. It is possible to be against something without being inflamed or more angry.

We should also be cognisant of where any anger is directed - is it to the policy makers in government, or to the immigrants themselves?

And 48/72/120 months (I've only just replaced my Dell Inspiron that has been happily running Linux since 2010). Security updates are pretty slick now, I don't expect them to break anything. Upgrading to the next Mint major version can be a touch tricky sometimes, but same with MacOS.

Once something works (and only WiFi didn't work out the box), it keeps working.

The problem is stirring up hatrid against one or more defined demographics to make political advantage. It is a core component of fascism's path to power.

Thinkpad X1 Gen 11 + Linux Mint = everything works.

(Well, I had to update the kernel for the wifi)

And it has a hash key!!

And this is on a backdrop of a long term 'hollowing out of the middle' as technology automates rote work (AI being the latest incarnation), leaving only high skilled jobs (including in tech) on one end, and manual jobs (driving, picking, construction) that we've been unable to automate on the other. Thus both ends (high and low skill) are seeing 'refugees' from this economic process, with overskilled people doing menial work, and underskilled people trying to tackle high end work.

They have professional associations - the most successful unions ever, not least because they pretend not to be unions. See the medical profession as a good example.

Total conclusion from all of them would be a high bar, given that such a large section of society had become convinced that they do not work for reasons far removed from any facts.

Lots of people died.

100% cotton would seem to be widely available? Certainly for shirts, t-shirts, jumpers, trousers, socks. I don't wear anything other than cotton really for those items.

For some reason they have started putting stretchy stuff into cotton jeans - maybe style, or maybe (my pet theory) that good quality cotton is no longer economic for jean production, and so they have to use rougher cotton, which needs the stretchy stuff to be comfortable enough to wear.

The lazy person invented the wheelbarrow! Everyone else was too busy lugging rocks around by hand.

My understanding is that the bolts did have castle nuts and retaining wires in the design. So either they were incorrectly fitted, or the bolts themselves were under specified with regard to strength.

Except of course that masks do help, and we did find evidence. However many would like to justify their inability to accommodate the slightest inconvenience necessary to help the people around them - a clear case of starting with the premise ("I don't like wearing a mask") and then perceiving any data through that view.

> only if technologists seek this wisdom can we ensure human flourishing in the modern technological age.

Or alternatively, keep technologists well away from policy making.

Once the web/mobile/advertising boom finally finishes up (and we are nearly there) and all these things are commodified, then nobody will care about 'the modern technological age' because there will be no money.

It would be nice to see something about gifted people that didn't conflate that with, or allude to, or even mention, ADHD, autism, or other 'neural deficiency'. Some people are just super bright, not just analytically but emotionally/empathically too - get over it.

I am again reminded of Huxley's 'Brave New World'.

There was of course the Alphas and the Betas - and the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons beneath them.

However the very gifted were lifted from this caste system, and placed on the islands, where they might direct the future (or at least that is my somewhat dim recollection/interpretation).

It would be nice for us (the masses) to believe that it is likely wrong, so we can sleep easier knowing that 'everything balances out'.

However perhaps this is an uncomfortable truth, that we may or may not choose to face.

Tax on fuel reflects the externalities to the whole of society, and arguably it is not high enough.

So exempting tax (equivalently not charging for externalities) is indeed a subsidy, a transfer of wealth from government (and so society) to the airline operators.

Or perhaps (and by extension?) help to curate a society where these sorts of bad things don't happen.

It may kill e-books, but nobody is going to go to the time and effort to print physical books written by AI.

If you want to read books, buy real books (or join a library).

And not everyone has the same abilities. Tayloresquece methodologies like Agile are great for getting mediocre results for mediocre projects using mediocre developers (if they are not mediocre to begin with, certainly they will become so) in a repeatable and reportable fashion.

Hamas opened the gates of hell, awfully hard to prevent what happens next.

Imagine if the Mexican army went on a rampage through Texas (again) - how could a similarly overwhelming response be avoided?

Agreed that indiscriminate air raids are both militarily ineffective and terrible for civilians. But it is so easy to reach for them against an enemy without proper air defenses, as the chance of your own casualties is very low. It is also NATO/US doctrine - establish air superiority and then explode everything vaguely threatening.

How else do you suggest we destroy Hamas, given that they've already said they'd do October 7th again as soon as they can?

Hamas was never imposed on the Palestinian people, of which a sizable proportion support the elimination of Israel ("from the river to the sea"). Maybe the horror of the calamity befalling them might concentrate some minds.

I have to agree with you, and this is deeply sad.

I read an article about Netanyahu that suggested he views any viable Palestinian state as a security threat to Israel, and hence has been doing everything possible to stop that from happening, up to and including enabling Hamas (to discredit/disrupt the Palestinian Authority).