Yup, from the first season. “Be Right Back”.

I’m on Fedora with Plasma & Wayland, everything just works… Honestly not sure if Fedora is doing something special or all this talk of Plasma being crashy is overblown.

Don’t be ashamed of being a Luddite. The Luddites were actually fighting for a righteous cause.

You got me interested, so I searched around and found this:

So, if I understand this correctly, the only fundamental difference between level 4 and 5 is that 4 works on specific known road types with reliable quality (highways, city roads), while level 5 works literally everywhere, including rural dirt paths?

I’m trying to imagine what other type of geographic difference there might be between 4 and 5 and I’m drawing a blank.

He was also in favor of defunding the police in 2020

He’s still advocating that, just stealthily without saying those specific words. “We need social workers to deal with mental health crises and non-violent 911 calls” is basically defunding the police without the stigma.

They had to work the whole day, dawn to dusk, just to survive.

I don’t think that’s true. At least the stuff I’ve read seems to show that about ~40 hours a week was pretty normal.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s good reasons to not want to go back to hunter-gatherer societies (the linked article goes into that), but raw hours worked isn’t one of them.

You’re not wrong, but from my limited perspective it doesn’t look like the capitalists are united on this.

There’s the “old money” types (think banks, long term investment, industry) who support the Democrats today because they want nothing to fundamentally change.

Then there’s the “new money” types (think crypto bros, short term hair traders, software companies) that support the Republicans for the crashing and burning of the economy in order to buy up what’s left at bargain bin prices.

what the hell are they focusing on exactly?

Inclusivity and LGBQ+ issues (absence of the T is intentional). This is because those are issues that’ll get them some popular support while in no way offending the capitalist class

Or spent more time debugging what it produced than it would have taken to write it themselves.

Could not agree more. I’m a democratic socialist. I firmly believe that the ideas of that ideology, properly implemented, can drastically improve the standard of living for a huge percentage of the population.

I live in a country where our democratic socialist party is fantastically corrupt, lazy and completely bereft of any motivation to do anything that doesn’t directly benefit themselves. Consequently, I don’t support them. Results over ideology is an important mantra no matter what you believe.

Europe is primarily white people

Hah, that’s telling. Just FYI, there’s been generations upon generations of racism and ethnic hatred here in Eastern Europe. I guess we have the advanced racists: the ones who don’t hate you for your skin colour, but who your parents were, religion and primary language.

I’ll bet that if your dad grew up here in Romania, he’d be complaining about those sneaky Szeklers trying to steal Transylvania and Roma people being subhuman.

Also, he seems the type to pine for Europe because “We’re all Christian!”. Trust me, you haven’t seen “Christian love” like state religions persecuting people of the wrong sect. Orthodox Christianity is the state religion here, and Protestants of all stripes get treated like heathens.

Best of luck. Whatever else happens, I hope you manage to make it through to the other side.

Stay strong, talk to your neighbours if feasible where you live, work together locally. Every major catastrophe in my area of the world, even ones which totally upended my country (Romania) for a generation, my family survived via community and friend groups.

In a collapsed or collapsing state, mutual aid is mandatory for survival.

Hi, Eastern European here. We begged to join NATO. We kicked and screamed, wheeled and dealed, anything we could to get that coveted NATO membership.

You know why? Because we’ve been dealing with expansionist Russian imperialism for our entire histories. Different coats of paint in different time periods, but it’s all the same shit. The US is an empire, but at least here it’s preferable to Russia’s imperial ambitions.

That’ll last all of 1 week before a large percentage of new homeowners run out of money and start using the house as collateral with no hope of paying back loans.

The most effective solution I’ve ever heard of is the Norwegian housing first model, where the house itself remains under state control (at least at the start). As the occupant goes through rehab if necessary, retraining if necessary, is helped to find a job, etc, they can start paying towards the house and eventually fully buy it from the state. Meanwhile, the state can use that money to buy/build more social housing to help more people.

Disclaimer: I’m not an expert but that’s how it works as far as I’ve read.

Edit: Oh, fun fact, this is similar to how the rich made so much money during COVID. Throw money at the poor, they have to spend that money, money goes to companies, then the owners.

I appreciate his response to criticism of his city-run grocery store initiative. I can’t recall the exact wording, but it was something like “If it doesn’t work, we’ll cancel it”. I don’t mind an experiment like this as long as the people involved are results-oriented and willing to pivot if evidence shows it’s not working.

This reminds me of a story from “They thought they were free”. A Jew was accused of raping a woman. The judge heard the case and determined he was innocent. However, the gestapo were waiting outside the court to nab the accused as soon as the trial ended.

The judge decided to stick to his verdict instead of ruling guilty to put him in a normal prison instead of a concentration camp. After all, how could he justify ruling an innocent man guilty, even if that was objectively a better result for the man?

Also, if you get up at 11, you could just go get lunch.

In Romania, CFR makes DB look like the most competent shining lights of progress by comparison.

Track that hasn’t been properly maintained since the fall of communism (and we keep lowering max speeds because of it). Rolling stock consisting of hand-me-downs. Constant engine breakdowns.

And the worst part? Due to political shenanigans finding inventive new ways to siphon money out of the company, it’s still managed to find a way to go bankrupt again, meaning another government bailout.

I have a friend who does game QA. A lot of the time issues this major are caught, documented, and then management decides the extra delay to solve it isn’t worth the effort because “it’s not going to impact enough people to matter”. Then, once a firestorm erupts due to public backlash, they try and blame it on QA.

My friend has gotten very good at ass-covering, and makes sure every issue ticket is very explicit, not only in terms of what the issue is, the cause, reproducibility, but also how likely the average user is to hit it just to avoid blame.