They want a device that “just works” and has their ecosystem.

i have friends that struggle to pay rent and they’re forced to pay apple’s extortion-esque prices when something goes wrong or when purchasing their phones and equipment.

witnessing them suffer like this hits close to home for me because i grew up poor enough to ration out the government cheese & powdered milk along with asking extended family and begging neighbors for food so that we could stay alive until next payday and also because i’m tech savvy enough to understand how unscrupulously apple has behaved at creating this well designed trap of an ecosystem that’s actively easy to fall into and passively difficult to leave; locking my friends into a seeming perpetually repeating cycle of new iphones and government cheese.

i think that the icing on this shit-cake is that they’re all atleast vaguely aware that apple is screwing them over; but they still accept it because it either “just works” or it’s “all they know” and that blows my mind because 5-year-old-me HATED government powdered milk in my cereal enough to switch to oatmeal for breakfast if it were an option.

if you’re referring to climate change and i would expect that it would cause the 4th near human extinction event at a minimum; so there’s a chance humanity will survive and there will be some sort of a society if it does.

perhaps since we’ve exhausted most of the easily accessible sources of energy; maybe the next society won’t be able to advance past the next stone age on-wards to develop the industrial or technological capabilities that enable such absurd disparities in wealth they can afford to bend the entire world to their will for a genocide; rending 99% of the world helpless as they can do nothing but witness palestinians culled into numbers small enough that isreal no longer considers them a threat.

Harris is Palestines best bet at continued existence. Sorry if that hurts your feelings or something…

continued existence is going to happen one way or the other. isreal is going for an american style genocide which means kill enough of the natives so that they’re a small, manageable enough number and then your country can spend the rest of its existence throwing enough $$$ at their reservations to ostensibly show you’re “super sorry” that you genocided so many of them; but not enough to for them to ever escape this newly imposed generational poverty and also without any promise that your country won’t ever fuck them over again in the future when another pipeline needs to be built.

It’s a matter of time.

i wish that timescale wasn’t in the centuries.

You’re getting down voted but this is what it feels like watching our gargantuan government help eradicate an entire people…

– again.

sometimes the sense of helplessness that comes from watching us repeat the history that everyone abhors and ignores makes me wish that i was a moderate so that i can fool myself into believing that voting for one genocider was better than voter for another genocider.

i also wonder if my existence at the intersection of several vulnerable communities would eventually dispel that world view anyways if i were a moderate since there are so many brown, immigrant, gay, autistic conservatives.

if that were all they touched, it would be fine; but i’ve lost track of the number of times i setup a linux system for newbies and got emergency phone calls that the install was broken only to discover that they clicked on some kde setting somewhere that they both forgot about and didn’t understand.

it’s sort of like people deleting the windows folder on a windows system because they don’t think that they use it.

If it’s you’re first install go with gnome since it’s intentionally simplified.

You WILL get lost in all of the customization options that are available in KDE and most xwindows environments if you have no experience w anything besides Windows or Mac

Which made them react by passing laws like doma and don’t ask don’t tell.

Best case scenario is that they pass respect for marriage act which did absolutely nothing but give legal protection for anti-gay bigotry since the supreme court already invalidated all anti-gay marriage laws almost a decade before hand.

there are a lot of barbershops and we would never have known how fucked up so many of them are w/o the internet.

it’s only the lucky and the people with enough support in urban enough environments that are not hiding anymore; everyone else is still stuck in the closet.

They are just quiet about it. They aren’t saying crazy racist nonsense on tiktok, but if you talk to them about issues like housing or schools… they make it very obvious what they think. Using polite language, of course. Black people are great, as long as they don’t live near them, or go to the same school as their kid goes to! These are the same people who are NIMBY because they don’t want ‘people who haven’t worked as hard as I have’ from living near them.

my favorite version of this “identity politics” minimizing the very real and tragic harms that our hegemony has done to its minorities.

the fashy-waves were manifested by centrists leaders that we learned were very fashy-friendly after those upsets made those leaders intrigue with the far right; as is happening in france with macron; or clinging on to conservative policies; as is happening in the uk with starmer.

the people voted left; but all of the leaders went right anyways.

harris and trump are doing something similar with harris ignoring the will of 68% of americans when with comes to the genocide and trump with project 2025.

I’ve installed Gentoo, fedora and Debian on powerpc and Intel Macs a couple times in my past.

The Intel Macs were no more difficult than Windows machines and the powerpc Macs required an extra step for yaboot and time to fiddle with an of the services; but still not difficult.

use the user field parameter so that any volume can be mounted on demand.

i hate how knowledge of a place’s night spots is so esoterically known to its locals only and it makes finding a new home very difficult; as a night owl.

like you i had grown accustomed to new york’s availability and it took a decade plus to learn where san francisco’s night spots where and it took over a year for me find a new place to live after austin. (austin is the biggest place i’ve ever lived in that shuts down after 10pm except for alcohol)

the cia admitted to starting the cocaine epidemic so that they can use the money to fund rebel fighters to keep central american countries weak and dependent on the united states.

but not until after destroying a whistleblower’s life and livelihood for trying to uncover it publically and then made his death look like a suicide.

google and nvidia both do.

i don’t know if it’s still true; but they gave their employees 2 computers where their workstations were usually linux and their laptops were either linux or mac if they were engineers. it was their choice to decide what to get; but they usually went along with whatever their peers where using; except for non-engineers who always wanted macs no matter what, even if their windows machines were newer and better by miles.

knowing a queer kuwaiti, russian, chinese and mexican plus my own experience in the united states have taught me that there’s atleast a bi-model reality for queers everywhere.

anecdotally: the well connected; rich; and/or attractive queers usually don’t see much of a problem with living a queer-phobic country, citing that they can usually find a queer friendly community in their home country without much trouble.

also anecdotally: the other queers that don’t fit into the shapes i mentioned have a bad time in their home country and their existence in the western world isn’t much different than anyone else there.

i felt this way too so i started therapy a while ago and that led to getting tested and diagnosed with autism.

i was surprised since i had known and worked with autistic people and seen depictions of them on tv and movies and never guessed that i shared the same condition that they did. many people refuse to believe that i’m autistic still.

i got that diagnosis when i first hit middle age and learning about it made me wish that i had known sooner since that knowledge would have helped A LOT in my past.

get tested for diabetes; you’re probably not diabetic but an astoundingly large portion of the population is pre-diabetic.