The year isn’t quite done yet. It’s a high bar to clear, but with the incidence of bullshit this year, a bigger turd may yet come along.

I mean, I don’t think any US politician could do so without it being career suicide. I don’t know Hochul’s policies, but she probably didn’t get the governorship by being an anticapitalist.

For state level charges, it would have to be the governor, right? Maybe the governor of NY could do him a solid.

You’re probably not. Even in the event that Hell is real and the Christian god exists, he probably has a sense of humour, and possibly quite a twisted one.

Also, I’m sure you’ve done worse things in his eyes.

Bitch, my boss is doing more for my healthcare.

Spontaneous Home Office because I caught a cold? If you mark it on your time sheet, I might have to reprimand you, so just don’t.

Doctor’s appointment with awkward scheduling? If it interferes with important meetings, we’ll have to see if we can make it work, otherwise just mark it in your calendar so I know when you’re unavailable, catch up the hours whenever.

Granted, it’s an office job and I’m doing good work, so he has little reason to object, but that puts him above Thompson already.

One of my two major projects is a long-term reporting system on a sustainability initiative to help managers figure out whether their unit is compliant (definitely not for control, of course, nooo… though they are expected to talk to their respective subordinates if their results deviate too much, which probably filters up the chain when a given higher level breaks down their subordinate units’ figures).

Probably a PR push (I swear, if I ever see a figure calculated by my model in the newspaper, my impostor syndrome is gonna thoroughly shit my pants for me), maybe a move to get ahead of competitors in the face of legal stuff I’m not in the loop about, but doing the right thing for selfish reasons is still the right thing.

The other project… Well, I’m trying to push for measures that prevent user-level evaluations, but it’s a kind of corporate limbo right now. I’m doing my best, but that’s not a whole lot in this case.

healthcare providers

I know this is indirect speech how they’d spin it, not your own words, but I fucking hate the way these vampires are spun as “providers” - they don’t provice jack shit except the rare case of “I provide the wealth to shoulder large financial burdens at once” (but we all know the fine print on that).

The actual providers, on the other hand, have to watch a mother’s entire world collapse when she’s told her child is gonna die because the treatment isn’t affordable and the insurance that made her come all this way to find an in-network doctor in the first place decided the kid should try Yoga or whatever bullshit.

tinkers with pulseaudio
“Why does my audio not work?”
tinkers more
“Okay I think it kinda works now?”
it breaks again
“fml”

I found the docs for pulseaudio and particularly for pipewire to be rather hard to use, personally. RTFM works if the manual is readable, but in these cases, the learning curve was very steep for me (and I still don’t know that I properly understood what’s going on, but it’s working, so I’ve stopped tinkering for now).

What else do you suggest?

I’d argue a different approach: Teach critical thinking and scepticism to children. Banning things makes it a race to keep up with whatever new thing comes up; it’s not a sustainable solution so much as a constant fixing of new holes without tackling why these things are so destructive.

I could try to come up with some bullshit home remedy solution and insist “That’s what my pa alwys did, helps every time!” and when it doesn’t work for you, double down angirly “Well it works for my pa, you’re just doing it wrong”?

Or I could acknowledge that I’m not actually qualified, and all I can do is say “Sorry to remind you of that”

There’s a general argument - not strictly applicable to you, I don’t know you - to be made that a natural-born citizen of a given country is more likely to be loyal to that country than a “foreigner”, for lack of a better word, and more familiar with its culture and society. It makes sense then that a country would want to restrict their higher public offices to “their own people”. (How much those people actually care for the wider body of constituents is a different question, of course.)

Voting on local politics that influence you more directly isn’t the same as participating in federal politics. Musk is essentially a foreign actor, he shouldn’t have such influence over the government of a different people.

(He shouldn’t have any influence at all, actually, but I’m just talking about the “try to change the law so he can run for president” concern you responded to)

Not strictly: he says only an educated people can be a free one, meaning that all free peoples are educated ones, but the inversion of that is “No uneducated people can be free”. By that, I assume he means that uneducated people are far more susceptible to deception and manipulation compared to the educated that will be better able to detect lies, point them out and understand explanations of why that’s bullshit.

As an example: If I tell you that the “vaccines cause autism” study was a) just a pilot study, not an actual one at scale, b) heavily fudged to the point that one scientist was kicked off the project for refusing to falsify results, c) only examined a specific vaccine, the MMR combination vaccine usually given to infants and d) led by a guy that had financial stakes in a company trying to sell individual vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella, you can probably smell the bullshit.

If I tried to explain that to someone who’s not educated enough, they’ll probably stare at me blankly, then shrug and say something to the effect of “Well, you never know what to believe these days” and change absolutely nothing about their stance.

Things get far worse when someone tells their base that some group is capturing and eating their pets and ends up inciting violence by people who take him at face value.

Edit: I don’t know why I said “harmless” there. Anti-Vaxxers aren’t harmless, even when compared to incitement of hate crimes.

Me too, let’s touch circles

Eh, between the financial expense, the human reluctance to change and the still very real barrier of “We can’t migrate where there’s nowhere to go” with respect to the software landscape, I think we need to compare our definitions of could. It’s not just a business culture issue either. All change brings friction, but trying to replace the entire infrastructure of a company (and it has to be pretty much everything - one selling point of MS is how thoroughly integrated its products are) is basically ripping out most of the internal organs and replacing them with transplants, but also trying to keep the patient alive somehow… and you need to sell the people with the money on the idea.

Throwing away and starting over is costly, no matter the context. So no, I don’t think larger companies can even make that choice at this point.

Smaller companies without the same inertia, in industries where there are Linux-compatible tools? Yeah, they can, provided the software they need is there too.

I use Linux privately, and haven’t had a Windows OS on my PC in years except for a VM I needed for a university project. I’m all for hoping that specialised apps get developed for Linux too. I like mine and would probably enjoy using it for private purposes too, but it won’t work with wine and learning different tools is obviously an additional time investment in my free time compared to the one I get paid for learning.

But I’m both quick and happy to learn. Many people are not (and I see that daily with my users). The cost of switching and disruption in productivity would probably be disastrous enough to ruin the company even before considering the fact that “industry giant unable to fulfill contractual obligations because they have to rebuild half their infrastructure from nothing” would be a crippling blow to its professional reputation in an industry where IT is still considered second-class at best, the ideological gain of no longer depending on Microsoft would net them nothing and in an economic system where short-term profitability is more important than long-term independence.

And that’s not considering the difficulty of convincing company leadership that Windows really is that bad and Linux really is much better and that we only need to provide the financial incentive and invest the time and money to have someone port already expensive software to a different platform. FFS, we’re still struggling to get people to see IT as a service rather than an expense.

Finally, even if they were to switch out their entire IT infrastructure, they’d start asking whether it would be cheaper to outsource our internal IT to a company that already knows the new stuff than to retrain all of us. I’d very much like to keep my permanent position, even if it means using Windows.

The only way to make “I assassinated a politician whose ideology I resent” legally defendable would be massive popular support. “Some people” isn’t enough if you risk serving as scapegoat to have your entire community labeled as terrorists. The dilemma of violent action is that you need enough people behind you to become a credible threat before you start threatening.

Ours is. Last I heard, our Client Management team is already looking for different ways to disable it and make triple sure it stays off.

(inb4 “Switch to Linux”: several thousand users, specialised software and a technologically conservative company would already make that a non-starter)

Ideally, tradition and innovation are two parts of a healthy system: Tradition is what had worked so far, but as circumstances change, innovation seeks ways to improve and adapt. Critical reasoning needs to balance them, so that their oppositional forces can pull society towards their shared purpose: prosperity.

The issues arise when the tempering mechanism of critical reasoning breaks.
Without the lessons of the past informing the decisions of the presence, odds are that mistakes will be repeated eventually.
On the other hand, rigid tradition obviously risks failing to adapt to changing circumstances.

Where modernity exacerbates those issues is in the sheer destructive power of modern weaponry and the complex infrastructure and administration required to maintain modern population and living standards: errors of either kind can easily become more costly than ever before. At the same time, modern state capacity puts far more power into the hands of those entrusted with it, enabling far greater mistakes. And finally, as you noted, the fast pace and scope of modern developments and changes quickly invalidates many old premises and requires faster adaption.

Not all traditions are bad, but figuring out which ones are and how to fix them is hard to do quickly.

Anyone convinced they’re immune to propaganda, bias or plain human error is extremely vulnerable to being wrong and never realising it.

Relatedly: One of the easiest mistakes to make regarding fields you’re no expert in is to underestimate just how much there is to know that you don’t (or maybe nobody does). I’m very prone to that one, personally.