Thank you! I really don’t mean to complain. We really have it very good. I think it’s a common sort of story here. We are extremely lucky to not be lower SES, a targeted racial minority, etc.

We’ve considered it, but my wife really doesn’t want to move far from her family, and especially not out of country. I have some friends who moved to Canada, though, and have found it to be very welcoming & they have had a lot of success with the process. My sister has definitely thought about emmigrating if things get worse - I believe she has a plan to get out. Luckily she seems to have a great group of friends who are able to support each other

It makes it risky to have kids here. We have some risk factors for it. Some of our friends had a rough time, and all had to make emergency plans to leave the state if worse came to worse. They also had to be careful to hide the pregnancy since the government was talking about tracking who was pregnant to catch people who left the state to get abortions - that hasn’t happened yet though. And if we left the state permanently, we’d have to do it without family support which would be hard.

So, no direct harm of course, but it has caused us to delay having kids. More than anything it causes anxiety - which is why all this stuff affects most people: not because of direct harm right now, but because it makes the future uncertain.

No worries. I’ve heard (not that you said this, but in general) people say that folks are anxious just because of politics & things that don’t affect them - I think that’s sometimes true, but more often the politics affect people’s lives directly, or at least threaten to, and that causes real stress,anxiety, and harm.

That’s why I tried to tie systemic causes into my rant. Literally every single stressful thing in my life I can point back to a systemic, “political” cause. And I have it pretty freakin good, all things considered. There’s a lot of folks I know who are much less fortunate who are impacted much worse by… gestures at stuff broadly

I’m pretty anxious.

Fascism is advancing very rapidly in my country and is dismantling everything from science funding to the basic rule of law to basic public health and disease prevention while being openly corrupt and literally just stealing tax money.

My country is helping to perpetrate a genocide and has launched a completely voluntary war against Iran for no reason. It also did something that “was totally not war” to Venezuela and is threatening both Cuba and Mexico now.

I work minimum 45 hours/week, usually closer to 55 hours/week. This is nice because I was working 70-80 hour weeks last year, but things have slowed down for me a bit. Idk who in the US is working 35 hours, but it’s not me…

Trying to plan for the future is very difficult because my government is running pump and dump schemes on the market literally constantly while also effectively destroying the bond market, threatening the dollar’s status as world reserve currency, etc. There’s no safe place to put money away for retirement and it is very unlikely the Social Security program will exist by the time I retire. I am lucky to have begun saving for retirement early and live well below my means in a low cost of living area, but even though I have saved like half my income for my entire working life that may not be enough.

Speaking of the future, it is very dangerous for women to get pregnant in my state because if they have an ectopic pregnancy or the fetus dies, the doctors will basically make the woman get sepsis before treating her because of the anti-abortion laws here. Many women have died. So even though we’re lucky enough to be in a position to afford to have kids, we’ve had to put our lives on hold & consider fleeing our home state where our families live.

My relationship with my family is strained - my parents, older relatives, and one of my sisters are all completely brainwashed by fascist propaganda. It is getting better, but during Trump 1 and Biden, they became more hateful and crazy than they ever had been prior. My other sister is trans but hasn’t come out to them yet. I expect that to be very difficult because they’re bigots and have been spewing hate about trans people for years at this point. My sister is doing a very good job of prepping them, and I’m helping how I can, but I’m worried for her. Our government has labeled trans right organizations as domestic terrorist organizations. Trans people are constantly under attack.

My younger siblings and older family members are also hurt by the economic state of affairs, either struggling to get a start in life or having a hard time making ends meet in retirement, paying for health-related expenses, etc. That causes me some anxiety.

I have a good standard of living because my wife and I are highly educated professionals. We are lucky to have had a lot of advantages. So really, we don’t have a lot of financial stress many others do. But even still, prices have risen on most goods like 30-50% or more over the past 6 years or so. If this continues, it may or may not threaten us right now, but it does call into question if we can afford kids, retirement, etc.

The environment & ecology is rapidly getting worse and the government is doing worse than nothing to help. We have flesh eating parasites coming back after having been eradicated since the 60s. Our government is attempting to destroy the national parks and wildlife system and allow.strip mining and drilling. Temperatures are rising and rainfall is decreasing, fires are becoming much more widespread, tornadoes have been hitting our area much more than in the past, etc. New Orleans, a city my wife, I, and our families have a connection to is projected to literally sink into the sea within our lifetimes.

Meant by whom? The people who do things like this have different, personal motives. They aren’t doing it to spread ideology, they’re doing it to address specific ideological needs in irrational ways.

It bothers me when people aren’t consistent.

Like when something good happens to them: god is rewarding me for being so good

When somehting bad happens to them: god is testing me and will reward me later for being so good

When something bad happens to someone they don’t like: god is punishing them for being so bad

Or like how they pray to god for individual favors. Like “dear god even though I didnt study please let me do well on this test” as though god should care and give them special treatment for… nothing. Yet they claim to value hard work, god only gives you what you can handle, are generally fatalistic, etc.

I wonder if it’s a regional thing? I’ve only ever heard it in movies or older TV shows. Where I live people are much more likely to just say “crippled” or describe someone as walking with a limp.

I was confused when I saw Pulp Fiction as a kid because I was like “why is this handicapped guy in a leather suit and what does him being hadicapped have to do with his apparent hobbies” lol. But like I said, never really heard it used in other contexts.

Gimp is really just a rare/archaic ableist slur anyway - like to refer to someone with a limp or otherwise a leg/lack of a leg that impedes their gait. I’ve never heard it used in my life.

The sexual usage is from gay bdsm subculture in the 70s that the large majority of ppl who are aware of it are only aware because of Pulp Fiction.

My vote is for pimp

This is what I ended up doing, and it works great. I knew about aliases, but didn’t really use them at all - I didn’t know about bash functions though.

So now I have a few functions in .bashrc for short things and am just aliasing shell scripts for easy access to more complex tbings I don’t want cluttering the file

Oooh ty that makes a lot of sense. I was unaware of that functionality.

This should be the next step for me. When you do aliased commands, can they take arguments? Like to download a playlist with yt-dlp, could i do download-playlist [URL]?

It’s really easy. Linux Mint. Bootable USB. Back up your important files on a separate harddrive. Plug in USB. Reboot. Install. Port old files over. Good as new

Bonus points for looking into how to optimize your partition structure, but it’d be fine to just let it do its thing. Also like… I guess you should probably make sure your audio and video cards are supported, but they like 98% are

It’s a type of kei car - a kei truck

Its the heat, mostly. If you use the low or very low/delicate settings, it will help.

I find that there is no benefit from using medium or high heat. It just shrinks my clothes. Low/delicate doesn’t and I haven’t noticed any damage.

Other tricks: wash and dry pants inside out to avoid fading. Also, this stuff only applies to fabrics that are dryer safe, obviously

Go to the doctor. Especially if you are in otherwise OK shape and your capacity for exercise doesn’t seem to improve with practice. Being unable to walk for one hour without severe fatigue is pretty good evidence of exercise intolerance.

Exercise intolerance is basically an inability to perform physical activities that someone your age typically would be able to.

This can be evidence of various underlying health issues (heart, lungs, muscle disorders, nutritional deficiencies).

I really don’t think original buldak noodles are very spicy at all. Like, I can feel it, but it isn’t what I would consider to be very spicy. They also don’t taste good, though. Like 3/10 spiciness.

Typical buffalo sauce or name brands like tabasco, cholula, etc. are not noticeably spicy to me.like 0/10 spiciness.

I have a decent spice tolerance, but I also don’t enjoy eating super spicy things “just because”. I want my food to actually taste good. Being able to eat spicy food lets me taste more flavor in hot peppers, but there’s zero point in eating really spicy stuff just to prove you can, imo.

Short answer: Many people support those governments critically or uncritically for various reasons.

Long answer:

Russia: Some people who oppose US hegemony support Russia as probably the most effective anti-US actor globally - I mean look at what they’ve managed (in part) to do to the US government over the last 10 years or so. They may also be sympathetic to Russian anti-NATO sentiment. People who support China may also critically support Russia since they are a strategic ally of China. Some people just full-throatedly support Russia uncritically - I don’t know why they’re quite so enthusiastic, but most others who have pro-Russian sentiment are still critical of Russia, but support them as a major power capable of attacking US hegemony.

China: China is the most successful communist country to have ever existed. Many left-leaning people may support China to varying degrees because they are an Actually Existing Socialist country and because their model of Communism with Chinese Characteristics seems to work quite well for them. Due to the West (broadly) attacking Socialist governments in the name of Liberalism & becoming increasingly more fascistic, China could be an important bulwark against fascism. Many people support China uncritically - they genuinely like the Chinese system of government and want their governments to be more like China’s. Other people critically support China - they believe China’s government is problematic in some way(s), but support it anyway as a bastion of socialism and a significant challenger to US economic & political hegemony.

As for support for the governments as opposed to the people: We kind of have to talk about these things at the country level, since governments are the (imperfect) embodiments of political ideologies and collectively act on behalf of the people within their borders, and “the people” aren’t monolithic. We often treat countries as avatars of political ideologies which is inaccurate but is an abstraction that unfortunately often leads to an oversimplification of the ideologies behind & effects of those governments’ actions while allowing us to create a comprehensible narrative.

I have 2 monitors at different resolutions, works fine and my desktop/icon theme/etc is very pretty imo. I do agree that mint out of the box is maybe equally/sliiiightly less pretty than windows - but as soon as you change the shitty default wallpaper it is prettier imo.

That is true about Adobe products. But fuck adobe. And if you need Adobe, then just dual boot.

+1 to Mint. It is a very easy transition & you will not have ragerts.

Pros:

1. prettier than windows while having a similar interface

2. more responsive than windows

3. more stable than windows

4. zero spyware/bloatware

5. basically the same level of software compatibility as windows

Only things that take some research ahead of time or getting used to imo:

1. deciding how you want to partition your drives during installation (you can let it automatically do this, but there are reasons to create a different partition structure across drives/have different sized partitions),

2. mounting drives. There are GUI tools for this (file explorer for mounting, gparted for formatting), so it really isn’t a big deal, but it is a little more difficult than with Windows and you may need to reformat your drives depending what file format they’re currently in.

3. make sure your motherboard/video card/cpu all work well with linux. They should, but just check first.

4. note that games requiring kernel level anticheat (aka spyware) won’t work. So if that’s a deal breaker, then dual boot or don’t switch.

True that. Our tax dollars could be spent much more effectively if our government was more focused on the wellfare of its people.