Well, right, you’re dealing with statistics. It’s not impossible that Trump will quantum-teleport into the sun, physics allows for that possibility. It’s just incredibly unlikely. And the odds of some other person getting elected with no actual effort to make it happen before now is similarly basically zero. Theoretically possible is all very well, but we live in the real world.

Aww, why didn’t he stay the course? Things have been going so well!

You can label your devices. When formatting, do mkfs.ext4 -l my-descriptive-name /dev/whatever. Now, refer to it exclusively by /dev/disk/by-label/my-descriptive-name. Much harder to mix up home and swap than sdc2 and sdc3 (or, for that matter, two UUIDs).

First, why is every post on this forum -1? Somebody must be holding a grudge.

Second: it doesn’t matter. ECC just prevents bit flips in RAM, once data leaves a system it’s irrelevant whether it had ECC or not.

I’ve been running servers of various kinds for decades. There is a difference between running servers on hardware with ECC vs none, but it’s not a big deal. Unless you’re running, like, banking software or something where accuracy or uptime is critical…I wouldn’t sweat it. You may just have to reboot cuz of a kernel panic once or twice a year.

Trans is something we made up.

Gender non-conformity is a real thing and happens across all cultures. Our approach to understanding it is culturally specific, and kinda fucked up.

Yeah, it’s a barrier. Factoring in cost of living, getting elected to congress would be a significant pay drop for just about any middle class person (unless, of course, they were willing to accept the legally-grey ‘benefits’ that come from the position, like early info on stock market movement along with freedom from prosecution).

It’s just weird to watch Americans complain that “All our politicians are old retirees and lifers, rich assholes, or thoroughly corrupt! Why is that? I don’t get it! Also, why are they getting paid a halfway-decent middle class salary (before factoring in cost of living), we should be paying them minimum wage–if that!”

Like…duh, guys.

You’re right that upfront costs are a problem, but that’s a hard problem to solve. Also, in the age of crowdfunding, it’s a less significant problem than it’s ever been before.

There’s a few different community browsers:

browse.fediverse.de

lemmyverse.net

It’s still got the problem of being repetitive.

Yes, that is the status quo. If you want to change it, you need to accept higher pay so that more average Joes seek election and then vote to restrict trades by sitting politics.

Constricting pay only cements the status quo by making it so that only rich people or cheaters can make a living as a politician.

And to pay politicians! Doctors, lawyers, bottom -rung programmers, and ambitious plumbers all make more than the people who run the county–and aren’t expected to constantly fly themselves across the country and maintain multiple residences–at least one of them in one of the priciest markets in the country.

The only people who want that job are already rich, or are great at schmoozing and finding donors.

Pay them so well, all your best and brightest want to grow up to be legislators, and have no urgent need to start accepting graft. At least make it competitive with writing python scripts.

FWIW, I’m running NixOS but gave up on running the Lemmy module. I gave up when I realized that Lemmy seems to need superuser access to the Postgresql server, to install plugins or whatever.

So instead, I used Arion to make a docker-compose image, running in podman. Works great so far.

They didn’t start that until the war was well underway, and Russia was already stopped in it’s tracks.

Also: much of that hardware is coming from Europe, not the US. Also: if NATO disbanded, Europe would have to ramp up military spending: Trump’s big complaint was that France and Germany aren’t carrying their weight.

(ed: fix autocorrect error)

There’s a lot to worry about from a second Trump presidency, but Russia running amok in Europe isn’t one of them. They’re having enough trouble running amok on the eastern fringes of Ukraine.

Back when I was in high school (in public school), chess caught on in a big way. Chess. It was the weirdest thing. It was a public school in a small farming town, and pre-Nerd Renaissance, so picture a stereotypical 80s or 90s school where jocks were top of the food chain–and then picture those same jocks in their letter jackets rushing to the library on their free periods to take turns playing chess. They set up tournaments and kept track of win/loss ratios and talked about chess strategies in the hallways.

So obviously something had to be done…I guess? The school started making rules and posting them around the school: one game per student per day. One game at a time in the lounge. No chess in classrooms or in the library! The chess board must be returned to the lounge supervisor between games, then signed out by the next person wanting to play–not just passed willy-nilly from one student to another! No outside chess boards allowed!

That pretty much strangled the chess fad. The jocks went back to stuffing nerds in lockers and sneaking out to smoke behind the school, and the chess boards returned to the shelf by the lounge supervisor, where they collected dust.

Problem…solved? The whole thing was pretty surreal.

What I would dearly like is an SSO system that can also act as a drop-in replacement for Kerberos. Existing krb5 servers (on Linux) are ancient, quirky, and underdocumented, but kerberos is so useful at a CLI level. I’ve always maintained separate LDAP & Kerberos instances, and the thing stopping me from moving to something more modern is that I’m holding out for that kerberos feature…

I saw a tip a while back that you could search for “commercial display panel” or something and buy high-quality dumb TVs with a few HDMI inputs and that’s about it. They’re designed for restaurants or shops, so they’re reliable and good looking, but dead simple.

I don’t honestly remember if that was the right phrase, though.

Then what’s your explanation for the huge rise in life expectancy and food availability–starting in capitalist Western countries, and then spreading to the rest of the world along with the market economy?

Capitalism is certainly imperfect at distribution of food and medicine. As the saying goes: it’s the worst system, aside from every other that has existed. And the margin isn’t particularly close.

You date the origin of capitalism to Columbus? Seems pretty arbitrary. Markets date back thousands of years, and recognizably capitalist forms of government emerged in the 18th and 19th century at the earliest. Columbus was sponsored by a king seeking new land, not capitalists seeking new markets.

Alternative systems such as…? I can think of several, but none I’d describe as ‘successful’.

It’s kind of a red flag (no pun intended) when your preferred system can be destabilized with some money stuffed in the right pockets, isn’t it? Most failed systems that were ‘undermined by capitalists’ mostly involved funding and support, not invasion or anything. Meanwhile, democracy and capitalism emerged in the midst of hostile aristocracy and royalty, and survived decades of attempts by the USSR (and now Russia) to undermine it.

My personal opinion is that those systems were doomed from conception, though I don’t deny that the US certainly engaged in speeding their demise.

Anyway, that’s all beside the point. Both populations and consumption increased under the Soviets, and any other system you care to name, proportionate to their effectiveness at keeping people fed and healthy.

This isn’t a property of capitalism, though. It’s a property of humanity, and really of life. What capitalism did was just to efficiently provide food and medicine to people, and the population graph turned into a hockey stick.

Is starvation and infant mortality preferable? Do you think if people had found some (as yet unknown) economic system that was as effective at supplying food and medicine, people wouldn’t have had kids? And if they did keep having kids, wouldn’t that have taxed the planet like capitalism has done?