Suburban unc take

I agree with this sentiment. In general, I think that leftist political ideas are quite popular when you swap out the leftist terminology. “The real culture war is between the shareholders and the workers” doesn’t raise a person’s guard like “The bourgeoisie are oppressing the proletariat”. It also forces you to explain a little about your meaning to somebody who maybe doesn’t already know what these terms mean. Whenever I’m trying to talk politics with someone who is open-minded but not explicitly leftist, I try to use this tactic so I don’t immediately run into a wall of conditioned responses.

Dropout is pretty good. I don’t think they’ve really been around enough to enshitify yet though. They’re on big up-swing. During that time they’ve been cheap, audience-focused, and fair to their cast and crew. They’ve already raised the price at least once. If they get some loans/investors involved or have a bad year, I could easily see them becoming more like other streaming services. I hope I’m wrong.

North Korea is the only one that could fall under that category. It just seems like a ton of resources to throw behind a tiny fraction of the nuclear threat to the US. Couldn’t we station boost-phase interceptors in South Korea and/or Japan for a whole lot cheaper? An anti-satellite capability is much easier to get than a nuclear ICBM. If they can make a nuke, they can take out a satellite.

Ultimately, Golden Dome is a wunderwaffe. The Trump administration is excited about it for the same reasons the Nazis were excited about their military vanity projects. It’s hard to discuss it purely in it’s own merits without also considering the reason it is being pursued. It isn’t being pushed by top people in the military or Pentagon. It’s pushed because some high up fascists saw the Israeli Iron Dome and were like “we gotta have one of those, but BIGGER, and make it GOLD”. It’s an aesthetic marketing halo project for MAGA fascism.

The second key is, in order for it to be viable, you need enough of them in space to actually have the impact that you need.”

This is the part that makes Golden Dome non-viable IMO. Golden Dome is attempting the holy Grail of ballistic missile defense: boost phase intercept. The idea is that the missile is slowest, biggest, and easiest to detect and track immediately after launch. Golden Dome is attempting to place the launchers in orbit.

The problem is every satellite takes a predictable path, so the launching country could just wait until it’s not overhead and launch. This means you need a bunch of satellites in a spaced out orbit so there’s always one over the launcher. And you need that for every potential launch site. And most nuclear capable countries have road-mobile ICBMs, so you need enough to cover the whole country. The launching country could just knock out a satellite to punch a hole through your defenses and then launch in the brief window. So now you need redundancy. But every redundant satellite you place can be countered by one extra anti-satellite missile. Anti-satellite missiles will always be cheaper to build than satellite-based interceptors. China has 110 nuclear ICBM silos in one field in the desert. Are you going to be able to shoot down 110 missiles launched at the same time from the same area?

The author makes it sound like Reagan-era Star Wars was infeasible but now it’s fine because of technology. I really don’t think the fundamental economic issue has been resolved. It would take these satellites becoming much cheaper to deploy or some kind of counter to an anti-satellite missile.

A good bicycle is what I was going to put. I was able to get rid of my car and dramatically cut my spending on rental bikes and public transit.

A method of optimizing parameters for manufacturing bearings. Specifically the raceway superfinish process.

There are several machine parameters (oscillation speed, stone pressure, time, etc) that go into the superfinish process. The only output is surface roughness. I created a way to optimize for a low roughness. The best part was that once you set it up, you can just start printing out worksheets and handing them to engineering techs to get some more data collected.

Before I did this, superfinish parameters were considered a bit of a black art and were only adjusted when there was a problem. This means they were always as bad as they could possibly be.

Me and my friends used to get high and play geometry wars on the 360. Lots of fun passing the controller around to see who can get the farthest.

TBH, I agree with you. However a lot of people’s PCs are no longer supported with no practical way to change that. For those people that are trying Linux out timidly and reluctantly, I’m fine with a little handholding. I wouldn’t recommend someone switch to Linux unless I knew they were a bit savvy. But if they’re worried about going behind on security updates and can’t afford a new PC, I will suggest their one option, even if I know it will be challenging at times.

For me personally, I would remember none of that if taught to me. I’m stubborn and handy enough to figure it out during an emergency. For the kind of noob OP is describing that benefits from a handheld on-ramp, they will probably never be able to do what you’re describing.

I think a good compromise would be mentioning a few things that you can do in case of emergency so a more savvy person would know what to look for in an emergency. You don’t have to teach them so much as tell them there is something they can do. If there’s a fire, idk where the fire extinguisher is but I know there is one and I can go looking.

This was going to be my suggestion. Most noobs will be familiar with phone app stores. You can present a distro’s software manager like an app store. People coming from another OS will probably be happy they don’t have to find, download, and install their programs.

As a Linux noob, this is not as basic as you think it is. It’s probably cool to show them “sudo apt install [program]” as a neat trick to dip their toes into the command line. All the other things you mentioned would scare me away if it was presented as beginner essential knowledge. I legit have no idea what you’re talking about.

Ahh this makes sense

Thanks to everyone recommending Syncthing. I just set that up on all my devices and it’s pretty much purpose built for what I’m doing. A little bit fidly to set up but not that bad and it seems to just work now.

Bitwarden is just a paid password manager, right? Do you know if it’s possible to transfer my passwords from a Keepass database into bitwarden?

Keepass works but you need a way to sync the database file between devices. This is the part that doesn’t work.

For a password manager, I’m not sure if this is an issue since I’m only changing the database file while connected to the internet. Am I overlooking something?

Ideally white collar crime wouldn’t even be possible.

I’ll bite.

I believe most crime is fundamentally due to poverty. I don’t believe you can simply enforce your way out of crime. That would be extremely expensive and wouldn’t do anything about the poverty. You’d be better off giving the police funding to the poor communities. Enforcement would be unequally dished out to poorer areas, creating an oppressive atmosphere. So when people say it’s something a dictator does, it’s because it ignores the fundamental problem in order to jump straight to aggressive policing. Aggressive policing is something a dictator does.