COBOL

Well, I was surprised at the time…

I actually tried flatpak uninstall --unused and it didn’t remove these ones. So there’s something odd going on there. My guess is maybe Mint manually installed them through the driver manager program? That’s a wild guess, I don’t know how it works.

I agree, it’s very tactless.

Mint took a while to handle flatpak decently in the update manager, and now it’s a nice experience.

Plus I found on my install flatpak wasn’t cleaning up the flatpaks autoinstalled for older versions of nvidia drivers, they were all still listed as dependencies. Not sure who’s to blame but that was taking up a few much needed GBs.

Where is that constraint coming from? “Death to [x]” is a statement of a desire.

“Death to Americans” would be a call for the deaths of citizens. Obviously Iran doesn’t consider the typical American citizen to be oppressing them, so they are not interested in calling for that.

Someone yelling “death to America” could still be supporting the death of George W. Bush or Donald Trump, who are Americans. It could even involve combating many in the US military. That’s still very different from calling for “death to Americans”, because the target is the regime, not its citizens simply for being citizens.

But I still think you’ve raised an interesting discussion to have so I’ve tried to answer it.

In an ideal world, regime change. Relatively peaceful dissolution is preferable and possible (consider the death of the Soviet Union).

However, given the ruthlessness of the people with the most power in the US, I suspect they would gladly kill millions of Americans before even considering a peaceful surrender. People are shot by the state in regular protests, let alone one directly threatening the state (case in point - Jan 6 had a protester killed by police). So unless some interesting lucky opportunities open up (such as a military coup), the USA will (continue to) kill Americans to maintain stability, regardless of whether those opposing the USA kill a single American.

Given that situation, it sounds like any resistance to the US is bad because will likely involve deaths of innocent people. Yes, but the other side of the story is that to do nothing ‘‘also’’ results in the deaths of innocent people. To the people running the show, it’s completely normal to oversee the constant atrocious social murder of many thousands each year through poverty, artificial scarcity of food and medication, healthcare denial and other neglect in the name of profit. We overproduce enough food to feed everyone, there’s enough land and property to house everyone.

To do nothing is to allow many Americans to keep dying each day from easily preventable deaths. To fix that system will most likely kill many Americans in the process. You can almost simplify it down to a trolley problem - there’s no clean solution whichever choice you make. But, for each of us, there is a correct decision.

When someone says “death to America”, they aren’t saying “death to Americans”. A government/state is a regime, not all it’s people, despite how much as nationalists love to stoke that sort of patriotism. So I have no problem with the slogan, I call for the fall of the US imperialist regime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_to_America#Interpretation_and_meaning - has some confirmations from various Iranian politicians and a travel writer.

A work can have multiple meanings, even unintended meanings. It can even have no intended meaning.

Its creators define its intended meaning, if any. Valid interpretations can create other meaning from it.

Yep, crack economics. Give product out for free until they’re dependent, then exploit them.

I’ve found that when I’m deciding to try out something creative or artistic, I start to look for techniques in other people’s works when I might otherwise just be enjoying them on a surface level. Anyone can look at a work and say if it’s pretty or not, if it seems well-designed, how it makes you feel, but when you start to ask how an artist does that, you quickly discover techniques that you may be able to apply to your own art, your own writing. You can even look at a list of techniques [1] and then start to identify when creators are using them, and how to use them effectively. The more you experience and the more you think about it, the more understanding and the more tools you have at your fingertips. And by forcing yourself to get into D&D, you’re throwing yourself into a game that will help you develop that variety of skills, and probably into a scene where plenty of people know enough of those skills that you can rapidly learn from them, see what they do brilliantly and see what they could do better.

As for games, I admit I haven’t tried many of them but the Explorable Explanations I have tried are great, particularly the ones by Nicky Case (Parable of the Polygons , the Evolution of Trust , the Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds). I’d call these short games even though they lean strongly towards elements of education and simulation.

Rat

Since this question is asking “should”, I think it’s fine to answer with a rational but radical answer:

• People can be useful to society even if they aren’t employed in our current economies. Retired people may not have jobs, but often still perform productive or necessary labor, like maintenance, artistic contributions, child care, historical preservation. When someone isn’t working for money, they still often voluntarily work for society!
• I believe that, generally speaking, it’s within society’s best interest, even just from an economic standpoint, to support these people even if they aren’t formally employable.
• Looking at most capitalist countries, overproduction is normal. Usable property remains empty just because an owner wants more money for their investment. Perfectly edible food is systematically thrown in bins rather than given to hungry people for free, or rejected by stores because it doesn’t look perfect (like an oddly shaped carrot). Clothes are thrown out once they’re “unfashionable”.

We have all the resources needed to support everyone, and it wouldn’t take much extra effort from a determined government to get those resources where they need to go. There’s no reason why unemployed people should be left to starve and freeze simply because they don’t have enough income. In our society, the scarcity of basic needs is artificial (‘artificial scarcity’).

Automation is seen as a bad thing, a threat, because workers in society are threatened with starvation if they don’t have the income needed for food, shelter, medicine and perhaps basic luxuries. But if our political economy were first-and-foremost based around society’s needs instead of profiting, and therefore we used our modern technology to automate the production of these basic needs and distribute them, then suddenly automation would mean free time and easier labor!

The simplistic ‘left-right’ spectrum isn’t particularly useful when it comes to something as complex and location-specific as politics, left-right is really just vibes in the end. You’re on the right path by comparing policies, and it helps to understand the different contexts they’re in (e.g. US red scare culture), along with the similarities you mentioned.

I think this exercise could be fun and deepen you/our understanding of politics, but at the end of the day, different cities have different material conditions (circumstances) which means the same policy may make sense in one environment but not the other. I think an insightful exercise would be to compare the DSA to your country’s main demsoc parties (PvdA/GL?) and figure out the main differences and why they’re different.

I wonder if it was a romance scam.

There was a person last year going around to websites posting a whole bunch of hastily-made .onion single-page scam websites that essentially just say “Pay $10 to this bitcoin address for the service”. They’d post a series of links, like:

Facebook hacking:

http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14h3kjfu4.onion/

Love potion spell

http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14hfspopd.onion/

Mystery box

http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14fine9ffewh.onion/

[…]

Not only are many of these scam services played out and pretty obvious, like pretending they will hack facebook accounts for $25, and not only were many others ridiculous like a love potion spell, satanic spells, a “mystery box” that you pay $10 to find out what’s in it, but their shotgun approach of listing them all in a single post makes it obvious how fake and desperate it is. I’d be amazed if anyone fell for it, but they kept hand-posting these for months until site owners manually blocked them.

Here are three variants of Linux Mint with different Desktop Environments: (click their example image to make it larger)

• Linux Mint (Cinnamon Edition) - the default, I’d use that until you have a reason not to
• Linux Mint (MATE Edition)
• Linux Mint (XFCE Edition)

All of those are Linux Mint, they use pretty much the same core tools under the hood, but the desktop environments change how you engage with them. Mostly the way things look, the way you organize programs on your screen, and the default apps (like which text editor it comes with by default). This can change your experience a lot, I think Cinnamon looks nice and is smooth, while MATE and XFCE are more lightweight and might be better for older computers or if you don’t like something about Cinnamon.

Now, those are all somewhat similar, they have a program start menu in the bottom left, a taskbar on the bottom, the basics are familiar. There are some (not officially supported by Mint) which are more different, like GNOME (Ubuntu’s desktop default) which has a different app launcher instead of a start menu and a different way of switching between programs. Then, as others mentioned, some people choose to not even install a pre-designed Desktop Environment and only install some of the more core components of a DE, like the Window Manager. People who really love the keyboard might use a tiling window manager, these tend to make you think “wow, this person’s a hacker”, where they’ll rapidly switch between programs using keyboard controls, with the window manager automatically shifting and dividing new windows so that they tile together to fill the screen. Loosely speaking, the opposite of a tiling window manager is a floating window manager, where windows just float and you move them around with your mouse, just like Windows (well, apart from the tiling options in more recent Windows versions when you can drag a window into the corner and it tiles to fill the screen.) I think the “best of both worlds” midpoint is a dynamic WM? I’m not sure. hyprland is an example of that.

I haven’t given it a try yet, I’ll have to give it a read.

Not who you asked, jumping in until they reply: Windows and most GNU/Linux distros are much further apart than most GNU/Linux distros are to each other. Unless you’re doing a lot of manual meddling or using hacky tools, the biggest change between Mint (Ubuntu/Debian-based) and a Fedora-based distro, in my experience, was that apt is replaced by dnf, so if you install apps from the command line instead of a prettier software manager (I did lots of programming so this was normal for me) then the names of programs and libraries were a bit different. I’d also make a list of things you’ve installed (VPN software, chat apps, etc.) and look them up in the Fedora packages site or their own website and make sure they’re all available. I would assume they would be, Fedora is popular enough.

The desktop environment (Cinnamon vs. KDE) will be an initial change, but they’re both familiar enough with a program menu, task bar, like how Mint lets you carry over some of that same basic surface-level intuition that Windows taught.

Yep, if you have the means, I recommend having two SSDs until you feel confident using one of them full-time. The only downside is that if your computer is so small/cheap/old like mine was all those years ago and doesn’t have enough cables to keep both drives plugged in, switching between them can be annoying for a while.