OK, I’m gonna make this simple, since it seems like no one has tried to do that for you. There’s only 3 points

1. Do not expect to buy hardware and THEN use linux
2. When choosing a linux distro, do not choose one that requires you to compile anything
3. Your killer problem - battery life - is 100% a hardware support problem

Breaking it down…

1. Do not expect to buy hardware and THEN use linux Technically no operating system actually works this way. The problem is that every single hardware vendor works with Microsoft to ensure it works on Windows before they release it. You cannot just buy hardware and then later decide to use Linux. You must always check for linux compatibility, and often distro compatability, before buying your hardware.

The reason for this is that every single piece of hardware needs a driver and not every single piece of hardware has a driver in Linux, and not every driver properly works with the hardware it was built for.

So step 1 is always review your preferred distro for support for your target hardware and don’t just wing it. There’s a lot of shitty broken hardware that Linux devs haven’t built workarounds for and only work in Windows because there’s money to create driver workarounds.

This isn’t that strange in the world of hardware, it’s just something MS managed to prevent everyone from dealing with through it’s monopoly power and Apple prevented everyone from dealing with it by only allowing OSX on it’s hardware and controlling all the updates. In any other world, you don’t just buy random components for your car, or buy electronics without worrying about EU vs US outlets or buy power supplies for electronics without researching voltage, amperage, and polarity. It’s just a thing you have to do.

2. When choosing a linux distro, do not choose one that requires you to compile anything

If you want a “just works” experience, then you do not want to be doing it. The forum link you posted is bonkers. There is no way someone with your level of experience should be bisecting anything. You fell into a hole, asked for a way out, and that forum gave you a shovel.

You want to stick with distros that are ready to go: Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, openSuse, Fedora. My personal opinion is every beginner should start with Mint, but everyone’s got opinions.

3. Your killer problem - battery life - is 100% a hardware support problem.

Whatever components you’re running don’t have whatever driver maturity is needed for power management. That could be a lot of things, and there’s no fix unless you want to become a volunteer device driver developer, which is like asking if you want you to become a volunteer suspension bridge repairperson. It’s not a real option for you. That means you’re stuck waiting for someone else to write support for whatever hardware you have. Bringing me back to point #1, do not just attempt to put linux on any old hardware - you must research compatibility as part of your purchasing process.

I’ve been running linux for decades. In the beginning, it was a nightmare. I had to debug it every week, sometimes multiple times each week. Nearly every problem was something I caused trying to fix some other problem. Nearly every problem I was trying to fix was ultimately just a lack of out-of-the-box hardware support and hardware auto-configuration. Fast-forward to 2007, I bought my first thinkpad. I researched linux support and bought one that I knew worked with Debian. Worked first time, no tweaking. Fucking beautiful.

Except some features of the laptop didn’t work. I needed to manually configure the pointer device.

But then, I bought my second thinkpad in 2010. Everything worked, and all the config was through graphical settings tools. Amazing.

Well guess what. I bought a new thinkpad a few years ago. I really wanted a Ryzen. But Lenovo only had the first gen available for sale, the second gen was sold out. I saw the support was perfect for the second gen, but not perfect for the first gen. I bought it anyway.

Wouldn’t you know it. The motherboard has hardware bugs that the drivers just don’t handle gracefully. There’s a fight between Lenovo and the driver developers over it. It never gets fully resolved. However, the battery life problem gets resolved. Now I have 2 bugs:

1. sometimes I have to plug and unplug my external camera into the USB multiple times because the mobo can’t negotiate the connection properly.
2. Sometimes the laptop fails to return from suspend and I have to reboot it.

Both of these suck, and there’s nothing I can do to fix it. I could post on a forum and spend literal weeks trying literally everything everyone tells me, but I know what the problem is - hardware/driver support. I could volunteer to become a driver developer, or to work with a driver developer and give them absolutely everything in detail so they can maybe find the time to fix it, but the reality is, I bought unsupported hardware and this is the consequence. Had I bought the second gen ryzen thinkpad, I would not have these issues.

So don’t try to force your way through this sorta shit and then assume everyone else is going through the same thing. Only buy hardware with components you know are going to work, only use distros that are simple to install and operate. And don’t try to solve problems that are caused by failing to adhere to rules 1 and 2.

America must end for the world to heal. If it happens in these 4 years, it’ll be super painful because no one is prepared. But it has to happen some one or another.

Don’t exit the scene. We need you.

I’m sorry. The military build and use promised by Trump? Have you been asleep for the last 4 years? For the last 24? The military build and up and use has been nonstop under every single president since Reagan.

Your definition of “force” sounds like “anytime I am uncomfortable”. Someone made a choice to invent slang, someone else picked it up. Not using youth vernacular as a youth often results in mockery. Someone brought in a loan word, others chose to use it. In business or political spheres, failing to adopt the style of the times often led to mockery, ostracization, or diminished station. None of that is force. It’s all just choices.

You think suffering consequences for misgendering someone is aggressive but you don’t think suffering consequences for being a “square” is aggressive. When we raise young people in the sales professions we tell them to get interested enough in sports to be able to talk about it to build rapport. Same for TV. There was a time when if you didn’t watch TV you were cut out of conversation regularly.

Aggression is when bigots beat transpeople to death. Not when trans people ask to be respected through use of language. Aggression is when neo-nazis block access to drag storytime, not when someone asks you to use the pronouns they have chosen for themselves.

If you haven’t read anything about how gender is a system of control I would recommend starting with any of bell hooks’ work on patriarchy. Here’s a short PDF summarizing some of the legacy of colonialism and its impact on gender-nonconforming people. https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/cfi-subm/2308/subm-colonialism-sexual-orientation-cso-ilga-world-joint-submission-input-2.pdf

And finally, you don’t care that much about trans people. That’s the insight. You need to start seeing everything else you’re saying through that lens. You’re not rationally correct on each of your points, you’re justifying your emotional position. The reason we are having this argument is because I do care about trans people and we can argue about the use of language, which makes you uncomfortable, to advance the relationship. I can get you curious about the topic, I can share things you wouldn’t have heard before. The debate is the point. It’s a social evolution, and one of the ways we are doing it is through language. There are other ways, like fashion, literature, drama, academia, sexual relations, legislation, court cases, public spectacle, conflict, solidarity, etc. But it’s all evolving and there are people actively pushing that evolution in a direction that allows themselves to be safer being who they are as opposed to afraid for their lives on a daily basis.

It’s clear that you don’t understand the value of speculative analysis and thought experiments. That’s OK. Just stop engaging.

Language evolves because people force it to. It’s not a natural organism independent from our choices. We choose taboos, we choose meaning, we choose pronunciation, we choose loanwords. It’s all evolution. The idea that it’s “forced” is ludicrous because no one can take words from you nor force you to use them. Your words are your own and no one is capable of stopping you from speaking them. But, if you choose not to respect the wishes of others, you will suffer consequences.

The reason some languages have a gender binary is often because that society forced a gender binary on people to control them. There are plenty of non-Euro languages that have no gender binary built in. Language is an active participant in social oppression and changing language is an active countermeasure to that oppression and indeed a tool in shaping future society.

Inventing entirely new pronouns is no more ridiculous than inventing yet another television show character or yet another tiktok dance craze or yet another romance novel or yet another $15/month subscription service that does the same things other service do or writing yet another magazine column.

We put effort where we care. That’s how we work. Where you put your effort shows you what you care about.

They aren’t referred to as “preferred pronouns”. That concept doesn’t exist. They are just pronouns. The pronouns for this person are x, y, and z. There’s no preference, just a declaration.

It’s a thought experiment to analyze specific variables. Whatever we assume as given for this experiment is not what we’re trying to understand. If we assume our understanding of physics is accurate for this thought experiment, it allows us to focus on the behavioral variables in the geopolitical, military, economic, and economic dimensions. I am not interested in a thought experiment that identifies what are the possible areas of new physics that could be implied from this thought experiment, all though a deeper analysis might indicate that specific new physics might result in specific behaviors of states and we need to itemize them as additional thought experiments.

Remember that this is a thought experiment. I am using the word “assume” like we’re doing geometry in math class. Assume the triangle XYZ has one angle of 60 degrees. Why would you assume that? Because it’s useful when doing an analytical exercise.

In the larger context, I don’t assume our physics is accurate, but I’m not interested in speculating on the ways in which it’s inaccurate for this thought experiment.

It’s an intellectual pursuit like analyzing the situation in Ukraine or analyzing decisions before the FTC or analyzing a football league

I am not talking about speculative fiction and what could happen. I am talking about taking your hypothesis - that alien contact has not happened at all - and attempting to build a steel-person argument against it.

This is how we got the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis: 1 assume UAPs are alien ships, 2 assume our understanding of physics is accurate, 3 assume that aliens wouldn’t fly all this way for nothing, what could be a possible explanation for 1 and 2? This the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis is born and now we can setup experiments to gather sufficient evidence to close out that hypothesis.

I am looking for something similar with regard to the theories of alien contact resulting in an arms race. The best way to defeat any ridiculous hypothesis is to steel-person it.

Honestly this is completely ridiculous. Hypertext using HTML constraints is absolutely insufficient for representing application state. It’s the wrong tool for the job and always has been, because it conflates document structure with semantic meaning.

Said another way, HTML cannot be relied on to capture a representation of application state.

The reason REST doesn’t use HTML in most contexts is because applications don’t use HTML in most contexts anymore.

Demanding that application representation use a specific encoding strategy is ridiculous and misses the point entirely, which is that HTTP is no longer the right protocol for the job.

The capabilities to generate summaries? Yeah, that’s probably true, I knew of AI that could summarize data into narrative years before the current LLM hype. I don’t know the underlying tech behind those things I saw though. They could have been early LLMs, they could have been some other neural network. But it was definitely a machine learning solution.

The point that machine learning can reduce the effort to produce dossiers to the point of making millions of dossiers feasible still stands though.

The Supreme Court gave the office of the president full immunity for discharging duties of the office.

You’re distrust of AI hype is fine, but you’re missing the point. OP said AI makes it simple to compile dossiers on everyone, meaning it’s now far less labor intensive to take all of the data being gathered by SIGINT and turn it into reports. The amount of labor required to build 10M dossiers on mostly impotent randos makes it completely unfeasible, but with generative AI being able to quickly summarize a dataset, suddenly we can have shitty, somewhat lossy dossiers on every moron shitposter.

IQ only means something within a small subset of the establishment. It’s a made up thing that is highly biased towards white European men. Yes, the system will hold you back if they determine you to have a low IQ, but for thousands of years people of all intelligences successfully lived in societies with others.

You have to give up the belief that the system is the sum total of reality. It’s the reason you wonder if your life is over at 23 - because the system is narrow and myopic and only has a little space in it and everyone else is pushed out. But the system isn’t even half of real life, and when you find the rest of life by giving up on the system you’ll find your life is just beginning.

Carl Jung even said that life doesn’t start until 40 - everything before that is just research.

That’s a white puritan definition of perfection, and perfection itself is a white supremacist Christian concept. You may think you’re an atheist but you have a lot of Christendom to shed.

Emotions are super potent. You will not be whole until you feel all of them and work with them on a regular basis. Eliminating anger from your life is a totalitarian strategy based on a Christian ideology that is fundamentally anti-human. Anger is amazing.

Yes, the standards you are holding for yourself are absolutely toxic and you will suffer from them long-term.

This is the work we have to do as individuals, to struggle with our understandings against the real world we live in and challenge our own positions and understanding to more thoroughly champion those values we hold dear. Keep going, you’re on the right path. Keep struggling, it only gets harder for a while. If it starts getting easier, you’re going the wrong way.

Keep going! I think you still need more precision. Your racialized students are all victims of racism at nearly all times. What you’re talking about is when racialized students are victims of harm (which comes in many forms) where that harm is the intimate form of structural racism.

So when someone uses a racial slur, racialized people experience harm if they are exposed to it. A) what is that harm if the slur was used at them versus if that slur was used near them but not at them? B) is there harm if no racialized people are exposed to that event?

Being able to articulate these sorts of nuances in a way that is internally consistent will be the result of struggling with these concepts and coming to deeper understandings and the path forward will be clearer.

To put a finer point on it, if a white child, in a room of 5 white children and a white teacher, uses a racial slur, how would you describe that, how would you understand the consequences of that, how would you make the decision on whether and how to intervene, and how would you communicate your decision in context?

I will challenge for the sake of you refining your argument: bigotry is equivalent with rude behavior and aggressive confrontation. Bigotry is not limited to the structures of racism. You can be a bigot against people without hair, bigot against people based on height, a bigot against people based on body fat, a bigot against people based on body shape and proportions, etc.

Racism, on the other hand, is a structure that exists even without bigotry. Bigotry is a symptom or an outgrowth of structural racism. The earliest racists didn’t spend their time being rude and getting into fights with people, they spent their timing writing academic essays, giving lectures, and generally being perfectly calm, reasonable high society people who just believed things like race is inherent in the person and values are inherent in the race.

I challenge you to get more precise about why you think bigotry is different than other forms of conflict, connect it to the structural so that you’re not only dealing with the individual, and proceed from there with a refined analysis and set of proposals.