The only options were girls under the age of 16.

Unfortunately, it was all of our responsibility to make sure our neighbors didn't turn out to be uneducated assholes, and we collectively failed. As it turns out, abdicating that responsibility to a department of education in a far-away land didn't actually satisfy the need.

Good question, that probably should be addressed in TFA, but isn't. Have a cookie, assuming you're not blocking them. :)

The Earth was exiting a period of relative geological and climatic stability and entering a cooling phase, which would have helped strengthen the AMOC. This process was then enhanced by a large scale volcanic eruption, thought to be in North America, with the ejecta from that and a series of subsequent eruptions leading to a significant deviation from the trendline, a mini-iceage known as the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LILIA) similar to the Maunder Minimum, a multi-decade period of cooler than statistically expected temperatures (up to 2.7C cooler than average in European summers). This is reflected in tree-ring records which show highly stunted growth for the time, ice cores from polar ice cores, and some of the remaining writings from the period that describe widespread crop failures.

If a total collapse of human civilization and organic life is the price then it is a small price to pay.

Without trillionaires who will protect ethics and games journalism and women's sports?

Sure in the past our billionaires have been able to protect us. Spending thousands of hours on 4chan to make sure you knew what was really important.

But no mere billionaire can protect us from the woke mind virus. For that we need trillionaires.

Like a congressional bill. And in the middle of a sentence he suddenly started talking about a imaginary guy named Bill.

I don't think Trump is parroting Fox news, because I don't think his brain works enough anymore for him to do that. Maybe 8 years ago during his first presidency but right now his brain is just gone.

Just recently he went on a rant about how terrible the country was a year ago without realizing he was President a year ago.

The guy has absolutely lost his marbles and if Congress was at all functional he would get 25th amendment'ed, but if we had anything functional Trump wouldn't be president for reasons I'm not going to list out because this post would get too long

That's it. That's all you got to do is stop ticket scalping. If you enforce antitrust law then we go back to the days when tickets were sold in all sorts of different places and there were lots of different venues for musicians and comedians and whatnot. As a result ticket scalping becomes impractical because there is just too many different places to buy tickets from and too many different venues to go to. It's only out of control market consolidation that makes scalping practical because you can go to Ticketmaster and just buy an entire run and do that for the handful of remaining venues.

There are lots of problems with our broken capitalist system that need fixing but the quickest, easiest and highest impact is to just start enforcing antitrust law so that the basic mechanism of competition starts to work again. Unless and until we do that everything is going to keep falling apart around us.

So yeah you're going to turn to randos for journalism because a handful of billionaires bought up literally 90% of all the news media and they are in the process of buying up and shutting down what little is left. There are serious efforts to undermine and shut down the associate press and Reuters. And they're basically the last source of Truth left. There used to be a whole bunch of independent journalists who made a living on Twitter but well, you know.

So unless you just want billionaire Epstein class propaganda you've really got to go looking. There are several YouTubers I like. Belle of the ranch, Rebecca Watson, and professor Dave come to mind immediately. Patrick Boyle is pretty good too and so is Adam Something. I like some more news but I'm a pretty staunch Democrat at this point and they like to spend hours and hours crapping on Democrats for no particularly useful reason. I don't say good here because there's plenty of reasons to complain about Democrats but I don't find it useful in 2026..

But getting back on track yeah I'm not going to waste time on CBS or CNN let alone Fox News and news Max and oan because I know they're all owned by billionaires that have heavy control over what is allowed to be said and what isn't allowed to be said. So I can't get reliable information out of them.

I will sometimes settle for CNN if I have to they weren't able to go full Fox News but Lord knows they are trying.

So say we all.

Apple is its own thing. It is not fully inconceivable that the feds (and therefore everyone else) would switch to MacOS if Windows became [even more] unsupportable, but I doubt Microsoft can provide Office at even the sad level it achieves on Windows and it would take Apple time to ramp up supply.

Linux is an easy sell unless people are hooked on some application or game that doesn't run on it, then it's hard. The interface is familiar enough now (especially with KDE, but there are some other basically credible options) that they won't have a lot of room to complain so long as they don't have problems. That part is going to depend on the hardware, and IME they will have the fewest problems with AMD CPU and GPU now. If they have Intel it might or might not be OK; if they've got Nvidia they're likely to have a bad time at least sometimes.

Business is increasingly using web-based tools for everything, which is not itselft a bad thing- if only more of them were self-hosted. But either way, this decreases the dependence on Windows. I've worked where there's a few Windows machines for clerical staff, or where there's a Mac for the graphics department. That can be Windows' fate again.

They have to also have the balls to have a winning formula, like put the nerds with successful histories in charge and let them make decisions and spend money. Instead they want to design everything by committee, and everyone wants to have the biggest piece of the pie. The more companies you combine the less successful it is likely to be. See: Every fucking project like this ever between any of the principals you named here.

Do you need high performance or only compatibility? If the latter, you can at least stuff Windows into a VM for your own protection. Only the graphics performance is poor, but the graphics functionality is also poor.

I believe the OS uses less RAM, but that doesn't change application memory use overall. If applications make inefficient use of resources, there's only so much the OS can do to improve that. It's not like iOS where it's on lock, developers are free to do things not-the-Apple-way.

Admitted on TV that even if the factories came back the jobs wouldn't because the factories would be automated.

One of the things I really hate is the way we just keep lying to people. The only way we're going to get a lot of good middle class jobs in this country is with a massive amount of government jobs repairing our crumbling infrastructure and building out renewable energy and some desalinization plants to deal with drought.

But that would involve taking money away from trillionaires and we can't have that. If we start diverting resources away from the upcoming trillionaires some of them might not even become trillionaires some of them might be mere multi-billionaires.

Anyone know how to pronounce that?

If the left wing or even the center had even a tiny little bit of political acumen this would be all over the news. It's like when Trump literally said he's not going to heaven. Or that moment when Trump was talking about a bill he wanted to pass and in the middle of a sentence started talking about a non-existent person named Bill.

The left and the center just don't have that kind of killer instinct that guys like Carl Rove and Steve Bannon have. To be fair I think it's because the people on the right are all crooks of one kind or another and if they start losing elections then they are pretty quickly going to get rounded up and thrown in jail for all the crimes they keep committing. I think Steve Bannon is on his second pardon from Trump.

But still the idea of trump actively supporting manufacturing overseas is the exact opposite of everything he claims to stand for. This isn't even about hypocrisy at that point. It is fundamentally why people support Trump and while anyone paying attention knows Trump isn't about America first this is the kind of thing you can beat people over the head with to make them wake up a little.

I found this review of the Neo illuminating. His take is that the market for cheap Windows laptops is a mess. There are some decent computers, but they're mixed in with a whole lot of garbage. The fatal flaws are often things you can't learn from a spec sheet, like that the screen looks terrible or the keyboard is awful. Even if you find a usable one you can't recommend it to anyone else, because all the models churn constantly. By the time they get to the store, there's a good chance it will already have been discontinued and replaced with a much worse one with an almost identical model number.

That's why the Neo is a big deal. It's a cheap laptop you can recommend to someone else. It still cuts corners to keep the price down, but it mostly cuts the right corners. It's usable, and if you recommend it to someone you know what they'll be getting.

So yeah, a faster CPU is nice but the CPU speed wasn't the problem to begin with.