BTW, the only politician I'd call a true anti-statist was Ron Paul.

I don't consider Trump an anti-statist. Most of the people who voted for him (conservatives) are not actually anti-statists. I'm not sure what your conception of "anti-statist" is.

For me it is closely aligned with real libertarianism (in contrast with libertarianism in name only, or the "libertarianism" that conservatives get labeled with by the left). Furthermore, anti-statism to me is the idea that the state is a fundamentally illegitimate entity in its present form. Though, I don't maintain that it is necessary to be completely eradicated. There are possible ways to resolve the concept of the state to not be fundamentally flawed, yet still maintain a central authority on the use of force.

Classical Liberalism principles (which elevate individual liberty above most social engineering goals) go a long way toward anti-statism.

However, in this day & age, there are almost no people I encounter who can consistently articulate a set of absolute principles by which the power of the state should be constrained, except among hard-core libertarians (Lew Rockwell and the gang).

From my perspective, even most conservatives are "liberals," as they are happy to engage in social engineering just like contemporary liberals. They just have different social engineering objectives.

Anyway, I hope you are right. Brexit was certainly a rare bright moment in a sea of creeping totalitarianism.

Anti-statists number in the handfuls out of the entire global population. Almost everybody is a statist.

"the disservice I've seen the Linux community perform for people by recommending Linux as an alternative to Windows and MacOS is terrible."

What do you mean?

I don't think there's any problem with recommending Linux as an alt., since it can be a credible alt. It all just depends on what you want to do with it. These days it does seem to be the case that some distros. are useable "out of the box" for most purposes. This was not the case at one time, which is quite a long time ago now.

OSes are tools, not religions. It's all about weighing the pros/cons and then just making a decision.

My personal experience is that, since I want certain things to work a certain way when I set up a Linux machine, I have to put in tremendous effort for the first few weeks to get it mostly right. But then I can just use it. For years and years and years, with rarely any problems. The only reason I ever change is because of hitting a roadblock with some software that won't work unless I upgrade.

It's also the case that when you plan a new Linux machine, you have to do your homework. I research what hardware will work, then put together my own machine.

With Windows OTOH, it seems like the hair pulling is spread out continuously. At my job it's really hilarious. Every single time I turn on the Windows machine, it has to update something. Update nag-o-grams from the central management team pop up in the middle of doing work. I usually end up muttering "how the heck does anyone actually get anything done like this?"

I actually bought two Surface Pros, because I tried to condition myself to accept that the OS is just a mechanism for running programs I want to use. But I can't figure out how to get data to be synchronized btw. them and my Linux machines. I can get close, but end up wasting a lot of time trying to reverse engineer shit – where does the IDE store it's config data, can I get the configs to be consistent on both sides without having to manually set up all my tweaks on both, etc.

I don't seem to be using them much anymore. If I had time I'd install Linux on them.

Windows in VMware is useable, since it can access my Linux files semi-directly.

"Every OS sucks..."

Don't get me started on the recent changes to KDE though. Argh! I had to go through an ordeal to figure out how to turn off that stupid Baloo shit, as did many others. The guy who insisted it be in KDE with no way to turn it off posted somewhere re his motivations. It sounded exactly like the attitude everyone in the OSS world always hated about M$.

I should seriously look into XFCE and other more "crude" desktop environments that don't do much at all except what you tell them to do.

The strange thing is, I can easily imagine how to make Linux *and* Windows much better. I don't mind stuff like the Win 8 UI being included, if there is more flexibility about whether one uses it or not. Actually I didn't find it that hard to adapt Win 8. Nor do I have many problems with Windows instability. It's just a time sink to figure out how anything works under the hood, with many cases leading to impossible dead ends because it's just not OSS.

I think M$ really blew it by chasing the phone/tablet market. If I was in charge there, I would have put up billboards saying "For those of you who still have to do actual work with your computers, it's still mainly on Windows where you can run all your industrial strength applications..."

"An there are plenty of us that work in both windows and linux." I do both as well. Linux is the base, however. No way I can manage my data on Windows as efficiently as I can with Linux.

why run Linux on bare metal?

Uh, because Linux is the only OS I can reasonably comprehend, I have all my data organized in ways that can't be reproduced in Windows, I don't understand Windows, I hate Windows because it almost ate my history paper in '96, Linux has become far easier to use for me (because I comprehend it) whereas Windows is baffling and opaque, Linux is free, Linux doesn't spy on me, I have written many scripts that make my work-flow efficient on Linux, I feel happy using Linux and miserable using Windows, an increasing number of programs I use are becoming available on Linux so I don't even need VM, my kid started using Linux at 8 and 4 years later is still doing fine, likewise with my wife since 2000, etc.

Linux (as a desktop distribution with GUI) is an OS, so of course it sucks. But it sucks at a level that doesn't bug me most of the time. Windows sucks in a way that every single moment of using it pisses me off. And I'm not paying an arm+leg for Apple.

If there had only been Gnome however, and no KDE, my opinions about all of this could have turned out quite different.

What if she's really hot?

Aren't there piles of FPGA designers in Si Valley? My nice employer in Livermore let me go take a Verilog course at Xilinx once, and I ended up helping out teaching the thing. Not because the teacher wasn't smart, he was really quite good. But his english was painstaking to follow, and he just couldn't keep up with the demands for assistance during the lab exercises. Most of the people in the course, however, were Xilinx employees. At least half of them being Asian and Indian women. Very nice company, and very nice people! What's that thing about women in STEM? I've never quite been able to understand what that is all about. I had just about the same experience at a TI course once.

I once hired a high-school grad. for an Electronics internship. Part of it was to write a program to automate some part of printed circuit CAD software operation, most likely in Python.

I spent a lot of time preparing a carefully considered task list to make good use of this intern. The kid I hired had only tangentially related experience, mostly hobbyist and school project stuff.

But the GPA and the intellectual enthusiasm were such that it convinced me he could almost certainly learn and do the job. Well, he grossly exceeded my expectations on the programming, and most important, part!

It was a great experience. Fortunately, he had to go off to college, or else he could have probably replaced me in another year or two ;-)

So, there are indeed capable "on the job learners" out there to be had. I was one as well.

OTOH, the intern did have a weakness – mediocre attention to detail. It wasn't much of a detriment when programming, as the interactive nature of the work allows one to self-correct. However, a relatively simple board design I had him do required three fabrication iterations to get right. Whereas I have only had to re-spin my board designs about 1% of the time, and those are usually for some minor oversight that could have been patched by hand, rather than a major spatial reasoning fail.

Being a perfectionist is the lock I have on my job, which involves a great deal of "it absolutely has to be done right, the first time." I've never had a single hardware or software bug in the field. Of course, I'm slow as heck to make delivery. It's a trade off that can be appropriate in a research environment.

I suspect that my intern could have improved his attention to detail in time, but it may have taken some stern yet wise guidance rather than coming from his own nature.

Corps.' will follow the rules they are given. If the rules include the opportunity to redefine the rules, then they will do that too. If you don't like what corporations do, reform the rules and the process by which they are initially made.

"I make a six figure salary working in tech ... My girlfriend earns over twice what I do working in HR"

Holy shit. She at least the boss of HR then, right?

Creative minds cannot be "trained." They must however be fed with enough information and some examples of what has been done before so that they can begin to synthesize different aspects of old ideas into new ideas.

E.g. once I had just learned what a "state machine" (FSM) was. I learned how to design them using logic, and I learned how to implement them in software.

Then one day I had the idea to make the software FSM table based, as I had learned that a state table is a thing, usually put on paper, used as a tool for thinking through the design. But the means of coding a FSM I had only been exposed to in the form of static code (ie. FSM logic hard-coded in the program structure).

Then one day I had the idea to use an FSM as a real-time control mechanism, for dynamic and glitch-free switching of arbitrary waveform generation tables.

Then one day I had the idea of making the state table itself dynamically changeable, via a transition in the state table to another state table.

And so I had invented the dynamically reconfigurable real-time FSM control system.

Then I discovered that someone else had already invented it. That was Ok, however, as it didn't really matter to me, since I still owned the satisfaction of having advanced my own understanding and capabilities through sheer personal effort.

It did mean that there were potential patent implications. Fortunately, my designs are only used in scientific research labs, so I probably don't have to worry about patents.

Also, my being a relative "non-expert" in the field, having made the leap to the invention that is patented within just a couple iterations of having first grokked FSMs, does tell us something about how absurd the patent system can be.

The point is, I don't believe this sort of thing can be trained. Only the ingredients for creative work can be provided.

BTW, I'm a scientist ;-)

No, I'm trying to say that I think the problem is *systemic* and rooted in the nature of people. Scientists mostly do the right thing, but the degree to which they deviate from the ideal appears to be a function of corrupting incentives. Of course, the political system is a complete pile of shit. I don't have the answer for that. I suspect there may be no answer as long as people are involved.

What disturbs me in this case (and some other that I won't get into...) is that Doctors, who are supposed to be applied scientists, did *nothing* to correct this.

In fact, by some interpretations which may be reasonable, they fed into it. They gave pills to people, to treat the consequences of obesity (diabetes, etc.), instead of calling foul and stating to their patients that they should lower carbs and get ketogenic if they want to have any hope of loosing the weight.

So there are 2 possibilities (or some combination of both), neither of which are pretty:

1. Doctors were oblivious to the research indicating likely flaws in the "accepted wisdom" of low-fat diets, and also that they blew off a *pattern* of anecdotal evidence of people experiencing dramatic turnarounds on ketogenic diets, that should have led any competent scientist to say "hmm, maybe there is something wrong with this picture? I need to investigate if this pattern constitutes reproducible data that may falsify the low-fat hypothesis..."

So if you are correct that the right information has been available for a long time, then at a minimum Doctors have been incompetent, by not paying attention to the research and the shaky basis of the low-fat doctrine.

2. Else, they were complicit in giving patients bad advice because the regulatory system defined "standards of care" making low-fat followed by treatment of long-term terrible health consequences with lots of pharmaceuticals something doctors could do without fear of legal consequences. They then proceeded to practice so-called "evidence based medicine" in this unethical manner for decades just to collect paychecks and kickbacks from drug corps. knowing full-well that they were killing people.

I navigate my Moto E go-phone mostly by yelling and screaming at it, threatening to toss it, and uttering lengthy expletives about the programmers who created its perplexing and idiotic UI.

It took me a few weeks to figure out how to answer the damn thing. It's still unreliable, as hitting *anything* by accident instead of performing the correct touch gesture makes it leave the answering context. I had to look up the manual (yeah the freakin' *manual*) to learn how to answer my phone! You would think they could have printed a little "swipe that-a-way to answer phone -->" on the screen to give new operators a clue. But no... If you fail to answer it with the right gesture, then it provides a menu of options including everything EXCEPT "Answer the fucking phone." There is some way to get back to having a chance to answer it, but I forget what it is. Then of course it always turns on the camera as the side button activates it.

It is a hideous thing!

If I didn't have Linux for my PCs, I would be extremely unhappy with the computing world, because everything else is borderline unusable by comparison.

I would rather just have a simple phone. Maybe with an .mp3 player feature. Of course, such a thing no longer exists :-(

East Asian women are free to do whatever the f*ck they want in their societies.