Most of the entrenched administrators see nothing wrong with violating Wikipedia's policies on civility and especially not on "don't bite the newbies." They violate those regularly and with impunity, confident that other administrators will always protect them.

Anyone who isn't an administrator who has stood up to an uncivil administrator has found themselves indef'ed and accused of being a "sockpuppet" merely for asking that administrators be made to follow the same rules everyone else has to follow.

Wikipedia concentrated on fixing their power structure and the entrenched, abusive administrators who cause most of its editor retention issues.

No, China is an authoritarian state.

Maoist China was totalitarian. Modern China is not.

Chinese people have the same freedoms as you do, except for challenging authority.

The Chinese nuclear industry has a solid safety record.

Their nuclear regulations seem to be working well.

The AI says, "I believe in forgiveness, and a God who forgives."

So, it advocates a very light sentence, or none at all.

Trump won because the majority of the electorate (out of those who made the effort to cast a vote) didn't feel any of Trump's previous transgressions disqualified him from holding office again. That's the real issue here. You keep talking about a woulda-coulda-shoulda scenario based on razor thin margins, and I'm here saying that in a sane society, a race against Trump shouldn't even be close in the first place, and when it is, that's the real problem.

I would say the real problem is that people were more willing to accept his previous transgressions than accept the policy Democrats were pushing . It really bugs me that Democrats gloss over this fact. Biden's policies were unpopular, and Harris accepted the exact same mantra and was just as unpopular. Much of Trump's current agenda is still relatively popular: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcis.org%2FArthur%2FDeporta...
Most of it fails in the extreme and haphazard/illegal/unconstitutional manner in which he's implementing it. That's what people don't like. They like what he's doing, just not how he's doing it. For instance, if he was in solidarity with our allies and only trade warring China, or if he was deporting people constitutionally, he'd be the most popular president ever.

To me, it reads like a large portion of the country were glad that somebody, anybody, finally was willing to do something about the blaise attitude previous presidents have been taking on issues like the border and illegal entries. Similar with issues like being tough on China, govt debt spending, DEI overreach, etc. These are all issues a good chunk of the country cares about that Democrats continue to be on the wrong side of every administration, and in this two party govt, people are always forced to choose the lesser evil. In this case, people looked at Trump's mostly benign first term and believed the tradeoff was worth the risk. And now they're finding out that's not the case. And my proof of this is that the swing voters have all changed their mind about him: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.yahoo.com%2Fnews%2Ftru...

No they are not. EV owners are taxed at a higher rate. There are plenty of rich people who only drive ICE vehicles.

It's like you're not even reading the words I write. A far greater number of higher income people drive EV vehicles than poor people: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.parking-mobility.o.... That's a fact. " About 60% of EV owners have an annual income of more than $100,000, while only 20% have an annual income of less than $50,000."

By taxing EVs, you're hitting far more high income individuals than lower income.

You mean, kind of like how you can install software on Windows and Linux from any old random website? Where's the rage about that?

I have been raging about that for decades now. There are not many that can handle that level of computer openness.

Not to say we should lock it away but that for most people that is not secure, and we have COUNTLESS examples of now that is true - not just for those choices but MacOS as well. Malware, viruses, etc, the list and harm to real people is endless.

Tha's why I say there are already insecure choices, I should have mentioned traditional computer OSs but I am including the lot of them.

Do you really buy Google's and Apple's marketing that says they lock down the app stores to protect users?

For Android it's not relevant because you can use alternate app stores with pretty much all Android devices.

But for Apple - yes I in fact KNOW they lock down app stores to protect users, because as a developer I have had to adjust apps I produce in ways that do inherently protect users. App review is real, iOS App Security is a strong force. It's not foolproof but it's a billion times better than MacOS or Windows, in terms of something I can hand to my mom and not worry she'll be letting random apps have her banking info, steal her identity or brick her device and make her pay to have access to personal data again.

I think this law seems like a *good* idea.

I truly hope you and all those you love suffer the full consequences of your cavalier approach to computer security for the normals. Maybe then you'll understand.

This is because the disadvantages are not seen by white people. Traffic stops that turn into prison or death. Home sellers not selling because the buyers have black skin. Job interviews not granted because the name sounds black. There's no way for white people to notice these things, and because they don't notice these things, they often think that such discrimination doesn't exist and such stories are made up. Instead, many white people just see how other white people have more and see that as discrimination against themselves.

While this did happen in the past and I'm sure there are some rare isolated incidents of this today....it is largely a thing of the past.

And for the past decade or two....the ONE category it is been perfectly acceptable to put down, make fun of and discriminate against is the white male.....so, I don't buy the priv. Bullshit...sorry.

That was certainly a load of words generated by AI to concoct bullshit, but none of it with a basis in reality. For instance, no actual engineer would refer to a "knee-of-the-efficiency" curve, nor describe the knee OF an efficiency curve (as in, the start of 'diminishing returns' because efficiency has plateau'ed) as "steep."

Likewise, you claimed that dehumidifiers are rated at 80F and 60% relative humidity? You're Lying. The standard is 65F as of 2019. The standards page even notes that this change was made "to more accurately reflect expected performance in a basement setting."

dehumidifiers these days have a short service life before the refrigerant leaks out - if you're buying the cheap-ass $40 Wal-Mart brand ones that don't even work to begin with, sure. But then again, those didn't qualify for the Energy Star rating to begin with...

the units ice up solid during operations - Fun fact: if the refrigerant has leaked out, it's impossible for the unit to ice up. Because it won't have any refrigerant left to do the cooling part that would result in ice...

I'm almost impressed that some trumpist fraud got ChatGPT to write such a load of utter factless crap.

Pedoshit Trump is in fact a child raper. Best buddies with Epstein and numerous victims of record. Fuck off you Klan Childraping Shitass or better yet stick a shotgun in your mouth and pull the trigger. One less Childraper like you in the world would be a win for everyone.

I am all for opening up freedom of payment options. I think it would hurt Apple (and Google) but I am pretty sure they would survive because of the ease of paying via their systems. So that recent ruling along those lines was I think a good thing overall.

But a mandate for support of third party app stores on all platforms is insane. The more wide spread this becomes, the greater the opportunity for malware creators to target the vast numbers of people who can't manage computer security themselves - think of all the seniors who have installed malware on laptops and lost banking info, now multiply that by 10000.

There is no need other than regulate this since Android already party functions in this way. People have a choice if they want an inherantly insecure ecosystem. Regulating away the only meaningful attempt to secure an App Store results in less choice, not more - it truly brings the Internet of Shit down on everyone with dire results.

I just got the latest 15 yesterday and there are new text scaling bugs and they broke the Do Not Disturb tile. Battery drain jumped too.

Maybe they could take advantage of everybody being too broke to buy a phone and do a bug-fix release.

And breathe a little more.

P.S. There are only a dozen people outside of Silicone Valley who want a Gemini AI Phone.

That's not what DEI is. That's what right-wing media has told you DEI is. DEI tends to involve things like removing names from applications and resumes so that people don't choose, consciously or unconsciously, based on the perceived racial/ethnic background of the applicant. It's things like making sure outreach and recruiting efforts aren't skipping over underrepresented areas

That's not what DEI is. That's what left-wing media has told you DEI is.

In reality, it's both . The "good DEI concepts" went way too far and started adopting things like defacto quotas (see modern day college admissions, or "Biden: the next Supreme Court member will be a black woman, nobody else need bother to apply"). And the current Republican govt is overreacting and labelling all DEI bad, instead of just the overreach. If the Dems ran DEI on equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome, they wouldn't get nearly as much pushback. The resume concept is actually solid practice, but that's like a very small percentage of the whole of what DEI is doing.

In other words, you think a tax increase for everyone is okay, because other people who are not you will be taxed even more.

I never said it was "okay". I said it wasn't regressive . Our current income tax brackets for instance are progressive because rich people are taxed at higher rates than poor people. Similarly, this is a progressive tax.

The problem with this line of reasoning is, ironically, is that it's the same line of reasoning that has caused Microsoft to add their AI shovelware into Windows, and that's this: that Windows is a selection made, by users, explicitly.

It isn't. Microsoft's mindset on this matter is that people actively choose to run Windows because of the value-add that Microsoft implements, while the Linux enthusiasts assume people run Windows because they don't know better.

Windows is still as popular as it is because of all the applications on it. That's it. That is the reason people run Windows. If they don't have Windows-specific software, they've likely already moved to an iPad or a Chromebook or a Mac or just using their phone for everything. If they're using Windows, it's not because of some allegiance to Redmond, it's because of an allegiance somewhere else; Windows is simply a means to an end. "GIMP and LibreOffice are drop-in replacements!!", even if it were true, is a half-baked sales pitch.

Allow me to paint a picture that might shed a bit of perspective: Assume I was encouraging you to move to VoyagerOS. It doesn't run Chrome or Firefox, but it does have a web browser. It doesn't have LibreOffice or OpenOffice, but it does have a word processor and a spreadsheet. It doesn't run Apache or nginx or lighttpd, but it does have a web server. It doesn't have php/perl/python or VSCode/Eclipse, but it does have a scripting language and an IDE. It doesn't have GIMP or Photoshop, but it does have an image editor. It won't run MySQL, MariaDB, or Postgres, but it does have a database. It doesn't have VLC or AIMP or iTunes, but it does have a music and video player. ...you're buying a new computer with this OS, right? Because I said it's awesome, right? It runs software *equivalent* to what you're used to, but am I really in a place to truly ensure that 'equivalent' to your use case? Of course not...and while it's probably "close enough", "most of the time", you're just going to...slide into my DMs for help, right? I mean, I'm the one who encouraged you to use it, so...obviously you'd be totally okay with me telling you to Google the answers to all your questions, right?

Of course you wouldn't switch, because your preferred distribution, for all of its flaws, are worth putting up with those flaws because rebuilding your *entire* software stack, and learning all of the idiosyncrasies of all of the replacements, all at the same time, is more headache than it's worth to switch.

THAT is the essence of "just switch to Linux". There are countless use cases that extend beyond Word, Excel, and a web browser, and I say this as someone who uses more Linux at home than Windows...but as long as "just move to Linux" hinges on a *similar* software stack, it's not going to be an improvement over Windows to those dependent on Windows software, it'll just be a matter of trading problems.