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.

It was an unusual campaign in that 95% of campaign promises weren't not just unfulfilled but 180* opposite of policy. Ultimate con man.

But now that Philippines is nearly out of oil China has made overtures to take care of their oil needs which have been defacto accepted.

The quid pro quo isn't stated yet but US caused their oil crisis so this announcement isn't real.

What an odd thing to say.

I rip my DVD and Bluray discs to a NAS and play them with Jellyfin. There's not even an optical player near a TV anymore. The last one died in about 2008.

But I have put some of those files on USB before for the kids.

Used Blurays are about $5 usually and much better quality than any streaming service rental.

The Onn is an excellent device for the money and most questionable aspects can be disabled or piholed. Jellyfin and SmartTube and Projectivy are all fine.

I should go see if LineageOS has added any new low-power devices in the past year. That's the best option but nothing supported was for sale when I last looked.

Exactly.

Somebody said they spent a lot of time and money coming up with a new "nonbinary" mascot.

I started using Firefox over 20 years ago and never had any idea whether the fox was male or female. Since thunderbirds are fictional I'm not sure about the sexual dimorphism of their plumage.

It's hard to understand how they think these days. At least Ladybird will offer a second rendering engine when the bubble pops. Engineering-focused software organizations used to be the norm.

I guess a Ladybird is a female, not that it matters at all. The AI should have Majel Barret's voice anyway.

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.

Posting since it was only in the footnotes.

15W might be good for use cases where n1x0 are a bit slow.

I'd consider a mini pc with one of these for kiosk-type applications. I have an n100 platform that gets maxed out with about 8 4K streams running. Would be nice to bump those up to 12 streams without much more power.

The iGPU code for ffmpeg is pretty good.

Hopefully these move beyond laptops later in the year.

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.

And Windows 11 is dog slow. So you're going to have a really hard time matching the performance of the MacBook neo because Windows 11 really needs a minimum of 16 gigs of RAM and to be honest you really want 32 gigs and even then you need a stupidly fast processor to deal with all the Cruft and slowness.

But with all that ram that you need just for your operating system to be barely functional and with ram being so stupidly expensive you're just up a creek without a paddle.

This is not to say the MacBook couldn't use another 8 gigs of RAM but it's at least going to be functional with that much memory. Windows 11 will technically boot with 8 gigs of RAM but the experience would be something like running Windows XP with 64 MB. You can do it but it would be so painful you wouldn't want to.

But hey at least you're operating system constantly spies on you and uses every single movement you make to train an AI with the hopes of using it to replace you at your job leaving you homeless and destitute.

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered [Linux Mint] community when IDC confirmed that [Linux Mint] market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent craft survey which plainly states that [Linux Mint] has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. [Linux Mint] is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive working test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict [Linux Mint]'s future. The hand writing is on the wall: [Linux Mint] faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for [Linux Mint] because [Linux Mint] is dying. Things are looking very bad for [Linux Mint]. As many of us are already aware, [Linux Mint] continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

[Linux Mint] is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time [Linux Mint] developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: [Linux Mint] is dying.

All major surveys show that [Linux Mint] has steadily declined in market share. [Linux Mint] is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If [Linux Mint] is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. [Linux Mint] continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save [Linux Mint] from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, [Linux Mint] is dead.

I already know that people are going to be stupid and easily manipulated. So does everyone else who has an IQ in the triple digits.

If we already know a substantial percentage of the population is easily manipulable and that they can be manipulated to do terrible terrible things then those of us who aren't in that boat have a basic moral responsibility to prevent the people who can't see past bullshit for whatever reason from screwing everything up in their lives and ours.

It's like the old quote, for evil to win all that has to happen is for good men to do nothing.

But screw morality, I'm talking about basic self-interest here. Again we know what those stupid motherfuckers in America are going to do if we let Russia do whatever with them. We also know that the people in America who aren't idiots have already lost out to Russia because of course we did Russia is a nation state.

So given that the most obvious line of defense has fallen I'm saying Europe just in terms of self-interest should have prevented Russia from tricking dumb Americans into being dumb Americans.

Instead Europe followed a different line of self-interest the predominantly benefits a handful of European billionaires at a very very high risk of total world devastation from a batshit insane United States.

If you're a billionaire trying to become a trillionaire and a borderline God then that's probably an okay gamble. You own private islands with bunkers that you have a chance of hiding out in.

But for the other several hundred million Europeans that's not a good gamble to make since you're not on your way to becoming a trillionaire and you don't own a private island that you can try to ride out nuclear war at.

It doesn't fucking matter whether or not it's the job of the American voter to stop being stupid or not. The point I'm trying to make here is that the American voter failed at that job and now Europe has the option of either helping us clean up our mess or getting dragged into it.

Protectionism isn't an option because we have a huge military here in America and we are fucking insane. It's like if your neighbor has a shitload of firearms and psychosis. You can't just pretend that's not happening. Well I mean you can but you'll wish you hadn't eventually when he inevitably starts just randomly firing off high powered rifles in your vicinity.

And again remember the reason Europe is ignoring Russia attacking America with propaganda and cyber warfare is because Europe's billionaires are hoping that America going down the tubes will give them a chance to become trillionaires. It's not that you guys are over in Europe are washing your hands of everything you're actively participating in the downfall of America because you think, or rather your ruling class thanks, that it will benefit them personally. As for the people of Europe I don't blame you for wanting to ignore your crazy neighbor but unfortunately you can't evict an entire nation state from planet Earth.

Basically nobody, European or american, gets to pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist anymore. Christ that hasn't been true in at least 300 years.

So the addresses are bigger, so what?

In most cases, all you care about is the prefix, which is just 64 bits, expressed as 4 groups of 4 hex digits. This is IT, is hex really beyond people's grasp?

Most of the admin is done one terminals that support cut and paste anyway.