Alupis

Is being in an airport actually considered private?

It's a public space, and you must show ID to gain access to the secured area. Additionally, you are subjected to baggage and carry-on inspection, as well as body inspection and metal detection, etc. There are cameras everywhere, monitoring and recording everything.

Presumably this system was designed to recognize individuals that may be traveling under false-identities, and are known "bad guys" - otherwise the nation-state security apparatus would have known about the attempted air travel well in advance.

The ability to abuse this system may be real, but it seems much more likely your rights would be violated well before you reached any facial recognition systems.

The mental gymnastics and contortions you are putting yourself through are quite stunning. You're finding associations that do not exist. I feel I'm staring at a wall strewn with thumb-tacked red yarn, linking all sorts of nonsense together while the creator steps back and exclaims "see, proof!".

Framework makes hardware and software. If you're going to close yourself off to any product or organization that happens to have some users you disagree with - then you're not going to get very far in this world. This is a wild, and frankly unhealthy perspective to hold.

That was not all of Hunter's legal problems - he had serious tax evasion charges[1], along with other Biden family members (all of which were pardoned, unprecedentedly by President Biden).

Trying to minimize Hunter's significant legal problems to "he did [many hard, highly regulated] drugs and [illegally] owned a gun [which was thrown into a dumpster]" is disingenuous and factually incorrect.

Hunter's (and other Biden family member's) legal issues were so plainly severe, with a near-guarantee of prison time, President Biden was forced to issue an unprecedented, unconditional pardon for "offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024." A decade-long period during-which any crimes Hunter committed were erased and forgiven.

Nobody is above the law? This was Biden's own DoJ.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco-weiss/pr/grand-jury-ret...

The Hunter Biden issue was not about smoking marijuana... that would have been the very least of his multitude of legal problems. Biden's own DoJ was prosecuting the cases - which is important context to consider here.

Yes. The EU focuses on safety of pedestrians, and the US focuses on safety of occupants. That's not to say a vehicle cannot do both well (see the many European vehicles sold in the US), but that is to say Chinese vehicles may not meet the US standards. The US has a lot of vehicle regulations that significantly differ from the EU market.

This statement doesn't make a lot of sense. 40-50% of vehicles are foreign-made already[1]. I would strongly wager it's vastly more likely that these Chinese vehicles do not meet US safety standards - which are quite high.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/03/fact-sheet-pr...

Zed looks and feels amazing to use. I test-drove it for a bit on my linux system, and the feel of it is difficult to convey to those who have not tried it yet. It's easy to overlook the significance of gpu accelerated editor - but I promise you, use it for a bit and you'll be sold.

The only feature that is preventing me from switching to Zed is the current lack of DevContainer support[1]. After investing a significant amount of time perfecting a devcontainer (custom fat image with all tools/libs + config), it would be a large step backwards to go back to installing everything locally.

There's a lot of eyes on this feature, so I'm hopeful it will be implemented in the future.

[1] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/11473

> The reservoir for the palisades wasn't filled due to a different form of incompetence, so even if the firefighters were there they would run out of water

> The pump system in the palisades didn't have enough pressure for large scale use, multiple fire hydrants would have resulted in the same lack of water

You cite even more governmental failures, then somehow still claim "due to climate change" policy needs to change. Weather events didn't create this fire - a human did, and governmental failures stacked to turn it into a disaster. Somehow your take-away is "climate change" nonetheless...

Fedora makes major upgrades pretty easy - you can even do it via the GUI Software Center, then reboot.

Personally I'm using Kinoite[1], an "immutable" version of Fedora that has an immutable base image, which makes it nearly impossible to break things during updates (even major upgrades).

[1] - https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/

Again, FTA:

> A Times investigation found that LAFD officials did not pre-deploy any engines to the Palisades ahead of the Jan. 7 fire, despite warnings about extreme weather. In preparing for the winds, the department staffed up only five of more than 40 engines available to supplement the regular firefighting force.

> Those engines could have been pre-positioned in the Palisades and elsewhere, as had been done in the past during similar weather.

This was governmental failure at large. Not climate change. Extreme weather happens, and we (citizens) expect our government to prepare accordingly. It's literally their job to prepare for this sort of catastrophe.

> Right now, that’s just government officials trying to cover their ass with finger pointing

You are right - with finger pointing at climate change, throwing their hands up in the air while saying "what are you gonna do, it's extreme weather!". The weather was predictable and was predicted - and the government failed to plan accordingly. The government systematically underfunded, under-trained, and under utilized it's emergency resources. There's very little excuse here.

People often mistakenly believe artists could/should be paid significantly more per listen, ignoring the huge costs of streaming distribution as well as the global scale/reach/discovery these platforms offer smaller and indie artists.

People don't buy music anymore, outside of a few niche environments. In the day of at-home music production, music has become a commodity. The few artists that do "make it big" are rewarded appropriately.

FTA:

> Los Angeles fire officials, already under scrutiny for their failure to pre-deploy engines to the Palisades fire, are now facing questions about why they didn’t fully extinguish the flames from the initial fire before hurricane-force winds blew into the area and fanned an ember buried within the roots of dense vegetation.

Multiple, stacking governmental failures are to blame for the breadth of destruction here.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-10-08/palisade...

Due to government failures... That's the point.

A significant amount of that damage was due to government policy, or rather failures of government policy.

Fire hydrants literally went dry in the middle of firefighting. Fire Departments were critically understaffed, and were using critically outdated dispatching systems that didn't share information or communication effectively.

The fire was started by arson, and it ravaged the city due to government failures.

Government policy has significant impacts on the probability of total loss events, such as wildfire or flooding.

Climate change is a really good excuse for insurance companies to raise premiums... people just shrug their shoulders and say "what are you gonna do?", then pay the new premiums.

Some of what insurance companies say may be true, but quite a bit of it is not. Funny how we don't believe health insurance companies but we'll take property insurance companies for their word.

Governments control budgeting and staffing for first responder units, they control training budgets, they control responses. While climate change may be impacting some of these events, they should never spiral into massive total loss events like as-of late.

At the time, every politician including California Governor Gavin Newsom jumped on the "it's clearly climate change" bandwagon.

It turns out it was good old fashioned arson[1].

[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-10-08/palisade...

AoE2 runs great on Linux[1]

[1] https://www.protondb.com/app/813780

Along with Teams if you have Microsoft 365 for Business.

Bejeweled and friends tend to show back up again on consumer machines too, I've noticed.

Absolute headache...

Fedora

I've been using the latest Fedora full-time for over two years without issue, and have been doing nearly all my gaming on it as well. The only gaming that doesn't work are games that deliberately use anti-cheat that doesn't support anything but Windows (typically the games run great in single player or offline, but multiplayer refuses to work). Of my Steam catalog, over 90% just works, and a large amount of that now has native Linux support thanks to the Steam Deck.

What particular issues were you experiencing?

As a counter anecdote, on my Windows installation I routinely run into "WTF" moments, such as BitLocker randomly deciding I need to enter recovery codes, the constant nagware that is OneDrive and friends, plus when I search for the same binary exe I've launched a dozen times Windows still displays "web results" first - fooling me just about every time.

FWIW, Kinoite will auto-update itself (the base image gets an update nearly every day).

While Fedora technically isn't a rolling release distro, it is very "bleeding edge" and it's major release cycle is quite frequent. With the Atomic (Immutable) flavors, major releases are an easy upgrade - just click the "Upgrade" button then reboot without fear of anything breaking.

Your "pet" containers basically become your traditional OS, in a way. They use filesystem overlays, so your container can see all of the files on your system, plus it's own layered files, ie. each container has it's own "view" of the filesystem.

You can install anything inside your "pet" containers that you would normally install on your actual system. The container keeps everything tidy and self-contained. I have a container for development, another for music/DAW, another for certain games that needed weird deps.

Fedora Kinoite/Silverblue come with `Toolbx`[1] preinstalled, but I found `distrobox`[2] to be more flexible for my needs. I layered distrobox onto my base image, and it just works.

Many GUI apps are available via Flatpaks, and can be installed directly or via the Software Center. You can enable Flathub[3] as a source, so there's a ton of available software, including Steam, Chrome, Firefox, Discord, Spotify and more. Flatpaks are also sandboxed and self-contained, so they can't pollute/break your system either.

[1] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/toolb...

[2] https://distrobox.it/

[3] https://flathub.org/en

Been rocking Kinoite for 2 years now - several major Fedora release upgrades, and zero breakage. I do weird stuff in my "pet" containers (using distrobox), and I love how my base system remains indestructible no matter how much I goof around.

Immutable is indeed the future. The moment a user installs something on a traditional mutable OS, it's configuration/environment drifts from the "base", making any system update or application install a potential conflict. After you install something on a traditional mutable OS, there's often no way to get back to the base without a OS reinstall (programs don't clean up after themselves, they change system settings, environment, more/worse).

Immutable operating systems solve this by having an immutable base image. Everyone running, for instance, Kinoite 42.20251011.0 all have exactly the same base. Users then can "layer" applications on top of the base image, sort of like a dockerfile. If something breaks, you just remove that application (layer) and it's like it never happened. Everyone having the same exact base image also means updates can be much more thoroughly tested, and confidently rolled-out to users.

Note, "Immutable" doesn't mean you can't save files or install things - it just means you cannot mutate the base OS image. There's always a "known good configuration" to go back to.

You're also encouraged to use "pet" containers for things like development - where you will install all sorts of weird system packages, libraries, tools, etc. without fear of polluting or breaking your system.

An immutable system + pet containers means your system will always be stable. Really neat.

I'm confident you understand the difference between killing puppies and the bias, partisan reporting that occurs on many "news" stations.

People often equate "Public" with meaning "middle-center" or "apolitical". Many would claim National Public Radio (NPR) is middle-center, politically-speaking.

Plenty of people disagree with that statement, and those who agree tend to like NPR's messaging - hence the "bubble" you referred to. Good, non-partisan reporting should make "both sides" groan from time to time.

If you find yourself in agreement with nearly everything said, then it's a fair sign the politics lean "your direction".

> A decade ago, Intel tried that back in the day with Galileo / Edison, and tellingly, they came up with the same "ideas": IoT / AI.

Intel's execution - as usual - was poor and lacking.

Both the Galileo and Edison were much more expensive than their Arduino counterparts, and their x86 cpu's were of little value within that space (especially at the time). Neither made it past 5 years without being killed - which is exactly what people feared. A stunning lack of long-term commitment from Intel to develop and grow a community, leaving anyone that actually built products based on their devices holding a useless bag.

A company I worked for stopped doing physical catalogs too - after having done so for a very long time. The cost to produce the catalog was insane, and had quite a bit of dedicated staff working on it full-time. Making a catalog is a specialized skillset, and has little overlap with the business' core competencies, such as website administration.

Over time, the revenue attributed with the physical catalog declined year over year. People said they wanted the catalog, but it didn't translate into attributable sales. The ones that did order from the catalog were often the smallest, insignificant orders the company took in. The website and online advertising are where customers gravitated towards, and remain today.

The amount of people that actually want a physical catalog, even for IKEA, I would wager pales in comparison to the amonut of people that want to browse the catalog on their phone or tablet. Pricing changes, stock comes and goes, products get discontinued, colors/materials are changed, etc. The website is always up-to-date, the physical catalog... is not.

When I read comments like yours, I interpret them as people wanting nastolgic items more than marketing materials or ordering guides. The costs for the company are just too high to produce those anymore; well over $2 per catalog someone up-thread mentioned - we're talking more like $10-$20+ these days (not accounting for anything except print costs) for a full-color, glossy/professional catalog with hundreds of pages.

I have serious doubts IKEA printing catalogs today would garner any new business. They would give away (or perhaps sell) some copies to existing, long-time customers with a fond memory of the brand and their catalogs - and I'm afraid that's it.

You actually believe 88% of all UN aid disappeared to "shrinkage"? The mental gymnastics going on here are stunning...

You're trying super hard here...

So explain to us who is armed and can loot a moving UN convoy in the Gaza region???

This is some insane, wild, political nonsense.

And last time we had this same standoff, Democrats held a majority and Republicans were blamed for not "getting in line". Can't have it both ways guys...