supportlocal4h

Sticking with Windows95 because you like the UI is a bad move. Ditto XP, 7, 8.

10 is still maintained, so it's a different case for now. But W10 users should be developing a migration plan -- either to 11 or away from Windows.

I've never understood the mentality of staying on an old release of Windows. If you use Windows, you should stay current. If you are not willing to stay current, you should move to something else that is responsibly maintained. To stay still is to accept ever increasing vulnerability. That is bad for you and bad for everyone you touch (which probably means everyone, period).

You're first sentence points out there are multiple budgets at play (time, money) so it's hard to dispute the ambiguous conclusion. I would guess that your conclusion is true by definition everywhere including the US in terms of time budget. I'm skeptical of its truth for any other budget.

A bit off-topic, but I remember a college class in which I was completely lost. I wasn't even clear on the topic of the class. Nothing ever made sense. I got D's on most of the tests. I was enormously frustrated. Then, at the end, I got my final grade: B+.

My sense of relief was comical and fleeting. It was replaced by anger. How was it possible that most of the students in the class did worse than I? What an absolute waste to subject us all to such nonsense.

The vast majority of USians I know do not speak proper English. Nor do they follow the rules of English taught at any of the US schools I attended. Many people fight against this. Others embrace it. You might say that these people speak pidgin. I say it is their native language.

Most football coaches have the option of using "robust" English (or some other robust language). Nobody sees it as an advantage.

It is human nature to detest regulation in general but insist upon it after the fact of some failure. This can be easily illustrated with automobile speed limits. Almost everyone would be outraged if they were ticketed for driving 2 k/mph over the posted limit. It is a widely held belief that drivers traveling at or just below the maximum limit pose a safety risk because they are too slow. An officer who rigorously enforced posted speed limits would get run out of town. But who's to blame when the officer looks the other way and it results in a crash?

> This thread is about whether China is taking actions that could be a threat to the United States.

This thread is about the U.S. producing a war plane. Somehow China is threatening the U.S. just by knowing about a weapon produced by the U.S.? China is the threat?

> China claiming the territory owned by their neighbors is about slowly stealing land (and sea) and making them part of China. It's completely different.

Tell that to Puerto Rico or Guam.

How many times has Cuba invaded the U.S.?

> Meanwhile, China has been aggressively expanding its influence worldwide, in South America, Africa and Afghanistan.

In contrast to the U.S.? When other countries did this in the past and present, it was ok, but not for China? The U.S. can invade and occupy countries on the other side of the world, but it's aggressive for China to occupy an unoccupied island off its own coast?

I'm not thrilled with China's behavior, but the U.S. needs to stand down until they can act from the high moral ground. They have a lot of work to do to rebuild a working compass. Until then, nobody can trust their navigation.

I was specifically contrasting the two to question whether there might be some point in the middle that avoids the downfalls but is still practical. Some balance that could be doable and acceptable.

The original proposal was to do something that almost no consumers do: eliminate beef consumption. I was not proposing to change consumer behaviour so much as producer behavior. Of course it would impact consumers significantly in the prices they pay.

You assume too much. I cannot stop doing something I never did to begin with. Do you really think Biden got elected without help from the right? Many people from the right rejected Trump and contributed to voting him out of office. You don't have to be a Biden fan to recognize the danger of Trumpism.

I consider myself to be on the right. We use Ivermectin. We have stocked it for years. It's a very handy de-wormer. It has served our livestock very well. If you have never used it, and have never treated animals for worms, maybe you should listen more and talk less. Most experienced people I know on the left are fine with Ivermectin.

Oh, you mean for Covid? We use BioNTech and Moderna for that.

Please stop confusing people on the right with vulnerable uneducated people in general. There are plenty of those on the left and right. Donald Trump does not represent the right. He represents Trumpers. Unfortunately many of those who shape the Republican party are Trumpers. But there are obviously perfectly reasonable people on the right who are not Trumpers.

The ignorant are exploited by both sides. Please be careful to distinguish between the exploiters and the exploited.

My family raise one steer in our back yard. It feeds two families for a year. Do you consider this animal abuse? Do you consider it a source of groundwater or air pollution?

I'm genuinely curious and somewhat open to being persuaded. It's hard for me to see it, but there could be an argument for it.

Or perhaps you feel that those things are a product of industrial scale. If so, can you not conceive any solution that would involve less than 100% reduction?

When you refuse to hire junior developers for $50-60k and every new hire has to be a $200k rockstar, the rockstars have to provide value. They have to have something to show. So they have to rearrange something, replace something, do something.

This isn't unique to Windows. It's a general problem. When something like network configuration or screen resolution had been a pretty stagnant thing for 20 years, you could just leave it alone or... spruce it up. Sure, it's always possible that there are better ideas. But implementing a change because you have a better idea is one thing. Implementing a change to justify your salary is another thing.

The word "label" is very important here.

"Smart" children are identified early. After that they are smart because everyone knows they are smart. It is very hard for a person who knows they are not smart to convince a society who knows they are not smart.

Dumb people are sometimes lucky and get something right. That doesn't make them smart. Smart people sometimes make mistakes. That doesn't re-label them as dumb. The important thing is the label you start with. Smart people will recognize the grammatical "mistake" in the previous sentence and understand that this post came from a dumb person.

So 35000 deaths per year is ok? 100000? 250000? 1.5 million (diabetes)?

500000 hospitalizations (influenza)?

What deserves such incredible non-stop daily attention? Answer: whatever makes the most money.

More like being inundated by smoke. My town is currently experiencing intermittent days of smokiness from fires burning 100s of miles away. People are dying in those fires. Homes are being destroyed.

But the local fire department isn't doing anything about it. Nobody around here is installing sprinklers as a precaution. They act like there is no fire at all.

Covid is a serious thing. But "engulfed by flames" is the exact overstatement that causes people to question the motivation of fear-mongers.

I'm vaccinated. I wear a mask. I think too many people are whipping up a frenzy for profit. Why don't we lockdown our highways when there are 600,000 deaths from auto accidents? Why not lockdown breweries when there are 2 million drunk-driving incidents? Why isn't there a frenzy over influenza?

Covid frenzy has a better marketing campaign. It's the kind of thing that has people claiming we are "engulfed by flames" when things get smoky.

Did you see the sentence about current lack of transparency with insurance companies?

You offer two examples of value:

1. Fund and drive vaccine development

2. Purchase large quantities

Neither of those is what I want from my insurance company. How much are those two things costing me? If my taxes just went up $100/year for the next 3 years to pay for that vaccine, that maybe wasn't ideal. If my taxes went up $10 total, that was an awesome deal. If I have no idea how much that vaccine cost me, and nobody else seems to have a way to figure it out, that's really bad. One of my biggest complaints about health insurance in general is the lack of transparency. If government control reduces transparency, that would be bad.

Decades ago the U.S. tied healthcare to employment. It had some big positives at the time. I think it has proven to have more negatives as time has unfolded. Here is one of them.

If you reduce hours per worker by, say, 10% you just pay each worker 10% less and hire 10% more workers, right? It's not so simple. If you try to cut the health insurance premium of each worker by 10% the policy becomes unattractive. If you keep the same policy, you increase your health insurance costs by 10%.

For this and other reasons, it's time to separate health insurance from employer.

Remember the good ol' days when you waited for the results to get published in the newspaper? They're back.

Not so. You're 20+ years late for that. When you require viewers to create accounts with individual identity, you've gone beyond advertising. Of course you might argue that the modern ad industry has evolved beyond advertising. We have just failed to relabel it.

NBC has held the Olympics hostage in the USA. But the last time I made an effort, a few Olympics ago, I did try to watch the gold medal round of women's judo to see the American. I couldn't watch it because NBC was showing a qualifying round of women's handball: Poland vs Lithuania or some such. So much for USA-centric.

I guess you'll never please everyone.

If you had paid more attention to that frown you might have passed the interview.

(It's Monday. Smile a little.)

I tend to think such requirements are helpful to me if I were job seeking. It helps to avoid an employment situation with an organization that doesn't really know its own needs, or is trying to cover three bases with a single hire. Dysfunctional job postings often (though not always) indicate an undesirable situation.

Perfect. Tax Uber to subsidize free public transit.

One of the issues I've run into with Nix was lack of OpenGL. Does Guix have similar issues?

Sounds like you've got some ideas. That's cool. Take a risk and try to run with some of your ideas. Maybe you can help them grow legs.

You could just leave it up to somebody else to solve, but if you've got viable ideas, give it a shot.