When he’s up in the polls, easier voting m helps him , when he’s down in the polls it’s a danger.

There is a base of perpetually mobilized voters who will show up through hell and high water for him, but, it’s not enough to win against opposition when they’re able to mobilize voters.

Cash liquidity =/= standard of living

A lot of people are in debt on things like cars and homes, that’s where a lot of the debt is. There is also credit card debt, but that’s a whole other thing. So long as people can make the payments on the loans, and those payments grow slower than their income, they can maintain a given standard of living.

Also a lot of the super rich make most of their money off of collateralized assets as a sort of tax dodge. Them being largely payed in assets that appreciate in value, they then take loans out against the value of the asset, and so long as the asset appreciates in value faster than the interest rate, they’re fine. Since the assets aren’t taxed until they are sold (unrealized gains) and they’re technically not selling the assets by using them as collateral against a loan, so they’re not taxed on that income. This situation also skews the numbers on “the average debt of Americans”.

Ultimately though, this is all a super fragile situation, and all it takes is for assets (like say a house or stock in a big tech company) to decrease in value for everything to explode.

There are also a lot of Americans who are not in such a situation and are limping along financially, trading debt for time, and live at a much lower standard of living.

“We’re sorry… we’ll definitely stop, definitely don’t look at anything else we might have done for them.”

a diagnosis and previous medication used to be a straight up disqualifier. Over the past few years they’ve slackened that a bit, with some branches going to “unmedicated for a year” or a medical waiver. Ultimately the policies around mental health in recruiting are based around conceptions from the 70s, and given that diagnosis methods have moved on from then, now tending to catch a lot more mild cases, way more people are getting disqualified due to things that used to not be noticed. To be clear, a lot of people currently in the US military today have ADHD, but they weren’t diagnosed until after they were admitted except for very recent recruits.

Part of the reluctance to recruit anyone with any mental health diagnosis is the long shadow of “project 100,000” aka “ McNamara’s Folly”. Essentially a program where people who fell in to the bottom 10th percentile of testing on mental and physical were conscripted anyways to make up numbers during the Vietnam war. This lead to some pretty disastrous outcomes, with soldiers conscripted as part of this program dying at 3 times the normal rate. The movie forest gump touches on this a bit, but it kind of glosses over the real tragedy of it all nor the diversity of fucked up situations this created.

The institutional memory of this has created a strong prejudice around any sort of mental health diagnosis in recruits, but again, this is in conflict with the fact that mental health is much less stigmatized these days, and much milder situations that were just ignored in the past are now diagnosed.

Can’t wait for the “can you garden for someone instead of renting?”

And “how to make huge passive income through garden sitters! Allow them to stay in your property in exchange for growing food that YOU get to sell!”

And people just stumble backwards back in to tenant farming.

“Hey guys our sales are falling through the floor faster than Tesla, maybe we should rework our pricing and reconsider our policies towards buyers to move more volume and improve our imagine.”

“ Uh… nah. How about instead, we put ads on the center console!”

If the game was crashing to desktop, it was probably not a graphics card thing, but that you were running out of ram and the system was just automatically killing the program when that happened. That’s a system stability thing, it prioritizing the needs of the system and desktop over a program so as to prevent the whole system from crashing.

The easiest solution to that is to increase the “swap” size (IE a bit of storage that gets set aside to act as back up memory). That is a system level thing, but it’s not really a big deal to change.

If you were getting to the command line, Linux was running, although, if it was just the command line then it may have been an issue with the desktop or window manager not starting. And if it was an issue with the desktop or window manager, then I could see changing some boot loader settings fixing that. Like, making sure the boot loader automatically starts the desktop when the computer boots. not sure how you got from messing with graphics card to the system only booting in command line, but, shit happens. I’ve broken my system in weirder ways while pulling at the guts.

By switching from cinnamon to XFCE desktop you may have solved the issue with the game crashing simply because you had more memory available, as XFCE is a much lighterweight desktop.

If the games was slowly slowing to a crawl before freezing up completely but not outright crashing to desktop, that could have been an issue of running out of video ram for the the GPU, I’ve had that happen with helldiver’s 2. I don’t remember exactly what I did to fix that, something with the launch options that affected the graphics settings or capped the frame rate I think. Not sure how changing between desktops could have fixed that though.

I mean, a lot of people have lost their jobs at these companies due to gen AI, but it’s not because it’s replaced them. It’s because these companies are burning cash like crazy on gen AI even as it looses them billions upon billions every quarter. They’re letting people go to cover some of that cost and then spinning a positive narrative to shareholders about increased efficiency and productivity.

There is also a lot of still born projects and initiatives that are getting dropped because the executives now have an excuse to wash their hands of them without admitting to shareholders they made a bad call. Like Microsoft and their failed attempt to roll up the games industry.

You can probably get a pirate hat online for a few bucks. And there are plenty of discoverability systems not based on integration with a subscription service.

you may not need a dedicated GPU, the iGPUs on AMD CPUs have gotten really good lately, like better than a mid ranged dedicated GPU from even 4 years ago.

My laptop has a 780m integrated GPU on its 7840HS cpu, and I’ve been blown away at its ability to run modern games. Like, sure, not running cyberpunk 2077 at max settings at 120 FPS in 4k, but running it at medium settings at 60 FPS in 1080? It’ll do it just fine.

My laptop was a bit pricy, but I did a little searching and saw that there’s something called the GPD WIN Mini, the 2023 model was listed as having the same CPU/iGPU as my laptop and it was listed at 700$. It’s an odd form factor, and I couldn’t see it in stock anywhere.

You might be able to get the kind of performance you’re looking form the iGPU on an AMD ryzen 7 or later CPU, and something without a dedicated GPU will probably be a lot cheaper.

If you don’t mind a non-traditional form factor, as other’s have mentioned, definitely check out the steam deck. It’s very affordable and very capable, and other than the form factor, it is just a computer running Linux. You could even boot other distros on to it if you don’t want to run SteamOS (Valve’s arch derived distro).

Lawns are bad, yes, replacing lawn with hard impermeable surface, worse.

It’s as if someone turned their whole front yard in to a parking lot.

The only good back up is the binary carved in to stone tablets.

I think that in a lot of ways, it’s less about the Epstein files, and more about how deeply complicit in the elite culture that he claimed to be in opposition against.

Epstein is just an acceptable outlet among his base to air their uncertainty and unease they’re feeling. Because his ties with Epstein have been well publicized and well known about for a while, but from a right wing populist perspective, that was kind of written off and discredited because it didn’t fit the feeling, the “vibe”, that he was upsetting and visibly angering elites and thus he must be acting against their interests in some meaningful way, now though, it’s very clear he’s cosying up to the tech elite and taking huge obvious bribes from other elite groups and actually gutting social programs they use everyday, rather than that just being a threat made by the “woke” media they don’t trust.

So suddenly the Epstein being associated with him is believable to right wing populists because of how visibly elite aligned he’s being from their perspective.

The current situation is a bubble based on an over hyped extension of the cloud compute boom. Nearly a trillion dollars of capital expenditure over the past 5 years from major tech companies chasing down this white whale and filling up new data centers with Nvidia GPUs. With revenue caping out at maybe 45 billion annually across all of them for “AI” products and services, and that’s before even talking about ongoing operation costs such as power for the data centers, wages for people working on them, or the wages of people working to develop services to run on them.

None of this is making any fucking profit, and every attempt to find new revenue ether increases their costs even more or falls flat on its face the moment it is actually shipped. No one wants to call it out at higher levels because NVIDIA is holding up the whole fucking stock market right now, and them crashing out because everyone stoped buying new GPUs will hurt everyone else’s growth narrative.

See that’s the kicker, windows has so many “are you sure” pop ups about stuff that most people just click through them without reading the fine print. People get desensitized to it and just ignore them, or maybe even they just assume microsoft is trying to sell them on a feature they don’t care about.

And in this case it didn’t save the files to the trash can, I imagine because it was synching local files with what was in one drive. Not the user deleting local files.

I had a colleague at work that had to redo several days of work because of the one drive thing.

The long and short of it is that they noticed that their connection was being super slow, opened up task manager to see if anything was eating bandwidth, saw one drive, went it it, correctly diagnosed that it was uploading files to it and eating up bandwidth, and then deleted all the files in one drive to stop it.

One drive decided that this meant they wanted all the local copies of the files deleted as well. Like, on the one hand, not the correct way to stop that behavior, but also like, the kind of thing a lot of people would try, and it then deleting all the local files in turn is an unintuitive outcome.

Because it’s something where the current government can claim they’re “doing something” or “addressing a real problem” but it also doesn’t threaten the rich and powerful.

Going after Facebook would threaten the rich and powerful, for who it is an important tool for manipulating people, who think they can use it to mold culture to what they want it to be my breaking the minds of children.

The current UK government is desperate to say to the public that they’re governing and fixing problems, but they also really don’t want to piss off the rich and powerful.

It’s unlikely any of this will ever be profitable, the only one making profit from this right now is NVIDIA. Everyone else’s costs dwarf revenue, even just operational costs, not even counting capital expenditure to set this stuff up. None of these companies have a path to profitability, and most of the little revenue is coming from services burning investor money built upon other services that are also burning investor money, or temporary shenanigans like Microsoft trading OpenAI free compute time at their data centers in exchange for IP, or coreweave using their GPUs as collateral against loans to buy more GPUs that get collateralized in turn.

At best the deregulation makes things less unprofitable and drags the bubble out a little longer.

I think it’s likely that Microsoft will start turning it on by default, and resetting it with updates for people who have opted out. Much like they did with edge and Cortana, intentionally making it harder to choose not to use it.

More programs actively blocking it will make that harder, but I wonder how many will stick to their guns when pressured by Microsoft.

I suspect that Microsoft will ratchet up the pressure to force it on people as the gen AI bubble pops, an attempt to keep the narrative alive to keep up demand for their overbuilt GPU data centers.

It’s a trend In canada of provincial leaders trying to prevent bike lanes.

Like, they lost their weird obsessive fight against bike lanes in cities and towns that wanted to do it, so they go a level up and just impose it from there.