Yes, and the two are interrelated. Scarcity breeds insecurity, insecurity breeds conflict, and conflict destroys physical and societal infrastructure of production that leads to further scarcity. It becomes a vicious cycle. And indeed I believe you are entirely correct that a long legacy of U.S. neocolonial interventionism has contributed to the instability.

This is just the start. A billion people on the Indian subcontinent are next. The tropics globally will desertify as the planet warms. Even the increase in migration from Central America to the U.S. is driven by extreme weather and lapses in agricultural productivity. A 2017 study by the World Food Program found that “no food” was the main reason people from Central America sought to emigrate to the U.S.

40% of the world’s population - 3 billion people - live in the tropics. A single city is one thing. Where will 3 billion people go?

Not to mention the ridiculous irony of white South Africans complaining about “replacements.” You are the replacements, colonial dipshits.

Basically the slogan for the 2020s

They’re already executing Palestinian prisoners. And beating them, and torturing them, and gang raping them, and arresting the lawyers who leak the footage of the gang rape. But now the executions will be legal.

I work in a high power field and we straight up cancel projects because we get quoted six year lead times more and more often. We can’t absorb the lost revenue.

There are some places that have grown so quickly, like downtown Denver, that capacity is just completely tapped out. And you either pay millions for feeder upgrades that won’t be ready until 2032 or you just move on.

Sometimes we ride in on the coattails of a data center that pays for the upgrades and leaves a few MW left over, but even electric service equipment never had its lead times fall since the pandemic. Projects that used to take eight months now take two years or longer. Not an easy time to be agile.

Heck, the present is ublock origin!

Amazon recommended me a book by Charlie Kirk. I guess the algorithm hasn’t got me yet.

Victory speech was a banger. Quoted Eugene Debs, told Cuomo to go enjoy private life, proudly declared himself a socialist, and told everyone not to expect an apology.

I’ve also used it successfully for those kinds of special cases - particularly translating complicated medical documents back and forth to Japanese due to my wife’s treatment.

But I think the caution here is overreliance. Using it in a university setting, where you feed it everything you were supposed to read and understand, and having it write down all the analysis that you were meant to analyze, and what have you personally gained as a result? The article cites students who couldn’t even recall what they’d “written” after submitting an assignment.

You can use it as a tool, or you can use it as a crutch. If you outsource your whole thought process to a computer, I can see the detriment.

I actually went with Tuxedo OS, which is based on the Ubuntu kernel but has a very noob-friendly desktop environment.

My daily driver laptop is a 12-year-old Hackintosh MBP that I’ve been repairing for years, but I’ve priced out a Tuxedo laptop for when it finally kicks the bucket. So I started dual booting Tuxedo on that as well to get my bearings.

Once I’m a little more experienced, I’m definitely interested to check out other distros! Right now it’s a lot of looking up terminal commands and learning the architecture. The firmware fan control in the MacBook is shot - fans blasting at full speed due to a failed GPU temp sensor that makes the computer assume it’s overheating - so I’ve already learned how to write to /sys/ with a custom fan control based on the working sensor in the CPU die.

It’s been really fun so far. You get the sense of just having vastly greater control over the hardware at a low level and the ability to control how it functions in a way that Windows and MacOS completely obfuscate. I still have very little idea what I’m doing in the terminal, but I’m starting to pick it up.

This is why I decided to dual-boot Ubuntu and Win10 until I’m fully comfortable on Linux. Every single thing about Win11 just makes my skin crawl.

Last week it was the news that they’re eliminating methods to install the OS at all without being signed into a MS account. The degree of snooping had no plausible explanation other than for Microsoft to harvest and sell your data.