They were never a thing in Europe.

Not really a thing in Canada either. Bought a reasonably midrange ($600k) brand-new apartment back in 2006, it didn’t come with it. Also have never seen it in any other house that I’ve visited, except for the wealthy. And by that, I mean in a house that you would normally pay $4-8 million for. Which is certainly upper middle class where I am, but not overly wealthy.

The so explains the conservative ascendancy. More morons for their electorate who uncritically swallow everything spoon-fed to them, less for the progressives on the left.

Corporate cuts should always start with the greatest fat that does the least work - the ones at the top.

Because if the company has found itself in a place where headcount needs to be reduced, these are the people who led it there and deserve all of the blame for hurting the company to that degree. Plus, you should always start cutting where you get the lowest volume of productive work for the greatest money spent, and that is always at the top.

I would consider the latter to be depraved indifference, but the former to be maliciously genocidal.

Of the two, the former is much, much worse than the latter. And with everything being a spectrum of some kind, the former is much further along the path to being evil than the latter.

With that said, there is no single person pushing all the buttons in Israel; as such, I am sure there are people in the Israeli command structure that represent the former much more than the latter, and vice versa.

But if there is one characterization I feel is wholly appropriate: on Oct 6, Israel looked at the evil of Hamas and said, “hold my beer and watch this.” And boy, did they ever deliver.

$325k for a 3bdrm 2bath detached SFH in good condition?

Awww, that’s adorable. Even after taking the exchange rate into account, that would be like going back to 1998 in my corner of Canada. Right now, a house like that on a 0.21 Ac plot of land would be running you $1,300,000 CAD. In places like Vancouver? $4,800,000 CAD on average.

I have a tube-based distribution system from the second-floor window that I started using during COVID to keep my distance from those plague incubators that came calling, and just never stopped using it.

I live in a moderately cold climate, and Halloween evening nearly always drops to around -5℃ to 5℃. So it’s much nicer to just sit in a cushy armchair by the window with a warm blanket over my legs and drop candy through the tube. A surprising amount of adults, teens, and tweens are tickled pink by that system, although a lot of little kids need a surprising amount of direction to get their candy.

And yes, I always drop either two pieces or - for those in dark hoods and carrying scythes - full-sized snickers.

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The Parasite Class. That’s what happened. These are people for whom any amount of wealth will never be enough. So they extract it out of the working class by cramming down wages, making all aspects of life precarious, and raising prices.

We all suffer and the 0.1% accumulare more wealth than they could possibly spend in a thousand lifetimes.

North Korea calls itself socialist

They also call themselves democratic.

Are they? Would you call their system democratic? No?

Why one and not the other?

It’s not laziness.

Most people are too resource poor, too time poor, and too exhausted from being violently forced to be profitable to someone else, to have the headspace to do what you suggest.

You can indeed spend every waking moment optimizing your life, but then you would be just one person among tens of thousands who could be successful doing that. 99.999% of people would utterly burn out trying to achieve the same. They don’t have the underlying intergenerational wealth that would give them the ability to do so, or don’t have the free time to do so, or have too high of a cognitive load just putting one foot in front of the other to do so. Vanishingly few people are “just too lazy” to do so, and of those who are, they are the ones who can monetarily afford to be lazy.

It’s why poverty is fiendishly expensive, and why it is almost impossible to escape poverty

OMG, like North Korea isn’t bad, it’s just the US that “doesn’t like them”.

You’re linking North Korea to the conversation about communism, when that alone is a fatal error: NK is equally as much communistic as they are democratic. As in, not in the least.

There has never been any kind of a long-term (5+ years) communist country on the planet. Prior power structures have always stepped in to decapitate communism in favour of a violently autocratic dictatorship much like a monarchy. What remained of communism was only ever kept as a thin veneer of legitimacy, much like a rotting Edgar suit.

religious beliefs aren’t considered mental illness

You’re right — it’s actually brain damage and cognitive impairment.

In a fair and equitable world, communities like this would not exist, because these people would not have that wealth.

All extreme wealth has been stolen from the working class. That’s the only way it can be obtained.

I make a meaty spaghetti sauce with various spices, but I cook the ground beef in the pan at a low simmer for about 2hrs before I even add the tomato sauce, in order for those spices to penetrate the meat.

I call it a nuclear time bomb because it tastes totally normal - very delicious, even - but about 10-15 minutes in, you are reaching for a hand towel to wipe away the sweat which is quite literally dripping off of you. And you have felt NONE of the hot spices on your tongue.

A much quicker dish involves Cæsar dressing, which I add copious amounts of garlic powder to (4-5 tablespoons), then prevent the dressing from solidifying by adding lemon juice, then wrapping up with freshly ground garlic. As in, a paste, *not chopped or minced._ For a salad using a single head of Romaine, the paste alone uses 15-30 garlic cloves depending on size. And this is on top of the garlic powder. Tastes amazing, but it can get garlicky enough to be barely edible. Think the same kind of burn when chewing down on a fresh raw clove. I sometimes get an “addictive overwhelming thirst” for this garlicky dish that has me gorging on it almost exclusively for an entire week.

Well said. Then there is the entire ecosystem of programs and apps for which there is no real ability to install on Linux (and for which tools like Wine will either be buggy or even nonfunctional), and whose absence will just piss users off.

As much as I love Linux and BSD, it is really only for people who are either mentally geared to shift off of Windows or whose minimal needs won’t notice the difference; it is not a drop-in replacement for Windows.

For example, my octogenarian father has exactly such minimal needs except for one program: Quicken. Any bugs or issues running that as an installed desktop program on Linux would have him enraged and throwing the PC out the window. So he is still on Windows, and I am keeping my eyes open on how to properly neuter/excise Copilot once it drops.

So far tools like Win10Privacy have been exemplary in allowing me to rip all manner of spyware, adware, and annoyances out of Windows.

I’m sure that Copilot will meet the same fate with one external debloating utility of another. Even if I need to replace the Explorer-based shell with a third-party one.

I think you are ascribing to an entire community that which only a few descend to.

I’ve been a mod on forums before, and my only concern was keeping the signal::noise ratio high. In that regard, new “I’ve got the same problem” posts made many months or years after the current thread had gotten wrapped up only increases the noise; a new thread is far more appropriate for the latecomer and anyone who replies to them than continuing to use the old thread.

The difference is temporal, and dependent on the activity level of the forum in question: highly active forums should see new threads spawned after only a few days or weeks, slow forums could see follow-up comments in the original thread still being appropriate many months or even years later.

Being a good mod isn’t about power or control, it is ensuring the forum operates as effectively as possible for it’s users. Sometimes that means spawning new threads, locking old ones, or even banning bad-faith or misbehaving users. Once you moderate, you discover very quickly that moderation is a highly grey zone, with surprisingly little black or white.

This is the attitude that leads us to search results polluted with forum threads with bad, unchallengeable ideas (because they’re locked). Almost all web1 forum are becoming digital flotsam because of these bad moderator opinions.

I thing you replied to the wrong comment, buddy. Nothing in your comment makes any sense in the context of my comment that you replied to. Nowhere did I say anything about locking threads or moderation.

Quote above, reply below was the eMail and Usenet standard from the 70s until Microsoft introduced Outlook, and more importantly, bundled Outlook Express with Windows in the mid to late 90s. Those were the first products that automatically top-posted by default, and especially on Usenet, you could almost always correctly identify an Outlook Express n00b by virtue of them top-posting.