Despair is useless

What a piece of shit. I hope he gets the book thrown at him.

My general opinion on China over the past few years have evolved to “OK they aren’t perfect, but at least they seem to be trying, instead of actively making everything worse.”

This. People exercised their consciences.

The same thing that is powering most other political figures, all of which can be termed “Populists”

People are angry about a number of things. The wealth gap is very large, they are constantly told that the reason they aren’t doing well in life is because of their own failings, whilst they watch elites with political access get away with things they can only dream of. They’re being told immigrants and/or AI’s are coming for their jobs. They’re being told they can’t have what their parents or the wealthy had because Climate Change, or because inflation.

This generates a great deal of friction, which in turn pushes people to radicalize their beliefs. You can’t continue to sell a liberal, centrist viewpoint of the world when it simply isn’t working for them. They might cotton on to “dumb” ideas, but this does not mean that they are stupid. It means that they are angry. This is is demonstrative of a deeper problem that is being very deliberately ignored or papered over, because those in power have a vested interest in keeping the gravy train running for as long as possible. The sheer scale of the problems we now have to deal with are exceeding the kinds of moves and actions most Western politicians have learned over the years, so we aren’t getting appropriate results out of our political apparatus.

In times such as these, many people will look to the past for ideas on how to deal with their current situation. They sometimes come back with bad ones, sometimes they come back with good ones, and the pre-existing power structure will do everything it can to resist both of them, because to change is tantamount to completely losing grip on power for many of the people invested in the way things are. They cannot adapt, and once gone they will never get it back.

So we have a kind of a worst-case situation with a maladaptive leadership, extreme public resentment and actual natural/physical catastrophes forming a kind of crucible that this civilization needs to endure.

The trumps/erdogans/farages/orbans/lukashenkos/putins/meleis of this world are symptoms of these issues.

At least we have Bitwig for music production now (if you can work out how to use it… I still haven’t had the time :-/ )

reliability problems?

Driving is a privilege, not a right and the test needs to reflect that.

That may actually provide some impetus to properly fund them so that they can fulfill their agency mission, then.

Most of them don’t have the resources and access to the professionals they need to get it done. Sure, self-serving managerial incompetence really doesn’t help to move projects along or retain talent either.

Really wish we’d get some nice, fast RISC-V base boards with a nice amount of flash memory paired with a cool round LCD display…keep patrolling CNX for the parts but they don’t seem to be quite there yet.

The riots are coming.

Respect and discipline AND infrastructure is the answer.

NYC’s cyclists (of whom I know many) need to follow traffic laws.

Those laws are there because people need to act predictably on the street. When a red light becomes a mere suggestion for cyclists, motorists eventually start treating them as such as well. Monkey see, monkey do.

…and getting t-boned by some douchecanoe driving a car when you have the light is commonly fatal for a cyclist.

There was an uptick in utterly shitty driving from 2019 onwards in NYC, and the police stopped all enforcement actions even in egregious cases… then the roads became, and largely remain, a free-for-all. I’ve seen some attempts recently to start clearing the mess up, but too often NYPD are ignoring these dangerous road users… or hiding their license plates and being offenders themselves.

…and this is before you’re fighting for space in a the bikelane with some drunk+stoned asshole on a moped.

I’m fully in favor of delivery professionals being required to have a license and display it at all times when on the clock. They should also be required to have specific insurance, and a highly visible personal identifier when working. They should also get automatic Union representation and a living wage.

Anything more powerful than a class-C e-bike should have a license plate, and if not it gets taken and destroyed, or auctioned to a more responsible owner. Sales of these vehicles without a registration needs to be illegal. Anything more powerful than a class-C e-bike found in a bike lane should be impounded on the spot. Running a stop sign or a red light should get you a ticket, regardless of what wheels you’re on. Going the wrong way down a one way street should get you a ticket.

It doesn’t help that NYC doesn’t have the space and largely practices “maximum-conflict” street design… but that’s just the slow, shitty entropic action of self-serving interests pushing communities around, and they react very slowly. It takes (usually multiple) fatalities for anyone to wake up and actually do anything about it.

Also wear a damned helmet.

Matrix

…yet another reason to not use that pestilence.

I managed to migrate all mine to libvirt when I dumped esxi. They dropped support for the old opteron I was running at the time, so I couldn’t upgrade to v7. Welp, Fedora Server does just as well and I’ve been moving the VM hosted services into containers anyway.

Ofc… well, we’ll see what IBM does with RedHat. Probably something like this eventually. They simply can’t help themselves.

CUNTS.

No, most people would not.

Most people would share, or hit a point and think “OK, that’s enough for anything I really want personally… I’m gonna try and help out now…”

Nobody in their right mind should want a world where they are privately wealthy, but publically impoverished.
Because then, you have no security.
Someone will always be gunning for you.
You can stave it off by layering brute force, and laws, but there is no such thing as 100% secure. Eventually something will make it through, and wreak havoc. And because all you now care about, over everything, is whatever paltry “wealth” you’ve managed to secure, the catastrophe is magnified orders of magnitude. You have no real friends or community to turn to, nobody who would support you if you didn’t have the most, and the rules didn’t make you “king” because of it.

It’s a sickness.