Windows is an option

Lobbying is a good concept corrupted by greed, as are many things in the US.

As someone with few USBs available, Ventoy takes me 2 minutes to flash, several minutes to copy a set of ISOs, and then any time I need it, it takes 0 minutes to have a working USB with some arbitrary ISO. Sure, it’s not up to date, but I don’t need it to be if I need to recover an install or use some random tool.

I don’t think you fully understand right to repair.

Companies (most egregiously Apple, but Samsung, Microsoft, and other tech, farming, and medical companies as well) have been actively introducing barriers to self or third-party repairs for decades. Apple serializes their displays on iPhones, so if you were to swap the screen on an iPhone without Apple’s authorization or without specific hardware, your iPhone disables specific features on your new screen, even if it’s a genuine Apple part. Apple also has incredibly unfair and invasive contracts with their authorized service providers such that they have to provide a slower return window than Apple’s own service centers. Furthermore, Apple et al. don’t sell every part needed to fix phones, and even when they do sell parts, they are often sold as packages or bundles that make the parts unnecessarily expensive.

To be clear, it’s rare for companies to ban third-party repairs outright. However, the vast majority of device makers artificially limit who can buy spare parts and who can fix their devices via software, by tight supply chain control, lawsuits, or getting governments to seize the few parts that could be obtained. This means that most third-party stores can’t compete with manufacturers because they can’t get genuine parts without becoming “authorized”, and by becoming authorized, they can’t provide a quality service.

You’re ignoring the fact that it’s nearly impossible to implement this right now. Big pharma and numerous politicians want to keep the status quo for as long as possible. By the time we have more affordable medicine, numerous people would have suffered greatly or died because they couldn’t access the medicine they need. Having solutions that don’t require an entire rework of the healthcare industry is necessary so that we can save as many lives as possible.

I should’ve said “anything math-heavy,” but even then, it seems like switching fields or applications of math requires understanding a new definition of the same symbols, and a lot of that could be avoided with words.

What OP is talking about is readability, so in a situation where you’re taking your own notes and have your own set of defined symbols, full words aren’t necessary.

I personally lost all interest in math because there are way too many opinionated or non-standard symbol definitions

I’ve read enough accounts from both men and women to know that sexual harassment is not taken seriously at many places.

I do agree that it’s a stupid phrase, but the point of it is to say that bad apples ruin the bunch. Police in the US, especially the bad apples, rarely are held accountable.

Have you considered that depression is “hot” because a huge portion of the population no longer have to suppress their feelings?

PCP is an incredibly common term in the US.

Something being accessible usually means that the results have a lower low-end and higher high-end, no? In the context of music, it would mean that there are bigger heaps of trash with a few hidden gems

Kamala is a cooler name

I pay $30 per doctor’s visit and $40 if the visit is for a specialist. I also pay $0 for a yearly checkup and $0 for telehealth. For any hospital visits, I pay 20% of whatever the actual bill is after a $300 copay (basically a down payment), which came out to a total of $600 when I went to the ER. Lastly, my prescription drugs are capped at $10 per month for generics and $150 for some brand-name drugs.

I use a ton of healthcare and the costs have been super manageable, but affordability is going to vary wildly between people. A ton of insurance plans don’t start working until you hit an out-of-pocket minimum of several thousand dollars, and others work like mine except with way higher copays.

Lastly, insurance often doesn’t cover certain drugs or procedures. As someone with really good insurance with good customer service, it’s still an issue every so often, and the solution is either to find an alternative, try to find a manufacturer’s coupon and pay up, or suck it up and move on. There are insurance companies that use shady tactics to get them out of paying for certain expensive drugs that they’re supposed to cover.

All that buying another soda maker does is create more waste. If you don’t want to support Sodastream, then buy some of the high-quality accessories from 3rd parties.

The company is based in Israel and makes a lot of their products there. That being said, they’re owned by PepsiCo, an American company.

I get your point now. I interpreted your comment as “he was born rich”. I also didn’t watch the exposé until after I wrote mine.

Just because it’s possible with a small sample of games doesn’t mean it’s possible for all or even most of them.

Also, even if a normal desktop can’t run a particular game server, there is almost always a way to get a computer that will.

Many consider games to be works of art in the same way that music, books, movies, and paintings are. In the same way that historians use the creative works of yesteryear to guage how people during events like World War I, historians of tomorrow need access to games to study the events of our lifetimes.

Book burnings have occurred throughout history and they have been devastating, but many works can still be studied because other copies exist elsewhere. The problem with games is that they’re deliberately designed to self-destruct. Historians 50 years down the line can’t study Fortnite’s mechanics or its evolution because as soon as a new update releases, the servers for the previous chapter of the game are gone. Even if we wanted to preserve just the final release, we can’t because it is far easier for Epic Games to hide or throw away the server source code rather than properly archive it when they inevitably kill the game. This is a huge deal because Fortnite has genuinely had an impact on our culture, for better or worse. Even if it didn’t, it is a technical feat to get a game like that to work well, and programmers need to be able to study the game after the industry inevitably moves on.

To be clear, companies shouldn’t need to maintain their games and software forever. However, there is simply no way to play many games because there are no usable servers for them, which is entirely unacceptable. The initiative simply wants us to be in a world where someone can put in a reasonable amount of effort to play abandoned games, and I don’t think that’s a huge ask.

In many ways, I think that accurately reflects US politics.