My journey was Windows-> Ubuntu -> Mint -> Fedora -> Arch.

(Infuriatingly i still use windows for gaming, but nothing else.)

Did i mention that i use arch?

More importantly:

fucked up all my data with no backup.

One time i messed up a script and accidentally copied 40,000 mp3s to the same filename. 20 years of music collecting, literally going back to Napster, all gone.

Well, not completely gone. I’ve got everything uploaded to iBroadcast, and I’m pretty sure i can download my library. But I’m not sure i deserve to.

I dated a girl named Password for a while. She was a lot older than me, she was born in the year 1234.

Anyway, @op the exact same thing happened to me. I gotta get smarter about opsec.

Me: Oh, I get it, this “Lemmy” website – it’s like The Onion but for nerds?

My fellow lemmings: No, they’re serious. run0 is real.

Me: Hah. The Onion, but for nerds! I love it.

While you’re not wrong, it’s important to retain a global perspective. There are “communist” leaders that were total pieces of shit and while they did have help, that help wasn’t always capitalist. Stalin is an example here.

And then there’s pieces of shit who were supported by external forces, but not by capitalist regimes seeking to undermine them. I’m not 100% confident in this history, and there’s no way I’m going to spell his name right, but, the Romanian piece if shit, Caucescu (???) came to power riding a wave of support from the Nazis. Hitler didn’t do it to destabilize Romania, but because he was like, “there’s some good old fashioned fascist genociders down there, let’s give them more guns.” And those fascist genociders were technically communists.

What I’m getting at is that the enemies of a worker-ruled communist state are many, and many of those enemies are within their own systems. Communism, like every other system, suffers from the fact that there are humans involved. Just because a communism exists doesn’t mean it’s going to be utopia.

But that also doesn’t mean that communism can’t be good, or at least better.

Lol you just provided the simplest counter to the most common capitalist argument.

“You don’t understand capitalism, bro. The problem isn’t capitalism, it’s the regulation on capitalism. Under a true capitalist system, there can’t be monopolies because capitalism rewards competition.”

Ok so what happened to all the reddit apps

Edit: I really like the reddit app example because it’s simple: no regulation or anti-capitalist force made them to that, it was literally just a capitalist decision.

But regulatory capture is an important part of capitalism, and no matter how many ancap bullshit artists say otherwise, government is absolutely part of the capitalist plan. Giving the workers a “say” (or the illusion of one) keeps them a bit quieter, but more importantly, having a government outsources a lot of crap they would otherwise have to pay for, like infrastructure, which would be a huge strain on profits.

In fact, the ancap bullshit idea that unregulated markets would improve things is an artificial limitation on capitalist power. Total lack of regulation is a restriction on capitalism.

Tbf reddit used to be a lot more lefty. Back when Shit Reddit Says was the dominant subculture it was a lot of fun… But then Steve Bannon wanted Trump to be president and SRS lost the war against red hats and bots.

The enumeration on the losing side of that debate is probably correct. But as a person who was in my early 20s in 2000, I’d like to offer what I will characterize as The Historical Context and Definitive Conclusion to This Debate.

No one actually gave a shit about that debate. Sure, it came up, but it did not alter anyone’s party planning. We weren’t actually celebrating the changing of the millennium, we were celebrating because we had a permission slip to do so. Any attempt to withdraw that permission was unwelcome.

In Paris on December 31st, 1999, at around 11pm local time, someone threw themselves in front of a metro. The trains were free that night (because it was the 100 year anniversary of their opening iirc), but because of that suicide, at least one of the train lines was substantially delayed. The streets from the center of the city to the north side were crowded well toward dawn as everyone chose to walk home instead of wait indefinitely in a stinky train station.

That person, who chose to end their life on the tracks that night, holds the core truth of the debate within his death: it’s a ridiculous debate and those who would fight for it should just stay the hell home and let the rest of us drink a lot and dance.

Chicagoan here, chiming in: I saw this guy like 4 times on my way to work this morning.

I’m not opposed to the idea but it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you can just try one time. Isn’t there some kind of preparation phase to be able to handle …“stuff”?

We don’t do it for the purpose of increasing responsibility. I mean , I didn’t, maybe other people do. I just really wanted a couple little mini monsters following me around.

When I was like 30, I was out hiking and I saw some guy with three little kids, the kids were hopping from rock to rock, and the littlest one ran up past the siblings to hold the dad’s hand. It was super cute. My parents were kinda uninterested and afk, so I haven’t seen a lot of examples of dads just having fun with their kids.

That little family was inspiring, in the sense that it opened my mind to a new way of thinking, but also in the sense of taking in breath, it felt like I had been holding my breath and finally stopped. I realized I didn’t necessarily have to be like them, I could use their bad/mediocre parenting as a “what not to do” list, and still do some of the things that they did that were good. I could go hiking with my kids, I could teach them how to build a campsite out of nothing, or how to build a server, or how to put your thumb on the end of a house so it sprays really far.

Sure it’s more responsibility but it’s also really fun.

And, tbh, all the nice things in life are even nicer if you can share it with people. That goes double for kids, because they don’t know how shitty the world is. You just gotta make sure they understand and appreciate the fun stuff and don’t get spoiled.

That person didn’t suggest it, it’s in OP’s list.

There’s no benefit to that. Removing the limit on house representatives, that’s huge and real, but merging Congress is dumb. There’s a few dumb things on the list (eg “abolish gerrymandering” is like saying “abolish speeding”). Choose your favorite!

Edit: Now that I’m not trying to hurry to get ready for work:

Chapter One: the HoRs.

For those that aren’t aware of how it works:

There’s are two lawmaking bodies with two different purposes. The Senate is equally split among states. There are 2 senators for each state – as a result, those seats are elected by their entire state (more people voting on each person), and the seats are more competitive (more people want to be elected to that seat). So Senators tend to be more serious politicians, more “universally appealing” (aka centrist). This also makes the Senate the one that gives smaller, or less populous states, more power, because both California and Wyoming get 2 senators, no matter what. These factors contribute to the Senate being a more deliberative body.

The House Representatives are determined by population – so California has many more senators than Wyoming. They’re elected in their district, which can be quite small, so the profile of voters in a district is often very different than in an entire state. (This is why all the crazies are in the House.)

There’s a minimum, obviously – the smallest state will always have at least 1? Or 2? I don’t remember. But you can’t have a state with no representation, that’s not ok.

The problem is, our national population is very very different from what it was. The difference between New York and Maine is much more drastic than it was 200 years ago. But we haven’t increased the number of Representatives. And there’s a minimum. As the oopulation grows, and the House doesn’t, it’s becoming more and more unbalanced, in favor of smaller states.

Imagine trying to get smaller states to vote in favor of decreasing their power.

(Also: electoral college votes are on the same system. The electoral college was intended to give smaller states more power, but because there’s a minimum, and we haven’t reduced the total, it’s become super imbalanced. It was a mediocre idea to start with, and now it’s even worse. Abolishing the EC is pretty popular, but it might be easier/better to just follow the rules and increase the total number of EC votes. But, again, small states won’t agree to it.)

The Constitution says we’re supposed to increase the total number of Representatives (and EC votes) but at some point (1929 to be specific) Congress was like nahhhh

Chapter two: why we can’t Abolish Gerrymandering.

First of all, it’s already illegal.

Secondly, it’s hard for outsiders to tell the difference between appropriate “gerrymandering” and actual gerrymandering. If you look at Chicago, where I’m from, there’s a weird vote assignment on the west side of the city, it looks manipulated and weird. But if you live here, you know, there’s a huge highway that cuts through there that’s very hard to cross, so populations on one side are very different from on the other. One side of the highway is there a bunch of Latino immigrants and settled, and on the north side are more affluent (white) people.

(The fact that a highway cuts through a neighborhood isn’t an accident, but that’s just regular systemic racism, unrelated to Congress.)

If you made the voting map a simple grid, the Latino voters might be split up in a way that reduces their voting power. So the map is weird, but it’s actually good that it’s weird.

(This is why I said it’s like speeding: one, it’s already illegal, but two, it’s something everyone is doing (and traffic would be super shitty if everyone followed the speed limit), but some people are taking it to an illegal extreme.)

If you look at a state, calculate a percentage of the minorities, and check that number (those numbers – since there are more than one minority) against the number of districts that vote the way those minorities vote, then, that’s what we’ve decided is “fine” – and, for real, what else are you going to do.

Illegal gerrymandering is when those blocks of voters (“blocs,” is you want to get into Gramsci), are intentionally divided so as to reduce their power. The voting rights act of 1965 made this illegal, and every ten years, after the census, districts are often redrawn. In 2010, we ended up with a lot of gerrymandering. Now,finally, were starting to see some corrections to badly gerrymandered maps, like Alabama, Florida, New York, Wisconsin, Georgia… Louisiana…idr the others, but it’s a lot. 2024 is going to have a very very different House of Representatives than the one we have now.

This last point is worth underscoring. The current Republican house majority is due to illegal distract maps. It is, technically, an illegal Congress. So all these ridiculous shenanigans the House Republicans are up to shouldn’t be happening. (And, in fact, one could easily make the argument that the high percentage of insane and stupid Republican Representatives is because of the maps – because the the “depressurization” caused by fair maps would have dialed Congress back to a more centrist stance.

If you want to learn more, check out Democracy Docket, which is a news source from a group of people (lawyers) who are taking bad maps to court.

Vim wasn’t invented, it spawned fully written and tested at the moment creation came into existence

That’s why vi is already installed on every Linux system

I intended to write that just as an intro paragraph to a critique of enlightenment philosophy, since I feel like, while the goal of objectifying the human experience was the natural predecessor to the eventual subjectification of the exterior universe, their confidence in their interpretations of their experience – or maybe just in the universality of their interpretations – makes their entire project a bit sus

But then life happened and I just said the thing about coffee.

Did you know that Kant used to criticize people who drank more than one cup of coffee per day. Also, he would refill his own coffee cup before it was empty, so he never had more than one cup.

Wtf is this bullshit. When tf did vim start allowing you to do the same thing in more than one way

You’re right, I’ll concede that – but only because BSG is an amazing show and very few characters can be reduced to “good” and “bad” – even the “antagonists” (in the traditional sense of those characters working against the stories’ progression) have pretty valid reasons for doing what they do.

Gaius (sp?) is one of the closest characters to “bad” – but not because of the bad things he does, but because of the bad things he is – ie, vain, selfish, etc – and the fact that he lets those negative characteristics drive his actions.

All the characters have flaws, but the “good” characters do their best to mitigate their flaws, and let their positive traits motivate them. For example, Adama often acts before he thinks, a trait that is awesome in combat, but can be less positive other times – and he (as best he can) seeks advice and counsel from the people he trusts (eg Saul Tigh) – he knows he can be impulsive and he knows his “instant judgement” decision making isn’t perfect.

Cavil (that’s his name I think) is close to “evil” but he does have reasons for his actions – preservation of his “species” (though really it’s just himself) – but he’s evil because of the fact that he doesn’t listen and acts with disloyalty and dishonor.

(There’s an amazing comeuppance for the titular character of the show Nathan Barley that epitomizes this idea: Barley doesn’t actually do anything wrong, but his motivations are repugnant, and his motivations are what’s revealed… Shit I should write a whole essay on that…)

Are there contemporary shows that are as good as BSG? I kind of gave up on TV after Firefly.

Cylons being manipulated by other cylons doesn’t absolve them of guilt.

BSG did have a few instances of the reverse of OP’s question tho – where the “good guys” turned out to be bad" – trying to say this without spoilers; it’s a 20 year old show but ffs of you haven’t seen it, go see it now.

• the (temporary) new admiral
• several main characters during the part where they live on the dirty planet
• a very specific set of seven main characters (wink wink) … .and more,…

And there’s one specific example of the full 360 – a character that starts good, turns bad, but turns out they were actually good all along. I won’t give the name, but they were passing messages to the resistance.

That show was awesome.

One note tho, on the topic generally: flipping character alignments is a frequent pre-shark-jump thing, and is often bad writing. In BSG, tho, all of the “flips” are pre-planned, or at least 100% true to their character (eg the 360 example above).

Yeah, the Serenity Prayer context might help.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I can’t change
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference

You’re being downvoted because people people think you’re being obtuse, but, as a person that overuses logical thinking to a diagnosable degree, my suspicion is that you’re doing that. Also because your tone is kind of…not good.

The whole point of the Serenity Prayer (“accept the things I cannot change”) is that it includes “change the things I can” – so the things Davis is changing are things she CAN change, by definition.

But her point is that she is reframing what she believes she can and cannot change. Recategorizing, if you will.

She’s invoking the third part of the Serenity Prayer: the wisdom to know the difference. As we grow and learn, our wisdom increases, so the things that belong in the first two categories will shift.

Things that used to be things that can’t be changed are becoming things that she can.

To understand the quote, you just have to give it some space to breathe, and not be so logical about it.

I’m just going to plug iBroadcast to everyone in this thread. It’s everything good about Google Music but without the bad stuff.