Utahns generally don’t like to draw attention to themselves as firebrands (e.g. Mitt Romney, Orrin Hatch), so methinks the Senator is planning to get into the 2028 presidential primary.

This. I’d say it’s perfect for people who don’t want to tinker at all, and it’s excellent for experts who either know or will enjoy learning how to make its containerization/sandboxing/whatever approaches work out. “Tinkering” is the specific doughnut hole where it is a problem. I replaced it with Tuxedo OS because I was frustrated with trying to set up the toolset for the QMK keyboard firmware, and it turned out there’s a whole layer of things you have to do to make it work, and some of the simpler ones simply break the immutability. A few other tools I wanted to use were running into similar hurdles.

NOw, it’s not that I beleive any of this stuff was a showstopper for everyone; I have too much confidence in the community for that. I am just old and dumb and while I love using Linux, I don’t necessarily want Linux itself to be my hobby. Now all that said, my Minecraft and Starfield installs were working really well on Bazzite, and I haven’t done any gaming in recent weeks so I hope they’ll be as good on Tuxedo.

We have a president who issues fascistic edicts from the toilet and then phrases them like a Karen in her first term on her HOA or Condo board.

I know they don’t mind “dramatic iteration” in testing, but aren’t the tests supposed to get better as time goes on?

This one didn’t dump debris across Caribbean islands though, so I guess there’s that.

I just wiped Bazzite in favor of Tuxedo OS. I liked Bazzite a lot until I wanted to do the faintest wisp of development (setting up a new DIY keyboard with QMK). At that point I realized I’m in a very specific doughnut hole where I will occasionally want to do things that are still not mindlessly simple on an immutable distro, but I’m still untutored enough to need the walkthroughs that never include how to properly layer or sandbox stuff without just fucking up the very immutability that made it a good idea in the first place.

Shame though, as it was dead easy to install and use for basic productivity and especially games. A person with different needs and/or more skill would do very well with it. In the meantime, Tuxedo seems like a good snap-free Kubuntu alternative, and I’ve been floating around in KDE-running Debian derivatives (off and on) for decades.

Not immune, but let’s say resistant. Due to federation, they couldn’t lock down existing federated content; due to open source they couldn’t lock down the user experience; and due to those two, nobody’s going to offer them a check for a couple million dollars.

There is test-taking software that locks out all other functions during the essay-writing period. Obviously, damn near anything is hackable, but it’s non-trivial, unlike asking ChatGPT to write your essay for you in the style of a B+ high student. There is some concern about students who learn differently or compose less efficiently, but as father to such a student, I’m still getting to the point where I’m not sure what’s left to do other than sandbox “exploitable” graded work in a controlled environment.

Yup. I joked that we’re still on Constitutional Republic version 2.27, and not only is the next point release long overdue, but we should really have upgraded to version 3 or 4 by now.

I think a huge part of the problem is that it’s run on Gentlemen’s agreements but we pretend it’s not. The UK’s “Constitution” is a hodgepodge of laws and court cases and things that probably closer to treaties than anything else. It’s a mess, but they know it’s a mess so there’s a very real sense that the gentlemen’s agreements are important and as real as anything else.

In America, we worship our Constitution like a holy text, but so many of our institutional controls depend on Judicial Review (which is not technically mentioned in the constitution), on following along with the presumed intent, and on fudging around the edges when it’s obvious the machinery of the state would grind to a halt if we had to amend it every time a novel situation arose. Yet, nevertheless, we have an entire school of thought built around the idea of shallow surface readings. The “originalists,” not to put too fine a point on it, are fucking idiots.

If you get the idea that the only important thing is the blackletter text agreed to by a gaggle of 18th century provincials, many of whom were intelligent and well-intentioned, but all of whom were elites and either slave-owners or okay with hanging out with slave owners, then you have a recipe for considering stupid shit like presidential immunity or having a speaker of the house who’s not a Congressperson and who can become president despite already serving two full terms, because it doesn’t explicitly say you can’t. It’s childish and dangerous, and their ascendancy in the judicial branch is a travesty.

I do unironically believe the Mercator projection has influenced how much he talks about Greenland.

Yeah, I guess just assuming ill intent and fascism makes it a simpler discussion that’s still perfectly reasonable.

I assume certain short-term things will get better with anyone less crazy than Trump, but I agree the US is no longer reliable for anything long-term, and no other country should deal with us on the assumption that we’ll give up certain short-term advantages for a long term stability within our sphere of influence. It’s not even that the US was “good” (though I imagine the next hegemonic power could easily be worse), but across administrations, the US was generally intelligent about how to leverage its influence but retain enough goodwill to continue to do so indefinitely.

I like to idly game this out because it truly reflects how narcissistic and uninformed he is. So, he’s talking about admitting Canada as a single state. Lets assume somehow that happens, even though the Canadians themselves would undoubtedly push for as many states as possible if joining the US were the only option.

You’ve now got a new largest state by both population and area, and one that has ridiculous reserves of resources and a coast-to-coast infrastructure. It instantly becomes the most important state. It’s also full of millions of people who didn’t want to be Americans and who’ve had a hundred years of more progressive governance than the US. Congratulations, Republicans, you’ve just skewed the Senate and completely fucked yourself in the House for a generation or more. You’ve also got 8 or 9 million Francophones who weren’t even entirely sure they wanted to be CANADIANS, much less Americans, to say nothing of being Americans in a MAGA world. This is how real troubles begin.

So, in return for dubious “improvements” to the trade deficit, and certain (what?) administrative conveniences (I guess) for a military that already had basically all the access anyone would ever need, as well as a giant buffer territory you’re not politically committed to defending with the same gusto you would your own soil, you completely upset the balance of power in Congress to your own party’s detriment and add a huge population that hates their situation. Brilliant.

Although, I guess if you’re just done with free and fair elections then a lot of these concerns evaporate…

If you raise the tariffs to a billion percent then the US will get a billion dollars revenue for every $100 TV that comes from China! There will be so many millions of billions!!! Why wasn’t anyone smart enough to do this before???

But, you see, he looks like a secretary of defense, so therefore he must be an excellent one!

The natural resources, a tacit admission that Global Warming is real, continued control over a strategic area even after completely fucking over the perfectly good allies the US has now, and even though it’s under the second largest ice sheet in the world, the island is just a tiny bit larger than the Louisiana Purchase, so I’m sure there’s a huge ego factor.

I suppose it’s a relief they’re not talking about invading (for now), but Jesus what beatdown this all is.

I do sometimes think there is a bit of hand-wringing that happens where people glom onto the most visible sign of changing times and blame it for things that probably aren’t as different as the adults think, but by the same token most schools in richer countries have screens everywhere with school-related interconnectivity and even tools that are not unlike social media.

I see very little downside here, even if it may not result in some magic rebirth of older forms of social interaction. It seems like the major benefit from the French pilot programs was “improved atmosphere,” in which case it’s still better than nothing. Having a period when kids are learning to deal with small-group dynamics is not a bad thing, and neither is taking “dealing with phone bullshit” off the teachers’ plates.

I mean… fine? France always does things kind of top-down and there’s certainly no reason you have to have your phone readily available, and plenty of evidence it’s good to be away from it.

It’s not like they need to get to their phones to tell their parents there’s an active shooter on campus. 😐

Hey! The workers in the cell phone factory aren’t that fat!