the first DE I used on Linux was cinnamon and I was like “wow, this is great, everything makes sense to me out of the box”

And then I tried Gnome and was incredibly put off by it, like “why the hell is this over here, this layout is strange to me. Why are all these unconventional features on by default, this is very annoying.”

And then I tried KDE and I was like “wow, this is great and everything makes sense to me out of the box, also there’s all these features and options, I don’t know what they do, but i don’t have to interact with them if I don’t want to.”

Honestly, I’m just surprised this is the first time someone has dared to put a phone SOC in a laptop chassis.

It seemed kind of obvious to me that a laptop experience on phone hardware (but like… with a bigger screen, keyboard and mouse/trackpad) was sort of perfect for most use cases. I just assumed that it would come in the form of a phone docked in to a hollowed out laptop. The core issue was just that the software was awful with such a set up. Apple just kind of bypassed that by having their whole OS and everything on it switch over to ARM and just running a non-mobile OS on a phone SOC.

It seems like Google is kind of edging that way by merging chrome OS in to android. And windows was maybe flailing that direction with windows on arm… but… I think that was mostly just them trying to copy Apple without really thinking to hard about it.

To put that number in perspective, there are 1.3 million active personnel with in the DOD right now, and a 1.5 pound live lobster costs about 34$. So, that’s enough for 1 in 5 active duty personnel to have a lobster with in the given time frame.

I’d say that 9 million dollars on an expensive food category over several months isn’t that much when we’re talking a population of 1.3 million (active duty personnel with in the DOD). But then again, that money probably wasn’t evenly distributed, I doubt they’re serving lobster dinners to all the privates at fort polk. So, some officers are getting some big lobsters once or twice a month. That’s probably a bit much, lobster is a treat, not something to be on the regular rotation.

Ultimately though, all these luxury expenses are just a drop in the bucket of over all spending. Everything when described as a line item will be massive. We could force every officer to live on dog food and it would barely make a dent in the expenditure. Ultimately, the budget is the result of the shear scale of the organization. The only really way to reduce the spending is to decrease the scale of the organization, and that requires reducing what it is expected to do. That means closing some bases, reducing overseas commitments, and giving up capabilities.

The discussion that needs to be had is around what the organization should be focusing on, what the people of the US want it to be doing. Like, maybe, we don’t want it bombing random countries at the whim of a president. The ability to do that off the cuff is quite expensive.

The reason we can’t build the same thing as before is because the tooling is all gone, the set up of tools used to make those parts no longer exists. Half of designing a large complex thing is setting up all the machinery to actually produce what you want, testing and checking and dialing everything in, verifying that what you’re getting out is with in tolerances and will fit together properly. Building test segments and measuring how the behave and then going back and readjusting all the tools to account for differences and altering the design to match what you can actually make. Also all the people who knew the ins and outs of the old designs and manufacturing processes to make them are retired (and probably have forgotten some stuff) or dead. Recreating those production lines, manufacturing methods, retesting and dialing it all in, it would be expensive and time consuming, more so than just building something new based on modern manufacturing techniques and using already produced parts.

And we have been doing that… but it’s not getting nearly the same level of funding the Apollo program had, nor the same level of political commitment. Between 1963 and 1971, nasa’s budget was on average double what it is today (accounting for inflation) and they were allowed to focus most of that on a single project for that whole 8 year period. Compare that to today where nasa has hundreds of different projects ( ISS, near earth science satellites, mars rovers, probes to asteroids and outer planets, Artemis) and their goals and plans get whiplashed about every 4 years each time the administration changes. Not to mention Boeing routinely running over budget and over time and forcing nasa to foot the bill for their fuck ups. Blue origin and space X are also behind schedule on their lander projects as well.

So why were we able to do it back then and can’t now? NASA got the funding they needed, got to focus most of it on a single project and got to make a long term plan and stick with it, and private companies were much less willing to screw them over for a quick buck.

“Oh and it’s more expensive to run than your salary… but… there is zero risk it will try to unionize.”

Lmao, ok, so you want to put both Texas senate seats up for grabs at the same time? Ok go for it.

What a nonsensical statement. It’s not about anyone “stopping him”, Everyone just need to not collaborate. Not nearly enough people are collaborating with him for anything he’s suggesting to be practical.

He can “say”, “declare” and “decree” things all he wants, but for that to do anything requires that people up and down the system go along with it. Sure people with in the executive branch might even be legally obligated to do certain things if he tells them to, with in certain limits.

But most of the voting infrastructure is outside the federal executive, so it would require that a huge amount of local officials and administrators go along with that, some might be ideologically inclined to do so, but are there actually enough to overcome a groundswell of dissent?

“Oh he’ll just use ICE to bully them in to doing it” there literally are not enough ice agents for that to be even remotely practical. “Well they’ll just hire and deputize more” They’re trying to but they can’t get enough people in the door, and a lot of the people they have aren’t getting payed. Are they really gonna stick their necks out to help him break the law when he’s not even paying them?

This is not a masterful plan from an evil genius. This is a in denial old naracasist in way over his head surrounded by yes men who are saying what he want’s to hear so they can keep their positions and continue stealing everything that isn’t nailed down. It’s not that he doesn’t want to steal the election, it’s that he lacks the capacity to do so, and the people he’s surrounded him self with are not competent enough to build that capacity.

The issue is, his people have been selected based on their ability to tell him what he wants to hear, and that’s mirrored up and down the hierarchy. Everyone up and down the line is fudging what they can do or the reality of the situation, and that gets amplified as it travels up, and seemingly meaningful orders get diluted while traveling down.

Their understanding of their own capability and what options they have is massively distorted. They think they have more capacity and influence than they actually do, and what real power they do have will be poorly allocated when the time comes.

He and his people will absolutely try, and it’s going to create a bunch of messes, but, it’s like a toddler trying to fly a passenger jet, they can hit a bunch of buttons and switches, but the chances of that actually leading to the engines starting and the plane taking off are near 0.

How? Initially because it was expedient and then later because it became a central pillar of the platform. In the 70s and early 80s they adopted the southern strategy and dog whistles to flip over all the Jim Crow southern democrats who were fuming at LBJ and the democrats for going along with the civil rights movement.

Like, they’d lost the debate about “the new deal” in the 40s and 50s and “the great society” in the 60s, and knew that actually repealing such things would be electorally unpopular, but they still wanted to get rid of them and all the taxes on the rich that funded them. So, gotta find some wedge big enough to convince some people to look past losing such popular programs, they went with “racisms”.

Gee, maybe there might be some practical, social and legal problems with always recording camera glasses…

all modern computers are universal Nueman-Turing machines, thus, with enough time and power, any program can be run.

Edit: to be clear I’m referring to universal turing machines and Von Neumann architecture