I was listening to conservative AM radio (combo of morbid curiosity and masochism), and they talked about a social security warehouse full of documents and how inefficient that is in 2025, and we should get rid of it.
I’m just like:
First of all, there’s no way that’s their primary data source. So if you’re crying for modernization, that already happened a long time ago.
But if you’re saying we shouldn’t preserve paper copies, then you’re opening the door to all sorts of terrible things.
Like, saying we should just trust whatever the government says and not have to prove it in a court of law, or making our systems vulnerable to hackers, or making it so certain government actions can never be undone.
But uh... I guess all three of those things have become hallmarks of this administration anyway, huh?
The real question is all the stuff beyond just having the distro installed. The packages, the services, the configs, the application data.
If you leave all that stuff the way it was installed via the old package manager, it may have some bad assumptions baked in and may be incompatible with packages you install with the new package manager.
And if you clear all of it out and reinstall it, have you really gained anything vs. just doing a clean install?
There’s a reason you have a home dir. Just copy that forward along with whatever other config files you might’ve customized.
Btw, if the ability to make drastic changes while still maintaining continuity is an important feature for you, maybe check out NixOS.
No deets on methodology. “Of Democrats”. How many? Where? Registered Dems? Likely voters? 2024 voters?
It matters greatly. In the primaries, Obama was invisible to pollsters that were only looking at prior Dem voters. His support came mostly from first-timers and independents.
So you’re saying they didn’t even have enough resources before the slaughter began. Cool cool cool. Very nice and good.
Reminds me of how virologists were warning that we were underprepared for a pandemic even before Trump cut that funding in his first term.
Seems like the debate is always whether we can afford 10% or 30% of what a normal first-world country would have, and we act relieved when the 10% guys leave office and the 30% guys make a compromise to bring us up to 20%.
Public sector growth (federal budget surplus) is private sector atrophy.
You can keep the charade going through risky debt, like mortgage-backed securities. But since there’s no new money entering the economy, those will eventually collapse. And they did.
Worth noting that Japan is the #1 foreign holder of US treasuries. More than anything, they want stability. Good sign for the US that they’re holding off on damage control mode.
I’d’ve been saying either “dispel this fiction” or “dispense with this fiction”, not “dispel with this fiction”. But then again, I don’t know what I’m doing.
IP law does 3 things that are incredibly important… but have been basically irrelevant between roughly 1995-2023.
Accurate attribution. Knowing who actually made a thing is super important for the continued development of ideas, as well as just granting some dignity to the inventor/author/creator.
Faithful reproduction. Historically, bootleg copies of things would often be abridged to save costs or modified to suit the politics of the bootlegger, but would still be sold under the original title. It’s important to know what the canonical original content is, if you’re going to judge it fairly and respond to it.
Preventing bootleggers from outcompeting original creators through scale.
Digital technology made these irrelevant for a while, because search engines could easily answer #1, digital copies are usually exact copies so #2 was not an issue, and digital distribution made #3 (scale) much more balanced.
But then came AI. And suddenly all 3 of these concerns are valid again. And we’ve got a population who just spent the past 30 years living in a world where IP law had zero upsides and massive downsides.
There’s no question that IP law is due for an overhaul. The question is: will we remember that it ever did anything useful, or will we exchange one regime of fatcats fucking over culture for another one?
It’s cuz they work as a team. An IT team. Team, team, team. Team players, each and every one.