I’m not surprised about your experience though. I have also lived in the south and many of the southern states are still feeling the effects of decades of extensive lobbying on education by the Daughters of the Confederacy.
They DoC has historically pushed a narrative about slaves being happy and content overall, cared for by empathetic masters who valued their well-being. There are many monuments still standing glorifying the wartime deeds done by “loyal” and happy slaves. It’s really insidious.
I know there is regional variation on how the slave trade is taught, but when I was in school we had numerous, extended, and graphic discussions on the horrors of the slave trade starting from elementary school and extending into college.
Buying a high end large format inkjet is the answer for artists, photographers, and graphic designers who regularly need hard copies of their work. The average user who prints a couple times a year would be much better served with a b/w laserjet and the occasional trip to a print shop when something fancier is needed.
Because the biggest practical downside of Linux is a lack of natively developed big name software. It’s annoying to find some great software that perfectly meets your needs and then discover than it can’t run with decent performance on Linux.
Market share growing means that Linux becomes a better and more accessible option.
This was my experience too. Most of my 20s I was dirt poor- like constantly losing weight because I can’t afford basic food levels of poor.
Then I got back into college and got a good career as an engineer. I’m far from rich, but $10k has gone from a truly unfathomable amount of cash to a percentage of my savings account. Kind of funny how that happens.
That’s not the average but it’s far from being rich by most major cities’ standards.
For example, I live in Denver which is somewhat HCOL but nowhere close to cities like San Diego, San Francisco, or New York. The median single family home closing price in the city is $650k. Including taxes and insurance, that’s a >$5k mortgage payment at current rates.
Granted, it’s difficult for many people to afford to buy a SFH here. However, it’s in the ballpark of normal for a dual income household of young professionals.
All they have to do is get an account and sit there seeding their own movies, then keep a log of the IP addresses of the people they connect to. That’s how most P2P enforcement is done.
Problem is that anyone with enough knowledge to get private torrent access also knows enough to use a seedbox or VPN. The whole business case for a VPN revolves around not giving out IP addresses so that’s generally a dead end for copyright holders.
Absolutely. There are definitely still holdouts but it represents a major change.
Some highlights:
In 2021 the Director of National Intelligence issued a memo clarifying that past, or even current, marijuana use is not determinative in issuing security clearances. It may be considered a sign that someone would break protocol but that approvers should use a “whole person approach”. She said in a later interview, “We recognize, frankly, that many states have legalized or decriminalized marijuana use and wanted to be sure that we’re not disqualifying people solely for that purpose in that context.”
Late 2022, the Biden administration requested that the scheduling of Marijuana be reviewed with the presumptive result it will be reclassified as no longer Schedule 1
Early 2022 the house of reps voted through a bill officially legalizing recreational marijuana at the federal level. It lost by a few votes in the senate. It received bipartisan support.
Late 2022, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee voted through a proposal explicitly prohibiting federal agencies from denying security clearances over marijuana alone. It was later squashed by a couple old guard GOP senators.
That has been gradually changing because it’s quickly becoming obvious that the majority of the republican voter base is pro-legalization and that the states that legalized recreation marijuana have seen mostly positive effects.
Meanwhile, the current stance on marijuana is making it more difficult to recruit for national security and defense related positions.
I dunno, when I was in high school there were a number of Ayn Rand essay contests with prize money.
I won’t say they’re good books but I did make good money from reading them.