Good people of the Imperial City, welcome to the Waffle House! Who will prevail, the Pit Dog from the Yellow Team, or the Pit Dog from the Blue Team? Let’s find out! Open the store!"
So… proprietary data collecting thing owned by Google, service that requires phone number to sign up, or service that does not even pretend to be E2EE and (worse) routes chat traffic through multiple potentially-adversary-controlled servers on its way to you?
Reality check: nobody cares about you if you do not comply with societal “common denominator” norms.
As unfortunate and bullshit as that sounds, it will always hold true. This is the reason I have Whatsapp and Discord work profile sandboxed and highly restricted running through custom HOSTS ruleset + NetGuard. I concluded these are the 2 platforms needed to minmax information “freedom” and social compliance.
The average person just has no idea about RCS or protocols in general and are incidental adopters of it just like SMS. Sometimes these nerd debates about platforms and protocols emphasize technology features over actually connecting with people or doing something productive on said technology.
I’m a nerd. I know vaguely what RCS is because I had a discussion in 2019 with a friend about it. Do I have it? Do I use it? I have no idea. Is it an app or just a protocol that happens behind the scenes? I would assume the latter. My phone’s a few years old, isn’t everyone’s? Probably that means I don’t have it. No way to tell and I’m not going to bother trying to find out.
Most of my friends use Signal. Honestly hadn’t heard of RCS till now. Either my phone only supports SMS or I’m too technologically incompetent to enable RCS.
I was thinking the same. People are probably mixing up the being alive during the construction of the pyramids with coexisting with them. Even us today coexist with the pyramids and could be accurately pictured around them.
The weirdos crusading against bloat helped keep distros light weight and performant decades on. It allowed a linux distro to fly on older hardware that was bogged down by newer linux versions. The legacy to this day is that WMs like KDE can actually be fairly light weight and there is still attention paid to not using a lot of resources.
Nowadays I feel like the complainers dont even have a consistent definition of what bloat is and it ranges from command line only users who know theyre crazy and niche but speak up anyway, to people who are just upset if a distros ships with basic default tools like an image viewer or something that opens text files or videos, or drivers.
The whole thing is also silly with how much cheaper ram and storage have gotten. Even moreso because the distro and WM isnt the limiting issue. Yes you can still run a KDE based distro with 2gigs of ram, but as soon as you open your web browser and visit the modern internet the dozen high definition images that load in and videos and javascript.
Even my supposedly “big” Ubuntu install is just 40GB. It has Wayland AND Xorg X11, multiple JDKs, Netbeans, Blender, some Games, even some snaps. My Music folder is almost as big. Together they use only 9% of my 1TB SSD. I back them up onto a 1TB USB stick.
What’s the size of your actual root though?
My root is only ~8.9GB and I have basically all the same stuff you do. Well except for snaps, those are yucky.
Minification is a curse. Now hear me out… I’ve wasted so much engineering time trying to figure out why various build scripts fail in docker only to find there’s a tool = $(which tool) 2>/dev/null in there eating the real error. Which is missing because someone wanted to save a 100k by not installing it the docker image base image.
Ignoring the joke, it is actually obsolete. The last ninja family refuses to name a successor, pass on certain techniqies, etc. so technically, no more official ninja
They’ll change their minds one a skilled but arrogant youth appears on their doorstep. They will, of course, be later killed by his nemesis, but not before transfering their legacy onto him.
Now, imagine being, let’s say 50 years old, and losing your career. You previous job that you have been doing for 20 years is gone. And soon your home and possessions are too.
Do you have time to go back to school to learn a new skill and then start from the bottom again? And by the time you are done retraining, will anybody hire a 50 to 55 year old rookie when they can get a younger person for less money instead?
It’s easy to say, “Just move and do something else” when you are 20. But the older you get it becomes very difficult to nearly impossible for a large number of people to do so. Not everyone can be retrained and there are few low skills jobs these days.
I bet a number of those jobs had transferrable skills. “Cigarette Girl” likely had sales and customer service skills. “Toad Doctor” may have either moved on to small amphibians, or something with crystals.
Some do, some don’t. And not all people can be retrained for a new and different job. That takes time, money, and aptitude, which is something not everyone has.
There was a time when coal mines were being shut down - a good thing right?. And 1000’s of miners were losing their jobs left and right and families were homeless and starving. Whole towns and cities were losing population as jobs were lost. The economic impact was felt up and down “Main Street”.
There was a large cry that something must be done! An idea took hold that we should retrain all these coal miners for a new career. The Federal government even got involved with educational grants. The idea was to train people to code because well, the world needed a lot of coders, the pay was good, and the miners would have a better life - A win for all. And everyone in the rest of the world felt good about it and went back to their lives.
Turns out, coal miners don’t really have a suitable and transferable skill set to learn coding. Nor is it very effective to teach a 50 year old how to code from scratch. And even if you were one of the lucky few to manage succeed at it, now AI threatens your livelihood.
The moral of the story is: Things change, the world changes. There are a lot fewer places large numbers of people can go to so they can start over. The skills barrier is a lot higher than it was when “cigarette girls” were a thing and that barrier just gets higher everyday. And frankly, not many cigarette girls were capable of learning the newest skills to get a different and hopefully better job. So now what do we do?
But the “smart” people are always willing to tell others what to do - it’s their job you know.
And I wouldn’t hold your breath about “safety nets” anytime soon. Resources aren’t unlimited and greed to prevent that net is eternal.
And government tends to not do broad social policy well. They are stuck with “one size fits all” solutions out of necessity. And the more granular those polices get, the more byzantine the rules get. Plus by the time there is wide social approval to do something, the moment has passed and the world is now worse off.
Shuttering whole industries quickly, (a generation or less time frame), is how you create a huge population of “angry refugees” without homes or jobs as they try to move to other places to try and not starve. This seldom works out well for anyone.
The tried and true methods humanity has historically used to solve social upheaval are: Starvation and death where you are at. Moving to new lands that have few to no one else living there. War to eliminate surplus populations.
Since no one wants to starve where they are and there are currently no new lands to settle, my money at this moment is on War. It will, unfortunately, solve a lot of current issues caused by excess populations - at least for a while.
“Cigarette Girl” likely had sales and customer service skills.
I don’t know about that. They stood with trays of cigarettes in clubs. It’s about as much of a customer service skill as people selling peanuts in the stands at a baseball game.
Hi, that’s me now that everyone has access to a video editor. Even though most of them don’t understand how to use it properly. They don’t think they need people with actual editing skills anymore. I’m 46. The last job I had involved checking designs for quality control issues at a company where mostly businesses ordered a personalized product with their own art on it. It paid nothing. I’m kind of fucked, especially since I’ll now have a gap in my resume because I had to leave to put my daughter through online school. If she stays in online school until she graduates, I’ll be “out of work” for five years. At that point, no one is going to be a video editor anymore. I can’t go back to school when I’m 51!
Professional mourners are very much still a thing. Had them at a few funerals I attended. Very awkward to see them more invested into crying for the departed than the family. Some of the family members also seemed to think so, but hey, it’s tradition and respectful of the dead.
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