I wasn’t expecting much, but that was legit good.

My experience mirrors yours. Back in the day I used to have to do clean installs all the time, but I haven’t for years now, and I’ve swapped lots of hardware and disks, etc. it’s fairly problem free for the most part, except for the creeping sense of doom I feel with each new piece of adware they cram into the user interface. I am definitely planning on switching to Linux, I have an Ubuntu server and have installed a flash drive version of arch on my laptop before, but I just haven’t hit a wall yet that makes all the work of completely switching necessary yet.

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I mean I hear ya, but most of those folks look pretty old. A lot of cultures have elder traditions that don’t exactly include looking hot. No idea, but given how old the photo is, might be they’re important village elders, or people like priests/spiritual leaders, and they’re wearing ceremonial stuff also.

Oh yeah, I’ll bet. It hasn’t happened as far as I know, but that’s the kind of situation where things like really strong storm surge or tsunamis would be pretty rough to evacuate from. I assume there are some ferry’s, maybe the region could mobilize a personal craft flotilla for a evac rescue, like dunkirk…

“It’d be a real shame if something happened to your work file. If you pay us monthly, we can make sure your work is protected”

Yeah absolutely. This is one of the things that movies seem to get right. Also in post apocalyptic disaster type movies, you often see freeways with just huge empty traffic pileups.

I was leaving on a car trip a few years back, and unbeknownst to me, about 20miles up the road, a huge thunderstorm had brought down some trees and power lines, blocking one part of the northbound highway, during early rush hour. We got stuck for 3 hours trying to get past it. No matter which side road, turn, whatever we took, it was jammed. We waited for an hour on one small side road only to get sent back because a line was down at an intersection. This wasn’t a major natural disaster, things went back to normal in a couple hours. But it really drove home to me how pointless it would be relying on escaping/evacuating from a real disaster if you didn’t get out early. I don’t say this to suggest that people shouldn’t follow evacuation orders, they absolutely should; an evacuation order is early warning. I’m saying this to suggest that none of us should assume that we’ll just be able to get out in an emergency, particularly in a car. It just doesn’t take that many people on the road to completely seize the system.

Exactly right.

lol, first thing I saw too.

Given that half of them were enthusiastically taking horse de-wormer a few years back… this is not impossible

You nailed it. Been trying to resolve this in my head and it’s been a challenge, but the way you framed it exactly describes what I’ve been trying to get to.

Name checks out

This is absolutely true. But Uber and lime etc also directly undermine useful mass transit. Over the years I’ve found myself in situations where I’ve gone to a place thinking that I will easily be able to get back via Uber, and then found that there are no drivers, or no drivers that want my fare for the return trip. So far after some time I’ve been able to finally find someone, but it’s become more frequent and I’ve been concerned I wouldn’t be able to get home.

A more amusing anecdote: my brother was in a Midwestern small city for a conference. His flight out was at 8am, airport serving the town was about 20mins away by car. He woke up and tried to get an Uber, Lyft. No dice, no one out driving. Tried calling the one remaining cab company, but they didn’t have any drivers out. There was no airport shuttle, or mass transit. Freaking out a bit, he finally spotted one of those electric scooters, and sighing, he signed it out. He was dressed in his conference gear, and had his bag. The city was very hilly, and he found that with the extra weight of the bag, the scooter didn’t have the power to get up hills, so he had to kick push to augment it. An hour later he gets to the airport, soaked in sweat, to see multiple scooters discarded along the road, others had clearly used the same method recently. The cost for the scooter was close to 40 bucks, 2.5 times his Uber fare in from the airport. Anyhow, an isolated incident, but sort of funny depiction of how the transit landscape has degraded a bit over time, and how Uber etc is not as instant and reliable as it sells itself to be.

Have you heard that ol’ chestnut: Republicans: 10 white guys should rule the world. Democrats: hey, that’s disgusting! At least half of those 10 should be women and minorities!

“We are not bats” lol. But yeah this is so true it hurts.

I don’t know about the particulars of this one, but these electrification mandates usually have exemptions for critical facilities and backup systems. It seems to be more about never using nat gas powered appliances like say a water heater. This also keeps in line with the new DC energy codes that are becoming mandatory in two years, and those have exemptions for diesel generators and such.

Forgot to add, this comparison is even more skewed in chinas favor as a lot of that emitting is on behalf of industries supplying American/western product needs, so a sort of outsourced carbon footprint in a way.

Yeah I buy that—they have, or at least had, an immense about of population as rural peasants. Also their individual modes of co sumptuous are way less than an avg American. I think this comparison works fine, but the US/USSR one would be enjoyable because they were both so neck and neck and directly competing. China is too, but it’s more of an underdog coming for the aging alpha’s neck kinda deal, whereas USA and USSR have this 40-50 year race. Anyhow, I think it would mostly be safe to assume that generally carbon footprint would be lower under communism. After all, they didn’t have 50+ brands of sugar cereal staring them down when they went to the market.

Has anyone done a decent comparison between USA and USSR during height of Cold War for carbon footprint per capita? Would be interesting to see what the differences were. That said might still be flawed, since USSR had to behave in certain ways as a response to USA capitalism, so hard to say if it would reflect communism carbon footprint not distorted by strong external pressure.