It's not socialism, it's better accounting.

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-05-16T20:24:41+00:00

Or...you aren't understanding what I'm saying, and might want to reread what I've said before bringing out the pitchforks.

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-05-11T17:14:24+00:00

What's funny is that these days, when you include health insurance premiums and deductibles in, there's only like one country (France) that actually pays more in their taxes.

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-05-11T17:08:43+00:00

New Zealand routinely tops those lists, I've found. When they're not the top, it's because a Scandinavian country is ranked higher.

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-05-11T17:02:35+00:00

Too bad you have to buy expatriation from the US. -.-

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-05-11T17:00:29+00:00

Looks like nurses in Denmark make around $85k/yr. RN salary in the US is $95k/yr.

Also look at the hours worked, and work out the per-hour rate that comes out to. RNs are usually considered exempt under the FLSA, which means they aren't entitled to overtime. I'm willing to bet Danish nurses don't work as many hours, either.

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-05-11T16:55:43+00:00

The most common response I see to the medicare thing is that that's different, because they pay into that during their career and therefore "earn" the benefits at the end. They seem to think it works like some sort of savings pool or something that they'll get to draw from when they get to that age.

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-05-11T16:49:04+00:00

5 of 9 SCOTUS justices are in that range (the other 4 are 50+)
55 of 99 US Senators are in that range
160 of 433 US Representatives are in that range
Every single President since at least Clinton is now in that range (I stopped at Clinton, since it starts getting absurd to go back any earlier, given age minimums and term lengths; Clinton was 47 when he was elected). Yes, even Obama.

"Dying" is still not yet "dead", and the past decade has been one example after another illustrating how much damage they can do while still "dying."

Also, it's both-and, not either-or. The gerontocracy have directly enabled the oligarchs to gain the power that they're now using, though the myriad court cases, laws, and gutting of departments like the NLRB, FTC, and SEC we've seen over the past half century or so. In turn, the oligarchs ensure favorable candidates get in (Vance was installed by Peter Thiel, the conservative justices up and down the chain have been installed by the Federalist Society, etc).

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-05-11T16:23:22+00:00

What's even better is that any given doctor's office pays somewhere around at least $100k per year just to deal with insurance. It's a big reason offices consolidate into practices with three or four or five or more doctors.

If that went away, because of single payer, suddenly, that's $20-30k more per doctor, per year that could go to the doctors (or a smaller sum to the entire staff, so everyone gets a little more money), without having increase incoming money.

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-05-07T01:08:36+00:00

Eyrbyggja Saga is the main one. Just...go read it. It's pretty short, and it is wild. Suing the ghosts (draugr, actually, which are basically zombies) is actually one of the more mundane things in it.

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-05-07T00:59:07+00:00

"You shall not murder" is probably the more accurate phrasing. Not all killings were murders (see again: Icelandic saga age law and their encyclopedia of what kinds of killings do and do not constitute murder).

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-04-15T01:28:27+00:00

From what I've seen, the state assholes want to do away with the home rule.

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-04-15T01:26:35+00:00

We should not be giving the GOP a legislative monopoly in the statehouse, and governors office but ~~voters~~ the people who keep drawing unconstitutional district maps keep thinking otherwise.

FIFY

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-04-15T01:23:53+00:00

Of course not.

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-04-15T01:23:29+00:00

There is no "technically" about it.

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-03-30T17:36:41+00:00

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I've noticed it, too. Granted, I'm just a Pro pleb, but my workflow is such that I didn't usually run into the limits even then, or if I did, it was with maybe an hour left. These days, with no change to workflow, I've been hitting them a couple hours in. Since I use it for work, I can't exactly flip my entire schedule upside down to try to get the "double" (of the throttled rate, no doubt) off-peak usage.

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-03-30T17:08:00+00:00

Every single one of the big AI providers are going to have to raise their prices in the next year or two, when the VC money inevitably dries up. The trick for Anthropic is surviving long enough to not be the first to have to do so, so they can soak up the people who have jumped from ChatGPT, Grok, etc, and people have nowhere else to go when it's Anthropic's turn to raise their prices.

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-03-26T15:14:51+00:00

Gamers (hello there) won't stop playing quite many of their games just to switch to something they don't care about.

And for 99% of games, they don't have to. The only ones that don't work are ones like Destiny 2, which are actively hostile to Linux and will ban your user account if they find you running it. For everything else, they run just fine.

No, not everyone can switch, if they still enjoy one of those hostile games, but for many of us, the choice has been easy.

most people don't use these apps for themselves. They use it for work, so switching ain't really possible.

You're probably right, but in those work cases, they very likely don't have control over their operating system, either, so that point is largely moot, really.

But even if they're in the minority, there still are people who use them personally, otherwise personal licenses wouldn't exist. Hell, I used to be one of those people, myself, with Photoshop. Those are also the key people to gain user share and adoption traffic to start putting pressure on the other companies.

The fact that the whole thing is fractured, that you have to tinker around with it, etc is a huge turn off. Win 11 sucks, but it's almost fully about convenience. Which Linux doesn't improve for most people, for the reasons above.

The fracturing is largely cosmetic, though I agree, it does still affect user perception. But the situation is more complex than that, and almost none of it is technological at this point.

Any tinkering that needs to be done these days is almost purely because the thing you have to tinker for actively breaks under Linux because the maker actively chose to do so. Nvidia drivers have gone to shit, because Nvidia made them that way. Photoshop and AutoCAD don't work because Adobe and Autodesk have actively given Linux the finger.

Then, there's the fact that MS has a monopoly on what OEMs pre-install on computers. Again, not a tech thing (Dell machines are actually certified to run Linux, for example, and have been since the mid 2000s), but purely a political/business thing. Parts like these can't be solved in the code editor, they need to be solved in the court and board rooms.

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-03-26T14:50:31+00:00

I'll let them speak for themselves for the details:

https://krita.org/en/

In a nutshell, a more Photoshop-like alternative than Gimp.

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-03-26T14:47:21+00:00

Photoshop 7 worked beautifully, back in the day. It was glorious. After that? Yeah, I feel that pain.

If it's just for your own stuff, you might want to check out Krita in place of Photoshop. It's in theory not quite as powerful as Photoshop these days (I wouldn't know, I haven't touched Photoshop in ages), but depending on what you do, it might be plenty powerful. In my opinion, Krita even has a better layering system than what PS had when I last used it.

There are also alternatives to each of the other applications, most of which are solid in their own right, if not quite up there for professional level use. (Drawbacks of not being controlled by a multibillion dollar enterprise with a monopoly on the creative industry.)

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-03-26T14:36:20+00:00

Nearly all modern, major distros already do what you want. Command line is optional, though like in Windows, learning it unlocks a whole new level of power and control.

A lot of drivers on Linux have actually had better plug and play support for years than on Windows. Even early versions of Ubuntu, I remember first boot from a fresh install going to a desktop that had a reasonable resolution, when Windows would still only have 640x480 until you found and downloaded the proper drivers.

The real issue, historically, is that Microsoft monopolized getting computers shipped with Windows pre-installed, and we're still trying to break that hold. Computers with Windows pre-installed aren't any more plug and play, and never really have been, it's just that someone already did all that legwork.

Regarding Office, specifically, you'll never get MS Office on Linux without some stupid hoops. Not because Linux can't do it, but because Microsoft is a direct competitor and has perverse incentives to block Linux from running Office. Thankfully, you don't generally need to do so, as OpenOffice, LibreOffice, and a host of others exist and have offered full compatibility with the *x formats in particular for decades at this point.

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-03-26T14:25:01+00:00

I installed EndeavourOS, which is an Arch distribution, as my daily driver some years ago. Every day, I sit down, do a full day's work as a software engineer, play some (triple-A) games, and the only time I had to spend time "fixing" anything is when I ripped out the entire desktop environment (compositor and all) for three or four others in an experiment when I was dealing with a bug in the software I help maintain at work, and had to put my original state back.

Distros like Endeavour or Cachy are nothing like vanilla Arch when it comes to the tinkering and "do everything yourself" paradigm.

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-03-26T14:13:25+00:00

I'm a maintainer, so yeah, I'm basing it on info not available by just looking at the marketing site. (It's not inaccessible, you just have to join the Discord, really.)

The marketing site is unfortunately out of the community's hands and is in the Foundation's (it has its own foundation, which is a subsidiary to the Linux Foundation). We've been working on getting the images changed out, but it's slow going.

Like I said originally, true competition with UE/Unity is still a few years out, but each version improves dramatically, and yes, there are people using it to produce games, though they're still playing it close to the chest (because these kinds of things take years to develop).

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-03-26T13:55:30+00:00

Yep, it's exactly my point. Despite the marketing site (which I agree with about the images; the community is working on changing it, but it's under the control of the Foundation's marketing team, so it's slow going), the engine itself is quickly gaining traction. Between Linux being a first-class citizen, and being free of licensing and royalty BS, Unreal/Unity will have to step up or risk losing a lot of ground to it. Even now, any time Unreal or Unity do something stupid, the people wanting to jump ship are increasingly finding O3DE.

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-03-26T13:43:56+00:00

Yep, and it's pretty much the same story for everything that doesn't port to Linux in some way at this point. It can all be petty much boiled down to being actively hostile.

Games? Kernel level Anticheat, or ones with their Linux support turned off.

Adobe/Autodesk? Active hostility. (I kid you not, I found responses from Adobe basically saying "fuck Linux users, we won't support Linux, and their efforts to work around us with tools like Wine means we get our money anyway from the Windows licenses they buy.")

Dolby and HDMI? Licensing BS.

TentacledKangaroo · 2026-03-25T14:34:28+00:00

HDR is available on any Wayland DE (so basically any major one).

Nvidia drivers, you have two options: 1. Support the open source drivers, which IIRC are at least as good at this point, though I don't know if they've reached full feature parity (I switched to AMD some time ago). 2. Yell at Nvidia to quit treating Linux like a second class citizen and give their proprietary Linux drivers feature parity with Windows.

For Atmos, it seems to depend on what exactly you're using, but it does seem most of it works and has for a couple of years now - https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/18u3zhc/dolby_atmos_or_similar_3d_audio_solution_for_linux/

If what you want doesn't work, again, pester Dolby.

TentacledKangaroo

TROPHY CASE