I mean it’s the whole tolerant paradox right.

When you view things in the context of a social agreement, there is no longer any paradox.

If these people have broken the social agreement to be tolerant, they have then intentionally and explicitly removed themselves from that agreement, thereby opening themselves up to intolerance thanks to their intentional and explicit rejection of said tolerance.

It’s much the same way as outlawing worked in the old days - in the absence of a police force, you willingly agreed to follow laws that had been laid down. If you openly broke those laws in clear defiance of them, you could be removed from their protections. Ergo, you became “outside the law”, allowing anyone to harm or even kill you without legal censure.

Because if you clearly don’t want to be a part of an agreement, why should you have any right to benefit from it’s protections?

If you want truly bulletproof clothing appliances and live in America, look up Speed Queen. They’re built to commercial standards and are trivially repairable. Many last for decades with only minor maintenance and upkeep.

Unfortunately, Speed Queen not available outside of America. 😭 Or, at least, absolutely not available in Western Canada.

I went with LG, as Bosch didn’t have the capacity I was looking for. Pretty happy with LG for both washer and dryer, four years and counting without a single issue. Would be nice if the front-loading washer came with an automatic dehumidifier, tho, as we have to leave the door open to avoid funky smells developing.

VW really dropped the ball on software

Why bother with software, then? Late-80s and 90s Type III Jettas can be absolutely bulletproof if you find them in not-bagged and well cared for condition.

Depends on when it was produced.

My 1998 HP 4050DTN is still going strong, an absolutely bulletproof beast of a machine. Plus, I can get extra-stuffed cartridges for it that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage. Even after two degrees and a quarter century I am only on my third cartridge.

My HP 5000DTN wide-format printer is much the same.

Of course, this was years before the DRM enshittification path that HP started down, so there is that.

Depends on when it was produced.

My 1998 HP 4050DTN is still going strong, an absolutely bulletproof beast of a machine. My HP 5000DTN wide-format printer is much the same.

Of course, this was years before the DRM enshittification path that HP started down, so there is that.

Antibiotics.

Their discovery and development is what has directly enabled our sudden rise from 2B to 8B humans in only about a century. Without antibiotics, we would likely still be under 3B humans world-wide. Yes, disease really did kill off a lot of humans back in the day.

Graph out the human population over the last two centuries, and you can even see the very decade when Penicillin use became widespread, along with doctors washing their hands and other basic hygiene tasks.

In most western countries any unintentional mistake made by the employee is considered a cost of doing business… after all, if such a mistake is doable, there is a problem in the business processes that needs correction.

Now don’t get me wrong, many shady business owners will still try to pin things on employees and take it out of their pay. But that is illegal here.

And there are ways of having that entry removed from the list of options entirely, and not just shifted to the drop-down menu. Makes it harder to physically shut down, but its absence can be a WTF big enough for you to realize which machine you are working on.

I don’t bother doing that to VMs, which can be trivially restarted, but their Hyper-V hosts? You betchya I do it to those.

Rick Mercer was Canadian Gold.

when it wasn’t actively sexually harrassing T’pol

I never understood that need. T’pol was already fiercely exotic, what with her flawless face and remote Vulcan disdain. They could have put her into a spacesuit for the entire series and she would have still been attractive AF purely due to her personality and strength of character. About the only improvement I would have liked to see is more of her character arc being in conflict with her Vulcan upbringing, particularly in trying to deal with those infuriatingly irrational humans, and her emotional entanglement with Trip.

Nationalize healthcare, take it out of the control of the provinces, have its funding hard-set to population metrics and then insulate it completely from political meddling. Ensure that all upper-level execs in this crown corp have never nor will never be involved with a related free-market corp, in order to prevent corruption and service degradation in favour of Parasite-Class profit margins.

Set up turnkey operations for GPs such that new doctors are incentivized to service communities at the grassroots level without driving themselves into poverty. Set up national unions for all healthcare workers that ensure wages remain appropriate for each region’s CoL. Set up a watchdog that ensures hospitals and other institutions are being run decently well in relation to the funding they receive, with the ability to seize underperformers (as in, shareholders lose everything) in order to bring them back up to minimum thresholds of service.

Finally, make the government the only possible payer for any healthcare service for anything, from vision and dental to physio and anything science-based (too bad chiropracty, we don’t need your snake oil). As in, make it illegal for anyone to be charged anything out of pocket, including drugs. Use economies of scale to minimize costs to the taxpayer.

That’s how you resolve the current conditions: you utterly eviscerate the profit motive when dealing with healthcare.

Meanwhile in Western society, 40% don’t believe in evolution, flat-earthism and “birds are drones” have moved from silly jokes into serious movements, and a significant minority of people think that COVID was a hoax and the vaccines were made to implant mind-control chips.

No wonder China has surged ahead… even an authoritarian state can easily leapfrog a society crippled by anti-intellectualism, alternative facts, and cultivated ignorance.

trying to get him to upgrade to Windows 11?

If it’s currently running Win7, it likely doesn’t have TPM 2.0, and in extreme circumstances may not even have the SSE 4.2 that 23H2 requires (Win11 will then fail to boot).

And while a RUFUS-modded installer can remove the TPM 2.0 requirement, the SSE 4.2 requirement is kinda baked into the pie; there is no avoiding that.

So maybe it is not related, then. Or maybe only causally related, or under certain more specific visualization deficits.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Historically, before agriculture it was about two to three women having offspring for every man who did.

During the Agricultural era (12,000 BCE to 2,000 BCE) that ratio hit a high of 9 women reproducing for every man who did so, and stayed around that for most of that time.

From there it slowly declined back down to the current world-wide average of two women reproducing for every man who manages to do so.

I have no sense of direction. None.

Sounds like you are a real-life Ryoga Hibiki.

Just curious: do you also lack the ability to visualize things in your mind? For example, I am able to bring up a road map of my city in my mind, figure out the most effective route between two points, and rotate that map in all three dimensions to “look” at it from all angles. My familiarity with the city layout and geography is the determining factor on how easily I can visualize that map. I can also do the same thing with large buildings and their internal layouts.

My wife, on the other hand, has a somewhat similar (but nowhere near as bad) sense of direction as you, and a commensurate inability to visualize objects in her mind. So while she can mentally visualize a soccer ball as a spherical object, she cannot even visualize the hexagonal pattern of pieces, much less (on a traditional soccer ball) how some are white and others black. She doesn’t technically have aphantasia, as she is still able to visualize to a small degree, but I have always suspected her inability to visualize effectively was directly connected to her inability to navigate effectively. She also relies heavily on GPS and maps when navigating anywhere else other than the town she was born in.

Get back to me when an EV is released that doesn’t require an Electrical Engineering degree to do any work on it, doesn’t require $1M+ in manufacturer’s diagnostic hardware for every tiny issue, doesn’t have DRM that locks the vehicle down after any manufacturer-unapproved work, and which doesn’t upload gigabytes of my driving metrics for the manufacturer to monetize without my permission or knowledge.

About the only chance I currently have for any of this is to convert a classic car.

Exactly. Nationalized industries care nothing about profit margins, only with serving the public good to the maximum of their abilities.

It’s why nationalized institutions - such as Canada Post and the CBC - could actually break even if they were just free of conservative defunding and leg-breaking. But they continue to exist because they serve a public need that would otherwise be far too expensive for the average Canadian.

NDP

They have always been in the corner of the average Canadian, which is why they are so poorly funded - millionaires and billionaires don’t control them, and so won’t donate to them.

The Liberals, in contrast, are strongly influenced by them, which is why they are small-c conservative and only moderately to the right. The CPC and their racist little brother the PPC are all about suckling at the teat of millionaires and billionaires, which is why all their policies pay only vapour-thin lip service to the average Canadian, and so much of their rhetoric is spin and alternative facts to distract their non-wealthy electorate away from the fact that they are voting very much against their own best interests.

You do what you think you need to do, buuuuuut…

I’m in a senior level engineering position.

You are already exceedingly difficult to trivially replace. It’s entry-level devs which are a dime a dozen. Senior level engineering positions are frequently open for many months because candidates in general are difficult to find, much less good candidates.

Colour me biased, but I strongly think you are significantly underselling your own power and influence. Any company worth working for isn’t going to turf a senior engineer over a $40 stipend unless their middle manglement positions are staffed with morons.

Well, it’s your calculus to make, not mine.