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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • The entire concept of reparations for slavery is that non-black people will be forced to pay black people money, either as a one time lump-sum payment, or an open-ended pseudo-UBI. Some suggestions include mandated documentation of ancestral slabery, but the most popular ones don’t. The vehicle for this payment would be either increased taxes, or redirection of taxes.

    If you’re not talking about race-based redistribution of wealth, you’re not talking about ‘reparations,’ which is what this thread is about.


  • This is hard for me to commit to an opinion on. I totally understand the argument that systemic injustices of the past have impacts today on the opportunities presented to descendants of affected individuals, therefore proactive steps are required to achieve equity. But solutions like requiring blanket reparations from one race to another seem to take for granted that everyone of the first race has been equally privileged by historical injustices, while everyone of the second race has been equally disadvantaged.

    This obviously isn’t true. People of color are disproportionately likely to be disadvantaged, but there are people of color who lead highly privileged lives, and there are white people who are highly disadvantaged due to coming from low socioeconomic class, poor health, lack of access to education, etc.

    The concept of reparations being paid on a basis of race necessarily involves the government forcing disadvantaged white, Asian, Latino, and other non-black people to become more institutionally disadvantaged, so that a group that contains highly privileged people of color can become more economically advantaged.

    Something absolutely needs to be done, we need to be actively fighting for equity, but it’s hard for me to accept an argument that that should be done on the basis of race instead of addressing the causes of class-based inequality that will benefit disadvantaged black people along with disadvantaged people of other races.

    For example, instead of seeking to improve the intergenerational income mobility of POCs in a system that restricts the income mobility of those without wealthy parents, we should fix the system and ensure a level playing field between someone who is born to high-school drop outs, and someone who was born to Ivy League graduates.



  • Okay so your comment about “waddling from the toilet to the bidet” is all someone needs to read to know that you have no idea what you’re talking about.

    Detached bidets exist, but nobody is buying them for $45 on Amazon.

    The type of bidet that people are talking about here are ones that attach to your toilet. You twist a knob to activate the sprayer, which hits where it’s supposed to hit without you having to move.

    You don’t waddle anywhere. It takes 5 seconds to wash. You use one wipe with 3 squares to dry, which is hopefully at least a few times less than you use when you dry wipe. You absolutely feel cleaner afterwards, because you’re using water to remove the shit instead of smearing it around with dry paper.

    The problem that it solves is that you don’t have to walk around with an unwashed ass. Maybe having a disgusting unwashed ass isn’t a problem for you. Maybe if you got shit on another part of your body, you’d just wipe it with some TP and call it good. I’m not judging. Seems weird as hell that you’re trying to shame people who would rather use water to get the shit off, though.





  • Sure.

    MacOS is an excellent workspace operating system, largely due to its near-POSIX compliance and the fact that it has access to the enormous body of tools developed for UNIX-like OSs. For development work in particular, it can use the same free and open source software, configured in the same way, that Linux uses. Aside from the DE, a developer could swap between Linux and MacOS and barely realize it. Everything from Node, to Clang, to openJDK, to Rust, along with endless ecosystems of tooling, is installable in a consistent way that matches the bulk of online documentation. This is largely in contrast to Windows, where every piece of the puzzle will have a number of gotchas and footguns, especially when dealing with having multiple environments installed.

    From a design perspective, MacOS is opinionated, but feels like it’s put together by experts in UX. Its high usability is at least partially due to its simplicity and consistency, which in my opinion are hallmarks of well-designed software. MacOS also provides enough access through the Accessibility API to largely rebuild the WM, so those who don’t like the defaults have options.

    The most frequent complaint that I hear about MacOS is that x feature doesn’t work like it does in windows, even though the way that x feature works in windows is steaming hot garbage. Someone who’s used to Windows would probably need a few hours/days to become as fluent with MacOS, depending on their computer literacy.

    People also complain about the fact that MacOS leverages a lot of FOSS software, while keeping their software closed-source and proprietary. I agree with this criticism, but I don’t think it has anything to do with how usable MacOS is.

    I’m not going to start a flame war about mobile OSs because I don’t use a mobile OS as my primary productivity device (and neither should you, but I’m not your mom). The differences between mobile OSs are much smaller, and are virtually all subjective.

    You’re welcome.


  • Having the highest market share doesn’t mean that windows uses logical conventions, it just means that lots of people are accustomed to the conventions that it uses. The vast majority of professionals that I’ve interacted with strongly dislike having to work on a windows machine once they’ve been exposed to anything else.

    Off of the top of my head, the illogical conventions that Windows uses are: storing application and OS settings together in an opaque and dangerous, globally-editable database (the registry), obfuscating the way that disks are mounted to the file system, using /cr/lf for new lines, using a backslash for directory mappings, not having anything close to a POSIX compatible scripting language, the stranglehold that “wizards” have on the OS at every level, etc. ad nausium. Most of these issues are due to Microsoft deciding to reinvent the wheel instead of conforming to existing conventions. Some of the differences are only annoying because they pick the exact opposite convention that everyone else uses (path separators, line endings), and some of them are annoying because they’re an objectively worse solution than what exists everywhere else (the registry, installation/uninstallation via wizards spawned by a settings menu).

    For basic usability functions, see the lack of functional multi-desktop support 20 years after it became mainstream elsewhere. There is actually no way to switch one monitor to a 2nd workspace without switching every monitor, which makes the feature worse than useless for any serious work. In addition to that, window management in general is completely barebones. Multitasking requires you to either click on icons every time you want to switch a window, or cycle through all of your open windows with alt-tab. The file manager is kludgy and full of opinionated defaults that mysteriously only serve to make it worse at just showing files. The stock terminal emulator is something out of 1995, the new one that can be optionally enabled as a feature is better, but it still exposes a pair of painful options for shells. With WSL, the windows terminal suddenly becomes pretty useful, but having to use a Linux abstraction layer just serves to support the point that windows sucks.

    I could go on and on all day, I’m a SWE with a decade of experience using Linux, 3 decades using Windows, and a few years on Mac here and there. I love my windows machine at home… as a gaming console. Having to do serious work in windows is agonizing.


  • Of the three major desktop operating systems, windows is by far the worst.

    The only advantage windows has is that Microsoft’s monopolistic practices in the 90s and 00s made it the de-facto OS for business to furnish employees with, which resulted in it still having better 3rd party software support than the alternatives.

    As an OS, it’s hard to use, doesn’t follow logical convention’s, is super opinionated about how users should interact with it, and is missing basic usability features that have been in every other modern OS for 10+ years. It’s awesome as a video game console, barely useable as an adobe or autodesk machine, but sucks as a general purpose OS.





  • No that’s a totally valid question and I’d wonder the same thing.

    But he definitely is all of those things, he’s got a dozen published nonfiction books that are easy to find, with a picture of his face on them haha. Listed as faculty/former faculty at Utah State University, CSU Chico, two BYU campuses, University of San Diego, University of Malaysia. Reasonably high profile on LinkedIn.

    I used to go on family vacations with this guy’s family as a teenager, his whole family are genuinely some of the best people I know. But he’s a perfect example of the incredible power of the confirmation bias. I just try to remember that someone like him can have such seemingly obvious blind spots, I definitely can too.



  • I’ve known a guy for like 20 years, currently in his 60s, who firmly believes that anthropogenic climate change is entirely false.

    He has a bachelors degree in physics, a bachelors degree in mathematics, and a Ph.D in economics. He’s written a handful of high level Econ textbooks, he’s worked as a professor off and on at 3 or 4 respected universities here in the US. He was most recently employed at a supply chain consulting firm, making an ungodly amount of money.

    By all accounts, he’s an extremely smart, well-educated, well-read guy. But holy shit if that boomer isn’t constantly reposting the most transparently fake anti-science nonsense on his Facebook page. Think, “New research proves that Climate Change is a liberal myth” - The Religious Conservative Storm.

    Just demonstrates how it doesn’t matter how educated someone is if they don’t think critically about information that confirms their expectations.