Given that this is a laptop we’re talking about, OP is definitely over selling it. Bring a backpack, unpack the laptop box into your backpack (assuming the box is too big to fit in the backpack itself). Something bigger like a TV would be more problematic.

The main worry is that being seen with new-in-box fancy electronics makes you look like “guy with money”. It’s not so much that someone’s gonna steal your TV on the subway, but if you can afford a new TV your wallet probably has good stuff in it. Then it’s just a question of “how bad is the crime actually on this commute?”. Most places it’d be fine but some rough parts of some cities I’d be worried.

The US may affect the whole world less next year if everyone else works hard to find alternate markets, but it’s going to take longer than that for the rest of the world to totally detangle themselves from our mess.

The easiest offsite backup would be any cloud platform. Downside is that you aren’t gonna own your own data like if you deployed your own system.

Next option is an external SSD that you leave at your work desk and take home once a week or so to update.

The most robust solution would be to find a friend or relative willing to let you set up a server in their house. Might need to cover part of their electric bill if your machine is hungry.

I don’t think “mods per user” is that important of a metric. “Mods per daily/weekly/monthly post/comment” is a more useful gauge of a community’s activity.

It’s a context thing.

Ohio = a bad place to be. Honestly, as a non-Ohio Midwesterner, I say this should be allowed.

Chat = like addressing the twitch chat. “Chat, are we doomed?” It’s actually pretty interesting from a linguistics perspective because it’s arguably a fourth person pronoun. But in-class I can see it getting out of hand.

Bill Nye kind of is a dick though.

Some people are really warm in acute person-to-person interactions, but lack the chronic empathy to spread long-term kindness. See “southern hospitality” clashing with who those areas vote for.

Others have a well-oriented moral compass but are just really abrasive in person. That’s Bill Nye. I’ve met him and he’s not like, super mean but he’s got a bit of a holier-than-thou (or rather, smarter-than-you) complex.

Cool how you used the quote markdown for a bunch of stuff I didn’t say.

My argument is “The banks have a ton of capital. They are willing to grant lower classes access to that capital, as long as the bank is able to make some profit from it. If the bank cannot profit, they will just sit on that wealth and lower classes will lose the only access to such capital that they currently have.”

Like I said, the fact that many borderline necessities in the US require access to capital beyond one’s individual means, is a real problem but separate from this argument.

Nobody with financial sense is taking out a 16.9% loan on a car. 5% is pretty typical right now for people with a decent credit history.

Whether or not that’s reasonable, is certainly up for discussion.

Definitely shop around, but sometimes the dealership does have an actual competitive offer. Especially if you threaten to use external financing (and have the pre approval in hand), they might knock down their interest rate to save the deal, as the loan is where the money actually is.

You pay for the ability to access capital you do not currently have. Nobody owes you thousands of dollars with which to but a car. If you want to buy a car with money you don’t have, then you have to give the bank something in return. That something almost always is “more money than we initially lent you, over the course of the loan period” and if you shut that down, banks just won’t give loans anymore. Suddenly poor and middle class people have lost their biggest tool for accessing capital.

Lack of public transport is a separate problem. The US has dropped the ball across the board there. Only a handful of cities have any reasonable public transport and even those systems are old and often shitty.

Education being so expensive that it needs to be financed, is a separate problem. Education is too important to leave to the free market, letting our system metastacize to this extent is the result of decades of compounding failures.

16.9% interest is predatory, but “interest above inflation” is necessary if you want banks to do anything besides hoard money.

Even then, there’s a warning that the upgrade process can take several hours. Even if it’s largely hands off, that’s not exactly my image of an easy upgrade.

I’ve only met two Finns in my life, but they both assured me that licorice and sauna were on the citizenship application so I don’t think the /s is necessary.

Specifically upgrading major versions. See the official documentation for upgrading Debian 11 to 12. It’s far more involved than minor version upgrades.

https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/release-notes/ch-upgrading.html

Here’s the official documentation for upgrading from Debian 11 to 12. The TL;DR is that it takes 8 chapters to describe the process.

https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/release-notes/ch-upgrading.html

The problem is when it comes time for a major version upgrade. Debian 12.10.0 to 12.11.0 probably won’t be a big deal. But upgrading from Debian 11 to 12 was a pain. Debian 12 to 13 will probably be a pain as well.

The thing with Debian is that yes, it’s the most stable distro family, but stable != “just works”, especially when talking about a PC and not a server (as a PC is more likely to need additional hardware drivers). Furthermore, when the time comes that you DO want to upgrade Debian to a newer version, it’s one of the more painful distros to do so.

I think fedora is a good compromise there. It’s unstable compared to RHEL, but it’s generally well-vetted and won’t cause a serious headache once every few years like Debian.

you can’t deny, that this makes the whole issue a lot more visible than just doing nothing.

Yes I can. Because what fucking issue is this about? What are the goals this protest is trying to achieve?

Making a fuss about nothing, and doing nothing with any lasting effect, is not a protest.

You make some pots for the neighbors, think your work is done, then suddenly it’s “Oh no Arkadios we dropped one of our urns and also we want to store extra grain for the cold season” and here I am making MORE FUCKING URNS.

What I wouldn’t give to live in the old days before people had to learn a trade to get by!

The thing with Debian distros (like Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS) is that they’re extremely stable releases. This does not necessarily mean everything “just works”, but rather that they will not experience major code changes that could disrupt a working system. This means that if some apps don’t work out of the box, that state is going to be pretty much the same in any distro based on the same Debian version.

A more “agile” distro might be less stable, but as a result could see some updates to apps that Debian is still lagging behind on. Fedora is probably the “next step” in this direction: it’s still reliable but gets updates more frequently than Debian (it’s sort of a “proving ground” for code before it gets pulled into Red Hat, which is a distro focused on long-term stability).

As for desktop environments: I’ve always thought GNOME was the most Mac-like DE, but KDE has enough configuration options that you can kind of turn it into anything you want. Since this is on a very old laptop, you might consider LXDE, which isn’t the prettiest DE, but it’s super lightweight and might let you squeeze out a bit more performance if you’re wasting a lot of compute power just rendering the desktop.

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