The actual problem is how do we give people things that are way more expensive than those people will ever be able to cover themselves?
The answer is to make someone else pay for it. But man, have you ever gone to dinner with your large tech salary and been advised you have a moral obligation to cover 80% of the table's bill, and then be demonized for scrutinizing what people ordered?
Socialism is great when you can get yourself to believe that the government is a bottomless money pit fed by evil people with infinite money harvested from captive forced labor.
Capitalism is great when you can get yourself to believe that the lives of people who cannot carry (or did not carry) their weight don't matter.
I think you’re a magnitude or two off in the current state of wealth inequality. It’s more like people are asking you with a 400k/yr salary to pitch in to buy candy bars and you’re upset someone picked out a king size for fifty cents more.
PG&E's prices are not a function of what people will pay though, it's a function of what people expect.
CA wants green energy now (aggressive targets), needs to have fire hardened infrastructure (expensive upgrades), and wants full service to sprawling remote areas using modern infrastructure.
The combination of these is incredibly expensive.
If you don't believe me, buy PGE stock and get your dividend from their "greed". But honestly, the stock is an awful performer, because the actual problems facing them are real.
The writing is on the wall that people, especially young people, don't want to be using fossil fuels anymore.
Refineries are expensive (like $10B for country scale) and take years to build.
Which begs the question, how much renewable energy can you get for $10B? And perhaps even faster?
But it's not that clear, because reality has these fractal trade offs and the future is typically pretty opaque. So then will/motivation because an issue too.
I feel like an intellectual god to have been gifted the brain power to recognize that 150 kids being killed is a awful tragedy, and that converting a building on a military base to a school is recklessly stupid and borderline purposely done as a trap. It's like letting your child play in the road at night, and then being upset when a drunk driver hits them.
Anyone can look at the satellite images from the bombing and see how ridiculous whatever Iran was doing was.[1]
"I understand that the officer killed your unarmed teen son. But you have to understand, in the dark, he appeared to be reaching for a weapon, and the officer feared for his life."
"It's a tragedy that she was raped. But you have to understand, the way she was dressed, she clearly wanted it, she was sending mixed signals, you see."
Anyway. Here's a preschool right next to a military base, it took me about 3 minutes of scrolling around on google maps to find this.
Because the US military publishes maps of the base. Anyone who bombs a school on a US military base is doing it intentionally. China could probably call up the DoD and ask for maps of every base, and they would get it.
If your force your enemy to decide what is and isn't a civilian target, you are the deranged one.
I'm just gonna assume you are an American, just because this is a website who's audience is in large part American. But I might be wrong. Anyway, as such you must at least in passing be familiar with the concept of a "military base" as it is practiced by American society.
> Everything that the average family needs is there; a grocery store, shopping mall, bank, post office, theatre, religious centers, outdoor activities, community center, clubs, dining facilities, gas station, quick stop markets, and, if not a full size hospital, medical clinics. The majority of bases do not have schools physically located on the installation, but the children are educated in the neighboring school systems.
I just googled that so I don't have to write the text myself.
So while you might be technically correct about schools, do you think housing on a military base for personnel and their families is akin to playing on the road at night ?
> I feel like an intellectual god
HN rules prevent me from writing anything snarky here.
Yes, you are correct. Military bases even have schools and kids!
But do you know what else the US does?
The locations of military and non-military buildings is public information, and even intentionally made obvious to anyone. You can get maps of the bases from their websites. You can even go on google maps and see what most of the buildings are. To avoid exactly this situation. And even beyond all that, in the event of military escalation where their is real threat of the bases being hit, the civilians would be evacuated anyway.
(Legitimate) countries at war aren't trying to massacre civilians. They all agreed to that and all take agreed upon steps to stop it. Like at the most basic level issuing uniforms to soldiers so you can clearly see who is a civilian and who is a fighter.
I can assure you that in a war between the US and China, there would be dramatically fewer civilian deaths, because both countries don't fuck around with "military/civilian ambiguity" as a war tactic. Because you or your enemy end up killing a bunch of innocents.
Are you trying to tell me that you believe that the Iranians were under the impression that this school was a secret that the United States did not know about ?
Do you believe that these military buildings were a secret that the Iranians thought the US and Israel don't know about ?
> (Legitimate) countries at war aren't trying to massacre civilians.
You think Israel is not a legitimate country? Cause that just very openly happened and continues to happen.
And maybe you think that killing civilians is not the point, which I don't agree with but I can at least understand why one would come to that conclusion.
But you must at least remember that the US is kind of famous for Hiroshima and Nagasaki - an action based almost in it's entirety on killing civilians.
But even if you want to only defend that "legitimate" countries aren't trying to massacre civilians, you must be able to see that the threshold of killing them if they just happen to be in the way is very low.
The Secretary of Defense of the US recently called for removal of all these rules you alluded to
> We also don't fight with stupid rules of engagement.
Look at what is happening even with this lose framework you are referring to in place. Do you think if China invaded the US, the US would not do everything it takes to defeat them, even if it means giving up conventional warfare. You think the US forces would give up a strategic advantage that could be gained by taking off their uniform and continue fighting without it ?
You don't seem aware that Japan armed and trained it's population (Kokumin Giyū Sentōtai), men and women including kids, and mandated them to attack invaders. Another example of deranged theocratic dictatorship. The US doing a land invasion would have almost certainly resulted in far more "civilian" deaths.
Also the Geneva conventions don't apply when fighting an enemy who doesn't abide by them. Its incredibly annoying to fight an enemy that has no problem using ambulances as troop and weapon transports. Or an enemy that refuses to issue uniforms to it's fighters. This isn't even necessarily referring to Israel and Hamas, it was rampant with al qaeda and ISIS.
As for China invading the US? Well Ukraine has managed to keep it above board. It's only these shit head theocratic lunatics that have no problem shoveling civilians into the fire to keep their ass in power. Maybe you aren't aware, but Hamas consoles it's civilians by telling them they are dying for God. Just like Japan trained it's civilians during WWII to die for God (who happened to be the emperor.)
Sure, the easiest way out of your dilemma is to just declare everyone killed to not be a civilian, and define every enemy to be out of scope of any restraint.
By that metric there are never any dead civilians and no rules apply.
Kinda sounds as if you are looking for excuses to make these rules you yourself brought up not apply to any real situation.
I really, really wanted to avoid making fun of of your "gifted brain power".
Your argument is so lazy, I am starting to doubt your godlike intellect.
Uh no, the onus is always on the one doing the attack FFS what's wrong with you?
You are bending over backwards to shift the blame away from an administration that was utterly negligent and reckless and caused an obvious and expected outcome of having "No rules of engagement"
You don't get to blow up a school and say "But a decade ago it was part of the military base!". That's Russia's SOP
It's stupid, lazy, unacceptable, and indefensible in a war of choice. This administration had years to vet targets, and instead eschewed all preparation and fired the people who had been working on preparation.
The problem with linux is that it is made and maintained by people who love linux. Until product people start getting involved, it's damned to it's eternal ~5% consumer market penetration.
The problem with Windows and MacOS is that they are hostile to the user, and that's because they serve a "product" manager who is trying to maximize business value for a massive corporation, not serve you a good OS.
We don't need three garbage corporate operating systems mismanaged by MBAs, we already have two!
Anyone who's ever tried to get support online with a question about Linux will quickly meet *actual* user hostility as they're asked why they didn't know to check for the config file in the filing cabinet in the basement behind a locked door saying beware of leopard, how dumb they are, etc.
> This has been my experience with the Linux community for 26 years.
I read through that post that elicited those comments that you have a problem with. At the end of a long list of complaints, it says: ".....yep, just as user friendly as I remember."
Nowhere does that post request help, and with that last comment, is clearly intended as a disparagement of Linux, not a request for help.
Then, you are turning around, and cherry picking responses to highlight the negative responses to a negative post, and disparaging the Linux community while ignoring the helpful responses.
Half those aren't even remotely harsh. Saying the raspberry pi wasn't designed to be mained is totally reasonable, what possible objection do you have to somebody saying that?
I understand pointing out that an upgrade failure should be expected when Ubuntu tells you that upgrades won't work, but I don't agree with calling the Pi a "device for experimentation". Not only it's used for serious applications in industrial settings, but some products are sold as... personal computers:
> Raspberry Pi 500
> The refined personal computer.
> A fast, powerful computer built into a high-quality keyboard, for the ultimate compact PC experience.
That my complaints trying to install software have absolutely nothing to do with it being a Raspberry Pi and the experience is identical on any Linux machine.
> Half those aren't even remotely harsh.
....and the fact that people consider this to be the case is more evidence of the Linux community's hostility.
Linux is like Rick and Morty: I don't mind it, but I never want to be associated with its fans.
If you can't take the mildlest of implied criticisms without feeling offended, this isn't a Linux problem, it's a you wandered out of your safe space hugbox problem.
That's how it has to be. Volunteer community doesn't have the bandwidth to make everything maximally user friendly. Users have to do their share too, by accepting the responsibility to learn about their system. Otherwise the model isn't feasible. If you want an appliance experience where you have zero responsibility as a user, you can go to the commercial vendor, but they will also have power over you and abuse it.
Linux is indeed for people who can love linux. For people who don't like computers, there's basically no solution.
Ironically, 3 of the 4 are unix based with product people in the loop.
Linux can work as the savior of computer users, but it's not going to happen with a bunch of people who fetishize using a computer like trinity in the matrix.
I think that's a fair criticism for issues where Linux devs might be blind to the friction a lot of Linux distros come with, but I don't think it's universal for all devs and for all features, all the time.
Personally, although I'm not a Linux maintainer, I am a dev and I love doing work that makes UX better for everyone.
> The problem with linux is that it is made and maintained by people who love linux
To specialize that statement a bit, Linux is made and maintained by people who showed up and contributed. These two facts create a vicious cycle. The people show up to add things they love to Linux, and Linux becomes something that only those exact people love. We're deep into this spiral where Linux has become specialized for ultra-nerds who enjoy solving puzzles to get their wifi to work.
If you look at old Linux magazines, the community is completely different. People were focused on "beating Microsoft" and democratizing computing. The people who took those goals seriously have left the scene.
The people who take that goal seriously get burned when, having persuaded a normie to install Linux, they realize they just volunteered to provide free tech support to that person until whenever time they give up and buy a Mac.
The last two people I handed Linux to were not tech literate. I offered them tech support from the beginning. They have been happy users for well over a year now that have not once called me for help. The story for normie Linux use really is pretty good now.
A few people installing Linux on their friend's PCs is nothing. They can check their email, do their taxes, and play games from their iPad. It's an illusion of accomplishment. The entire Linux community, including people who actually build things, used to be focused on making Linux usable by EVERY class of user, including engineers, doctors, and lawyers.
No, the problem is that windows is in schools and come pre-installed with majority of computers. Another problem is kernel-level anti-cheats mentioned earlier.
I actually hope “product people” won’t be involved as long as possible. “Product people” is mostly a reason of our current state of enshitification of most of the products. I would actually try my best to gatekeep.
Ubuntu is a good example of why you don't let "product people" near the thing, Ubuntu is not even remotely the most noob appropriate distro but costs on marketting. As for SteamOS, Valve does many things which everybody else fails at, so they're not a good model for typical outcomes.
Frankly, I hope Linux keeps the product people out. Product people always turn what they touch to shit. It’s the product people who made Windows the ad ridden mess it is today.
We could have great public systems, but their is a fundamental problem that perpetually keeps these systems unstable:
The people who pay the most for these systems use them the least, and the people who pay the least for them use them the most.
At best you can have a system where the people paying for it are respected for their contribution (and likewise feel good about it), and the people using it are ever grateful for what their receive (and can shamelessly feel good about it).
Consumer CPUs don't have enough PCIE lanes to do that. Even if they had physical x16 slots, at most two of them would be x16.
What's cheap to you? You can find Epyc 7002/7003 boards on ebay in the $400 range and those will do it. That's probably the best deal for 4x PCIE 4.0 x16 and DDR4. Probably $500 range with a CPU. That's in the ballpark of a mid to high end consumer setup these days.
That's the path I'm taking.
All with all those PCI-e lanes available.
If I had more income, I would also buy 4x 96g Optane drives of p0 swap disks and a few ssd's for p1 swap disks. To evaluate how well you can get a 1T model running in these absurd ram prices.
Even if you're fine with risers, that might not be enough. If the bridge lanes are PCIe Gen 3, as many consumer boards have, your Gen 5 card might not init. I extensively tested several motherboards to try and get my AM5 CPU talking to a triple Radeon AI Pro 9700 XT setup, and they absolutely refuse to come up on PCIe3. I was using dummy EDID plugs for them, so they think they have a display, ruling out that issue.
What I eventually had to do was buy a used Threadripper box to run those cards, because PCIe Gen 4 definitely works.
I want to spend $1500 for a card that can run a proper large model, even if it only can do 25 tk/s.
Intel is squandering a golden opportunity to knee-cap AMD and Nvdia, under the totally delusional pretense that intel enterprise cards still have a fighting chance.
I guess you are right. I assumed that something like Youtube Kids would have no ads at all given the audience, but it seems it does have ads targeted at young children. Bleak world we live in.
The answer is to make someone else pay for it. But man, have you ever gone to dinner with your large tech salary and been advised you have a moral obligation to cover 80% of the table's bill, and then be demonized for scrutinizing what people ordered?
Socialism is great when you can get yourself to believe that the government is a bottomless money pit fed by evil people with infinite money harvested from captive forced labor.
Capitalism is great when you can get yourself to believe that the lives of people who cannot carry (or did not carry) their weight don't matter.
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