NateNate60

These are not the same thing. At least in America, these terms are only superficially similar in the sense that they are "people who say they love their country".

When someone points out a country's shortcomings and how it could be fixed, a patriot listens and makes plans, while a nationalist denies those shortcomings exist or blames them on external factors.

When someone says we should learn from our history and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, a patriot pulls out the history books, while a nationalist instead goes through them with a black highlighter.

When someone burns the country's flag as a protest, a patriot asks why, while a nationalist will say they should be thrown in prison.

When abuses of power happen by the police or government agents, a patriot will demand an investigation and accountability, while a nationalist will say that actually, they deserved it.

Linux Mint is great for my 80-year-old grandfather. No Microsoft account BS, and the interface is simple enough for him to learn. He only uses the computer to look at his investments online using Microsoft Edge and play Minesweeper (GNOME Mines seems to be an acceptable replacement for him), and look at old family photos. It runs great on his 6-year-old computer.

It's hard to argue that Windows 10 isn't way better than Windows 7 in terms of user interface, workflow patterns, security, and feature support. Despite the fact that Windows 10 comes with a lot of useless junk. Hell, even the junk it came with (Microsoft Edge, Cortana, OneDrive) is more useful than the junk Windows 7 also came with.

And similarly, while people have a lot of nostalgia for Windows XP, from an absolute standpoint, Windows XP is complete ass as an operating system. It was only good in comparison to Windows 2000, ME, and 98/95.

Delicious edible icecream

A strictly logical clock for a 24-hour day would have 0 at the top with 1 on the right and 23 on the left. And it would be only ever set to UTC.

I cooked up my own VPN and I still get blocked sometimes because it's a data centre IP. For example, Wikipedia blocked the whole /30 range.

I took a screenshot of this page

(Screenshot removed because it takes forever to load and is not interesting enough to waste bandwidth on)

I am connected to a 4K monitor and this picture is also at 3775 × 2119. The total file size:

12.1 MB

I have never had a screenshot exceeding 40 MB. That is humongous.

There are eight genders: null, undefined, false, NaN, 0, "0", {}, and "".

The Sovereign Grant was some £86 million, which certainly sounds like a lot, but the reality is that heads of state are actually just really expensive no matter whether you have a republic or a monarchy. Maybe you could argue that a president could just quietly exist in the background while people expect a monarchy to be lavish and fancy, at least to a degree. There's a lot of pomp and ceremony associated with the head of state, because they not only represent the government of a country but also serve as a cultural symbol for the nation as a whole.

For comparison, in the US, excluding the policy departments within the Executive Office, the White House Office and Executive Residence and presidential salary budget lines totalled almost $94 million in FY 2025. This does not include the cost of Secret Service protection (paid by the Department for Homeland Security) nor does it include the cost of Air Force One trips (paid by the Department of Defence). And while Brits complain about their monarch not having to pay tax, I think the fact that the American president, or at least the current one, cheats on his taxes is also a somewhat open secret.

I'm American and technically also British despite never having been there (I hold a type of second class citizenship through Hong Kong), and I honestly think £86 million is a bargain for the UK monarchy considering their cultural draw and the fact that they're not just the head of state of the UK but a dozen other countries as well.

Now, one can argue all day about whether it's appropriate to have a monarchy in the modern day, even if that institution were to be discharged of even theoretical political power like it is in Japan, and whether such an institution is compatible with democratic principles like the rule of law, but that's something I'm wholly unqualified to opine about.

Did they (the gangs who asked for protection money) actually ever catch the people responsible or blamed to be responsible?

The idea is to have state-wide races where parties, not individuals, compete. Let's take Washington State, as an example, because it has a nice and even 10 representatives. Instead of having district campaigns, you would have one big statewide election where each party puts up their best campaign, the people vote, and then the votes are counted on a statewide basis and tallied up. Let's say the results are in and are as follows:

Democratic Party: 40%
Republican Party: 28%
Libertarian Party: 11%
Green Party: 8%
Working Families Party: 6%
Constitution Party: 4%
Independents: 3%

For each 10% of the vote, that party gets allocated one seat. So Democrats get 4, Republicans get 2, and Libertarians get 1. The remaining 3 seats are doled out to whichever party has the largest remainder. So the Republicans and Greens with 8% get one more each, and the Working Families Party with 6% gets one. The Constitution Party and the independents will go home with zero seats.

The final distribution:

Democrats: 4
Republicans: 3
Libertarians: 1
Greens: 1
Working Families: 1

There are two ways of determining which exact people get to actually go and sit in Congress: open list or closed list. A closed list system means that the party publishes a list of candidates prior to the election, and the top N people on that list are elected, where N is the number of seats won by the party. A simple open list system would be that everyone on that party's list has their name actually appear on the ballot and a vote for them also counts as a vote for their party, then the top N people of that party with the most votes are elected, where N is the number of seats won by a party. In a closed list system, the party determines the order before the election (they can hold a primary). In an open list system, the voters determine the order on election day.

The main drawback of this system is that with a closed list system, the voters can't really "vote out" an unpopular politician who has the backing of their party since that party will always put them at the top of the list, and open list systems tend to have extremely long ballot papers (if each party here stood the minimum of 10 candidates and 10 independents also stood, that would be 70 candidates on the ballot). It also forces the election to be statewide which means smaller parties can't gain regional footholds by concentrating all their efforts on a small number of constituencies. Small parties in the US don't tend to do this anyway, but it is a fairly successful strategy in other countries, like the Bloc Québécois in Canada or the Scottish National Party in the UK. That being said, a proportional system would still increase the chance that smaller parties have of obtaining representation. Small parties in the US have almost invisible campaigns but if they took it seriously, they'd only need to get 10% of the vote to guarantee a seat, and even with 6-7% they'd still have a good shot at getting one, which on some years they almost do anyway even without a campaign.

The other drawback is that it eliminates the concept of a "local" representative (oddly-shaped and extremely large constituencies notwithstanding), so if a representative votes for a policy that is extremely unpopular in their constituency, it is less effective to "punish" them for it within that constituency as long as the candidate or their party is still popular statewide.

Like the others have said, all major distros are fine. Ubuntu is or used to be Valve's "favourite distro" and the package that you can get from Valve's website is for Ubuntu. That being said, software on Linux should be installed using the package manager (the Software Centre) and not downloaded from the Web.

You may wish to upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS later. This is fairly easy (you can use the Software Updater application) but the newer versions have better drivers and newer GNOME versions which may bring better performance.

Arch is the one thing that should be absolutely not recommended to beginners. Even implying that it is a suitable beginner distro in any way like you have done in this comment is only likely to drive away users when they inevitably get confused.

Existing Windows users mostly are not interested in even knowing of the existence of the Arch Wiki. They will just give up and conclude Linux is shit.

If you know the root password, then you can switch to the account called root using the su root command.

In Linux there is always a user called root, which is the only account allowed to perform most system management tasks. The sudo command just executes a commend as root. Most of the time you don't need to actually sign into the root account, just use sudo, but you can actually sign into it in the terminal as it is a real bona fide user account.

The sudoers file is located at /etc/sudoers. Do keep in mind that this file should not be edited directly. You can use the cat command which will print the content of a file to the terminal. So try cat /etc/sudoers.

I'm not sure exactly what causes this, but you can work around it as long as you can actually run commands as root (i.e. using sudo) in the terminal.

The command to add a new user is adduser.

The command to add a user to the administrators group (i.e. give them the ability to use sudo) is usermod -aG wheel.

These commands should be run as root by prepending sudo.

No, I go online and just order another one for same-day pickup from a local electronics retailer. Then I restore my files from my backup.

It would be cringe if you were using a shared server and set this as a default for everyone or if it was interfering with something. But if you're just minding your own business I could not care less what customisations you put on your terminal as long as it isn't using excessive resources

I think one other factor that people have not considered is the monitor. To run all games at 4K maximum settings, yes, this type of PC might be required. But at lower resolutions, such as 1080p or 1440p, this is overkill and one would be able to run any game as maximum settings even with a computer costing a third as much.

I am not the parent commenter, but the argument for and against wealth taxes is a lot more nuanced than many people would originally think.

For one, a great deal of wealth in this country (the overwhelming majority, actually) is not money but takes the form of illiquid capital goods like real property and shares in companies. There is a real concern that people subject to tax just won't have enough dollars in a bank account to pay for it, and forcing the sale of that many goods could render the markets illiquid as it wipes out the red side of the order book every April.

A potential way around this is if the tax can be paid in kind, similar to how wealth taxes were collected historically, such as in the Roman Empire. This could be stupid easy to administrate—a 1% wealth tax against companies can be enforced by just minting 1% of every registered company's outstanding shares in new stock and then transferring it to the control of the Government. Though the downside is that this sort of tax is very indiscriminate and difficult to target towards certain demographic groups. While shareholders are largely wealthy individuals who would be the target demographic for a wealth tax, they aren't exclusively so. Effectively that becomes a tax on holding shares in companies, which is a good, but not perfect, proxy for wealth. The drawback to collecting shares in kind is that the stuff that is raised is not really "revenue" for the state, in that it is not money that can be spent, and to liquidate it would incur significant loss for the state as well. Which is basically throwing wealth away. This wasn't a problem when "in-kind" meant grain and barley that could be used to feed the army, but soldiers can't survive on a diet of stock certificates.

I am in favour of large-scale wealth redistribution from the billionaire class to the working class, but doing so isn't as easy as saying "You, billionaire, give me 1% of everything you got, cash." I think a policy of combined high income tax, high capital gains tax, and taxing loans for personal expenses secured against shares as income is more likely to be effective.

NateNate60

@ NateNate60 @lemmy.world

Posts

7
Comments

333
Joined

2 yr. ago

NateNate60

Patriotism and nationalism are instruments of power

Windows 11 could actually become the same kind of mistake Sony made with the PS3

Windows 11 could actually become the same kind of mistake Sony made with the PS3

Why do you need, want and/or have a gun/guns?

Clock but we saved DB space by just returning the index of the array of DigitNames

Have you ever sworn someone as your enemy? What did they do?

Highlight of my Morning

Webp

Webp

Stringly typed

Where has the tax money "saved" in uk austerity gone?

Do gangs that collect protection money actually do any protecting?

YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to determine election outcomes by changing electoral maps. In most western countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States

Steam data reveals PC gamers shifting from Windows to Linux

Steam data reveals PC gamers shifting from Windows to Linux

desktop user password issues. can't do squat in desktop.

desktop user password issues. can't do squat in desktop.

Permanently Deleted

Never go full cringe

Permanently Deleted

Do you take the deal: Musk admits he rigged the election and provides proof in exchange for a pardon from the next Democratic president.

What is the smallest city in your country that everyone can still instantly recognise the name of? What is it famous for?

Is the Robert Reich mastodon account actually run by Robert Reich?

Oh boy what a beautiful regex. I'm sure it does something logical and easy to understand.

What is one relatively unknown thing that your country does much better than elsewhere, but that most people don't know about?

Tally marks are just a base-1 numbering system

It is a huge failure in communication to pretend that distro upgrades are entirely different versions of the operating system. It does nothing but make Linux seem more complex than it actually is.