Beard, not mullet.

Anxiety stopped having nearly so much of a hold on me when I realized that there usually wasn’t a “why”, that it was just anxiety chasing its own ass and only pretending to have anything to do with the stimuli.

Remember print magazines and newspapers? Ads pay a large portion of the costs of producing them, but no reader is obliged to look at any ads at all. Advertisers pay for a chance to be seen, not for an obligation for anyone to look at them. Since nobody has any obligation to read the ads, avoiding them cannot be a violation. You pays your money and you takes your chances.

I think they’re still on Bawdy Satans or something. Fools!

Microsoft, the state of South Dakota, and the Freemasons have been infiltrated by the Unified Buttjones Imperial Court (UBIC), formed in 1834 by the merger of the Imperial Buttjones Society and the All-Ireland Industrial Arsing Federation. UBIC agents camouflage themselves as janitors, assistant product managers, or beagles, and spread an invisible green slime over toilet seats to infect the minds of their targets. Through this mental infiltration, they obtain control over the vazween or pony-flavored sector of the human soul, creating Inter-Vazween Buttjones Networks (IVBN) through repeated application of the Greater Invoking Pentacle of Pony Erotic Revelation (GIPPER). Using an apparatus constructed from illegal immigrants, UBIC uses the IVBN and GIPPER to insert bugs into Windows, Masonic initiations, and the Lewis & Clark State Recreation Area. Anyone who denies this obvious truth is a buttjones.

If you’re looking for commercial games on Linux, Steam has pretty much solved this with the “Steam Play” compatibility feature, which uses a customized version of WINE to run Windows games. For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 runs perfectly. It should work anywhere Steam does.

Plenty of goth squirrels in parts of the Bay Area, California too.

In Heinlein’s story “The Man Who Sold The Moon”, a businessman threatens to put a corporate logo on the moon … in order to get a rival company to bid higher to keep the moon un-logo’d.

Mispi

“Heck, I had a truck like that once.”

“Evolution is so complicated. Can’t you see that it’s just simpler to admit that God did it?”

They should take down their shorts.

Ubuntu on Desktop I can understand.

Not anymore. A whole extra, unneeded, proprietary, locked-in package system. Ads in the default install.

There’s Mint, Pop!, and plenty of other options that actually respect the user.

“The Electric Company” came on TV, so of course we were dancing around the TV in excitement … and knocked it over. Crash!

When I was in middle school around 1990, my family lived in military base housing, and there was a “teen center”. It had a TV, stereo system, some arcade games¹, and a snack bar. It hosted dances on weekends; with one night designated for the middle-school crowd and one for the high-school crowd.

¹ “Red wizard shot the food!”

It’s not clear there is one! One of the nice things about liberal-democracy is that different people can create different forms of social and economic organization to meet their needs and interests. A family business, a worker-owned cooperative, and a publicly traded corporation can coexist in the same economy (and even on the same street). People can start monasteries or communes in the woods if they want to; or move to the big city to seek their fortunes.

But again, freedom isn’t free: there has to be enforcement of individual rights and fair trade to ensure that the most powerful & successful don’t get to run over everyone else with force and fraud. Right now I suspect this looks like some form of liberal social democracy; probably with more worker protections than the US has right now, but probably with less bureaucracy than the EU has right now.

Kaczynski’s madness was manufactured through calculated psychological abuse in the Harvard laboratory of one Henry Murray. Look it up, dude.

Free markets can’t exist without enforcement of rules against violence and fraud. Without such enforcement, race-to-the-bottom effects mean that employment devolves into slavery and all markets in goods become dominated by “lemons” (fraudulent goods).

An actual free market in labor requires limits on what a powerful employer can demand from workers. An actual free market in goods requires protection of customers from fraud, and arguably also from monopolies. Both of these require something like a state, an entity empowered to intrude into other people’s business in order to enforce rules.

Even starting with anarcho-capitalist principles, consistency ends up endorsing a minimal state: see Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. (However, Nozick’s path is not the only path by which a state-like entity could arise; rather than from ‘protection agencies’, we could imagine it arising from labor unions or cooperatives instead.)

In gist, “freedom isn’t free” — if you want to have a free market in labor or goods, you have to have enforcement against those who would deprive others of freedom through force or fraud.

Kaczynski was not an anarcho-capitalist, in any event, but an anarcho-primitivist — whose beliefs led him personally to commit murder, and who endorsed the mass murder of almost all humans. It’s worth noting that Kaczynski was also arguably manufactured by psychological abuse; he was a gifted mathematician until he became the victim of an MK-ULTRA program.

Remember SOAP? Remember XML-RPC? Remember CORBA?

Those were not very good.

If your input is limited to ASCII, sure.

But ASCII is only a 7-bit standard, and only supports those characters needed by American English computer users in the 1960s. Lots of characters you might see in “plain text” are not part of ASCII; including all accented characters, all non-Latin alphabets, and many common symbols and punctuation marks including these: £€¢©™°

(Yes, you could get accented characters in the pre-Unicode days using 8-bit “extended ASCII”, e.g. IBM/Windows code pages. However, those are not really ASCII and they will break if the text is interpreted as the wrong code page.)

Unicode collation is the Right Thing today.