If the punishment for a crime is a set fine, then it is a law that targets only the poor; the wealthy will just pay that fine with the spare pennies at the bottom of their pocket as “a cost of doing business” and move on like nothing ever happened.

Antibiotics.

Their discovery and development is what has directly enabled our sudden rise from 2B to 8B humans in only about a century. Without antibiotics, we would likely still be under 3B humans world-wide. Yes, disease really did kill off a lot of humans back in the day.

Graph out the human population over the last two centuries, and you can even see the very decade when Penicillin use became widespread, along with doctors washing their hands and other basic hygiene tasks.

In most western countries any unintentional mistake made by the employee is considered a cost of doing business… after all, if such a mistake is doable, there is a problem in the business processes that needs correction.

Now don’t get me wrong, many shady business owners will still try to pin things on employees and take it out of their pay. But that is illegal here.

And there are ways of having that entry removed from the list of options entirely, and not just shifted to the drop-down menu. Makes it harder to physically shut down, but its absence can be a WTF big enough for you to realize which machine you are working on.

I don’t bother doing that to VMs, which can be trivially restarted, but their Hyper-V hosts? You betchya I do it to those.

Many modern routers have this exact capability - to take a USB-only printer and serve it up over the network. Even some ISP modem/router combo units are set up to do this. Check to see if your router has any USB ports on the back.

when it wasn’t actively sexually harrassing T’pol

I never understood that need. T’pol was already fiercely exotic, what with her flawless face and remote Vulcan disdain. They could have put her into a spacesuit for the entire series and she would have still been attractive AF purely due to her personality and strength of character. About the only improvement I would have liked to see is more of her character arc being in conflict with her Vulcan upbringing, particularly in trying to deal with those infuriatingly irrational humans, and her emotional entanglement with Trip.

Nationalize healthcare, take it out of the control of the provinces, have its funding hard-set to population metrics and then insulate it completely from political meddling. Ensure that all upper-level execs in this crown corp have never nor will never be involved with a related free-market corp, in order to prevent corruption and service degradation in favour of Parasite-Class profit margins.

Set up turnkey operations for GPs such that new doctors are incentivized to service communities at the grassroots level without driving themselves into poverty. Set up national unions for all healthcare workers that ensure wages remain appropriate for each region’s CoL. Set up a watchdog that ensures hospitals and other institutions are being run decently well in relation to the funding they receive, with the ability to seize underperformers (as in, shareholders lose everything) in order to bring them back up to minimum thresholds of service.

Finally, make the government the only possible payer for any healthcare service for anything, from vision and dental to physio and anything science-based (too bad chiropracty, we don’t need your snake oil). As in, make it illegal for anyone to be charged anything out of pocket, including drugs. Use economies of scale to minimize costs to the taxpayer.

That’s how you resolve the current conditions: you utterly eviscerate the profit motive when dealing with healthcare.

Implying that we have a future at all is inherently hopeful

Over the last year I have done a deep dive into climate science, the capitalistic and political responses to it, the collapsing Return on Research, and how modern agriculture at scale is going to be impacted.

If humanity is either not already extinct by 2100, or at the very least caught in an unavoidable terminal decline leading towards it, I would be very, very surprised.

There is a reason why climate scientists have begun to - very grimly - start calling themselves “climate pathologists” and - for the younger ones, at least - avoiding having any children at all.

The vast majority of people have absolutely no clue how apocalyptically bad things are out there, and how on the one side capitalism is whitewashing the problem under the rug, while on the other side right-wing politics are trying to make everyone think it’s all fake.

Meanwhile in Western society, 40% don’t believe in evolution, flat-earthism and “birds are drones” have moved from silly jokes into serious movements, and a significant minority of people think that COVID was a hoax and the vaccines were made to implant mind-control chips.

No wonder China has surged ahead… even an authoritarian state can easily leapfrog a society crippled by anti-intellectualism, alternative facts, and cultivated ignorance.

I have a different take: I try to not be an unpleasant person.

I suffer from a particularly nasty Voltron of ADD and Asperger’s. High-functioning, yes. But it’s still a non-trivial level of neurological fuckery. This means that my social actions and reactions are… different. Sometimes they deviate significantly from the socially accepted baseline. So to be “nice”? What is nice? How to categorize that, measure that, evaluate that? “Nice” could be different for each person I come across.

So to avoid driving myself crazy, I have flipped things and simply concentrated on not being an unpleasant person. To not be rude, not disrespectful, not frightening or combative or creepy. It ends up being a little easier to categorize, define, and measure in that regard, because it involves not doing something instead of doing something. It is avoiding a baseline instead of trying to meet it.

The real trick is in finding the genuine collector, and not just another Nazi in a collector’s Trenchcoat.

Came here to say exactly this, only I wasn’t expecting to be anywhere as concise and erudite as you have been.

Landlords say this would push them to sell.

Yay? Maybe then it could be sold to people who are desperate to get off of the rental merry-go-round.

As in, these homes will be owned by people who actually live in them; non-parasites who aren’t going to be sucking the lifeblood out of hard-working, working-class Americans.

And maybe instead of being landlords, these parasites could actually go out and get a job?

trying to get him to upgrade to Windows 11?

If it’s currently running Win7, it likely doesn’t have TPM 2.0, and in extreme circumstances may not even have the SSE 4.2 that 23H2 requires (Win11 will then fail to boot).

And while a RUFUS-modded installer can remove the TPM 2.0 requirement, the SSE 4.2 requirement is kinda baked into the pie; there is no avoiding that.

Didn’t Red Dwarf have an episode that touched directly on this? I recall Lister having some very uncomfortable experiences

So maybe it is not related, then. Or maybe only causally related, or under certain more specific visualization deficits.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Historically, before agriculture it was about two to three women having offspring for every man who did.

During the Agricultural era (12,000 BCE to 2,000 BCE) that ratio hit a high of 9 women reproducing for every man who did so, and stayed around that for most of that time.

From there it slowly declined back down to the current world-wide average of two women reproducing for every man who manages to do so.

I have no sense of direction. None.

Sounds like you are a real-life Ryoga Hibiki.

Just curious: do you also lack the ability to visualize things in your mind? For example, I am able to bring up a road map of my city in my mind, figure out the most effective route between two points, and rotate that map in all three dimensions to “look” at it from all angles. My familiarity with the city layout and geography is the determining factor on how easily I can visualize that map. I can also do the same thing with large buildings and their internal layouts.

My wife, on the other hand, has a somewhat similar (but nowhere near as bad) sense of direction as you, and a commensurate inability to visualize objects in her mind. So while she can mentally visualize a soccer ball as a spherical object, she cannot even visualize the hexagonal pattern of pieces, much less (on a traditional soccer ball) how some are white and others black. She doesn’t technically have aphantasia, as she is still able to visualize to a small degree, but I have always suspected her inability to visualize effectively was directly connected to her inability to navigate effectively. She also relies heavily on GPS and maps when navigating anywhere else other than the town she was born in.

Unless you airgap the machine, Windows 7 is now becoming more and more insecure and out of date.

It’s like using Debian 9 or earlier in production… not something you want to do unless you enjoy being pwned.

I have always bought surplussed business hardware, which back in the day came with COA stickers still attached. My latest iron had two attached for some strange reason. So when Windows 10 came along with its “Upgrade Win 7 key to 10” plan, I fired up a VM (for this exact purpose) and went to work. Now (after moving them to 10 and then 11) I have a handful of Win11 Pro licenses for whatever machine I need to license.

Slowly moving away from Windows due to their AI and spyware shenanigans, but hey. Likely always will run at least one Windows rig, even if I have to spend the first day or two after install castrating it.