Email has taken 25 years to get people that comfortable with it, and most folks either go with their ISP email, or one of 3 or 4 providers. Discord, you’re already in the tech savvy population.

You have to pick a Mastodon server, before you know anything about anything. The acquisition funnel probably drops 90% of the people checking it out right there.

There was nothing successful about this cycle. We live in a post-truth world, and it may be unfixable.

But pleasing the bulk of progressives (meaning idiot hippies who have nothing going on but attention for temporary media outrage) is not going to repair the Democrats. The Democrats can only succeed if there is a consensus reality, and there is no longer one.

You’re thinking like one level deep, but the real issues are much more difficult.

Everything the GOP does makes them stronger, and everything the Democrats do makes them weaker. This is because exploiting things makes money, and defending things costs money. There’s almost nothing the Democrats can do about any progressive issue that doesn’t also create huge numbers of Republicans, so pleasing progressives is generally not the winning strategy you think it is.

I’m more interested in solving these problems than I could adequately explain, but you, like most progressives, think about goals and not strategies or ancillary outcomes.

So full of shit. The Dems have been robustly defending your civil rights this whole fucking time. Go check the ACLU’s legislative scorecards: you’ll find virtually every Dem rep and senator with a 100% voting record aligned with the ACLU, and almost zero GOP pols with a 100% grade (I found one senator on the 2020 scorecard at 100%). Some GOP pols, like Josh Hawley, score 0%.

The Dems do the damned work, quietly and diligently. Unions saw their biggest gains in decades under Biden. Real wages rose under Biden, more than inflation, and rose highest for the bottom quintile. There hasn’t been an administration in my lifetime (I’m 56) that has come close.

Young progressives are, for the most part, self-important shits that care more about posturing than actually knowing who is doing the most good for the most people, without conducting destructive purity tests on them. Young Progs don’t show up for midterm votes, and didn’t show up on Tuesday. Thanks for showing up in 2020, but what have you done for the world lately? Old fucks like me show up every goddamned time. Voting is a fucking duty, a bare minimum of effort that young progressives have to be wooed with flowers and candy into exerting. Go skip classes in a tent on the school quad without resulting in ANY CHANGE AT ALL, and preen for your Insta friends.

Personal dignity?

My mom died.

My father taught me to hate myself.

You invite my “billionaires shouldn’t exist” TED talk.

Yeah, and folks know “scruples” as a noun which some people have and some don’t, but “scruple” as a verb is a nice archaic version that I really like, which you don’t encounter much outside of, say, a Jane Austen novel.

I would say “meaningful”. Billionaires can have a very noticeable effect with their philanthropy, while making essentially no sacrifice on their part. The Gates Foundation does very noticeable good, but Bill Gates isn’t giving of himself very much.

“scruple” as a verb, meaning “hesitate due to conscience”.

It was coined by Cory Doctorow.

Some of us learn better lessons.

I have become aggressively more anti-capitalist as I’ve grown older. At 56, with a nice professional career mostly behind me, I am vigorously ANTIFA EAT THE RICH ACAB.

Windows has problems, no doubt. But in terms of surfacing functionality in the GUI, it does it a lot more thoroughly than Linux does.

Not to mention having to know things like what my window manager is, am i running “Gnome” or “KDE” before i download an app in a software store. And on and on. Linux is so much less friendly.

Every print dialogue in Windows, they all pretty much have all the same basic options, called the same things, so that inconsistency isn’t that big a deal.

My experience has been filing a bug on a FOSS app, and having it almost immediately closed because it was a dupe of a bug reported ten years prior which remained open and unfixed. I’m not a programmer, so it’s just, “Well, I guess I’m out of luck on this ever being fixed.”

I’ve done a fair bit of UI/UX work in my career, so I have a lot of sympathy for naive users, and FOSS devs mainly do not. If there’s some functionality that is only exposed with a command line parameter, well, that’s good enough. Read the man page.

Linux users are self-selected for increased tech savvy, so they’ll say, “Yes, it’s the best,” but really, the Linux community is still extremely forgiving of terrible user interface, and value things like FOSS over things like apps with robust, accessible feature sets. Linux users are happy to fix functionality holes with writing a shell script, and think nothing of it: it’s not a lack in the OS, it’s a testament to the power and flexibility of the OS!

I’ve used a few flavors of Linux, and their GUIs are almost uniformly terrible, only partially functional without using a terminal. For instance, they have various software and OS update apps located in semi-random menu locations, and none of them work as well as “sudo apt update / sudo apt upgrade / sudo apt full-upgrade / sudo apt autoremove”. And there’s a huge part of the Linux community that thinks this is great and not a problem at all.

Windows hides the ugly sausage-making from typical users, and forces IT folks and other developers to wrangle with it. Linux makes IT/dev lives easier while making typical users somewhat hamstrung if they’re scared of a CLI. So, if that has meaning for you with regards to the question “Is Linux as good as we think it is?” then you may have your answer.

What happened in Twoteen Twooty Two?

US universities are pro football teams with a sideline in education.

It means not letting Trump take away what little democracy we hsve.