It depends how you define it. I first installed Slackware at work on a retired IBM PS/2 in '94 or '95, because somebody was working on MicroChannel bus support. (That never materialized.) Later, we checked out Novell Linux Desktop, maybe Debian, too. At a later job, we had some Red Hat workstations, version 5 or 6, and I had Yellow Dog Linux on an old Power Mac.

At home, I didn’t switch to Linux until Ubuntu Breezy Badger. It was glorious to install it on a laptop, and have all of the ACPI features just work. I had been running FreeBSD for several years, NetBSD on an old workstation before that, and Geek Gadgets (a library for compiling Unix programs on Amiga OS) before that.

Skill issue. Should be doing both at the same time.

Good comment, but this bugs me:

*Reagan

Regan was Reagan’s chief of staff for his last couple of years in office.

I like the metaphor of a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a piece of flotsam in the cold water a mile from shore. He’s losing body heat, and eventually hypothermia will set in and he will drown. But if he lets go and starts to swim for shore, he’ll lose body heat even faster, use up his energy, and he probably won’t make it. The “harm reduction” argument says that he should reduce his heat loss, and stay clinging to the flotsam. He’s safe right now, while attempting to get to shore is difficult and dangerous.

Of course, by the time that the fallacy of that strategy becomes apparent (*gestures at current events*), he’s too cold and weak to even attempt the swim.

In my city, we have a barely-there progressive, third party with a presence in the city and county government. It’s all that remains of an attempt to in the 1990’s to launch a Midwestern political party based on an electoral reform called “fusion voting,” which would allow a candidate to get the endorsement of multiple parties, and appear on the ballot multiple times as a candidate under each of those party banners. That way, the candidate would know where their support came from, without the “spoiler effect.” I learned from the Wikipedia page that it was an important tactic in the movement to abolish slavery.

But, in this case, the Democratic Party (technically, the Democratic Farm Labor Party) went to court to shoot down that idea, arguing that it was too confusing to voters. The American left isn’t just sitting here waiting for someone to start a revolution, it has two major political parties actively suppressing it.

Amusingly, one tidbit of information that I just now learned from that Wikipedia article, presented without further comment:

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during the heyday of the sewer socialists, the Republican and Democratic parties would agree not to run candidates against each other in some districts, concentrating instead on defeating the socialists. These candidates were usually called non-partisan, but sometimes were termed fusion candidates instead.

Voters do have a say.

That’s why I vote third party.

Not at all. Making families buy life-saving medicine, at whatever price, is in fact the opposite of left-wing policy. Universal, single-payer health care is just centrist policy in many countries.

Same deal, you’re not wrong. At the same time, it has to be done. Voting Democrat to hold off the fascists was, at best, a holding action rather than a viable, long-term strategy. A slow track to fascism, as it were, as they were going to win an election eventually. Democrats weren’t going to fix the problem. For example, we voted for Biden in 2020 to hold off the fascist threat, they attacked the Capitol because they lost, and Biden did next to nothing about it. Hence, the depiction of the party as the pawl in the ratchet mechanism.

Let me say again, the FPTP voting system leads to two dominant parties, but nowhere in mathematics or law does it say the those two have to be Democrats and Republicans. We’ve always had the choice of a different two parties. That the Blue and Red duopoly would lead to fascism via the ratchet effect been clear for nearly 30 years.

I wouldn’t claim that Democrats don’t see the people of Palestine as human, exactly. They may just put it out of mind. Denial is a very potent force.

Similar to others, I got on Facebook when you had to have a .edu email address. I’ve been less than pleased with it in recent times, as my feed ignored activity by my friends and groups in favor of “suggested” content, and the Reels (which I tried in vain to disable) had degenerated into softcore porn, although/because I’ve never watched one.

I haven’t logged in since Zuckerberg came out as mask-off fascist. I’ve kept the account in case I want to contact anybody, or check Marketplace. But I’ve found that my brother was correct: Facebook is the junk food of social connection. It tastes good, but always leaves you hungry. Getting off of it was painful, but I feel better for having done it.

Only if you have installed the correct license file.

Lotta boring crap about PLUs, SKUs, UPCs, TPRs, and such. Stores have dedicated pricing staff for a reason. One trick that might be interesting, but not surprising, is the way stores hide price increases by putting a product “on sale” this week, so it’s cheaper than last week, but raising the regular price, so it costs more when the sale price ends.

I got degrees from both a community college and a major research university. The two don’t share instructors, but on average, the quality is much better at the community college.

Community college instructors are there to teach. They go to continuing education classes to learn how to do it better. Some classes at a research university are taught by similar, dedicated instructors, but some are taught by the professor who drew the metaphorical short straw that semester, and who’d rather be focusing on her research. She will put in her best effort, don’t get me wrong, but her first priority is research.

That is to say, for anyone thinking about a degree, don’t overlook the value of community college.

(ETA: I work at a research university now; the research professors who also teach are some of my co-workers.)

Oh, man, as the network admin for several hundred machines, “Windows” and “works” in the same sentence is hilarious.

However, I must point out, Celsius is not metric. It’s been adopted as the step-child of SI, but it’s not metric. You can’t meaningfully multiply and divide degrees Celsius; 100°C is not ten times hotter than 10°C Celsius. Sure. you can use the metric prefixes, just like i could measure things in kiloinches, that doesn’t make it metric. It’s just as arbitrary as Fahrenheit, and people have to make arguments regarding water and life to try to pretend otherwise. True, it’s officially defined in terms of Kelvin, but then, so is Fahrenheit.

This.

It’s irrational to consider maximum monetary gain to be the only best outcome. Why? What’s the goal? Money is only means to an end, not intrinsically worth anything.

Put another way, if the Argentinians cherish good wine, how are they better off with slightly more money and mediocre wine? (I guess they could use the profits to buy good wine?)

That’s amusing to me. Back around 2010, I used a lot of state legal forms that they only released as PDF files, but not fillable. It was annoying to print them and fill them by hand, and terribly fiddly to use the PDF annotation tool on the computer.

So I just used OpenOffice.org to create almost-pixel-perfect versions of the forms, with fillable text boxes, then exported them as PDF. Word couldn’t do it at the time.

Now, at work, I use Microsoft365 because that’s what everyone uses because of the site license. I wish we’d switch to something else, because Outlook fails so hard at basic email stuff.

The court thing is not universally true. I worked in a family law firm for several years, and the practice in the courts here is to start from a baseline of equal custody and placement, and I’ve heard the same about other states. The men who lost out were the ones who wouldn’t fight, because they were convinced that the courts were biased. But hell, in one case, we got full custody and placement for a guy whose son wasn’t even biologically his! (His wife cheated, and he didn’t find out until well after they’d emotionally bonded.)

To highlight why it’s wrong, I just use the example of asking if the store has widgets in stock, and the clerk says, “We have any.” (Compare to, “We don’t have any.”)

Honestly, this argument comes across to me as a horrible mangling of different pop-sci concepts to construct a victimology. There’s good evidence of the mechanism by which stress and trauma induce epigenetic changes in organisms. (Selective methylization regulating expression of genes.) There’s some evidence of epigenetic changes due to physiological trauma passed down through germ cells. But it’s a huge leap to ascribe mtDNA damage to psychological experiences.

The mitochondria have a degenerate genome, a tiny amount of DNA with (looking it up) 37 genes to support the processing of energy into ATP to power the cell. It is susceptible to epigenetic changes, which leads pretty directly to a number of metabolic disorders, but I can’t find any evidence that those changes result from life experiences of an animal. The idea that mtDNA has accumulated generations of damage from sexist trauma beggars logic, too, because there’s just not a lot of room to collect damage, and that damage leads to health problems fairly directly. If one got every cell of life from one’s mother, in turn, she got it from her mother, and so on all the way back to the first eukaryotic life. All of those generations of trauma, how are we even still living?

Furthermore, the assertion that “men created the patriarchy” ignores actual history and context. One simply cannot ascribe a singular intent to a class comprising billions of individuals across time and space. At best, one could describe patriarchy as an emergent phenomena of societies and cultures. About half of the individuals in those societies and cultures were women, so you’d have to conclude that women helped create patriarchy, unless you deny their agency or intelligence.