So communism was bad because western billionaires couldn’t profit from it.

Yup. When you dig into the history of Cuba, Iran, basically all of central and South America, what you ultimately find is “This nation decided it wanted to be communist, but that hurt the bottom lines of banana, sugar, and oil companies, so the US waged unrelenting covert and overt wars against these nations”.

The reason everyone was focused on this primary is because AES flies in the face of decades of democrat strategies.

The democrat consultants would all say that “In a purple state like Michigan, you should run the most conservative democrat possible. Otherwise, you’ll lose. Moderates win states which constantly flip from democrat to republican”.

AES is michigan voters rejecting that notion and running someone that is to the left of a lot of democrats currently in office. That’s them ignoring what the establishment want. It’s even more significant because he was outspent 9:1 (10:1? 12:1? That’s a fuzzy number, but by a lot).

The general will prove whether or not this was a good strategy (I think it is). And if it is successful, it upsets the narrative of a LOT of pundits. It shouldn’t be possible (according to them) for Abdul to wins.

This is why this is generally seen as a very important election.

I’m a similar age and can certainly relate.

Most of what I was told about communism was from people that didn’t know what communism or socialism was. All the bad parts were basically what’s wrong with any authoritarian government. “In soviet russia, you could be arrested for speaking out against the party! Isn’t that awful!” That sort of a thing.

Once I realized that communism, socialism, and authoritarianism were all very different things and that many nations have varying degrees of each, it was game over. Someone being a communist or socialist just didn’t mean anything to me. Especially since most of the time what they are actually advocating for is simply improving public infrastructure in ways that it used to work before Reagan and Clinton got in office and destroyed our public institutions.

Yeah, if you are looking for waste, fraud, and abuse it’s this right here. It’s endemic in all things health related. Very few individual patients are wasting social welfare money, instead it’s almost entirely the providers who are milking the government.

Yet for some reason (hmmm) basically all the laws to “stop fraud” focus around the patients and not the providers. May have something to do with the fact that senators like Rick Scott being one of the biggest medicare fraudsters in the US.

Waste in government happens when private businesses get involved. There’s very little real waste (beyond, ironically, laws which create waste to try and stop waste or means test recipients).

Healthcare should be nationalized. We’d save huge amounts of money by eliminating all these private company hucksters stealing public funds.

For a daycare, it’s because setting up a new one is expensive and risky. You need property, insurance, and licensing. You need employees you’ve vetted and trained. It takes months to do all this and during these months you aren’t making any income.

Nursing homes are even worse because they have a lot of legal requirements (that should exist!) which raises the barrier even further.

It’s hard to get the loans needed for these new businesses if you aren’t already wealthy.

The people that are wealthy enough to do this are instead investing in PE firms which buy up daycares and run them into the ground for profit. You are looking at “I could invest here for 10 or 20% return and I don’t have to do any of the management work” or “I can invest here for 3 to 5% return and it’s a full time job running the place”.

Mind you, once these places are established, a LOT of the owners just do “market rates” for everything because, of course, they are quite greedy and the returns doesn’t really improve when you treat your employees well.

Yeah, the most blatant example of this is national debates. On the topic of healthcare I’ve not seen a national debate that hasn’t framed universal healthcare “questions” as some sort of extremely expensive unaffordable luxury that will make jesus cry because it’s communist.

IE “Mister Sanders, you support universal healthcare which our analysts say will cost 1 trillion dollars and will cause insurance companies to go bankrupt costing thousands of jobs. How will you solve these problems?” (not exact, but pretty close).

There’s a tendency for people with autism to have fixate on aspects of education. It can also be hard for them to learn things that aren’t interesting to them.

This creates a problem for the education system that instead wants uniform education. It’s also just a problem in general as a lot of classes build on one another.

I had someone (well, multiple really) people in my EE classes who could do insane things in terms of physical build outs, but really struggled on pretty simple concepts that weren’t interesting to them.

Yeah, it’s definitely got a no-no word on it.

and it didn’t need to go through FDA approval, which like yeah it was, but that doesn’t mean it’s unsafe.

It was rushed, yes. And it didn’t go through the regular FDA process.

It did, however, go through the full FDA process. What they did was run stages of the FDA approval process in parallel that normally needed to be done in series. All the same steps were done, but they were doing stage III testing at the same time they did Stage II testing.

And, funnily, the vaccine which actually caused health problems wasn’t an MRNA, it was a traditionally developed vaccine (the J&J shot).

99% of the time the product is safe, and the FDA is just this giant ball of red tape you have to cut through.

Safe and effective are 2 different things that the FDA tests. Drugs aren’t always safe and they aren’t always effective. FDA testing forces pharmaceuticals to prove both things before giving their drugs to people.

It’s a lot of red tape, but it’s there because of things like Vioxx (an FDA failure and a result of “just trust us, it’s safe”) which ended up killing/injuring over 10000 people.

Headed towards a gateway.

Not just copper. These server racks are so unfortunately loaded up with parts and components worth a lot of money on the open market. Very unfortunately they have enterprise grade SSDs worth thousands and AI accellerater cards worth 10s of thousands.

And these poor starving companies very unfortunately don’t have the funds to hire a lot of security staff. It’s sadly usually just one guy.

Prices have skyrocketed, quality has tanked.

Sorry, but I have a hard time buying a salad for $10 when I can grab the ingredients for 10 salads for about $5. And they’ll be higher quality. Not browning lettuce with mayo sauce.

If you are having a party with lots of people, fine by me, I’ll avoid your group.

This is a much bigger problem when you are at a crowded location with strangers and you choose to play music. In that case, get some headphones.

The truth is autocad.

Curves and pillars are hard to represent architectures in computer software. What’s easy is nice boxy boxes.

Are you kidding? That looks pretty similar to the Enterprise bridge in TNG. I absolutely did star trek make believe.

All they need is a giant LCD in front of me showing random images of Romulan ships and I’d make due with this sort of design.

Not if you don’t want to. It’s an option outlined in the gentoo docs but for first time gentoo users they recommend just grabbing sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-bin

Well, I’d start by saying that linux has a superior story here vs batch files.

The most direct equivalent is bash/shell scripts. However, they are far more capable. Better conditional statements, loops, variables, text manipulation. It’s always shocking to me how limited batch files are when I’ve had to deal with them. Bash/shell are more equivalent to powershell if you are familiar with that.

But if you want something nicer/more powerful, then nearly every linux distro at this point ships with python. That’s what I’d probably use if I needed more than 100 lines of code. As a bonus you can also install python on windows/mac and keep using those scripts.

If I wanted to install something additionally though, then I do really like the asthetics of ruby. But it’s by no means as popular.

Perl is the old guard here and it does generally exist on all linux systems. However, I think python is superior in basically every way.

The process of installing gentoo and arch is nearly identical. Really the main difference between the two is that arch (usually) offers binaries to install while gentoo prefers that you compile things (though it does actually allow you to use binaries as well).

I suppose my very basic knowledge of terminal isn’t enough to install Gentoo, even with the handbook.

Nope. The gentoo handbook is VERY good. Don’t skip parts on it and you can install a gentoo. You really don’t need very advanced terminal skills to get gentoo up and running. So long as you understand basics like cd/nano/ls/cat then you can pretty easily do the entire handbook.

One thing to realize is that you can always go backwards and fix things if you make a mistake. Nothing is permanent. If you get into a “why isn’t this working” state, just go back and see if you’ve skipped something.

He did in my heart and that’s all that really matters.