To the design leads at Microsoft and beyond: Stop trying to shove this down our throats, people. We don't like it, you can't make us like it, and we're not dumb for disliking it.
Wrong.
If you don't like it, don't use it. That's the only real recourse you have with crappy products.
The problem is that people just want to whine and complain, but they won't hold these companies accountable, and will instead happily use these crappy products, while making all sorts of excuses for doing so.
As long as people keep buying and using these poorly-designed products, their makers are going to assume that that's an endorsement of their design decisions, and continue on with them.
and maybe a viable alternative to that cancer, the touch screen,
There's nothing wrong with a touchscreen, and a lot of advantages to one, for certain applications. Just like anything else, there's advantages and disadvantages to it, so proper design needs to take that into account and seek an optimal overall solution so that actual humans can best make use of it. The problem is stupid people thinking that user interface design that makes sense on a 5" handheld touchscreen device should be carried over wholesale to other places where it simply doesn't make sense.
Google isn't "baaaad" because of this; there's no indication of evil here. But there is indication of incompetence, because other companies have solved this problem ages ago, and don't inconvenience their customers because of utterly trivial debts. Yeah, it's nice they weren't complete bastards, and quickly fixed the problem and gave the customer a small bonus for her inconvenience, but it shouldn't have happened in the first place.
This is news because this is Google, a giant company that's supposedly an expert in software. (Have you ever tried going through one of their interviews?) One part of their company has been working on self-driving cars for some time now, and silly mistakes simply cannot be tolerated in the software controlling an automated car. If they can't even get this simple accounting thing right, how can we trust their car software to be safe?
Well, that would make me try to game the system. Say my bill is $30 each month. I'll pay $29.01, every month, just to get the free $0.99.
That's very simple to fix. You put in a threshold, below which the company won't bother harassing the customer for the amount due (perhaps $5 or $10). But you never actually forgive the debt, you just hold it over. So if someone like you tries to game the system by underpaying every month, you won't get away with it: the past-due amount will show up on the next bill, and be paid by your latest payment, leaving a slowly-increasing past-due amount. At some point (~10 months maybe), that amount will be greater than the threshold, and now they'll threaten to cut off your service if you don't pay.
That way, the company eventually gets its money from people who remain customers, since most such cases are simply where there was a slight shortfall, so it's easier to just hold it over and add it to their next bill, which most customers will simply pay in full. For the smaller number of cases where the customer is no longer a customer (it was their last bill perhaps), then the company will eventually drop it after some time since it's not worth it to pursue the person for such a trivial amount.
No, not exactly. This is an example of Google being totally incompetent in their billing (which will probably be fixed now, after this embarrassment), but once some humans finally got involved it was quickly fixed and rectified.
You're right, it's not an example of evil at all. But it is an example of some incompetence (because, as many others have pointed out here already, other companies have long had policies to not bother billing people for such trivial amounts; this isn't something new). So it proves Hanlon's Razor: "never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence/stupidity".
The answer isn't to keep using antiquated pieces of paper, or to use credit cards. The answer is to use bank transfers, which every developed country on the planet uses.
Engineers today, the ones doing the hard thinking involved with design, like to be able to turn around and talk immediately to their coworkers about stuff, not have to go to a conference room. When they're not part of the conversation, they just ignore it and keep working. If you're not the kind of person who can multitask in that kind of fast-paced, noisy, and highly social environment, you have no business being an engineer.
What they really should be doing in universities now is explaining this to anyone considering enrolling in the engineering program, and also actively pushing out ones who aren't highly social, and not members of a fraternity. Engineering is just not a profession for people who like quiet, or who don't like to socialize a lot, even while working.
So while I don't have an 4k content to play back having used a 4k TV for a couple of months now there is no way I would buy a none 4k TV in the future.
That's easy to fix: just go to your favorite torrent site and search for "[movie name] 4k".
Autopilots in planes have been able to land and exit the runway for quite a while.
Some can, many can't. It's just like cruise control in cars: some can detect cars in front of them and slow down ("adaptive cruise control"), most aren't at all that advanced.
I'm quite sure that all the people with 60s-era Cessnas do not have autopilots capable of auto-landing.
Spanish speakers tend to speak more quickly than their English-speaking counterparts, so the information rate in the spoken language is comparable
Actually, the whole point of that research paper was that *all* human languages seem to have roughly equivalent information rates, because ones with poorer information density make up for it with higher speaking rates. My point in bringing it up was only to show that Spanish and English really are very different languages as seen by the information density.
The people building the product don't want offices, they want an open area so they can collaborate, at least if they're under 40 years old.
I just got moved into an actual cubicle where I am (with nearly 6' high walls), along with the other software people. I like it, as it's a big improvement from what I've been working in for a while now. The rest of them are all complaining about it, saying they want lower walls, or to remove the walls altogether so we can see each other and work together.
Airline pilots are intelligent and highly trained individuals. That is why they are not found on every street corner, and are worth more than a dime a dozen.
Actually, this isn't true. Pilots start out their careers as instructors ("those who can, do, those who can't, teach"), and make peanuts. After that, they might get a job as a copilot for a regional jet company. Last I heard, the starting salary for one of these guys is $18k. Yep, barely above minimum wage. It takes many years for them to work up to any kind of decent salary approaching 6 figures. Then, when they hit 60 years old, they're forced to retire.
Being a pilot is for people who are independently wealthy (e.g. trust fund, or has a spouse willing to support them), or for people who love it so much they're willing to sacrifice everything just to have that job.
And autopilot for planes is far, far, far more advanced, capable, robust, and reliable than the shit Elon is selling.
That's total bullshit. Autopilot for airplanes has been around for many decades now. It just maintains a heading and altitude. It's roughly analogous to cruise control on cars in technological terms, and maybe automatic lane-keeping in actual functional terms (since cars have to follow a road, planes don't; of course, technologically, lane-keeping is far, far, far more advanced than the autopilot in a typical Cessna).
Yes, there are very advanced autopilots in today's newest passenger planes like the 787, but the term is not exclusive to those, and there's countless decades-old Cessnas and Pipers out there with autopilots that are quite primitive.
No, autopilot in planes does not autonomously pilot the plane. It doesn't take off or land, it doesn't fly around bad weather, it doesn't check METARs and PIREPs, it doesn't watch for other traffic, it doesn't handle radio calls to ATC when you cross into class B airspace, it just keeps you flying straight and level.
The only thing in your post that's correct is the bit about pilots being trained to use their equipment. That isn't true for Teslas, but it also isn't true for any other car either. How many drivers on the road today got explicit training to use the cruise control in their car? Cruise control has been around a few decades now too. Or how about the more advanced features we have not, like adaptive cruise control, lane-keeping, and operating the infotainment system? Every car is different, with different controls and different quirks. Airplane pilots aren't even allowed to fly a plane (solo) unless they've been specifically trained for that model and received a rating for it. Perhaps we should do that for cars....
making them very likely to get STEM degrees, especially with computers where you don't need to deal with people as often. Mix in that tech culture loves a meritocracy
Where does this idea that you don't need to deal with people as often in STEM/computer jobs? That's crazy. It was true in the 80s, but these days with open-plan offices being the norm, it's not. And in the big tech companies like Facebook, the "office" is really just a big giant open room with open tables.
Tech work isn't for people who don't like to deal with people, it's for people-people now. You need to love being surrounded by your coworkers at all times, with no privacy at all, and constant chatter. Any time discussions about this come up online, you'll see two camps: old people (Gen-X or older) who hate the new workspaces, and young people who absolutely love them.
Hasn't happened yet, at least in my locality. But I admit it is a danger.
However, I'll also point out that 1) you can always get internet service elsewhere (e.g. free WiFi in shops), and 2) you don't need to download 40GB: a decent x265-encoded version of a movie can be as small as 1-3GB (in 1080p resolution). Even the super-high-quality rips are maybe 8GB or so, though I seriously doubt anyone can really tell the difference without very careful examination. The really big ones are x264, which is old and should not be used any more since x265 is so much better.
Yep, I just had to replace my otherwise fully functional BD player, because Hulu had changed their API, and Sony no longer provided updates for this model. The really sucky thing is that a new shiny 4k BD player lacks a lot of functionality that the cheaper old one had, like analog audio/video out, storing authentication on USB (so when re-playing an already played BD, there's no delay while it contacts the mothership) and an information display.
This is precisely why it's better to just not have a Blu-Ray player, not buy BD discs, and just download stuff on BitTorrent...
You don't have a right to a contract with a particular company
But this is different: as I understand it, the lottery is run by state governments, or at least under the auspices of a state government. It's not just some private for-profit company like McDonald's running a Monopoly game promotion, or a casino. Governments should not have the right to refuse service to just about anyone.
There are swingers all over you just don't have as a large of a field to play.
Swingers are a subset of the whole non-monogamy movement, and really just in it for NSA extra-martial sex (other non-monogamists don't limit themselves this way). But overall, the entire movement is a tiny, tiny, tiny portion of the population.
I've known a few swingers often times it was the husband that convinced his wife and then it was also the husband that became jealous and territorial.
I've read that meme before: the husband initiates it, then the wife find she loves it and won't give it up. Be careful what you wish for....
How did you ever know any swingers anyway? Usually, they keep their activities very private except to others in the swinging community, because they don't want their neighbors/coworkers/relatives/etc. to know this about them, since it's so poorly looked upon by general society. They're generally not at all open about their activities.
Ideally it would be a huge wake-up call to Debian, and by extension Ubuntu.
No, it wouldn't. Everyone would say how "MS has changed!" "MS isn't as bad as they used to be!!" "Look how much code MS has contributed to Linux!!!" or "MS is much better than Apple" (which actually may be true in a way).
I don't think they'd want to deal with systemd, GNOME 3, and other software if it were primary developed by a MS-owned entity or a division of MS.
I disagree. Everyone's all too happy to jump on the Gnome3 bandwagon, despite it being an obvious turd; I don't think a change in ownership is going to change that.
The ideal outcome of that would be Debian immediately ditching systemd in favor of OpenRC (or even sysvinit), along with GNOME 3 and GTK+ being ditched in favor of KDE and Qt.
I'd love to see Gnome3 and Gtk+ being ditched by the mainstream Linux community, but I think it's about as likely as the US adopting single-payer healthcare.
It would restore the reliability and trust we used to have in Linux, but that has been draining away with the rise of GNOME 3, GTK+ 3, and systemd.
How have Gtk+ and Gnome3 eroded the trust in Linux? And who's "we"? I agree with you on the Gnome/Gtk+ issue at least, but I certainly don't consider myself representative of most desktop Linux users. On Linux-oriented message boards, I mostly see fawning over Gnome3. Most Linux users seem to love it. Why, I have no idea, but they do. Talk about KDE and they'll say "I don't want to mess around with a million configuration options!" or "it's ugly!". And most distros have happily adopted it, including Debian, and now Ubuntu again. I agree that if MS acquired RH it would be interesting to see if these attitudes changed, but personally I don't think they will. Linux users happily defend Microsoft, pointing to their "generous" contribution of kernel code to enable Linux to run on MS servers on Azure.
Spanish and English are pretty far apart on the language tree. English is a Germanic language, and Spanish is a romance language derived from Latin. You have to go all the way back to Indo-European to find a common root, which IIRC is a theorized language as it's so far back there's no records about it. English does borrow a lot from the romance family through the Normal influence, which is French.
One huge difference between English and Spanish is the information density. They're almost at opposite ends of the spectrum: Spanish has a fairly low ranking in this metric, whereas English has one of the highest.
It won't make their boss less of a douche, their job less stressful, their spouse stop cheating, get them out of debt, give them a raise... sometimes you just have to divorce the cheater, find a different job, and file bankruptcy.
I honestly wonder if a lot of people would be happier if we as a society could abandon the idea of monogamy. People who aren't content with a single sex partner end up lying because it's culturally expected to be monogamous and they can't get a date without professing to be monogamous, and then when in a relationship they end up cheating. If they could just be honest about it, and it wasn't shunned, more people would be OK with it, they'd be able to find relationship partners who accept it or practice it themselves, and this whole "cheating" thing would become a historical curiosity instead of something that drives a gigantic legal industry (divorce lawyers, plus PIs).
As for the job problems, I think a UBI would fix at least some of that. With a UBI, a lot of people wouldn't bother with bullshit jobs or jobs they really hate, so the BS jobs would evaporate to hopefully be replaced with something more meaningful, and shitty companies and bosses would have a hard time competing for workers (as they're competing with "do nothing and collect a small check"; if your immediate choice is between that and "work for a horrible boss and get more money", some people are going to pick the former, reasoning that their sanity and stress level is more important than the extra money, unlike today where the choice is between that and being homeless).
Personally, I think antidepressants are massively overused, and cause at least as many problems as they solve. For some small fraction of users, they're really helpful because the alternative is much worse, but for most users, I think they're just a band-aid for mental problems caused by living in a shitty society with too much stress. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn't live like this, and didn't have remotely as much stress.
Today refusal to participate in social media activity marks one for social isolation or worse (No facebook? Strange. Dangerous) and in the near future it will make one a complete outcast. We lost. It's time to join the rest of the world.
I'm not so sure about this. From what I'm reading, the Gen-Zers are actively shunning Facebook, because their parents are on there, so they want nothing to do with it. At most, they'll put up a profile and use it to communicate with the other old people on there, and so employers don't think they're a weirdo, but it's not where they actively spend their time. They do use other social media of course, but it won't be venues where employers and other old people can see what they're really up to.
Honestly, I wonder if this idiotic "I don't care about privacy" thing isn't mostly confined to the Gen-Xers, which is the generation of morons I got born into, plus a lot of the Millennials (Gen-Z is not Millennial BTW, for people who don't realize this, the Millennials are all out of college now and about half of them in their 30s; Gen-Z is college-age and younger).
Personally, I have a FB account, but like I said about the Gen-Zers above, it's mainly a placeholder and used on rare occasions to communicate with Boomers and Xers older than myself who insist on using it, and also because some bands I follow use it (sounds like what MySpace used to be popular for).
But of course none of that matters, because I can't afford tens of thousands of dollars in lawyer fees, plus many many hours of my life to sue them. All I can do is warn other people not to do business with this super slimy company, and make sure that I never give them another penny as long as I live.
So in other words, false advertising is fine, they should be allowed to do it.
Exactly. That's just how it is: the American people want it that way, because that's how we vote. We don't have strong consumer-protection laws, because we won't vote for candidates who do that. It's "socialism". Fighting against this is futile, because 100+ million other Americans are dead-set against you, so the only thing you can do is work around the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
To the design leads at Microsoft and beyond: Stop trying to shove this down our throats, people. We don't like it, you can't make us like it, and we're not dumb for disliking it.
Wrong.
If you don't like it, don't use it. That's the only real recourse you have with crappy products.
The problem is that people just want to whine and complain, but they won't hold these companies accountable, and will instead happily use these crappy products, while making all sorts of excuses for doing so.
As long as people keep buying and using these poorly-designed products, their makers are going to assume that that's an endorsement of their design decisions, and continue on with them.
and maybe a viable alternative to that cancer, the touch screen,
There's nothing wrong with a touchscreen, and a lot of advantages to one, for certain applications. Just like anything else, there's advantages and disadvantages to it, so proper design needs to take that into account and seek an optimal overall solution so that actual humans can best make use of it. The problem is stupid people thinking that user interface design that makes sense on a 5" handheld touchscreen device should be carried over wholesale to other places where it simply doesn't make sense.
Whoosh
Google isn't "baaaad" because of this; there's no indication of evil here. But there is indication of incompetence, because other companies have solved this problem ages ago, and don't inconvenience their customers because of utterly trivial debts. Yeah, it's nice they weren't complete bastards, and quickly fixed the problem and gave the customer a small bonus for her inconvenience, but it shouldn't have happened in the first place.
This is news because this is Google, a giant company that's supposedly an expert in software. (Have you ever tried going through one of their interviews?) One part of their company has been working on self-driving cars for some time now, and silly mistakes simply cannot be tolerated in the software controlling an automated car. If they can't even get this simple accounting thing right, how can we trust their car software to be safe?
Well, that would make me try to game the system. Say my bill is $30 each month. I'll pay $29.01, every month, just to get the free $0.99.
That's very simple to fix. You put in a threshold, below which the company won't bother harassing the customer for the amount due (perhaps $5 or $10). But you never actually forgive the debt, you just hold it over. So if someone like you tries to game the system by underpaying every month, you won't get away with it: the past-due amount will show up on the next bill, and be paid by your latest payment, leaving a slowly-increasing past-due amount. At some point (~10 months maybe), that amount will be greater than the threshold, and now they'll threaten to cut off your service if you don't pay.
That way, the company eventually gets its money from people who remain customers, since most such cases are simply where there was a slight shortfall, so it's easier to just hold it over and add it to their next bill, which most customers will simply pay in full. For the smaller number of cases where the customer is no longer a customer (it was their last bill perhaps), then the company will eventually drop it after some time since it's not worth it to pursue the person for such a trivial amount.
No, not exactly. This is an example of Google being totally incompetent in their billing (which will probably be fixed now, after this embarrassment), but once some humans finally got involved it was quickly fixed and rectified.
You're right, it's not an example of evil at all. But it is an example of some incompetence (because, as many others have pointed out here already, other companies have long had policies to not bother billing people for such trivial amounts; this isn't something new). So it proves Hanlon's Razor: "never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence/stupidity".
The answer isn't to keep using antiquated pieces of paper, or to use credit cards. The answer is to use bank transfers, which every developed country on the planet uses.
Engineers today, the ones doing the hard thinking involved with design, like to be able to turn around and talk immediately to their coworkers about stuff, not have to go to a conference room. When they're not part of the conversation, they just ignore it and keep working. If you're not the kind of person who can multitask in that kind of fast-paced, noisy, and highly social environment, you have no business being an engineer.
What they really should be doing in universities now is explaining this to anyone considering enrolling in the engineering program, and also actively pushing out ones who aren't highly social, and not members of a fraternity. Engineering is just not a profession for people who like quiet, or who don't like to socialize a lot, even while working.
So while I don't have an 4k content to play back having used a 4k TV for a couple of months now there is no way I would buy a none 4k TV in the future.
That's easy to fix: just go to your favorite torrent site and search for "[movie name] 4k".
Exactly what I was thinking. They should have known better than to buy iPhones; Apple is infamous for this kind of thing.
Autopilots in planes have been able to land and exit the runway for quite a while.
Some can, many can't. It's just like cruise control in cars: some can detect cars in front of them and slow down ("adaptive cruise control"), most aren't at all that advanced.
I'm quite sure that all the people with 60s-era Cessnas do not have autopilots capable of auto-landing.
Spanish speakers tend to speak more quickly than their English-speaking counterparts, so the information rate in the spoken language is comparable
Actually, the whole point of that research paper was that *all* human languages seem to have roughly equivalent information rates, because ones with poorer information density make up for it with higher speaking rates. My point in bringing it up was only to show that Spanish and English really are very different languages as seen by the information density.
The people building the product don't want offices, they want an open area so they can collaborate, at least if they're under 40 years old.
I just got moved into an actual cubicle where I am (with nearly 6' high walls), along with the other software people. I like it, as it's a big improvement from what I've been working in for a while now. The rest of them are all complaining about it, saying they want lower walls, or to remove the walls altogether so we can see each other and work together.
Airline pilots are intelligent and highly trained individuals. That is why they are not found on every street corner, and are worth more than a dime a dozen.
Actually, this isn't true. Pilots start out their careers as instructors ("those who can, do, those who can't, teach"), and make peanuts. After that, they might get a job as a copilot for a regional jet company. Last I heard, the starting salary for one of these guys is $18k. Yep, barely above minimum wage. It takes many years for them to work up to any kind of decent salary approaching 6 figures. Then, when they hit 60 years old, they're forced to retire.
Being a pilot is for people who are independently wealthy (e.g. trust fund, or has a spouse willing to support them), or for people who love it so much they're willing to sacrifice everything just to have that job.
And autopilot for planes is far, far, far more advanced, capable, robust, and reliable than the shit Elon is selling.
That's total bullshit. Autopilot for airplanes has been around for many decades now. It just maintains a heading and altitude. It's roughly analogous to cruise control on cars in technological terms, and maybe automatic lane-keeping in actual functional terms (since cars have to follow a road, planes don't; of course, technologically, lane-keeping is far, far, far more advanced than the autopilot in a typical Cessna).
Yes, there are very advanced autopilots in today's newest passenger planes like the 787, but the term is not exclusive to those, and there's countless decades-old Cessnas and Pipers out there with autopilots that are quite primitive.
No, autopilot in planes does not autonomously pilot the plane. It doesn't take off or land, it doesn't fly around bad weather, it doesn't check METARs and PIREPs, it doesn't watch for other traffic, it doesn't handle radio calls to ATC when you cross into class B airspace, it just keeps you flying straight and level.
The only thing in your post that's correct is the bit about pilots being trained to use their equipment. That isn't true for Teslas, but it also isn't true for any other car either. How many drivers on the road today got explicit training to use the cruise control in their car? Cruise control has been around a few decades now too. Or how about the more advanced features we have not, like adaptive cruise control, lane-keeping, and operating the infotainment system? Every car is different, with different controls and different quirks. Airplane pilots aren't even allowed to fly a plane (solo) unless they've been specifically trained for that model and received a rating for it. Perhaps we should do that for cars....
making them very likely to get STEM degrees, especially with computers where you don't need to deal with people as often. Mix in that tech culture loves a meritocracy
Where does this idea that you don't need to deal with people as often in STEM/computer jobs? That's crazy. It was true in the 80s, but these days with open-plan offices being the norm, it's not. And in the big tech companies like Facebook, the "office" is really just a big giant open room with open tables.
Tech work isn't for people who don't like to deal with people, it's for people-people now. You need to love being surrounded by your coworkers at all times, with no privacy at all, and constant chatter. Any time discussions about this come up online, you'll see two camps: old people (Gen-X or older) who hate the new workspaces, and young people who absolutely love them.
Hasn't happened yet, at least in my locality. But I admit it is a danger.
However, I'll also point out that 1) you can always get internet service elsewhere (e.g. free WiFi in shops), and 2) you don't need to download 40GB: a decent x265-encoded version of a movie can be as small as 1-3GB (in 1080p resolution). Even the super-high-quality rips are maybe 8GB or so, though I seriously doubt anyone can really tell the difference without very careful examination. The really big ones are x264, which is old and should not be used any more since x265 is so much better.
They shouldn't even exist and instead be bundled with a Roku, Chromecast (the device not something built in) or something similar.
The problem is lots of dumb consumers don't like having multiple remote controls, and want everything integrated into a single device.
Yep, I just had to replace my otherwise fully functional BD player, because Hulu had changed their API, and Sony no longer provided updates for this model.
The really sucky thing is that a new shiny 4k BD player lacks a lot of functionality that the cheaper old one had, like analog audio/video out, storing authentication on USB (so when re-playing an already played BD, there's no delay while it contacts the mothership) and an information display.
This is precisely why it's better to just not have a Blu-Ray player, not buy BD discs, and just download stuff on BitTorrent...
You don't have a right to a contract with a particular company
But this is different: as I understand it, the lottery is run by state governments, or at least under the auspices of a state government. It's not just some private for-profit company like McDonald's running a Monopoly game promotion, or a casino. Governments should not have the right to refuse service to just about anyone.
There are swingers all over you just don't have as a large of a field to play.
Swingers are a subset of the whole non-monogamy movement, and really just in it for NSA extra-martial sex (other non-monogamists don't limit themselves this way). But overall, the entire movement is a tiny, tiny, tiny portion of the population.
I've known a few swingers often times it was the husband that convinced his wife and then it was also the husband that became jealous and territorial.
I've read that meme before: the husband initiates it, then the wife find she loves it and won't give it up. Be careful what you wish for....
How did you ever know any swingers anyway? Usually, they keep their activities very private except to others in the swinging community, because they don't want their neighbors/coworkers/relatives/etc. to know this about them, since it's so poorly looked upon by general society. They're generally not at all open about their activities.
Ideally it would be a huge wake-up call to Debian, and by extension Ubuntu.
No, it wouldn't. Everyone would say how "MS has changed!" "MS isn't as bad as they used to be!!" "Look how much code MS has contributed to Linux!!!" or "MS is much better than Apple" (which actually may be true in a way).
I don't think they'd want to deal with systemd, GNOME 3, and other software if it were primary developed by a MS-owned entity or a division of MS.
I disagree. Everyone's all too happy to jump on the Gnome3 bandwagon, despite it being an obvious turd; I don't think a change in ownership is going to change that.
The ideal outcome of that would be Debian immediately ditching systemd in favor of OpenRC (or even sysvinit), along with GNOME 3 and GTK+ being ditched in favor of KDE and Qt.
I'd love to see Gnome3 and Gtk+ being ditched by the mainstream Linux community, but I think it's about as likely as the US adopting single-payer healthcare.
It would restore the reliability and trust we used to have in Linux, but that has been draining away with the rise of GNOME 3, GTK+ 3, and systemd.
How have Gtk+ and Gnome3 eroded the trust in Linux? And who's "we"? I agree with you on the Gnome/Gtk+ issue at least, but I certainly don't consider myself representative of most desktop Linux users. On Linux-oriented message boards, I mostly see fawning over Gnome3. Most Linux users seem to love it. Why, I have no idea, but they do. Talk about KDE and they'll say "I don't want to mess around with a million configuration options!" or "it's ugly!". And most distros have happily adopted it, including Debian, and now Ubuntu again. I agree that if MS acquired RH it would be interesting to see if these attitudes changed, but personally I don't think they will. Linux users happily defend Microsoft, pointing to their "generous" contribution of kernel code to enable Linux to run on MS servers on Azure.
Spanish and English are pretty far apart on the language tree. English is a Germanic language, and Spanish is a romance language derived from Latin. You have to go all the way back to Indo-European to find a common root, which IIRC is a theorized language as it's so far back there's no records about it. English does borrow a lot from the romance family through the Normal influence, which is French.
One huge difference between English and Spanish is the information density. They're almost at opposite ends of the spectrum: Spanish has a fairly low ranking in this metric, whereas English has one of the highest.
It won't make their boss less of a douche, their job less stressful, their spouse stop cheating, get them out of debt, give them a raise... sometimes you just have to divorce the cheater, find a different job, and file bankruptcy.
I honestly wonder if a lot of people would be happier if we as a society could abandon the idea of monogamy. People who aren't content with a single sex partner end up lying because it's culturally expected to be monogamous and they can't get a date without professing to be monogamous, and then when in a relationship they end up cheating. If they could just be honest about it, and it wasn't shunned, more people would be OK with it, they'd be able to find relationship partners who accept it or practice it themselves, and this whole "cheating" thing would become a historical curiosity instead of something that drives a gigantic legal industry (divorce lawyers, plus PIs).
As for the job problems, I think a UBI would fix at least some of that. With a UBI, a lot of people wouldn't bother with bullshit jobs or jobs they really hate, so the BS jobs would evaporate to hopefully be replaced with something more meaningful, and shitty companies and bosses would have a hard time competing for workers (as they're competing with "do nothing and collect a small check"; if your immediate choice is between that and "work for a horrible boss and get more money", some people are going to pick the former, reasoning that their sanity and stress level is more important than the extra money, unlike today where the choice is between that and being homeless).
Personally, I think antidepressants are massively overused, and cause at least as many problems as they solve. For some small fraction of users, they're really helpful because the alternative is much worse, but for most users, I think they're just a band-aid for mental problems caused by living in a shitty society with too much stress. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn't live like this, and didn't have remotely as much stress.
Today refusal to participate in social media activity marks one for social isolation or worse (No facebook? Strange. Dangerous) and in the near future it will make one a complete outcast. We lost. It's time to join the rest of the world.
I'm not so sure about this. From what I'm reading, the Gen-Zers are actively shunning Facebook, because their parents are on there, so they want nothing to do with it. At most, they'll put up a profile and use it to communicate with the other old people on there, and so employers don't think they're a weirdo, but it's not where they actively spend their time. They do use other social media of course, but it won't be venues where employers and other old people can see what they're really up to.
Honestly, I wonder if this idiotic "I don't care about privacy" thing isn't mostly confined to the Gen-Xers, which is the generation of morons I got born into, plus a lot of the Millennials (Gen-Z is not Millennial BTW, for people who don't realize this, the Millennials are all out of college now and about half of them in their 30s; Gen-Z is college-age and younger).
Personally, I have a FB account, but like I said about the Gen-Zers above, it's mainly a placeholder and used on rare occasions to communicate with Boomers and Xers older than myself who insist on using it, and also because some bands I follow use it (sounds like what MySpace used to be popular for).
But of course none of that matters, because I can't afford tens of thousands of dollars in lawyer fees, plus many many hours of my life to sue them.
All I can do is warn other people not to do business with this super slimy company, and make sure that I never give them another penny as long as I live.
So in other words, false advertising is fine, they should be allowed to do it.
Exactly. That's just how it is: the American people want it that way, because that's how we vote. We don't have strong consumer-protection laws, because we won't vote for candidates who do that. It's "socialism". Fighting against this is futile, because 100+ million other Americans are dead-set against you, so the only thing you can do is work around the problem.