With the concentration of wealth and thus power being the ideal state, you appear to be arguing in favor of a landed aristocracy who are inherently better at ruling than everyone else because of their noble character. The peasantry would not know how or even want to wield power, and need to be guided by those with the right to rule. In this case it is the right mix of sociopathy and exploitation that defines nobility of character instead of strictly bloodline and Devine Right. This is a very interesting take.

I personally feel that along broad scopes, any human is equally capable of the desire and capacity to wield economic power. It is nurture and not nature that derives this. I would then argue that a level playing field with the Government enforcing strong anti-trust laws is a much better driver of economic force and growth. Healthy competition with no artificial barriers to market entry will allow the market to produce the best results.

Preventing monopoly, duopoly, and oligarchy will constrain the scope of inequality along with taxation without any need for a planned economy. I favor something like a land use tax, but there is much discussion to be had on that front.

Humans are semi-eusocial creatures, so greed must be properly channeled and cannot be allowed to run unchecked. Inequality at certain levels is expected and can/does increase drive for success, but must be tempered for optimal results.

Some humans evolved to wake up when the sun rises. Others evolved to hit peak wakefulness in the middle of the night. Humans evolved with shift sleeping and night watchers, and are most likely naturally biphasic sleepers as well.

Starseige Tribes prepared me for this. Let the telefrags commence!

Eggplant out here catching strays.

This very much annoys me. I am a left leaning libertarian (so probably considered Center Right), and this is stupid. Waste of money and labor. I am not really for the EV mandates because I respect a free market. But oil is heavily subsidized and thus not a free market, so charging infrastructure should get the same benefit to allow consumers to decide what works best for them. If low energy prices are a priority as their lip service indicates, then all forms should be treated equally. Government doesn't get decide winners and losers. Lobbying is corruption.

I love my plug in hybrid. I would love to be able to charge at work. I also love gas and diesel, but I want to see where hydrogen and other cleaner combustion options can go for environmental reasons. Level playing fields is the main reason for Governments to exist.

I thought that was one of the bedrock foundations of the US, regardless of political leaning: if you are against Dolly you are against America.

At the very least back up your Audible library in a DRM free format with something like Libation.

I am still using Audible because their web player works in my restricted office, and the authors get a couple of pennies from dragon, but have my library safely exported to ensure continued access and prevent fuckery like this.

I'm sure Mint is in a great place now, I enjoyed it when I tried it 8-10 years ago during my last foray into Linux. I looked at the reviews complaining about Mint as outliers, but did the same for Manjaro and PopOS and all the others. PopOS was what I was initially planning on for Nvidia support, but my 2080S started acting like it might be dying and I picked up a 7900XTX to open up my Linux options more.

BTRFS snapshots sounded like a good "training wheel" for easy restoration after I inevitably break something, which was a selling point for Manjaro. Rolling release is also both a plus and a minus. It is easy to get choice paralysis with trying to jump into Linux, especially if you don't want to do a bunch of initial distro hopping to feel out the different options.

That is super exciting, I'll give it a try. Thanks for pointing that out, I thought it was still in the rumours and supported speculation phase. If this trend continues then Linux will be more and more viable going forward. SteamDeck pushing the gaming scene has been huge, I hope the momentum just keeps increasing.

Thank you for the insight, that is actually useful information for me. I currently have a 4tb nvme with a small (250gb) C drive and the rest as an E drive (Program installs and Games) for Windows, the same general setup with a second 4tb nvme for Linux, and a 3rd separate SATA SSD that acts as my "home" drive with Documents/Pictures/Downloads /etc. I planned and sharing that third drive between Windows and Linux so I don't require duplicating data.

A home server/NAS is also in the works, and I'll be looking into Samba. It's just been a bit enlightening finding out all the unicorns and rainbows on the Linux side of the fence are equines of indeterminate parentage with paper cones glued to their foreheads and RGB light strips soldered together with a "trust me" sticker on them.

Microsoft is still a ghetto, and Apple is a WASP country club where the HOA president lives next door and is "retired". Computers are both at an all-time high for choice and in some of the worst states it's been in.

There's the rub. Every distro has vocal supporters and detractors, and appears simultaneously good or "dog shit". Determining who is accurate is a crapshoot, and there apparently is no right answer. Manjaro was attractive because of built-in automatic snapshots for recovery when I inevitably break my installation. There was also previously a well reviewed gaming focused Manjaro fork, though I stuck with the main fork.

Mint had just as vocal of detractors saying it was unstable. Same with Ubuntu and I dislike the company focus anyway. Arch is Arch, and Manjaro is an Arch fork anyway. It's the same problem someone looking at starting One Piece or Bleach or Naruto have: there is too much and even the fans appear to hate it more than anyone else, lol.

I don't want to distro hop, that doesn't interest me at my current stage. I want long term (at least a year) in between reinstallations. More self hosting is lined up for the future, so desktop is dipping my toes in the water as my server is piecemealed together.

I am mid switch, but it's not been smooth or easy. I chose Manjaro and maybe I chose poorly. I am a lifelong techie, and have used Ubuntu and Mint in short stints in the past, but the transition is rough.

I didn't attempt the switch before because I primarily played Destiny 2 and Bungie hates Linux. The enshittification of Destiny drove me away, and in theory the games I am playing now should work. I have had mixed results however.

I play Darktide and Vermintide 2 and heavily use their modding scenes to make them fully playable. Vortex mod manager is a huge bonus for this, and I still haven't been able to set this up.

My Elgato equipment has community support, but has a bunch of steps to get working that I haven't spent the time to fully research or attempt.

I still haven't set up an automatic mount point for my shared NTFS drive to load on boot, both because I don't have a good grasp on the fstab and because Windows does a chkdisk every time I mount it in Linux. Dual access storage still seems iffy as of 2025.

I am going to keep trying, because I hate Microsoft right now more than I dislike the learning curve and limitations. Not sure if that is enough to make this the year of the Linux desktop though.

You're absolutely right, I feel almost as bad attempting to use Mac as I do Linux but it is a less powerful OS and I just accept there are things I can't do. Plus it IS designed to be idiot proof.

For Linux, I run into the problem that there is a floor of knowledge assumed in every tutorial. Auto mount my secondary NTFS drive at boot? Just do XYZ in fstab. Don't know where fstab is and where to make that entry? You're SOL. I am comfortable in command line to an extent, but it's been a long time since I dailied DOS, honestly don't spend a lot of time in PowerShell, and networking equipment is a completely different beast.

Microsoft may suck, but I can usually find my way through a script or formula or something with their knowledgebase. My skill set doesn't translate well, and I am finding it harder to learn than I probably should. I probably need to take an introductory Linux course.

This right here drove me to dual boot Manjaro. I can't be the only person who has stacked monitors instead of side-by-side monitors. The UI is an abomination and the telemetry even moreso.

Linux is not turn key, and as a significantly PC gaming user it has limitations. I still have not set up modding yet, and whether Vortex mod manager will work or not is still unclear. I can't get more than 60Hz out of my monitor on HDMI, which is required if I want 175Hz and 10bit color due to DisplayPort 1.4 limitations. Sleep causes my motherboard to permanently display a "CPU unknown" QLED Code. Instructions on simple tasks like creating a permanent drive mount at boot are confusing because there are steps that seem to be just assumed by everyone writing them. Etc.

I am working my way through these, but still find myself in Windows 11 most of the time because unfortunately it just works. Software is natively written for it, there is no searching for how to get peripherals or programs to work. I say this as a lifelong tech nerd who started on Windows 3.1 and DOS, and who's job involves working with Linux based equipment. This shouldn't be as hard as it has been to transition, but it is.

Only two ways to find out. Time to fire up universe sandbox, cause I'm fresh out of the ability to delete the sun in the production environment.

The real question is if the earth becomes a rogue planet or if Jupiter captures most/all of the remaining solar system. Jupiter is technically a failed star, so could it finally get it's glowup from being the sun's understudy and keep us all together until we fall into the gravitational well of a new star?

Voyage of the Mimi theme song intensifies.

He completely turned his life around and became a martyr hero by killing the most evil person alive at the time, even though it cost him his own life in the process.

Thank you for taking the time to discuss this with me, I am finding this very enjoyable and educational.

I agree with Friedman in principle, but then I look at Ford and the other car companies with the Pinto and Takara airbags, etc. The cost of paying lawsuits gets factored in and until the cost point breaks over the deaths and injuries are just a cost of doing business. With regulation that actually has teeth and enforcement, just doing the bodies-to-profits calculations becomes an untenable solution and the recalls happen even if they aren't profitable. I don't think a private tort system is capable of having the teeth to achieve this in the real world. It is why Libertarianism still has a central government. It will have its inefficiencies, but it's a right tool for the right job kind of thing.

Same with asbestos, lead, fillers in food, etc. The damages from them are so divorced from the product that many may not know who or what caused it. Lawsuits have a hard time with those kinds of things even if you know exactly which business is the cause. Look at tobacco and leaded gasoline and myriad others where lawsuits failed initially because damage was difficult to prove before the government stepped in. If fossil fuel companies can pay for the science that muddies the water on climate change, what chance does John Doe have doing enough through a lawsuit to stop DuPont from flooding the planet with forever chemicals?

I like where Friedman is coming from, but I hold him at the same level as Marx or any other economic theorist: assuming a spherical cow, at a specific temperature, without friction, and without wind resistance. I like Henry George the same way. That's why I still claim to be a libertarian (just a left leaning centrist one), because I think Friedman and George are actually the better end result and closer to a workable solution than Marx. Marx was onto something though, and shouldn't be dismissed outright. I do think we have stuff to learn from all branches of economic theory, and subscribe to a "the truth will be somewhere in the middle" philosophy.

There is some merit to that, and free education has the same issues in other countries besides Germany. My planning process was to treat the 2 year associates degree like we do with high school, no performance testing or path tracking. Everyone is entitled to a high school diploma of they want one, and with an associates degree being the new high school diploma it makes sense to include it.

It is what we as a society have determined makes the bare minimum education standard for then learning the rest on the job. The employment sector has moved this bar from high school graduate to associates degree, and the education system should reflect that.

The complete abolishment of public everything and allowing the market to dictate and provide is great in theory, but the same was Marxist communism is. There are always those that will break the system for personal gain.

There are also efficiencies of scale that business in a healthy, non mono/duopolostic environment can't take advantage of that the government can. This is why I put education and healthcare under the "provide for the common defense and well-being of the people" that it exists for. This is why we the taxpayers should be paying for education in what may be or appear totally irrelevant: it results in a net gain as far as expenditure across the country as a whole and makes companies better able to train workers on the job. It also allows easier job transitions allowing more economic mobility, and also helps maintains balance of power between the worker and the employer.

In a libertarian ideal the worker is not trapped working the job or for the specific employer because that is the only job they are trained for and where their healthcare comes from. It is a contract of mutual gain. It is unreasonable for a worker to start over from scratch to change jobs if an employer is not maintaining market wages. It also allows a worker to more easily become an entrepreneur and open his own company, as this requires a broader education basis to succeed at than the job he does for another.

Strong but limited regulation is need to keep markets free. Regulations preventing pollution of the environment as a common resource, truth in representation of goods and services, prevention of anticompetitive actions and regulatory capture., etc. Without this markets inevitably fall to monopoly and the system switches from mutualism to parasitism.

There is a careful balance to maintain and government overreach is just as easy in the other direction. This is true is any economic and sociological system though. Perfectly free laze fair markets do not exist the same way perfectly egalitarian communism doesn't exist above the small commune level and for the same reasons. Or perfect democracy where everything is voted on by everyone and everyone is making fully informed and educated decisions. If none of these are possible in the real world, all we can do is take the best parts and attempt to create the best possible real world results.