Hey me too, birthday buddy.

They made it the default option for businesses that routinely buy computers with less local storage than their users need. Pretty much every company I have worked for.

They then pushed it out hard into the consumer market when SSD came out and the average storage space on lower end models dropped by 75%.

I see why they did it, how they did it was in usual Microsoft fashion, idiotic.

It’s sort of their pattern.

1. Introduce new changes.

2. Screw it up royalty.

3. Fix the features that are salvageable and revert most of the remaining except: Double down on the shitty ones that they think will make them more money.

4. Rinse and Repeat

Forums were awesome until the ads took over. Then apps like Tapatalk made reading them easier. Then Tapatalk went to shit and power users migrated to reddit (mainly for the easy to use wepage and awesome independent apps.).

Then reddit shit the bed so now Lemmy is filling the gaps.

Windows 11 adoption to business customers is really bad. Most of the adoption to 11 has been from people purchasing new home computers and being stuck with 11 (I have two win 11 computers now).

Since the bulk of Microsoft’s revenue comes from business customers, they have a huge impact on decisions.

At this point the only decision Microsoft can make is to write off win 11 as a failue. Resuming feature upgrades to win 10 makes business sense.

Farming is always environmentally destructive. There is no such thing as “environmentally friendly” farming. The solution is massive investment into the farming infrastructure and rewilding of vast tracts of land.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

We use around half of the arable land for agriculture. The sad fact is we only need to use 10% of it. The rest we farm because we can make a profit. Not because it makes sense.

It would take a complete upheaval of our agricultural system. Massive investment into water storage, irrigation systems and protected culture. It would also mean the forced migration of a millions people from rural areas to be rewilded to areas under intensive agriculture.

Aka it’s not an easy fix. t’s a systematic change to the way we interact with the environment.

So, it’s not going to happen.

Look up the “TAS2R bitter taste receptor gene family”. It’s a fun little group of genes that control how well bitterness is detected.

I am a moderate bitter taster. So I do not like celery (mildly unpleasant flavor) and prefer cucumbers that contain the recessive bi gene that stops the production of cucubitacin in the plant. The ones that contain the bt gene, the skin gets too bitter for me. This gene mostly stops the cucubitacin production in the fruit but not the plant.

Life is much more complicated than the middle school definition. Some of the more interesting species are “sterile” crosses that have overcome the sterility. For example the ancestry of wheat.

Wheat is mostly a hexaploid aka 6 copies of each chromosome. It arose from a triploid interspecific cross (triploids are always sterile) that spontaneously doubled (hexaploids are fertile).

As a hexaploid it can be crossed to diploid rye to produce fertile offspring called triticale (tetraploid). Crossing triticale to either wheat or rye creates sterile offspring (pentaploid & triploid)

So are they all one species because they can sometimes produce fertile offspring?

It’s ironic that what most people think of as a highly intelligent person is a polymath aka somebody who is an expert in multiple topics.

Academia today is designed for extreme specialization of knowledge. So it actively selects against anyone that would be classified as a polymath.

It’s a pretty big disconnect between expectations and reality.

It’s all about profits. Seedless watermelons usually sell better with American consumers.

In order to produce fruit on triploid watermelons there has to be regular seeded (diploid) varieties in the field. Traditionally they would use a large oblong traditional seeded (allsweet types). Mainly because there was a market for them and they looked different than the seedless varieties.

The growers had to dedicate 1/5th of their acres to growing a seeded melons which they could sell at 50% or less than seedless varieties.

That’s when seed companies introduced dedicated pollinators (non-harvested). These untilized several different dwarf genes and could be interplanted with seedless varities with no loss of space.

With the exception of the big party markets like the 4th of July, most fields utilize the dedicated pollinators in the U.S. now. For production in Latin America, they export the seedless ones to the U.S. and sell the seeded ones l ones domestically.

Bottom line, today you only occasionally seeded watermelons in grocery stores in the U.S. and Canada.

They are not all bad. In the early 2000’s a breeder created a logistical method create tetraploids in 6 years (5 generations every 2 years). He used 3 countries to do it in if I recall correctly.

He integrated some of the small seeded deep red fleshed Chinese germplasm combined with the old flavorful allsweet types to make dramatically improved tetraploids.

Other companies have followed suit and the average quality of the fruit has improved. Some of the newer ones have really excellent flavor.

Also a bit of trivia I had to double check.

The seedless watermelon against Catholics image.

The original picture is one I took.

A. They have no significant difference in nutrition than non-GMO. In fact many GMO’s have been created to improve nutrition but sadly not used because of dumbfucks like Greenpeace who would rather have people go blind or die than accept GMO food. For example, rice that produces vitamin A and folic acid have been created but never used.

B. The “Terminator” GMO gene was created by the USDA-ARS and was NEVER released. No seed on the market has ever had a GMO sterility gene. Contrary to public opinion, it was designed to be integrated with other GMO genes to prevent the outcrossing and spread into the environment, not as an IP control mechanism.

Now why seedless watermelons suck is an interesting story.

The first intentional creation of a seedless watermelon was done in 1939 in Japan. University breeding programs in the southern U.S. after WWII began using the technology to create the first hybrids. In the early '50’s and '60’s multiple tetraploids were created by the university programs and released to private companies to produce seed with.

These tetraploid lines were “greys”. “Greys” were selected to have a thick hard rind for long distance shipping. They were barely red on the inside and tasted slightly bitter. They all sucked for flavor.

A seedless watermelon hybrid is made by crossing a tetraploid female by a diploid male. The resulting hybrid (triploid) has 3 copies of every chromosome and is sterile.

Fertile stable tetraploids take a long time to create - around 15 generations of you are lucky. Seedless watermelons also took a long time to gain popularity in the market. So nobody put significant money or time into creating more tetraploid inbreds for over 40 years.

From the 1980’s when seedless watermelons were introduced until around 2010, everyone used those shitty old tetraploids as 2/3rds of the hybrid. Since 2010 companies have created new tetraploid to use, but a significant portion still use 70 year old shitty ones.

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Been on my own since I as 17. The first few years were rough to say the least.

I worked 2 jobs, 30-60 hrs per week and went to college. I shared shitty apartments with some pretty creepy people. I moved so constantly I ended up paying for a post office box so I could get my mail. I did not have a vehicle (no car) so I rode a bike for up to 60 miles per day. Even all that wasn’t enough without government grants and student loans to pay for college.

Food was something that I ate when I had it. I spent a few months with mybe 4-5 real meals. Cornflakes and ramen where the bulk of my diet for a while.

I took the first professional job I could find. It was terrible but it paid well. I gained 50lbs to be at a healthy weight the first year. The next few years I jumped around jobs until I landed in one I liked.

The last few weeks before I graduated college I met my wife. Her family has become mine over the past 25 years.

Today my income alone puts us in the top 10% of earners. My wife makes close to the same. At many crucual times in our lifes we’ve taken advantage of government assistance. To be blunt, it’s not possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You need a helping hand once in a while no matter how small.

I have gotten flamed a few times for telling the Linux fanboys the hard truth.

If I have to hit Terminal even once with an average setup the OS is not ready for mainstream use. No exceptions. It has to work out of the box on the newest systems.

I use Linux the same way that you have: for a few applications that need a rock solid stable system. Once you get the damn thing setup, it truly is wonderful. Stable, reliable, easy to use. But getting there… Fuck that.

I think I had one clean distro install where everything worked. The PC was 7 years old when I installed it.

Mac did have a better OS than Win 95 -Win98 It was smoother and crashed less.

The difference was that Windows still ran DOS programs, 5.25" floppy disks etc… They made the decision to maintain backwards compatibility.

Mac decided to drop support regularly for what they considered “outdated software and technology.” For example: when USB drives came out they canceled support for 3.5" floppies in their OS. Machines that had a 3.5" drive installed could no longer use it. Put a floppy drive in and nothing happened.

Although Mac was a smoother more stable OS, windows had more functionality and greater compatability. Windows was a far superior product because of it. Even with the regular apearance of the blue screen of death.

Linux at the time also suffered from being a terminal based OS. Too much like DOS for way too long. I used it for specific tasks where it excelled at.

Had two ponies growing up and 15-18 horses on the ranch.

The two ponies were absolute assholes. Vicious aggressive beast who hated people. The farrier charged double for them.

The 17 hand paint was a big puppy. He’d follow us around looking for loves and your sandwich. He would beg for a PB&J.

As a highly paid professional this is bullshit. Most insurance plans in the u.s. are costing more and covering less every year. They have introduced all sorts of fun things make it more brutal. Evaluating a companies insurance plan has become a critical exercise in evaluating any job offer. Some major companies offer shit benefits packages.

Things they have done:

Raised deductables: The insurance basically pays nothing until the deductible is met. In many plans, this is $4,000+. I have seen them as high as $10,000.

Increased out-of-pocket maximums. This is the maximum amount a person can pay in a year. These are important for chronic illnesses or serious accidents etc. it used to be $4000 in a year for a family. Now I see plans that have $8,000. as the maximum.

Decreases the percentage they pay. When I started working a most “good” insurance plans would pay 90% of the bill. Now 80% is the standard with many “bad” plans only offering to pay 50 or 60%.

Limit medical networks that they do business with. You want to see a Dr or specialist who is not in your network. You are fucked.

What has the government done? Introduced the HSA plan. Basically you can save money out of you paycheck tax free to pay for all these ballooning costs. The plan just happens to be an investment plan in the stock market with high fees and lots of money for Wall Street.

Insurance and medical care for my wife with another autoimmune disease has been as high as 30% of our income.

She started a union job with better negotiated insurance. It’s down to 10% of our income now.

It makes more sense if you use it as intended. It’s designed to be a simple way for farmers/gardeners to classify the basic soil composition by particle size.

Take a cup of dirt, put it in a mason jar, fill it full of water, put a lid on tight and shake the hell out of it. Come back in 3-4 days and measure the layers.

This comes in helpful in applying pesticides and basic water management. It’s pretty much pointless for anything else.