You have guessed right. The US government had a massive hand in the creation of modern social media, such as a significant amount of funding for Facebook during its startup phase. The intelligence agencies are mad that they can’t pull data from TikTok or influence its algorithms, on top of the American social media companies wanting to kill off their foreign competition as much as possible.

This bill has nothing to do with data privacy because if Congress cared about that they would’ve banned other platforms too. It’s about control and unfair competition.

The “data privacy” argument is bullshit and the people pushing for this law know it. That’s what is being sold to people but it is not why this TikTok ban got passed. It got passed because American social media companies are pissed that TikTok is outcompeting them for the attention of young people, and because the US government has a heavy hand in what algorithms are allowed to push on Facebook and Google and others. A good portion of Facebook’s initial funding came from government sources.

“Data privacy” is just an excuse. Lobbying from the intelligence agencies and social media companies is why it’s really being enacted.

The history speaks for itself. China is less of a threat to other countries in the world than the USA is. Your idea that they’re some international boogeyman that’s going to take over the entire world and doom humanity is just you repeating “China bad and scary” State Department propaganda.

Even with China’s human rights record being what it is, they don’t export war across the entire world.

This comment was brought to you by the US State Department.

Tell me, how many countries’ governments has China knocked over in the last century as compared to the US CIA?

How many countries did the US drop bombs on in the last decade, and how many did China?

It’s not even close. In terms of physical violence the US is the world’s #1 exporter.

There’s never been a day where I regretted deleting my Reddit account and removing that site from my life. It’s only gotten worse since I left.

Snap has always bothered me and this is another great reason why.

Oh I see what you meant than. Older and cheaper would definitely fit your application better and all of Framework’s stuff is expensive. Repairable and upgradeable comes at a cost!

What concerns you about Framework’s chipsets?

If you need cheap, and “built for a group”, an existing SBC and custom-printed enclosures are likely the best option.

Maybe if it was a joke about leftist infighting it’d be understandable

I seem to remember that, for a couple years after DDR4 became the standard, it was significantly more expensive than DDR3.

I just checked in my own, you can change the toolbar to the top of the screen in the “Customize” page of the settings.

In seriousness, I have used Mint as a daily driver for probably 7 years now and I have found only the MATE and xfce flavors to be properly reliable and stable. Cinnamon, no matter how many times and on what hardware I’ve tried it, has a lovely habit of crashing and freezing at random times. For normal desktop tasks, Linux Mint xfce has been more reliable than any Windows I’ve ever used.

Have you considered that you might have Bad Vibes? Maybe the installer is afraid.

You say that, but just like with XP, Microsoft announced a paid subscription to Windows 10 security updates for up to 3 years after the EOL date. There are probably a good number of companies who haven’t switched yet or will not be able to switch easily.

I think you’re massively over-generalizing here to make Linux look like an unstable mess. Rolling release distros are the ones that want you to read the patch notes. Arch is the poster child for those. Stable distros like Mint and Ubuntu and elementaryOS don’t brick your system with every update. They hold back updates and stick with older kernels to ensure stability. Linux is, already, very good. It sounds like you haven’t used it for any length of time. Valve’s work on Proton has made Linux gaming viable for a whole lot of people, but the majority of computer users don’t play intense video games. They want web browsing, email, office software, that kind of thing. Linux does those just great on almost any device all the way down to Raspberry Pi boards.

We can only hope that, like the citizens of Rapture, the rich tech-bros go insane from their own fumes and start eating each other.

Motorcycles are not as dangerous as people think. What they are is unforgiving of mistakes.

My opinion is that the crash and fatality statistics are heavily inflated by the fact that risky people are drawn to motorcycles, and the evidence backs me up on that somewhat. Studies like the Hurt Report and subsequent NHTSA studies on fatal crashes show some absolutely baffling things, like over 20% of all fatal crashes involving unlicensed riders and almost 40% involving alcohol consumption in some way. Hell, in a shocking amount of US states, helmets are not required and every time I’m in one of those states I see people riding around on the interstate without any head protection. Absolutely terrifying and an incredibly stupid thing to do. I never ride without a full-face helmet personally.

There are plenty of ways to mitigate risk but most of the riders who die in crashes don’t do them.

Oil processing is definitely bad for the environment, but think for a moment about the scales. Just in raw materials, ignoring the massive impact of battery manufacture alone, the average motorcycle weighs less than 600 pounds. The Prius weighs about six times that. That means six times the amount of shipping, forming, refining, finishing, et cetera…

The Prius still has an internal combustion engine that burns gasoline, and requires a significant amount of rare-earth minerals for the construction of its catalytic converter. Most motorcycles now have catalytic converters, but they are smaller and thus the environment suffers less damage per vehicle.

I agree that a Prius will burn cleaner while running than probably any motorcycle – but the total amount of damage done just by being built has to be a whole lot more than almost any motorcycle and it can’t be close.

Must be something pretty modern with fuel injection!

I was very heavily generalizing; there are so many different kinds of motorcycles and they vary so widely in fuel efficiency that it’s really hard to average. Here in the US, the average new motorcycle sold is a 700-pound monster with an engine larger than 100 cubic inches of displacement. (Again, generalizing a bit, but Harley-Davidsons still make up over 4 out of every 10 new motorcycles sold here.) Harley-Davidson’s largest model, the Electra Glide Ultra Classic, gets less than 40 MPG and weighs well over 800 pounds.

My understanding is that the motorcycle/rider combination in most cases has a very poor coefficient of drag and that’s the largest issue at highway speeds.

Depends strongly on the motorcycle, however, as there are so many different kinds with varying amounts of bodywork. Some are absurdly efficient, like the Honda Grom, which routinely achieves over 100MPG.