My worry isn’t that we will have a rational war. War isn’t rational to begin with.

My worry is that we will have an irrational war. All it takes is a button push to end the world.

Going with the spirit of the question, not the text (I don’t really think we are forced to pay for “extra” things, it’s all choice):

But one area I cannot comprehend is people buying cars on finance only to keep up with others who buy cars on finance.

It’s different if you’re away from family though. Oil rig workers, navy folk, logistics etc. When it’s just you, running that kind of lifestyle is doable (speaking from experience). But good luck being a human/parent next to that commitment…

6 hrs on average I’d say.

Would love 8 hr average. Feel a completely different person on 8 hrs.

We have four kids (4, 6, 15, 18) all still at home, so once the little ones are in bed, there’s lunch boxes and teenage dramas to sort out, plus getting some time with my wife and some time in the man cave. It’s easily past midnight every night before all needs are seen to, often gets closer to 1am.

Unfortunately my job has a quarterly cycle which destroys 4 weeks every quarter; during that time I get less, probably 4-5 hrs. Brutal. But hey, everyone’s fed, warm, healthy and happy - that is what parenting is about; paying back what your parents put into you.

The world is definitely worse for younger people. I’m raising four kids and I weep for them.

Smart phones and social media have a LOT to answer for. I know that won’t necessarily be a popular opinion but that’s where I find the root of the problem. Well, that and FPTP election systems.

I’m still rocking a license from early 2000s

Fastmail. Getting better and better, profitable and charging for services.

Posthaven. Not getting better and better but started good and staying good. Profitable and charging for services.

Unraid. Getting better and better. Not cheap, but a lot simpler to operate than TrueNAS for day to day stuff.

Kickstarter. Yes they’re a virtual monopoly but so many awesome things I’ve joined through it (though fuck you Eve/Dough for roping me into your shitty monitor which never really worked).

Virpil controllers. Rock solid, made by fanatics and rightly loved by fans. Cannot speak highly enough about their hardware (though their attitude to customer service is … Eastern European).

Affinity products. They might be cresting though and about to roll steeply downhill towards enshittification valley. But I still love them for now.

Linux. What’s not to love.

Lemmy. In fact so so many open source products. Honestly, it’s hard to grasp the quality.

And in the darkness bind them?

The western economy is a boom and bust cycle, most often driven by US loosening of economic controls. I’m sure the Chinese property bubble will burst too and then we have to deal with that one too.

How I long for social democratic, Nordic style government everywhere.

Setting up a fully automated system to download, track and organise Linux distributions onto a NAS under the stairs. I used to subscribe to a bunch of services that would provide access to all sorts of Linux distributions for a flat monthly fee, but I realised that I often was only really interested in one or two specific Linux distribution so I really didn’t need to pay for these services.

Now I just download the Linux distributions that I actually want to install. It also prevents my kids from endlessly installing different Linux distributions. Not really a productive use of time.

Congrats, you managed to turn this conversation into a socialism vs fascism conversation. It wasn’t easy but you spotted an opportunity and you took it. Now we can all talk about your favourite topic!

Of course not speaking for experience. I’ve personally never broken the law.

But often when companies listed their contact information they’d have a phone line and a fax number. If those numbers were near each other, you could pretty much guarantee that there would be a phone number somewhere in that sequence, or just past it, that would let you dial into their network, often weakly guarded with default password on common user names.

While it could take a little while, I’m aware of people collecting company phone numbers and war dialling overnight to find the network service number. Once you spoke to a modem it would give you a telnet connection and there was hardly ever any form of rate control. The worst I’ve hear about was getting chucked off after three attempts. But you could just dial up again.

I’ve heard of many, many company secrets being found that way.

I actually do think I’ve invented a data structure for interleaving multiple streams in a single file in a really efficient way. I can’t find something that looks like it, and it seems obviously faster and more logical than anything else I’ve seen. It’s the level below B-trees so not optimised for least amount of lookups within a record table, nor would it be efficient for adding records in a middle of the stream, but for treating data streams like files (append, shrink) I do think it’s significantly more efficient than what else I can find. One of these days I really should submit a paper and see what reviewers say.

And you can direct traffic with a high viz vest.

Yes! Yeeeesss!

Let the distribution flame wars begin. Strike Zorin down with all your heart and forget that it is Linux and a move away from Windows.

Let the snake eat its own tail!!

I actually managed to come off it completely. Even though Lemmy is 10000x smaller, it still scratches the same itch for me.

I actually do. For some reason my children are fascinated where it all goes, so we’ve seems lots of videos on plumbing, in house and on the street. They’re absolutely bowled over by how it all works and it’s made me appreciate it so much more.

It’s also an enormous hygiene booster; running water, waste management etc. If you have a working water system in your neighbourhood you’re blessed. It’s one of those things Stone Age people would barely believe was real.

Which reminds me of a comment I read on Lemmy not too long ago - someone was wishing for a robot to handle the laundry. And I was like: “What do you think a washing machine is?!”

Product management.

All of them.

If there was a way to enable “see verified accounts only”, and “verified” actually meant using a system of legal identity verification in each territory, I would.

By how accounts talk on social networks, I struggle to see more than 5% actually coming from real people. The alternative, that people really are this uneducated, fooled, mean and angry, is just too horrible to bear. I have to believe it’s discord bots destroying our democracy, not actual people. It is, right? Right?!

Ah right - oh well, however it’s achieved I don’t have see every post in my feed turn into a discussion with two sharply defined poles: Nazis and communism.