Those made 1000x more sense.

Oh God, they can’t even do prepping right any more.

No, they live off eating paper. Crunchy little rectangles with pictures of royalty on them.

cIvIliAn tArGeTs dOn’T CoUn’T!!!

Seriously, why won’t anybody play nice with us? It’s a mystery…

The simple math is, for almost every forced-laborer “blocked”(real-speak: denied entry, or deported upol discoveryd…), China will bring-in a CCP shill. If the forced-laborer isn’t qualified to do the work, then why try to smuggle them in? … but are only those qualified to do the work “worthy” of asylum? Once you’ve ensured they get paid appropriately(by China…) and treated with respect, they are no longer forced-labor…

… but yeah, x workers are going to be required to do the work. If a portion of them are “accidentally” liberated from hellish conditions back home, and their oppressors jailed, how is that not a win?

Save some (more)Uyghurs and arrest some human traffickers, versus force China to bring-in only spies and shills, because the best way to solve a problem is to deal with oppressors so long as they agree to leave their worst-off victims back home.

Yes, my way you end up with more bodies, and resources to house and feed imprissoned traffickers, but that’s why you send China the bill. It could ultimately be cheaper for Canada to do the right thing.

… or, you know, grant them asylum, and arrest individuals involved in the human trafficking of these people until China stops sending human traffickers?

Its amazing to think the UAE and/or Oman went with opposing Iran rather than trying to get in on this, vs appeasing a genocidal ethno-state neighbor and a super-powered toddler-state on the opposite site of the planet.

You don’t have to be in the wreck to end-up “involved with” the wreck. Even if you’re not decent enough to stick-around to assist with the fall-out or give a witness-statement, there’s always the physical and time barrier of the wreck itself and the ensuing wait for emergency services, police, or even just a tow-truck.

What in God’s Green Earth are you talking about, “windows-or-nothing people”? Employers? Schools? Told a lot of them to kick dirt, but with them owning the buildings, that basically amounted to me walking away.

One of my favorite things about my current employer is that the “Windows” part doesn’t matter -it just happens to be the only thing the bespoke software suites we use will run-on, and the entire shift is spent in those applications anyways. I’ve almost got my boss convinced to ditch Acrobat Reader though, or rather, its constant demands to be allowed to present AI Summaries of confidential documents is doing the convincing for me.

The simple fact is, all four of my children can generally get done what they want/need to in Windows, Mac, Chrome, Android or IOS, including customization or “esoteric” stuff, and get on with their lives, without coming to me pretending there aren’t a million tutorials on Youtube for whatever and that they shouldn’t even have to check there first. Only one of them has shown the same aptitude, willingness, patience, what-have-you, for Linux. Another is just too young to tell where she’ll go with all that.

I meet my users and use-cases where they are and presume a heterogenous network/device environment. That becomes and stays true the moment you introduce a game console, a printer, a tablet, phone and/or a router of all things.

I like Linux, love it and can’t wait to get back to using it more in fact, but using only Linux isn’t going to leave me with any way to relate to or convince people who are sceptical and comfortable with another OS they are already comfortable with, and forcing it into the present state of my life is going to demand time I don’t have available for the next year or so, but it was my daily driver for years and will be again.

Meanwhile, I’m counting down a shorter-every-day fuse for when the one boy wants an Amiga or roll-your-own-“retro” device of some sort to go with his RaspberryPi, OrangePi, plus various consoles and old phones he’s torn-down to the compotenent leven and built back up(successfully … err … to a surprising degree anyways), and his brother just laid claim to my (kickstarter-era)Snapmaker A350 CNC/Laser/3D Printer.

Some people still want to feel like Windows is something they own, like back when it was something you installed on-top-of DOS. Taming the hostile mess its become is still rarely worse than de-bloating a new OEM PC ever was, and if you use your PC rarely-enough, there’s hassle aspects that blur into near-parity versus Linux(updates, anyone?)

… share a PC with others, and just keeping Open-Shell(plus PowerToys and/or StartAllBack, or sometimes Rainmeter for a laugh) on one’s profile looks sufficient, versus dual-booting or whatever. Personally, my Laptop can go un-used(by me, anyways) for months and months, and letting my family use it helps keep it up-dated and let’s me know if problems arrise before I run face-first into them in a moment when I just need the thing to work.

I’m looking-forward to each of my kids having their own capable laptops(just ONE more …), but until then, Windows updates are stupid-prone to breaking dual-boot, only one of my kids likes/uses Linux half-so-much as I do, and even he is in more of the tweak-it-until-it-breaks-and-start-over dabbler stage, so I let him keep to his own laptop and a pile of old used ones(and consoles…) that are older than he is. 99% of what I would use it for in the mean-time, I just use my phone.

I knew eBay fucked-up, but $55 billion? That’s couch-change to a lot of businesses with much worse brand-recognition. At least their turn-key operation isn’t over-valued by orders of magnitude…

Like Free-to-Play games and Casinos, they “make their real money” on whales. Go step foot in a Best-Buy; 95% of the time, the employee-to-customer-ratio is about 5-to-1, or worse.

To be clear, I think basing one’s business on that concept is delusional at-best, but its what a “profitable” retail chain has looked-like to share-holders for at least the last 30 years.

Mounting a successful invasion of a sovereign nation 101: Give the saner nations of the world the longest heads-up possible, so they can help your intended victim prepare.

Crazy to game on anything you trust with important data in general. Same for internet browsing-in-general though. Good Luck.

This is pretty much me. More or less with consoles as-well.

Between this, and Macron towing the Trump line on Hormuz, I hope he remembers to mock them for constant surrender in his next rant. Y’all invented the guillotine, and now worship the oppressors. Gross.

That special definition of “My country” where he means land he hasn’t even visitted in decades, if ever, but thinks he owns, and magically its all the people living there who have no rights to it.

They’ll toss them as soon as it returns “CITIZEN” on a brown-person they “just KNOW” is in the country illegally…

I live in the midwestern US. There you go assuming things again. Although, considering how much sanity and common-sense have anything to do with the decision-making of the powers-that-be in this brave, beautiful land, you’ve got me wondering if we’re neighbors, or you could be, idk, my mayor?

That said, the traffic light situation in my town seems insane at times, but if I visit the nearest larger cities in any cardinal direction, the streets and traffic alone make me glad to come back home, so I guess you can keep knocking it out of the park and throwing facts of negligible-relavence to me in this thread, Mr. Mayor from Aussie-land.

Again, making assumptions about what every light will be like. Different places installed different things at different times. Sensors fail. Programming gets updated and introduces errors. My city has a dozen or-so painted cross-walks at intersections that work as I’ve described previously, and without any buttons for pedestrians to push to make the light change; Those lights will NEVER change for a pedestrian at night. The “exceptions” laws stay on the books for many different reasons, reasons that will likely never go-away.

Literally no-one here is arguing against “bike holding areas”(?), but if you want to argue there should never be exceptions, exceptions made to accomodate bikes and pedestrians of all things, you’re gonna have a bad time.