I guess it probably depends on where you’re going. I went to the UK earlier this year, and my experience was mostly painless. Landed in Manchester, and they basically had self-checkout customs. I scanned my passport and looked at a camera once, and that was it. It was actually more of a hassle and more invasive coming back home and getting back into the country.
I just do Auctex instead of orgmode, but this is the way.
Zotero is awesome, and I’d also recommend the browser extension with an account. Account is free, but it’ll let you save any web sources with all the metadata you need and sync it to the main program.
Zotero in combination with LaTeX and Biber have saved me so much time. Especially when I had a crazy professor who would make last minute changes to style requirements. I remember we had a paper to write that they initially said “Just cite with whatever format you want, it’s fine as long as they info is there.” Cool, write my ten pages or whatever with footnotes containing short citations and full citations available in the bibliography at the end. The night before the paper was due, “Actually, I need all papers to use APA citations or you’ll be docked points.”. No problem, just change my citation style at the top of my LaTeX doc and tell it to reprocess the paper, all the citations fixed in about 5 seconds, without even needing to learn the ins and outs of APA formatting.
Yeah, my experience has been that a lot of countries whose residents tell me racism is an American problem and we should stop trying to project it onto other societies happen to live in countries with huge problems with it that just aren’t explicitly spoken about in the same terms.
I had a Brazilian friend tell me race is not all that important in Brazil and that he’s tired of Americans assuming it is. I periodically have to ask him, “Do you read Brazilian news, bro?” and send some links that make it blatantly obvious that racism is alive and well down there.
You also just get people who have bought into very pervasive attitudes in countries that justify/explain away racism when it’s encountered.
The Shin Megami Tensei games have some replayability between multiple routes, NG+ and coming up with the perfect team. Grandia is just one of the first jrpgs I really got in to, and I still love the characters today.
Even cash breaks down pretty quickly in a hypothetical situation where you have something similar occur that lasts for an extended period. When banks’ systems are impacted, how do I get more cash from my account with them when whatever amount I had when the system went down runs out? I haven’t had a physical passbook for an account in a good 20 years.
I would argue the main benefits are to teach people how to effectively switch registers as the context demands, and to expose them to a range of language they likely wouldn’t ordinarily encounter in their daily lives. English teachers could do to lose the judgmental aspect of “This is the one true way to speak English, the way you talk amongst yourselves is wrong and you need do stop,” but there’s a definite value in teaching students, “This is a way to write/speak clearly and effectively that will be understood by quite nearly every other educated English speaker you might encounter.”
As far as exposure to a broader range of language than one normally encounters in their life, I saw the importance of this first hand with many of my coworkers who were heritage speakers of Spanish. It’s not my native language, but it was my primary work language for a good 5 years, and I wound up getting put on interpretation duties for our safety meetings over a native speaker with pretty limited formal education in Spanish. For topics to do with daily life, family, friends, etc, this guy would be able to speak much more naturally than I could. I might not say something that was exactly wrong, but perhaps I would be too formal or make odd word choices he wouldn’t. The problem was, he completely lacked any technical and professional vocabulary, and had no concept of what words/phrases were unique to his own country and what alternatives might be more widely understood.
We would have safety meetings once a night, and they would have topics like, “When a forklift has its forks in the air, don’t walk beneath it, as hydraulic failure could lead to injury or death.”. He translated that one night as “Cuando la vaina del pasillo tiene esa vaina de en frente en el aire, no pasen por debajo de la vaina. Es peligroso.” Basically “When the thing in the hall has the thing in front in the air, don’t walk under the thing. It’s dangerous.” Best case, he might say “El forlift,” but he would never land on “el montacargas,” or even think to look it up. Some of his wilder attempts at interpretation didn’t work for anyone, and the ones where he just used a Spanglish version of technical terms only worked for other coworkers who already knew at least a bit of English, and probably didn’t really need the translation that much to begin with. Unfortunately, we had a fair number of employees who were monolingual Spanish speakers that he found himself just completely unable to communicate with effectively.
Granted, not everyone takes full advantage of it, but English classes do (or at least should) expose you to a broad range of the language, as it’s used in various contexts and forms, while also furnishing students with the ability to expand upon that and adapt to new contexts on their own in the future. Failure to do so leaves students with stunted linguistic and communicative abilities.
Everyone I’ve come across from NZ says it like igg, so there’s that one, too. Aussies have a weird vowel to it that I hear at times, too.
My first OS was whatever ran on a Commodore 64. I guess the Commodore kernel and Basic?
My first distro was whatever version of Fedora was current in the fall of 2008. I’d gone to university that year and my laptop crapped out. Couldn’t afford a legit Windows license at the time to replace it, and I’m pretty sure I just remembered that Red Hat was a thing and found Fedora that way. One thumb drive and 16 years later, still using linux, so I guess that was about the only good thing to come from my abortive first attempt at higher education.
the will to learn about the topic
I think this is the bigger issue, to be honest. Like your example of environmental variables, it’s not a complicated concept, but when a guide says to set the variable for Editor rather than a context menu asking you to choose the default program to open this type of file in the future, all of a sudden, people lose their minds about how complicated it is.
Comparing uncloging -manually pushing and pull a bar- or chaning a light -turn left, change, then right- or a breaker -literally just pulling a tab up- are WAY simpler actions. Yes, running apt upgrade is easy, but how you know is all well? That it work? + if I run apt update everyday I see almost no diference in my system, why should I even do something like that
These examples don’t make sense to me as a point against using the terminal, especially since GUI package managers are a thing these days. Many upgrades are under the hood, so to speak, and don’t produce visible changes for most users, and this applies just as much to other operating systems as it does to Linux. When Windows finishes upgrading and reboots, or Chrome tells a user updates are available, and they restart it, how do they know all is good? For the most part, they take it as a given that all is good as long as there’s no new, undesired behavior that starts after the upgrade.
Just because I haven’t been exploited by a security vulnerability or encountered a particular bug is no reason to remain on a version of my OS or programs that is still liable to either of them. That’s just a bizarre argument against staying up to date.
It’s pretty unreasonable to expect people to know all the intricacies of their OS unless it’s their job, but I do think people could stand to treat their computer less like an unknowable magic box when they need to work with it and take a few minutes to try any basic troubleshooting at all. An example of the sort of thing I’m talking about, last year, my fan stopped working nearly as well and began making crazy amounts of noise. Could I explain to you how the motor in my fan works? Absolutely not. But I unplugged it, looked up how to disassemble it and got out my screwdrivers and opened it up to see if there was anything that I could see wrong with it. Turns out there was a lot of hair wrapped around a shaft and the base of the blades that built up over the years I’ve had it, and removing that and reassembling it was all it took to get it working fine again.
Plenty of people don’t want to put in even that small amount of time and effort to understand things when it comes to computers, which is also a valid choice of its own, but they tend to annoy me when they attribute being unable to do something to the system being too complicated to understand/use, rather than owning their decision to focus their time and energy elsewhere. There are absolutely complex programs that are not accessible for non-tech people on Linux or the BSDs, but the same could be said for Windows and Mac. In the case of the other two, people just choose the option that works for them, but with Linux, they decide ahead of time that Linux is tough and complicated and don’t even try. It could be something as simple as they want to install Debian and need non-free firmware to use their wireless card, there are people who will declare this to complicated to understand and discard the idea of using an OS entirely over a question that can be resolved in less than 5 minutes with a quick search and nano, all because “Oh, I’m not a computer person, it says terminal.”
You can set general options for all compilations in /etc/makepkg.conf, and package specific options would probably be best handled by just downloading a PKGBUILD for the package in question and editing it to include the option you want to enable. makepkg won’t ask you about options by default when building something, but it’s not that complicated to edit the PKGBUILD prior to calling makepkg.
It’s a rolling release with minimal changes to packages from upstream, and generally the latest versions of available software in the repos. I guess you could go through and rebuild the whole system from source if you were determined to, but a quick look at the ABS wiki page doesn’t make it seem like it’s set up to make doing so all that easy. For other software not in the repos, the AUR makes it easy enough to build them from source, though there’s often binary options available as well. The base install is pretty simple, so you can build upon it as you’d like if you really want to go wild on a minimal, highly customized system. Or you can go wild installing what you’d like and trying all the things.
When your justification is an uncertain investment, it isn’t that hard of a concept to realize you’re wrong. You’re literally the only person I’ve ever seen advocating for the lump sum payment as the financialyl sound move when it quite nearly halves 100% sure income.
Inflation is also much less of a concern when you’re talking about literal millions of dollars, unless you’re talking about the Zimbabwe national lotto. If you’re living in a way that your ability to live with $15,000,000/year towards the end of a 30-year annuity payout has materially changed, you have bigger issues than inflation going on.
the same reason that you’re better off taking the lump sum vs the 30 year pay out if you win the lottery.
money today that i can use today is worth more than money tomorrow.
You might be theoretically better off in an ideal outcome, but I’m pretty sure taking the 30 year payout is the generally recommended option. If I were to win the Mega Millions at the current level, I would need to make investments that paid $96,244,081 over 30 years just to equal the tax savings of taking the annuity versus the lump sum payment. That works out to a 3.1% return on the initial lump sum, every year, 30 years straight. Granted, this isn’t exactly impossible, but it does require a few caveats. For example, this assumes you don’t actually spend any of that money, investing 100% of it and never having a bad year. Of course, the average lotto winner is not exactly known for their great ability to invest their money. Meanwhile, there’s nothing preventing the person taking the 30-year annuity from investing a portion of their annual payouts, which are guaranteed, while returns on investments are explicitly not guaranteed.
A guaranteed $96,244,081 return is a better investment than a possible $200,000,000 that’s continent on absolutely nothing going wrong for the next 30 years, but the sort of people who run companies seem to forget about this these days.
Especially if you aren’t financially that well off or on a good career track, I think it’s really appealing just for the stability it affords. My current landlord has been a pretty good guy for us, but if I owned my apartment rather than renting, I wouldn’t have to worry that I’ll suddenly need to pay a ton more money if he dies and his kids decide to jack up the rent, or worse, having to uproot my life entirely and move out because of someone else’s whims.
If you read the article, it seems to actually be paramedics administering the medications in every case mentioned. The cops are still being shitty by using dangerous restraint holds on people, along with often encouraging EMTs to give sedatives in cases where the only justification is the convenience of the cops, but I didn’t see them mention any cases of cops actually being the ones sedating people in it.
If you’re going to say Hamas’ attack was an attempt to draw the US into a war, I think that falls a bit flat. When was the last time the US did anything beyond provide the same sort of aid it currently gives Israel? Especially in light of Iran not giving into Israel’s provocation to attempt kick up a regional conflict that would draw the US in, I think this accusations is lacking.
If they wanted to draw the US into the conflict, why would they just push for one large attack and then just let Israel steamroll Palestinian territories while demonstrating they can get on with things just fine without the US doing anything but provide the same sort of weapons aid they always have? Why not take the bait with the most recent provocation?
Besides, even Israeli publications admit that it has been Israeli policy to prop up Hamas, so this smacks even more of propaganda efforts to distract from Israel’s culpability in creating this situation.
Yes, Iran has provided backing to many of these sorts of groups, but they’re hardly unique in this in the region. Why is trying to kick up a regional conflict when Iran does this, but Israel gets a pass on buying oil from ISIS and aggravating the situation there? Heck, Israel’s past actions in Lebanon helped kick off the founding of Hezbollah when they overstepped what they could get away with under the pretense of chasing Palestinian forces over the border.
The truth is necessary to arrive at a sound opinion, and Iran are no angels, but there’s far too much handwaving away of Israel’s role in creating the current situation while demonizing Iran with exaggerated capabilities.
Which Iranian attack is this that’s supposed to have started a war to drag in the US? Their most recent attack on Israeli targets was in response to Israel attacking them in a third country, and Israel has been trying to provoke them into a response that would kick off a war the US would get involved with to draw attention from their ongoing genocide in Gaza.
They may be idealists that don’t reflect a use case I think is reasonable to expect of the average user, but I would also say that it’s very important to have them there, constantly agitating for more and better. They certainly don’t manage to land on achieving all their goals, but they also prevent a more compromising, “I just need to use my stuff now, not in 10 years when you figure out a FOSS implementation” stance from being used to slowly bring even more things further away from FOSS principles in the name of pragmatism.