• 0 Posts
  • 444 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 4th, 2023

help-circle



  • It’s party marketing, yes, but it’s also Quality of Life features. Windows either has a setting you can find by farting around in the settings or it doesn’t work. Linux can have every setting, but most of them need CLI work, research, and the wherewithal to unfuck whatever you fucked.

    If CLIs could be listed, explained, and parametrized in a simple GUI, it would make learning them 10x easier. More default scripts for unfucking things would also help (like Window’s old troubleshooting wizards). More status checking and better error messages, so one can tell when something is broken without manually inspecting every module.

    It’s gotten much better, and will certainly improve by necessity if more average users pick Linux up, but it’s a step that has to be taken before Linux sees a major marketshare, regardless of marketing.



  • I think one of the benefits of Land Value Tax is that an empty lot costs as much as a highrise or factory. It heavily disincentivizes leaving a property undeveloped or poorly developed, like with parking lots or abandoned buildings.

    That being said, it would also put pressure on underdeveloped properties, like your home on a street with rising property values. Some limitations would almost certainly be necessary.

    This could also be solved with better zoning, but most of our social problems could be fixed with better governance of some kind. Land Value Tax is one of the proposed methods that would need less fixes to make work and (hopefully) be harder to co-opt for wealth extraction.

    I’d accept trying anything though, instead of more tax cuts and funding cuts.




  • So to be fair, I’ve read the original comic, and it probably was just focusing on the negative aspects of airshows.

    What a lot of people get from this (including me) is the absurdity of military shows. Air shows are less ridiculous because planes are capable of some incredible things, but it’s still unsettling. Like gun shows or parades of duty.

    We have advanced many of our societies to such a point that we might be able to do away with weapon worship entirely, so I think it’s sensible to be uncomfortable with venerating the trappings of dictators and despots.

    I kind of agree that militaries are still necessary, but there’s a big difference between an unfortunate but necessary thing and a celebrated thing.

    The difference between an F-15 and an angle grider is that the F-15 is intended to hurt people. Pulling an angle grinder out of your coat isn’t as intimidating as pulling out a knife, even if the angle grinder could do more damage. Yet both angle grinders and most knives are tools used to create. An F-15 can only destroy. It can’t carry passengers, can’t fight fires, can’t deliver supplies, can’t advance science, at best it can do acrobatics while being incredibly expensive. It’s nothing more than a weapon.

    To be entirely fair, even without military aircraft the U.S. would meddle in international affairs. The air force doesn’t specifically enable these killings or infrastructure damage. It is however a popular and representative method of international war, and I don’t think that’s something to celebrate.


  • Most people don’t like living near even civilian airports. Active duty flights would’ve usually happened nearer to the front, and modern flights often happen from aircraft carriers anyway.

    Much more common for people to hear are shows of force, like the States do for holidays, airshows, and large sports games.

    The comic is making fun of the fact that an airshow idolizes machines of war. Not all airshows focus on military craft, but most of them do, often being held at military airbases.

    As cool as they are, it’s good to remember that those machines are instruments of death, and often used against people of no immediate threat. Regardless of the necessity, I don’t think that’s something to cheer for.







  • Well yes, that makes sense and all, but it’s not nearly as fun as saying mojo is directly controlled by heart health. Or that cancer causes cell phones, or that people named Killian cause air bag recalls. They’re obviously wrong and ridiculous, and that’s funny.