I was helping another team at work a couple of years ago, and during the pandemic shortages they had ordered pallets of computers at a time rather than just ordering as needed like they usually did before and after the shortages. I was tasked with babysitting 5 of those laptops which had been sitting in storage for over a year while they applied updates and whatnot.

I kid you not, babysitting those 5 laptops took the entire business day to get up to date (they for whatever reason did not have any flash drives so I couldn’t simply install the latest ISO) and one of the laptops managed to delete all of the keyboard drivers from itself so I had to use the onscreen softkeyboard to attempt to fix it, and ultimately used the manufacturer restore partition to reset it and restart the update process as the cleanest solution

I also got minimal other work done that day as every step of course required some manual intervention on the laptops. I shudder to imagine the scale of lost productivity across the entire world at the hands of Microslop

Hirens Boot CD might have sufficient utilities to perform a bios update? I’ve not tried because I usually don’t bother updating the BIOS unless there’s an actual problem I’m hoping to fix

There is absolutely a stereotype of dads not being involved in the child raising process outside of “teaching the kid to play ball” or teaching the kid repair skills around the house/car.

I know at least one friend who’s husband refuses to change any diapers and generally leaves the entire child raising process to his wife. But it’s also rapidly becoming far more normal for dads to actually be involved in their kids lives and take their kids places and taking an active part in raising their kids

You joke but my youngest learned to jump from Laura Croft.

Mid-2020 my wife was playing through the Tomb Raider remakes and left the computer to go fo something and my youngest walked up and pressed the biggest button that they could reach, the space bar, then was amazed to see the button caused something to happen on screen, so they kept doing it. Then the mimicry kicked in and they started trying to copy what they saw on screen and proceeded to jump for the very first time

Dude you badly need to spend some time offline and touch some grass and talk to some new people. Go have some fun in the real world!

That line of thinking only comes from being in an echo chamber for too long

Y’know if you’re so jealous of streamers there’s nothing stopping you from downloading an app on your phone and trying it out.

Every job and every career has aspects that suck, and different people excel at handling those different types of suck. At my work I support people who do industrial sanitation. Literally the stuff you’d see on the TV show Dirty Jobs, while I sit in my cushy home office working about 6 projects at a time keeping the servers and databases happy and secure. Just about every day I have a conversation with the folks I support where they say something about how they could never do my job, and I reply with the exact same sentiment.

Hasan preaches against capitalism, but he literally runs a for profit clothing brand where he sells clothes at ridiculously high prices.

“How come you, a communist own an iPhone. Checkmate communists”

Also in the present race to the bottom if you have standards that you expect your comparatively small run of clothing to meet (such as that the clothing is made by union laborers in decent working conditions) compared to say whatever clothing is being sold in big box stores, you have to expect that it will cost more.

Now if it came out that his merch was made in a sweatshop in Bangladesh and of lousy quality that would be a completely different story

he is notorious for bragging about he spends thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, on designer brand outfits and jewelry

Buying better quality stuff can improve one’s quality of life compared to whatever’s cheapest in the constant race to the bottom that this world is going through. If you can afford to buy something nice for yourself that you like, why not?

He preaches against wealth hoarding, but again, he’s a multimillionaire who used money he earned from ads, sales, and hard earned dollars from fans to buy a $200k sports car and $3 million mansion in Hollywood.

Soooo he’s hoarding his wealth? Or he’s spending it all and flashing it around? Which is it? Also $3 million for property in Hollywood only buys you a smallish house by the rest of the country’s standards. Seriously.

Like, clearly your problem is the classic “why do you a communist own an iPhone” but at the scale of a relatively wealthy person. People can have different opinions but I don’t think it’s unfair for someone who was able to get themselves into a position where they have some wealth to spend and enjoy that wealth, especially one who actively campaigns and lobbies in the interest of the working class and against their own interests.

The difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is about a billion dollars. There’s about 24 million millionaires in the US, there’s only about 3,000 billionaires in the entire world. There’s a world of difference between being wealthy and literally having wealth that exceeds that of entire countries

People are allowed to complain about their jobs regardless of their short/medium term plans

I mean, it’s okay to complain about your job regardless of whether or not you plan on leaving it. Especially when you have what is literally many kids’ stated dream jobs, it’s kinda important to give those kids some perspective when they’re at an age that it’s easiest to shift gears into a different career

Let me get this straight, you’re saying that because some people hate their jobs, nobody is allowed to say a different job sucks? Or is it that nobody is allowed to enjoy their job?

And you’re saying that because some people are struggling financially nobody else is allowed to be doing okay financially and enjoying the fruits of their labor?

Get some perspective bro. Read the room!

Hey, Ferb, I know what we’re gonna do today!

But, if humanity stays below replacement rate, humanity goes extinct.

I don’t think this is a real risk. And if it were, it certainly won’t be anytime soon. Fewer people means fewer mouths to feed, fewer homes to build/maintain and less consumption in general, which given how the planet is struggling to continue balance with current human resource consumption, a gradual decline in human population would probably be beneficial in the long run.

To actually threaten humanity’s continued existence the number of humans would need to dwindle so low that the societial and the medical infrastructure that permits/causes the declining birth rates would completely collapse and people would naturally start having more kids again in order to keep up with the work on the farms that most people would need to work on at that scale of society

Edit: Put more susinctly, the current declining birth rates are a because of societal changes, not biological ones

My wife has one branch of her family where 4 generations occured in a 60 year period, the 5 generation photos are pretty neat, and also I’m really happy for the last generation which broke the cycle.

I knew someone who was by her own description baby-crazy as a teen and basically seeked out someone to knock her up. Hormones are wild things sometimes. Her child did not repeat the cycle fortunately

Oh I see what you’re saying! Does make me wonder how long until it cycles around again (assuming vehicle opinions do cycle around over time like fashion/design language preferences tend to)

Like I said, I got the crossover before I understood what actually gets you safely across unplowed roads and unpaved farm driveways in the winter, but I at least knew just enough that I went for a crossover and not some disgusting oversized SUV or truck like plenty of other folks around me go for.

Now that it’s been totaled (cosmetically) by hail damage it’s simply not fiscally reasonable to replace it until it’s entirely worn out so that’s just a past decision that I’m going to have to live with for the next decade or so

Part of this is because for someone in the process of obtaining citizenship in the US it’s actually much easier to legally start a business than it is to legally get a job. And with the decade or so that it can take to become a fully naturalized citizen in the US, folks have to make ends meet somehow so they’ll naturally start a business since that’s the one way they can legally make money until they get a work permit.

This is part of why there’s such a thriving restaurant scene for foreign foods across the entire US, a family will come and pool their time and money to open a small restaurant, and that will be how they survive until everyone gets work permits and eventually naturalized. There’s even a sub-industry of immigrants teaching other immigrants how to start a successful restaurant and what recipes work well for the American pallete. This is where some of the staples of Americanized Mexican and Chinese menus come from for example.

The factory window tint that’s now standard is also incredible for making getting into a parked car on a hot day so much more bearable

I recently inherited an older Toyota Sienna and it’s made me realize the current crop of 3 row SUVs and gigantic trucks is mostly sold to people who would absolutely love a minivan but just don’t know it.

• I’ve got more cargo space than any truck I pass on the road made in this century
• I can fit my entire family plus drag along multiple friends and still have space for everyone’s bags
• I can stand and walk through the interior if desired, even climbing to the far back from the front seat
• the sliding doors mean you can get in and out of the vehicle from any parking spot without a door in the way
• it’s got a turn radius so short that I can do a full U-turn without reversing on any road or parking lot
• the high seat+low nose means I can nussle up within inches of a vehicle in front of me and still see the bumper
• the engine is has enough power to be comparable to some small locomotives.

I would never have bought a minivan on account of the gas milage (~20mpg just ain’t great, and filling up the 25 gallon tank every week hurts the pocket book way more than my crossover that I got before I knew snow tires were a thing) but holy crap having this much space for people/stuff is incredible and I thoroughly enjoy playing bus/truck with it for all of my friends and family. For anyone who’s considered a truck/3-row SUV to be a requirement, they need to do themselves a favor and try out a minivan

This is part of why I was hoping the conflict in Iran would keep ballooning gas prices, we got so many small cars and creative approaches to save gas out of the 1970s oil crisis, and a new oil crisis could absolutely do the same thing again, except now a lot of that technology that companies were experimenting with in the 70s is far more viable, so just that small push of a couple of years of oil crisis (honestly just needs to be >$4/gallon from what I’ve seen) could easily push oversized vehicles off a cliff and usher in the bike revolution that New York, London and Paris have been experiencing across the entire US