Okay so Emperor Shaddam gave the fifedom of Arrakis to House Atraides after… okay so the houses all make up the Landsraad which was established right after the Butlerian Jih- Okay see the Butlerian Jihad was a war waged between the humans and the thinking machines and the titons- Ok, but before that humans were enslaved by…

That sounds like exactly the sort of thing therapy is for. I’m no kind of expert, but it’s very likely there’s a lot of deeper things keeping you from developing achieving the kind of skills you’re wanting. And it sounds very much like it’s a problem in your life that’s causing you a lot of anxiety and pain. I think if there’s any way you can do talk therapy, that’s the place to start.

Wow. Huge topic. And it depends on a ton of things. And I definitely don’t feel like I’ve got it all figured out myself.

If you’re young and just for the first time having to manage your own affairs rather than depend on parents to help with that, then self-help kind of stuff might well be a fine place to start. (Just avoid Jordan Peterson.) If you’re older and feel like you’ve had the time needed to develop those skills and still don’t have them, it’s likely there’s something deeper going on that might benefit from therapy.

I personally cared for my ailing grandmother for a long time. And that shit’s hard work, and takes a lot of time. In the process, I let a lot of things go by the wayside like yardwork, home repair, and organization. Now that she has passed, I find myself with a lot of remedial work to catch up on. I feel like I’m making progress. It’s frustrating and slow, but it is progressing and that’s the important part.

Send help.

Every time you see a Grimreaper thread, I want you all to remember…

I can’t imagine you’re the only one in this situation. If I were in your shoes, I’d search for similar stories online and see if I could get a sense of how friendly the company is to swapping OSs. For some companies, changing the OS is a complete deal breaker. Other companies are pretty willing to assume the issue was indeed strictly hardware and had nothing to do with changing the OS, and thus will go ahead and do the repair.

If you find that company is more like the former, install Windows. If not, just start the warranty repair process.

“The country”. U.S.A.? The respondent’s country (whichever that might happen to be)?

Also, presidents mostly don’t have complete dictatorial power… the current president of the U.S. notwithstanding, but do you mean for respondents to give answers that a president could realistically make happen, or is the spirit of your question more about what respondents would like to see changed by someone with dictatorial power?

Depends how he responds now that that article came out, I’d say.

Doubtful, unfortunately. FUTO seems like the sort of narcissistic assholes who won’t be swayed in any way, shape, or form

There’s no third option between FOSS and proprietary (unless there are licenses that match the Free Software definition but not the Open Source definition or vice versa, I suppose, but I’m not aware of any). All software that is not FOSS is proprietary by definition, whether the source is available or not. It’s not “disingenuous” to call FUTO software proprietary. It’s simply factual.

They’re openly disdainful of all things Open Source and OSI, and their software is not Open Source.

They’re a fully for-profit company using consumer rights kind of rhetoric to manipulate people in service to FUTO’s own pocketbook. Don’t fall for their use of the .org tld or promises to “never abuse customers”.

I’ve written many times about what assholes FUTO is. I’m fully convinced they’re way more part of the problem than part of the solution and they’re not to be trusted.

They’ve soured me on Rossman. Back when he was doing coverage of things like the court cases around right to repair and tractors and stuff, I watched a few videos of his and thought he was awesome. And then he got involved with FUTO and started billing Grayjay as “Open Source” and I’ve gotten sufficiently disillusioned with FUTO that I haven’t followed Rossman at all. I’ve got coworkers changing their avatars to Clippy and shit, and I believe their hearts are in the right place, but I can’t in good conscience really get behind anything or anyone associated with FUTO.

Edit: Oh. I honesty didn’t even see this OP was a link to an article. Lol. Now I’m very interested to go read that article.

Edit 2: Shite. I’ve now read the article. I knew FUTO was assholes in a lot of different ways, but now I know how deeply, completely irredeemable they really are.

Mechanical keyboards have several (clicky/thocky/tactile/linear/etc switches, Cherry MX Browns, etc), but if I had to choose one, maybe ortholinear vs staggered.

A picture will probably illustrate it best:

Ortholinear evangelists contend that the staggered layout was invented for mechanical typewriters exclusively to reduce the incidence of typebar collisions and is detrimental to optimal ergonomics. I, as someone who prefers staggered keyboards, just don’t want to be ruined for the majority of keyboards out there. (If my muscle memory “learns” that “m” is “here” because I use an ortholinear keyboard at home, I’m worried it’ll be awkward to use a standard keyboard on a laptop or whatever and I’ll be fat-fingering keys all over the place.) I might switch sides someday. Who knows. But for now, I’ll stick with staggered.

I’m conflicted. I prided myself as a kid on having exclusively on-brand LEGOs and always considered Megablox and such inferior in quality, aesthetic, “cool factor”, etc.

But on the other hand:

Plus I’m into 3D printing and like the “stick it to the man” aspect of 3D printing that might reduce people’s dependence on serving some company’s profit motive for things like shoes (Nike, etc), replacement parts (like parts for my washing machine, improving repairability), figurines (D&D miniatures, for instance), and, indeed, toys like LEGO-compatible pieces.

Maybe I should go 3D print me some Bionicles.

I do that but not because of empathy or karma or anything. I just don’t want bug guts smeared across my wall.

So “yes”, then.

billionaires would suffer extreme depression and paranoia until they downgrade to millionaire status

I think that’s kindof already a thing. Like, do billionaires as a demographic come across as not depressed and paranoid to you?

Trump famously eats McDonalds so much largely due to paranoia about being poisoned. (Hitler had similar anxiety delusions about being poisoned.) Musk is so insecure about himself that he pays people to play video games good so he can trick everyone into thinking he’s a good gamer.

There’s not all that much more to tell, really. And mind you it was 9 years ago. And it’s far from the only “wild” experience I’ve had that changed my perceptions.

Normally, particularly when it’s really dark, I have a lot of little blotches of a lighter, gray shade that fade and shift constantly across my whole field of vision. Until it abated temporarily, I wouldn’t have thought it possible for it to abate. But when it did, I got to experience a more potent experience of “darkness” than I had before probably ever. But it wasn’t just darkness that was amplified. My vision definitely felt “clearer” of… the ordinary sorts of visual artifacts I see pretty much all of the time.

It was a very calming and pleasant experience for sure. Definitely the sort of thing I wish could be the case all the time.

This has only happened to me once. It came on while I was meditating (so that may not particularly qualify as “spontaneous”, but anyway) and lasted until I fell asleep maybe an hour later. By morning, my vision was “normal” again.

You mentioned “good and bad.” I don’t think there was any part of that experience itself that I found “bad”, challenging, difficult, unpleasant, etc. Though that experience was had in a period of my life when I was regularly meditating and practicing mindfulness. Before that period of my life, I engaged a lot in fantasy and found it very fulfilling. But I feel like during that meditation phase of my life, I lost my taste for it, and I feel like I lost something of value. Fantasy has returned to me somewhat slowly since, but it’s still not as fulfilling as it was before. So if there’s a “bad”, it’s not particularly about that one experience about which we’re talking as it is about arguably-bad side effects of meditation/mindfulness.

I’m not saying my experience was (or wasn’t) the same as the experience you’ve had. I don’t disbelieve your account, though. And it wouldn’t surprise me if the same sort of experience I had might sometimes be experienced spontaneously by some individuals.

Anyone who mentions, acknowledges, or even doesn’t sufficiently attempt to ignore/deny my existence or influence in the world, anything they eat tastes and feels like eating raw, unseasoned egg whites for a month. And I’ll put knowledge of that fact in everyone’s minds.

Then I can do whatever I want to annoy the fuck out of people and they have to ignore me. Wet Willie Elon Musk in public while looking him right in the eye. Replace the audio at a Kid Rock concert with Baby Shark for the whole show and everyone has to pretend it was a typical Kid Rock concert. Draw dicks all over Trump’s face with a sharpie during a presidential address on live, national TV. Find every HOA president and kill grass in their front yard in the shape of Bevis and Butthead.

I wouldn’t be unreasonable. A wry, approving smile here. Stopping and reading an obscene message I planted before realizing it was me. Stuff like that gets a pass. I might even turn a blind eye to an involuntary case of the giggles brought on by my hijinks, particularly if it helps the vibe. Also, anyone under 15 is exempt from the whole egg whites thing and can laugh their asses off and point with impunity.

I’ve had some wild experiences for sure. Total loss of visual snow. Synesthesia. Major time distortions. Stuff like that. (Meditation is a hell of a drug. For realz.) Particularly during a period of time about 9 years ago.

Username checks out.