I work in individual support under the NDIS in Australia. The NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) is a system that disabled people can access to fund various needs not covered by our medical system. I help one client who has had a stroke with eating and massage, another client with woodworking and metalworking, another with cleaning and organising their house, and really anything else they need.

It is really flexible and allows us to meet their needs, not what someone else thinks their needs must be.

I have tried both and a bunch of others with a laptop with nVidia and Intel and have had a range of experiences.

Anything Ubuntu based worked out of the box but any significant deviation from the exact current standard made things less stable. Changing WM/DE was not really possible and troubleshooting was opaque. Snap was also a nightmare of broken packages and bad update processes.

Manjaro looked really nice and had that lovely Arch flavour, but it is not really Arch, more Arch adjacent. Lots of things work similarly but lots of things break in bad ways. They have had numerous issues with security, bad updates, and general poor practice.

Pop is cool, I like it, but just not a good fit for me. Cosmic is a great environment but I like to tinker too much and while the team is great and do good work it is just not the same kind of defaults I like.

EndeavourOS is my current pick. It is Arch with sane defaults. It comes prebuilt with a DE configured, backups using BTRFS snapshots, a handy updater and package management config, some cool apps built in, and it is very performant. The guides for hardware video acceleration worked first time for me which has never happened before, normally that is a major pain and takes a few days to get sorted on a fresh install. Graphics performance is awesome, same with built in OOM protection. That said, make sure you have enough RAM. I had 8gb in my laptop and ended upgrading to 32gb after a number of failed builds and messing around with swap to get things to finish. If you have less than 16gb RAM I would recommend upgrading.

Whatever you choose, I would recommend trying a few things before settling down. The right fit is right for today and may change, so try things again in the future if you feel uncomfortable. Also do what works for you, not for anyone else. If you don’t like Arch you are not obligated to use it, same with Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, etc. Keep the fun of it and play around, maybe just boot up a few live environments and see if something tickles you. I hear good things about Hannah Montana Linux.

Indeed, it was a really clear case of election interference through the falsification of business records. It is a good result and now we just have to wait and see how people react. Will he beat Biden in the election? Will he be clearly rejected? I hope things end with him not being in office, but no matter what happens he cannot pardon himself for state crimes and if he wins the election and New York sentences him to prison time then there will be a novel set of issues to resolve from there. Ideally he loses, is sentenced to prison, and spends the remainder of his life offline.

To be fair, it would only have taken one jury to hang it and worrying about that makes sense. Happily thus has worked out in favour of justice, but it was not a given and people were right to fear that outcome. Hopefully we will see the predicted change in likely voting outcomes from unaffiliated voters and thus can be the end of MAGA over the next couple of election cycles.

Also scooby based leather is a newer vegan option making progress. It is the bacterial mat from the top of kombucha and is able to be dried, tanned, and oiled until it is a very nice alternative leather, no plastics in sight. Also, my spelling may suck on scooby, maybe scoby or something else.

I agree with many of these points, but have two thoughts here. First, the same was true of many items being produced in China in the past, but quality control got better and honestly most of the products you can buy for a reasonable price are partly or wholly made in China. Second, Tesla is a good example of a US based company with many of the same issues. Loose panels, door handles that fall off, accelerators that get stuck, and so on. Bad engineering is not only available in Mandarin.

I hope they can produce a good quality electric car and help accelerate the transition.

Yeah, meds are not the solution to all problems. Some meds can at some times be useful for some people, but it is not appropriate to just blanket the population with benzodiazapines and consider the population to be mentally healthier. All sort of other stuff like improving social connection, reducing working hours, building skills, and so on can do a lot more to reduce anxiety and depression, but where is the funding for a local community garden or woodworking class?

Australian healthcare is actually pretty amazing. I had endocarditis last year and had two collapsed lungs with my blood oxygen plummeting and no clear reason for the infection. The bacteria ate one of my heart valves so my heart had to do 4 pumps to have the effect of one, pushing my heart rate up to around 140 bpm while sleeping. I was flown from my regional town to the best hospital for the job and had an emergency valve replacement. I was up and walking 2 days later and I was flown home a couple of weeks later. I now take Warfarin and will for the rest of my life, along with a beta blocker. My biggest healthcare costs involved with this whole thing is my monthly medication cost of about $30 from 5 prescriptions including ADHD medications.

That all said, mental health care is not as good here as it used to be nor as it should be. We had a conservative government for 12 years and they absolutely gutted the mental health care system. They cut funding for extremely effective programs and did some real harm to vulnerable people (if interested look up robodebt). So yes, mental health is not great here. It is way better than in the US or in the UK but it is not in line with best practice research.

The fact that we can do better does not eliminate how we we do. I didn’t die from something that should have killed me, and this is the second time I have had a really major injury that required surgeries and so on. Well, third technically. Still, I have never paid a cent at the time of use for any medical care and I have paid for the medical care of others with my taxes. Am I coming out ahead of my costs? I hope not to be honest. I hope I have contributed more than I have cost the system because I care what happens to other people. I hope I have paid my way but I will be sure to honestly file my taxes every year knowing the system I am paying in to is the same one that has saved my life. Again. Man I am stupid.

I think the mistake we make is thinking that people are better than they are. I probably have some hidden bigotry that I am unaware of right now but given a space to be exposed to it someone would notice and point it out. If you only know of someone from one thing they did you can form an opinion of them based on very limited information. Get to know them better and you find that hidden awful. Twitter is a tool of constant broad interaction and it preserves bad takes long enough to see them. Add a culture of never admiting to being wrong and filtering by who you agree with and you have a cycle of awful that turns perfectly boringly not great but OK people into monsters defending genocide. Maybe we shouldn’t know anything about the author, replace their name with a serial number or pseudonym and let the art stand on it’s own. Though the racist jewish, wait no goblin, bankers was fairly intense tbh.

Damn, that sucks. What sort of stuff were you trying to keep running? I haven’t got a lot of old hardware anymore after moving a bunch of times, everything I have is modern old, around to 5 to 8 year mark, so no hardware support issues but also nothing powerful enough to do anything fun with.

Quite a few people here sound like ideal candidates to try ReactOS. It is an open source implementation of the NT architecture and should generally slot in for most software including drivers. It works quite well and plenty of people have managed to get old hardware working on ReactOS that was not otherwise ssfe to connect to a network. It works just like Windows NT and looks very similar but also supports more modern security standards and software.

Consider trying out ReactOS. It is an attempt to reverse engineer a fully compatible Windows replacement which uses Windows drivers and Windows software. It looks verysimilar and works similarly but is completely open implementation of the NT architecture and as such may actually meet your needs while being free software. I would love to hear how it goes if you try it.

Root your phone and you can manage which APN is used by tethering. If you can’t do this consider trying a connecting to a VPN before enabling tethering, the connection will on some devices remain active on the normal APN because changing would disconnect the VPN and keeping connected is higher priority than updating the APN. Also USB tethering and WIFI tethering may behave differently.

In the end this is a good argument for better regulation. When you buy a car they don’t get to extract more money from you because you drive out of state or use it for business. The fact that telecommunications companies have so much power and access to basically monitor what you are doing and bill accordingly is insane. You should pay for a service with a simple and clear contract and all this crap should be made illegal.

Working for a VoIP company in the early 2010s I rm -rf’d the /bin/ directory. As root. On a production server. On site.

I ended up booting from my phone (android app for iso booting) then manually coppied over the files from another machine. Chrooted and some stuff was broken but rebuilding from the package manager reinstalled everything that was missing. Got the system back up in around 40 mins after that colossal screw up. Good fun and a great learning experience. Honestly, my manager should not have had me doing anything on a root shell with no training.

In the early days the data was fairly clear. We have a new virus which could be of natural origin or lab origin, but the early spread data basically showed two different strains at first jump to humans, suggesting a fairly large number of infected animals in the same area around Wuhan. This is much more consistent with a natural spillover than a lab leak because the differences would take time to accumulate. If you have a virus in a new host it adapts to that host rapidly and changes, so if two separate animals of different species were both infected that would make two different strains with two different spillovers into humans and it happening at almost the same time is not crazy, both animals may have been in the same place and gotten infected at similar times.

If it were a lab origin it would be identical virus when it jumped over to humans. It would also have been better adapted to humans and not had as much change in humans in the first few months.

So is it possible it was a lab leak? Yes. Is it more likely than a natural spillover? No, not more likely. Possible, but no specific evidence that makes it reasonable to conclude either than we know for sure what happened or that it was a lab leak. The correct answer here is we don’t know for sure now but regardless of what happened this time we know another event will happen in time and natural spillovers are just as dangerous as lab leaks. We need to have a One Health approach, taking care of humans and also the natural environment and the interplay between them. Having humans living on the edge of wild areas is a recipe for disaster.

Nah, it was honestly a really cool experience. It was scary at times, yeah, but I absolutely love medical sciences and it was a fascinating experience. I had world class healthcare with experts and overall fantastic facilities and now I have made a really good recovery. Most people with two collapsed lungs and a sternotomy (I think that is the correct term for open heart surgery) have long term damage, but I work an intense physical job and feel better than I did for at least a few months, maybe a couple of years, before it all happened. Now I have to take some extra meds on an ongoing basis but as a bonus I sound like a cartoon bomb about to go off. Also my partner can hear my heart ticking from the other room, so that’s pretty cool.

I can’t say for lisdexamphetamine itself, but with plain old methylphenidate (ritalin) I found everything was really quite quick to adapt. I take Concerta 18+27mg in the morning and Ritalin 20mg on afternoons when I need it, so a total of 65mg in a day. When I started I had no real side effects but I did have a whole bunch of trauma based issues because here, finally, was the cause of many of my problems and my parents had lied to me about my diagnosis for 13 years. That said, my psychiatrist was gradually increasing my dose and when we tried the 54mg Concerta and the 25mg Ritalin I knew on dose 1 of each I was over my limit. Sweating, rushing, agitation, and generally feeling awful, it was too high a dose.

That all said, completely unrelated to my meds I had a heart infection last year. A bacteria (streptoccocus sanguinis for the curious) ate a valve and my first symptom was a chest infection. I had fever for a couple of weeks, some gout symptoms, coughing, sweating, and eventually I had to drive to the emergency room. It took me 3 rest stops to walk the 100m from my car to the emergency room and I knew I was in trouble. They thought it may be Covid but no, I had bilateral pneumonia and when the doctor listened they thought I must have a bicuspid valve. It turned out most of the valve was eaten away and the little bits of valve left were flapping away, sounding like a bicuspid valve. Further scans figured out the issue and I had an emergency flight from my country town to a larger city to get an emergency valve replacement. Two days after surgery I was up and walking again with a lovely new scar and a prescription for warfarin and a beta blocker. So if you are feeling weirdness with your heart it is probably a good idea to get it checked if you can manage it. I am in Australia so none of that cost me a single dollar, but where you are it may be different.

UBI will cycle in the bottom of the economy.

When you give a rich person more money they buy assets and increase their wealth, it does not impact their spending activity and has no measurable impact on economic activity.

When you give a middle income person more money they buy something new or pay down debts. Buying something new stimulates economic activity, but paying down debts is really just another wealth transfer to the banks which are owned by rich people.

When you give money to low income people they spend it. They have unmet needs and always have something they can spend that money on. That money then generates economic activity.

Increasing economic activity is what all of the interest rate and inflation talk is about. If you get people spending money that generates activity which increases wages, increases income, and decreases wealth inequality.

A good example is during the GFC the Australian government gave low income people $750AUD, about $350USD. The prime minister asked people to spend this money rather than save it. People bought a bunch of things, in the people I knew it was mostly TVs and new clothes, things you can put off for ages but benefit from whenever you buy them. All of this purchasing stimulated the economy, leading to Australia being less impacted than almost any other G7 nation. We recovered very quickly and boomed from there.

If you want a more long term example look at any welfare. If you have extremely poor people they just die. They are underfed, have weak immune systems, and they face imminent death. They can’t access housing so they end up on the street. They have tonnes of inteactions with police and end up in the criminal justice system. They end up having their lives ruined and being purely a drain economically. They suffer.

If you give them enough money to have housing and food they are not going to be as costly to manage. They won’t require policing, they won’t get sick as often, and they will suffer less. Will this increase the competition for the lowest cost housing? Yes, but the answer to that is to build more housing. Even with the impact to housing cost this will not result in 100% of that payment going to landlords. People don’t pay their whole income for rent, they will buy food and other needs first, so if they are faced with too high a rent cost they will remain unhoused but at least tbey will eat.

Do you want a grilled human? Because that’s how you get grilled human.

I have some experience with mental health in Australia and it is pretty dire honestly. There is a constant sense that the staff are concerned first with making sure you don’t hurt yourself because that would be a breach of their duty of care. This unfortunaty made much of the interaction between staff and patients adversarial.

I am currently entering the individual suppory industry and we have a concept called dignity of risk. You have to remember that people are entitled to take risks that they consider worthwhile regardless of what you think. This means if someone wants to smoke weed that is their choice, I can’t stop them. If they want to drink that is their choice and I have to respect that. This is because they are their own people and have their own autonomy.