Many fines are just a tax on the poor and would fall under this.

I had a buddy who was rich, like fuck-you rich. He’d park his hummer wherever he felt like it (handicapped spots, up on the curb, etc), and every week he’d take his stack of parking tickets and write a cheque.

A lot of wealthy people are like this. They have no concept of what $100 is worth to an average person, and if the only punishment for something is a monetary fine, it’s effectively permissable for them.

Yeah, you tend to see the best of humanity during a shared struggle (and sometimes the worst too, but seems more often the better).

In 2003, there was a massive power outage over a big chunk of the midwest. Power was out for about three days. My entire city just kinda… shut down and took a break.

It wasn’t all great–a few elderly folks even died of heat stroke (it was hot, in the middle of summer if I remember right). But there were some positives: the city functioned as a community in a way I’ve never experienced before or since. It felt like we were all on a broken elevator together–a sudden sense of camaraderie in the face of a shared experience.

Most businesses couldn’t function, so everyone was pretty much outside in the parks and at the waterfront, and everyone seemed pretty welcoming to everyone else (they kinda had to be, there were a lot of people out). My dad had a portable generator, so we went around town taking turns at friends’ houses to run their fridges and freezers for a while, and got to just spend time with them.

I don’t expect that the world could function like that all the time, but it was kinda nice for a few days.

It’s not dumb to feel sad about it. Enshittification is sad, especially when you see it from the inside.

I die cleaning a bicycle chain.

Canadians also use “cheque”, but I’ve got a foot in both countries. Consider me your Bri’ish/'murican translator.

I’ve had others correct me the other direction (specifically decrying the use of “refund” because it wasn’t money owed in the first place). At some point it’s just semantics.

I’m aware, I was simply translating for our colleague across the pond.

You might be getting the wrong idea. We have tax withholding on our paychecks, same idea. Then when you file your taxes, you either send a cheque (if your withholding was less than you owed) or you get a return (if your withholding was more than you owed).

I had looked at those, but the hat alone is over $70. Plus they need an RPi5, because earlier ones don’t have a PCIe interface. For that much, I could get a Beelink or something similar.

The hat is a cool idea, though.

I hadn’t looked at any ODROID stuff, and the HC4 is a cool looking solution! I’m actually even more impressed with the M1S, which has a built-in M.2 slot. Can’t use my existing spinny drives, but for the price of the M1S, I could pick up an NVMe drive to go with it.

A SBC with SATA ports, to use as a Plex server. I’ve only ever found one (the Zimaboard), but it’s a bit pricey for something that I’d still have to find some way to house with an external HDD.

I’m not a fan of Ford, but a broken clock…

As a dual citizen, fuck this guy.

Stepped on a rake, smacked me right on the forehead. More plausible than you might think.

What DE are you using? I noticed that under XFCE, I have to use the display-managed suspend option, rather than the “system-managed” one (not sure why there’s a distinction).

Not as far as I’m aware. The Linux community is largely cooperative, the idea is that everyone can choose the DE they like best. I don’t remember seeing anything about Cinnamon trying to bring back an older GNOME version - you might be thinking of MATE (though I’m not aware of ANY friction there either) considering MATE is a fork of GNOME 2.

That’s like saying the ocean is completely saturated with water. The internet is just cats.