calling someone a prepper is an adhom, just like calling a greenie a tree hugger. just another way to dismiss something that is emotionally confronting so one can continue to feel some comfort in their own bubble.
Well yes and no. You will always have some have actually prepared; people, and you will have people who cosplay people who are prepared. The latter see buying things that help survival more as a hobby than a thing that needs to get done in order to survive. It is the difference between a hunter who needs a gun as a tool and a gun nut that collects guns because he likes theorizing over minor differences between them online and nerd out about them.
That doesn't mean anybody who does a lot of research online or buys a lot of things is a obsessive hobbyist of course. The difference can at times be hard to tell from the outside, but someone whose first thought when an apocalypse brews on the horizon is to get weapons and turn their home into a bunker, instead of e.g. relying on a strong neighbourhood network and helping others is certainly a specific type of person. The problems that will arise are of the type that will be hard to solve alone. E.g. prep all you can, but what if your family member needs a doctor? Or something is fucked with your electrical system and you need someone.
This is why people make fun of preppers. Not because being prepared is a bad thing (it is not!), but because you get the feeling some of them can hardly wait for the end times to come around so they can test drive their gear.
I feel like fallacies can always be applied to anything because unless you're doing pure math (and even then, tons of caveats - one major one being that you already bought into the framework), you can always question deeper assumptions and yes, structurally it might even fit a fallacy. I mean, is-ought is one of the famous unresolved ones.
Yet we still have arguably correct beliefs in spite of fallacies. That suggests that merely pattern matching isn't a good solution to detect what "truth" is...
as much as i dislike m$, at least windows works and it works for games and graphics. when i need text or computation without a ui, i use linux. similar to the argument in the article about use what works, i use what works.
I got a gaming computer during covid and initially ran Windows on it. It had so many problems with the audio and random crashes I eventually gave up and switched to Linux. Only loss was the newer Blizzard games, all the Steam games worked.
Idk - I’ve been trying out Linux gaming on Bazzite and everything seems to just work? It’s been a basically flawless experience.
I dual boot Linux + Windows (technically triple boot - I have a third drive with a different distro for dev work) and I haven’t needed to boot to windows a single time in the ~5 months I’ve been testing out Linux gaming. Not a single game has required any tweaking with proton settings either. My plan is to remove Windows entirely if I make it through the year without needing it.
No issues with drivers, no issues with peripherals (Wired speakers, Bluetooth headset, usb headset, webcam), with 3 displays at different resolutions/framerates/orientations. Running Ryzen 9800x3d and an RTX 4070ti.
Games I’ve played on Linux cover a pretty wide spectrum too.
- Arc Raiders
- Stalker 2
- Kingdom come deliverance 2
- Doom the dark ages
- Timberborn
- Pacific Drive
- Baulders Gate 3
- Disco Elysium
- Peak
- Alan Wake 2
- RV there yet
- Yapyap
- Pentinence
and probably others I’m forgetting.
I honestly wasn’t expecting the experience to be this smooth. Windows days as the gaming default feel numbered.
> at least windows works and it works for games and graphics
It doesn't, actually. I vividly remember trying and failing to play some old games on Windows. GTA San Andreas, I think. Didn't even launch due to missing DirectX libraries or whatever. I hunted down and installed all the redistributables and DLLs. Still didn't run.
So much for the fabled backwards compatibility of Windows. Microsoft clearly does not give a shit anymore. Wouldn't be surprised if Linux with Proton becomes better at running games than Windows one day.
In 2008, I remember playing starcraft over LAN with my roommate. It played better on Wine/Ubuntu than it did on his Vista machine (and unrelatedly but hilariously, in the middle of the game his computer gave him a countdown to reboot with no option to cancel it)
should have kept the internet open and free, govts and big business trying to control people is a missed opportunity for catching stupid people blabbing all their plans online. now the stupid people are going to think twice before sharing online.
blaming open ai emps is like blaming current germans for ww2. that sort of collective moral guilt, sometimes even inherited, is simply unfair and stupid. i get that people want to undermine companies' support structure and that their dream is probably to guilt shame open ai's employees into quitting. but it feels like people trying to score points for their own agenda, claim the moral high ground, and label entire groups of people with some sort of guilt by association. its fake. its a game. and they know it.
But we’re not taking about a 80-year gap here (“blaming modern Germans”); we’re talking about people who are in the global top 5% of income and prestige choosing _today_ to contribute to these organizations.
If you believe that your labor is worth something — which I’m pretty sure this crowd does — by working for a given firm, you’re voting with the value of your time in support of what your employer does.
Which, to be clear, is 100% your choice! I’m not going to accuse anyone of being a “bad person” because they decide that stable, high-paying employment is more important than taking a particular ethical (or political) stand at work.
But it _is_ a choice that you make every day by showing up for work.
In my view this is even more relevant for tech workers who receive equity. If you’re a shareholder in addition to being an employee, you’re now voting _twice_ in favor of what management is doing, and benefitting directly from both pay and ownership.
fair point, and i do agree with you. i guess ive seen too many politicians recently with agenda's doing the moral high ground thing and im beginning to see that sort of conduct everywhere. thanks for your reasoned comment. it seems to be a growing problem or maybe im just more aware of it
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