I think it's absurd. I work full time in the richest country on Earth and I can't afford an apartment and healthcare. The problem is clearly not advertising.
Real "billionaire goes homeless for one night to prove the stupid poors are lazy and stupid and need to hedge their expectations" type of energy
Good news - his plan also includes not being able to afford healthcare and housing while working full time! Are you interested in doing what you do now but different? It just cuts corners in different places than other people do to achieve a result that doesn't seem that interesting to most people but is also bad in interesting ways.
I don't think that this approach is "scalable" and I don't think it's a good idea for most people (perhaps not for anyone). I do think it usefully focuses attention on how so much of cost of living is not exactly one line item, but the massive interconnection of modern life. Living in a place where you can have access to the networks (literal, social, medical, etc) you need for the rest of your plan.
I wouldn't want to live like this! But the fact that one could until one got sick (a common limitation on many creative ways of living the modern US I find) is interesting. I think the fact that there are similarities to traditional frontier living (wood stove heating included!) makes it a particularly interesting.
Edit: Arguably, I think the problem is that the USA achieved the original "American Dream" and simply stopped thinking about how the world was changing and what a modern re-envisioning of that dream should be. Pointing out that you can be an impossibly good frontier pioneer in 2025 could be a way of pointing out to people that we need to move on and stop imagining a thing we can active as the pinnacle. We need to imagine living in a world where everyone who works full time can afford housing and healthcare, where performance is rewarded but isn't required to simply live and where we can let living in the woods safely fade into history as a thing we can certainly do if we prefer but should stop idealizing.
We're all being asked to sacrifice the living standards our parents grew up with because the utter failure of local, state and federal government to provide housing, public transit, education and healthcare, something most of the Western world manages to pull off without issue.
We have never been more productive in this country's history and yet we cannot even meet a bar set in the 1950s.
Median disposable household income is higher in the US than anywhere else in the world [0]. Real median personal income has increased 50% since the 1970s [1].
Officially, disposable income means income minus taxes. Lots of people assume it means minus necessities like housing and food, but that is discretionary income.
With WSL you can use “Linux the good parts” (command line tools, efficient-enough paradigms for fork() servers) and completely avoid X Windows, the Wayland death spiral, 100 revisions of Gnome and KDE that not so much reinvent the wheel but instead show us why the wheel is not square or triangular…
It's all opinion of course, but IMO Windows is the most clumsy and unintuitive desktop experience out there. We're all just used to the jank upon jank that we think it's intuitive.
KDE is much more cohesive, stable, and has significantly more features.
/s indeed because there are actually no plans at all to replace Wayland!
I think the infamous cascade of attention-deficit teenagers (CADT) has slowed down quite a bit in the desktop space because... well, most developers there are over 30 now.
It blows my mind that people can complain about the direction KDE is going when trying to paint a picture about how it's so much nicer to use Windows. I know the boiling frog experiment is fake, but just checking: are you sure the water isn't getting a little uncomfortably warm in the Windows pool right now?
Agreed. I used tiling WMs for a long while (ion3, XMonad) and it was such a productivity boost.
Then I was forced to use a Mac for work, so I was using a floating WM again. On my personal machine, ion3 went away and I never fully got around to migrate to i3.
By the time I got enough free time to really work on my personal setup, it had accumulated two huge monitors and was a different machine. I found I was pretty happy just scattering windows around everywhere. Especially with a trackball's cursor throw. This was pretty surprising to me at first.
Anyway this is just my little personal anecdote. If I go back to a Linux install I'll definitely have to check out i3 again. Thanks for reminding me :)
Compiling and testing cross-platform software for Linux lately (Ubuntu and similar)... You can't even launch an application or script without CLI. Bad UX, IMO. For these decisions, There are always reasons, a justification, something about security. I don't buy it.
I compile my program using WSL, or Linux native. It won't launch; not an executable. So, into the CLI: chmod +x. Ok. It's a compiled binary program, so semantically I don't see the purpose of this. Probably another use case bleeding into this. (I think there's a GUI way too). Still can't double click it. Nothing to launch from the right-click menu. After doing some research, it appears you used to be able to do it (Ubuntu/Gnome[?]), but it was removed at some point. Can launch from CLI.
I make a .desktop file and shell script to move it to the right place. Double click the shell file. It opens a text editor. Search the right click menu; still no way. To the CLI we go; chmod +x, and launch if from the CLI. Then after adding the Desktop icon, I can launch it.
On windows, you just double click the identified-through-file-extension executable file. This, like most things in Linux, implies the UX is designed for workflows I don't use as a PC user. Likely servers?
This sounds very weird to me. Any sane build toolchain should produce a runnable executable that already has +x. What did you use to compile it?
Removing double-click to run an executable binary certainly sounds like something either Gnome or Ubuntu would do, but thankfully that's not the only option in town. In KDE I believe the same exact Windows workflow would just work.
Yeah the typical way programs are run is by using a .desktop file that's installed. The reason nobody cares is because running random executable that have a GUI is a pretty rare use case for Linux desktops. We don't have wizards or .msi installers, we just install using the package manager. And then it shows up where it needs to.
If you're on KDE, you can right-click the start menu and add the application. Also, right-click menu should give you a run option.
Nope, setuid programs have an effective UID as the owner (often root), but also have the real user ID of the original user. Programs intended for setuid operation pay attention to this; it is very important. They can use to to perform certain operations under privilege and then permanently drop to the original user.
This is why I think we need publicly funded open source projects with paid leads. There are so many basic things we've failed to do for ourselves and our fellow human beings.
For example, the best non-AI TTS system is still Ivona TTS that originated at Blizzard in like 2007. The best open source solution is espeak and it's permanently stuck in 1980... Ivona was bought up by Amazon and now they don't even use the original software, but do charge money per word to use the voice via Amazon Polly. They could open source it, but they don't.
We don't even have something as basic as text to speech freely available, whether you are disabled or not. That is a problem. You have this amazing innovation that still holds to this day, squandered away for nothing.
Why can't we just have an institute that develops these things in the open, for all to use? We clearly all recognize the benefit as SysV tools are still used today! We could have so many amazing things but we don't. It's embarrassing
I think that is about the most gentle way you can put it. This is an echo of 2008 and the notion that this is normal is so absurd to me. It comes off as super out of touch. Financing groceries is dystopian.
"suffer" in this context is using some form of renewable energy and curtailing the industries that pump the 95% of all CO2 into the air. The absolute horror.
You say this, but if you think that is suffering, wait until clean water is a limited resource. You aren't going to be running away to Mars. We can't even fix the very simple issues on Earth.
Suffer, in this context, is living a life that is completely different than the very convenient one we're used to. Not just renewable based.
The technology just isn't there, and I don't think it will be there by the time we need it.
Clean water is already a limited, and fought over resource. The water wars in the US will start in either Colorado or Texas within 50 years. I'm calling it now. There will be actual violence.
What tech isn't there? It's been there for decades at this point. Unless you mean delusional ideas like pumping even more waste into the air in hopes that we can magically pull it out. Yes, that's always been a lie, and will always be untenable. The reality is that the US has no intention of moving away from oil and thats purely due to financial incentive and existing power structures being intertwined with oil barons
Storage and grid resiliency is what I'm talking about. Renewables just aren't there yet. I genuinely wish they were and dream about an alternate timeline where electric cars weren't killed in the crib.
I'm sorry but this is so misguided. You could magically take every gas powered vehicle off of the road immediately, and you would only remove like 3% of the problem. The idea that you can "consumer activism" your way out of a industrial production problem is a malicious lie propagated by Neo-Liberals who directly benefit from those industries.
I'd trust BYD more than Tesla but I don't want to have to trust anyone. I drove a 20 year old Honda still to this day, but literally every new car has software in it and it won't be an option in the future. It's just too profitable to gather the data that they generate. It's a privacy nightmare. I'm still appalled that Tesla got caught pulling footage of people having sex in their own vehicles, but the legal world has no intention of doing anything about it.
Real "billionaire goes homeless for one night to prove the stupid poors are lazy and stupid and need to hedge their expectations" type of energy
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