Hmmm... for reasons I cannot justify my brain is telling me the equivalent for "my man, you really blah blah blah" should be "madame, you really blah blah blah"

Though I agree you can't correct someone by being like "ahem, it's madame actually" 😛

To be fair, as a native English speaker from Canada, I don't know what the heck is going on with the South African accent.

Half the time I can't even recognize it (likely just due to lack of exposure), so when I hear someone speaking with an accent that's kinda like Australia and New Zealand, but isn't quite right for either of those, I think "must be South African"... 😅

This is also why taking about a country's debt is often more complicated than people think. Because when I go into debt on my credit card or whatever, that's bad because the credit card company starts feeding on me.

But when a properly functioning government goes into debt, it's to me! What I get out of it is a bridge or train or something now, greater economic opportunities associated with that, and then also I get my money back later with interest, so it gives me a reliable way to grow my own money. Or, like I said, for banks or investment firms on my behalf to use these tools as some of the tools in the box to grow both my and their money.

It's only a problem when the debt gets to the point that it doesn't seem like the country will be able to pay it. Or, similarly, when the investment in infrastructure doesn't produce enough extra value to fund this repayment.

But again, when a government is in debt, it's in debt to investors who are using that debt to grow their money while the (well-functioning) government is using the money to grow the country.

This is the problem any time the news talks about countries' debts.

The answer is others of us. The government wants to build a canal or something, but they don't have room in their budget. So, they make some bonds that say we give them $100 today, they give us $105 in 5 years, and a bunch of people buy them and now they can finance their project.

And who are they in debt to? Us, the people who bought the bonds and who they have to pay back later.

And if some of the buyers if that investment was China, then you could say the government is in debt to China. Sometimes if just normal Chinese people buy it, the news will report the government is in debt to China, or "owned by China", even though it just got some money and owes some money to normal Chinese citizens who just took a solid-looking investment.

And if one person buys such investments from two countries, or is part of a mutual fund that does, then perhaps they may own hundreds in dollars of debt from two countries.

So I assume in this case they took the debts of various countries and added them up. But the answer of who the governments are all in debt to is us, normal people, and also banks and investors and other governments, etc.

I think at least part of the problem is that Democrats believe in The System. So when someone cheats and whines about fake votes and stuff, they can resist that with faith that the system is working, but when the system willingly chooses the other side they have no choice but to concede that this must just be the Will of the People. And who are they to stand against the system they uphold...

Knowing the folks at IA I'm sure they would love a backup. They would love a community. I'm sure they don't want to be the only ones doing this. But dang, they've got like 99 Petabytes of data. I don't know about you, but my NAS doesn't have that laying around...

a spokesperson for the honeyseller, Vladimir Dmitriev

Listen, obviously people with names like that can be totally normal and great people. For sure. But this name, connected financially to this candidate, at this time. Guys... It's not a good look...

I mean, I can't speak to OP in particular, but there were definitely lots of years where people made shit for free, sold nothing, and didn't consider it a job.

Like, there was no real mechanism for stick figure martial arts animations to make any money at all. Newgrounds or Ebaum's World must have made some money from ads, but I don't think any of that was profit-shared with the creators back in those days. Some of the creators were straight up anonymous because they didn't even think to put their names on their stuff.

Obviously celebrities and ads and stuff still existed on the earth at the time, but it didn't spread to the internet in a big way until later.

At least that's how I remember it...

I don't normally do this, but I see this from time to time, so just so you know:

wary: feeling or showing caution about possible dangers or problems.

leery: cautious or wary due to realistic suspicions

weary: feeling or showing tiredness, especially as a result of excessive exertion or lack of sleep

I'm sorry if this was annoying rather than helpful!

Some tips:

• Unless the code is very small, or your feature is very big, try to put blinders on, and focus only on the code you absolutely need to to get your feature built. Use search tools to comb through the code to find the relevant methods while reading as little surrounding code as possible, tweak those methods to be different, and call that a first draft. If the maintainer wants the code refactored or differently arranged, they can help with that as part of the review process
• Being unable to build sucks, it really does. But if the software is released for your platform, it means someone out there is able to build it. And these days that someone is often an automated build tool that runs per release. See if you can figure out how this tool works. What build steps it uses, what environment it runs in, etc. If you can't figure that out, try contacting the person who releases the builds
• If the software is in apt (if you're on a Debian-based system), you can use apt build-dep, apt source, and debuild to try and recreate the native apt build process. These tools will give you the source that built the system package, and its dependencies, and allow you to build a deb yourself out of it. Test the build to make sure it's working as-is. If it is, and if the software's dependencies haven't changed too much, you can even use apt to fetch the old version that's in the repos, update the code to reflect the upstream release, and then test the build there to see if it still builds. If so, now you have something you can start working off.
• If you aren't on an apt system, but do have a package manager, I assume there's an equivalent to the workflow mentioned above
• If your change is subtle enough that you think it's pretty low-risk, you could just edit the code even though you can't build it. This might be sufficient for bug-fixes where you just need to check something is greater than zero, or features where you pass a true instead of a false in certain conditions or something. You should probably mention this in your PR / MR / Patch so the reviewer knows to test building it before merging.
• This one is a bit wild, but let's say you're on a Mac or Windows machine, and the build instructions only work for Linux. You can just run a virtual machine that's got Ubuntu or something running on it, and use it as your build environment. These days you can probably be in a simpler situation with Docker or something more lightweight, but as a worst-case scenario, a full virtual machine is there for you if you need it
• And finally, if the tool isn't a crazy popular or busy tool, it's possible the maintainer or other people in the community are more approachable than you think. If they are looking for contributions, then getting a willing contributor's build environment setup is a benefit to the project. Improving their build docs helps not just you, but potential future contributors as well. A project will usually be more helpful towards someone who says "I'm trying to build this feature, but I'm running into trouble" compared to someone saying "why doesn't your tool do X". You may need to be a bit patient, they're probably doing this on volunteer hours, but they might be happy to help you get your stuff sorted out

Good luck out there, and try not to be discouraged!

Well... That's actually probably fair as stated.

BestBuy etc don't sell Apple's products on commission, they bought them from Apple for a wholesale price, they've got them in a warehouse and on shelves right now on their dime, and the only way they make that money back is by selling them.

And the only way Apple makes money from a product being sold at Best Buy is that Best Buy will likely buy more stock to replace the stuff they sold, and they'll buy that from Apple.

So if it was banned everywhere it would be unfair to the retailers that already paid Apple for a product they now can't recoup, and it wouldn't impact Apple at all because they already made their money from Best Buy.

This way the retailers can get their money back, but can't get any more, which means only Apple is impacted.

The only other way that's semi-fair (but would be extreme) would be for Apple to be forced to do a recall or something and reimburse all the retailers the money they had already spent. Doable, and definitely more of a punishment for Apple, but a lot of extra work for everyone if the outcome of this is that Apple settles and then everyone can just go back to ordering more again.

I used to use Firefox before Chrome came out, because it was better than IE. When Chrome came out it was a breath of fresh air. A real third option! (konqueror didn't really count). And it was faster, cleaner, lighter than Firefox. Just better at everything. So I installed it on all of my family's computers, which they allowed me to do because IE by then was so bad it was an obvious improvement even for the layman.

Then in the intervening years Firefox dwindled to basically no market share and IE died, so now Chrome isn't a third option, it's the only option. And so I switched back to Firefox basically as a political sacrifice, but there's no way I'm going to be able to convince any of my family to switch because Firefox isn't better for them in any perceivable way. It's just different and they don't care. If Firefox had 30% market share I'd almost definitely be using Chromium still myself.

So probably that, but a million times. There was a period where every nerd moved all their associated people to Chrome because it was new, great, and non-dominant. It was hip and indie. And now they're still there and there's no reason for them to move that they care about.