I reckon it’s because you can’t resist tinkering and never READING THE INSTRUCTIONS

I think you may have hit on the answer here. If you don't mess around with Linux, it will usually run fine for years. Mess around, and you can do things that only someone with you+2 years experience can undo.

I'm really curious what things people can't get running or didn't have good enough alternatives for in Linux? Obviously, if you are a professional in X field and you need a specific program that will not work on Linux for your job, then Linux is not for you at that job. You didn't choose MS Win or MacOSX, the company that makes the software that you need to do your job made that choice for you.

If you are not a professional, and you pirate Adobe XYZ (or whatever), and feel like you must have it on Linux, and that GIMP or Krita (or whatever) are not good enough, I don't know what to tell you. Ask yourself, if MS and Adobe found a way to require you to pay full price for that software, or you could not use it at all, would you pay? Or would GIMP or Krita (or whatever) suddenly be good enough? Is having that software (when you are not a professional) really a good reason to stay on an operating system with so many other drawbacks?

In my experience:

• MS Windows Explorer is crap. I ended up buying Directory Opus to get a decent file manager. Too many good ones to mention in Linux (though I admit, most are not as powerful as DO; maybe Dired in emacs comes closest?). (DO is awesome - if you are stuck on MS Windows, I highly recommend it.)

• KWallet (and similar security apps such as KeePassXC), the various clipboard apps, the various text editors, the media players, etc. are excellent in Linux and don't have alternatives in MS Windows that are as good or as easy to install. Actually, I guess it comes down to the repositories having everything, and much of it being installed by default. (Of course, if you are just streaming stuff through your browser, media players matter much less.)

• The choice of window managers and desktop environments is a killer feature for Linux. MS Windows barely even has virtual desktops.

• I am not a graphics professional, so for me, GIMP and Krita are fine. And Inkscape. And Scribus. (And, for many people who are not me, LibreOffice Draw.)

• I do do a lot of writing. LaTeX (several types) and all supporting software is super helpful, but must be found and installed separately in MS Windows. Will pandoc run natively in MS Windows - you have to install python first, right? It is python, right? I'm not sure, because I didn't need to worry about it when I installed it on Linux, from the repository. On MS Windows, you'll probably have to worry about it.

Sure, as mentioned above, you can install many of those on MS Windows. Are they in the MS Windows store? Do you have to update them all individually each time there is an update? I don't - they get updated when I update my system, along with the rest of my system.

One little observation sort of sums up the Linux / MS Windows debate for me: in LibreOffice, no matter which program I am using, I can open or create a new office file of any sort. Last time I used MS Office, you couldn't create or open an MS Word file while in MS PowerPoint, nor the opposite. Instead, you had to open MS Word separately. MS Office is a 'suite' in name only. LibreOffice is a suite, designed to go together. Linux distros sort of feel like that too. MS Windows (last I used it), not so much.

(Obviously, I have feelings about this. Been using Linux since 1998, so yeah, feelings.)

edit: spelling error / typo

I left Japan in 2008. Phones had had cameras long enough that the makers had to add the can't-turn-it-off shutter sound because so many chikan were taking upskirt photos on public transport.

Less salaciously, there was also panic about people taking pictures of magazine articles in bookstores and then not buying the magazine. Not sure anyone really would have tried to read an article on those tiny screens, though.

Lived in Japan for many years, came back to the USA for many of the reasons you touch on. I knew a few foreigners who had non-English-teacher type jobs, but mostly, it was English teacher or English juku owner. The systemic issues, for young Japanese and for foreigners, in Japan really need to be dealt with if they have any hope of slowing their population decline. So, not going to happen.

Japan is never going to have enough immigration to significantly impact the population decline. Even back in the early 2000s, it would have taken millions of immigrants a year. Now, forget about it.

Living in inaka is not bad but not great either, for most people. So, tiny apartments in or near big cities or large houses in the middle of nowhere are pretty much the choices. Jobs in inaka? Fisherman, elderly care, sakaya, maybe some other generic retail for the eldest sons who couldn't escape. And, of course, government jobs.

Re: media hype, yes there are still young people. But not enough. Societies need 2.1(-ish) children per couple to maintain population equilibrium. Japan, South Korea, Italy, and several other wealthy nations are way below that. Add in the Japanese propensity to live for a long time, and Logan's Run becomes more and more thinkable each year. When the population pyramid becomes whatever shape parallel lines || are, the economics of a modern, wealthy society break down.

I gave a PD session for Japanese teachers back in like 2004 or so about why learning English would be helpful, because they might end up with a lot of immigrant children in their classes. (Or, I didn't say, because you could use your English skills to look for jobs outside of Japan.) Of course, immigration barely happened, and many of those teachers are probably close to retirement age by now. So, my bad, I guess. Someone should do that PD today, because the situation is even worse now.

Cool cops put down 420. It isn't about speed, it is about weed.

(or did everyone already realize that?)

I need a 'remind me in a year' feature!

True, yeah. I just wanted to be clear about it in case people confused median and mean. I work with high school students who struggle with the difference every year. So, thought maybe some adults who'd been out of school for a while might also not realize the difference.

Important to note here the important difference between "mean", aka the average, and "median", the middle number in a set. Assuming Krueger intentionally used "median", the situation is actually worse than people realize.

The average can be affected by large outliers - like billionaires. IF the "average" American makes $50,000 a year, the median could actually be more like $30,000 (totally made up numbers, as an example).

In other words, the median is the more "accurate" number to use in these comparisons because the income of the extremely wealthy has less of an impact on the result.

Just as a sort of tangent to this - it used to be normal (apparently all over the world) for people to wake up after a few hours, get up and do stuff for a while, then go back to bed. Basically, there were 2 sleep periods each night.

BBC has a rather long and overly detailed article about it: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep

Maybe all of us waking up at 2:00 or 3:00 is a remnant of that?

Education is one area where GenAI is having a huge impact. Teachers work with text and language all day long. They have too much to do and not enough time to do it. Ideally, for example, they should "differentiate" for EACH and EVERY student. Of course that almost never happens, but second best is to differentiate for specific groups - students with IEPs (special ed), English Learners, maybe advanced / gifted.

More tech aware teachers are now using ChatGPT and friends to help them do this. They are (usually) subject area experts, so they can quickly read through a generated or modified text and fix or remove errors - hallucinations are less (ime) of an issue in this situation. Now, instead of one reading that only a few students can actually understand, they have three at different levels, each with their own DOK questions.

People have started saying "AI won't replace teachers. Teachers who use AI will replace teachers who don't."

Of course, it will be interesting to see what happens when VC funding dries up, and the AI companies can't afford to lose money on every single interaction. Like with everything else in USA education, better off districts may be able to afford AI, and less-well-off (aka black / brown / poor) districts may not be able to.

Am I correct in seeing this as the company is claiming that courts of law cannot require them to transfer control of an account from one user to a different user? This despite the fact that doing so has been fairly standard practice for years now?

Personally, I think the lawyers for The Site Previously Known As Twitter have a very weak argument. However, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, so there's also that.

along with citizenship of their born in the US children

Totally agree with your point, but I have a bit of hope regarding the citizenship point. Birthright citizenship is a result of the 14th amendment, so revoking it would be very difficult. I wouldn't be surprised if maybe they try to ignore court decisions, or just deport people without due process. But, getting rid of the 14th wouldn't happen, so things could be undone (in theory).

CNN article on the 14th Amendment: https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/31/us/14th-amendment-birthright-citizenship-explainer-trnd/index.html