Thursday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, September 5, 2024
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86 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Watching the brief troll invasion on the Tucker post was fascinating. I felt like I was doing cultural anthropology in real time. They certainly didn’t last long in this sandbox.
@Dutchgirl: So Matt Drudge, a semi-closeted gay man, is a Hitler apologist? Doesn’t he know his history?
@Dutchgirl: Thanks to all those comments, I’ve changed my mind. About everything!
I’m declaring today Free Speech Day, because really you just can’t say anything anymore without woke leftists cancelling you for not being politically correct. Look, just because the globalists want you to believe in, like, climate change or the Holocaust doesn’t mean I can’t ask questions! Why do you censor one side? The Left is scared to debate my new facts!
(Did I do it right?)
@MarkedMan:
I don’t frequent drudge, but IIRC he’s anti-Musk and anti-Carlson, so likely his link to the OTB article wasn’t pejorative.
His right leaning audience just naturally has a lot of Hitler apologists.
@MarkedMan: “So Matt Drudge, a semi-closeted gay man, is a Hitler apologist? Doesn’t he know his history?”
“it’s different this time.”
“I am special.”
“There are guardrails which protect me.”
“There are limits.”
@Neil Hudelson:
I’ve never frequented it. I did visit yesterday, and it struck me as odd to see 21st. Century news on a 90s website.
@MarkedMan:
FWIW, in recent years my understanding is that Drudge has become a vocal Trump, Musk, and Carlson critic. So I think this link to the article was a sign of approval.
And let’s face it, a lot of folks “hate-read” stuff they don’t agree with. See all of our visitors who choose to comment.
Interesting article over at Ars Technica about the FTC making noises about control of the software in IoT products. There’s been enough cases of suddenly-you-have-to-now-pay-a-subscription-to-keep-your-X-running that they’re thinking it’s time for regulations in this area.
In probably the least surprising news of the day, it turns out alt-right media outlet Tenet Media and its content creators, including prominent MAGA morons Tim Pool and Benny Johnson, were being funded by Russia.
Russian money was funneled to right-wing creators through a pro-Trump media outlet: prosecutors
The “commentators” have claimed they did not know where the money Tenet paid was coming from and that they had total control of their programming, which may help them from a legal standpoint, but really means they didn’t need Russia to feed them talking points because they were doing just fine coming up with Russian talking points all on their own.
Can you spell “useful idiots?” I knew you could!
@Grumpy realist: Oh thank god they are finally getting serious about that. I wonder if it was the Fisker debacle or if it was Peloton announcing they are charging people who buy a second hand Peloton a large one time fee? Maybe it was the $400 baby monitor that requires the internet to even work and features may be disabled at any time. There’s been a slew of ioT devices becoming unusable or becoming more expensive for corporate profits.
Do NOT buy an iot device or any device that requires an internet connection/subscription to function. You’re just setting yourself up to get nickeled and dimed before your device is de-activated like the Spotify player they sold.
@Mikey: They are claiming to be victims.. I WISH I could be a ‘victim’ of 1 million dollars for typing stupid stuff.
Bonoism of the day:
This shitty world sometimes produces a rose
The scent of it lingers and then it just goes
@Matt: Agreed. I thought the whole “BMW charges subscription for heated seats” thing was about my breaking point on this silliness.
@Matt:
Yeah, must of us just write stupid stuff for free. I know I do 🙂
Speaking of which, the home desktop PC looks dead. Booting up ends in a set of recovery tools. I’ve attempted scan and repair, and uninstalling updates, to no avail. Yesterday I set to reset the whole thing, which means reinstalling Win10. It proceeded, until it hit “Resetting this PC 68%”
It stopped there, though the HD light kept flickering as though the disk was spinning (old, old PC), for about an hour. By then I was going to bed, and would not leave it on all night to see if it advanced or not. So, I switched it off.
I’ll try again on the weekend, after I download and make a local installation media just in case. Fortunately the laptop still works.
@Matt: this is why I am a cranky Luddite about household appliances that I buy. I don’t want a SmartFridge, a SmartStove, or anything else that requires me to be in contact with the Internet for it to work. I don’t even have an electric mixer. And what I had to go through to find a normal mechanical eggbeater…yikes.
@Kathy: Just curious why you are thinking about a new desktop? For years I’ve had a laptop with extra monitors and external keyboard and mouse when I’m at my desk, but then can just unplug and hit the road when I need to.
The one caution I would make no matter which way you go is don’t get the cheapest. A few years back we needed the very simplest and most basic laptop just to monitor some test equipment and we tried some $300-400 ones and they were atrociously slow. Unusable, really. I understand we could have wiped the drive and reinstalled a clean version of windows which would have sped it up but if we re-installed using the manufacturer’s technique we would have got the same crap reinstalled, and if we bought a separate version of Windows we would have had that extra expense and then would have had to manually figure out all the correct drivers.
@Grumpy realist:
What? You don’t look forward to the day when the electric company’s smart meter, your smart heat pump, and your smart dryer bring your household to a halt because they’re chewing up all the bandwidth arguing about who gets to use the available electricity?
Kitchen Tools
Two of the best deals that I’ve found at the Kroger clearance shelf recently (other than the Aviator Sunglasses for 50¢) were two manual can openers marked down from $9.99. One was $3.50, the other $2.50. Can’t account for the price difference. They were identical except one has a blue handle and the other has a black handle.
@Mister Bluster:
Two funny things about your comment:
1. Looking at it quickly in our WP backend, I thought it was spam and I was wondering how it got through the filter. Man, I need more coffee.
2. It only took me 49 years on this earth to learn that I wasn’t using a can opener in the “correct” way. I’m not sure if it’s actually correct or not, but the following approach works so much better and leaves far less dangerous craggy edges:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVYrWJqxejU
@Grumpy realist: I have to laugh because I’m the same way. I refuse to WiFi my appliances. But what really makes me laugh is my 30 year old daughter (another attorney BTW) go off on a rant that goes something like “Every time I turn around I have to download another god damn app” . It goes on from there. It is pretty awesome to watch.
@MarkedMan:
I have a laptop. I’ve been meaning to try to see if I can make an “illegal” Win11 installation in it*. Desktops tend to be cheaper and, in my experience, run a bit faster than a laptop with comparable specs. Granted, my experience does not extend to SSDs.
I may buy a laptop and a monitor, though. Many of the desktops on offer are all-in-one, and I really don’t want another of those.
If I could afford it, I’d get the most expensive liquid cooled gaming PC. As is, I go for mid range, as that is all my budget will take.
*Probably not. It’s also a bit old. it just has seen less use than the desktop.
The one connected gadget I’ve seen that makes full sense, is a temperature probe. You insert it in the meat you put in the oven, and it has no wires that require awkward angles and may interfere with the oven door.
It sends the temps it measures to your phone. This way you can leave the meat to cook, and know exactly when it’s done.
Of course, all it saves you are one or two trips to the kitchen to check the temp, and a few seconds arranging a wire. So it’s not like a must-have life-changing revolutionary gadget.
@Matt Bernius:
I disagree with the video on the proper way to use a can opener. Using it the way indicated makes it harder to drain liquid out of the can which you don’t want to use (such as for canned vegetables or tuna). It also makes it more likely that the sharp-edged top will detach from the rest of the can, which could be hazardous for the trash haulers.
Here’s Lara Trump’s latest “music” video, “Hero,” without the autotune:
https://x.com/scaredketchup/status/1830745574636953934
@Kingdaddy:
It was painful to hear w/autotune, you’re a sadist for hanging that in front of potential masochists.
@Grumpy realist:
I imagine these appliances scolding their owners:
Don’t put that inside me. It’s hot!
That’s not enough time to cook a turkey.
You need to stir the risotto.
Would it kill you to scrub me once in a while?
Oh, some more expired yogurt. How nice!
You need to stir the risotto.
Burning another batch of cookies, I see.
You need to stir the risotto.
Why are you putting water in that pot with the onions?
Your steak is burning.
That’s not enough Maillard.
You need to stir the risotto.
Stop lifting that chicken breast to see if it’s cooked.
You need more oil on that pan. And you should use butter anyway.
You need to stir the risotto.
@Matt Bernius:..Kitchen Tools 2.0…
Thanks for the can opener tip. I am scheduled to open a can of green beans tomorrow. I’ll give it a try.
I’m not trying to shill for Kroger. However I do most of my shopping there for the gas points. Paid $2.339/gal last week including $1.00/gal gas point discount.
A friend of mine gave me his extra P-38 when he returned from the jungle years ago. I used it for a while.
(Now I’ve got myself thinking about that goddamned war and how he suffered and died decades after he came home from the vile effects of Agent Orange.
I gotta go.)
@Kingdaddy: I will leave that link forever unclicked.
Hunter cops a plea.
@Mister Bluster: I kept an extra on the chain with my dog tags because you never know. As for your friend I truly feel for him, I have a bunch of problems from that toxic sh!t. If anyone still has their Boy Scout pocket knife the funny hook shaped thing is a can opener, works just fine.
Via Balloon Juice, an excellent piece at Public Notice on Harris and the media.
Kamala Harris is cutting off Trump’s political oxygen
A little further down:
Go read the whole thing, it’s really good.
@Jack: Why should anyone care? His legal troubles were irrelevant when his father was running for President, now they are less than irrelevant.
I would appoint Judge Chutkan to the Supreme Court. She has a focus on what’s important.
To wit: “I’m not talking about the presidency of the United States. I’m talking about a four count indictment.” Meaning it’s not the court’s responsibility to accommodate the defendant’s ambitions.
Again, Liz Holmes should have run for president when it was clear an indictment would drop, rather than trust her fate to a jury.
@Jack:
Thanks for the heads up on that. I just read the details and will put up a quick post on it.
My immediate reaction is “That’s a bold move Cotton.meme” and I suspect that it may be rejected by the courts for reasons that I’ll explain in the post.
Update: Here you go — https://outsidethebeltway.com/hunter-biden-is-attempting-a-novel-plea-strategy/
@Michael Cain: well, I’m already convinced that when Mercury goes retrograde they get together and connive to carry out mutual strikes…otherwise why did my freezer AND microwave AND smoke detector all decide to break the same week?!
Allan Lichtman has released his official prediction for the 2024 election. He says the winner will be…. Cornel West!
(Yeah, of course it’s Harris.)
@Mikey: If it helps, the clip isn’t exactly the no-autotune version.
Apparently, they are going to charge the 14-year-old perpetrator of yesterday’s school shooting as an adult.
I remain surprised this practice survives constitutional scrutiny. It feels like cruel and unusual punishment to hold a 14-year-old to the same standard we hold an adult with a fully developed brain.
Dental cleaning
Covid shot
Flu shot
Dry cleaning pick-up
Laundry
Docusigns for financial planner
Fill in and Fed Ex tax docs to accountant
Transfer money
That’s it, I’m done. I hate days like this. Time to spark up.
@Tony W:
I agree 100%. WTF is the point of differentiating juveniles if we’re going to randomly declare them adults? A 14 year-old is not an adult.
If they want an adult to prosecute they can find the adult who gave this child a weapon of war. Then they can find the members of Congress and the members of our corrupt Supreme Court who are responsible for making this weapon available, and give them the business end of a baseball bat.
@Tony W: Ya know what doesn’t surprise me at all? The fact that his father kept guns in the house, got a visit from the police saying his son was threatening to shoot people, and yet still kept the guns.
@Michael Reynolds: I think this is more of a dilemma than just age. “Tried as an adult” really means “Is of such a danger to society we feel that we can’t risk further lives on the chance that he somehow grows out of this murdering people”. We don’t have a special category for that, but perhaps we should.
Put another way, this kid allegedly committed mass murder. If he goes through the normal juvenile system and doesn’t get into trouble for the next (less than) four years, he will be back on the street and unsupervised, record expunged and able to buy as many assault weapons as he can afford. Are we as a society obligated to take that risk?
@Tony W: I wonder if they’ll charge his parents, like they did with the kid in Michigan.
https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/james-jennifer-crumbley-sentencing-04-09-24/index.html
@Kingdaddy:
Lara’s video should be re-done with images of the Capitol Police from 1/6.
@MarkedMan:
It can also mean “We’re so pissed of at this kid for reasons, that we will extract the maximum punishment possible short of execution.”
And the reasons can be “because we lack the will to stop this kind of thing from happening regularly, so it’s easier to take it out on the kid.”
@MarkedMan: And… of course the father said that he had “hunting” guns that turn out to actually be assault weapons. We don’t yet know if one of them was the actual gun used by the killer, but the police have revealed the type and it matches. So the kid either took one of his father’s guns which, again, the father continued to keep in his home despite warnings from the police about his son making threats to shoot people, or the kid obtained another similar gun from another source. Not all gun owners are ridiculous and dangerous man-boys, but far too many of them are.
@Kathy: Whatever mistakes society has made, what is the alternative? Let him out of juvenile detention after 3+ years and tell him not to do it again, and let him go shopping in the first gun shop he comes across? However much he was failed by his parents and society as a whole in the past, what do we do now? For me, the answer is most emphatically not to treat him like any other child offender. This is a mass murderer and the risk that he will murder again strikes me as very, very high.
@Kathy:
My 3 computers, yes I have three*, will be good as dead next year when Microsoft stops doing Windows 10 fixes. So I’ll be in the market for new PCs. If I’m alive still.
Oh its been 7 years since I had a computer crash. I shouldn’t jinx myself when the youngest machine I have is 5 years old…..
*= 2 laptops and one desktop. First laptop is for work, the desktop is for my Strat-O-Matic baseball, commenting on OTB, and just about everything else I do on the internet. The second laptop is just a back up that the wife uses sometimes.
@MarkedMan:
There’s such a thing as taking the right action for the wrong reasons.
But in the first place, the refusal of so many to address the problem continues to puzzle the majority of the world. And it’s not just the wide availability of guns.
@Bill Jempty:
I’m used to having two.
Technically I have three. there’s an old, old, old HP I got in 2007, that runs Windows Vista, now gathering dust in storage. It was also really slow towards its end, when I got my current one. That’s why I never even tried to sell it. Slow and Vista? had someone given me $10 for it, my conscience would trouble me. I did try to give it away, but there were no takers.
It turns out I may be able to upgrade that one to Win10. save for one thing: I’d need to pay MS for a license, because Vista is not elegible for a Win10 upgrade. Maybe I can get around it by first downgrading it to Win8, if that is even remotely possible (I figure all the Win8 and Win8.1 code was hunted down and destroyed*). Win 8 machines are eligible for a free Win10 upgrade.
More realistically, the monitor of the old HP still works, and I should be able to use it with the laptop. It’s small, but larger than the laptop screen.
Less realistically, perhaps, I’m wondering if I could use the screen and speakers of the dead all-in-one desktop for the laptop. that would save me the price of a new monitor.
@Mister Bluster: @Matt Bernius: Meh… not sold. You’re trading on craggy edge on a lid for one razor sharp edge on a can that still has to have the label removed before it can be recycled. Still, “you can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
@Dutchgirl:
Oh? Wasn’t around yesterday.
Lets look.
<opens comments>
Oh my!
<closes comments>
Some pretty ripe specimens there, to be sure.
@Kathy: At this point I would make sure all ram, daughter cards (GPU soundcard etc) are properly seated and that nothing happened to the CPU mount. Check all power and data related cables to ensure they are properly seated. THen I would probably toss a different hard drive in there. Because it sounds to me like you’ve got a dying hard drive that keeps creating bad sectors galore as it goes. I’ve had HDD last two decades or two weeks. The two week one was a seagate that bricked itself because of a firmware bug. That seagate drive barely lasted two years. I’ve had terrible luck with seagate as a whole but great luck with western digital and older samsung. A while back samsung sold all their hard drive manufacturing stuff to seagate which might of improved their reliability.
EDIT : I just woke up from finally falling asleep after a migraine. So I missed your last part about not using local media for the install. I didn’t even realize you could install win10 over the internet. I always used an ISO on a bootable USB drive.
@Kingdaddy: Wow! That’s the most tuneless singing I’ve ever heard. Worse than Johnathan and Darlene Edwards although, to be fair, they were doing comedy.
@MarkedMan:
Pass laws that either require the juvenile to undergo psychiatric evaluation and/or allow him to plead not guilty by mental incapacity? I don’t think this is a good idea and suspect that it has it’s own set of unintended consequences, but when people ask for an alternative, I offer one.
@Matt:
Thanks for the advice.
Although I translate it to “take the thing to the shop*,” which I do intend to do if the reset fails (and if I can find one). If it’s the hard drive, given the age of the machine and the death of Win10 support next year, it makes more sense to invest the money for a new HD on a new PC.
I’d no idea you could download Win10 without a working OS, just from the recovery tools on the BIOS or whatever. That surprised me.
*I’ve learned better than to mess with the insides of machines.
@Mister Bluster: “They were identical except one has a blue handle and the other has a black handle.”
Which was the more expensive?
And no, there is absolutely no reason that this information matters a bit in my life. But it seemed rude not to ask!
@MarkedMan:
We do, it’s called Mentally Ill and Dangerous. Commitment under MI/D puts the person away for an indeterminate period and while the commitment is reviewed periodically, in high profile cases that review gets awfully political.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Indeed, but be aware that opening cans was one of the least used utilities of the P-38. Gets used as a screw driver. Scraping off carbon, and all sorts of small tasks far more than that.
@Grumpy realist: Wow I haven’t seen a mechanical egg beater in a decade or so.
@MarkedMan: Indeed when it comes to computer components you get what you pay for (some brands are worse than others). Bloatware varies too and is the first thing I remove on a new system.
My dell laptop started off with win8 but is now running win10 despite it not being officially supported by dell. Everything works normally because drivers are fairly standardized for specific pieces of hardware. Compatibility is helped by the fact that off the shelf hardware is cheaper than running custom chips for sound/wifi/gpu/etc. The intel smart response stuff worked outright. I did have a bit of a hiccup with getting the system to switch between the on-die CPU gpu and the discrete GPU based on use. When I installed win10 the discrete GPU was used 100% of the time which increased battery drain. I found if I installed the dell 8.1 driver then installed AMD’s driver on top the switching setup would work normally. No other issues outside of that.
You do not have to buy a separate version of windows to install a clean OS to that system. Windows will see via the HWID that you have a license for that version and authenticate it. Worst case you have to call MS support to get it authenticated. In my last IT job we used a singular ISO for the desktop units and a single different ISO for the laptops. Didn’t matter if the systems were HP, dell, lenovo, old, or new they all used the same ISO. It was vastly easier than trying to uninstall all the bloatware and manually remove the recovery partitions and all that crap. The uniformity made maintenance and updates vastly easier.
Trump and Vance were both asked in the last day or so what they would do to help Americans with the high cost of child care.
Vance’s answer: get the grandparents to take care of them.
Trump’s answer (gleaned from trying to pull anything coherent at all out of a long word salad): tariffs. Tariffs will bring in so much money to this country, the high cost of child care will be fixed.
No word (that I can see as a nonsubscriber) on these brilliant plans from the NY Times, but WaPo called it “nonsensical.”
Which is worse: the ideas of one who is totally unrealistic about modern society, or the ideas of one who is totally ignorant about everything, including economics?
@Kathy:Dollar for dollar desktops always outperform laptops. Desktops also tend to survive a lot longer because they are vastly better at heat management. Laptops have all the hot components crammed into a tiny space right next to each other. Then there’s the ease of upgrade/repair for the desktop.
I’ve never used liquid cooling and I’m the type that ran an e7200 at 4ghz on air during winter using a cooler master hyper 212 heat sink. During summer I had to drop the clock to 3.7ghz to keep the chip well below thermal danger. That same cooler kept a q6600 system relatively cool at 3.6 ghz. The q6600 machines were basically space heaters though eating 300 watts from the wall. The q6600 CPUs were bought used off ebay for $12 shipped and I never did manage to kill one of them. I ended up tossing them as e-waste because I just couldn’t find a use for them anymore.
All you need is a good thermal paste and a relatively cheap heat sink to OC these days. Gamer’s nexus on youtube has done extensive tests on various heat sinks and they have found some really effective cheap heatsinks (think $15).
@Kathy: For a while I used to buy used small form factor HP/compaq business machines off ebay to turn into cheap gaming rigs for people. For some of those machines I had to install win 8.1 to get a free upgrade to win10. Most of the machines authenticated with windows 10 right away. MS doesn’t like to admit it but you could still do the upgrade from 7/8 to 10 for free up until last year (I haven’t built any since). Corporate bulk licensing FTW. Doesn’t matter these days as it’s easy to authenticate an install of win10 without a purchased key.
I’m not sure what I will do once EOL occurs for win10 as I have no desire to move to win11 and win12 is going to be even more intrusive and abusive. When they removed the “my computer” icon they kind of gave away the game that they no longer consider your PC to really belong to you.
@MarkedMan: The father should be in jail too. That’s just fcking ridiculous. The guns should of been secured before the police even talked to him. His failure to secure the guns after being informed of the dangerous behaviour of his son shows a blatant disregard for the safety of everyone. I really hope he gets jail time for this.
@Matt:
I’m not exactly eager to resurrect the Vista PC, or to upgrade it. It’s worse than that: now I’m curious how it would run. From what I recall back in the day, Win10 was promoted as being less resource intensive even than Vista. So a Vista PC might run rather well, assuming the CPU is not that old and slow, and the HD doesn’t crap out (I think I used that thing less than the one I use now).
@wr:..can openers…
These purchases all went down a few weeks ago? maybe a month or more. So the reliability of my memory of events can not be guaranteed. When I bought the first one with the black handle there were several black handled openers all priced at $3.50 marked down from $9.99. I check the clearance bin every time I visit Kroger’s. Several shopping trips later there were identical blue handled and black handled can openers all priced at $2.50 down from $9.99 so I picked up a blue handled one to throw in my travel bag. There have been too many times when I’ve been on the road with a can of green beans and left the can opener at home.
@Matt:
Back when MS doubled down on Ballmer’s Folly (aka Win8, aka WINDOS), I seriously considered installing Linux on a desktop. I went to far as to run two different distros (see, I got the lingo down) on an old laptop to test them.
The only other choice for Win10 is to pay MS for extended support. I find that quite unappealing.
As for intrusive OSs, eventually they will all be.
What I never considered even once was getting a Mac. I still don’t.
@Bill Jempty: I have three desktop machines that I’m actively using to “farm” in a game. The oldest is my secondary machine that I use to dual box games with that has a sandy bridge xeon e3-1230 from 2011. The next oldest would be my third machine which an i7-3770 (ivy bridge 2012) and the fourth machine that has an i5-3470 (ivy bridge). My primary machine is a ryzen 5 3600 based system. The i7 machine would be my secondary machine but it’s a sff machine with a slower GPU than the e3 system.
I have 1 machine that is usable but it’s offline because I no longer have a use for it. Then there’s the 2 machines worth of spare parts in storage.
Then there’s the fully functional Dell laptop I mentioned earlier. I also have two older laptops that I keep in storage because while they work they are so outdated I have no use for them.
Common theme for me is that my machines outlast any shred of usefulness.
@Kathy: Win10 actually shows as using more resources because it’s vastly better at cache and prefetching stuff. IF you’ve got 10 gb of free ram that’s ram that’s not helping you do stuff faster. So win10 preloads stuff in the background. It’s one of the features I liked about win8 that they expanded on with 10. Windows 8.1 is a good OS it’s just MS made a premature jump to a tablet based GUI. Vista was actually quite good after some specific patches. Much like win8 though vista was released in a less than ideal shape and that is all people remember. You only have one chance to make that first impression and that stuff tends to hang over your head. Except for win XP for some reason. When it was first released people hated it but now it’s like the gold standard of how great an OS can be or something. Only took two major service packs to get there..
I am not a fan of what MS is doing with win11 (ie unavoidable Ads, spying and recall). I fear win12 will expand on the spying on your activities and the amount of ads. At this rate hackers are going to be able to spy on you withoI’m waiting to see if they decide that your OS must be always connected to the internet too..
@Sleeping Dog:
Is that sentencing determination available in juvenile court? In Georgia?
@Mister Bluster:
If that’s not a euphemism, it should be.
@Matt: Interesting. Although I gotta say it just reinforces my commitment to Apple for my personal gear. There is less expensive Apple hardware but there is no cheap Apple hardware. Device to device Apple is as well priced as similar quality devices from Windows PC manufacturers, sometimes even cheaper once you get enough add ons to the Windows device to make it as snappy as the Apple one. And you get free upgrades for as long as the OS supports the model you have, typically 8-10 years for a computer. I have a 2009 iMac that I updated every year until 2020 or so. Still works but it is quite slow to boot up. It’s going into the recycle pile but still runs.
And Kathy, this definitely does not mean I’m recommending a Mac for you. Once you’ve learned one system the other just seems annoying. I’ve used Windows at work and Mac at home for three decades, so I can go back and forth pretty seamlessly, but it’s not worth the aggravation if you’re not used to it.
@Kathy:
With a Macintosh, or really any Apple Product, you are paying a premium for adequate.
There are absolutely other PCs/Phones/Tablets* that are better deals, but with Apple, you know that the likelihood of it having fatal flaws or just sucking in some other way is low.
The median Apple product is about average, maybe a touch below. The standard deviation of inherent goodness** is really low.
I’m happy to pay that premium to save me a lot of hassle — learning all the details of new PCs, understanding what I’m looking for, dealing with the consequences when I am wrong, etc. This makes me the worst Apple fanboy***.
*: Tablet may be dependent upon your usage, but for most uses, an off brand android is fine. The iPad Pro is amazing for digital art. And pricy. But it is best in field. I’m thinking about upgrading as it now supports pen orientation (rotate the pen in your hand to change the orientation of the virtual brush — the one I have has location, tilt and pressure, which is really good.)
But it’s so pricy. I might need to get a job.
**: inherent goodness is my preferred metric to encapsulate an assortment of other metrics that I don’t feel like breaking out and analyzing separately. Vibes, essentially, but pretty well informed vibes. Might be wrong, but almost certainly not disastrously so.
***: is that the least effective Apple fanboy, who fails to pursuade others to join the cult? Or worst as in completely bought into buying Apple stuff? Not sure, but one of those. I’m glad edit is back.
@MarkedMan:
The kid should be involuntarily committed to a secure mental health hospital. His father should do 20 years. A hard 20. Fucking asshole cost 4 people their lives and given the kinds of injuries you get from those kind of rounds, he may well have crippled and mutilated still more. It is his fault. He has the moral burden here.
@MarkedMan: I can build a regular PC for the fraction of the cost of an apple system while outperforming said Apple system. Apple is using standard PC hardware but they add a premium to the price. Sometimes Apple will even use inferior hardware while still attaching a premium price to it. Some of their mobos are outright shameful in the usage of inferior components (mosfets/caps etc).
I’ve run hackintoshes and I’ve also been responsible for multiple generation of apple desktop/laptop units (+100 units). I am not a fan of how their updates don’t work simply because Apple decided they want you to buy a new PC. That’s the kind of shit MS is starting to do with win11.
@Michael Reynolds: I was in full agreement until you left reality with your statement about “those rounds”.
@Matt:
All I do is browse the web, stream video, and use Word. From time to time I’ll run Excel and Acrobat. I don’t need a very fast machine, I just want one.
I used to play Sims, and now and then some other simple(ish) games. Lately I don’t, because of work.
Windows 8 had no workable desktop interface. I did try it. I hated every second of it. It had its good points, but not enough for me to consider using it given all downsides, and it wasn’t just the start button.
I never got that complain, BTW. What I wanted was the start menu, not the button. If you could bring it up some other way, fine. When they put the effing button in Win8.1, it was like a bad joke. And don’t get me started on touch.
So, yeah, maybe it was stable, and made better use of resources, and yadda yadda yadda. What’s the use of all that if you can’t use the interface for work or play?
I did like the idea of active tiles, or whatever they were called, and the jump lists on many programs. These were carried over to Win10, but not to Win11.
That said, Win8 is the New Coke of operating systems. No one wanted it, everyone preferred the older version(s), and even the marketing and rollout were a disaster. Come, you put in a completely new interface, and all you offer for help in figuring it out is a text box saying “touch any corner”? Really? And then there was the whole mess with the Metro/Modern/Nameless interface.
When I think of that era and for some reason don’t get mad all over again, I feel so much pity for the people who implemented it, and poured hundreds of hours of work and effort and sweat and tears into something that looked pretty but was essentially useless*.
Last, there was the Surface tablet. Win8 might have been a great interface for a handheld touch device. I admit, though I never tried one. The separately sold keyboard looked amazing, too. And one of MS’s BIG selling points fo it was that, unlike ipads and Android tablets, it ran the whole MS Office suite of apps, not the mobile versions.
Only it ran them on an emulation of the old Windows desktop, not on the touch-centric interface. I never tried it,as mentioned above, but I read several pieces claiming it was like the worst way to try to use Word or Excel ever devised.
But don’t take my word for it. MS wound up taking a $900 million write off on the first generation Surface tablets.
*I felt just that sort of pity when I watched video reviews of the Humane AI Pin, and the Rabbit R1. Especially the latter.
@Kathy:
You can change settings to make windows 8.1 look/act like windows 7. The initial “attempt” at reintroducing the start bar was annoying I admit. The final variation though proved to be useful for me. I fully hated the first version of win 8’s interface. At this point though it doesn’t matter because we’re well past that OS.
Speaking of surface tablets/laptops.. Did you know when MS released win11 basically none of their surface tablets/laptops were supported? You had to buy a newer generation surface tablet/laptop AFTER win 11 was released in order to have support…
Win11 felt like MS deciding to push more system sales by arbitrarily refusing to allow whole generations of CPUs to run win11. Hell they weren’t even consistent about CPU generations either as some older cheaper CPUs were supported while newer higher performing CPUs weren’t. There seemed to be no real consistency as some CPUs were supported by win 11 while better CPUs of the same generation weren’t.
@MarkedMan:
While I can’t speak authoritatively about Georgia, I’d be shocked if the state didn’t have an equivalent.
Generally the first step toward MI/D would be a criminal case where it is determined that the defendant is mentally ill and incompetent. The next step would be for the state to seek commitment.
Reagan’s would be assassin was never convicted of attempted murder, but was committed as MI/D and spent 40 something years in a locked psychiatric unit. He was subsequently released into a community based program, but only after years of trying.
@MarkedMan:
Good choice. Sound judgment.
When someone recommends I use a Mac, I will picture Elnor saying “Please, choose to live.”
@Gustopher:
I’ve never really used one. But here’s the story:
A few years back, my mom got a Mac of some sort. one day she asked me for help, because she said the printer didn’t work. I warned her I knew nothing about Macs, but I’d take a look.
The machine was off, and I spent the next ten minutes trying to turn it on. I couldn’t find a way. Later I found out the on button was concealed in the back. I did look at the back for it, and honestly I didn’t see it.
another time I helped her print a PDF (she was trying to print the email displaying the PDF). I could make no sense of it. I had no idea how to run a program that wasn’t pinned to the desktop. there was no task bar. The controls to resize, minimize, and close the windows were colors, and on the left side. The last might be helpful to left handed people (my mom isn’t), but I found it irritating.
I should say regarding Windows I find the usage of pinned apps on the taskbar just as irritating. First thing I do with every new PC is unpin everything, then set the taskbar so the buttons never combine (Win11 was a laggard in this matter for some inscrutable reason).
I also had many many issues with iphone 4 I used briefly years ago. It’s all Windows and Android for me. I’d consider other OSs, like ChromeOS or Linux, but not anything remotely related to Apple.
If I had to use a Mac to save my life, I’d first figure out an estimate of how long I have to live. it might not be worth the aggravation.
@Matt:
I read that claim lots of time. I tried it. It never worked.
What did work, alas after I’d bought my ill-fated desktop, was an app called Start8. It cost $5, disabled the Metro/Modern crap, and restored the Win7 start menu (with button). I used it on my laptop until the Win10 upgrade kicked in.
My first home windows PC was a Compaq with native Win95. Upgrading to Win98 required paying for the Win98 CD. I never upgraded past that without buying a new PC (until Win10). When Win10 came around, things had changed a lot. MS did not charge for the upgrade to Win10 from 7, or 8.1. I assume they lost a bundle on that, and thus made sure Win11 would require lots of new PCs with new licenses paid to Microsoft.
And that’s a really dirty thing to do for their own hardware, given MS charges as if it were Apple for its surface line.
I also wonder how risky is it to run an OS that’s no longer supported. Yes, I know the risk is in your machine being taken over to spread malware, mine bitcoin, run denial of service attacks, etc., rather than steal your data (which you give away to the social media apps and Win11 anyway), your passwords, or your credit card.
The father has been arrested and charged with second-degree murder.
Via the NYT:
@Sleeping Dog: My question was more about the first part: is that a determination that a juvenile court can make? Or do you have to be tried as an adult for that to happen?
@Kathy: Should I point out that many of the UI choices Microsoft made for Windows was essentially, “The Mac did it first (or rather Xerox Parc did it first) and we need to be different. So let’s just do the opposite”?
No. No I shouldn’t…
Considering what you do with your computer there is absolutely nothing about any other operating system that would offer a better experience. That’s actually true of me nowadays. For the first time I am able to run everything on my Mac almost exactly the way I run it on my PC at work. For those few apps that are not Web based or don’t have native Mac versions I use Windows Remote Desktop. And for IT reasons, I access them on my work PC through Windows Remote Desktop too.
For most people the choice of computer (unless it is underpowered or full of bloatware/spyware) or operating system is not going to make any sort of a difference to what you can do or how fast you can do it. Except for games. If you’re a gamer, get or build a gaming PC. (Although it will be interesting to see what happens to games now that Microsoft is pushing a switch to ARM based processors.)
@Jen: Even worse, he purchased it as a Christmas present for his son AFTER the investigation into his son’s online threats.
May he rot in hell.
@Gustopher:..euphemism…
Kind of like up a creek without a paddle…
So now I started reading about euphemisms. Scrolled down to Euphemisms for pooping.
Which triggered my memory to the Larry Sanders Show. A scene where
Arthur’s (Rip Torn) son is in the office.
“Where’s the restroom? I’ve gotta’ drop the kids off at the pool.”
@MarkedMan:
If you ever see me standing up for Microsoft, you’ll know there’s something wrong with me.
BTW, I’m using the laptop right now. I haven’t used it in over a year. I’d forgotten how tiny the screen is… It feels slow, and I’m having trouble getting office 365 and One Drive to run. I’ll allow three guesses about how I feel about MS just now.
@Matt:
Left reality?
@dazedandconfused: I was talking about the TicTok video, not the corroded hand-tool.
While I’m here, a “mechanical” egg beater is called a ” whisk” or “whip” in the modern era. The work great!
@Kathy: While back I left one of my old windows XP laptops running connected to the internet for a week. Nothing happened because I have a properly secured network and I didn’t use the machine to browse questionable sites. Now if I connected to some random public wifi with the firewall disabled and started browsing random sketchy websites I bet it would catch something.
Using an OS that is no longer supported does make you more vulnerable. Vulnerability can vary wildly depending upon usage and your own hardware/software setup. Your average user isn’t as protected or careful about network security as me. So that’s something to keep in mind.
@Michael Reynolds: Oh here we go again I’m about to basically repeat the same response I’ve given every time you make that factually incorrect claim. Do you even bother reading my response or do you just run off and ignore it?
A 5.56 round fired from a standard 16 inch barrel has a velocity of about 2800 Ft/sec with about 1700 Joules of energy. A 5.56 round fired out of a standard looking bolt action hunting rifle is +3000 FT/s with +1800 joules of energy. So strike one against your statement that a round fired by an AR15 is inherently deadlier. The 30-06 hunting round can do 3000 FT/sec with around 3820 Joules of energy on impact. If you go with a 220 grain round it’s 2500 FT/sec with 4200 joules of energy. The round dumping energy into the surrounding tissue is what does damage.
The rest of the article you linked are just statements that can be applied to any round.
The biggest complaint about the 5.56 round in Vietnam was that it would put nice clean holes in the enemy instead of dropping them. It’s funny to see people are trying to claim that the 5.56 is some kind of magical people destroyer now.
In the Black Hawk Down book SFC Paul Howe described SFC Randy Shughart’s choice of weapon like this (he chose to carry a 7.62 m14).
“‘His rifle may have been heavier and comparatively awkward and delivered a mean recoil, but it damn sure knocked a man down with one bullet, and in combat, one shot was all you got. You shoot a guy, you want to see him go down; you don’t want to be guessing for the next five hours whether you hit him, or whether he’s still waiting for you in the weeds.’ [1]”
THe book “The Black Rifle: M16 Retrospective” goes into greater detail about one of the selling points of the .223/5.56 round was it’s ability to tumble to increase lethality. Real life usage has shown the round tends to fly straight or curve without tumbling when hitting tissue.
Here’s an article from 2004 covering what I just said with vastly more citations. Yes I know it’s the American Thinker but the article is making an argument that the 5.56 round is not nearly lethal enough and is causing unnecessary American casualties in Iraq.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2004/08/the_last_big_lie_of_vietnam_ki.html
Here is a video of a 5.56 round fired by a standard AR15 hitting ballistic gel. Ballistic gel is designed/formulated to simulate human tissue for bullet evaluation. This is a standard used by the FBI and other government agencies for testing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55CkeT7qdtM
Looks pretty impressive right?
Here’s a standard hunting rifle round being fired
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8E138NgyFs
So now do you see how it’s a bad joke to say that a 5.56 round fired from an AR-15 is somehow the most lethal round in existence?