If I wanted your clothes, I wouldn’t have left them at goodwill.

“Disrespectful” would be telling you that you in particular should continue to use windows or mac, and avoid Linux like the plague.

Do you actually want to run an application that doesn’t exist on Linux?

I use a virtual machines for the 2 or 3 times a year I need to use a couple garbage windows-only programs. Usually for configuring some arcane piece of proprietary hardware that people were getting rid of because it is incompatible with everything.

Well, yeah. I mean, help desk deals with users at their moment of peak incompetence. If 1 in 20 users can’t figure out that “Office” is now “Libre office”, help desk is going to be swamped.

The solution is to merge help desk and HR, so that something productive can be done about PEBCAK issues.

It’s not the IT folks who need to be pushed. It’s the users.

Considering that only 2% is not Hydrogen or Helium

I assume that claim comes from:

The abundance of chemical elements in the universe is dominated by the large amounts of hydrogen and helium which were produced during the Big Bang. Remaining elements, making up only about 2% of the universe

I kind of doubt that hydrogen or helium comprise 98% of the mass of the 48 tons of meteors per day. I kinda suspect that the 48 tons of meteors are comprised almost entirely of “other” elements.

50% of people are going to be dumber than average because in normal distributions the mean is the median. The “general population” is not smart by any definition.

What if “smart” begins at the 35th percentile, rather than the 50th? What if “gifted” is anything above the 50th percentile?

Every machine I’ve purchased in the last 16 years has had a Linux liveCD or USB key before first power up. Windows has tried to boot a couple times, when I was too slow to figure out how to select a boot device, but none has actually completed the boot process. I take a sort of perverse pleasure in formatting pre-installed windows without it ever having run.

Wow, I actually forgot about Vista. I never actually had it installed on anything. XP was the last OS I had installed on hardware. Win 7 was the first I knew only from VM installations.

Straw that broke the camel’s back? Every vertebra in that camel’s back has been smashed with a sledge hammer over the past 30 years.

Windows 95 was the last version I was excited about; Windows 98 SE was the last version of Windows I willingly purchased, and XP was the last one I willingly used. When they announced Win7, I downloaded Ubuntu 6.06, “Dapper Drake”. Since then, Windows has only existed on my computers as pirated, virtual machines.

SteefLem is a 47-year-old scuba instructor and retired lion tamer from Winnipeg who has just learned the colloquial meaning of the phrase “pulled it right out of my ass.”

NGO: Non-governmental organization

GDPR: General Data Protection Regulation. A set of European laws intended to empower individuals to control personal data held by companies.

“noyb” is a European privacy rights organization, who appears to prefer to style their name with lowercase letters. The name is an acronym for “none of your business”.

Reddit users were infamous trolls and shitposters leaning heavily on sarcasm. The problem they are in facing is Poe’s law.

Turbine engines (jets) do not burn leaded fuels. Jet fuel is similar to kerosene or diesel fuel, with certain additives to meet aviation needs.

The overwhelming majority of piston powered aircraft use 100LL, which has a relatively tiny amount of lead compared to automotive fuels of the 1970s. The FAA has recently certified 100UL for use in all aircraft, but production does not yet meet demand.

Jet-A has higher energy density and is cheaper than 100LL or 100UL, but can’t be used in spark-ignition engines.

Compression-ignition (“diesel”) piston engines are coming on the market as new and retrofit kits, allowing the use of Jet-A in general aviation aircraft.

We didn’t “switch” to unleaded gas in the 1970s. We added unleaded, required gas stations to offer it, and vehicle manufacturers were prohibited from making new cars that required it.

Leaded gas was still being offered at some stations well into the 1990s.

Everything you just said is only true for stocks that pay dividends now, or may pay dividends in the future.

It is not true for companies with zero intention of ever paying dividends.

Even if the company went bankrupt, you own a sliver of their real product

Historically, when that happens, the creditors walk away with the assets. The shareholders get nothing.

but the stock itself is intrinsically tied to the literal ownership of those profit generating assets.

That’s the scam. It’s not. In practice, the sole value of a zero-dividend stock is the speculative value.

it is not tied in theory or in practice to something of perceptibly equal realized value.

Electricity has value. Crypto value is intrinsically tied to mining costs. Even if you have access to a free source of power like your own solar panels, you have to weigh the cost effectiveness of mining against the revenue from using your panels to backfeed the grid, selling power back to the power companies.

Because crypto is tied to something of utilitarian value, and zero-dividend stocks are tied only to the whims of investors, the stocks are actually a significantly greater scam than the crypto.

There are plenty of places I can take you where your $20 bill isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. There is nothing particularly special about a dollar bill that makes it fundamentally different from any other intangible object.

Again, the only difference is the size of the community that shares the belief. The dollar has a much larger user base than crypto. Crypto has a much larger user base than the Albanian Lek.

Your comments about Emperor Norton and the Ruble demonstrate my point. The value of these currencies is entirely in the minds of the people using them. None of the items I mentioned have any significant intrinsic value. Their value is to the community that uses the .

I was not suggesting that any of these items was a currency, merely that they derive their value in the same way that currency does.

It is real because the people who use it believe it is real. Same goes for zero-dividend stocks, crypto, Yu-Gi-Oh cards, Beanie Babies, etc. The difference between currency and any ofbthese others is only in the number of people involved.

You can point to government regulations for money. You can point to SEC regulations for stocks and other securities. I can point to algorithmic scarcity for crypto. And I am sure there are standards that various collector communities deem important. But, the fundamental concept value for any of these others is that the people using it believe it has value.

Money is real in exactly the same way that zero-dividend shares are real, or that cryptocurrency is real.

The difference is that the government can freely adjust the value of money, and anyone can create shares. Cryptocurrency can only be generated per the conditions of an algorithm.