The Gnome overview is simple enough to use that people think there’s nothing to it.

I’ve never had a better tool for interacting with apps, and I’ve worked with a lot of tools / DEs. There are some that are arguably more fun, or that clearly give better customization options.

…but just being a clean tool that works, provides what you need, looks good doing so, and gets out of your way? Gnome, hands down.

thanks! You’ve satisfied my curiosity, and piqued my interest in MX Linux.

I wasn’t asking for “proof”, I was asking for curiosity.

distro?

if you have an extra drive around, you could try a fresh installation on that drive, then do the things on that that cause crackle.

And what might those preparations look like?

All preparations for disaster look like a cost-benefit analysis and reasonable actions taken to mitigate those disasters. Sometimes, that means relying on collective tools - laws, incentives, etc., which can be easier sometimes, if it works. Other times, it’s internal planning, or physical training, or avoidance of problematic situations.

Another big aspect of preparation that people can do is genuinely coming to terms with the existence of whatever particular problem they’re facing. “Radical acceptance”, so to speak, though one needs to know the difference between accepting and submitting. When you can’t accept something, you end up blindsided by it, shocked and appalled that it can happen to you, or that humans can’t just talk it through, or whatever. When you can, you generally see it coming a ways away, and can address it before it becomes an issue for you, instead of thinking “I shouldn’t have to deal with this,” or “but humanity is better than that, and we can just talk it through.”

But, that kind of preparation takes a lot of world-view shifting, and skill-building in processing fears, and for people who don’t really have evidence of the benefit, it’s hard to pay the cost in time and effort on personal growth in that area. C’est la vie.

A vaccine is never 100% effective. […]

Indeed. However, there must be a line for what a collective can or cannot reasonably impose on an individual. And, whether you like it or not, the physical body is a real boundary, and granting a collective governing body power over what you put into or take out of your own body is a larger issue than vaccination, and people will utilize that power against you, not just for you.

This is true enough that as soon as the Democrats started pushing for mandatory vaccinations during covid, I knew and stated that the cost would be abortion. …and that’s exactly what was lost, in many states.

Any power you give the government, will be used all of the ways it can be used, depending on the party in power and the moral fads that the culture goes through - and as you can see with trump and the underlying expressions going on there, these fads aren’t always going to be in your favor.

Although there are some areas that are morally more stable, any area that doesn’t have fairly universal support will go through this dynamic of flipping what side gets to utilize that power, and in what way it is used.

Case in point:

The Republicans centralized power in the presidency with the USA Patriot act. The Democrats, in power when it expired, renewed it, rather than letting it drop, or (even better) making an act to prevent that centralization of power. Obama utilized that power to great effect, including to fulfill the reason for it’s temporary existence. …and then he renewed it, when it was no longer needed, and after it had expired, because of lack of ability to consider that maybe power isn’t always a good thing, and sometimes you need to let go for things to work right.

…and the dems can’t keep hold of that power. …and now that power is Trump’s and the reps in general, until their fire burns out.

As a side note: The irony is that maybe Trump, if he thinks the dems will win, might nerf presidential powers out of spite - which would be great, if it sticks.

Yeah… …I really love some of the core Swedish ideals, and it’s sad to see this happening. I really hope that Sweden is able to generate an effective response to the incoming ideologies without sacrificing their own ideals.

When people get too soft, times get hard (bullies win when people are too soft). A genuine balance needs to be struck, which requires a lot of personal processing by many people, as well as time for the resultant answers to spread through the culture. Sweden may need to limit immigration in the mean time to give time for that to occur.

this was always the argument in the US when taking with people regarding all the cool things Sweden instituted - “but they are culturally contiguous, and that’s what makes it work.”

…in a melting pot, you have to account for the existence of all these extreme viewpoints, and have some kind of response. Those things that aren’t accounted for simply spill out into the populous, and become everyone’s problem.

yep. tha’s them.

you’re not wrong.

I appreciate this response, and agree with much of it.

There’s some grey-area stuff:

Evolution is messy, and the evolution of the immune system is messier still. Even if we only look at it from a simplified Darwinian evolution perspective, having genetic diversity might be more important than any shedding of ‘weaker’ alleles from people dying off because their natural immunity couldn’t handle a particular infection.

True, but in theory, a good chunk of people would be taking vaccines - and so while there’s a selective pressure (mostly on those willing to undergo it), overall diversity would be maintained.

and, as an aside – alas, simplified is the domain and utility of science. It’s how we grasp anything natural at all.

…there are some tidbits I do disagree with, though. mainly:

Someone’s HLA alleles can be a poor match for a current disease, but very helpful for a future disease. Having them die off now would be a bad thing.

While that would be a bad thing, it’s not like there’s selective pressure against having the HLA alleles that would be good for a future disease - more, just that there’s selective pressure against not having one for the current disease. Let’s say that the theoretical future-disease-preventing HLA alleles are randomly distributed, and that the incidence of death from a current disease roughly matches the incidence of death from car accidents, then the car accidents have just as much of a deleterious affect on the future as the current disease does. That’s like the Christian argument “The baby you’re about to abort could be the one that comes up with the cure for cancer.” …sure, but it could by Hitler 3.0, too.

The very multifaceted complexity that goes into the entire process of how animals (including us) handle disease has a couple knowable facets:

• It works, generally speaking, over the long term, and often enough in the short term

• we have added new means of gaining immunity, but with that we also reduce selective pressures on the species, not just for disease-specific immune responses, but any other traits (including but not limited to rapidity of immune response) that impact the capacity to handle and survive a disease

• it is clearly selection pressure that has led to effective immune systems in the first place

but even aside from that, the following are my opinions, and though I’m open to the possibility, I doubt they’ll change today:

• taking away the body sovereignty of an individual is an abominable act which reduces diversity, and harms the species as a whole, in many different ways, some subtle, some less so
• the benefits of body sovereignty far outweigh the detriments of it, particularly since we, by and large, have a medical answer for those who wish to be protected from a disease but don’t want to rely on the natural biological process to do so, but would rather use a method that involves a technological support framework.
• evolution works, and although it always costs lives, it’s a prerequisite for life. We don’t evolve out of evolution.

edit: btw, thanks for the genuine civil discourse, I enjoy it.

Then don’t stab anyone, and prepare for what situations you run into where you know it’s possible to be stabbed, but won’t stab in return.

Yes. You can get measles from someone, and can give it to them. The fundamental bad actor is the disease itself, and we address that by getting immunity to it, one way or the other.

Get a vaccine. Nobody should every be able to take that right from you.

The circumstance of dying from a disease due to biological weakness has a suppressive affect on phenotypes which don’t provide an immune system capable of fighting the disease. This is basic.

I am not making the argument that we are destroying species immunity to any particular disease by getting vaccines, which is clearly false. When you get vaccines or get a disease, the result is some degree of immunity to that specific disease (or some degree of immunity or maiming or death, in the case of getting disease).

Rather, bolstering the immune system with vaccines is a crutch that, while it may be the best option for an individual to choose, does still permit phenotypes which cannot handle the disease to be passed to offspring.

Obviously, this is a slow process. But also, just as obviously, someone who chooses not to vaccinate and thereby dies from a disease would have, otherwise, potentially passed that weakness on to their children.

this isn’t bullshit or a niche theory. It’s basic evolution, but in an area that is hard for some people to accept because they don’t like it, and want to distance themselves from death, and feel like they are outside of the realm of natural necessity, or because they just can’t conceive of biological robustness being that important, or being truly subject to any kind of degradation. But that is a failing to see the scope of the necessity to sustain our genetic robustness - not enforced by some creepy nazi idea is what’s “perfect”, through eugenics, but through sovereign choice.

And yes, making vaccines available does benefit the species as a whole, because we increase the ways we can fight disease. But those who fight a disease naturally, and actual actually accept the consequences of that, are exercising their individual rights in a way that is also beneficial to the species, by reducing the instances of problematic phenotypes, and (hopefully) breeding if they survive.

No. You can reasonably take an action against someone that is the same degree of involvement they attempt to do to you. By someone stabbing you, or attempting to, they consent to the same degree of violence against them, by having taken direct action against you.

This is not the same as, for example, someone fleeing from attackers, and knocking on your door, thus potentially drawing the attention of the attackers to you. Of course, you’re free to deny the attackers or the victim entry.

this was my thought, too.

solid

I reject societal contracts that do not support individual and body sovereignty. Of course, you can do with that as you will, because… …well… …sovereignty. Just know that if you take body sovereignty from people in one area, you empower the government to make decisions about your body, as well.

…and as we all have seen, the benevolence of the government is largely dependent on what party is in power, and what societal dynamics are in play. it’s… …unreliable, at best.

I literally called it, the day Democrats started pushing forced vaccinations, that the Republicans would go for reversal of abortion law. …and they fucking did, and they fucking succeeded in many ways, and that is direct consequence of permitting the government to violate body sovereignty, even when the voiced arguments do not pertain to it.

So, you can have your contiguous society, with forced social contracts rather than ones people actually are willing to agree to. …and you’ll also have the consequences, whether or not you can cognize how bad that will be right now.

Crackpot theories… …like… … how evolution works? …or how regressive evolution works?

Diseases have killed countless people, and we have multiple vectors (and should have multiple vectors) for addressing them.

We have technology, as in vaccines. This is a good thing.

We have social behaviors including social pressure (which is, unfortunately, often compulsive and not well-aimed by the people that exercise it, but such is life).

We have individual immunity, and the direct biological pressure for health and general genetic robustness, which is also a good thing, even though it kills some of us.

the cool thing is, we’re now at a point where there are lots of anti-vaxxers who are totally willing to throw their lives away for the benefit of the species. …and, their surviving genetic lines and the rest of the species, as their children interbreed with the rest of humanity, will be better off for it. That’s true, whether you like it or not. It’s also true that forcing vaccination rather than simply providing and incentivizing vaccination is a terribly, terribly flawed strategy which causes far more issues than it fixes.

I understand that you’re making social-pressure arguments, and that they are valid in the context you’re in. But they aren’t the end-all be-all, and they’re not fundamentally scientific (or even logical) just because you’re trying to support science by using them.

I also know this whole conversation brings up tons of uncomfortable topics, for which I’ll probably get yelled at. I just don’t care, because being more forceful about an argument, or getting the last word, really has no bearing on the truth of that word.

I’m absolutely for the rights of people to either have or refuse vaccines. Of course, in your mind, that probably just equates to being an anti-vaxxer. I get vaccines when it makes sense to me to do so, which doesn’t include all vaccines.

Nah. It’s not concerning that otherwise intelligent people can’t figure out how to deal with their own lives without resorting to controlling others.