I’m not surprised. Very few people can afford hardware to drive such displays at native resolution so 1440p is usually though of as a good balance. The other issue would be that it’d have to either kinda big or you’ll have to deal with display scaling which is not great on Windows.

I just contributed to this. My gf bought her old work laptop for cheap (an employee perk) for simple survivors-like games. It should have been perfectly capable machine (i5-8350u, 16GB of RAM, fast NVMe drive) and it’s compatible with Windows 11 so I went with that. I’m a Mac guy these days and but use Windows at work so I’m only familiar with LTSC versions. I wasn’t ready for how much of a shitshow it is.

Couple of hours later I had debloated it and disabled Defender yet it was still running dog slow. The laptop had trouble with Thunderbolt 3 docking station, not recognising anything beyond connected displays. Intel graphics drivers were so unstable games kept crashing left and right.

I got tired of fighting it and installed vanilla Ubuntu (didn’t want to disable Secure Boot). I’m not a Linux newbie by any means but these days it’s home server stuff and the like. I stumbled on Bitlocker protection that I’m 100% sure is there to discourage people from switching. Microsoft set it up so that when you look at it funny you have to find unlock keys at your account page. Funny thing about that - when my gf was typing the address for that page in Safari with Google search on her phone the first autocompleting result was a scam page. I’m fairly sure Google does this to spite Microsoft. Fuck big tech but I digress.

After that it took an hour to install including figuring out that I had to add DisplayLink drivers for the dock myself. The process wasn’t great but I guess it’s a real niche case. Either way, this machine is now flying and Steam+Proton handle everything pretty well.

Last time I used Windows on desktop was around W8 and it wasn’t half that bad. Microsoft is doomed if they offer this kind of experience. I was critical of Proton before but I need to acknowledge that some working solution had to be created ASAP to get people off this dumpster fire.

This is not up to Harris or politicians to fix, they are not capable of getting people out of this. They will just let you down in new and innovative ways. You talk about the changes they are doing now but I was talking the changes that they’ll need to get reelected in the future - it will be grim and similar to what’s happening all over Europe. Centrist liberal parties are becoming indistinguishable from parties they lost power to (Labour in UK, Renaissance in France, Civic Platform in Poland). It will discourage even more people from participating in politics.

People need to get out in front before it happens to minimise the damage. This means more respect towards people we don’t agree with and that unfortunately includes less poo slinging at bigots. This also means less involvement in treating symptoms because it depletes our capacity for change („orphan-crushing machine”).

Yeah, that’s what I’m warning you about. This approach has been tried. Whatever happens, it was already decided because you’re not going to course correct at eleventh hour and root cause of general discontent is much deeper than you want to admit.

If you lose you’ll go into democratic resistance, fight every single thing Trump does. By second or third year regular people notice that not much is changing in their lives and then you lose all of your steam. When actual bad stuff happens nobody cares.

Then in a couple of terms people will get tired of the right, vote for the libs and then you realise that those Dems have adopted lots of stuff Republicans did because that was the only way to get back into power. And that it was always about power. I’ll be there to say „told you so”.

Don’t Americans get both? :P

I’m trying to explain to Dem voters that their moral high ground and calling everyone a Nazi will lead Republican voters to entrench in views pushed by far right even if they didn’t hold them before. Dem voters are supposed to be the smart ones so they should understand that, right?

In what ways will it be worse / more Nazi than under Nixon? Healthcare? Infrastructure? Minority rights? Black rights? Waging wars and supporting genocide in some third world country? Sorry to break it to you but US was always a borderline fascist state and that includes Democrats.

That feet stomping and refusing to acknowledge reality is a symptom, not the root issue. People don’t feel like they have a real choice so as a response to this overwhelming world they start to treat it like a football match. You support your team no matter what, right?

It’s good that you recognise tribalism as a core issue although you need to acknowledge that you can be victim of that too. You’re trying to start from the top because that looks like it’s have biggest impact but the actual change needs to start at the bottom. This is something we can do but it’ll be much more work than waiting for someone to do that for us. I realise that all of us are so used to slacktivism by now that it sounds like an insurmountable task but there’s no other way. First step is to stop contributing to the problem so here I am trying to explain why current approach won’t work.

So, not much is changing then but you assumed history can only move forward. We’ve reached a point where this belief is pretty much a modern secular religion - nobody guaranteed it would be so. This religion even has prophets like Francis Fukuyama who I blame for popularising it.

It’s likely we will be set back again many times and there’s no guarantee that the end result will be satisfying. The best thing we can do for now is to figure out why those things happen in the first place without attributing blame. The future needs to include everyone, even the bigots. My guess most of the bigots wouldn’t be bigots if they had higher participation in profits that our societies generate. This is because politicians funnel those into the pockets of various oligarchs. Neither Republicans or Dems will fix that unfortunately.

Will US under Trump be more or less of a Nazi state than, for example, under Nixon?

Banning all self promotion is usually done not to play favourites. It gets tiring being a gatekeeper so you just remove that variable. Mods should have been shepherding communities to alternative and open platforms themselves though.

Have you considered being out of touch then?

Most the ones i know that support him are higher class than me.

Statistically this is not a representative group.

Yeah, I was shot by Trump to death twice yesterday. Try to get down go actual issues rather than whatever it is that you’re doing.

I understand what you feel, I was there too accusing others of „symmetrism”. You don’t want to see critique of your side or pointing out that others might not be entirely wrong because you feel like everything you do contributes in some small way to which side will win. But this only leads to dishonesty and overt hyperboles. You’ll be frustrated, anxious and sad when you lose so don’t do that to yourself.

Maybe people voting for Trump don’t care about public healthcare because they don’t trust doctors in general. Maybe they feel that the entire healthcare industry is there to scam them and putting public money would be a waste. They’re probably wrong but you need to consider what led people to vote for someone that promises to dismantle the whole system. Maybe the root cause is something different and that’s what needs addressing first?

For starters, by not assuming every single one of them blames all their problems on people purely based on their birth characteristics. Treat them with no prejudice. You’re likely prejudiced against lower class people and not even realise it. Listen to what they have to say and see what led them to distrust public institutions, what are their troubles and priorities.

I’m not interested in political theatre, I judge based on outcomes because it’s impossible to know intent.

In Poland libs were very up their arms about human rights abuse against migrants on the Belarusian border. Just months after they got back into power they formally suspended ability to request asylum (mandated by Geneva convention and EU basic rights charter). Similar stuff in France as well.

Yeah, tell me how well applying this to anyone voting for Trump goes in a couple of years. If you have a moral high ground but didn’t achieve anything then is it something you’re interested in?

You’re doing more harm than good with this attitude but at least you have achieved a moral victory, right? We did that too.