At this point, I wouldn’t blame any company that immediately ceased expansions in America and started to consider moving existing production facilities to adjacent countries, like Canada.

I kept reading about people having trouble during the restore process.

It is Duplicati, and IMHO restores work best if they aren’t restores-in-place. As in, dump the restores in a central location then drag-and-drop the data into place. Most of the issues I have heard of involve restoring data and settings back to where it originally was backed up from, and restoring directly back to those places - other than fully user-controlled directories, such as Documents or Photos - seems to be problematic.

Other than that, I have been using it for nearly a decade and have done a number of restores - after total drive deaths, so not just accidentally deleted files - to great success.

The downside is that tweaking backups from within the hidden C:\Users\[username]\AppData\ directory involves many days of whack-a-mole to exclude untouchable normally-in-use files so you don’t get scads of errors in the backup process. Plus, there are a fair number of entries in there that don’t really need backing up. But once you get that to settle down, it’s largely smooth it’s-set-so-forget-it sailing.

The Socratic Method tends to be effective in many cases so long as the other person remains open to reason and logic, especially the requirement for evidence.

Brainwashing gets increasingly easy the younger the subject is. Children, in particular, have an evolutionary need to automatically trust adults and what adults tell them, as they don’t yet have the cognitive tools to handle the world around them. Trusting adults have been baked into that part of childhood development because, historically speaking, it gave a distinct evolutionary advantage. Those children that listened to adults had a much stronger probability of surviving until adulthood.

It’s why religions so strongly proselytize the young – get them young, get them for life.

All you have to do is make it illegal to expose or proselytize religion to anyone under 22, and religion would likely die out within 2-3 generations.

When you have been raised as a rationalist and know, at a fundamental level, the bullshit detection system called the Scientific Method, you need to have some pretty powerful mental illness in play to willingly grasp at religion.

Meanwhile tomatoes rot on the vine on U.S. farms because ICE has deported most workers and the rest are too frightened to show up. Plus, pay is far too low to actually attract American workers.

That’s some real 10-dimensional thinking, there.

Nineteen people died on the ground.

Technically 260 people died on the ground. Because that is where the plane crashed.

However, nineteen people on the ground died.

There is a critical difference in that word order. The former includes everyone who had reached the ground by the time they died, the latter only includes those who were on the ground to begin with, and not those who were on the plane.

Or in other words, the first phrasing highlights destination, the second highlights source. Everyone died on the ground after the plane impacted it, but only 19 were already on the ground when the impact killed them.

The placement of the word “died” is what makes all the difference.

Isn’t English fun?

Yeah, my heat exhaustion event was a quarter century ago. It’s just gotten worse and worse over the years.

Ever since I had a heat exhaustion event in my late teens, I have been exceedingly sensitive to heat. Think actively sweating like I’m in a sauna - only in normal office temperatures. I have to shave my head for nearly half the year in order to not look like a drowned rat - and carry a “sweat towel” with me at all times to wipe the dripping sweat off a half dozen times an hour.

My home office is set to between 15℃ and 18℃ because that is the temperature where I feel the same amount of comfort as most other people do between 24℃ and 28℃. Throw a business suit into the mix, and that comfort range drops by 4-6℃.

There are times in the winter where I throw all the office windows open, let the -20℃ air roll in from outside, and actually enjoy wearing long pants and a sweater.

…I live in Canada. Near where it hit 50℃ during the heat dome a few years ago. Climate Change is going to be brutal for me.

I have a really big thing for 70s PNW homes done really, really well. The vaulted ceilings, open concept main areas with multiple levels, the sunken living rooms, the cedar used everywhere… just leave out the shag carpet and I’ll be A-OK.

Good brutalist architecture can take your breath away. It’s so solid, so permanent, so delightfully uncompromising.

Hey nice, journalism with a backbone!

If only more news orgs in America could import that.

But then, it would probably be blocked by TACO tariffs.

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And I self-host precisely because of the money I save using surplussed hardware. I have a symmetrical 1Gb SOHO fibre connection from my ISP, so I can host whatever the hell I want, I just need to stand it up. And a beefy older system with oodles of RAM is perfect for spinning up VMs of various platforms for various tasks. This saves me craploads of money over even a single VM on cloud platforms like Vultr. Plus, even if I were to support a “heavy” service sufficiently in demand to warrant its own iron, it still costs me less than a year’s worth of hosting to obtain a decent platform for that service to run on all by it’s lonesome.

My only cloud costs end up being those services which are distributed for redundancy and geographical distance, such as DNS and caching CDNs.

Confer the right to a portion of the profits, distributed as dividends. Or anything else, really.

Tell me you know nothing about stocks without saying you know nothing about stocks.

A company can create classes of stocks that confer zero ownership in a company.

False equivalence. Many co-ops have a top-down hierarchy for exactly this purpose: execution speed. But the person “at the top” is there as a navigator, not as a captain. They are there to make those quick decisions based on the will - and projected/estimated will, when time is of the essence - of the actual owners, the employees.

There are also many instances of companies - and even entire countries - going months to years without “top leadership” because the entire framework has been effectively empowered to make critical decisions. The effectiveness of the U.S. Military is also based on this doctrine. This allows a company to respond to market forces purely via effective communication between employees and managers coordinating across the different components of the company.

Multiple types of stock. One would be limited to employees, another would be open for purchase by anyone.

The key is in how the various stock types are structured. If control can be monopolized by a non-employee stock type, is the business truly employee owned? I would posit not.

Employee-owned businesses would be the thin edge of the wedge in favour of socialism/communism. It would be a “bridge system” whose purpose is to demonstrate the societal superiority of socialism/communism.

As such, I see your metaphor as being mostly inaccurate. The purpose isn’t to create more tigers, the purpose is to create more house cats. A house cat can still do damage to people, but at a much lower level than any tiger. House cats also provide many benefits even in a fully feral state, by lowering the population of vermin such as rats and mice, helping to blunt the spread of disease and crop/property damage.

Going directly from capitalism to communism is a bridge too far; not enough people know how to do communism correctly, and there would be far too much resistance by those whose greed is benefitted by capitalism and who control the public narrative through media and education (or lack of it).

In fact, as history has shown us, the only way to take that route in a single step is via authoritarianism - to force the population en masse - whereupon authoritarianism gleefully remains resident (as those who are corruptible remain in positions of power that they are loathe to relinquish), invariably employing violence to ensure compliance, and ending up royally f**king up the entire implementation.

With an intermediary like employee-owned businesses, we can both educate and expose, providing society with tangible, real-world, immediately-obvious benefits of communism that erodes resistance and shows people how to be communal in an effective manner.

And there would be other stages beyond that, gradually ratcheting society into a pro-communist state in a careful and thoughtful manner that allows us to build anti-greed, anti-corruption, and anti-authoritarian systems into the mix, to avoid outcomes such as pretty much every other “implementation” to date.

LOL 😂 I am also a software developer. 30 years in almost every sector of IT short of 3D animation and games development.

And no, AI hallucinates too gratuitously for me, and just pisses the hell outta me. It’s worse than a gaggle of juniors in terms of all the extra work it generates.