The gullible/naive ones. Right-wing extremists are generally quite good at promising simple (but wrong) “solutions” for complex problems that lower-educated people can easily follow and then feel like they’re on the correct track. That’s also why they produce so much easy-to-digest propaganda on the web.

But it’s all lies, accusing others who have nothing to do with the real problems, not making anything better except for the elite, and causing unnecessary cultural wars within the population instead of necessary class wars.

The elite generally wins when parts of the population are in-fighting against other parts of the population. Right-wing extremists love that and regularly pour more oil into that fire due to their general dividing and hateful nature towards all kinds of cultural opponents and minorities, and the elites love watching us fight each other while enriching themselves further and eating popcorn, because they know that when we’re busy in-fighting, we aren’t fighting for more equality or to change things in any meaningful way.

Probably, but it’s still much-needed actual retaliation against the regime. Doing nothing besides complaining helps even less. Wars aren’t being won in an instant but as a result of many cumulative small victories.

Microslop Crashpilot

Just remember that correlation is not causation. Yes, such things distract from the Epstein case and that’s a welcome effect for the US dictator. But he’s not thinking “hmm I really would like to have a distraction from that so that’s why I’ll just commit another war crime or atrocity so they’ll all be distracted”. He commits new atrocities anyway, and it just so happens that new atrocities automatically distract from older ones. He is causing way more problems than we are capable of mentally tracking.

Unfortunately, most Windows users have a long history of complaining about it and then still continuing to use it.

There’s no way around it: if you keep using abusive software, you’ll stay in an abusive relationship.

Most news is bad news and you certainly are exposed to more (bad) news these days than decades earlier. That certainly must be one factor why you can get increasingly bitter about the world.

But that doesn’t mean that the situation hasn’t gotten worse. It definitely has.

The three main factors are (although #2 and #3 are related): increasingly problematic climate change and exhausting the planetary resources too quickly while at the same time polluting it more and more, increasingly ruthless neo-liberalist capitalism (leading to increasingly poor regular people and increasingly rich rich people), and the rise of right-wing extremism / fascism (related to the previous factor because whenever the population is worse off, they tend to vote more for right-wing populists lying to make everything better and knowing the true causes, while in reality they deflect from real problems and will make things even worse for the general population, and faster). And since we have the internet, local fascism doesn’t stay local. It spreads globally.

In order of priority:

1. Check for a Linux-compatible alternative
2. Try installing/running it via Bottles (a veeeery easy to use Wine frontend, hiding lots of wine complexity). Wine allows running most windows programs directly on Linux, with almost zero performance overhead.
3. Try installing/running it via winboat (basically WSL in reverse - a well-integrated Windows VM or container running on Linux so you can run pesky Windows-only programs with it) (haven’t used it myself yet)
4. Use a regular full Windows VM on Linux (likely less well integrated and more resource intensive than #3, but maybe even more compatible). Set up a shared folder between host and VM for easy file transfers.
5. Dual-boot Windows from another disk. Set up a shared folder/partition for file transfers.

1. Lie that someone is a threat (without evidence)
2. Justify killing him based on #1 (without due process)
3. Claim that anyone opposing #1/#2 is aiding the enemy
4. Justify killing that opposition based on #3/#1

Fascism 101

With low-effort crap posts like this (made even easier with GenAI) he is “recruiting” stupid people who believe anything that’s not from reputable sources (mainstream/science is boring and hard to understand, conspiracy myths are easy to "understand " and exciting) into his MAGA cult which is also consisting of right-wing extremists and “conservatives” who are easily dragged to the right and made into extremists as well.

The wealthiest entities in the economy are then allying with that cult and push more propaganda in the hopes of “recruiting” even more people into the cult.

The goal of these political and economic elites is to establish an autocracy without any painful regulations of the economy, so the goal is to get even richer at the cost of a functioning society and democracy. It’s the capitalism endgame - merge corporations with politics (going much further than previous lobbying and corruption), establish a fascist ruling class based on wealth and influence, and try to keep the population in line through lies and propaganda. They need stupids, crazies and extremists as supporters of this coup. This works best with right-wing crazies because they are the most gullible and easiest to manipulate. And by pushing propaganda on proprietary platforms, they can convert more people into the cult.

Inciting a culture war between the cult and the other part of the population protects the elites from a class war occurring. If the population is busy fighting with each other, the elites can sleep easy and continue to extract as much money as possible, for as long as possible.

Just like you wouldn’t do a trip to North Korea or some war-torn country, you shouldn’t do a trip to USA in 2025. The country is currently in deep crisis with a rogue regime consisting of neo-nazi zealots & grifters and a big chunk of the population brainwashed by regime-supported propaganda on national TV (Fox News) and other random bullsh!t on proprietary social media, also radicalizing parts of the population. Plus they can all own guns legally. It’s neither a safe nor sane country currently. Sorry for the decent Americans out there but your situation is really bad and I don’t think you can turn this around non-violently anymore.

Job requirements for working with the orange Hitler:

1.) Be loyal to the fascist administration

2.) No Morals/Ethics or other woke things that make you a civilized human being

3.) For women: be somewhat attractive

4.) Everything else is optional as long as it doesn’t interfere with 1.-3.)

At this rate, there might already be civil war or at least no regular elections anymore in the US.

At this point, being on this planet is a losing cause.

I strongly disagree that unpopular things are automatically a losing cause though. I use and do some unpopular things because it’s more ethical or more beneficial overall, but I’m not at all troubled with it. I just try to be a somewhat decent citizen where many others would just be like “lol I don’t care about any consequences, just give me the cheapest or most convenient option”. I’m not like that. And I think more people shouldn’t be. But, again, at this point… it’s definitely a losing battle. But I still do it because then I can tell myself that I at least tried to do the somewhat right thing. It’s kind of just to have a clean conscience, whereas some others are completely fine burning the world for their own short-term gain. That’s basically the difference.

The current tech/IT sector is heavily relying on and riding hype trains. It’s a bit like the fashion industry that way. But this AI hype so far has only been somewhat useful.

Current general LLMs are decent for prototyping or example output to jump-start you into the general direction of your destination, but their output always needs supervision and most often it needs fixing. If you apply unreliable and constantly changing AI to everything, and completely throw out humans, just because it’s cheaper, then you’ll get vastly inferior results. You probably get faster results, but the results will have tons of errors which introduces tons of extra problems you never had before. I can see AI fully replacing some jobs in some specific areas where errors don’t matter much. But that’s about it. For all other jobs or purposes, AI will be an extra tool, nothing more, nothing less.

AI has its uses within specific domains, when trained only on domain-specific and truthful data. You know, things like AlphaZero or AlphaGo. Or AIs revealing new methods not known before to reach the same goal. But these general AIs like ChatGPT which are trained on basically the whole web with all the crap in it… it’s never going to be truly great. And it’s also becoming worse over time, i.e. not improving much at all, because the web will be even fuller with AI-generated crap in the future. So the AIs slurp up all that crap too. The training data gets muddier over time. The promise of AIs getting even more powerful as time goes on is just a marketing lie. There’s most likely a saturation curve, and we’re most likely very close to the saturation already, where it won’t really get any better. You could already see this by comparing the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4 (big) and then GPT-4 to GPT-5 (much smaller). Or take a look at FSD cars. Also not really happening, unless you like crashes. Of course, the companies want to keep the illusion rolling so they’ll always claim the next big revolution is just around the corner. Because they profit from investments and monthly paying customers, and as long as they can keep that illusion up and profit from that, they don’t even need to fulfill any more promises.

It’s just a tendency, not a hard rule.

German here. These are some cultural and day-to-day differences compared to the US:

• Sundays are officially a day of rest and so most shops and businesses are closed that day, with several exceptions like high priority stuff, restaurants, tourism/event-related stuff and so on. But you can’t go to a regular supermarket or expect a package delivery on a Sunday. Although some sundays are also different, it’s like an “event” where regular shops open sometimes. But that’s rare.
• Cash is still very widely used (and you also should generally use it even if it’s less convenient because it’s probably the most privacy-preserving payment option), but other payment options are also available almost everywhere
• There are tiny fees of around 1 € you probably need to pay when e.g. going to a public toilet or using a shopping cart (but for the cart, you get it back when returning the cart). You also need to pay extra for bags, or bring your own.
• Tip culture is very different, Germans usually pay very small tips compared to the US and no one expects you to, but in restaurants it’s common to tip something like 2 € for a bill of 25 € for example. Or you simply round up the number to avoid the hassle of small coins.
• Prices always include taxes already
• Water isn’t free and usually you can’t order tap water, although tap water is drinkable generally
• You can drink alcohol with fully visible labels/bottles in public
• For bottles and cans, there’s a “Pfand” which is like an extra deposit. So a bottle of water usually costs slightly more, but when it’s empty you can return it to get the extra deposit value back. It’s to encourage recycling.
• Germans are more reserved in public and might do less small talk, and are usually more direct, but that doesn’t mean they’re unfriendly. This also applies to customer service! Personally I like this more than obviously fake and exaggerated politeness.
• You should be more quiet in or near residential areas between like 10pm and 7am
• Punctuality is highly valued, this is actually not exaggerated or a myth. Public transport might not wait for you if you’re 1-2min late. People will assume that something’s wrong when you’re a couple of minutes late to an appointment. Although there is one well-known exception: trains aren’t always punctual or reliable. But other public transport usually is.
• Highways have no speed limits in parts but you still probably shouldn’t drive much faster than 130 km/h. Pass other cars only on the left lanes, never on the right lanes. Also don’t drive on bike lanes.
• Basically all streets or public spaces are safe to walk around. Also children don’t need supervision.
• Most Germans have very good English skills, except maybe very old generations

“No one is above the law” and other jokes you can tell yourself to feel better.

Why this is happening: right-wing extremist propaganda on popular proprietary social media, and random people believing it and radicalizing themselves. Of course it’s going to spawn more radicalized right-wing extremists, everywhere the propaganda machine turns its head towards (they managed to ruin USA, now they’re trying to ruin Europe). Normal people will become more radicalized in the process. It’s like a global cult and its propaganda distribution mechanism is the internet. Not everyone will have enough education or media literacy to resist this. China and Russia are the big benefactors of a divided and in-fighting West.

Collapse will definitely come. Our way of living on this planet is not sustainable, especially now where everyone who would have the power/influence to change things does literally and openly the opposite (e.g. USA turning their back on climate friendly research/technologies for example). So I think it’s kind of over, I’m kind of an optimist but time is simply running out, we had the Paris agreement and all that jazz like 10 years ago and almost nothing really changed (the only time something changed for the positive was during 2020/2021 but that was involuntarily!), in fact it’s now probably worse than it was back then, so it’s kind of over. Sure you can and should individually continue fighting for it because every small improvement will at least delay the collapse a bit which is useful, but I’m not going to naively believe that we will be able to counteract this anymore. It’s too little, too late. And that’s not even taking into account the possibility of a WW3. And rich/powerful people probably know this as well that the geological and political situations become increasingly unstable which is why they are building luxury bunkers. I would build one too, if I had the spare change.

By the way, ignoring as much of this big tech corpo crap as you can also makes you live an easier life.

Whenever I see a story of “some guy who relies on <big tech account> working loses access to it and suddenly can’t do anything anymore” I think “this can never happen to me”. Which means there’s a whole category of problems you’re suddenly never going to see. It also means you’re less naive. So just don’t vendor-lock yourself in. Don’t put a log-in for an account which you don’t control in front of important things you need to do. Simple as that.

On top of that, you’ll also leak less private data about yourself and probably others as well. So you even make yourself less of a target when it comes to data protection laws or something. I know, these get routinely ignored. I’m just saying, if you don’t even use the problematic stuff (or almost never), you’ll also have potentially less legal troubles at hand. And you never know, legel troubles might not appear for a while but they could lurk far in the future. For example, many Nazis got into legal trouble for their participation in Nazi Germany, even decades later.

I know, the guy from the story probably only needed that account to ensure he can compare some stuff with how MS Office is behaving compared to LibreOffice, or things like that. So it’s probably not a big deal. But generally speaking, you really shouldn’t vendor-lock yourself in.