I hate shopping at Lowe’s now because they physically removed the regular checkouts and only have a square of self checkouts. They did this so one “cashier” can watch over everything, saving labor on multiple cashiers. They also paired down every other department so it’s just as hard (or possibly harder) to get assistance in a department as at Home Depot. Feels like I’m watch the death spiral in full swing.

Less shoppers means less staff. Less staff means service suffers. Poor service means less shoppers. Rinse and repeat. This is happening at almost every brick and mortar retail business though, not just Lowe’s. It’s like the entire economy has turned into Circuit City trying to keep the lights on.

Some humans evolved to wake up when the sun rises. Others evolved to hit peak wakefulness in the middle of the night. Humans evolved with shift sleeping and night watchers, and are most likely naturally biphasic sleepers as well.

That’s a bold move, Cotton, threatening people with a good time. Let’s see how it plays out.

I am mid switch, but it’s not been smooth or easy. I chose Manjaro and maybe I chose poorly. I am a lifelong techie, and have used Ubuntu and Mint in short stints in the past, but the transition is rough.

I didn’t attempt the switch before because I primarily played Destiny 2 and Bungie hates Linux. The enshittification of Destiny drove me away, and in theory the games I am playing now should work. I have had mixed results however.

I play Darktide and Vermintide 2 and heavily use their modding scenes to make them fully playable. Vortex mod manager is a huge bonus for this, and I still haven’t been able to set this up.

My Elgato equipment has community support, but has a bunch of steps to get working that I haven’t spent the time to fully research or attempt.

I still haven’t set up an automatic mount point for my shared NTFS drive to load on boot, both because I don’t have a good grasp on the fstab and because Windows does a chkdisk every time I mount it in Linux. Dual access storage still seems iffy as of 2025.

I am going to keep trying, because I hate Microsoft right now more than I dislike the learning curve and limitations. Not sure if that is enough to make this the year of the Linux desktop though.

Thank you for taking the time to discuss this with me, I am finding this very enjoyable and educational.

I agree with Friedman in principle, but then I look at Ford and the other car companies with the Pinto and Takara airbags, etc. The cost of paying lawsuits gets factored in and until the cost point breaks over the deaths and injuries are just a cost of doing business. With regulation that actually has teeth and enforcement, just doing the bodies-to-profits calculations becomes an untenable solution and the recalls happen even if they aren’t profitable. I don’t think a private tort system is capable of having the teeth to achieve this in the real world. It is why Libertarianism still has a central government. It will have its inefficiencies, but it’s a right tool for the right job kind of thing.

Same with asbestos, lead, fillers in food, etc. The damages from them are so divorced from the product that many may not know who or what caused it. Lawsuits have a hard time with those kinds of things even if you know exactly which business is the cause. Look at tobacco and leaded gasoline and myriad others where lawsuits failed initially because damage was difficult to prove before the government stepped in. If fossil fuel companies can pay for the science that muddies the water on climate change, what chance does John Doe have doing enough through a lawsuit to stop DuPont from flooding the planet with forever chemicals?

I like where Friedman is coming from, but I hold him at the same level as Marx or any other economic theorist: assuming a spherical cow, at a specific temperature, without friction, and without wind resistance. I like Henry George the same way. That’s why I still claim to be a libertarian (just a left leaning centrist one), because I think Friedman and George are actually the better end result and closer to a workable solution than Marx. Marx was onto something though, and shouldn’t be dismissed outright. I do think we have stuff to learn from all branches of economic theory, and subscribe to a “the truth will be somewhere in the middle” philosophy.

There is some merit to that, and free education has the same issues in other countries besides Germany. My planning process was to treat the 2 year associates degree like we do with high school, no performance testing or path tracking. Everyone is entitled to a high school diploma of they want one, and with an associates degree being the new high school diploma it makes sense to include it.

It is what we as a society have determined makes the bare minimum education standard for then learning the rest on the job. The employment sector has moved this bar from high school graduate to associates degree, and the education system should reflect that.

The complete abolishment of public everything and allowing the market to dictate and provide is great in theory, but the same was Marxist communism is. There are always those that will break the system for personal gain.

There are also efficiencies of scale that business in a healthy, non mono/duopolostic environment can’t take advantage of that the government can. This is why I put education and healthcare under the “provide for the common defense and well-being of the people” that it exists for. This is why we the taxpayers should be paying for education in what may be or appear totally irrelevant: it results in a net gain as far as expenditure across the country as a whole and makes companies better able to train workers on the job. It also allows easier job transitions allowing more economic mobility, and also helps maintains balance of power between the worker and the employer.

In a libertarian ideal the worker is not trapped working the job or for the specific employer because that is the only job they are trained for and where their healthcare comes from. It is a contract of mutual gain. It is unreasonable for a worker to start over from scratch to change jobs if an employer is not maintaining market wages. It also allows a worker to more easily become an entrepreneur and open his own company, as this requires a broader education basis to succeed at than the job he does for another.

Strong but limited regulation is need to keep markets free. Regulations preventing pollution of the environment as a common resource, truth in representation of goods and services, prevention of anticompetitive actions and regulatory capture., etc. Without this markets inevitably fall to monopoly and the system switches from mutualism to parasitism.

There is a careful balance to maintain and government overreach is just as easy in the other direction. This is true is any economic and sociological system though. Perfectly free laze fair markets do not exist the same way perfectly egalitarian communism doesn’t exist above the small commune level and for the same reasons. Or perfect democracy where everything is voted on by everyone and everyone is making fully informed and educated decisions. If none of these are possible in the real world, all we can do is take the best parts and attempt to create the best possible real world results.

You need solid anticorruption laws the same way you need solid antitrust laws and they need to be liberally enforced. The problem is that neither have been since the 70’s. Regulatory capture by big business is a massive problem, and I am not sure if it is possible to 100% defend against.

I self identify libertarian but lean left. I’d argue that while things like funding higher education may currently be regressive, if free education extended from the current cap of 12th grade to encompass at least an associates level degree you would have a lot more lower and working class taking advantage of it and making it less regressive. With the country having jettisoned it’s manufacturing and blue collar industry, I would further argue this is necessary for the country to compete on the international stage.

I think some citation is necessary for the assertion that the Jewish people were not historically from the Levant region, and have no ancestoral “claims” in Jerusalem and the surrounding territory. I would love to see some anthropology studies or papers on the bronze age Israelites being proto-Asyrian or Persian and not one of the Canaanite tribes.

I’d also like to point out that basically every war ever has been and will probably be a land grab, wrapped up in some rationalized or causative skin. That stretch of land in particular has been conquered over and over again throughout human history, and the inhabitants forcibly immigrated and emigrated during many of these changes of power. Mesopotamia has been birthing empires since humans discovered it and it became a cradle of human civilization.