I think you missed the “despite all his efforts” - I’m trying to make a backhanded defense, along the lines of “You were a shit parent, but hey, your kid was alright, so I guess you failed”, but I phrased it awkwardly.

I very much know your position though. Someone close to me had a similar issue with their parent, who forced them to become self-reliant since the parent in question was neglectful at best.

Uhhhh at least… they…

nah, I got nothing. I can’t even muster a sarcastic backhanded defense for poor foster parents. Fuck that guy, and I’m glad you turned out well despite him.

Yeah, you’re right, the phrasing was awkward - the “despite his best efforts” was an attempt to subvert that sentence, but I guess it didn’t land.

Oh no, I’m not saying he did good. I’m saying he failed to do bad.

Edit: This comment was intended as a sarcastic way to say “Your father’s awful parenting failed to turn you into an awful person”, but it was both phrased poorly and in the event based on false assumptions. Read the replies. I’m leaving it up for context.

Well, at least he fathered a decent kid, it seems. I don’t think it was his intention for you to turn out so decent, so I wouldn’t give him credit for that, but I guess he did something right despite all his efforts.

My union costs 1% of my monthly salary. This year, they threatened to strike and got us a 5% raise that way. And that’s just talking about money, not other benefits like paid time off (30 days per year).

Why is this comment section full of people ridiculing the question in a community called “no stupid questions”? Like, isn’t the entire point here to be able to ask questions that you worry might be stupid without being ridiculed for it?

The year isn’t quite done yet. It’s a high bar to clear, but with the incidence of bullshit this year, a bigger turd may yet come along.

Thanks for the additions and corrections!

Yeah, shit’s fucked and it’ll take serious political will to unfuck it.

Hear me out before you rage:

In theory? I believe that killings warrant investigation, prosecution and trial, no matter their intention, though the intention should factor into the result of the process. I want him to be prosecuted with the same intensity as any other killing would be, and if found, given a fair trial, convicted for whatever charge applies, as would be proper for a functioning judicial system. But then I’d want to see him pardoned as political expression of his popular support (and the fact that his victim was part of a deeply inhuman complex of exploitation).

In practice? I hope they never find him. Appropriate intensity of investigation? Orderly arrest? Fair treatment as prisoner? Fair trial? Fair charges? Fair conviction? Fat chance. Pardoned? Not even a chance.

I want him to go without punishment more than I want to hope for a fair process, and I couldn’t believe in the latter in any case.

In Germany - for all thay we may laud our comparatively progressive mandatory healthcare / public insurance system - there’s an different perverse incentive.

Private insurance requires you to pay bills directly to the providers up front, then send them to the carrier for possible reimbursement. Mind, there is still some level of reimbursement, you don’t just carry it all on your own, and there’s regulations on how much providers can charge, but a larger bill may tear a hole into your savings, without knowing for sure when you’ll get it back.Most doctors will prefer privately insured patients (guess why?), and in some cases only accept new patients if they’re privately insured¹.

They can’t really refuse prior patients, though some may tell you “Oh, you’re in acute pain? I can see you in… three months.” which is really funny if you have a joint issue now and need a prescription for something _now_¹.

The original purpose, as far as I can tell, is to get particular groups of people away from the public insurance system if they can afford to carry their own cost. That’s not too bad on its own, but getting people to do so voluntarily obviously requires some incentive. That incentive is the privilege of better and faster care, because doctors obviously want to make more money too (within some ethical limits - some doctors really want to support the less privileged too, but with financial pressures of their own, they may have to compromise).

But within an environment where we have a shortage of medical personell and increasing prices for office space etc., that is leading to a situation where public patients struggle to find good care.

To enter private insurance, you have to either be a Civil Servant², self-employed or above the income threshold³ for mandatory public insurance⁴. It’s voluntary, but if you can afford it, there’s obviously good reasons to do so. Private carriers may still reject you based on age or preexisting conditions (does that sound familiar?), charge more for the risk etc.

The kicker? Once you’re privately insured, returning to the public healthcare is a bit tricky, because you need to lose whatever criterion got you eligible in the first place. Self-employed? Guess you gotta find an employer to sell your soul to. Earn “too much”? Find a way to earn less. Civil Servant? Quit and lose all the other benefits too.

You don’t have to check into this Hotel California style insurance, but if you don’t, have fun finding some motel to take you in. And if you do want to leave, perhaps because the cost is getting too much on account of developing serious issues that allow the insurance to charge serious premiums, you have to basically make them kick you out by dropping down the ladder far enough.

Is it better than the US? Certainly. 90% of us are carried by public insurance, I don’t have to worry about a sudden illness ruining me financially. My employer automatically deducts ~7% of my income to cover half and pays the other, so I don’t worry about the bills. I have two meds I need, which I pay a combined total of ~10€ per month for (one is a monthly package about 70€, the other three months and change for 90€, but the insurance has to pay 90% of that).

But having moved and trying to find a new primary care provider, it sure sucks to hear “I’m sorry, but we currently only accept private patients. Try again in six months maybe.”

¹Hospital ERs are required to accept you anyways, but for non-life-threatening conditions, you’ll usually have to wait a long time and receive worse care by overworked staff annoyed at having to deal with non-emergency things because the actual non-emergency doctors won’t.

²Special status with specific requirements, not all who work for a civil office qualify for Civil Servant benefits like job security (short of felony convictions, basically nothing can get you fired or your pay reduced), a special health plan where the state covers half your cost (even if privately insured), fixed pensions, exemption from social security contributions. There are restrictions too, but that’d be a whole post.

³Starting 2025, that would be 73,800 EUR gross income, about 78k USD right now.

⁴You still have to have some health insurance, it just no longer has to be public. If for whatever reason you don’t, things get complicated, but I’m too fuzzy on that to make any claims.

One of my two major projects is a long-term reporting system on a sustainability initiative to help managers figure out whether their unit is compliant (definitely not for control, of course, nooo… though they are expected to talk to their respective subordinates if their results deviate too much, which probably filters up the chain when a given higher level breaks down their subordinate units’ figures).

Probably a PR push (I swear, if I ever see a figure calculated by my model in the newspaper, my impostor syndrome is gonna thoroughly shit my pants for me), maybe a move to get ahead of competitors in the face of legal stuff I’m not in the loop about, but doing the right thing for selfish reasons is still the right thing.

The other project… Well, I’m trying to push for measures that prevent user-level evaluations, but it’s a kind of corporate limbo right now. I’m doing my best, but that’s not a whole lot in this case.

tinkers with pulseaudio
“Why does my audio not work?”
tinkers more
“Okay I think it kinda works now?”
it breaks again
“fml”

I found the docs for pulseaudio and particularly for pipewire to be rather hard to use, personally. RTFM works if the manual is readable, but in these cases, the learning curve was very steep for me (and I still don’t know that I properly understood what’s going on, but it’s working, so I’ve stopped tinkering for now).

What else do you suggest?

I’d argue a different approach: Teach critical thinking and scepticism to children. Banning things makes it a race to keep up with whatever new thing comes up; it’s not a sustainable solution so much as a constant fixing of new holes without tackling why these things are so destructive.

Me too, let’s touch circles

Eh, between the financial expense, the human reluctance to change and the still very real barrier of “We can’t migrate where there’s nowhere to go” with respect to the software landscape, I think we need to compare our definitions of could. It’s not just a business culture issue either. All change brings friction, but trying to replace the entire infrastructure of a company (and it has to be pretty much everything - one selling point of MS is how thoroughly integrated its products are) is basically ripping out most of the internal organs and replacing them with transplants, but also trying to keep the patient alive somehow… and you need to sell the people with the money on the idea.

Throwing away and starting over is costly, no matter the context. So no, I don’t think larger companies can even make that choice at this point.

Smaller companies without the same inertia, in industries where there are Linux-compatible tools? Yeah, they can, provided the software they need is there too.

I use Linux privately, and haven’t had a Windows OS on my PC in years except for a VM I needed for a university project. I’m all for hoping that specialised apps get developed for Linux too. I like mine and would probably enjoy using it for private purposes too, but it won’t work with wine and learning different tools is obviously an additional time investment in my free time compared to the one I get paid for learning.

But I’m both quick and happy to learn. Many people are not (and I see that daily with my users). The cost of switching and disruption in productivity would probably be disastrous enough to ruin the company even before considering the fact that “industry giant unable to fulfill contractual obligations because they have to rebuild half their infrastructure from nothing” would be a crippling blow to its professional reputation in an industry where IT is still considered second-class at best, the ideological gain of no longer depending on Microsoft would net them nothing and in an economic system where short-term profitability is more important than long-term independence.

And that’s not considering the difficulty of convincing company leadership that Windows really is that bad and Linux really is much better and that we only need to provide the financial incentive and invest the time and money to have someone port already expensive software to a different platform. FFS, we’re still struggling to get people to see IT as a service rather than an expense.

Finally, even if they were to switch out their entire IT infrastructure, they’d start asking whether it would be cheaper to outsource our internal IT to a company that already knows the new stuff than to retrain all of us. I’d very much like to keep my permanent position, even if it means using Windows.

The only way to make “I assassinated a politician whose ideology I resent” legally defendable would be massive popular support. “Some people” isn’t enough if you risk serving as scapegoat to have your entire community labeled as terrorists. The dilemma of violent action is that you need enough people behind you to become a credible threat before you start threatening.

Ours is. Last I heard, our Client Management team is already looking for different ways to disable it and make triple sure it stays off.

(inb4 “Switch to Linux”: several thousand users, specialised software and a technologically conservative company would already make that a non-starter)