I do believe there is also the concept of export taxes, though its much rarer than tariffs and generally only used to avoid increases in price of a locally producted product due to high demands from countries which can pay much more for it.

Luke was a late bloomer whilst Anakin was a child genious.

For avoidance of doubt my point is in no way a criticism of mankind:

• A % are always assholes.
• Also a % are always genuinely good people.
• The bulk of people are in the middle and kinda go with the cultural zeitgeist.

As far as I can tell, there are no more of the first kind than the second, though it’s my impression that the third kind, in the middle, are at times in average more pro-social or more anti-social depending on the predominant culture of a place and time.

In the current Greed Is Good environment dominant in the West I would say that the bulk of people who aren’t internally driven towards being a good person or being a selfish asshole tend toward “What’s in it for me” anti-social behavior if only because that attracts more rewards and less social pushback, though as I said and in my experience of living in a couple of countries, local culture also has a big say in that.

Never assume that just because somebody is a member of a minority they’re not prejudiced assholes.

It’s exactly because we’re all humans that assholes are equally distributed across all groups defined by things other than behavior and political beliefs - no such group is inherently composed of better or worse individuals than other groups.

People in groups being oppressed are less likely to behave as assholes simply because the assholes in those groups fear reprisals far more than the assholes in the dominant groups and in my experience plenty of people who behave meekly because of being part of an oppressed group will start behaving as assholes if given power and immunity to reprisals.

This is how you end up with phenomenons like, for example, anti-Transsexual Feminists.

Well that’s a shame.

I’ve been looking around for a replacement to my aged Samsung A6 (which has been given an extended life by replacing the factory ROM with something with less bloatware, but is still pretty limited in terms of memory) which is not a Surveillance Outpost for just who knows how many nations and just about any companies willing to pay the 3 cents of whatever for the data, and all the Linux and degoogled Android makers only have 10"+ ones, which are too big for my use case which carry a tablet on a coat or trousers back pocket when I’m going to be sitting down somewhere and waiting for something so that I can read books and maybe browse the internet on their free WiFi.

Personally I would LOOOVE a small Linux tablet, but I’m OK with some kind of privacy respecting Android which isn’t riddled with backdoors mandated by governments which have Information Courts issuing Secret Bulk Information Collecting Orders, like the US and the UK.

My hope is that the crazy RAM and HDD/SDD prices and hence crazy prices for new PCs will push more people to try Linux.

Oh, yeah.

I’m just thinking the more well known stuff with the “fancier” desktops and shipped with applications like LibreOffice and Firefox which are probably closer to familiar and don’t look like a step back for Windows and Mac users.

If you really want to extend the life of your hardware to the max, well, whilst Linux has discontinued support for 486 and Pentium processors last year, any hardware newer than that (so, around 30 years or less) will still run the latest kernel and as you mentioned there are distros targeting machines with very little RAM and HDD space.

And still blazingly fast for web-browsing, e-mail and office applications, as long as you don’t put Windows 11 in it.

This is around $250 (and that’s the version for Europe, shipped from Spain and the price includes VAT).

Six months ago it was just $150, so the current RAM and SSD prices seem to be fully included in the device price.

I got one to replace an aging Windows 8 PC of a family member who only does web-browsing and e-mail and put Linux on it, and have another one at home working as a TV Box + Home server.

With Linux that’s more than enough for browsing, e-mail and even office apps. Not a machine for gamers, but then again gamers aren’t buying “entry level PCs”.

Well, if the USD loses it’s reserve currency status, even $1000 or $2000 are perfectly possible in 2 years.

It’s not actually the “older hardware” that’s responsible for security vulnerabilities, it’s Microsoft chosing to end support for Windows 10.

That “older” hardware capable of running Windows 10 is more than capable of running any Linux distro which will keep on getting security updates for a long while (and you can just upgrade it again if that stops as Linux is nowhere as hardware demanding as Windows, especially the latest, Electron + AI, Windows).

For people who just use their PC for Office software, e-mail and browsing - who are the ones getting entry level PCs - hardware has been more than powerfull enough for 2 decades, and it’s only Windows bloatware having grown to use the available computing power that has forced people to upgrade the hardware.

Guess I know which brand my next smartphone upgrade will be.

If they did some nice 7" tablets too, that would be perfect.

My point is that forcing age-gates on anything provided via such formal systems incentivizes kids to go around those systems and install themselves an OS that doesn’t do age-gating to evade it, not necessarily at school were they’re unlikely to control the hardware, but at home.

Even before this, MS and Google have used their money to create a situation were very few of the formal systems for kids to access computers, such as schools, put anything other than their OSes in front of kids, so only kids who are naturally geeks/techies might have tried Linux out on their own - those kids would always end up trying Linux out because they’re driven by curiosity and enjoyment from tinkering with Tech.

My point is for the other kids, the ones who wouldn’t try out on their computing devices any OS other than the mainstream stuff that they’ve been taught about at school: with this law California might very well just have created a strong incentive for those kids to go around those formal systems and try Linux out on hardware they control, which not all will but certainly more will that they would if there wasn’t a law in place to limit what they can do when using a mainstream OS - if there’s one thing that is common in all societies and historical times is that teenagers naturally rebel against outside control and try and find ways around it, so limiting what they can do in the officially endorsed systems will push them towards alternatives systems which won’t limit what they can do.

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Think about it this way: how do people learn enough about it to program for and admin Linux systems as adults?

Unless things changed a lot since my days (granted it was over 3 decades ago), the path to knowing all about using, administrating and programming software for running under Linux was through being able to play with it for fun as a teenager.

That said, thinking further about it, this might actually push more teenagers to try Linux out to avoid age-gating since they can just download a distro from anywhere in the World and install it in their own PC.

Ok, that does make sense.

If you’re producing electricity in it, you can always bring some water up and use some of that electricity to extract hydrogen from the water to make up for any leaks.

It really depends how bad the leaking is since that dictates how much weight of water is needed to be brought up and electricity must be used for hydrolysis.

Wasn’t the way the Hindenburg burned due to both the Hidrogen AND the alumium oxide paint covering it?

LibreOffice can be used to produce and consume Pornographic Content in the form of of erotic stories, so it makes sense (within the “logic” of this law) that it’s age-gated.

You’re confusing GenX with Boomers - the explosion in Tech was in the 90s, not the 70s.

Even then, most GenX weren’t involved in Tech since when they learned how to use it, it wasn’t yet normalized and widespread, so only really people who found such things interesting went for it and generally the personality type of those attracted to power over others is almost the opposite of the personality type of those attracted to solving problem which are expressed in strict and complex logical structures (for example programming languages or electronics designs).