I’ve thought about it. And it’s not just Trump. I see Trump more as a symptom of the problem, not the problem himself.

The thing is, my values just don’t align with many, if not most other Americans. A lot of Americans are fairly money obsessed. Many Americans are greedy and selfish. There seems to be a culture of getting rich anyway you can, even if it is through unethical means.

I also think many Americans are hyper consumers. The idea seems to be to work and hustle and grind intensely, to make as much money as possible so that you can spend that money conspicuously. Work hard, spend hard, party hard. Indulge, indulge, indulge. Money and indulgence and consumption supersedes relationships and any kind of social connection.

And somehow, for some this money obsessed consumerism runs concurrently with a bizarre form of Christianity, even though those two things seem to be at odds with one another. Don’t get me wrong, the greed and the consumerism are by no means restricted only to Christian Americans. There are plenty of secular or atheist Americans who are plenty greedy, too. It just seems to be in the DNA of the nation. Everything’s money and money is everything.

Americans will say, “there’s nothing wrong with working hard to support your family,” but it’s not just supporting your family, it’s about making enough money to buy a massive house and fill it with stuff, and fill your extra large garage with big, expensive cars and trucks, and all sorts of “toys,” like boats and jet skis and four wheelers, and campers/RVs. And no matter how much stuff you have, it’s never enough. You always need more, or better stuff. That goes way, way beyond just “supporting your family.”

Frankly, I’m exhausted by it. I tried living that way for a lot of years but I don’t have the energy anymore.

If this disaster has taught us anything it’s that we can’t continue to be so utterly dependent on oil. This particular oil crisis was unnecessary, a result of profoundly incompetent leadership, but it really just accelerated the inevitable.

Oil is a finite natural resource. There’s only so much of it in the ground, and it can’t be renewed on human time scales. What we pump up and burn is essentially gone forever. We’ve already used a lot of what took nature millions of years to create. We’ve already pumped up and burned the easiest and cheapest to get at oil. There’s no more Jed Clampett oil. You know, oil that’s so near the surface and easy to extract that you can find it by accident. No, that’s all gone. We have to really look hard to find more oil, today. New oil discovery is much more expensive.

There are still about 1.77 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves. But, we use 37 billion barrels of oil every year. At that rate of consumption, proven oil reserves will be depleted in a little under 50 years. And that’s at current annual consumption levels. If our annual consumption increases, the time remaining to total depletion of proven oil reserves decreases.

We will all but certainly discover more oil than what is already proven. However, that oil will almost certainly be more expensive to extract. Again, we’ve pumped up and burned all the Jed Clampett, sweet bubbling crude. Today, we have to drill deeper to get to less easy to extract oil, like oil that’s locked up in porous rock that has to be fractured apart.

So it takes more money to produce a barrel of oil than used to, and the demand for oil just keeps going up every year. Higher oil prices are an inevitability. It’s simple supply and demand. We simply can’t afford to continue to be so dependent on oil. We have to diversify.

Electrified transportation is a great option, especially if the electricity is generated from renewable sources. Once we’ve burned a gallon of gas, it’s just gone. It’s been used and it’s never coming back. Conversely, the sunlight that was used today to generate electricity will be replaced with new sunlight tomorrow. The sun keeps making more, and it will keep making more for billions of years.

This isn’t just an environmental issue, it’s a financial issue, it’s a common sense issue.

Not exactly John Wick, is he.

Trump safe

That’s unfortunate.

I’m gonna buy a bottle of nice champagne for the day when Trump finally kicks it.

Late stage capitalism runs on addiction.

“If you’re an American, you don’t want to see your president having a feud with the pope,” said Taylor Marshall, an outspoken Catholic conservative with a considerable YouTube following. “And if you’re Catholic, it’s kind of hard. If you voted for Trump three times and you want to be a Catholic and you want to be faithful and submit to the Holy Father, the bishop of Rome, the pope, the vicar of Christ, it’s kind of a tough situation to see the leader of your nation feuding with the leader on Earth of the Catholic church. It is for me.”

These people need to be isolated and studied, because what the fuck.

Ok, look, I’m really not interested in getting into these weeds. My point was just that human rights, whether one believes they are divinely given or inherent to some part of our being, are, for all practical purposes, useless without some means of enforcement. Do you dispute that?

Philosophy can be tested

Like, through repeatable experimentation and observation and study of natural phenomena?

It’s not supernatural, it’s philosophical.

What’s the difference?

And it’s the foundation for most, if not all, liberal democracies.

I’m aware. That doesn’t mean it’s above reproach or critical examination/reexamination.

I don’t see any material difference between divine rights and “natural” rights. Both seem to be supernatural or metaphysical, to me, so I don’t think it matters if you believe that these rights come from a god or something else. Either way they are meaningless without some means of enforcement.

You can certainly say that you have rights and that those rights emanate from some inherent part of your human being, but without a means of enforcement, it’s immaterial.

“[Progressivism] holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government,” he said.

Because it’s unequivocally true. Even if you believe your rights originate from God, unless or until God comes down and forms a state capable of enforcing those rights, they’re meaningless.

“It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.”

What a stupid thing to say. He’s the one advocating for subservience, that is subservience to the supposed God who is supposedly the originator of our supposed rights.

That being said, I agree that we should not be subservient to the government. The government should be subservient to we, the people.

A monument to stupidity.

Why would you want a majority of people using the same distribution?

I don’t, necessarily. I just think it’s the only way we will ever see widespread adoption of Linux on desktops. But, maybe I’m wrong. Honestly, I hope I am. I hope through changes in the culture and more education, people will make the switch. But, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t skeptical.

they will complain that MSO, Photoshop, Premiere doesn’t work

That’s true. They will. But maybe if enough users switch to SteamOS, Adobe, and other software developers might port their software to it. That’s really the only hope for widespread Linux desktop adoption.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe more people will be willing to endure a learning curve for the freedom and openness of Linux, but I think that path to widespread Linux adoption would take a long time, if it happens at all.

Yeah, one more with the name recognition, like you mentioned. People don’t know what Silverblue is, they don’t know what an immutable distribution is, and, frankly, I don’t think they’re interested in learning. But they know Steam. Sad, perhaps, but true.

there are already a lot of immutable Linux distros

Exactly. There are a lot, and that’s confusing for most people. The fact that people have so many choices makes them less likely to switch. Most people want ease, simplicity and convenience.

Until there is one, single distribution that the vast majority of people can install on their existing hardware, that just works, easily and conveniently, Linux will remain a relatively niche desktop OS. I think when Valve finally releases the desktop version is SteamOS, that might do the trick.

Linux will really take off when Valve finally releases the desktop version of SteamOS.

Gnome