If you want truly bulletproof clothing appliances and live in America, look up Speed Queen. They’re built to commercial standards and are trivially repairable. Many last for decades with only minor maintenance and upkeep.

Unfortunately, Speed Queen not available outside of America. 😭 Or, at least, absolutely not available in Western Canada.

I went with LG, as Bosch didn’t have the capacity I was looking for. Pretty happy with LG for both washer and dryer, four years and counting without a single issue. Would be nice if the front-loading washer came with an automatic dehumidifier, tho, as we have to leave the door open to avoid funky smells developing.

VW really dropped the ball on software

Why bother with software, then? Late-80s and 90s Type III Jettas can be absolutely bulletproof if you find them in not-bagged and well cared for condition.

Depends on when it was produced.

My 1998 HP 4050DTN is still going strong, an absolutely bulletproof beast of a machine. Plus, I can get extra-stuffed cartridges for it that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage. Even after two degrees and a quarter century I am only on my third cartridge.

My HP 5000DTN wide-format printer is much the same.

Of course, this was years before the DRM enshittification path that HP started down, so there is that.

Depends on when it was produced.

My 1998 HP 4050DTN is still going strong, an absolutely bulletproof beast of a machine. My HP 5000DTN wide-format printer is much the same.

Of course, this was years before the DRM enshittification path that HP started down, so there is that.

If the punishment for a crime is a set fine, then it is a law that targets only the poor; the wealthy will just pay that fine with the spare pennies at the bottom of their pocket as “a cost of doing business” and move on like nothing ever happened.

Antibiotics.

Their discovery and development is what has directly enabled our sudden rise from 2B to 8B humans in only about a century. Without antibiotics, we would likely still be under 3B humans world-wide. Yes, disease really did kill off a lot of humans back in the day.

Graph out the human population over the last two centuries, and you can even see the very decade when Penicillin use became widespread, along with doctors washing their hands and other basic hygiene tasks.

In most western countries any unintentional mistake made by the employee is considered a cost of doing business… after all, if such a mistake is doable, there is a problem in the business processes that needs correction.

Now don’t get me wrong, many shady business owners will still try to pin things on employees and take it out of their pay. But that is illegal here.

And there are ways of having that entry removed from the list of options entirely, and not just shifted to the drop-down menu. Makes it harder to physically shut down, but its absence can be a WTF big enough for you to realize which machine you are working on.

I don’t bother doing that to VMs, which can be trivially restarted, but their Hyper-V hosts? You betchya I do it to those.

when it wasn’t actively sexually harrassing T’pol

I never understood that need. T’pol was already fiercely exotic, what with her flawless face and remote Vulcan disdain. They could have put her into a spacesuit for the entire series and she would have still been attractive AF purely due to her personality and strength of character. About the only improvement I would have liked to see is more of her character arc being in conflict with her Vulcan upbringing, particularly in trying to deal with those infuriatingly irrational humans, and her emotional entanglement with Trip.

Any drug made with even a penny of taxpayer money (grants, funding, etc.) should be priced to taxpayer-affordability levels, with any corporation making it beholden to production SLA’s that severely ding them (far more than they could ever make off of the drug) if they cannot meet 100% of market demand.

Plus, set up a government company whose sole purpose is to serve the public by producing drugs at cost for anything that isn’t meeting market demand. As in, massively undercut the Parasites.

Then make this retroactive to all drugs, all the way back, no matter when they were developed.

If a drug company wants to suckle at any teat other than 100% self-funded, they would have to put 100% of their own money towards developing that drug. As it is, there are ZERO DRUGS that haven’t been developed on the taxpayer dime, either in part or in whole.

Implying that we have a future at all is inherently hopeful

Over the last year I have done a deep dive into climate science, the capitalistic and political responses to it, the collapsing Return on Research, and how modern agriculture at scale is going to be impacted.

If humanity is either not already extinct by 2100, or at the very least caught in an unavoidable terminal decline leading towards it, I would be very, very surprised.

There is a reason why climate scientists have begun to - very grimly - start calling themselves “climate pathologists” and - for the younger ones, at least - avoiding having any children at all.

The vast majority of people have absolutely no clue how apocalyptically bad things are out there, and how on the one side capitalism is whitewashing the problem under the rug, while on the other side right-wing politics are trying to make everyone think it’s all fake.

What is the difference between forced intervention and whatever Portugal did when it decriminalized hard drugs?

Portugal treats it as a mental illness health issue, and provides counselling. Only large non-personal amounts are treated as distribution, and therefore, criminal.

Only mental heath professionals can assign intervention, and typically only in cases where the user is a viable threat to themselves or others (imminent danger of harm through violence). This means that the vast majority of users are not coerced at all - they enter into counselling willingly, and with an intent to come clean.

The reason why things have backslid in the last little while has been due to funding cuts, and nothing else. Which is the same as any public service – funding determines effectiveness.

running it in an ssd is it can speed it up

Let me be absolutely clear: due to the finite write capabilities of solid-state technology, using SpinRite on an SSD is materially harmful to that SSD, and WILL shorten it’s operational lifespan by a non-trivial amount.

This is why SSDs have wear-levelling technology: to limit the number of writes that any one data cell will receive. By using a program that conducts intensive read/write operations on sectors, you are wearing your SSD out at a much higher rate than normal, dramatically speeding up any failures in the future.

I don’t care about living longer. I see no point in doing so when beset with dementia or unable to even walk, much less run.

Give me full vitality in body and mind until my last day, and I’ll be satisfied even if it’s only 80 or 75 years.

The Right wants forced intervention

Forced intervention has a near-100% failure rate. All it does is waste taxpayer’s money while making the wealthy (the owners of these “rehabilitation sites”) even wealthier.

It is quite literally another implementation of “trickle-up economics”, explicitly designed to make the rich richer by punishing the poor for their poverty and parasitizing off the incomes of hard-working working-class Americans.

And since forced intervention is no different than forced incarceration without any sort of a trial, I would argue that it is materially worse than doing nothing at all.

SpinRite is only meant for traditional “spinning-rust” mechanical drives.

SpinRite IS NOT meant for SSDs. The existence of TRIM makes SpinRite useless on any sort of solid state storage.

And since almost all laptops sold within the last half a decade use SSDs almost exclusively, it is highly unlikely your advice will be useful.

Crime is a result of desperation and lack of economic opportunities.

Chronic addictions are a result of untreated/untreatable trauma.

Homelessness arises from poverty and precarious economic conditions, and can trigger both of the prior two.

And yet, these people are voting for the parties that would seek to implement and perpetuate poverty, precariousness, trauma and economic inequality.

…the fuq?

I would never be able to use these.

Not because of their nature, but because I would have to Slav squat to get into the correct position. And even at my thinnest, I have never been able to Slav squat without turtling over backwards.

I can only squat while perched on the balls of my feet, which require them to be much closer together and produces a much more upright position, putting any pants and underclothes that I have rolled down directly in the path of any brown bombs.

This is golden!

Literally.

Ironically enough, hypochondriacs who don’t want to touch the seat while shitting. So they crouch over it, and rarely in as vertical a position as when sitting directly on it.