I started writing out a question, but I realized I need a better understanding of what an insecure desktop environment even means first.

The question I want to ask here is, what does “secure” and “insecure” mean in the context of a DE. What distinguishes a secure and insecure DE from a practical perspective (physical access, privilege escalation, rootkits, etc.).

Looking at the FAQ, they do “maintain” their version of TQt3. Whether they maintain it to the extent that it’s secure is anyone’s guess. There’s always the question of what kinds of exploits can even exist in a desktop environment (which I should add to my original post).

It’s good that it looks to be still maintained, but I imagine their resources are limited with so little market share and it doesn’t look like they have the resources to switch to Wayland (which I assume is more secure).

I’m not sure my noob questions are worthy of asking the devs directly.

I didn’t even consider the possibility that people would consider Republicans to be literally the result of a Chinese plot (although there was open Russian intervention on Trump’s side). But I suppose it is entirely possible people would read things this and come to that conclusion.

Yes

Charging people to be unbanned would not be a smart move.

They’re just incompetent, there’s no conspiracy.

100%.

We are over-saturated in art, particularly corporate-backed art. My backlog just keeps growing.

Legal piracy would change the incentive structures around art in a good way.

Disney wouldn’t like it.

I’m trying to think of countries America is most likely to end up like, but America’s military power complicates basically any comparison. But I’m thinking there are so many parallels to Nazi germany. A core difference is the access to information we have. First and foremost historical precedent, but also social media (even though it’s also part of the reason we’re in this mess).

If Trump can’t achieve a critical mass of compliance, a military coup is the most likely salvation. Specifically Trump calling the military on mass peaceful protests and in response the military saying “we’d rather coup the president”. Violent resistance would close this avenue off, as it would galvanise the military behind the president.

There’s also the question of whether ICE will be sufficiently militarized by the time this happens, and whether it would even occur to Trump to call in ICE to suppress protests. Nobody but the worst of the worst will join ICE, if their personnel and equipment can overwhelm even the local police (ACAB, but like, not ACAMAGA) then it would take gross incompetence for Trump to lose power.

That is domestically. The question now stands:

• Will they actually invade Canada or Greenland (nobody’ll pay attention to Panama)?
• Would the rest of the world resist?
• Would they succeed?
• Would it result in nuclear war?

Keep in mind I am not an expert. Also this is all putting aside Trump’s narcissism. Trump wants to be seen as a good person and a genius and I’m not sure he’d go as far as to massacre crowds of protesters specifically. If nothing else such violence would look like a failure on his part. Whoever succeeds Trump, a Republican obviously, would need to be Stephen Miller levels of bad.

That’s why Trump’s building his own private military in ICE.

There are other meats?

Correction: Be just as profitable but cash out on that profit slightly sooner.

That’s what you can do if you’re not publicly traded. The supposedly “wise” market whenever anything goes wrong always seems to insist on burning down decades of good-will to extract a few bucks.

There’s also the gambling, and the 30% cut that allows them to make $3.5 million per head.

Steam is pushing the industry forward on Linux support though, so they have my support.

Search engines, I guess. No I won’t elaborate, mostly because I have no confidence.

It’s definitely the former.

When something like that happens, I automatically assume it’s on mute or frozen, so I can’t get those kinds of masterpiece moments. I wish I could trust art as much as you.

If anything it’s the internet that’s the problem.

Back in the day all it took was making the effort to show up and giving a firm handshake. Now there are thousands of applicants and about four or five jobs.

Guys, we’re losing big to mobile devices. Although I’m glad Australia is still going strong at 12% desktop computer.

Nowadays I mostly, unexpectedly, draw the line at whether the product is good. I haven’t really trained my mental ethics muscle because frankly most of the unethical stuff just isn’t high quality.

Often I use ethics not as a “line” but as a proxy for the quality of something. In a world where we’re bombarded with too many choices boycotting is more of an advantage than disadvantage.

In the rare instance when something is good and unethical, like meat, it becomes a case-by-case thing. In the case of meat I stay away from pork (because that’s the most inhumane) and obviously I don’t touch any American meat.

EDIT: The topic here was work. Which is a tough one because we’re basically not given a choice on jobs. I would never do a job that actively makes the world a worse place, but I would work for a for-profit corporation … except my quality argument still carries over here. For-profit corporations are horrible places to work.