I think at this point Mint is a brilliant option for mom or Dad’s laptop that’s still on Windows 10 and Microsoft deemed “too insecure” for Windows 11, but Bazzite and other newer Distros do so much better at being distros for gamers right out of the box that those are better to recommend to gamers

I’m really struggling to make heads or tails of your core point that you’re trying to make.

I shared my story about trying to do some car replacement trips by acoustic bike, how it took a full year of training to be able to consistently make the school runs by bike (with a trailer mind you), and then pointed out how ebikes completely remove that physical fitness requirements while providing all of the same benefits of an accoustic bike

Also I love how you keep changing and leaving out details of my story as you go along. I really can’t shake the feeling you’re not actually trying to make any specific point and just want to argue with people

Bruh you seem really stuck on this idea of “dormant physical athleticism” whatever that means.

Let me break this down for you, the human body has muscles, these are like motors for moving bits of flesh and bone around. Like motors, the amount of physical energy they output changes based on the energy that gets input. Since humans don’t really have control of the chemical energy flow to these muscles, the way you can change that is by pushing these muscles to their limits, and as you keep doing that these limits start increasing.

Its really quite awesome, because unlike most things in life, your muscle gain directly correlates to the amount of work you put in. Its one of the few things you can directly control!

You should probably reread my comment because that was literally what I said

Side note about normal bikses: The way I compare them, normal bikes are limited to physical exertion. Ebikes are limited to time, very similar to cars. Though at the long range cars are still more comfortable

I started biking again 2 years ago, honestly partly pushed by various city planning/car rejection media when I realized I could start being the change I want to see in the world. I’d done some strength training during the pandemic but holy crap was I not in shape enough to be biking. It took me a full year of biking nearly every day to be able to bike my kids to school in a trailer (about 2 miles round trip)

Even now where I finished last summer biking over 22 very hilly miles, I struggled to bike to a haircut just a mile away after just 3 months of winter hibernation, and now that it’s early spring I got up to 5 miles so far within a few bike rides.

Point is, for the average adult, biking is an option but it takes a ton of time and work to build up your strength. Ebikes completely change the game because anyone can ride 10-20 miles on those, and if you have balance issues or other health issues you can get an etrike! They’re such incredible life changing machines!

I just want to say, I absolutely love this kind of question because it forces you to imagine realistically what a car-lite world would look like, and it completely changes the line of thinking from problem identification to problem solving, and in a way that truly will change the world for the better

This is one of those questions where you have to look to the past to really understand the possible future.

Rural America was built by railroads. You know why there’s a town every 10-20 miles on a rough grid? It’s because steam locomotives built during the 20th century would need to stop to refill on water every 10-20 miles. These old steam locomotives were slow usually only running up to 30-40mph. The train would need a spot to stop & refill with water so when the railroads didn’t platte out towns to sell the land they just built through and increased the value of, towns would organically pop up near these stops anyways.

If we fast forward a little to the 1880s or so, electrification was going bonkers, and many electric companies would say “while we’re building these power lines, what if we also ran electric trolley services too?” So the trolleys would advertise the versatility of this newfangled electricity thing while also providing a second revenue stream to electric companies. This is when electric interurban services really hit their peak. There were thousands of interurban lines across the US at this time, but many didn’t survive out of the 20th century, and of those that did very few survived past the second world war, and of those, even fewer survived into being bought up by city transit agencies.

This pre-car period had most people either living in dense walkable cities or living on homesteads and walking/riding horses/carts multiple miles to go to the nearest town for the day. People didn’t move around a lot during this time, and the world was much smaller and life much quieter. This is part of why circuses and fairs were so big is it was the most exciting thing happening all year.

The world has changed so much since the invention and proliferation of the automobile that it’s really hard to imagine a car-lite world, but also there’s aspects of modern society that simply can’t exist without cars. I’m imagining a societal change pushed by something like legislation which doubles vehicle registration fees every year for a decade. Sure that $250 the first year will hurt a little, and the $500 the second will hurt a bit more, but you’ve got a good 3-5 years or so before it’s really going to start hurting most families, and I’d imagine it would be the $4000 mark where most don’t renew which is conveniently after 5 years of the registration fee doubling, and enough time for new bus services to be spun up and plenty of time for people to invest in bikes and manufacturing to adjust to the new demand patterns

The concept of road tripping becomes very different, and travel honestly gets more expensive. I was just looking at Amtrak tickets today chasing an idea of taking a couple day trip out of town during my kids spring break, and I’m immediately looking at $250 to go 200 miles, 5x the cost of just loading the family in the car and driving that distance

Without cars anyone living in rural areas is immediately stranded. Most of rural America has been rebuilt around cars because rural America was the first place cars were able to sell successfully (in fact car companies had to engage in conspiracies to force sales in cities once everyone who wanted a car had already bought one) there’s many houses which are multiple miles from the nearest store of any kind, and many small towns lack any kind of grocery store. Many business and public schools in rural areas are located miles outside of any town and require people to drive or take the school bus just to get there. With about a century for rural America to rebuild into the car centric life that it is and most of the railroad tracks gone, it’s pretty impossibls for rural America to de-car

Suburbs are similarly challenged to rural areas, but at least have the benefit of being close enough to their cities and hubs of commerce that biking and biking to/from public stops remains very viable. Exurbs where they aren’t connected to the urban fabric but are entirely reliant on easy vehicle access to it are absolutely fucked though, and would probably spin up new Intercity bus services to compensate, but needing to transfer bus services to get to anything rapidly makes these already undesirable exurbs become far more undesirable

Small towns that never had the population growth to spawl are even better off. Many of these small towns are super walkable and bikable today with limited infrastructure changes that might be desired. Stroads built to serve big box stores or industries would be the only major challenge, but generally all that needs is a road diet and/or a dedicated parallel greenway

Shopping will definitely look different. For one thing single use plastic bags become completely nonviable since they carry so little per bag even compared to just paper bags, and it’s difficult to carry more than about 3 plastic bags of groceries at once. We’d also definitely see a reversal from fewer larger stores which are further away back to many more smaller stores that are closer to people’s homes. Parking lots will be quickly realized to be unneeded, likely to be torn up with new housing, stores and bus terminals built where those parking lots once stood.

The average road and street will also change dramatically. With people mostly walking, biking and taking public transit, suddenly the minimum acceptable street changes a lot, where right now it’s relatively smooth pavement with relatively good drainage, in a world where people primarily walk, bike and take transit they will instead demand trees and narrower paved areas, bringing it down to human scale. A “narrow” 40 foot wide suburban street will rapidly become much too large and many will be rebuilt to be more pleasant for cyclists and pedestrians (I’m imagining 10-15 foot wide medians with trees, benches, water fointains and a nice greenway in the center, maintaining a pair of 10-12 foot wide lanes on either side for deliveries, emergency services and buses, or the inverse, with the road space narrowed significantly to 16-20 feet to allow for careful passing potentially with a parrelel greenway depending on traffic, again with trees, benches and water fountains)

See I worried about this with my phones for a while, but then I realized I’m literally just doing the job of a charge controller for the phone which only cost about $300, and by the time any wear might show up from enjoying the fast charge capabilities I’ll have already have switched to a newer phone since I tend to upgrade every 2-3 years

I mean, as the law is written there’s zero requirement for the entered age to be verified, only to associate an age bracket with the OS user account and to provide that info to programs as they require it. Now, I do wonder if a California-compliant OS would require service accounts to have an entered date of birth and what kind of fun that could potentially lead to of you enter the date of account creation as the birthdate but the full ramifications remain to be seen

there is no such thing as objective media of any kind anymore

All media has bias. Always has. Literally even just in the choice of what to report on, what to investigate, how and what gets written about. Best thing anyone can do is realize this, and reject the billionaires narratives and write their own shit. Make zines and hand them out! Make political shitposts on the internet! Make radical stickers and graphiti. Reject the manufactured narrative and write your own and share it to normalize it!

I mean this is generally a sign of growth by the content creator, shifting from whatever “personalized” ads the ad network decides to show, to having their own relationships with advertisers and doing their own ads. Honestly its a good thing because it means that the people making the content also have full control over who they sell ad space to and how that ad space is used, and if viable platforms other than Youtube existed, they would be able to to run their videos profitably without excessive user tracking

Hey man, I’m sorry that I did put you in that position with my comments! I thought you were exaggerating about the social anxiety (I’ve known several people who do) and that it was like myself where the best thing to do is to push past it, be awkward and do whatever it is anyways to build the skills to be less awkward later

I hope my comments are worth saving and coming back to later! I’ve had my own thoughts and ideas for running events in my community but I have my own challenges I should work on before undertaking such a project. But I did dump a basic framework for creating an event based on my experience volunteering at a few nonprofits and helping them run events so maybe there’s something there?

Any of the ideas I’d said above wouldn’t be solo operations. Sure they could be but finding a friend to be your business partner or creating a small organization to manage and run things both helps manage risk but also helps fill in the gaps in your own skillset.

The easy option is just to talk to the local library about running a film festival, get it scheduled in the community room and put on the library events calendar and just bring a laptop and a projector if the library doesn’t have one and watch some public domain films. This can grow into a larger indie film festival in time and in the short term you can get your feet wet and have some fun doing something meaningful in your community

Now if you wanted to go all out and do it for real with an actual budget (still only talking single digit thousands at the most though! I know folks who spend that much annually on their private hobbies, and if you play your cards right you can probably break even pretty easily) and really try to make something of the whole thing, this would be my gameplan if I were to try to set one up in my town:

1. Enlist some friends/trusted family members to help run it, create some loose organization amongst your enlisted folks to help delegate tasks and share the responsibilities and costs, create a regular meeting/working session schedule and break out into task forces as needed
2. Look around your local community and identify potentially suitable event spaces. Is there a local art gallery or community center you can rent out? Maybe an indoor/outdoor space at a park you can rent out from the city? What’s the cost to rent it out for an evening? How many people would be allowed in the space at once and what would it take to setup a projector, some speakers and a laptop?
3. If you find a suitable enough space and have reached this stage, strongly consider officially registering your organization (a non-profit would probably be lowest-risk since businesses and governments love donating to non-profits and it makes it much easier to rely on volunteer labor and donated hardware and licenses further reducing risk) this is also the stage where you should have ideally identified your budget and general gameplan for running this thing
4. Consult your local government and any local colleges for assistance. See if you can get any film, culture, English or even just liberal arts instructors on board with helping boost your event. Your city government may have resources they can offer as well, since boasting an indie film festival is usually a good thing for any city. This is one instance where living in/basing your operation in a smaller town is a big benefit because the local government will likely be excited to help however they can to build more local culture and draw to the town.
5. Schedule it! Book your reservation of the event space
6. Advertising! Post fliers, ensure its mentioned in the local paper and local news (if they exist) make sure its listed on the events schedules that would be relevant. Get any local/regional colleges aware of the event so that students might come attend. Contact the senior centers and make sure you’re on their event calendars so you get some bored retirees to attend too
7. Get your equipment in order. If you went the non-profit route contact local AV/IT companies for donations of equipment/time. Many of these companies will donate both in exchange for plastering their company name on event as a sponsor. Also get your food vendor(s) in order. See if there’s a good spot for a food truck to setup shop and contact some local food trucks to gauge interest. This is also the stage to line up your tuxedo rental so you can look the part when you give your opening/closing speech about how proud you are to have seen this event come together
8. Run the event! This is probably the hardest part because everything you thought would be fine will go wrong, while the parts you thought would catastrophically fail go perfectly, but ultimately its fine because its a brand new indie film festival and nobody expects it to have the polish of Sundance or the Grammys.
9. Do it again the next year! Or even in 6 months! Once you’ve held a couple of festivals you’ll start collecting some regular attendees, made some extremely important contacts, and you’ll have started to establish a reputation. Maybe this is just a cool thing you do now, or maybe it grows into an actual big thing! (if it does and my comment inspired you, please let me know though! I’d love to know if my random brain dumps on weird corners of the internet actually impact people in meaningful ways!)

Well, either that or crimes, but some crimes can be seen as illegal work

Human existence requires work. Someone has to grow the food, someone has to fix the things, someone has to build the structures and plumb them and someone has to help fix us when we get broken. The only way to never work is to freeload off of everyone who is working.

What really sucks is that society expects us to be “specialists” in one thing for the rest of our live

Specialization is literally how humanity shifted from being hunter-gatherers who lived to be about 30-40 before getting mauled by a bear or killed by another tribe or dying of an infection because you slipped on a rock.

In the modern economy specialization doesn’t have to mean doing the same thing every day. Any kind of career where you fix things, you can easily find a job that varies wildly from day to day. A mechanic might be replacing an engine cylinder one day and rebalancing wheels the next and rebuilding the exhaust the next. An IT person can be troubleshooting a software error one day then tweaking network performance the next then imaging laptops the next. A project manager will have different work depending on what phase of the project it’s in, and the type of challenges and work will vary wildly by what kinds of projects they’re managing

The trick is, find something you don’t mind doing and that can turn into finding something you kinda enjoy. As long as you don’t wake up dreading work every day (which if you do it’s probably time to shake things up, both for yourself and for your loved ones!) you can have a pretty decent life

The other way to look at it is what are hobbies and volunteering but work in of themselves? Human existence involves work, but every human should be able to find work that they can enjoy (or at least not actively hate)

So here’s the thing, many people hate their jobs and just work them because they don’t really see any other option than to keep working the job they hate, but also plenty of people really enjoy their jobs. Depending on your interests you might have to get a little creative or try something you’d never thought about or something you’ve never heard of

If you enjoy problem solving (a very common human trait), there’s some lucrative corporate careers out there in things like project management, asset management or even just straight management. If you just want to zone out and listen to podcasts and audiobooks all day there’s tons of machine operator jobs that will absolutely fill that role (and often in small towns with very low costs of living as an added bonus) if you want to just get paid go hike there’s jobs to be had in surveying and land management. If you like working with animals the ag sector has you covered, and if you like working with your hands there’s always tons of jobs in trades. If you like helping people there’s the healthcare sector and if that’s too much blood there’s always medical coding or outside of the healthcare sector there’s tons of banks out there looking for loan officers who will talk to people and fill in the blanks on the forms. Sales is also very lucrative and very cushy if you can get into B2B sales. There’s tons of jobs that exist and every job is different, so there’s bound to be one out there that scratches an itch for you and you can enjoy (or at least not actively hate)

And this is all assuming you want to work for someone else, you can always start something on the side while keeping another job that pays the bills, or if you have a supportive partner who’s willing to cover the bills while you take you shot at a business. Go start a hardwood furniture business, or find an obscure thing that nobody makes anymore and start making those. Go create an event that people can buy tickets to attend. Open a bar or a store or a pilates studio! Buy an old building on some unfarmable land and create a winery or fish farm or wedding venue! Sell pancakes out of your garage! Paint murals for people! Grow mushrooms to sell at the farmers market! Start a commune or a bus tour company or a bike taxi! Is it hard? Absolutely. Will there be roadblocks and challenges to overcome? Indubitably! But overcoming these challenges is fulfilling in itself and plenty of people start businesses successful enough for them to retire off of (or at least successful enough to sell to someone else who can make it successful enough to retire off of)

I could work in a movie theater or something similar, but then I’m back to making state minimum wage instead the almost double that I’m currently making.

You could own a theatre. You could also create a local film festival, even if that means just booking the community room at the library and screening public domain silent films to start with. Or if you want to make a job out of it, maybe you can snag the screening rights to some indie/deep backlog films and do a traveling film festival, maybe setting up in small towns where there isn’t already a ton going on where you could also get the venue for cheap.

There’s also companies popping up that have bought the rights to reprint deep back catalogue films. Like I recently heard about one that buys the rights to reprint B movies from the 70s and 80s on VHS, so apparently there is a market for that kind of thing too!

I mean one side has literal Nazis, is building detention facilities while sending a poorly militia into cities to arrest and attempt to disappear people without any charges, the other side just wants a half-assed European social democracy (because you know the Democratic party is currently captured and unwilling to make any meaningful change that isn’t incremental and trivial to reverse)

“I’m sure they were just good friends”

I work in IT and run a number of Linux servers and desktops, but my main gaming computer hasn’t run Linux since about 2021. Around mid-2021 I got tired of not playing certain games due to lack of Linux compatibility and realized my Windows skills were slipping so I switched it over to Windows 10

September of 2025 I installed a new SSD into my desktop and installed Bazzite (I have a bad habit of breaking my Linux desktops through too much tinkering, so they accumulate configuration quirks that I can work around but become more and more of headache. I describe it as being like a mechanics car to non-technical users, it works perfectly but you can’t use third gear, you have to cycle the heat before the AC goes and you use the screwdriver in the glove compartment to change the radio station) so immutable seemed like a really safe bet, plus its already preconfigured 80% of the way to how I like things which is closer than other distros

I fully expected to find some key game that I play a lot or software that I rely on wouldn’t work under wine/proton, but everything just kept working perfectly so it’s stuck for over a quarter of a year already. Also I’ve had less problems with KDE than I’ve previously had when running KDE 5+ years ago, so definitely some improvements there