Barry Zuckerkorn

Ha, ok, I definitely got whooshed then.

It’s the meme format:

“Men will literally (something) but not go to therapy”

People who use it don’t necessarily endorse the original view, but are making fun of it.

As of last year, English Wikipedia, articles only, text only, was about 22GB compressed (text compresses pretty efficiently), according to the current version of this page:

As of 2 July 2023, the size of the current version of all articles compressed is about 22.14 GB without media

Some other sources describe the uncompressed offline copies as being around 50 GB, with another 100 GB or so for images.

Wikimedia, which includes all the media types, has about 430 TB of media stored.

I agree with you.

An apathetic populace is how despots or oligopolies consolidate or retain their power.

Activism doesn’t always work, but there are plenty of historical examples of big social changes coming on the back of direct action by the people.

On the specific topic here, of greenhouse emissions, the U.S. has been decreasing its per capita emissions for something like 15-20 years. We have a long way to go, and should be going faster, but we are making progress right now. And none of this progress was inevitable. It was specific efforts by nonprofits, by governmental entities, by private industry, and by individuals to demand lower emissions.

Past environmental successes include the elimination of acid rain, the reversal of the hole in the ozone layer, and the vast improvement in outdoor particulate pollution and smog in the past few decades. This stuff matters, we have been making a difference, and the moment we give up we will start backsliding.

Vim is a text editor that works in a command line and therefore doesn’t require a graphical interface or windowing system, or anything like a mouse or trackpad or touch interface. It has a whole system of using the keyboard to do a bunch of things really efficiently, but the user has to actively go and learn those keyboard shortcuts, and almost an entire language of how to move the cursor around and edit stuff. It’s great once you learn it, so it creates a certain type of evangelist who tries to spread the word.

This meme template is perfect, because the vim user really did learn a bunch of stuff, and then wants to try to convince other people to do the same, using a pretty unpersuasive rationale (not using a mouse while programming).

Young people tend to be more persuadable before 30, and tend to bake in their political views around that age. So big events in one’s 20’s tend to lead to lasting partisan affiliations for life after that.

FDR’s presidency won over a lot of people to the Democrats in the 30’s and 40’s. Eisenhower’s presidency shifted people over to Republicans in the 50’s. Nixon pushed people away from Republicans. But by the 70’s Democrats were losing a lot of voters, and then Reagan won a bunch of people over to the GOP. Then 9/11 won people over to Republicans, while the Iraq war pushed them away.

But each of these things had an outsized effect on those under 30. So Boomers who remember getting fed up with Democrats in the 70s and crossing over for Reagan (and then voting Republican in every election since) just thought it was the effect of age, rather than the effect of that particular political moment in 1980.

And even though this data and the analysis is mainly for Americans, it’s probably reflective of how people shape their own political beliefs everywhere.

Sorry, in Linux everything is a file, so there is no “everything else.”

Who said it’s fat, though? Sauropods are interesting in that they had systems of air sacs, like modern birds, that can puff up their apparent size without necessarily adding a lot of weight.