This used to hold broad cultural applicability, back in the Before Times when the “Hitler Did Nothing Wrong” crowd was still excluded from the political mainstream. Norms excluding out-and-proud ethnofascists from official, public participation in the English-speaking political right started to seriously slip around the time of Obama’s election and certainly ceased to exist after Trump’s win in 2016, but prior to that time “Nazi” was very much more often an ad-hominem attack than an accurate description of somebody’s politics.

What’s a little Third Reich here or Reign of Terror there between friends, eh? Besides , it’s not like a little bit of anti-intellectual purging or nationwide famine isn’t worth enduring to get to a better world for the people left afterwards!

I used to know a poli-sci researcher who was trying to take a big-data look at the success and failure of revolutions, taking in variables like “how many demonstrators rallied against the government?” “How many dissidents were disappeared by internal security forces?” and even things like “how many bullet holes are there on the buildings around the main protest venue in the capital?”

I asked him once if he’d discovered the secret to a successful revolution, and he just grimaced at me.

It’s a damn shame, too, because the commercial software in the sector is abusively overpriced, and there’s just nothing to be done about it (unless somebody can get antitrust regulators to pay attention, which hasn’t happened yet, and I’m not holding my breath for it).

It’s not like the FOSS options out there aren’t fundamentally capable of doing the job, either – it’s just that they almost universally seem to have been designed by people who think of GUIs as a concession to the normies, and don’t understand typical or expected design workflows. I’d love to be able to use FreeCAD instead of Fusion for hobby projects, but just creating a sketch in the former is like fighting through molasses compared to the process in Fusion. A bit of focus on UI instead of under the hood features would go along way towards making these programs viable competitors – look at how Blender’s perception changed amongst professionals after it ditched its idiosyncratic pre-2.7 UI, for instance.

Don’t even get me started on BIM software… Ridiculous subscription pricing, barely a bug fix to be found, and feature requests ignored for a decade or more! The last release of Revit’s headline new feature was (drumroll, please…) A dark UI mode. Good to see Autodesk put my employer’s seven-figure subscription payments to good use. 😑

I was a longtime Debian/apt diehard but I’m coming down on the same side of late. My homelab runs Proxmox (Debian based) with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS containers for more up-to-date packages, but my attempt to use KDE Neon (Ubuntu-based) for my desktop PC was a disaster. I’ve switched to Nobara (Fedora-based), and other than having to switch from Wayland back X11 because Wayland on NVidia breaks a bunch of things I need for work it’s been relatively smooth sailing.

Battletech let you choose your pronouns independently from the gender presentation of your little 2D avatar icon and butthurt GamerGaters review-brigaded the game and harassed the one trans developer on the dev team.

Great game, though, even if your ops guy’s idea of advance Intel is telling you about reinforcements the turn after they open fire on you, the DropShip pilot lands by Braille on your head sometimes, and your shipboard engineer is probably a plant for the cornball tecnho-Illuminati who have been doing a space CIA for the last few hundred years… But I digress.

I had an architecture professor who studied design for aging in place, and this sort of thing was one of the things he advocated for. Aging and death are a part of life, and designing a room in the house to be able to support hospice care for a family member is a way to make a difficult experience more humane.

Keep in mind that a large chunk of the United States is considerably closer to the tropics than Europe is. Washington TC is on roughly the same latitude as Lisbon or Ibiza is. It’s not tropical, but climatically it’s still considered sub-tropical, and large chunks of the country have the summer heat and humidity to prove it.