we live in a system that puts immoral people in power

Not just that, it pressures people to act immoral.

but I also don't have to make excuses for those immoral people acting immorally.

First of all, explaining isn't excusing. Second of all, one perversity of the system is that it makes everyone complicit by forcing everyone to participate, as consumers, participants in production, as participants in the political system, etc.. If you push that to it’s logical conclusion, everyone who isn’t committing their entire life towards overcoming the system can be blamed to act immoral, depending on how strict your morals are.

Putting too much focus on blaming people’s morals instead of focusing on the system that corrupts people’s morals is counter productive and creates a culture where people trying to do the right thing burn out and adopt an attitude of indifference because no matter how much you are trying to do the right thing, there are always more things to do. It also creates a culture where people compare and compete with eachother’s moral worth, which can lead to fracturing and infighting.

some of them do have a sense of shame

Shaming people into acting moral is not very effective imo.

There were plenty of things that she spoke out on

She sounds like a decent person, but my point is that if you look hard enough, you will find moral failings (same as with every human). I could blame her for not speaking out against Israel, for eample, and condemn her for it.

To be clear, I’m not in general against applying pressure on people in power by voicing disapproval or outrage where it is effective. What I find moderately annoying in this example is that people seem to focus more on Ed Sheran instead of focusing on the people with the actual power behind the decision to kick him (like Robert Kraft)..

If becoming one of the world's wealthiest musicians requires prioritisation of your brand over improving the world in ways

There is no if, that's generally how it works. As I said, there are always exceptions, but when you are a super famous pop star on a major label, you probably ended up there because you do what your label/manager tells you to do, not because you alienate part of your fanbase/boss/business associates.

becoming a wealthy musician is absolutely a sign of moral failure.

I don't even fundamentally disagree, I just think you are setting a moral standard that unfortunately will not be upheld by a majority of people if they were given the chance, which means you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Most people would choose not to swim against the current and take a "neutral stance" (or whatever stance their boss wants to them to take) over risking their career, that’s just how most humans work.

That’s why it is useless to expect CEO’s, politicians, business owners, etc, to act according to your morals. They act based on incentives, and the only way to make them act according to your morals to some degree is by forcing them to.

It's also not even necessarily detrimental to the brand to associate it with acting morally

If your entire brand is “I’m a pop musician who makes unprovocative pop music for everyone and don’t make public statements about controversial political issues“, it can absolutely be detrimental..

I really don’t think it’s that surprising: Venue owners band together and tell that multiple concerts of your huge tour with 15 support acts is essentially chanceled unless you kick one support act. For pretty much any tour promoter/organizer/manager, the decision is obvious..

that only made Dolly Parton more beloved.

To be honest, I’m hardly familiar with Dolly Parton, but wasn’t she famously silent on controversial political issues? At least I found this quote from her sister

"You know, I’ll tell everything, and I like everybody know what I think about it, not her. Because she’s a good businesswoman. She’s a good businesswoman.”

I also didn’t find any comment on Israel or Palestine from her, so I’m not sure why you are using her as an example, maybe I’m missing something? Because it seems to me that maybe she was beloved across the political spectrum because she didn’t publicly speak out on controversial issues..

I don't really care about him, but this line of thinking creates assumptions and expectations that are almost never going to be met. He is one of the wealthiest musicians, he isn't just a performer, he is a businessman. If he was willing to risk or limit the success of his brand for his views (assuming his views are pro palestine), he probably wouldn't be in the position he is in.

At the end of the day, it is a mainly systemic issue, not an issue of moral failiure. Some individuals will push against the systemic currents, but this will always be the exception, not the rule.

The only way to combat systemic issue is by changing/replacing the system through collective action, not individual action. Ed Sheeran chancling his tour in solidarity with Palestine would not stop western nations from supporting israel. The only way is a nations citizens collectively applying pressure.

I'm very critical of AI, but complete bans on AI use are, at the moment, pretty much unenforcable. Not hard to enforce, not impossible to enforce 100%, but completely impossible to enforce in general. There currently is no reliable way to verify if and how much someone used AI, except maybe if you monitor people's systems (and even with a totalitarian surveilence system, coders will probably be able to bypass it).

Obviously, if someone who has no clue about coding uses it to write the entire code, you notice. But that's simply not how most coders use AI..

Edit: And additionally, mandating disclosure of AI can make sense, but it can also create the false assumption that codeers/code without any disclosure are verified to not use AI when coding when it simply cannot be verified. It depends entirely on the coder being honest and transperant about their use of AI. And given the passionate pushback, coders are definitely incentiviced to not disclose AI use.

But the issue is that in practise, there is no viable way to verify wether or not AI has been used at all. In other words, the disclosure of AI use entirely depends on the person providing the code, wether disclosure is mandated or not.

If there was enforcment to disclose AI use, it would create a false assumption that code which claims no AI use, is verified to contain mo AI use, which again, cannot be verified by anyone.

So it's not that it's hard to enforce, it's not that it's impossible to enforce 100%, it's that there currently is no viable way to enforce it at all.

When I first went to the US, the unrealistically low speed limits were one of the first things I noticed when driving.

I kinda assumed that this is by design so that police can pull over anyone they feel like since virtually everyone drives over the speed limit in some areas as it is so ridiculously low.

The only way to get steam hardware, according to support, is to have a credit card, address and steam account from an EU country or other supported country. Or wait if a local reseller (like digitec) gets their hands on them.

If you care about age verification then steer clear of Red Hat associated distros like Fedora.

Fedora has age verification?

basically all cardio machines at the gym are going to be boring as all hell, going outside and doing activities is a lot more fun

Or, alternatively, use the stationary nature of indoor machines to make it less boring. I typically read. Or maybe watch a show or movie.

Outside is great too of course, but bad weather can be hard to overcome depending on where you live.

Don't worry, Microsoft has you covered. By then you will have windows cloud copilot edition streamed directly to your device. Your device will only need a little bit of power (you can buy it for only 1999$). Just don't forget to pay your monthly subscription..

They say Arthemis landed on EARTH, but it actually landed on WATER (no earth far and wide). If they lie about something so obvious, what else are they lying about??

Don't try to tell me that it's all so easy now, I literally just went through hours of research and experimenting and samba settings and changing my disk's fstab file just to get a folder to show up on my home network.

For most people, it is (and has been) that easy. If it works as intended, you can simply open your desktop explorer thing, click on network and have it show up. I know that because that has been my experience a couple of years ago and I was surprised at it just working so flawlessly. To be clear, I'm not denying your issues, I'm just pointing out that your experience is not automatically the average experience.

Of course there can be bugs and other issues which require troubleshooting, but that's not specifically a linux issue.

The difference is that for non-techies, it's harder to troubleshoot because advice you find is mostly written for techies, there is less info and there are a lot of different linux based operating systems.

For techies, it's generally easier to troubleshoot because you can get more info out of the system (if you know how) and you generally have more power over the system.

but pretending it's all smooth sailing and so easy and polished is misleading.

I agree, you cannot generalize a personal experience and then universally apply it to every person as well as every linux based distribution, like "it'll work flawlessly out of the box because that's been my experience". You also cannot generalize it over every linux based system. I have tried a lot of different distros with different hardware and my experience has varied a lot. I have had issues and bugs with ubuntu that just didn't happen with arch based distros.

But again, it's virtually never smooth sailing for everyone in every case. Windows users have to troubleshoot issues and bugs too.