hotbathenthusiast

China has risen way less in terms of GDP per capita, even using power purchasing parity estimates. Japan is at 52k $, China only at 23k (Wikipedia).

I cannot ultimately judge this but the common wisdom about the Chinese social contract seems to be that the citizens get comparatively high economic security for comparatively low civil liberties. And while China’s pro-poor growth has certainly been more than impressive historically, I am not sure that the comparatively still low incomes especially in the inner parts of China are sufficient to maintain this social contract if growth does really slow down significantly.

Edit: I agree in general though that the state of Japan is probably not be as bad as it is made out to be in the article.

Sound great! Being gently touched in the face always feels wonderful, I think, no matter whether in a romantic or a non-romantic setting like yours. Scratches the itch for intimacy with another being.

I played my first official league game of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and it was a great experience. Not professional gaming or anything, just hobby gaming in the lowest league. But I always wanted to do that and finally found a group of nice people to do it with.

Weir’s characters are always so ‘alive’ somehow!

Weir! Though I am currently reading Martine myself.

Yeah, that’s what I haven’t figured out yet either. How do you make it a fair amount between a content creator and an email client developer, between one person, a corporation and a non-profit?

I have settled on not trying to make it a science. I can only give what I have, so always when I feel that I have financial breathing room (paycheck comes in and no urgent payments due) I am going to the relevant places and donate what I feel I can afford. While not perfect, I feel I should be proud about doing what I can rather than beat myself up over whether I could spend more, which a lot of free users will never think about in the first place. Otherwise I’d only go crazy.

The donations will go to what/who I feel like I have used/appreciated most since the last donations. So it’s mainly donations, not subscriptions which also helps not losing track and giving more than you can afford. Come to think of it, I also do not donate to the big creators whose content I consume as I guess they are rich enough. If you want a number, my last donation was 20€ to a small ASMR content creator. And for stuff that I use regularly like programs and apps (e.g. NewPipe 4€/month and KeePass 0.5€), my OS (3€), the hoster of the Piped instance I use (4€) etc. I have set up regular payments on Liberapay and such according to their tier system. I cannot afford all that much, so I am going for the small/medium tier according to my amount of usage (and I guess you should think about if they have running costs or not). If you are not constrained by money I guess you can just go for their higher tiers and vary them according to usage.

I realise it does sound like a pretty bad science now as it’s both complicated and does not sound fair at all (e.g. OS gets too little, no?), but well… This write-up actually helped me understand my own ‘system’ better, so thanks for asking! :)

My solution to this problem (which is only tangentially related to your technical question) is to block everything and really make an effort to donate to all developers of my open source programs, content creators, website hosters etc. in the services themselves or on platforms like Liberapay/Patreon.

Sorry that I cannot help with the technical stuff but maybe an idea if you don’t manage it your way.

I don’t know much about the console and such magic which probably makes me not exactly predestined for an Arch-based distro with the AUR where I feel like you can break more than in some more common ones like Mint. Despite that, I have been on Manjaro for years now, still learned only the very basics, but have not found a more stable distro that works so well out-of-the-box with some of the newer hardware I have (or had, it’s hardly new anymore). Also, I did in fact find the repos combined with careful use of the AUR to be satisfying.

I did distro-hop a lot especially in the beginning of my Linux adventure and was on Mint for a couple of years as well. And that’s what I generally recommend to the other non-tech-savvy folks around me as well: Just try a bunch of the top distros on Distrowatch for a couple of weeks. They all have their advantages and disadvantages but eventually you’ll figure out what it really is that you want from a distro and which ones work properly with your hardware – and you’ll learn about some fixes for common issues which helps the learning about Linux in general.

There are probably folks who know much more than me who can tell you if Manjaro is objectively better than its bad reputation but from my personal experience as a fellow Linux noob: I found it very stable, decently accessible and the KDE spin with its many themes absolutely beautiful.

Yes! For some reasons it is very hard to find, even through the search feature, but https://kbin.social/m/mma is where it’s at. They even have active discussion threads for the big events like r/mma did.

Finally a bit of Counter-Strike 2. Almost felt guilty for not being able to play much despite getting the coveted beta invite.

Does anyone know of an estimation of the net progressiveness (or regressiveness, I guess)? I only found this neat overview of the tax regime changes by EY.