Blah blah blah. Unencrypted data is the wrong default in 2025 for any OS. Linux should not be a poor man’s OS.

Sure. But defaults are important.

Perhaps AI could be used to rewrite this post so that it makes sense.

This is a case where Windows-bashing is hypocritical. Almost no Linux distro has disk encryption turned on by default (PopOS being the major exception).

It’s dumb and inexcusable IMO. Whatever the out-of-touch techies around here seem to think, normies do not have lumbering desktop computers any more. They have have mobile devices - at best laptops, mostly not even that.

If an unencrypted computer is now unacceptable on Android, then it should be on Linux too. No excuses.

If you do, then also choose full-disk encryption. It doesn’t make sense to close a small hole only to leave the big one gaping wide open. And yet on Linux FDE is mostly off by default, even in today’s era of encryption, even on laptops. Personally I don’t understand it.

Once you’re encrypted, then Secure Boot (if you even have the option of it) mitigates against the “evil maid attack”. To get access to your encrypted computer, the attacker will need physical access to it twice: first to swap out the bootloader, then to harvest the password you unsuspectingly passed to their freshly installed malware.

For most targets (i.e. you, probably), this would all be far too much trouble. But technically it closes a loophole: it means that you can go to Russia as a spy or a journalist and not have to carry your laptop on your person at all times.

Give it a few years.

I use sway in tabbed monocle mode, i.e. no windows at all, just one thing at a time like on mobile. Never going back to mousey Windowsy 1980s-style computing.

We need to enroll this guy in a mentoring program.

Tiling window manager plus a terminal.

Hmm, say what? No, it looks GREAT.

What’s GTK?

Black terminal FTW.

The small sacrifices you or I make are virtually meaningless, and are really just ways to make ourselves feel better.

Or simply to act to with moral coherence and avoid unnecessary cognitive dissonance. So that’s one difference between our attitudes.

If you or I really put all our eggs in the basket of individual impact then we’d be blowing up oil wells.

That would IMO be a negative impact. Ecoterrorism does not work. Wrong ethically, and counterprodutive. So that’s a second difference.

These are questions of deep philosophy, not simply judgements based on facts. You don’t see things as I see them, and vice versa. In a pluralistic society that should be manageable.

I would say that we don’t really live in a democratic society

Hence this third difference. The very fact that we can express disagreements like this and not be arrested is proof of something. The fact that our politicians are useless or malevolent is because we are those things. No societies in human history have been as free and democratic as the modern West. Things were (much) worse before, and soon they’re going to get much worse again.

Anyway. An unbridgeable gulf. Others can decide which of us, if either, is “right”.

and I am sorry but no you obviously aren’t an expert in keeping up with climate science and related topics

This is the only point I will challenge. I guarantee you that I know at least as much about this subject as you do. I choose to respond to it differently. That is all.

Not convinced that this kind of catastrophism is helpful. Certainly not round here, where people are already concerned (indeed stressed) about the subject by definition.

The fisheries thesis (or at least your strong version of it) I have not heard in those terms (and I’m pretty informed). As you surely know, there are plenty of potentially catastrophic outcomes other than fisheries - freshwater depletion, topsoil loss, plus the climate tipping points you mentioned. But nothing is certain in “10-15 years”. Talking in these apocalyptic terms is really a bit silly, not to mention counter-productive IMO. No surer way to tempt fate than to tell everyone that it’s all hopeless and they should all just go home and call it a day.

I do agree with your underlying point that climate is just one among a bunch of serious environmental threats. This is something that lots of people seem to have trouble grasping. Especially Americans IMO. Perhaps because the US lifestyle is completely incompatible with, well, basically any environmental limit, so the temptation might be to focus on one specific challenge and treat it as a problem to be solved. After all, Americans are a problem-solving people, right? They’ll just fix this one and get on with their lives. Etc. Anyway, I’ve gone offtopic so I’ll stop.

There are interesting dynamics at work here.

You may be right. You probably are right. But you’re not certainly right. In that uncertainty lie a wide range of possibilities.

Next, cynicism is corrosive and demobilizing (ask any dictator how powerful it is). By propagating cynicism, you’re making it slightly more likely that your own negative forecast will come true!

This is why, personally, although I’m tempted to agree with you, I choose to shut up about my feelings and instead focus on the upside possibilities of what we don’t know. Seems like a more productive use of my energy - and at least I’m not making things even worse than they already are.

Yes yes, I understand all that. It remains that people are using the systems argument as an excuse not to change their own lives. I’ve seen this in action and so have you. No democratic system is going to change when citizens are not lifting a finger individually.

There’s a legitimate argument to be had about the hypothesis where voters continue not to lift a finger but vote for green parties that promise to force them to. But that scenario seems to me too absurdly hypocritical and schizophrenic to be worth considering.

Of course it’s necessary to change the system, but that’s never going to happen until a critical mass of individuals put their actions where their mouths are.

Yes but that logic changes the goalposts a bit. The question of how to undo existing damage, or what we should do ethically, is not the same as the question of what is theoretically sustainable.

The gulf between your worldview and mine is so wide as to make a productive discussion impossible. Unfortunately.

But it has to be both if only because somebody has to show the way. Governments are not going to clamp down on meat ag when the whole electorate is cheerfully eating meat.

Personally I see the argument “I can’t do anything, it’s about the system!” as a extremely convenient cop-out. Any system is made up of individuals.

This has been my rule of thumb for a while. It should be clear as day that 9 billion people cannot all chow on hefty ruminant mammals. We would run out of land even before it cooked the climate.

The problem with chicken farming is the cruelty.

to open PDFs

mupdf

for selecting the text and stuff

This is what is slowing things down.