It’s been like that that since I can remember. Upgrading can extend the lifespan by a few years, but often it’s a good idea to replace the whole system.

It depends on a lot of factors of course. If you buy a midrange machine now, you can upgrade it in five years to a high end machine from today, then five years ago.

Rarely do you get to take advantage of technology shifts like hard drives to SSD. A couple of years ago, adding more RAM and an SSD made machines usable, that had these bottlenecks. Still the best thing you can do to an old laptop or desktop.

Over the last decade performance hasn’t improved that much for most typical use cases. An i7 from ten years ago with 16 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD, and a NVIDIA GTX 1080 is still a decent computer today.

What makes PCs great is that you’re more flexible regarding how you configure your machine. Adding more storage, more ports, extension cards, optical drives inside your machine etc. is just nice.

With a laptop you end up with crappy hubs and lots of cables.

Of course the sun prefers the celebrations held on shortest and longest days.

A sense and need for justice might be genetic in humans.

You can have a setup with a fish tank and some pots in your home.

Yes, I am German. I come from that alternative milieu. My father was a founder of the local chapter of the Green Party and active in the peace and environmental movement. His job was working at a co-op owned bookstore with a book selection that had a strong emphasis on environmentalism, peace movement, leftist politics, third world authors (mostly Latin American leftists), etc.

I was born in an anthroposophic clinic. Throughout my childhood I ate mostly organic food and was treated with alternative medicine, mostly homeopathy and herbal. This impacted my life pretty negatively as I never received antihistamines for my allergies, only some vaccinations, nor any kind of attention to my ADHD. When I first visited a regular doctor as an adult, it was mindblowing to receive medicine, that actually works.

Some of my friends went to Waldorf schools, so I have second hand experience. Their school philosophy has lots of things going for it, but in practice can be pretty terrible for some children.

I can talk about this stuff for hours.

They didn’t invent it, but they encouraged and invested in it. The number of biodynamic farms increased from 100 to 1000 after 1933. Some high up Nazis protected biodynamic agriculture and it was used on some SS run farms.

However the Nazis rejected Anthroposophie as an ideology.

Both stem from romantic and naturalistic idealism, that‘s Part of German culture. Modernity had severed the relationship between the people and the land and nature. Christianity and Judaism were seen as invasive religions, that eradicated the natural indigenous religion.

There‘s an antisemitic strain that rejected modern medicine as Jewish, and favored alternative methods. Homeopathy, Anthroposophic medicine, new Germanic medicine, quackery, and other alternatives were supported by the Nazis.

The Nazis regulated quacks and providers of alternative medicine as Heilpraktiker (healing practitioners), a law that‘s still around today in Germany. This legitimized them in the eyes of the public until today.

It’s all pretty convoluted and there’s no clear line. Nazism as an ideology has a lot of inherent contradictions. It’s both against modernity, for a more ancient indigenous culture, while embracing modernity, technology, media, and revolutionary change. It’s very syncretic.

Anthroposophy and other alternative medicine remains popular in Germany today, especially among the educated middle and upper class. Left-liberal hippies will often send their children to Waldorf (Rudolf Steiner) schools, which you can find in every medium sized city. I have personally listened to a Waldorf teacher talk in front a group of 40ish people how the Holocaust was the result of bad karma accumulated by the Jewish people. According to him the Jewish people were were cleansed by it and transitioned now to a higher stage of development.

The success of the German Green Party, organic farming, environmentalism, anti nuclear sentiment, alternative medicine, has a direct cultural origin in the naturalist romantic idealism from the late 19th, early 20th century. The Nazis co-opted some of it, because it fit in with their Völkisch and antisemitic ideas.

Even today, you can find neo-Nazis in Germany, who care a lot about the environment and animal welfare, also following alternative quack medicine. Anti vaccine sentiment was widespread in west Germany before COVID, and the anti-vax movement was easily co-opted by the far right afterwards.

Industrial scale permaculture is the solution.

Santa is a shared delusion running on people’s minds in a distributed fashion, known in magic occult spheres as an egregore. All of those minds then manifest Santa by their own deeds and the spread of Santa memes. Santa‘s sled is everywhere at once as the sequence of delivered packages doesn’t matter. One Santa manifested everywhere through human thought and action.

This is actually kind of a good analogy.

Germany lost WW1 because they were allied with the failing but ambitious Austr-Hungarian empire. They did pretty well considering the situation of a two front war against three, later four major powers.

Neanderthal genes, best genes.

Gaius Iulius Caesar also spoke (ancient) Greek.

Yes, it took a couple of days before this became a story. Anyone seriously looking into the files would have discovered that quickly.

New information will come up about this for years.

SUsE Linux had a nice GUI installer in 2005.

The introduction of SwiftUI and Liquid Glass has made these kinds of gore more ubiquitous and made the usability worse.

Spotify using several processes and GB of memory just play some music and browse a library is an abomination. WinAMP did most of that 20 years ago while using a fraction of the resources.

Discord similarly is an affront.

Hamas could have let them go and lay down their arms at any time to stop the war.