Posts by JohnFen

Re: Phone case???

I never use a phone case. I hate them. I have also never regretted not having a phone case.

Re: Double standards

"Yet when it's an Android device all is forgiven and everyone is willing to compromise."

What are you talking about? I think this is a terrible phone.

Oh, now, that's just mean!

Re: What ?! You can do that ?!

"You must be some kind of damn pinko preverted communist!"

It's even worse than you think -- I'd never stopped using makefiles, even when I was building from Eclipse!

Re: Eclipse has got its own problems

Yes, I have similar feeings about Eclipse. VS Code is not something that works for me, though, so I'm increasingly falling back to doing my actual building on the command line instead. It makes things so much easier!

Re: Nothing new...

"Do I like the default Ubuntu/Gnome experience? Nope. Do I hate it enough to spend oodles of time tweaking it and then again for my other machines? Nope."

I hate it enough that I simply don't use it. There isn't so much of a monoculture that alternatives don't exist...

Re: It's the monocolture of open source that led to this

"Microsoft under Satya is not definitely not Microsoft under Ballmer"

I'm not trying to be difficult here, but people say this a lot and I honestly don't understand why. Microsoft doesn't really seem much different now than it was before in terms of business practices. What am I missing?

Re: It's the monocolture of open source that led to this

"It's open source developers who made GitHub "the only repository you shall use""

I never got that memo. I did use GitHub until Microsoft bought it, but it was never the only (or even the main) repository I used. That's why leaving it was painless for me.

Re: The youf what accept this hasn't learned from the grey beards.

This greybeard is concerned about Microsoft's involvement with open source precisely because I do know what the "open" means, and I want it to stay "open".

True. I fully expect that any legislation to restrict robocalls would have exemptions for opinion polling. That's just how politicians roll.

Maybe.

We're entering the election season, and the Senate is in play in terms of which party will control it. Robocalls are an issue that directly affects every voter, and is easy for them to understand. The Republicans may push for legislation on this just so that the Democrats can't make hay about it in their election campaigns.

Re: Allow me to remind you

"It is targeting them because it believes China is breaking the rules themselves"

Which excuses nothing. If the US really believes that China is violating WTO rules, then there is an existing mechanism to handle that -- which is why I'm severely skeptical about that being the reason.

But I agree that the current administration probably doesn't care about breaking WTO rules. It doesn't appear to care about the rule of law when that's inconvenient for them or won't result in the outcome they want.

Re: Trump's logic is skewed

Pretty much. Trump learned how to business in the New York real estate market, which is notoriously corrupt and believes that "negotiation" means "beat people up until they cave".

Re: Allow me to remind you

"None of the big-box "auto enthusiast" car parts stores sold them or even had staff who knew what they were"

Even if they did, the big-box stores are almost certainly buying them from Chinese manufacturers, so that doesn't count as buying from a local producer.

Re: Allow me to remind you

"My problem with buying local is it is a pointless objective in of itself."

It's only pointless if you don't care about how well your local economy does.

Re: Allow me to remind you

"and the reason for that is that most people go fr the cheaper option rather than spend more for a local product."

Perhaps, but at this point, that's neither here nor there. Whatever the reason that some things aren't produced locally, if they aren't produced locally, then you can't buy them locally no matter how much you may want to, or how much you're willing to pay.

Re: I'm not so sure

"now we've switched to buying the same products assembled in Vietnam, Philippines and Taiwan."

But where were the parts that are being assembled actually manufactured? My bet is China.

Re: China has the upper hand and Trump is too stupid to see it

"I'm sure once his advisors talk him off the ledge"

I believe that he has replaced all of his advisors with yes-men. There's nobody left that would be willing to talk him off the ledge.

Re: It's the economy stupid

"That means that Trump, the Republican, the capitalist is actually a socialist/ communist?"

Trump and the modern Republican party are all in favor of socialism so long as it only applies to corporations.

Re: Allow me to remind you

"It gets even stupider with the twits who go to Ali Express, Amazon etc rather than using local firms (from a Kiwi perspective)."

For everything I buy, I buy from the most local producer that I can. But there is a wide swath of things that there are no local producers at all for.

Re: It all gets paid for by We The People.

"On both occasions Chinese government officials screwed with us."

Then why continue to do business with China at all?

This is what I don't get about the complaints about China's business practices. Yes, they're generally valid -- but the solution is to not do business with them. A war by the government to force them to do business differently strikes me as unnecessary and arguably immoral.

"Don't be alarmed that you have to pay the state to file your taxes that you have to pay the state, citizen."

it would be less awful to me if I did have to pay the state for this. Having to pay a private entity to do it just amps the awfulness up.

Re: Not being an American

"interest-bearing bank account, charitable contributions, and a car would be normal, and possibly a mortgage."

Interest-bearing bank accounts are less common than ones that don't pay interest, most people can't afford to make charitable donation in amounts that would really matter to their tax bill, and most people rent, so they don't have a mortgage.

Car loans are a bit more common, but even then, they usually aren't that large -- most car loans are for relatively inexpensive used cars.

Re: Not being an American

"None of that is at all unusual"

I suspect that it's more unusual than you think. Most US citizens don't have all that stuff. The 1040EZ covers a rather large percentage of the population.

Re: Not being an American

"In the USA citizens who wish to do their legal and moral duty and pay money to their government have to use a third party commercial company to do so."

Not exactly. You can file at no charge by filling out and mailing in the physical forms. If you want to do it electronically, however, then you're thrown to the wolves.

Re: *NOT* Emabarrassed American!

"It is not, and anything, even Trump (SO not a fan) that makes China less dominant is good, because its goals and the goals of any sane capitalist or socialist-capitalist are at odds."

(This is a thought inspired by your comment. I am not trying to imply that you are one of the people I'm talking about in this comment.)

I am a bit amused that many of the people who are inclined to say that the free market is the solution for pretty much everything are the same people who are in favor of this trade war. I'd think that this is one of the cases where a free market could actually be a solution.

If China is mistreating companies doing business with them so egregiously, surely the solution would be for those companies to cease doing business with China. That they aren't entertaining that course of action tells me that the situation is not as dire as the administration portrays. Clearly, on the whole, US companies are making more of a profit by doing business with China than not.

Re: China's Fault

That's a bit like saying that a war is your opponent's fault because they had the gall to counterattack.

" (unless the components were assembled into something else in the 3rd country)."

In the US, that's how it's done.

Re: What is it with Trump and Taxes?

"OK - want to make someone's tax records public? YOU first!"

Not just someone -- the President. If I'm ever President, I wouldn't hesitate, just like no other President except Trump has hesitated since Nixon started the practice.

Re: Diplomacy Speech

"Treaties and trade deals are agreements, not laws."

This is incorrect. By law, treaties are as much US law as any other US law.

Re: What are you waiting for?

Whether or not that's true depends on your use case. For many of the things Adobe software is used for, there isn't a good OSS alternative. However, for many other things Adobe software is used for, there really is.

Because there may not be a good OSS alternative for your use case doesn't mean that's true for everybody (maybe not even most).

Re: To be fair to Adobe ....

"If you're still using ancient versions of Adobe then you're missing out on improvements"

I don't understand why people raise this argument. Anyone using an old version of software is well aware of this already and have decided that the "improvements" aren't enough to be worth upgrading.

(Scare quotes on "improvements" because often, particularly these days, they aren't actually improvements at all, just changes.)