balsoft

Nah, the US is well-accustomed to handling that sort of thing, done it dozens of times already. What is different is that now it's imperialistic violence against a purported ally, a NATO country. If he invades, this will certainly have knock-on effects later, and I hope it leads to the destruction of the US as a global power eventually - that would be at least one silver lining.

It's similar to how his admin is using the genocidal violence usually designated for poor global south countries, at home, on US citizens. Same tactics, different targets.

Yeah, because the previous one is non-functional nowadays

Heh, that is really quite old. There might be a chance.

comprehensive public transport is impractical or next to impossible

That's how we used to do transit before cars were invented. The US had a railway line to even the most remote farms. USSR had amazing railways that interconnected almost everything despite being the biggest country on earth by a wide margin.

Generally the trick is to build densely populated walkable towns where you don't need a car for daily activities, and connect them with railways. In that case, it doesn't matter what the overall population density is.

Even for sparsely populated land, if you can build an asphalt road wider than 2 lanes, chances are you can also build a small commuter railway there eventually. It would also be cheaper overall, if you consider externalities like everyone having to own a car, car crashes being a lot more common than rail crashes, and of course CO₂ emissions and the climate change that comes along with them. And that's besides the socioeconomic benefits of letting everyone have a way to travel, rather than only those with financial means to maintain a car and the ability to drive.

Cars are sometimes necessary, but it's like 1% of what they are used for currently.

This one is actually a pretty good idea. Eventually we get rid of the parking garages too and cover everything with railways.

See if you can get by with a combination of Krita and GIMP. The former especially has improved a lot lately and is now a fairly professional tool.

New-ish versions of Photoshop are very difficult to run in WINE (which allows you to run some Windows apps natively - it's the thing that powers all recent linux gaming advances). The best you can do is run it in a VM with a window passthru, like so: https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps

Depends on what you need from your computer. If it's just web browsing and some light "office-like" tasks, it's very easy, especially if you've interacted with a computer before. If you need some specialized hardware support or rely on some complicated proprietary app (looking at you Adobe), it can get complicated quickly.

In any case there will be some pain as you get accustomed to the new OS. But overall it's not as bad as it used to be.

Oh my, I hope she knows how to sed the release name in /etc/apt, or else it's very out of date by now...

The functional elitist is actually running Yi in XMonad on Guix.

What particularly in my comment made you think I support the fascists? (Also, while generally I am pro-USSR, I think sending the army to Budapest was a wrong response to the uprising)

If you have even a few hours of spare time, read the Communist Manifesto and Lenin's "What is to be done". The latter one is a bit harsh and not entirely agreeable, but proposes effective techniques of class warfare.

Almost half of young adults (historically, this is the demographic that will be effecting the revolution) in the US agree that socialism is good, it's just that almost nobody is willing to do anything to achieve it because they feel alone and disconnected. Build the connections, build the communities. Join the PSL or any other socialist/communist/anarchist org near you.

More practically, learn how to operate & purchase a weapon. It might be needed in the coming years, even if just for self-defense. If history is anything to go by, the fascists who gain power are not going to stop at the current level of violence.

The checks and balances are working mostly as intended. The purpose of the system is:

1. Protect the oligarchy from external threats, should any anti-oligarch politician slip by all the various election disenfranchisement techniques,
2. Moderate any conflicts between factions of the oligarchy to stabilize the dictatorship of the capital.

As far as I can tell,

1. Billionaires are making more billions every day while the rest struggle to get by,
2. Almost all dem politicians and their wealthy neoliberal donors are doing alright despite a literal fascist party being in power.

Besides, even when someone like Mamdani gets elected, they can't effect any meaningful change because they are "checked" by the pro-capitalist legislature and "balanced" by the corrupt judiciary.

It doesn't need a reboot, it needs a complete realignment of who's in charge.