ProfessorOwl_PhD

Quite frankly there's been more than enough already, and everyone needs to just pack it in.

Text of post

Do you disagree with how the company you work for is run? Are they on the BDS list? Are they a fossil fuel company or SUV manufacturer? Is strike action not an option? Try hiding under a rock! Alternatively, adopt ‘slow-down’ tactics among your colleagues. These methods of industrial action are intended to slow down the efficiency of companies without risking disciplinary action. ‘Slow-down’ might take the form of playing everything ‘by the book’ and taking procedural processes VERY SERIOUSLY. In practice, corners are cut, so why not become that sticker for the rules and make sure everything is signed off exactly how the bosses intended? In an industrial dispute in 2011, right-handed Australian workers at the airline Qantas started using their left-hands. So get out from beneath that rock, and if you’re stuck by circumstances working for a bad-guy, get creative with your resistance - and organise offline with your colleagues. Crab Museum takes no responsibility for you getting the sack, but it's worth thinking about what power we still have over the world around us.

Got home from lunch with some friends right as 3 (three!) CID officers pulled up looking for me, over "malicious communications" I "may" have made. 5 hours later I was back home, having charmed them into asking for only a 2 sentence "I'm sorry for bullying you" letter as punishment. Not even a caution. Skip to the last section if you just want the analysis without story.

Let's be clear, I was extremely uncivil in my email (cw gross insults, mention of suicide)

Among my ranting - i.e these are the bits the cops actually brought up - I accused him of getting off on blowing up Palestinian kids to be so rabid in his support for Israel, compared him to Hitler and the Royal Family, and signed it with "Fuck you and kill yourself". I did not include any threats, actionable or not, veiled or not, or anything that could be interpreted as a threat to him - the closest I came was the phrase "kill yourself". The cops specifically stated that there was nothing threatening in the message.

I'm not trying to pretend what I said wasn't offensive, it was meant to be. Fuck him, he doesn't even have local support, nearly the entire Constituency Labour Party quit when the PLP forced his nomination on them, and since then he's unflinchingly supported Starmer's evil. Multiple people I know have sent very polite emails stating their objections to his support of Israel, and all received the same proforma zionist reply talking about Israel's "right to exist", so seeing as their politeness got ignored I aimed to make him just straight feel bad about the things he votes for, but that's all I did. I used some mean words, but it stayed well within the realm of just words.

Potentially I could have "no comment"-ed everything to make a big deal about it - I would 100% lose in court and get up to 2 years in prison and a fine, but it would drag things out in a way that attracted negative publicity for my MP and the police at an already quite volatile time - but instead, mainly for reasons that will stay between my solicitor and I, I was completely cooperative, making even more of a farce of the whole situation.
The cops arrived on edge and ready for something - a chase, a fight, an emotional breakdown - and instead got polite compliance from a charming and well spoken young man ("man"). They aren't used to people being friendly, helpful, and "open" while being arrested - they had to confer about putting cuffs on me before deciding there was no point. They certainly aren't used to receiving a cheerful admission of "guilt" and well thought out explanation of just what someone did to receive such abuse - once we finally got to the interview they were nodding along while I talked about evidence of the Israeli genocide being all over the news and the OSA doing nothing to protect women even before the technical implementation is considered.
With my solicitors help I didn't even actually have to say that I'd done anything wrong (not sure if it's the autism or what but I find it really difficult to use moral language to describe legality, even within the context of lying to authority figures), just that I could have used different phrasing (not a lie), I was sorry (definitely a lie) and wouldn't do it again (probably not a lie, but we'll see). She had to kick me under the table a few times to make sure I didn't get too close to certain subjects, but I was able to make it obvious that there was no crime here, just emotional language wrapping intelligent and legitimate complaints from someone who equally obviously wasn't a troublemaker, really a credit to their community, and the detectives ate it up. It was clear to them this was a complete nonissue of a case that just needs a light slap on the wrist to fulfil the requirements of the law, all tidied up just in time to clock out. They didn't even need to actually check my phone - I mean, I already admitted to sending the email, and I would hardly have given it over so willingly if there was something incriminating on there, would I?

The takeaway from the experience is that politicians are becoming scared of their constituents and are using the police to intimidate them, and it is obvious to everyone. I told my boss and he thought I was fucking with him. I told some libs at work and they started going on about 2004 honda accord jojo well. I told my dealer and he started laughing because I've been buying drugs from him for years. Even the coworker who's literally dating a cop was appalled. The unanimous reaction has been that while my email was maybe a little excessive, arresting me goes far beyond any reasonable response. Even the cops found it excessive - I wasn't joking about the two sentence apology and slap on the wrist, on releasing me the arresting officer literally said they were required to punish me because I'd admitted to breaching the 19whatever malicious communications act, but they were giving me the smallest possible punishment they had the power to give out.

I don't really know where else to go with this so TLDR:

Hopefully Ravirex here will get to eat the Ysoki Kineticist.

Edit: THE FUCKING INVENTOR GOT 3 FATAL D12 CRITS IN A FUCKING ROW

British Indian rapper I found on Mudrat's WE DESPISE THE BOURGEOISIE. Seems like he gets it.

Woo woo sage and crystals psychotherapist butted in to say they were definitely separate, because ADHD was genetic while autism was generally caused by outside influences like vaccines.

God I hate him so much. He bragged about spending 9 days in Peru on a Ayahuasca vision quest so I've been rephrasing it to everyone as shitting and puking until he saw god.

I only moved to it because it's free (as in beer, not as in speech, but it is also free as in speech), but it turns out a lot of distros are just better than Windows and Mac OS now. When I switched from Windows 7 to Windows 10 it wasn't quite there yet, but it's fully transformed from the OS for nerds to the OS for anyone:

• Quicker and easier to install even without the "try before you buy" mode Ubuntu-based distros provide
• Loads faster
• Basically the same UI - you won't need the command line unless you're trying to make advanced changes
• Customisation of every element is nearly unlimited - you could easily change the start button to shrek's face, for example
• Programs of all types are easier to find, install, and uninstall
• Programs generally load faster and run more smoothly
• Windows games generally run more smoothly and occasionally even at slightly higher framerates
• No ads or bloatware or background data collection getting in your way and sucking up your resources
• Can't run modern Call of Duty games (unfortunately many older ones do work)

Anyone who can follow half a page of simple step by step instructions is qualified to install it (the most complex part is flashing an .iso to a usb (a program does it for you)), and everyone who has used a computer is qualified to use it. At its simplest, with distros like Mint and Pop!, for the casual user it's the same experience as the mainstream OS's - or rather the experience they expect before the system throws the inbuilt bloat at them. When you get more specialised, especially on gaming distributions like SteamOS or Bazzite, it's a much better experience even for advanced users, as various utilities are preinstalled and preconfigured, minimising your time setting up. You can go up or downstream to find a distro with as much or as little as you need and then add as much or as little as you want to get your ideal computing experience.
There's also Arch, which we will only be acknowledging.

I thought that switching to Linux would be as big a jump as when I moved from Mac to Windows, but moving to Mint, trying Ubuntu and Kubuntu, then settling on Bazzite has just been a series of small, shuffling steps. Recreating a similar setup to what I had in Windows has been as trivial as it was time consuming to do originally, while still providing the option for much finer tuning - On Bazzite I had to install a grand total of 4 programs to recreate my software setup because the included utilities covered so many things I'd had to find programs to do in Windows.

As far as I can tell there's only one real downside, and it's one that only really matters to advanced users: if you tell Linux to do something stupid or that would break the OS, where Windows will do its best to stop you and Mac will ask where you learnt those words, Linux will simply ask for the password and then gleefully snap it's own neck. It doesn't matter if you meant to or not, you will have to reinstall and reconfigure it.
But like I said at the start, that's real easy, so it's not much of a downside.
The less real downside is that some specific games and applications won't work even with the translation layers, but you can always dual boot for that one thing.

You can switch because you hate corporations, or closed source software, or spending money, or for opsec, or because you're a big fucking nerd (Arch btw), or any of the traditional reasons for using Linux, but the main reason to switch over is because it's simply the superior product. The power of Windows and the simplicity of Mac OS, without sacrificing any of Linux's extensive customisation. I don't know how long ago it truly overtook the competition, but it definitely has done.
Just download Mint and give it a try - if you need something more specific you'll know and can explore further, but for most people it has everything you'll want ready to go.
Also if you don't switch you're a fucking liberal.

Stupid space wasters that make everything look like a toy.

A professional taskbar should be attached to the bottom of the screen, and an unprofessional one should be auto hidden or on the side of the screen. Top's a bit weird, but has character.

I moved from Mint to Bazzite the other day and was just about ready to move back when I saw the default desktop. Flatpaks are... Different, but don't seem particularly better or worse yet. That fucking floating taskbar had to go though. Disgusting. Stick to the edge of the screen like you're meant to.

I somehow broke my front spoke reflector and these things are all over AliExpress - are they as good as other reflectors or should I just get an ol' reliable?