davidp

You're right that this is potentially anticompetitive, but

    “Companies will regulate themselves” is a cute libertarian bedtime story. 

I've never heard libertarians say that. Rather, they say that consumers have the potential to regulate companies if they choose to do so, by voting with their feet. We should do so more often than we do; when there's a free market (monopolies are not free markets) it feels pretty good to tell a company to go screw themselves.

Personally I switched back to Firefox when Chrome tried to force login to my Google account, and I haven't missed a thing (other than some dev tools, e.g. websocket inspection). Firefox Quantum is really good, and their bookmark sync has replaced my previous usage of the now-defunct Xmarks.

Superb video, and in the public domain. Thanks so much for the link!

I certainly hope we don't.

The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and the press, including the freedom to make mistakes and even outright lie. There is no godlike authority that can tell truth from fiction without fail, and having government censors telling people what they can say (especially w.r.t. political speech) would invert the relationship between the people and their government, making government the master instead of the servant.

Instead, we rely on an educated readership to identify bias and mistakes and call them out, as has been done here. People get the journalism they deserve. To the extent we're failing to teach our children critical thinking skills, we're putting our democracy at risk.

The NY Times and other resources currently considered "credible" have earned that credibility from the people not through government permission but by generally providing a useful service to its consumers, despite all the mistakes they make and biases they present.

The NY Times in particular has unfortunately been burning through that hard-earned credibility capital at an alarming rate, even long before the current last few years, with the result that there are large portions of the country that no longer trust it like they did, with good reason. More recently they have taken the bait proffered by Trump and his ilk and lowered themselves to his level, spinning most articles I've seen with more political or oppositional bias than in the past.

I can only hope this is a cyclical phenomenon, where the citizenry/readership becomes ignorant of the related history and its challenges, simply because we've lived through a period where the battles were won and we could take such things for granted. Just like our predecessors, this generation is going to painfully relearn that everything printed (or typed) should be taken with a grain of salt and cross-checked against multiple sources.

Nothing built on X does mixed DPI well, because X itself (in most configurations) treats multiple monitors as simple viewports onto a single screen. A single screen with multiple DPIs doesn't make sense virtually any more than it does physically.

Wayland is supposed to help with this, since it has a more modern take on screen virtualization (a la Windows or Mac). Getting all the user software to work on Wayland (via XWayland) is a nontrivial ongoing task. I'm not sure what Gnome Shell's state of affairs is w.r.t. Wayland, but I do know the ecosystem missed the boat with Ubuntu 18.04, which elected not to make Wayland the default due to stability and usability issues. So it might be a while before a major stable distro makes the move.

  It's an improvement over writing csv files to disk.

This is not a high bar.

  They are hired by the agent

You can and absolutely should hire one yourself. Additionally, if you have a buyer's agent, don't make the mistake of using theirs either -- the buyer's agent has the same conflict of interest that the seller's does, despite the fact that in most cases they have a fiduciary responsibility to you, the buyer.

Another complication to be aware of: Inspectors can face "blackballing" by banks or realtors if they scuttle too many deals by finding bad things. If you find an independent inspector, don't balk at paying a little more -- they may need it to make up for business lost from being honest.

These struggles sound much harder than what I've had to deal with; please accept my sympathy.

About the student debt: That's a lot of debt. I suspect you and many other millenials were lied to when you were told that getting that much student debt is normal and necessary, when it is in fact neither. For example it takes longer to graduate when the student alternates semesters of school and work, but it does get them through (especially if the school has a strong co-op program), without nearly as severe a crushing debt load. Second, the overall benefit of an education goes way beyond the differences between schools, i.e. for many careers an inexpensive school is just as good as an expensive one. (Counterpoint: if you want to be on the Supreme Court someday, you apparently have to go to Harvard Law School...)

I confess that I'm puzzled when I hear about such high debt numbers from new grads, and the main explanation I can think of for what's different now from when I came up is that people are systematically being told that any college debt is a good investment (and loans are freely granted on that basis), when it plainly is not (and they should not be).

Agreed.

An expat is someone "on assignment", who has and expects strong ties with their home country. People who fit this description tend to frequently seek help from their own consulates, for example. It's particularly relevant for Americans because we tax ourselves even when overseas.

An emigrant (as seen from the source country) or immigrant (as seen from the destination country) is someone who has (usually permanently) moved and now expects primary services and sovereignty from their new home country.

I highly doubt that the distinction is strictly an anglophone concept, although perhaps it's related that they sound similar and have similar roots.

Agreed. Pre-Wayland, Linux/X typically needs to treat all your screens as viewports onto a single virtual screen, which of course has to have a single DPI.

This is a more common use case than some folks might imagine. My laptop screen is HiDPI, but as soon as I plug into a projector or screen sharing device that acts as a second display, things get realllllly weird: Linux/X does not know how to dynamically change screen DPI without logout/login. I work around it by just running my laptop screen at "low" DPI. I don't miss it TBH; I suspect that many people who do notice it have better eyesight than me (possibly an age thing).

Wayland is supposed to help with this to some extent, but it's not yet ready for prime time.

As simple as possible, but no simpler.