My cat’s name is Nancy Reagan. She’s almost lived up to it. And no, she doesn’t like you either and if you try to pet her you’ll get what you deserve.

Some cats have official titles. I had another cat whose title was “Chief Inspector.” He was known to do home invasions and conduct snap inspections of my neighbors houses. He had more friends in the neighborhood than me.

I work in industrial construction on massive unionized projects with tradespeople coming from all over the US and Canada and I can tell you for an objective fact that the number of guys --it’s almost always guys, which should tell you something-- who drive giant lifted obnoxious trucks as their daily driver vs the number who actually really and truly need them on a regular basis is like 100 to 1.

But even if it were only 10 to 1, that means we have 10 times as many of these giant gas guzzling dangerous trucks out on the road.

The industry has done such a good job at selling these trucks as part of a self-image, that a lot of guys are incapable of admitting that the only reason they drive one is because they think it looks cool.

I can easily do all of that and more with my non-lifted mid-sized long-bed pickup. It’s just a fact my dude; they are selling a self-image, not actual utility. Or what about a van with a roof-rack. In my professional experience that’s a lot more utilitarian if you’re a tradesman.

Again, it’s all about an image that’s been meticulously and brilliantly marketed and sold to very specific demographics.

To be fair, they are hugely popular in both Canada and Mexico as well. I’ll leave it to you to figure out why.

Hint; if marketing didn’t work, it wouldn’t be a multi-billion dollar industry.

Well obviously it’s very difficult for the poor to leave and if you aren’t poor it’s actually a pretty nice place to live.

Also most of the loyalists in the colonies fled to Canada during and immediately after the American Revolution, for obvious reasons.

This is actually a win for UAW. They want to unionize Tesla’s workers, so any anti-union activity on Elon’s part just gives them more ammunition with the NLRB, which has strict rules regarding what ownership is allowed to say publicly. It plays directly into their hands.

Also worth saying that the Biden NLRB is the most pro-union and labor-friendly in history.

No, this is a straight up win for UAW. They are trying to unionize Tesla’s workers, so any anti-union activity on Elon’s part only plays into their hands at the NLRB level.

This is a win for UAW though. They are trying to unionize Tesla’s workers and this behavior gives them an edge on the already labor-friendly NLRB by showing that Elon is actively anti-union.

If anyone thinks for a moment that union organizers don’t actively plan this kind of thing out, I can assure that they do. It’s part of their job description. My union is a lot smaller than UAW and our organizers get up to all kinds of subterfuge and shenanigans, so I can only imagine what the UAW people are doing.

And your point is…?

As a guy wholly descended from the peoples of the British Isles, I have a similar feeling, only in my case, it really is true that my people have trashed the world for their personal benefit.

Granted that the Irish side of my family was never entirely on board.

I’m GenX as well and I will straight up admit that my wife and I got lucky, purchased a house in a “distressed” neighborhood in Portland because it was all we could afford, and now, 20 years later, the neighborhood is fully gentrifying and our house and property is worth way more than what we owe on it.

I’m conflicted as to how to feel about it. While on the one hand we very innocently bought the place because it was in a shitty neighborhood and was all we could afford, on the other hand I now know that we were what the urban studies people refer to as “bohemian colonizers,” meaning that without knowing it, we were, by moving into the neighborhood as poor artist types, part of a much longer process of gentrification.

Again, I am of several minds regarding how I feel about the whole thing.

Where do you live that there isn’t?

That’s nowhere near as true as it once was. Most of your big well-supoorted distros run flawlessly on most big brand machines.

Where you’ll run into problems is in using more obscure distros that require a lot of tweaking and customization, but something like Ubuntu should run beautifully out of the box and if it does have a problem it will be very well-known and heavily documented with easy to follow step by step instructions on fixing it. Linux just isn’t the pain in the ass it used to be. Or at least it doesn’t have to be.

Obviously not referring to you.