I'm wondering if it's possible for other people to break through their own molds or self-perceptions that lead them to think they are unable to achieve more than the sum of their active lifestyles -- because of boss restrictions and economic constraints.

What's holding us back? Is it these geriatric Republican senators from the south who are doing their best to appease Donald J. Trump while making sure millions are screwed out of their _right_ to healthcare? <-- I'm calling it that and not looking back. We have arrived, further than what happened during the 1990s with HMO's.

I want to know, now. I really do. What else could it be that's wrong with American society besides only people taking off at 7:15 in the morning to go to work.

My pro-environment mission statement thought up as question is this: Anyone want to tell me why doing that for around forty or so years could be a short term or medium term challenge for every other living thing on the planet while tens of millions do the same driving everyday in the USA on a planet with the finite resource called fossil fuels?

Is work their motivation? Or is it money? I was raised in a family that fit in with the American lifestyle during my childhood. My Dad had a few friends he could turn to for moral and spiritual support and he tried to get out with both me and my Mom.

The problem I found later was that the way in which I was treated by both my guardians was unevenly disproportionate to how I learned to finally get along with others - first by being independent and the second was doing things that I liked when I was able to.

"See them fighting for power..."

I hear Bob Marley's words just a little when I read about techbros such as Zuck throwing hundreds of millions at developers so they can assist Meta.

Meta makes up 7-13% of this country's IT/ICT annual revenue.

Meta is not important in the larger scheme of things, apart from making money from advertising and Facebook. This fact is not in dispute, especially as it relates to the development of #AI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_bro

I'm glad the U.K. public is staying on top of this, even if their court system now stinks since they have ideologues sitting on the bench[1]. The U.K. Supreme Court sat in judgement and interpreted only through negative and arbitrary fashion on the subject of trans rights[2]. Their decision is perhaps similar to what America's Department of Defense did here in my own country with regard to how our military processes its recruits for future military service. Our now-biased DoD banned trans enlistees from all of US military's branches when the two-time rapist, former Fox News commentator, and drunken oaf, Secretary of Defense Pete #Hegseth, took charge.

Time will tell.

Here we have rich people and Boomers who engage in #whataboutism. I'm personally all too familiar with them trying to turn the argument around online by making everything about what the other side is doing improperly or "wrong." This is, of course, nothing new. We are going to forever have disagreements with conservatives. The problem is that the American right-wing has been bestowed all three branches of government. They are really mashing it up or stomping all over our shared right to be free. So, many of us are fighting back against their policies in government. We are resisting against the system, and winning in the process.

That is just Trumpian whataboutism. The glorious thing is that #whataboutism is already dying on its own sword. #Smart people such as you and me who write toots such as this one don't go for that, ever. Even when our psychologies (psyches?) are being tested or challenged by others -- the intelligent folks among us do know how to tell apart fiction from reality at all times. I'm not a parent myself but I know several parents from my generation (#GenX) and they are good at doing this with their children. It's because young adults lack the emotional and mental maturity to think like real adults. So, parents help guide their kids toward recognizing their own strengths and weaknesses; or their allowances and constraints, as it were.

#Transphobic hate and anti-gay behaviors are nasty habits which rich people such as Briton J.K. Rowling and most financially poorer MAGA types here in America all have in common. Uber-conservatives always make statements where they put themselves and their needs first, as if that precedence alone is the single condition which makes the whole world revolve on its axis.

The certifiable losers who support Donald J. Trump both think and feel in their own hearts that their individual right to hate someone else over who that other person loves supersedes any other's wisdom and logic.

It's one thing for both haters and people in general having the right to express their feelings to others within a democratic society. In the US (but not if you're serving in the US military) we are all protected by something called the First Amendment. It is really quite another thing for our feeble legal system to be lenient towards those voices who hold political office and who also channel hate publicly, online, or on TV.

https://www.comicsands.com/pascal-explains-rowling-loser?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=infeed&utm_campaign=linkprogram

[1] - https://uollb.com/blogs/uol/hierarchy-of-the-courts-of-england-and-wales

[2] - https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/05/09/uk-court-ruling-threatens-trans-people

I used to actively think in terms of #chiptunes a lot in my mind during my teens and mid-twenties. What I imagined sounded just like this (purposefully slowed down) song by FM-84 called Arcade Summer.

Later on, I became a lot more autistic. I'm more of a writer and part time coder now than a composer. I always thought of music as math.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v0SDAId_BY

Here's the regular version of Arcade Summer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssdA6IiP3r4

Finally, we all now have found peace in letting go of "the specter of the Spectre" vulnerability, once and for all! The Intel Corporation was kind of holding their cards close to their chest after side-channel attacks were discovered back in 2018.

Now, Ubuntu's engineers are just dumping their Spectre mitigations in favor of #GPU performance.

"Ultimately, cryptography engineer Sophie Schmieg said, the benefit of the mitigations isn't worth the performance costs to GPU performance, where predicting instruction branches is more critical than for CPU performance."

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/06/ubuntu-disables-intel-gpu-security-mitigations-promises-20-performance-boost/

I think now is the time to say my peace with #freebsd.

I have found through my own experience that using UFS (not zfs) to attempt to install as a dual-boot alongside Windows 11 is pretty much a non-starter.

Whoever is in charge of FreeBSD's installer is living in a virtual setting that is 20 or 30 years in the past.

Never mind the modern garbage such as Windows 11's BitLocker. That must be turned off before trying any type of dual boot scenario with any non-Windows OS. When BitLocker is on, it creates a nightmare as it locks everything down. ANYTIME YOU RUN A USB-BASED NON-WINDOWS INSTALLER, IT ALERTS #BITLOCKER; EVEN AFTER YOU'VE ALREADY SUPPLIED THE KEY ONCE DURING BOOT UP. IT MUST BE TURNED OFF!

I used Windows 11 drive formatter. That also isn't the problem as far as I can tell.

It's when I assign a mount point in the FreeBSD 14.3 installer to the newly created partition. When I try to commit those changes in the FreeBSD installer I then get an unknown error and I cannot go further.

I hate fdisk. It's a UNIX holdover and I won't mess with it. They'd just tell me to use fdisk. No.

Help. I'm somewhere between modern and "old school." I know many UNIX-based conventions but I like some of the cutting edge.

FreeBSD has a real problem interpreting the logic of certain NVME drives.

FreeBSD is really only meant for back-end corporate servers handling large volumes of I/O using very large SSD's or hard drives. Such as 3 TB SSD's or larger...

No matter what they say, FreeBSD is not designed specifically to be a PC or laptop system -- no matter what. I won't listen to them if one of them maybe sees this toot and tries to start a debate with me.

I've given FreeBSD the benefit of the doubt way too many times. I quit.

I know more than enough to know what I'm doing.

What I like about #Debian and Ubuntu Linux is that they passed the hurdle which I was writing about many moons ago. Nobody in the Linux community worries about the internal tags or labels contained in a freshly formatted drive. Only FreeBSD would care if the non-encrypted drive was exFAT or NTFS. See where I'm going with that? The fact I hit a roadblock just right there with FreeBSD is totally absurd.

Sorry, FreeBSD. #SystemV was better in many ways. You guys were always niche.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_V

I do understand that infosec is not national security discussion.

I only want to briefly highlight the disastrous foreign policy road that Trump has gone down in this era in which facts don't matter too much.

Donald J. Trump himself started the era of facts don't matter. His first political adviser, KellyAnne Conway, admitted as much when she used the phrase "alternative facts" during a TV interview. Please believe what they say. Do take them all at their word.

These ultraconservative people who hold power in D.C. are a known quantity. They only attract loyalists and extremists. Loyalists are now the functioning part of the Trump Administration. The latter consisting of extremists never were. Those types are too extreme, politically, to ever hold office or get elected -- with the exception of Stephen Miller, a rabid hater of Latinx immigrants (or probably any immigrants who aren't white). Stephen Miller is a policy extremist.

Here's where all of the Western world and Western-based US Media in particular treat the wider US population like we're all idiots and dumbshits. "Oh, the intelligence agencies are a fickle business" or something to that effect.

Balderdash. It was recently reported in the US #news that those very same intelligence agencies officially claimed that it was quite likely Iran was NOWHERE NEAR producing weapons-grade uranium just a few weeks before Trump bombed Iran yesterday.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/22/middleeast/unknowns-after-trump-strike-iran-intl-cmd

This is where the major Arab countries (also known as players) situated around Iran are more cautious than the hawks in Israel's cabinet and a lot of the institutional Western world.

https://www.newsweek.com/arab-world-reacts-us-strikes-iran-2088930

The country of #Egypt is especially concerned. Their rich history dealing with Israel's hostility towards them exemplifies their careful, measured response here to Trump's aggression.

Nobody is cheering this development. This big strike by Trump does not help the US military clarify its global aims in any way. They already sort of knew Iran was a problem for a while.

Now Trump cannot go back. He is now more firmly committed to aiding Israel.

The unspoken part? Oil. Dirty energy. Fossil fuels.

Trump wants to ease geopolitical tensions so that oil keeps flowing from the Arab countries. Except Iran. They are #China's major oil supplier.

What Donald J. Trump did was, like President George W. Bush before him, go his own way. The only difference today is that the intelligence agencies all sided with Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney so that they could launch their preemptive invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Need I remind the reader just what the end result was in having US soldiers fight in Afghanistan and also the second Iraq war? The people in charge of our US military during the early and mid 2000's shifted the cost of waging those two wars to America's credit card, now often used to fight foreign wars. It could figuratively take the taxpayers well over two hundred years for America to finally pay all of that off.

The current US national debt is $36 trillion dollars. That is trillions of dollars with a "T."

The next time some degenerate MAGA comes at me talking it up about Trump's "beautiful" foreign policy I may have the nerve to slap them hard. All of MAGA are #rubes. Trump cheats and he lies. He omits facts and he thinks everything is ok, going forward. It's not ok in any way, shape, or form.

#convictin2027