Thinkpads are great, the problem is the price, specially overseas because of the exchange in countries which currency value have lowered in comparison to the dollar. Any Thinkpad was barely affordable and this situation became worse. A X1 Carbon is a dream, but it costs 5-7 times more than a low cost laptop (and low quality as well). A T490 is 3-4 times more expensive than a low cost laptop.
I'm typing this comment in my lovely T440, but my next laptop will probably not be a Thinkpad. They are great, but having one doesn't payoff nowadays (YMMV).
Bear in mind that the very worst accusations against Google have been for considering possibly working within the demands of the Chinese government in the future, with the whole dragonfly thing.
You're saying that the Chinese government is more ethical, themselves.
> Almost nobody wants to overthrow capitalism. People want to make adjustments to the current form of it to address concerns.
You are right, and that is exactly the problem, since it is something history proved impossible to be reformed.
EDIT: reforming capitalism is a long term desire from part of the humankind. It is not a new idea and has yield very long discussions [1]. So, the big idea today is indeed how to overthrow it in favour of another form of social organization.
We abandoned Bretton Woods and triggered the hugely inflationary seventies - the 73 oil crisis helped a lot here too.
We've had, and still have, the Nordic model.
Capitalism is dramatically different today than it was in the 1960s in most countries. We've had the monetarism/neoliberal experiment for 40 years.
We've had globalisation to completely disconnect capitalism (and capital) from government, country and employee - just join the global race to the bottom.
We have had a huge number of reforms to capitalism. Trouble is for the last 40 years all reforms have been in one direction: In favour of the capitalist.
The only difference is there was no labor capital at that period. The risk of capital has been transferred to labor from capitalists. The real change in government happened through Reagan who legalized big corps and started the age of M&A. Globalisation also did help in economy but countries like China which have closed markets but access to open markets lead to more marginalization of labor.
Reforming capitalism has been done in many countries for a long time by adjusting policies. Has worked great . There is no way you can organize a society without making constant adjustments no matter what the ideology is.
What you mean by "west"? Latin America (where I live), all the Africa and some poor european countries are "west" and those are not very good examples of prosperity.
Even in "western" rich countries there is a lot of growing unequality. The capitalism is falling by itself.
I am not sure that's accurate. UAE and Saudi are monarchies.
Singapore is very socialist, if you look at their housing policy, it's entirely run by the state. They even allocate apartment to ensure that different ethnic groups mix.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cjPgNBNeLU
Also, I would not consider China poor today, and certainly even less so in the future.
This is not as hot of a take as you think. Many reactionaries believe that a monarchy under a good monarch is the ideal government system - much better than a democracy where uninformed voters make so many decisions
Singapore is ranked 3rd in the world by PPP, at $100k
The United States is ranked 10th with at $62k
I can come with with hundreds of criteria by which US is laughable, take foreign debt for example, or number of people dying from preventable diseases.
China has a capitalist market economy. They do have some degree of government ownership of companies and the government has asserted that they are not capitalist as the communist party is in charge and they have to maintain face. However, in practice, they are on the capitalist spectrum. Also, monarchies can be capitalist. Capitalism just means the state doesn't own everything and collect all the profits.
> Latin America (where I live) is "west" and those are not very good examples of prosperity.
Chile is a good example of a "western" latin american country. Brazil/Argentina are bad examples. Brazil for instance, has state-ownership of its entire oil industry - pretty textbook socialism.
As if the lack of prosperity in these countries were because supposed lack of capitalism...
Chile? Just look how people are satisfied with their system nowadays... Behind seeming positive macroeconomic numbers, there is a very unequal society. Chile is the most unequal society among all OECD members. The riots that happen there right now are not against any socialism, but against the liberal fail. They followed strict liberal rules since Pinochet dictatorship, and that is what it became.
I'm a few surprised nobody have mentioned UlixOS [1]. I'm reading their book, it is just great on many aspects, although it rushes to explain other things that should be detailed a bit more. The chapter about paging is very explicative too.
Few people here have referred to the /tmp directory. This is essential in my workflow. I put a lot of things there (this is also my Downloads folder) and when the computer reboots, its clean again!
One of the computers I use stay turned on for long times, so I have /tmp/t and a cronjob that cleans all files older than 1 day in this directory:
# Remove all files in /tmp/t older than 1440 min (one day)
*/10 * * * * find /tmp/t -cmin +1440 -delete > /tmp/.find-delete-1440.log 2>&1
Besides that, I have a lot of bunches in $HOME. dot.files, dot.vim, dot.mutt, etc., are all in private git repositories and I have a "~/s" directory I keep synchronized among different machines with rsync (I don't trust Google nor Dropbox). I was thinking about starting using Syncthing [1], though.
