“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”

“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

-George Bernard Shaw

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I’ve seen people argue the real numbers of the decline for China are much worse than they have shared and they may already be past the point of no return like Japan and South Korea. It’s going to be interesting to see how they handle an aging population.

    Asia does have a more recent tradition of kids being the retirement plan so they might fair a little better than places like the US where that is not the norm anymore. The US with their infrastructure crumbling from underfunding and a general lack of care, should provide a good side by side comparison of the ride down with the differences of family versus industry support of seniors.


  • Most here will recommend Linux Mint and it’s what I use now after trying many different versions over the years. There’s a simplicity to Mint that just works especially well for those just surfing and doing office tasks. I’ve given away old work laptops with just mint installed as most people just need a web browser and it works great for that.

    MS office can be used in your web browser or you can switch to Libre Office which should open most of your office files.

    If you have a old laptop or computer I recommend trying to install Mint there first to try it out. It’s pretty easy to start out there first before trying dual boot. You might be surprised at how quick your older laptop works with Mint in the process.

    I use dual boot on my machines but most of the use these days is to get to a web browser so I find I rarely boot into windows now.

    You will find Firefox is the default web browser but you can add Chrome to Mint if that’s your browser of choice.

    Many will say what about the privacy issues with Chrome but many still use it. I’ve switched back to Firefox myself and I like it better for my Android phone.

    Good luck on your journey!






  • I’m glad to see this. I was mostly a lurker at the old place for over 10 years.

    Creating posts and commenting at times was difficult and often they were deleted due to some rule or issue. The worst was when users would message to let me know the post had been deleted and they knew due to some other form of the site they were using.

    In all my years of managing Forums before this period it wasn’t that hard to create new topics and participate so I gave up.

    I started lurking here at Lemmy then starting seeing this theme about user engagement going down and not enough content. When I would end up back at the old place after a Google search on something I could see the volume number differences between lemmy and there so I decided to try posting again.

    So far it’s been a lot easier especially in sh1tposting. I did run into a couple of hiccups but overall it’s been a lot easier.

    I’ll enjoy it while it lasts as over time with more users things will change, at least for now the posts are not drowning in comments by the thousands yet. I can keep up with that. It kind of reminds me of my old forum days in the early 2000s.


  • For me it’s a big F you to HP and it has been that way for a many years now. I loved their HP 4250 series laser printers for work. Those things were work horses, almost every part could be replaced, and the toner was cheap for what it put out. I had various HP multifunctions after and they were just garbage. Updates breaking them and disabling them. Not being able to function without all ink and the ink being very expensive.

    Canon and Epson came in second for me on the F you list. I had some great Canon multifunctions but Canon would just abandon them on the support side. If a windows update came along you would lose the ability to use the printer.

    Epson was a true pain in the ass as the driver would constantly break and need to be reinstalled or it would reinstall itself each update and switch back to the default settings. When dealing with many of them in a office environment it was a hell.

    The one special gem that deserves it’s own place in hell is the Xerox 7855. That was one of the worst POS they ever made. It was a contract service unit. It was always breaking down, there was never a tech available to fix it, and when they did fix it, it was not long before it broke again. We paid a lot up front for the thing.

    We had a office party where we rolled it off the shipping deck in the warehouse into the parking lot below. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place. Tears of joy. We never used Xerox again after that.

    The multiple home office brother printers we bought just seemed to work. Next time I need to outfit a factory it will be Brother. I currently have a small brother “inkvestment” multifunctions that works great at home due the little printing I need. Comes with a ton of ink and it was cheaper than replacing the ink in my last printer.