QuickTime 3.14. it’s a really old media player from 1998. Unfortunately, I don’t think version 3.14 specifically ever actually came out. We’ll never really know what it would have been able to do because 4.0 came out instead. So I can see the appeal for him. Trying to use a 27 year old outdated media player that doesn’t actually exist is a lot like repeatedly shooting yourself in the leg.

No. You’d be surprised. Old growth specifically means forests where the trees are older than 200 years on average. If you include mature forests, which are defined as 80-200 years old on average, the amount of forest becomes much larger. But also consider how much there used to be, and how much disappeared. The US was the first place in the world to really add forest protections. Theodore Roosevelt alone set aside over 150 million acres as national forests at the turn of the 20th century. We’re insanely lucky that happened. I’ve been lucky enough to have traveled to and seen national forests in almost every US state. It makes me die inside knowing they might get cut down now.

I’ve been wondering the same thing ever since seeing the map.

That includes almost all remaining old growth forests. Almost all of the areas he chose are old growth forests. Here’s a map of all remaining old growth forests in the US for comparison.

The differences are a lot more than the current state of affairs. My great great grandparents were serfs, so I’ve heard quite a bit of stories about what it was like. As bad as stuff is right now, we are still worlds better off. Thanks to relatives that are still there today, I’ve been to where they lived during the serfdom, and saw the work they had to do. They slept on what looked like picnic table benches. Two people per bench face down with their arms and legs hanging over the sides. One tiny house, for a family with 7 children. They were constantly sick and weak from lack of food, despite growing it. Almost everything was taken from them from the insane taxes. Moving was not an option because they were bound to the land. Every day, they had to walk up and down a mountain to tend sheep. The one advantage over slavery is that they could only be bought and sold with the land they were bound to. So families couldn’t be split apart. It was also illegal for owners to murder their serfs. Slaves, on the other hand, would have been legally considered dead in the court of law.

That said, the oligarchs absolutely want to bring back both serfdom and slavery. Prison labor will be the means of slavery. Freedom cities will be the path to serfdom. The fact that there is a long way to fall to get to that point should absolutely terrify us because YES, it gets MUCH worse, and yes, we are taking an express train straight to that dystopian reality. There is no bottom for billionaires. There is no road too low. The most horrible things imaginable are part of their plan. The road doesn’t stop at late stage capitalism. Late stage capitalism leads to oligarchy, authoritarianism, and corporate feudalism. And the horrors of that we cannot yet comprehend.

Or suppressed. I’ll give some anecdotal examples. I have a friend that lives in a major metropolitan area with over 2.6 million people. When he applied to get a photo ID (he lost his previous one and needed a new one), the soonest appointment available for the entire metropolitan area was 3 months out. That’s just for the appointment to apply for the ID, not actually receiving the ID. You are required to have a photo ID to vote. Then, voter registration in itself must also be completed at least a month before an election. Now, let’s talk about the process of actually voting. I’ve personally stood in line for over 6 hours to vote. A lot of the people waiting in line had to leave to pick up their kids and other things. If you don’t pick up your kids from school or daycare at very specific times, there are serious penalties. While I was waiting, there must have been at least 40 people in front of me that had to leave before voting. Many of them had waited in line for over 4 hours. For most people, waiting in line is the only way to vote. Only the elderly and disabled qualify to vote by mail. Make no mistake, voter suppression is very effective, and it is implemented specifically in areas that vote against what the ruling party wants. In Trump leaning areas, the lines were no longer than a two minute wait if they existed at all. Trump never would have won either election if it wasn’t for voter suppression.

You can online. And if you haven’t ever had curry ketchup, prepare for your life to change.

Real talk, do you eat your cereal with pasta sauce?

While I get that concern, keep in mind most magats haven’t traveled further than maybe a 15 minute drive, and they don’t even know where Canada is on a map. Wherever you are, they’ll never find it. So without the ability to vote, they’d be mostly harmless. Obviously Canada is already a nice place and doesn’t really have anything to gain, but please just consider it. I’m sure Trump would sell all 50 states to Canada in exchange for 2 McDoubles and some fries. Just hold back the second McDouble until he signs the paper.

As someone from the US, I love this idea… But maybe you should go with territory instead. It’s questionable at best if the US can handle having its own government.

Thing is Canada shouldn’t have its politics influenced by the US from absorbing it either. As a Texan, I can say both our politicians and voters suck. But there could be an easy solution around this problem. Canada could just absorb the US as a newly created Southwest Territories. Territories are directly under the federal government and have no government of their own. Canadians would get new land and resources. Americans would get better healthcare and to be ruled by a less shitty government. Everyone would win.

As a Texan, I’d fully support our state becoming part of a newly created Southwest Territories that is governed by Canada.

Texan here. I’ve had some damn good hamburgers in my life, and I’ve been to numerous states. But the one of the best burgers I’ve ever had was in Luleå, Sweden at a place called Bastard Burgers. Specifically, you have to ask for them to add 3 pieces of Västerbottensoft crispy bites to the burger. It brought tears to my eyes just knowing I can’t get anything like that in Texas.

How about we just make minimum wage a percentage of the highest income in the country? Take whoever made the most money in a given year, divide that by 52 weeks, and then divide that by 40 hours. Then divide whatever the result of that is by 1000. This should be very reasonable basis. It still allows for a huge wealth gap, but asserts that nobody should make over 1000 times more than anyone else. You still get rich and poor people, so this is in no way a leftist policy. It’s a very moderate middle of the road one.

Anyway, looking at 2023. Not even examining his true income and how much he blew doing who knows what, Elon Musk had $95.4 billion net gain in wealth that year. Divide that by 52 weeks, 40 hours, and 1000 - we should make minimum wage $45865.38 per hour. And if that’s not reasonable or feasible, it just means he makes too much for the good of the economy.

It definitely got very intertwined with fascism, though. There were a lot of ideas like, “In the future, there will be no books. Books focus too much on the past, and we need to keep looking forward.” The never look back mentality especially led to a lot of bad things, and it ended up directly inspiring fascism. It’s pretty easy to see the close association, especially considering the Futurist Political Party got absorbed into Mussolini’s party basically as soon as he created it.

Actually, that is probably exactly what he was going for. Mussolini was a huge proponent of the Italian Futurist movement, and he had a lot of weird ideas about what was futuristic. Stuff like, “In the future, people will make their clothes out of milk.” Anyway, aviation and representing aviation was a huge part of that, and he frequently used it in his propaganda.

Yeah, XP would definitely have more issues. 98SE probably would have the best all around compatibility. But there are some Win95 games that only run on Windows 95. The computer you’ve got is really nice for the 1994 - 2001 era, though. What you could do is get a pullout tray, and have different drives with different loads, and switch them out as needed. Ultimately, if the games you want to play work, that’s what matters.

Keep in mind you’re not going to be able to run all games between those years on a single build. Quite a few older games need older hardware, especially slower CPUs. Then, the DOS support on ME has a ton of issues that broke many games (one of the reasons people hated it), and XP is needed for a lot of the later Windows games in that range.

That said, it should work very nicely as a 9X build, which also happens to be the era with the least emulation support. If an older DOS game doesn’t work, you can always use something like eXoDOS on a modern computer.

One additional cool thing you could consider down the road is something to really take your midi experience to the next level like an SC-55 MK II.

The first half of the 2000s was a lot better for Linux gaming than the second half. That time period after game companies stopped releasing anything for Linux but before Wine became realistically usable was very dark.

Moving to another state is more than just affordability anyway. People shouldn’t have to give up their homes and everything they’ve known. So many states with far right legislatures have a gerrymandered to hell population that’s 45% very liberal. Half of the population is just being completely disregarded and considered subhuman.