This feels like more of an operating system issue than a hardware issue. What you’re looking for is a way to reduce the power it sips while still allowing downloads to happen. Leaving aside the edge cases like OS updates others have mentioned, the major issue is that applications aren’t structured like that.

If I have Firefox open with one tab displaying a website that runs 1,102 javascript routines all the time in an attempt negotiate a really good advertising deal for each of the banner ads it’s showing - you know, the type you visit and your machine starts crawling and the fans start blowing almost immediately - and another open on Ubuntu.com where I’ve just clicked on the “Download Ubuntu desktop ISO” button, only Firefox knows which of those tasks can be backgrounded and right now (as far as I can see) there’s no API in any of the major OSes where it can say “Send me this signal and I’ll only do the thing that can’t be interrupted.” nor “I’ve put the stuff that can’t be interrupted in this thread, so only run this when you’re trying to save power and nobody’s using the computer anyway”)

Would it be a good idea? Well, that would depend on whether developers actually use that API if it ever comes into existence. I’d like it, I just see it being one of these well meaning things that devs would avoid using because it complicates their code and probably makes it easier to break.

Oddly enough, the Gen Zers that have decided not to talk to me or my wife, because they can’t stand disagreement, are our nieces and are both rabid Trump supporters (well, unfortunately I currently live in Florida) and couldn’t stand the fact my wife made a joke at Twitler’s expense.

Not that I’m complaining, I don’t want anything to do with Trump supporters (SEE! It’s US TOO!) so that made it easier for me. My wife is more family oriented than I am and is pissed about it.

All of which is kind of meaningless given the article conveniently forgets that under 25 year olds of all generations (as in I saw it with mine) traditionally (1) tend to be more politicized, (2) tend not to have the practical social skills to understand the need for tolerance and (3) quite honestly, the country has swung to the right recently and being intolerant of fascism is no vice and a mark of being a human being, so anything they’re seeing with Gen Z is simply an amplification, thanks to (1) and (2), of what’s actually happening among all generations.

If people want me to hang out with them, they can stop wanting LGBT people killed, can stop supporting politicians who are passing laws denying life saving healthcare to women, can stop calling everyone who disagrees with them pedophiles (and can stop supporting groups that actually support pedophiles like the big three churches), can stop supporting the murders of black people by law enforcement and “white people who think they’re law enforcement”, and so on. 'cos all of those positions are extreme. And horrible. And you don’t get a pass in my home for having them.

Is there actually an abolish the police movement in the UK? I’m an ex-Brit who lives in the US so I’m familiar with both, and the UK police forces have an entirely different history and reputation to the US LE organizations. I’d be surprised if there’s anything outside of anarchist groups there. But I’m happy to shown I’m wrong (well, “happy” is a relative term, if the UK police have devolved to the same troughs as the US LE orgs then that’s terrible news.)

If I may strike a positive note, at least the UK appears to care about this.

You don’t hear about this happening in the US (OK, now I’m striking a negative note, actually “note” doesn’t even cover it), not because America’s law enforcement organizations aren’t also infested with sexist, homophobic, and racist (which wasn’t even a big enough problem with the Met to note) corrupt assholes, but because nobody with power actually cares about it, so these people will continue to keep their jobs. And unlike the Met Officers, they have even more power and can kill people with impunity.

Bravo to the Met for actually sucking up and doing something about the problem.

This is just the way our natural grammatical structure works.

We’re not having a discussion about grammar, we’re having a discussion about how phrases can be misleading even if technically correct, and how those phrases can end up serving inhuman agendas.

While “Hit by car” the driver is usually at fault. Note news articles will generally go out of their way to avoid “hit by car” on the rare occasion someone jumps in front of one.

Hit by a pitch? Not sure what this means.

Hit by stray bullet is modified to describe an unusual set of circumstances so inappropriate here. That’s the equivalent of “Man hit by derailed train”. We’re not talking about that kind of situation. The nearest equivalent of “Man hit by train” where the direct cause of death is an aimed bullet is “Man shot”, or "Man shot by ", it’s never “Man hit by bullet”

Struck by new knowledge doesn’t really apply here too.

The underlying message of “Hit by train” is that transit was at fault (the train “hit”). Rather than the drunk driver. Rather than the reckless idiot who decided to go around the barrier. Rather than the suicidal cyclist who stepped in front of it. Rather than, in this case, the cop that parked on the tracks and locked a prisoner inside the car.

Words are about communication. And all phrases have subtexts and good writing recognizes those subtexts and avoids misleading ones and uses accurate ones that convey as much information as possible.

"Train hits " is an intentional choice by journalists to focus the blame on transit rather than the person whose actions lead to death. Whether it’s technically correct ignores the fact that there are better phrases that could be used that also focus the blame on the person who caused the situation. "Colorado officer who trapped prisoner in path of train sentenced to " doesn’t have the misleading nuances that the headline does. It’s more accurate and more informative as a result.

You know on a conscious level that the train couldn’t have done anything. But on a subconscious level the author is telling you the train, not the “person that caused something to be in the way of the train” was the cause of the accident. Had there been no pesky train just existing, there’d have been no accident regardless of how avoidable the accident was.

That’s my problem with the language. Just as you know an officer-involved-shooting actually involved the officer shooting someone, but the language is so weak that on some level your subconscious assumes it can’t be a big deal if that kind of vague, woolly, wording is appropriate.

And as I mentioned, it appears to be an intentional word choice. People don’t talk about rivers (non-sentient object) asphyxiating people, they talk about people drowning in rivers. A threshing machine (non-sentient) doesn’t thresh a minion (!), the minion falls into a threshing machine. But a train (non-sentient) hits people, rather than vice-versa. To be fair you occasionally see this language with cars, but cars are driven by people, it’s usually the case the car driver is actually the decision maker that caused a death.

Does that make sense?

Unless they have the exact same standards for hair length for all students, regardless of gender, that’s plainly discriminatory

I would suggest that in almost all cases a unified standard would actually be guaranteed to be discriminatory, in much the same way a unified standard for how tall you’re allowed to be would be. The only thing I can think of that wouldn’t would be if everyone had to have their heads shaved as “the standard”.

Biologically/genetically, and socially, different (protected!) groups have different hair and expectations about how that hair can be styled.

Even the “head shaved” thing, while possible with any hair no matter what the underlying biology and genetics, would be torture for a sizable number of women in a modern society.

I hate that phrase “hit by a train”. It’s usually because it’s fodder for NIMBYs. It implies the train did something, like it jumped the tracks or something, whereas the train was just traveling the path it always does. A woman drowns, she’s not “asphyxiated by the river”, a man burns himself on a stove, he’s not “Burnt by the stove.” In the train’s case the conscious action was the “putting something in front of it”. Yet somehow it’s the train’s fault? Suicide? It’s the train’s fault. Drunk idiot? It’s the train’s fault.

I mention this because this is yet another case in which transit is getting blamed for a human action, an action that human knew could leave to the death of someone else, but that the human did anyway. It detracts from the fact the blame is with the officer.

Anyway, I know you all don’t care, but it’s another way in which language serves an establishment, in this case two - the car centric, anti-transit establishment that it usually does, and the officer who all but murdered a suspect. It’s another phrase like “Officer involved shooting”, except maybe even that phrase doesn’t place blame on an inanimate object.

The “some sheriffs” thing refers to so-called Constitutional Sheriffs (https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/constitutional-sheriffs) which is a fringe movement which isn’t representative of that type of LE group by itself. And they can pretend to be above the law in a way normal law enforcement isn’t, but they’re brought back to Earth when they’re sued.

Alas in general, police, sheriffs, and state troopers, in this country have very little accountability thanks to issues unrelated to that movement (“Qualified immunity” is the main reason, a doctrine that says that a government employee can’t be held individually accountable for something they did as part of their job, even if they’re not allowed to do it as part of their job), but the Constitutional Sheriff movement is largely orthogonal to that and there’s nothing inherent about sheriffs that make them less accountable than city police.

The part I found most interesting after several years of hearing statements to the contrary: the pandemic lockdowns reduced, significantly, the suicide rate, which shot up again after businesses started demanding RTOs two years into it.

Time links to this article which goes into more detail - doesn’t explicitly mention WFH/RTO, but the years line up: https://time.com/6271257/suicide-rates-increased-2021/

After being told for so long that the lockdowns had caused problems with mental health, it’s interesting to see the exact opposite appears to have happened. COVID, sure, it’s caused problems (which would explain why rates went down then up once COVID had infected people and WFH started to end for so many people) and suggests the WFH-damages-mental health thing might just have been a bad faith meme introduced by our incompetent overlords…

Especially when it’s as easily replaceable as a movie publisher. It’s not as if WBD going under would result in 25% less TV/movies, and 25% less employment!

If I were the strikers, I’d be seeing the bankruptcy of one or more large studios as a goal unto itself right now.

Removed as a protest against the community’s support for campaigns to bring about the deaths of members of marginalized groups, and opposition to private entities working to prevent such campaigns, together with it’s mindless flaming and downvoting of anyone who disagrees.

As a postscript for this discussion only, be aware that virtually all the replies to my comments quote me out of context, or claim I’ve made arguments I haven’t. It’s safe to disregard them.

Removed as a protest against the community’s support for campaigns to bring about the deaths of members of marginalized groups, and opposition to private entities working to prevent such campaigns, together with it’s mindless flaming and downvoting of anyone who disagrees.

I would say this is actually an ironically encouraging sign that we are lurching in a good direction. There’s always going to be some level of racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc., but those things are mainstream enough that you have to be really hard right to beat the drum for them.

And yet here we are and they do. Do you remember how the term “Groomer” appeared? It was the DeSantis administration justifying the “Don’t say Gay” bill. That was a bill that, sure, mentioned gender dysphoria in passing, but it was primarily aimed at gay people.

I don’t see any evidence at all the Republicans have become less racist or less homophobic. Racism seems no better, maybe worse, than it was in 2008, and as the mainstream Republican establishment has declined, the party seems to have given in to the homophobic grassroots.

None of which really explains though why they’ve gone from merely laughing at transpeople to turning them into villains, while continuing to demonize the groups they’ve always done. Perhaps, far from transpeople being the only ones left, they’ve realized they can get away with scapegoating more groups than they previously have done.

I still don’t understand why the trans thing has suddenly become a “problem.” I’ve known trans people for 30 years. And I knew they existed before that. How the hell did it suddenly go from “Man wear skirt ha ha ha funny” at worst (not that that was good, just that it wasn’t what we have now) to “Fad! Groomers! They should die!”

We seem to be lurching as a society to a direction I don’t think I can live in.

Removed as a protest against the community’s support for campaigns to bring about the deaths of members of marginalized groups, and opposition to private entities working to prevent such campaigns, together with it’s mindless flaming and downvoting of anyone who disagrees.

There are multiple reasons, but one thing I’ve read is that part of the strategy of taking down someone big is to take down the people who work for him first. The process results in more evidence being gathered, plea deals that result in yet more evidence, etc.

Removed as a protest against the community’s support for campaigns to bring about the deaths of members of marginalized groups, and opposition to private entities working to prevent such campaigns, together with it’s mindless flaming and downvoting of anyone who disagrees.

Having done it before my honest advice to anyone planning this is:

1. Start with a Mastodon account on a regular server.
2. Build lists of friends etc.
3. After a few months, once you’ve curated a feed you like, move to a self hosted one.

That’s if you intend to use it “socially” as opposed to, say, “commercially” (ie an cartoonist publicizing their work, for example, or even the corporate Mastoverse account for a burger chain), in which case it makes sense to have that account on a private server (where it’s essentially self verifying, and can’t be killed by a single confused overworked instance admin - in the case of the burger chain, also by an instance admin that would rather not host commercial accounts), but also a private account on one of the main servers for just being yourself.

It’s the two party system. The choices you’re given are what the largest groups in each party are in favor of, not what most people prefer.

So with Republicans, most Republicans are pro-forced birth, so that’s their platform, however unpopular it might be.

With Democrats, you don’t notice it as much because the largest bloc in the Democrats is basically the “Centrist” group. But that’s also why they keep doing these bone-headed “Trying to be Bipartisan” things that nobody except columns for the New York Times really likes rather than actually using solutions that work.