And more generally, that the beneficiary decides their own benefits. I mean this is the mother of all conflicts of interest.

“You are all going to pay me a lot but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make”

Well yes I thought Zelenskyy looked great in that thing he was wearing. I thought it looked pretty kick-ass. To me personally pissing Trump off would be a feature, not a bug 🤭 But I don’t have any responsibility to save a war-torn country of course. There’s that. I do agree with Zelenskyy’s reasoning, he’s not a president who just sits behind a desk to sign papers.

But yes establishment, that’s what I associate suits with. That’s a better description than “old money” which I said.

For me it tends to have the opposite effect. I remember when my boss always wore this formal stuff and one time we had an issue and she came from home in a hurry to look at it. She was just wearing jeans and a T-shirt and I remember thinking “wow she is actually a nice person” 😆 . But yeah I’m not very (neuro) typical. Though a very typical thing of autistic people is that they love rules and I personally hate them with a passion.

I like the big capes, I sometimes wear them as part of a gothic/alternative outfit, though no suit under it but more like some mesh top. But I wouldn’t wear a suit at university if I had to.

And no I do think that last one is very different because the fabric is very fluffy on that one.

I think it will. I agree about Meta, though I’m too much of a VR fan to not have one 😳 And Pico isn’t any better (owned by bytedance). Vive is very focused on business (like large events with multiple people running around with headsets) these days.

Thanks!! I have seen those signs but I never realised what they were about. I thought it was rather some kind of tag for those people that do street measurements with those sextant-like things on a tripod. We have those big crosses on the ground for that too, that can be viewed from the air.

I think I’ve seen these signs in Holland too. Huh.

But I don’t think it’s an issue to park near such a hydrant, otherwise they’d make it more clear in the driving education. The only reason I knew the ground hydrants even existed was because once I called about a trash bin fire and I saw them using it.

It’s also better really.

I used to live in a place where I needed a car to go anywhere because the buses were so unreliable, infrequent and useless (all going through the town centre with lots of delays). I hated it, because everyone drove and was stuck in traffic. Driving is very stressful too.

And now I live in a big city, have really dense public transport for 20 bucks a month flat. No more finding and paying for parking spaces. Being able to go back from a different place than I arrived. No more parking meters timing out. No more maintenance. No more fuel costs. No more insurance. No more traffic fines. No more yearly inspections. No more people damaging my ride with shopping carts. I love it honestly. And to top it all off I can ride while playing with my phone and not having to pay any attention to the road. No need to be sober either for that matter.

Quality quickly drops off leaving the city unfortunately but that’s the thing with cities, you rarely need to leave them anyway.

Here in Europe it’s very hard to see hydrants though. There are no signs and they’re just little panel-covered holes.

It’s because your country makes so many cars. Same in the US. Cars are holy because so much money is made off them.

Where I’m from in Holland they are sacred also but it’s kinda a different reason, car ownership was a big symbol of economic progress in the 60s and people have become addicted to them.

Eh so these are official parking spots? That’s a bit weird yeah.

Whoa and that in Germany where people are pretty law-abiding.

Yeah that search bar, so useless because the start menu itself is a search bar if you simply start typing.

Yeah and also, many of the drawbacks of windows don’t really apply to companies. All the AI and MS account crap? Just switch it off in intune and M365 portal. Telemetry you can minimise with group policies. Crapware you can simply not install. It costs money? Sure but at a corp level so does Linux because they always want to pay a vendor so they can blame them when something goes wrong.

I work in IT (security). The reason they are so adamant on Windows at least in our place, is because it offers so many opportunities to go BOFH and lock everything down so much so the user can hardly do their job :) No other OS offers that, even Mac.

They think they need this to be secure. I beg to differ but unfortunately Microsoft is constantly feeding them with ‘best practices’ and other BS.

For Years, you had the Option to use Linux. Since the release of the win 11 beta, Linux has not made any relevant big steps.

I would argue it doesn’t need to. It’s pretty perfect these days as it is, especially with KDE (and the great thing about it having so much control over how your computer works and feels, Windows can never offer that).

Yeah this is just a weird tangent that will die off.

“Zorin Group” never heard of that. Seems to be a shop that just wants to lift along with the Windows 10 discontinuation tbh.

And if their selling point is running windows apps then they have no chance. You can’t get better at being windows than windows already is. You’ll always be one step behind the real thing.

And really you don’t need to, most linux apps are much better now that windows apps are more and more dumbed down. Look at the “new outlook” for example. It doesn’t even do local storage anymore, you must import all your email into the microsoft cloud overlord.

• Ads all over the place (and a start menu full of crapware)
• Telemetry you can’t completely turn off anymore (the only thing I’d respect is a license check)
• Constantly putting edge back
• Forced MS account and removing ways to bypass it
• Cloud upsells
• Forced updates “do this within the next 2 days or else…”
• “Copilot copilot copilot”

Gaming for me is the only thing I don’t use Windows for. But for gaming I still do. Because I mainly game in VR and that’s still so far behind on LInux :(

But I have 20 odd computers in the house so it’s easy to have one with windows around (two in fact, another old one with Win 10 LTSC for programming some old radios).

I love KDE for all the options it gives 🫶 I don’t like Gnome, Systemd and all the other redhat influences but they are easy to avoid these days.

Also, humans are social creatures. If you’re a progressive, surely you care about other people. I certainly do!

Other individuals yes, but not being part of a group. If I align with a group like a political party, it’s just a temporary thing while our goals align. I have no deep loyalty to any group or country.

I definitely think there’s some issues with a lot of the western notions of formality, with it being very Euro-centric and sometimes oozing with pretentious classism, often racism and misogyny, but that’s not an issue with formality

Here in Europe it’s definitely often associated with “old money”. Or people wanting to show they are powerful or rich, or that they want to hang out with people who are. I don’t believe being powerful or rich makes someone a better person or more important, so I don’t want to make special arrangement just because they have this group code.

However, maybe you are in the US? Progressivism here in Europe is a lot more left-wing than in Europe. Something like the Democratic party would be right-wing here, and the republican party extreme or at least radical right. I’d be more left than Bernie Sanders to give an idea. Many left-wing party politicians also don’t wear suits. There’s definitely an anti-formal slant there.

I’m not saying formality is some requisite of social life or anything, but I am saying that that stark rejection of it sounds antisocial, let me tell you. Well, to be totally fair it sounds neuro-divergent, more than anything, but I don’t mean to diagnose you either. You wouldn’t attend a friend’s wedding because it’s formal? I guess you just aren’t friends with people that would want you to wear a suit to their wedding. Whatever, feel free to disregard the last couple of sentences.

Oh yes I’m AuDHD so yeah I am definitely neurodivergent. And no I wouldn’t attend a formal wedding. I’ll be super uncomfortable and unhappy and people will see that and be bothered by it, so there is no point. Better not to be there. I wouldn’t enjoy it anyway. I’ve tried twice and it went down really badly.

Also, if your idea of diversity is “no dress-code”, frankly, that’s ridiculous. I admit that there’s, as I mentioned, quite a bit of classism and misogyny and racism in some groups, and those groups do end up being associated with more formal attire – I get that – but to blame that on suits or formality is ridiculous! Why are you talking like dress-code means people aren’t very diverse?!

No it’s not no dress code, I do go to dress code events. But more in the alt/goth/fetish sphere. But that leaves a LOT of room for expression. A black tie event for example does not, at least not for the guys. Women have a lot more wiggle room (and I’m kinda genderqueer but that kind of event is not very accepting of that either, lol)

I really do take offense to that position. The range of people that wear suits or go to formal occasions is extremely diverse, and to imply otherwise is beyond reductive.

I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s not the people per se but the events and what they represent. Events that I have seen that required dress codes and I have not shown up for:

• Expensive restaurants, clearly the suits are a point of “we’re better than the peasants here”
• A work event with lots of leaders - I believe in equality so I don’t think they are someone I want to impress with dressing up pretending to be in their ‘class’. With my actual skills, sure but such events aren’t the place for that.
• A cruise dinner with a captain, if I’m on a cruise I’m on a holiday and it’s me-time, I have no interest in that (and the whole thing turned out super boring anyway basically being stuck on an expensive boat with almost no time to visit interesting places :) )
• A trade show that required “business casual” attire. It was a security event and I’m an ethical hacker, everyone knows we don’t do suits. I’m not going to be super uncomfortable just to make the money men feel better.
• Job interviews, if they specify a dress code in the invitation then it’s insta-decline, I don’t want to work there anyway

And that’s just false. I mean, did you even see the pictures I showed? Do they look the same to you? Do they express the same things?!

Well I see they are a different colour but they are essentially the same to me. One of them isn’t wearing a tie which I like (I don’t do ties anyway, they are a hard limit for me)

So? I don’t care. Why would anyone care? I thought you were about wearing what you love and expressing yourself, why does it matter that businessman wear it too? I think corduroy pants look nice, so I wear corduroy pants. I think funky ties look nice, so I wear funky ties. If I think a suit looks nice, I’m gonna wear the suit – CEO be damned!

I do have to say I didn’t consider that you might actually like wearing suits. That’s something I didn’t think of, as I hate them so much. That changes things indeed. I was more arguing against events where people are required to wear them.

and that says that you meant to wear that, and didn’t just happen to wear it because you liked those pants and you liked that shirt.

I like that though because what you like says a lot about a person. I love self-expressive people, not people who just do whatever they need to fit in. I also hate formal occasions because again formal means there’s lots of rules on how to look and act. Again pressure to fit in. As a progressive I don’t align with that. I like people being very diverse. If I’m invited to a formal event (or even a trade show with a dress code) I just decline.

A suit is like the uniform of the business world. Very boring and non-expressive.

PS I also hate collared shirts and ties, I don’t wear them anymore. They bother my neck.