My partner and I are similar to you. We couldn’t care less. I proposed to her, she said yes, we’re happy with the way things are, nothing needed to change.

However. Legally speaking, when you get married, you are considered as a single legal entity in many things including court/law enforcement/taxes.

A person cannot be compelled to bear witness to their partners actions in court, in the USA, that’s the fifth amendment, in Canada, it’s section 11© of the charter of rights and freedoms. The basic concept being that you have the right to remain silent (and not incriminate yourself).

While I don’t plan on doing any crime or anything… That’s a nice perk.

Also, she hates doing her taxes, so when we’re married, I can do taxes for both of us.

There’s very few perks here and bluntly, it’s not worth the cost…

We’re going to elope and just throw a “reception” (party) afterwards.

Dunno why it’s even rated M. Seems high for what it is

… But why?

I would pivot to W10 LTSC to avoid Windows 11… So why would I move to the LTSC version of the OS I’m trying to avoid?

Makes zero sense.

While I get why they want to do all online accounts, no. Just no.

Ironically, for business users, online accounts are basically the way the industry is moving. Some integration with Azure active directory (now known as “Entra ID” - a useless rebranding of the exact same product), you can connect systems using someone’s email, and it can tightly integrate with your work email account on Microsoft 365, and everything just kind of fits together.

This prevents admins from having to go and do prep/setup on each system and/or maintain a library of system images with all the standard settings for the organization, since connecting with AAD/Entra can also enroll the device into Intune and those policies are just as powerful, if not more powerful than what you can do with images and prep; just now is entirely automatic.

For home users, it’s less about the convenience of system management and more data harvesting of their clients. The irony is that a lot of the business versions still have an option to bypass the online account (usually by selecting an option that you will be joining a classic domain).

So business has the option and largely, business is moving away from it, and home users don’t, but that’s something that a large number of home users want.

The only thought I have on it is that: bitlocker is enabled by default on many newer versions of Windows, by signing in with your M$ account to the PC, those bitlocker keys are backed up. If you don’t use an online account, it’s up to you to back then up, and users either don’t do that, or do it in such a way that it’s ineffective, like saving the recovery key to the very drive that needs that key to unlock it in the event of a problem.

I’ve seen more than one person fall victim to their own lack of knowledge and understanding when bitlocker is enabled, and Windows update screws their boot sequence to the point where they need to do a recovery, which requires the recovery key, which they do not have. It basically makes all of their data inaccessible, and gigabytes of data, just from the people I’ve known affected by this, has already been lost as a result.

I hear what you’re saying, but, there have been some pretty significant improvements to Windows, generation after generation.

Windows 10 finally seemed like they were on the right (and hopefully final) track with the direction of the operating system. Probably the last big improvement was to bring basically everyone to 64 bit.

XP moved us from the 9x kernel to the NT kernel that’s used in Windows today. Vista introduced security features and driver updates that help to keep systems free from many common root kits. 7 brought in a very standard UI, that would be the basis for things going forward, 8/8.1 existed… Then 10 basically uplifted everyone to 64 bit as a default.

Of course this is far from a complete list.

What did W11 add that we didn’t have before? A TPM requirement? Ads? AI slop/shovelware/spyware?

I won’t be doing pretty much anything about it. I have 10 pro, I don’t really give a shit about what Microsoft thinks I should do. My computer is behind a firewall, and bluntly, it’ll be a while before the security issues become such a problem that I need to go and upgrade.

However. I already did the legwork. I went out and upgraded the hardware TPM 1.2 in my system to TPM 2.0, and I picked up some (relatively cheap) Windows 11 pro product keys. I can upgrade if I want.

I also have access to W10 LTSC, so I can always pivot to that if I need to.

I get the security and other concerns with Windows 10. I do, but the windows 11 changes, to me seem like they’re changes for the sake of things being changed. Windows 10’s user experience was already quite good, apart from the fact that every feature release seemed to have the settings moved to a different location (see above about making changes for the sake of making changes). IMO, as a professional sysadmin and IT support, the interface and UX changes have made Windows, as a product, worse; it is by far the worst part of the upgrade process and I don’t know why they thought any of it was a good idea. I also hate what M$ has done with printers, but I won’t get started on that right now.

For all the nitpicking I could do, Windows was, for all intents and purposes, exactly what it needed to be, between Windows 7 and 10. There hasn’t been any meaningful progress in the OS that’s mattered since x86-64 support was added. Windows 10 32 bit was extremely rare, I don’t think I ever saw it (where W7 was a mixed bag of 32/64 bit). Having almost everyone standardized on 64 bit, and Windows 10, gave a predictability that is needed in most businesses. The professional products should not follow the same trends as the home products. If they want to put AI shovelware and ads into the home products, fine. Revamp the vast majority of the control panel into the settings menu, sure. But leave the business products as-is. By far the most problems that people have with Windows 11 that I hear about, relate to how everything changes/looks different, and/or having problems navigating the “new look” or whatever the fuck.

Microsoft: you had a good thing with Windows 10, and you pissed it all away when you put out the crap that is Windows 11.

Stop moving shit around, making controls less useful, and stop making it look like the UX was designed by a 10 year old. Fuck off.

Assumptions are the corner stone of the curse of knowledge.

NTs make a lot of assumptions about the listener and how they will understand something, because they always operate within a contextual box. They either don’t care, or don’t want to examine their statements from outside perspectives because their perspective is the only one that matters to them. That makes it sound worse than it is, but it’s accurate.

Neurodivergents generally spend a nontrivial amount of time trying to “fit in” with the NTs, often at the cost of their own mental well-being, but I digress. The majority of divergents have the skillset of understanding someone else’s point of view, since it’s a critical tool when building up a persona, aka masking.

I don’t care what anyone says, that’s a skillset, and it can be extremely useful. It’s often not used in a good, or productive way (looping back to the argument of masking being mentally burdensome here). As a tool, out can be used to great benefit, or great detriment, depending on how it’s used.

That’s apt. I like it.

Neurotypicals seem to suffer from the curse of knowledge far more than others. The worst part is, they’re neither aware of it, nor do they want to be aware of it.

They don’t realize how many assumptions they’re making about what you know, and that the information they’re assuming you have is the same information that they are working from.

For the uninitiated, the curse of knowledge is a concept where, by knowing the context of a thing, you understand it, but others do not because they don’t have the context of that thing. It’s a curse because the speaker with the curse of knowledge assumes that others have that context, often unaware that context needs to be provided for that thing to be understood.

The easiest demonstration of this I’ve seen is, try having someone guess a song by tapping it out on a table or something. More than 90% of the time they will not be able to guess what song you’re portraying because they lack the context. As soon as you mention the song, assuming the listener has heard the song before, they will be able to hear the association between your taps and the song, but not before being told.

This phenomenon happens a lot, and it’s the worst on government anything because often you are not provided any reference to look up what is intended for the question, form, information or whatever that you’re being asked to provide, you just need to provide it, but you lack the context to know what they even mean.

Fair enough.

This is what I would suggest.

Looking for grants and bursaries for the effort is something that should always happen. You may get lucky, or not, either way it will probably cost less than the same from an American university.

I mean, I haven’t done this, but it seems logical since OP is looking to further their education.

Those that want to leave are probably not the ones you want to avoid.

IMO, anyone who is awake and aware of the situation in any capacity, and can think rationally has, or is, considering leaving, or has left already.

It’s the people who agree and are happy with what is happening that you should probably avoid, and they don’t want to leave.

This seems pretty on-brand for burr… He’s always kind of rooted for the “little guy” so to speak. He’s also blunt and doesn’t really give a shit if you don’t like what he has to say.

There’s lots of things I don’t understand.

Like the color of thought and the sounds of a rainbow.

It probably did, but bluntly, when were already this far down, getting worse isn’t really noteworthy.

I think I’ve already watched this. Interesting stuff.

Pretty much everything gets it wrong in stone capacity. Some get very close, but fall short of representing radio in reality.

Just don’t.

As a qualified amateur operator, I’ll just say: that problem isn’t exclusive to die hard movies, nor die hard 1.

I had to stop playing when I saw the review for AC 3 (I think) from Zero punctuation.

He pointed out that the quests were almost entirely “gofer” quests… You know, you go over there and get that, then go fer that other thing and go…

I started the game not long after and I have to say, he was right. And every time I was given a quest to go somewhere only to talk to someone with little to no reason for doing so other than, I have nothing better to do in the game… When that happened, I heard his voice in my head talking about how annoying gofer quests were.

It annoyed me, and I stopped playing as a result. Never got past the first chapter.