I, too, am far from being either of those things, but it sounds like you could just track purchasing power to get a rough idea. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding it, but it seems to me that, if inflation or other factors have eaten into your purchasing power and you haven’t gotten a corresponding raise to offset it, you can reasonably conclude that the economy is getting worse for you in your personal circumstances.

If it’s anything like my time on the night shift at a grocery store, there’s probably one person that’s been there for decades and only has to pack out one aisle of pillows, or some other bulky and light stuff, while everyone else has to cover 3 times as many shelves, with smaller and heavier items. But since that person has been there forever, they’re one of the holdouts with a decent contract that makes several times more an hour than anyone else, including the shift supervisor, and actually has decent benefits.

I’m not really concerned about it myself, I’m already well beyond the point it would be terribly relevant to me. I would very much disagree re: education levels, though. I’ve worked with plenty of people from various countries, and those with less education often cannot switch to a more widely understood way of speaking, in my experience. Partly, it comes down to limited vocabulary, resulting in them being unable to provide alternative ways of saying things that might be more widely understood, and partly down to an ignorance as to what elements of their speech aren’t widely used or understood outside of where they grew up.

I would still argue that a neutral Spanish is no more real a variant than BBC English or “General American” accents and mannerisms used by news presenters represent actual variants of English, though. It might serve as a crutch for intelligibility in cases of extremely heavy accents, but most cases where you might employ it are situations where you already wouldn’t be expected to employ much in the way of slang. In regular interactions, though, people mostly just speak to each other in their natural accent, and if somebody busts out a local term that isn’t understood, the other person asks “¿Qué quiere decir huachicolero?” gets an explanation, and the conversation moves on, same as it does in English.

At the end of the day, I think pursuing a neutral manner of speaking from the beginning is something of a fool’s errand for most language learners. Like it or not, you will wind up speaking like the native speakers you interact with most. I don’t particularly use Dominican vocabulary, but people still assume I’m from DR when I speak Spanish, because when Spanish became my primary working language for 5 years after getting out of the beginner stages, that’s who I was surrounded by at work. Absent very specific goals (I knew a guy who focused exclusively on Rioplatense Spanish, as he was moving to Argentina in a couple of years to study in Buenos Aires), I think most people would be better served focusing on the fundamentals, reading widely, consuming a wide range of media and actually speaking with people, rather than endlessly agonizing over perfecting the process before actually getting to the point they can actually use the language.

After years of regular use, I can speak it fine and modify how I speak appropriately, as the situation calls for. If it’s sufficient for the RAE folks working on the DELE and the staff at my local Instituto Cervantes to not remark on anything beyond occasionally flubbing the gender of a word, I’m not too worried about the neutrality of my Spanish.

Neutral Spanish isn’t a separate variant, so much as a separate register of the language, though. It’s really just a thing I hear native speakers say when they don’t realize that educated speakers from their country do, in fact, still have an accent, but it’s more just down to vocabulary choice, rather than some major change elsewhere. Like, an educated Dominican isn’t going to call a bus a guagua and they’ll probably enunciate more clearly than they would in casual conversation, but they’re not suddenly going to start using vosotros and distinción when they speak.

Whenever I hear a native speaker talking about Neutral Spanish, it’s invariably followed by why I should try to speak like people from their home country, and that people from elsewhere don’t really speak proper Spanish. It also tends to correlate pretty well with people telling me, “Yo hablo castellano, y por eso no puedo entender lo que dicen las personas plebes, ya que hablan español.” for a nice dose of Latin American classism.

If you learn something too region specific, usually doesn’t.

My experience has been more that learners tend to not realize that certain things they pick up aren’t universal, and/or that they’re only acceptable in certain contexts, and then unwittingly pepper their speech with words and phrases from one country that are unknown/unacceptable in another, or use very informal/vulgar language in formal settings. Like, if I curse around my wife the way I would curse around my Mexican coworkers, she’s scandalized by how vulgar the profanity is, and if I told my Mexican coworkers I had a fuinfuán in my backyard growing up, rather than a columpio, there’s nearly 100% chance they’re not going to have any idea what the hell I’m talking about.

Honestly pretty sure not many people used 3rd party apps to begin with so I don’t think it was to do with any of that like the other strangely confident commenters seem to imply.

I don’t think it was sheer numbers of users that made 3rd party apps a big deal, but who was using them. Someone would need to actually do some research to confirm or refute it, but my experience was that they were disproportionately favored by power users, i.e. the really prolific posters and commenters that you would come to know and recognize after spending a bit of time in certain subs. If enough of those people decided they couldn’t be convinced to use the mobile site or official app, you’d probably have some small amount of previous lurkers step up their posting a bit, and bots.

From what everyone says when they mention the current state of the site, it mostly sounds like it’s bots just spamming reposts and arguing with each other with recycled comments originally posted by other users.

Gonic works pretty well with my library, and Tempo is fine for a client. I mostly just put stuff on an SD card in my Fiio these days, though.

I use mpd and ncmpc++, myself. My library got too large (Just shy of 70,000 songs now) and all the GUI players choke and freeze when I try to scan my library, including Rhythmbox and QuodLibet. I’m kind of interested in how inori develops, since ncmpc++ isn’t getting any active development beyond fixing bugs when things break with updates, but I’m also pretty happy with it for now.

It’ll get me at least a few years of happiness, and perhaps make my ensuing case of diabetes mellitus more appropriately named than that of most peoples’.

I managed to knock myself unconscious and give myself a pretty nice concussion during a particularly heated pillow fight at a summer camp. Pretty sure that’s about as unique a feat as I’ve managed thus far.

I’ve never seen any of them cause problems; they simply ride the trains all day.

Maybe this is dependent on country or region, because I see wildly different behavior between the unhoused in NYC and Manchester, in the UK, for example. In NYC, I’ve personally seen them pull a knife on random people, masturbating in the middle of the day on the train, two blind guys panhandling try to beat each other with their canes, each accusing the other of faking it to invade the other’s territory, smoking crack in the middle of crowded cars and plenty of other problematic behavior.

When I’ve been in Manchester, they’ve always been pretty reserved, just trying to do their own thing and get through the day without doing anything to draw unwanted attention to themselves. You wouldn’t even know a lot of them are there, unless you’re out after the shops close, and then there’s suddenly a bunch of people in sleeping bags in the doorways, just trying to sleep out of the wind and rain in a spot that might be marginally warmer.

Too many people just view scientifically sound treatment as drug addicts getting stuff for free, and get pissed off that someone else gets a “benefit” that they aren’t entitled to. They completely ignore the knock on effects that drug addiction has to those around someone going through it and just focus on what they perceive as unearned rewards for bad behavior.

I kind of think that a lot of people would be in favor of the same programs if they were pitched without being centered on the person getting treated for their addiction. Like, instead of saying, “This plan represents the best method we have to get people off drugs,” some of those same people that are totally lacking in empathy would be in favor of it if it were put forward as, “This is a way to get all those druggies off the streets and trains where they bother you, and it’s actually way cheaper than putting them all in prison, so it works out that we spend less of your tax money and save you in the long term.” Which is a pretty damning indictment of those people.

a test showing me how little I know, and a time-eater that causes my wife to wonder what happened to her husband.

Worth mentioning, but this gets much better with time. Part of it will go away as you learn new things, and is the same as learning any other new thing, be it using Linux, picking up an instrument, or learning another language. Hand in hand with this, you’ll also just get better at knowing where and what to look for to find answers to your problems, and how to ask for help in a way that includes all the relevant info and is more likely to get you a reply that sorts out your issue sooner.

It can definitely be overwhelming initially, but it’s always helpful to get familiar with the man pages and info pages, which are two forms of documentation that come built-in with your Linux install (along with other systems like the BSDs, if you ever wander over that way. OpenBSD man pages are amazing, fwiw, and may be more helpful at times for finding example commands). You can usually run

man command

to get a man page for most commands in your terminal, though not all. Info pages exist for GNU software, and can often be more thorough in their documentation.

man fstab

for example, will give you a general overview of how fstab works, and also include a list of other man pages at the bottom, under the heading SEE ALSO, that can be helpful in understanding related systems. If one of those entries is followed by a number in parentheses, you type the command slightly differently to access that section of the man page. For example, the fstab page suggests looking at mount(8), which you’d find with the command

man 8 mount

info info

in a terminal will get you a helpful primer on how the info system works, which is good, as it can be somewhat more complex to navigate than man pages and uses a lot of Emacs keybindings.

Both can be a bit daunting when you first start out, but it’s worth at least being familiar with, as you can access them without any internet connection, helping you to do things and troubleshoot issues when you’re unable to go online, for whatever reason.

Finally, don’t overlook the utility of the various wikis out there. For Linux Mint, the Debian Wiki should be pretty decent, and the Arch Wiki is also generally pretty helpful, though may not always work for Debian/Ubuntu-based distros, since it may reference features in newer releases of packages than are available elsewhere. They’ll often include basic setup and configuration guides, as well as a troubleshooting section that outlines how to solve commonly encountered issues.

It may have a large part to do with where in the UK you were coming from, and where in the US you wound up, in fairness. Bog-standard eggs are $8/dozen just outside a major metro on the East Coast, while less than half that for posters in other regions. Last week, I was in Manchester, and a 15-pack of eggs at the Lidl on Piccadily Gardens was about £3 or so, which would probably make $8/dozen seem pretty crazy in comparison. I think the lowest I saw while there, further from the city center, was £2.15 for 15 eggs.

No, because I don’t see any point to it. If they manage to catch him, they may as well just kill him on the spot when they get him, as I have no faith that his trial would be anything more than a farce to try and present some sense of following process and norms, while guaranteeing he gets some insane sentence, only to be found mysteriously to have hung himself. I’m sure that, somehow, a jury of his peers will be comprised solely of the 12 most ghoulish residents of NYC one could find, and they’ll probably try to shop around for the worst judge they can to hear the whole thing.

MPD and whatever front end you like for what’s the best music player going, imo. You can tweak your player to your liking, MPD will play any format supported by ffmpeg, has some forks for further functionality, handles big libraries like a champ (I’m sitting at 54,758 files in mine without issue), can serve music streams online and be remotely controlled, and even has ridiculous features like the ability to handle gopher urls for media/streaming.

It’s also as lightweight as you want it to be. MPD+ncmpcpp for playback use a whopping 66MB of ram for me.

On android, GrapheneOS, AntennaPod and Tempo are probably my top ones. On my desktop, Firefox, tmux, mpd, ncmpcpp, gonic, neomutt, qbittorrent, weechat, mc, btop, Lagrange and emacs probably round things out for me outside of base OS stuff. OS side, my desktop has Arch Linux and my laptop runs OpenBSD. Bitwarden across platforms.

It depends on why they’re laughing for me. Lots of terribly unfunny people essentially provide their own real time laugh track to signal “This is the funny part, laugh please,” which gets old real quick. They also tend to laugh incredibly hard at their own jokes, far more than is merited by the actual joke. Unfunny people trying to force a joke like that get old fast.

On the other hand, I don’t take issue with having a bit of a laugh with everyone else when you land a good one. On rare occasion, there are even jokes that wind up funnier because they’re just so hilarious that the person telling them can hardly get them out without busting up themselves.

They may be idealists that don’t reflect a use case I think is reasonable to expect of the average user, but I would also say that it’s very important to have them there, constantly agitating for more and better. They certainly don’t manage to land on achieving all their goals, but they also prevent a more compromising, “I just need to use my stuff now, not in 10 years when you figure out a FOSS implementation” stance from being used to slowly bring even more things further away from FOSS principles in the name of pragmatism.

I guess it probably depends on where you’re going. I went to the UK earlier this year, and my experience was mostly painless. Landed in Manchester, and they basically had self-checkout customs. I scanned my passport and looked at a camera once, and that was it. It was actually more of a hassle and more invasive coming back home and getting back into the country.

Both the Catholic school I attended Kindergarten through 2nd grade at and the public middle school I attended in suburban NY had blacktop as the main rec area during lunches and other such breaks, so it’s not just a CA thing, I guess. Neither school was in a very build up area, either. The Catholic school in particular had plenty of land they could have had us play on that wasn’t the parking lot. Had I stayed there for all my schooling, they were even known for sending students into the marsh out behind the school to catch their own frogs for the full experience of preserving something in formaldehyde and dissecting it during high school biology labs.