Aside from the occasional hit show, the real product is the illusion of choice.

The problem is that the more you fight change, the more you change things. Your movement becomes more and more focused on resisting change, and less focused on preserving any good qualities it once had. It's an inescapable bit of futility, hard coded into the human condition.

Seems like they adopted the world fucking, transformed it, and diversified it into new areas. World fucking used to be about war, finance, manufacturing, and pollution. Now it's about war, finance, media, fashion, manufacturing, the internet, politics, tech, society, food supplies, religion, pollution, and making the rich feel better about themselves.

Most of those things were products of earlier times, when our economic system and industries were more regulated and had a larger number of competitive entities. "Innovation" now is just more cupholders in the RV to put your chicken fries in. All flash, no substance. Everything is an AI wearable tacked on to something else we've already had for years.

EV battery tech, there's some decent work being done there. A few other niche cases like that. But the rest is one big fucking con game. It's all a race to find out how much money you can gouge out of people before the system just breaks.

I feel that the majority of innovation occuring in modern capitalism is confined to two key areas:

1. Regulatory capture and market control.

2. New ways to mindfuck people into overpaying for goods and services.

Seconded.

I've got a pair of Skullcandy Mods. The sound quality is decent but not stellar, battery life is good, charge time is good and they feel pretty solidly made. Pretty good deal for $40 on Amazon.

I previously had some of their ANC overears that while not spectacular, were much better than I expected given the price point.

I did learn about it while attending highschool in Tulsa back in the 90's, but having talked this over with other Oklahomans online and in person, it seems hit or miss as to wether or not it was taught. It should have been mandatory curriculum IMO.

This. I just want to write something I'm somewhat satisfied with and have people appreciate it.

That's pretty much it.

There are plenty of user friendly Linux distros out there and a bunch of them can serve as a daily driver for general computing. What's more, the learning curve isn't that steep and you can find tons of solid guides and tutorials out on the Internet.

But if Windows is working and you don't care about the privacy issues, ads, and it's general downward direction in user experience, there's no motivation to switch.

Sadly, the whole "Linux is only for power users and nerds" misconception is going to stick around until Windows becomes all but unusable for most people.

I switched in 2021 and I thought the same then.