Not sarcastic, I genuinely like this sort of thing. To each their own.

Also every manic pixie dream girl

So much this.

Also, its not just Bart Simpson, it is Homer too.

• Homer: (wakes up from a daydream about “the land of chocolate”). “What? Huh? Oh, uh we were talking about chocolate?” – Boss: “That was ten minutes ago!”
• At a Stone Cutters meeting, he uses the Sacred Parchment as a napkin. When everyone starts yelling at him for that, he gets nervous out and starts using it as a napkin even more.
• “You have my undivided attention” (watches a cartoon in his head)
• “What would my life be like if I robbed the Quick-E-Mart?” (imagines himself living in a mansion, wearing a tuxedo, spinning his gun on his finger, Marge in a swimsuit doing a 60’s dance beside him.) “I’ll do it! I’ll rob the Quick-E-Mart…D’oh!” (he has already walked out to his car and is driving home).
• When marge spends the whole day cleaning the house to host a party for friends, homer plays with a toy racecar track in his underwear. Marge says to him: “Homer! The only thing I asked you to do for this party is to put on pants and you didn’t do it!”

I would go with Guile, because it is built-in to the Guix Package Manager which is a really good general-purpose package manager.

It ticks several of your boxes:

• has a CLI interpreter
• is a general purpose language, Scheme, amd compliant with revisions 5, 6, and 7 of the language standard
• allows writing in a functional style (it is one of the original functional programming languages)
• small disk footprint, but still large enough to be “batteries included”
• decent documentation, especially if you use Emacs
• simple setup: not so much, unless you are using Guix to begin with. The standard distribution ships with lots of pre-built bytecode files, you need an installer script to install everything.

It also has pretty good libraries for system maintenance and reporting:

• File-Tree-Walk
• A simple web server
• XML parsing

I’m a communist but I suddenly realised that American conservatives should all be hardcore Linux enthusiasts. Why is this not already the stereotype?

Libertarians and conservatives in the US demand liberty only for the already wealthy and powerful upper class, the liberty to enslave and exploit whomever and whatever they choose. They believe the ultra-wealthy have somehow earned the right to do so. On the contrary, the socialists, especially the anarchists, are opposed to unjust hierarchies, and the hierarchy created by wealthy and politically powerful classes are the most unjust of all – quite the opposite of the libertarians and conservatives.

Libertarian (Liberal) propaganda appropriates the more popular socialist ideologies while conflating liberty for only the wealthy/powerful versus liberty for all people. One can see appropriation done in the same way in the very name of the National Socialist (Nazi) party of Germany. These tactics that were used by the Nazis are still used by various American conservative and libertarian parties, who mostly align under the umbrella of the Republican Party. Just look at what the Trump cult weirdos are all saying nowadays. It is pure KKK and Nazi ideology resurrected, under a thin veil of euphemisms.

So if you take at face-value what libertarian and conservative politicians in the US say publicly about freedom, small government, civil liberties, etc., then they ought to be very enthusiastically in favor of Linux, but it is all just propaganda. They don’t care about freedom, only freedom for the elite clique of their supposed “supermen,” the wealthy elites, the freedom to exploit groups of people who they hate most — take your pick: foreigners, black people, women, gay and trans, Jews, Muslims, the “woke,” the “leftist,” etc. The libertarians and conservatives hate things that benefit society at large, because what benefits society also benefits these people they hate.

Linux is pretty authentically a community project for the good of society, and it is truly subversive to the authority of the corporations and elites. So the various libertarians and conservatives of the US recognize Linux as a threat. Only that small group of privileged, middle-class libertarians stupid enough to be duped by the wealthy elite propaganda believe that free software is aligned with their ideology.

What I want to know is, how much energy was used to create these floors, install them, and how much energy will be required to service them (the electronics) if they break down over the useful life of the installation, including how much energy was spent on resource extraction and processing.

Then I want to see that number compared as a ratio to the amount of energy these floors can generate over their expected useful life span, say 15 years in high pedestrian traffic areas.

I am highly skeptical that the ratio would even approach 1:1, I expect a net energy loss. But I could be convinced otherwise with some good data.

Adding Solar to More Devices

I never understood why this wasn’t more common already. … Why not? Seems like an obvious solution…

Good question, with a simple engineering answer: often times the energy cost of creating these solar panels and installing them into devices is considerably higher than the amount of energy those devices could possibly except after many decades of constant use. The point in time at which the solar energy collected by the device matches the energy cost to create and install the device might actually be longer than the life of the solar panel or the device itself. So adding solar to every last little thing will actually cost a lot more money for consumers while causing more harm to the environment.

That is not to say that solar is always bad, in fact solar is incredibly good when used at industrial scales, especially in power stations, and on the rooftops of factories, parking lots, shopping centers, data centers, and warehouses.

We see too often on the news stories about how some amazing invention might help solve global warming, but this is often just propaganda. The oil and car companies want you to think buying more technology from these tech companies (which are often their own subsidiary companies) will solve the problem. But really it is just another way of profiting off of people, tricking them into buying their stuff rather than reducing consumption, reusing, and recycling, and without those companies doing any of the hard work on the energy transition themselves.

both can be installed side by side if you have enough disk space.

Yeah, this is exactly what I do using QEMU and Aarch64 Debian. I suppose I could try the Asahi Linux in QEMU but that actually might be more difficult since I don’t think QEMU can emulate the MacBook hardware, as far as I know. And I can’t do dual boot, I want to be able to switch back and forth between Mac OS and Linux without rebooting anything.

You can try asahi linux on the macbook :)

I could, but I still need Mac OS for work-related things.

I switched to Linux permanently in 2008. Last OS I used before Linux was Mac OS X version 10.4 “Tiger” (if I recall correctly) which is what came with the Macintosh PowerBook that I had bought roughly in the year 2004. I have never used Microsoft software unless someone was paying me to, but at the time, Windows XP was still all the rage even though Microsoft was trying to get everyone to switch to Windows Vista. (Vista got a lot of well-deserved hate too, sort of similar what we see with Windows 11 right now, actually.)

Anyway, I was a die-hard Apple fanboy, but getting more and more into free software and I kept on using Macports/Homebrew to build Linux stuff I found online, but back in those days a lot of apps I wanted to try did not have good support for the Darwin kernel build of GCC which was pretty old compared to what Linux was using at the time. Occasionally a build would fail, and I would try to port the software on my own, with the idea of maybe submitting a package to Macports. But after a while I realized, “if I want to use Linux software, why not just use Linux?”

So I bought a Netbook (Dell Inspiron Mini 10) with Ubuntu pre-installed. I really loved that little computer, I used it for a good 5 years until I needed a more powerful computer. I still have it, actually. I never went back to Apple until this year when I took a new job where they wanted me to use a MacBook Pro. (Again, not using proprietary software unless I am well paid.)

I can say with confidence that Linux is considerably better than Apple’s operating systems. I use Aarch64 Debian 12.5 in a QEMU on that MacBook for most things, only switching over to Mac OS when I really need to.

How can you pirate Photoshop and Elements? They are WebAssembly binaries that phone home before you are allowed to use them.