Someone made the comment about the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO and mentioned that the clients to private security forces are going to skyrocket. This is true.

It made me think of how much companies like these have profited from lobbying the government to remove their social contributions (i.e. taxes) while also being directly responsible for destroying those social safeties themselves.

The companies constantly lobby the government to reduce or remove their tax burden while retaining their state protections. But they don’t recognize that the more their actions erode the life of the working class, the more the social contract people accept to not take matters into their own hands is discarded.

As such, you start seeing things like assassinations and kidnappings, which in turn force the rich to use the money they saved by not paying taxes, to pay for private security instead.

This naturally leads to a more and more polarized society where the rich live in increasingly isolated and defended enclaves, while the proles live outside in slums and favelas. Sometimes directly next to each other, as this iconic photos from Sao Paolo exemplifies.

Of course, eventually, the dissolution of the social contract is going to make even this insufficient. More and more wealth will need to be used merely to protect their life and property, once the state has been sufficiently defunded, until at some point, you own private security will be either so powerful as to become a de-facto state, or they will turn themselves against the rich and claim their wealth for themselves.

Under capitalism, the taxman always gets their due.

cross-posted from: lemmings.world/post/17422969

Yesterday I did an update (using yes | yay) for about 75 packages on my 6 year old EndeavourOS system. I do updates every 2 weeks in general. Rebooted, did some work and left the screen on, for an hour (I usually do this). Came back and saw my screen having weird doubling text glitch, [like this screenshot above]. This issue also visible on my firmware setting (BIOS) screen, which leads me to believe this might be a h/w issue, though not sure.

I want to know whether an arch update can break my display. One particular thing I noticed this morning was, when i adjusted my display brightness, the screen went back to normal for a minute or so.

Also recently I changed my battery about 2 months ago. This was my second battery replacement. After I did my first battery replacement (3 years ago), my laptop had similar display issues with Intel integrated graphics on Windows a month later. which forced me to switch. It was fine on Linux, up until now. So it got me thinking if there is any connection with battery replacements and display issues. I know it sounds weird. Earlier there were not display anomalies on the BIOS screen, but now there is.

Is there a way to fix this.

System info: HP Envy, EndeavourOS Linux 6.12.1-arch1-1, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8550U with Intel UHD Graphics 620

[Update 1]
I hooked up my laptop to an external monitor and everything looks fine on the monitor screen. So the issue is only with my Laptop’s screen I guess.

[Update 2]
::: spoiler Packages I upgraded yesterday
alsa-card-profiles
alsa-ucm-conf
alsa-utils
sqlite
npth
systemd-libs
libsysprof-capture
gnupg
file
systemd
pacman
archlinux-keyring
bash-completion
btrfs-progs
c-ares
dav1d
dkms
edk2-ovmf
ell
eos-translations
fastfetch
spirv-tools
glslang
libpipewire
pipewire
pipewire-audio
libwireplumber
wireplumber
pipewire-jack
libjxl
shaderc
libplacebo
pixman
ffmpeg
noto-fonts
firefox
flatpak
fluidsynth
fwupd
gst-plugin-pipewire
iwd
js115
js128
less
libbpf
libsynctex
libtool
openal
mpv
noto-fonts-extra
passt
perl-image-exiftool
pipewire-alsa
pipewire-pulse
pkgconf
plocate
pv
qt6-translations
qt6-base
qt6-declarative
qt6-multimedia-ffmpeg
qt6-multimedia
qt6-svg
qt6-wayland
sudo
systemd-resolvconf
systemd-sysvcompat
ttf-nerd-fonts-symbols-common
ttf-nerd-fonts-symbols
virtiofsd
webkit2gtk-4.1
webkitgtk-6.0
welcome
xterm
librewolf-bin
librewolf-bin-deb
:::

This is a reminder to user sudoedit. Especially useful for Vim and Neovim users who have a rich and personal configuration.

sudoedit /etc/fstab

is also an option. sudoedit is a short form for sudo -e. It uses the default editor set int EDITOR or VISUAL variable. The difference to sudo vim FILE or sudo nano FILE is, that sudoedit FILE will use the editor configuration from the current user instead from the root. For me this makes a huge difference, because my plugins and settings for Neovim are not used when doing sudo vim.

Man page: linux.die.net/man/8/sudoedit

-e' The -e (edit) option indicates that, instead of running a command, the user wishes to edit one or more files. In lieu of a command, the string "sudoedit" is used when consulting the security policy. If the user is authorized by the policy, the following steps are taken:

1. Temporary copies are made of the files to be edited with the owner set to the invoking user.
2. The editor specified by the policy is run to edit the temporary files. The sudoers policy uses the SUDO_EDITOR, VISUAL and EDITOR environment variables (in that order). If none of SUDO_EDITOR, VISUAL or EDITOR are set, the first program listed in the editor sudoers(5) option is used.
3. If they have been modified, the temporary files are copied back to their original location and the temporary versions are removed.

If the specified file does not exist, it will be created. Note that unlike most commands run by sudo, the editor is run with the invoking user's environment unmodified. If, for some reason, sudo is unable to update a file with its edited version, the user will receive a warning and the edited copy will remain in a temporary file.