Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: KimyrielleBut many countries in Europe and elsewhere would be happy to have JUST 7% unemployment even WITHOUT a pandemic going on, so there is that.

This comparison is almost meaningless if you ignore relative living standards. An unemployed person in one country might be better off (and contribute more to the economy) than someone working a full time job in another.

It's also very hard to be sure what people are talking about when they say "unemployment"; the most frequently talked about "unemployment" figure refers to people who have lost their jobs, are drawing unemployment insurance, and are known to be looking for work. It does not include people who gave up looking, people who found a "job" with a zero hours contract that is getting them 10 hours/week if they're lucky, people who are "self-employed" at something too marginal to make a living because they can't find a real job, and so on. There are various different unemployment measures, some of which capture much more than others, but none of them really get everything. It's gotten to the point where I take someone talking about jobs a lot more seriously if they skip all that and talk about the labour participation rate--the percentage of the population that is working.

That said, until recently the United States did have a high and growing labour participation rate, and even longer term unemployment was quite a ways down. And bizarrely, despite all the damage the bastard did in other ways, with yet more tax cuts for the rich and badly thought out trade wars and so on, Trump could claim some credit for that. As the verrrry slow recovery from the 2009 financial crisis gradually cut unemployment levels, conventional economic wisdom had it that it was time to increase interest rates because low unemployment would cause inflation. Trump wouldn't go for it because it meant basically cutting short the economic expansion just when he wanted to be re-elected. He bullied the Fed into keeping rates low, and to the surprise of many, inflation (and decent wages) did not materialize. Probably because so much of the employment is precarious and virtually none is unionized. So that's actually one good thing Trump did, which a Democrat, or indeed a more conventional Republican, probably wouldn't have done. Probably the only good thing Trump did in his entire term, and even that he didn't do because he knew better than the conventional wisdom but because he was actually too ignorant to be fooled by it, but it had a significant impact.

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Quoting: Kimyrielle

Quoting: DorritI have few doubts that soon, this year probably, we'll have a financial/economic crisis of epic proportions; something to make the Great Depression feel like an appetizer. It'll be interesting to see how it affects the software landscape.

Off-topic, but I wonder why you think that would happen, when there isn't the slightest indicator of a collapsing major economy anywhere on Earth.

In the medium term, I see two and a half basic drivers: Inequality, climate change, and finance (the 1/2).

Nearly all the major developed economies have been gradually increasing inequality--some more than others, some from a higher starting point than others, but it's been a general trend. While unemployment has not been very high most places, people who are working and remain very poor, even homeless, continue to grow. Very large numbers don't have the money to weather a financial shock. Economies in very unequal societies tend to be unstable. Something gives sooner or later; crazies with guns storming legislative buildings so they can wander around taking selfies is a relatively minor example.

Climate change--Crop failures, beeg fires, hurricanes and tornadoes, places running outta water. That kinda stuff can cause economic shocks (not to mention war, famine, pestilence and death). It already has. They will get bigger, the question is how fast.

Finance, and financialization--This is really a subset of inequality. It's both a driver of inequality and a way to get around problems inequality causes, such as lack of demand. It has been growing rapidly as a percentage of the total economy, and that's a problem. Basic finance has some uses--basically, lending to and otherwise arranging money for pieces of the economy trying to do real things. But it doesn't take a big portion of the economy to do that, and indeed with modern technology it should be possible to do that with less economic overhead than ever before. But that ain't what's happened; much of the modern financial economy is parasitic, a drag on the real economy even though it's measured as a massive positive amount of GDP. And it has huge amounts of influence over governments and central banks. Things have not changed much for finance since the Great Recession; they're still way overleveraged, greedy and arrogant, sure that if it happens again the central banks will just throw money at them (as they did this year for Covid) and everything will be fine. But the throwing masses of money trick is an ad hoc thing that nobody really understands the consequences of, which means nobody knows when the gimmick might get overplayed and fail to work. The financial system and its houses of cards means that any shock from the first two problems or something else entirely could get hugely magnified.

But I don't know just when any or all of these chickens may come home to roost.

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Quoting: DorritValve's work for Linux can't be praised highly enough.
I have few doubts that soon, this year probably, we'll have a financial/economic crisis of epic proportions; something to make the Great Depression feel like an appetizer. It'll be interesting to see how it affects the software landscape.

Dunno about this year. These things always come slower than you expect.

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Hey, they added Boxtron!

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Quoting: kneekoo

Quoting: Purple Library GuyShall I copy and paste my reply to Schattenspiegel?

Why would you do that?

Because my answer to you would be exactly the same as my answer to him?

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The way they're doing things sounds silly to me, but that aside this does seem like it could be significantly good news . . . unless, as Nanobang says, they pull a fast one of some sort.

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I suspect a basic problem with the way user research works is that "easier to learn" is often not the same as "more effective to use". So you show people various ways of doing things and they're like "I get this one right away!" and you decide the User Has Spoken and you get something that isn't that great once people have it up and running for a while.

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Quoting: kneekoo

Quoting: Purple Library GuySo I like having two taskbars--one along the bottom for application switching, one going up the right hand side for launchers

Cinnamon can have taskbars on all sides. Right-click the panel, then "Add new panel". Cinnamon will then say "Select position of new panel. Esc to cancel." Click the right side of your screen - an area highlighted in red -, and a new toolbar will be added there.

Shall I copy and paste my reply to Schattenspiegel?

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Quoting: Schattenspiegel

Quoting: Purple Library GuyPersonally, I like Cinnamon quite well, but I use Mint with Mate because of a particular personal schtick: I like having a few launchers on the taskbar and launching my most-used applications that way. But I also like plenty of space on the taskbar for showing the different windows, because my long habit from old Windows days is to switch between things that way. So I like having two taskbars--one along the bottom for application switching, one going up the right hand side for launchers (on the side because widescreen real estate). Mate is happy to do that for me, and thus far every time I've tried Cinnamon I couldn't get that to happen. So I've stuck with Mate, but it's not like I have anything against Cinnamon; it's quite nice, it's just that one feature I want.

If I understood you correctly:
Add a panel to the right with panel-launcher-applet on it and drag the applet to the desired position in panel edit mode + use the bottom panel with the the classic windows-list-applet and drag it to either left/right/center position.

No doubt there's been changes since last I tried. First few times I tried, Cinnamon did not support taskbars on the side. I think maybe last time I tried it sort of did but they acted weird and made it crash, or something. Maybe I'll give it another shot . . . although my motivation isn't that high since Mate has been good to me.

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Personally, I like Cinnamon quite well, but I use Mint with Mate because of a particular personal schtick: I like having a few launchers on the taskbar and launching my most-used applications that way. But I also like plenty of space on the taskbar for showing the different windows, because my long habit from old Windows days is to switch between things that way. So I like having two taskbars--one along the bottom for application switching, one going up the right hand side for launchers (on the side because widescreen real estate). Mate is happy to do that for me, and thus far every time I've tried Cinnamon I couldn't get that to happen. So I've stuck with Mate, but it's not like I have anything against Cinnamon; it's quite nice, it's just that one feature I want.

Recently when I got a new desktop I tried out Ubuntu Mate on it for a while. Didn't like it as much, I'm happy to be back with Mint.

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