Wiser than Lembot, who asked.

That is, unfortunately, beyond my power.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/this-my-little-pony-figurine-in-a-jar-will-delete-your-faith

He’s giving the people what they want.

You tell me. What is the job of a high ranking military officer?

Edit: I’m tired of this. You are way out of line, and you won’t directly address your own statements without redirection. I’m out.

Please, please can you directly acknowldge the problem in your original assertion that more of the current military staff in Africa should be black because they are black. This isn’t about making all systems more fair. This is about whether or not it is appropriate to concentrate black personnel in Africa. I assert it is not appropriate, nor would it be appropriate to send other personnel into other theaters based on their racial geographic origin. That has huge “go back where you came from” energy.

Advancing through the ranks is a different issue. There are problems there that need to be addressed, and such changes would be expected to bring a shift in demographics among different military roles over some period of time.

None of that changes the current military roster. You just can’t send the black guy to Africa for the color of his skin. If you had a ratio of 50:50 black guys to white guys in command, and we ignore other demographics for a thought experiment, then it would be obviously weird and racial if a crew of five commanders in Africa were white. That is not the case. It would be weird and racist if three of the current commanders in Africa were black because that is an obvious skew of the commander statistics.

Your argument about demographic spreads in the military looking racist right now is valid. We should address those demographic skews directly, not insist that people are deployed in ways to offset those demographics. Picking the fewer black commanders we have and sending them to Africa specifically because they are black is insane. I shouldn’t even need to type that.

Okay, sure. You do understand that the vast majority of African Americans have been rooted families for generations now? I can’t underline enough how fucked up it would be to send someone to Africa because they have dark skin. That is a verbatim echo of all sorts of internal American racism.

I’m addressing that very specific point.

A different and likely more damning bit of racism perhaps.

The argument is that if you have 99 white guys and 1 black guy in your pool of people, then the choice to specifically send that single black guy to Africa is a bit messed up. You probably should have more black guys in the people pool, and that surely points to some racial bias in the hiring process, but the decision on how to deploy those people is a different decision that can be racist or not all on its own.

Amazing! That’s exactly it!

I would be confident just based on the summary, but I remember that minigame where you pilot the boat in the harbor.

Surely that will never become anachronistic.

Was this before actual hard disk drives became popular?

I remember as a child one of my friends has a very old computer, even for the nineties. All of the programs had to be loaded on with 3.5" floppy disks each time we wanted to run them. There was a cargo ship management game that we messed with that I was too young to understand. I was really interested in “ballast” as cargo because it was zero cost; no wonder I didn’t make any money.

If I stand on one side of a magic portal and there is a Nazi on the other side of the portal, that Nazi is in punching distance. Technology allows transmission of voices at the speed of light. Don’t be pedantic.

I’m still using Windows 11 just from inertia, but I’ve been putting my kids on Linux Mint and Bazzite depending.

I don’t think I can get away from Windows, as a professional .NET developer, but I won’t likely have more than the one Windows laptop at this point. My entire home lab and home infra is Linux of one variety or another. If we count VMs, then I overwhelmingly using Debian.

I mean, it’s labelled and everything. How silly of me.

That can’t even be the plumbing access because the fixture is on the other side of the tub. Is it some weird storage-maxxing cabinet?

I found this reference to some author origin more than a century old: https://ingeb.org/Lieder/thenight.html

Edit: I misread the heading. J. Mark Sugars is a contemporary source who put together this representative example of a century-old joke.

There are more granular properties that make up the composite background sugar. You can use background-color, for example. Can you make it work piecemeal?

✨

I have Aphantasia and ADHD, and I can confirm that the sleep/wake boundary allows for some startling visualizations.

Apparently it is a different visualizing scheme that dreaming uses, so practicing visualizing in that half-asleep state doesn’t strengthen the bit that is used while awake.