• 0 Posts
  • 64 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2024

help-circle



  • Yeah, I had the same thing with the photos of diseased bodies and the disparaging of contraception. I remember in particular that the textbook chapter on abstinence was immediately followed by the chapter on parenthood, which felt like it left a pretty conspicuous gap.

    Amusingly there were two very different Health Class experiences to be had at my school. You were assigned one at random, you couldn’t choose which teacher you got. One was a first-year math teacher and member of an unsuccessful local Christian rock band. He’s who I had. The other possibility was a lesbian gym teacher, whose class was apparently (and unsurprisingly) a LOT more useful.

    But yeah, the 90’s kinda sucked, and I hate that the US is trundling back towards that kind of “education.”


  • I guess I sort of agree? It’s a bit tricky to get it set up, for sure. Even just installing windows is probably beyond the average user, and this has a few more quirks and gotchas than normal.

    E.g., in IoT LTSC 11 (which is what I’m actually currently using), when you connect a controller, it’ll bring up an error message about not having a handler for ms-gamebar, and fixing that calls for regedit. (One it’s fixed, though, it stays fixed.) It also got itself into a bit of a weird state during the initial installation where it wanted me to log in with a kind of account I don’t have, and while I was able to bypass that, I don’t think I did it in quite the right way, and it broke something in the install and I had to do an in-place repair install to fix it before it would install certain updates successfully. It was also failing to download the in-place repair install, so I had to look up how to do it manually using the install DVD I’d burned previously. But that fixed it, and it’s been fine since.

    So, yeah, it’s got pitfalls and quirks and glitches. That’s also been my experience with other Windows installs, though, so it didn’t seem all that different in general.

    But once you get those initial hurdles sorted out, it’s really just like normal Windows. Better, even, since it doesn’t have all the cruft built into it, like Cortana, Teams, OneDrive, start menu ads, nag screens about upgrading to 11, the Microsoft Store, etc. (Though you can add most of those if you really want them.) My aging parents aren’t willing to upgrade to 11 because they’re afraid too many things will have changed, and I’m thinking I’ll probably switch them to 10 IoT LTSC instead. I’ll just have to be careful to make sure everything they want to do works before I leave them to it. It still gets monthly security updates and everything.



  • My high school did this. They hauled me and my friends in front of one of the deans because we’d been playing chess in the lunch room, and they said that if they let us play chess, they’d have to let the other students play dominos, and when they play dominos, they gamble, and when they gamble, fights break out, and there weren’t enough security guards to handle that. So no chess. We pointed out that we were the school chess team, but they were unmoved on the topic.

    It was really dumb.

    We talked a bit about the possibility of having a couple of our better players play mental chess, that is, no board or pieces to look at, and just yell moves back and forth across the lunch room while the rest of us loudly gambled on the outcome, but we never actually did it.


  • Sticking only to ones I haven’t seen mentioned:

    • Tandis : geometry puzzler
    • Gateways : a 2d portal-style puzzler
    • Elliot Quest : pixel adventure
    • Phoenotopia Awakening : also a pixel adventure, had trouble with the final boss but the rest is great
    • Wuppo : flash-animation-style comedy adventure
    • Alba : sweet game about a girl who loves wildlife
    • Salt and Sanctuary : 2d soulslike
    • Legend of Grimrock : tile-based first person dungeon crawler (“dungeon master” spiritual successor)
    • A Short Hike (really short but amazing exploration game)

    Ones I have seen mentioned but can’t bear not to mention:

    • TIS-100 : the finest of the Zachlikes; a programming puzzle game
    • Crosscode : 2d adventure with incredibly fine-tuned combat and puzzles
    • Outer Wilds : fantastic time-loop puzzle
    • FTL : space adventure “one more run!” game
    • Slay the Spire : deck-drafting “one more run!” game




  • The US population in 1980 was around 226 million, and in 2020 it was around 330 million. That’s an increase of about 50%. By comparison, the GDP in 1980 was about $2.75 trillion; in 2020 it was over $20 trillion, an increase of more than 600%.

    The problem isn’t that we’re spreading out the same amount of money over too many people. It’s that we’re making much, much more money, but concentrating it in the hands of a tiny number of people and letting everyone else scramble for scraps.




  • As far as I know there’s not a way to just add it to the house supply, like they do with water softeners in some places, but you can get drops you can add to an individual glass of water. There are also tablets you can take. What I do at this point is use a fluoride mouthwash in the evening (the purple listerine; you have to avoid eating or drinking for 30 minutes after using it, so the evening is convenient that way) and also get the fluoride treatment at my dental hygienist appointments, along with using a fluoride toothpaste (which you’re most likely already using).

    It’s a hassle, though, especially during the transition. When I moved out here, my teeth got worse in a hurry until I adapted to this new routine.



  • Yeah, this was the part that really got me:

    “Show us a warrant,” the video shows one of the two women demanding as they attempt to get between the detainers and the detainee.

    “Do not touch me or impede me in my lawful duties,” the man in the pink shirt responds. “We are officers from Homeland Security.”

    That’s a real bully-logic move right there. How are we supposed to know that these are your lawful duties if you’re refusing to show us your warrant or even your badge? Like, if she had blocked them at this point and the issue were brought to court (and yes, it’s ironic that this is happening in a court), then I can’t imagine a jury saying “well yeah, you can’t prevent a guy from abducting someone just because he won’t give you any indication other than a pinky swear that he has the legal authority to do it.” But, of course, the obvious implication in the moment was that since he was from the “abduct people in an unmarked van with unlimited authority” branch of the government, this wasn’t going to a jury trial, and she was either getting out of the way or she was going in the van too.

    I dunno, man. It’s scary.



  • So, this is wild speculation, but I’ll tell you my guess. I think it’s about TSMC, the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturer. China has, for years, been saying that Taiwan isn’t an independent country, but is instead “Chinese Taipei,” a part of China. They’ve been using this idea for years to gradually build towards an invasion of Taiwan. Taiwan, of course, does consider itself an independent nation. The US officially holds no position on this question, which is kinda bonkers; there’s this whole diplomatic dance about whether the US would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. The US might not care if it weren’t for TSMC, which runs the plants that produce a huge proportion of the world’s CPUs and GPUs and AI chips. All the best chip-making technology and know-how is with TSMC. It’s a major vulnerability in the US supply chain.

    China has been ramping things up in the past several years. It’s suspected that a big part of why they’re going along with the Russian invasion of Ukraine is that Russia probably promised to go along with China invading Taiwan in exchange. It’s all very sub-rosa, but there’s been so much military maneuvering and posturing and so on back and forth around Taiwan that it’s been kind of dizzying.

    This is, unfortunately, part of why China was enthusiastic about getting Trump back into the White House. Trump’s policies of isolating the US from its military allies, instigating worldwide trade chaos, and cozying up to dictators make the conditions a lot more ripe for China to make a move on Taiwan. And since the US has never been able to actually talk about Taiwan before, it’s gonna look absolutely batshit to the majority of Americans if China invades Taiwan and the US government suddenly wants to go to war against China over this, which seems like a huge risk. But since, as Trump so eloquently put it, “everything is computer,” we basically can’t stand by and let China take Taiwan without a fight.

    So he’s trying to gin up sentiment against China on his own terms to lay the groundwork for a war that seems increasingly inevitable.


  • Why doesn’t the successful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia without due process rise to this level for you? It’s true he wasn’t a US citizen, but he did have a protected status that let him live and work legally in the US. And given that he was deported without due process, but simply by “administrative error,” there was no point at which he was given the opportunity to bring up his legal status. That is, the thing that would be different if they tried to do this to a citizen is that they would have successfully done it to a citizen. Presumably the courts would order them to bring the citizen back, but they’ve already done that with Abrego Garcia, and the administration isn’t complying.

    If that’s your bright line, maybe check out the boot that’s straddling it.