SwingingTheLamp @ SwingingTheLamp @midwest.social

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2 yr. ago

Question: I know that Celsius is one of the accepted SI units, but is it really metric? (SI includes a number of definitely non-metric units.) And, if being expressed as a decimal number is enough to qualify it as metric, then isn't the Fahrenheit scale also metric? It is also decimalized, and also defined in terms of the SI unit (Kelvin).

It's gratifying to see President Biden quoted in an interview saying that he doesn't think that The Biggest Loser will concede peacefully. It may be his job to order a former President detained for national security reasons, probably at Guantanamo Bay, so he's inaccessible to the insurgent mob trying to free him.

He wanted a photo op of himself looking impotent and awkward? Maybe he's as weird as they say.

How about a government-sponsored, non-profit authentication service? That is, it should be impossible to get a loan, open a line of credit, or anything else in somebody's name, without the lending institution verifying that it's actually on behalf of the named individual. Eliminate the security-through-obscurity technique of using bits of easily-leaked personal information as a poor substitute for actual authentication.

I mean, (as a comparative example) I have to go through an OAuth2 consent dialog to connect a third-party app to my email account, yet somebody can saddle me with huge debts based on knowing a 9-digit number that just about everybody knows? It's the system that's broken, tightening up the laws on PII is just a band-aid.

Deep state fake news!

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, either, but my preferred suspicion is that it's aliens. They've tried a number of techniques, from implanting mind-control devices (Mitch McConnell and the way his face carries a look of horrified disgust at the things they make him do) to direct infiltration by putting one of their agents in an ill-fitting human suit (Ted Cruz). Ultimately, they seem to have given up the finesse approach, and settled on lobotomizing humans with existing personality disorders to create a RAID (redundant array of inexpensive dipshits) to simply overwhelm our system of government.

It's the only explanation that really makes sense to me.

I just checked, the MBFC web site explains that it has an American perspective on left vs. right. The Overton Window in United States politics stretches from far-right (Republicans) to right-center (Democrats). From a lot of Americans' perspectives, the BBC is a bunch of counterculture hippies.

Sorry, that I'm not certain of, since that's an installer-specific thing. I think I'd try that option first, and see if the installer lets you choose the empty drive.

Just spitballing here, but if I read this correctly, you pulled the Windows drive, installed Mint, and then put the Windows drive back in alongside the Mint drive? If so, that might be the issue.

UEFI firmware looks for a special EFI partition on the boot drive, and loads the operating system's own bootloader from there. The Windows drive has one. When you pulled the Windows drive to install Mint on another drive, Mint had to create an EFI partition on its disk to store its bootloader.

Then, when you put the Windows disk back in, there were two EFI partitions. Perhaps the UEFI firmware was looking for the Windows bootloader in the EFI partition on the Mint disk. It would of course not find it there. In my experience, Windows recovery is utterly useless in fixing EFI boot issues.

It's possible to rebuild the Windows EFI bootloader files manually, but since you don't mind blowing away both OS installs, I'd say just install Mint on the second drive while both of them are installed in the system, so the installer puts the Mint bootloader on the same EFI partition as the Windows one. With the advent of EFI, Windows will still sometimes blow away a Linux bootloader, but Linux installers are very good at installing alongside Windows. If it does get stuffed up, there's a utility called Boot-Repair, that you can put on a USB disk, that works a lot better than Windows recovery.

Why that fellow has such a sterling reputation for honesty and integrity, I can't imagine why nobody believes him when he says he doesn't plan to implement it. /s

Show of hands, did anybody think that this was not Russia's goal in convicting these guys?

Paved roads don't just naturally occur, though. That lifestyle is already an insane prospect, unsustainabke but for the large tax subsidy required to enable it.

I live in the U.S. That comment is 100% true, no matter where one lives.

Ha, I thought that the blatant contradiction about having too much space and therefore not enough space would make the joke obvious, but I guess not.

Also, a Canyonero isn't a real vehicle. It was a joke from The Simpsons.

Yes, that's what Europeans don't understand about America. When we go to, say, Wal Mart, there's only one. We have to go to Bentonville, AR. Not so bad for us here in the Midwest, but the residents of Alaska have it particularly tough. And since you go to Wal Mart to pick up milk, we can't go by public transport. It has to be by car, or better yet, drive the Canyonero. (No train schedule can predict when the milk runs out!)

The country is so big, and we have so much empty land, there's just simply no room to build more stores near where people live. What kind of madness would that be?!

Okay, you do you, but my father's career was as an AODA counselor, so I've heard a lot of stories, and "I just use it to relax" comes out of the mouths of alcoholics so often it's a cliché. There are other ways to relax without the long-term damage to one's health.

I'm too old to be an incel(tm); I was going through it back when the term incel was coined as a neutral descriptor. I'd like to think that I wouldn't have gone down that rabbit hole, because critical thinking comes very naturally to me, and the idea that it was women's fault didn't ever quite sit right with me. Women aren't a monolith; they don't get together and scheme. But if the incel phenomenon had been around, well, who knows? The camaraderie and validation of a group is incredibly beguiling.

Anyway, I was dealing with depression, which brought along a lot of other problems that caused me to be deeply angry and unsatisfied with life. One thing that really woke me up, oddly, was the song Toledo by Dan Bern. Specifically, the lyrics, "Maybe all the things you thought you got coming to you / Ain't coming to you / Not in this life / And maybe all of the promises you thought were broken / Were never really made" In short, where was I getting the idea that life was fair, or that the universe owed me, well, anything? Not quite out of my posterior, because many cultural messages tell you that. But those messages are wrong.

So I decided to make the best of what life gives me, work on my own issues, and to have fun and do interesting things solo. And wouldn't you know it, a year later...

...I was still single. What, do you buy into that trash about how you find "the one" when you stop looking? I'm still single years and years later. BUT! That's okay, because "giving up looking" isn't some fancy, new way of low-key actually-looking. The benefit has been being more satisfied with life, and doing fun and interesting things.

Four or five a day and not getting drunk? Holy shit, that's a tolerance! If this isn't tongue-in-cheek, I say examine the list a little more closely.

TIL that this architectural style came from Frank Lloyd Wright's use of this neologism, which seems to have originated with Scottish writer James Duff Law in 1865. And, that people have been trying to make this change happen for over 150 years. (Seems to me a review of the tale of King Canute and the tide is in order.)

I would just like to point out that this is an example of the tried-and-true rhetorical technique of shrugging off issues with a dismissive "that's not new." We see politicians and spokespersons do it all the time, because, maddeningly, it works.

But, it doesn't actually matter whether it's new, does it? Couple things: The Heritage Foundation has put out a similar document every election cycle for decades, but the contents have changed; this iteration could be (is!) much, much worse. Even if Heritage had been putting out the same plan all along, and we didn't object then, well, we can still object now. We don't have to keep making the same mistakes in the future just because we made them in the past.