be_excellent_to_each_other @ be_excellent_to_each_other @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Thanks that was a great analysis. Once you started in I did recall about half those details, but mostly I guess it needs to go on my reread pile since I've forgotten so much.

As a tangentially related side - one of the first emails I ever sent when I first started to use email in about 1996 was to Anne McCaffrey.

I was in the "everything you can imagine is on the internet" phase of just looking up random things, and somehow I found her email address.

I sent her a short note about how much I'd loved her books, and she sent me a brief, nice note back.

That email is long lost to the twists and turns of life - I didn't even understand the concept of keeping backups back then (Edit - that's not true, it would be more accurate to say I just never bothered) - but it was a cool little interaction that I always remember fondly. 🙂

I didn't say no conditions anyone would accept, I said no conditions you are going to accept. You wouldn't be carrying water to this level if you would.

I thought Lana was voiced by Katey Sagal for the longest time. Still catch myself thinking that sometimes.

I have a mouse and a can of sparkling water. My 60% has a different colorway. I'm running a different distro.

Otherwise - eerily close.

Ah, sorry for being so serious.

so it’d need careful handling of things like Lessa and F’lar’s relationship and such. And maybe, you know, keep Jaxom the hell away from Corana.

I read the original two trilogies in the 80s so I've forgotten some bits, but what were the things that would be problematic today? I don't think I remember any details relating to the above. Lessa is always one of the first people I think of when someone says "so and so was the first strong woman in scifi" and it's a character that came 30+ years later.

I only just read the Amber books a couple of years ago myself; I don't know how I'd missed them. Very much unique stories in my experience, really unlike anything else I've ever read. I did enjoy them, but I think I respected what he did as a storyteller more than I enjoyed them, if that makes any sense.

The refugees leaving through Egypt don’t?

How could they? Reiterating my prior point:

They are killing them as fast as they think the international community will tolerate. They won't kill them fast enough to provoke any major entity into opposing them, they will just stay firmly in the "everyone will wag their fingers at us and argue about whether it's right" zone, which is where they sit currently.

So the fact that this leaves open the possibility that some people get to flee their homes in terror, knowing that their friends and loved ones who refuse to be chased out of their homes by Israel are likely to be killed by the IDF, is one of the things that you feel might convince me that Israel doesn't have genocidal intent?

And what will make you believe genocide isn’t the end goal?

Clearly nothing that you're going to accept.

That's a false dichotomy. They are killing them as fast as they think the international community will tolerate. They won't kill them fast enough to provoke any major entity into opposing them, they will just stay firmly in the "everyone will wag their fingers at us and argue about whether it's right" zone, which is where they sit currently.

Unless you have very specialized requirements (and quite possibly you do) the solution is usually to unhook yourself from thinking of needing specific programs and to instead focus on needing to perform specific tasks. (Then finding the Linux way to perform that task.)

Barring that, the codeweavers suggestion is a good one. I used it in my early days when I thought I couldn't live without particular pieces of Windows software and although that was several years ago, even then it was pretty good about being able to easily run arbitrary Windows software. IMO it's cheap enough to be worth the investment.

If you truly have bespoke requirements that just can't be satisfied by either of the above, staying on Windows may legitimately be your best option.

More generally - if you decide to take this step, expect to have to learn to use a computer substantially differently than you have in the past. It's not harder; in many ways it's easier. But if you are very experienced and comfortable with Windows, a lot of concepts are going to feel foreign to you. Tackle one task at a time and your experiences will build upon each other. Go into it expecting to have to learn, and you'll do fine. Bizarrely I find the least tech-savvy folks sometimes have the easiest time transitioning.

I'll eventually do the same, but I have to admit that I find witnessing their trolling to be more entertaining than blocking them for now.

I'm not sure they've done anything bannable. They have horrible opinions that I strongly disagree with, but I don't remember seeing anything worse than that.

Really?

Yep that would be just the picture to post about an information freedom activist driven to death by the US justice system. That's why it says "Aaron Swartz day" in OP, because it's a pic of Rishi Sunak.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AaronSwartz

Downpunxx will be here any minute to let us know that the Hamas was stockpiling weapons under the UN headquarters, using them as human shields, and the UN workers in that building were complicit and happy to let them do so.

They'll only move as far left as they must to get votes, and sadly that's not very far left these days.

Even if we accept the casualty figures provided by Hamas (and I don’t)

I don't know why you wouldn't, unless your justification is just your own bigotry.

One snippet out of a lengthy article.

Many experts consider figures provided by the ministry reliable, given its access, sources and accuracy in past statements.

“Everyone uses the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry because those are generally proven to be reliable,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “In the times in which we have done our own verification of numbers for particular strikes, I’m not aware of any time which there’s been some major discrepancy.”

Shakir said Human Rights Watch would not use figures provided by parties with “a propensity to misrepresent information.”

Why news outlets and the U.N. rely on Gaza’s Health Ministry for death tolls

And another:

Throughout four wars and numerous bloody skirmishes between Israel and Hamas, U.N. agencies have cited the Health Ministry’s death tolls in regular reports. The International Committee of the Red Cross and Palestinian Red Crescent also use the numbers.

In the aftermath of war, the U.N. humanitarian office has published final death tolls based on its own research into medical records.

In all cases the U.N.’s counts have largely been consistent with the Gaza Health Ministry’s, with small discrepancies.

— 2008 war: The ministry reported 1,440 Palestinians killed; the U.N. reported 1,385.

— 2014 war: The ministry reported 2,310 Palestinians killed; the U.N. reported 2,251.

— 2021 war: The ministry reported 260 Palestinians killed; the U.N. reported 256.

What is Gaza’s Ministry of Health and how does it calculate the war’s death toll?

You’re missing my point.

Sorry, and thanks for claifying.

there’s a cultural element that no one (including Democrats, for some reason) aren’t willing to address.

Is that cultural problem something other than "a good chunk of gun owners fetishize their guns and the 2A itself to the point where preserving those things matters much more to them than the fact that we've now traumatized a generation of kids with active shooter drills, and death by guns has become the top killer of children" - because I can certainly agree that this is a cultural problem, but can't begin to imagine what we'd do about it that doesn't involve changes to our gun laws.

Clearly empathy and logic hold no sway with folks who feel that way sooo...

Local venture capitalist Paul Martino bankrolled the Republican campaigns and donated a majority of their funding — $239,000 of the $279,000-plus total. Martino – whose wife, Aarati Martino, ran for the board as a Republican this year – spent a total of $500,000 on school board races across Pennsylvania in 2021.

"Martino declined NPR's requests for comment."

Yeah, I bet he did.

• Laziness
• Reported by brown people
• Would require investigative effort not involving shooting things

Take your pick.

You'd think that only until you realized protecting themselves and their jobs is really the only thing that motivates police these days. Reported by a brown person and no explicit order to investigate? They've got marijuana to smell on passers-by how are they supposed to take time out for body parts?

I already replied to a similar comment hours before you posted this one. In summary, you are moving the goalposts of the specific comment chain I replied to, and in any case pretending these are not weapons designed to kill doesn't strengthen your argument, it makes it look disingenuous.

If you want to argue in favor of gun rights, be as honest as the other guy. You are arguing for the right to kill people in specific situations. I'm not saying there isn't some merit to that argument, I'm saying be honest about it, because this whole "nuh-uh they weren't really designed to kill people" thing is dishonest and doesn't serve your purposes.

Thanks for your honesty.