The problem is, it’s probably true that a greater than average proportion of certain minorities find themselves in legally questionable circumstances more of the time. This is because they’ve always been treated poorly, and had to adapt to survive.

And now those communities have generational problems and familial mental health issues because the fundamental base of their society and community has been damaged, leading to a vicious cycle of maltreatment and increased criminality.

In general, the solution is rehabilitation, not imprisonment. But it’s going to have to be a multi-generational multi-community effort, because for any specific criminalised individual, there’s no guarantee that one person can be rehabilitated; they might be too far gone.

Don’t get me started on the ham-fisted idea of taking children from affected families and raising them away from “bad influences”. It sounds like a great rehabilitative step on paper, but the evidence shows that it’s almost always the wrong thing to do. And it’s usually a convenient way to destroy families, community morale and culture foreign to those who would take the child away, anyway.

I mean, ideally it would be nice to rewind the clock and get all colonial Europeans out of the Americas (and elsewhere) so that the damage never happened in the first place, but those ships have long since sailed. Literally and figuratively.

The real reason that none of this is being fixed is that it’s cheaper and easier to simply lock up those who fall foul of the law. There’s racial profiling in there too, sure, but that’s all part of the cheap and easy part.

A real fix needs time, money, intelligence, compassion and effort, and those are in woefully limited supply. Sometimes deliberately so.

I’m pretty sure that if you use elevated privileges to run commands you don’t understand, you can break Windows just as much as you can break Linux. Windows might pop up an extra “Are you sure?” box or two though. It’s been a while since I did anything on that OS.

Some kid in a shiny car and a hazmat suit turns up out of nowhere five seconds later and starts shouting and cursing into a bulky radio about having missed it to someone called “Doc”.

Same reasons a bunch of Americans listen to the douchebag they elected President.

Farage is one of Putin’s useful idiots, if not also a puppet. He played a big part in Brexit and he’s vying to be the next PM. Populism is, unfortunately, a disturbingly easy route to do that.

Many of the rest of us wish that the helicopter crash he was in back in 2010 had made him give up politics one way or the other.

All the people saying she looks like Scully and her surname is pretty much the same as the actress who played that character? This idea practically fell into the laps of the people behind these photos.

Frankly, I would not be surprised if she had it as an office nickname before this even occurred to them.

Any conclusions drawn from a child’s personality can’t necessarily then be applied to a parent. Hannah Montana Linux was ultimately a Debian, but it was so far from stock Debian that the comparison makes no sense. The same, I assume, applies with the Arch-derivative that runs on Steam decks. We’re not in Arch-kansas any more, Toto.

The closest to “Windows with nerdnip” is probably Linux Mint, but even then that’s a fairly unkind comparison.

I use LMDE, btw.

Always have a Bacchup.

Yeah, I used pods for a few years. Went back to plain old liquid because this would happen once in a while. Or else this stuff would start gumming up the seals or out of sight waiting for the next time I used the machine.

As for the cause(s) take your pick from: water too cold, not enough water, tangled item(s) creating temporary pockets that only open up late in the cycle (which could be caused by:), overloaded machine.

Out-crazy them. Turn up at 12:20 and be ready by 12:25. Shout at them for not being ready when you are. Then when they start turning up at that time, move back to 12:10. Then 12.

And then when they’re turning up and ready at 12, go back to 12:35 and tell them you don’t know what they’re talking about, you’ve always started at that time, it says so in the official documents and you’ve never varied. Tell them they’re crazy.

I mean, hey, if you’re going to quit anyway, might as well have some fun before you do.

Will no one rid us of these turbulent shits?

.13

Well there’s your problem.

(Not 13 specifically. Just the odd numbered sub-version in general. But 13 if you’re superstitious, I guess.)

Schwa is a vowel, so it would be the long e, not schwa on “the”.

A possible exception is when the following word begins with a long e, and people might actually break the rule to make it clear where one word ends and the other begins. Or rather they insert a glottal stop before the vowel sound - I believe this is called “hard attack” - and since a glottal stop is technically a consonant, that allows the rule-break.

That is, something like “the eel” could go either way, but there’d be a very obvious glottal stop before “eel” if the speaker chose the schwa version of “the”, and they would have made that choice for clarity, to avoid sounding like they’d said “theel”.

The vowel sound rule (or a related one) is also used for which vowel sound goes at the end of the definite article “the”, that is, the sound the ‘e’ makes.

Usually the last vowel sound of “the” is a schwa, arguably the most common vowel sound in English, but before another vowel sound, it becomes “ee”, or what other European languages might write “i”.

There might even be an intrusive y (or j as used in Norse and Germanic languages) depending on the speaker. i.e. “The apple” may well be pronounced “thi(y)apple”, and a fellow native speaker wouldn’t notice. “The ball” has the usual schwa. As does “the usual schwa” for that matter.

Sound it out. The first sound is a vowel sound so “an elephant”.

Dukat would be proud that the humans in an alternate timeline, where he’s fictional, went and named something after him for all his great deeds.

And then he’d find out why we’re really naming it after him and he’d try every underhanded trick in the book and a handful of new ones in order to find a way into our universe to show us how great he really is.

Ratio’d

I’m not so sure about that. A mind in a machine lacks the chemical soup in the blood and tissues which drives behaviours far more than we’d perhaps like to admit.

Emulating a personality means emulating the whole human or else what you’ll get will be an approximation, and perhaps not even a very good one.

Just because these AIs are trustworthy doesn’t mean that the next ones will be. It’s always nice to be sure that what is being said is what is claimed to be being said.

A similar situation is when governments not on friendly terms, who each have a different language, each bring their own bilingual translator to the negotiating table, for each to be sure the other translator isn’t hiding something, or misunderstanding something.

It’s unlikely that a single translator would be underhanded (or misunderstood) like that, but everyone feels happier knowing that it’s even less likely with the extra safeguard.

So we’re led to believe.

It would nice to be sure though, wouldn’t it?

The Fediverse is also a sewer of both overt and covert Antisemitism

Is this a problem unique to the Fediverse, or is this a case that it’s more rampant here? Or does it only seem like it?

My feeds are fairly well curated, or perhaps you might say “blinkered”, so I don’t see a lot of it. Or maybe I don’t see what’s right in front of me, which is why I ask, since you definitely see it better than I can.

(This is not an attempt at a bad faith argument; I’m firmly anti-anti-Semitism, and I’m not saying it’s not there. Frankly, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t any. Anywhere there’s people, their prejudices generally follow.)