I wouldn't say Churchill was on the wrong side. Rather, Churchill (and everyone else) should have listened to Patton. Of course, Patton then got relieved of command and a couple months later got murdered for his trouble, I mean was coincidentally paralyzed and later died of his injuries in a low-speed collision that everyone else walked away from fine.
Along those lines, there's this story from yesterday where an Afghan immigrant who came over in the 80s said that San Fran is now worse than he remembers Afghanistan being
This. I've seen a couple ads for this thing and the whole premise of it just seemed pointless to me. I do not need a browser with integrated discord and twitch chat. And why on earth do I need social media and streaming services automatically built in?
I hate the idea that public sector workers are just rewarded for trying.
It is so, so, SO much worse than that. I've said this before on here I think, but I'm a community (junior) college computer science/IT professor. Probably about half my colleagues don't bother giving final exams in their classes. Many of them have a noticeable (10% or even more in some cases) portion of the student's grade in college level coursework (yes, anyone who wants to feel free to make jokes about community colleges being a continuation of high school, I've heard them all, but it's supposed to be college coursework) be "did you show up to class?". Because, when you fail Jimmy there's a chance Jimmy or Jimmy's parents start whining, and that gets escalated to the administration - and THAT gets into how most public sector employees function.
You do not try, unless absolutely necessary. Not only does trying potentially require effort on your part, but if you try you might have to get your boss involved, and if your boss has to get involved and maybe actually do some actual work then you might get in trouble. No, the goal of most public sector employees is "shut up the person on the other end of the desk/phone/etc. so they don't get the boss involved." And in an educational setting, that is just floating students through regardless of how little they actually know, because the lazy incompetent with a C who did nothing all semester will almost certainly be glad to take it and leave, whereas some of them may complain if they get a F. (Fortunately my department chair agrees with me on trying to have some rigor so he is willing to have my back in those cases, but I know at least 2 cases - one of mine and one from another professor in my department - did get escalated past him to the administration this past semester).
(and that holds for probably all public sector stuff, not just education. If you have time, listen to this playlist of a guy [Louis Rossmann, a few of his videos have shown up here before] spending literal days trying to figure out how a lien got placed on his business by New York City, and how to resolve it only to get bounced from department to department to department because no one in the bureaucracy even understands their own systems).
the system itself is flawed beyond belief to produce these results.
That's one way to put it, even then it is worse than anyone outside the system can imagine. At the high school level (and lower) in the US, it is even worse. Thanks primarily to No Child Left Behind (from George W Bush) and also other US Department of Education policies, it is nearly (if not literally) impossible to fail someone in high school. And that is not an exaggeration. You are forbidden from giving someone below a 50% (or is it 60%, not sure) as their grade in the first quarter of the school year even if the student does absolutely no work and gets a 0 on every exam - because a lower score is too difficult for them to make up. If a student does no work all year, and comes to you with 2 weeks left and says "I want to make up all the work I did not do" you are obligated to give them make up assignments, and give them credit for those makeups. And in the unlikely event that someone does fail a class, the district gives them some remedial stuff to do over the summer and then they're considered good to go for the next year. The US educational system is literally training people that they don't need to do anything they don't want to do, then they can just whine if things will end badly and their whining will be catered to.
I thought there already were math and literacy requirements?!
Seriously? Sure, on paper, there are requirements but anyone who has spent even a few minutes looking at educational results knows that those requirements are being consistently not met, and ignored.
In 2019, 40% of US high school seniors failed to achieve "Partial mastery of fundamental knowledge and skills". On reading, that number was 30%. Only 37% were proficient at reading, and only 24% were proficient at math. Plus, the next time that data is looked at, those numbers are going to massively tank due to the damage done by the covid lockdowns (the recent reports on 4th and 8th grade students both showed massive drops)
And that's national level data. In a lot of places, it is even worse. From February, there were 23 schools in Baltimore which did not have a single student proficient in math, and another 20 schools where there were only 1 or 2 students who scored as proficient.
Step 1 in fixing the educational system is start holding students back when they fail to meet the requirements, and start mass firings (beginning with the administration) if the students consistently fail to meet requirements.
The new law that bans gender-affirming care for minors also mandates that adult patients seeking trans health care sign an informed consent form. It also requires a physician to oversee any health care related to transitioning, and for people to see that doctor in person.
Oh no! So restrictive! Whatever can be done with that onerous ban? It must be genocide!
Another new law that allows doctors and pharmacists to refuse to treat transgender people further limits their options.
Again, it can only be genocide!
So, your claim is that this thing will be able to record enough info to make full 3d pictures of people? If so, when you combine that with Google's penchant for saving virtually all data about people that it can, the only way I'm getting anywhere near one of these is with a sledgehammer.
Man, this is a new level of insane even for codes of conduct.
The "misinformation" section alone pretty much lets them ban you for anything they want any time they want.
He said that Disney could have set the film in Haiti after it had overthrown the shackles of slavery, with Ariel meeting her prince against the backdrop of burgeoning racial harmony.
Ummm, but in the previous paragraph you say:
but he argued that children are not well served by overlooking the past.
There was no racial harmony in Haiti after the revolution. Just Dessalines having his soldiers going house to house and murdering nearly every white person in the country.
Absolutely. Of course, in my setting, many of the areas are very prone to flooding, and thus all buildings are elevated about 3 feet off the ground and have stairs you have to climb to enter them (ramps are not a viable option due to limited space availability, sorry).
He's already started trying to figure out how to get a judge to declare NY's Sanctuary City status invalid (no idea why he can't just do it himself, but whatever)
That said, though, he continues to fail at basic pattern recognition because even while doing that he continues to blindly accept every other Democrat idea, as seen in this post from yesterday about NYC declaring Landwhales a protected class
"Fun" fact the article doesn't mention while praising the building:
The temperatures are highest on average in October, at around 21.8 °C | 71.2 °F. In July, the average temperature is 13.9 °C | 57.1 °F. It is the lowest average temperature of the whole year.
Yeah, I'm sure that has no impact at all on the energy usage of the building.
More annoying IMO is the person who just keeps saying "This is a movie for children! We need a refund!"
Yeah, their antics are entirely inappropriate. Yeah, you may well deserve a refund. But, you went to a blatant race grifting cash grab film, then got all surprised when the race grift targets did what they always do, and then just sat there complaining about it (and maybe filming it). You got issues with what's going on? THEN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
The other (increasing) issue with Linux is that a lot of the distros (along with other open source projects) is getting taken over by the Woke crowd. openSUSE, for example, recently had a chunk of their mailing list chewing a guy out for asking why a rainbow icon was needed for the upcoming month of degeneracy, and one of the board members literally said people who don't like rainbow flags are rotten flesh who need to be cut out
Microsoft collecting all my data is bad. But at least Microsoft just wants my money, not my head.
This is the one for me. Especially when it comes to the trannies. "TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS!" Ok, what rights are they missing? No, going into whatever bathroom you want, forcing people to call you whatever you want, and irrevocably mutilating confused children are not human rights.
But in Seattle, where Scoggins himself helped protesters seal off the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in the wake of George Floyd’s death, promotions hinge on mastering these ideological tomes.
Seattle is officially done. A fire chief who actively engaged in activities which disrupted emergency services enough to cost lives should have been fired immediately and investigated for involuntary manslaughter. Instead, we're 3 years later and this guy is still in charge and pouring his ideology into promotion tests and likely will kill more people in doing it as the fire department gets less and less competent.
None of them are great, IMO, for the same reason that the Fallout TV show they're doing is almost certainly going to be trash (even if they kept all the woke nonsense out of it, which we know Amazon is pathologically incapable of doing) - at their core, the games are about individual player choice and experiences. Translating that to a TV screen just doesn't work because then it's Generic McGenericSon doing the main questline in the most generic way possible, losing 90% of the charm of the games (with one exception).
Going worst to best (and assuming the main 5 games):
Daggerfall is far and away the worst. Bethesda had to invent a space/time implosion to get a canon ending out of it, so trying to do it as a TV show would just end up souring people.
Skyrim is second worst - if it is just the Alduin arc it could maybe work, but if you pull the backdrop of the civil war and the Dominion out it the setting becomes a lot more of just generic fantasy. If the civil war and the Dominion are included, though, whichever way the story has the protagonist react to them is going to upset a lot of people (even though Ysgramor definitely had the only correct opinion on dealing with those pointy-ears). And parts of the main quest get weakened heavily without that backdrop (there's no need for the Graybeard peace conference, and Delphine and Esbern's caution becomes pointless. You might be able to make the embassy quest work but even that becomes rather silly without the political backdrop for providing a reason to not just slaughter the Thalmor to get the info)
Oblivion and Morrowind are roughly equal for me, as maybe doable but with big issues. For both, the main quest pulls out a lot easier than Skryim's does, but there's other problems.
For Oblivion, the biggest issue - and Bethesda did this some in Oblivion and ESO did it even more (at least in their trailers) - is that Hollywood will go hog-wild with Dagon = Satan which is not how it should be. Second is the issue that a lot of people have with the game - Oblivion Gates get real repetitive, real fast. If you limit it to just the Kvatch gate and the Great Gate it would solve that problem, but then your story about a daemonic invasion of the world will feature perilously few daemonic invaders. If you do include a bunch of gates (say, adding in the Allies for Bruma optional side mission where you close a gate for each major city), though, then the protagonist gets to do basically the same thing 8 times and by that point audiences will be yawning. Honestly, to adapt something from Oblivion, I think Knights of the Nine would work best (but, as with Skyrim, it risks becoming rather generic at that point)
For Morrowind, the main quest would work the best as stand-alone IMO but I just do not trust them to get the environment and the inherent ... alien-ness (is that a real word?) ... of it right. Plus, a lot of the charm (at least for me) is in books and drawn-out conversations and I don't think multiple episodes of "protagonist discusses metaphysics with Vivec" would go over well.
Which leads us to the last game, and the only one I think could work well - Arena. There's not much in the main quest that couldn't be adapted fairly easily, there's not much in the way of choice or branching paths, and pretty much all the side quests are randomly generated and pretty generic anyway so they could get added in pretty much anywhere if needed. And, on top of that, the main quest makes brief stops in each of the provinces but never spends much time or goes into too much depth in each of them. As a result, you could have 1-2 episode set-pieces in each province, show some cool stuff, and then leave to somewhere else and the next cool set piece, which seems to be the way Hollywood likes doing things.
CNN: Zelensky says fiercely contested Bakhmut ‘not occupied’ as Russia claims capture , timestamp: Updated 5:49 PM EDT, Sun May 21, 2023
NY Times: Zelensky Denies Bakhmut Has Fallen as Biden Pledges Commitment to Ukraine timestamp: May 21, 2023, Updated 6:13 p.m. ET
BBC: https://archive.ph/MIO60 timestamp: 6 hours ago (and I just archived it, so say 12:30-1 PM eastern today).
That's 3 of the biggest US news sources saying it's not fallen yet.
Already exists (sort of).
Darebee is a site with free workout (many of them designed around having minimal to no exercise equipment on hand) and diet guides you can download. Among their workout plans are a number of RPG-themed ones.
I've gone through a few of them and it's nothing groundbreaking but is definitely more interesting than "today we're going to do X repetitions of Y weight" even if the result is similar. Personally would recommend the Age of Pandora one - even if you're not interested in the workout aspect it's got a better story and branching paths than a lot of games (both video and tabletop) today.