Yeah, there have been a few instances of that happening. Notably, it happened when the governor of Arkansas tried to use the national guard to bar black students from entering a (recently desegregated) white school in 1957. Eisenhower federalized the guard, and ordered them to protect the black students instead. And the governor was forced to watch as all of “his” troops (who were already on the ground and ready to work because the governor had called them in) about-faced and started following the POTUS’ orders instead of his. It backfired on the governor pretty spectacularly, because they wouldn’t have been in place to enforce the desegregation unless he had ordered them to be there in the first place.

And Walz isn’t dumb. He undoubtedly knows that story. He doesn’t want a repeat of that, where he calls in the guard, then has them turned against him.

As much as anybody could “win” at war, I don’t think it would be possible with Trump as Commander in Chief. He wouldn’t have a head for tactics, and his blatant narcissism would refuse to allow generals (who are educated in war tactics and know what to do) to make decisions for him.

Realistically? If war broke out, I could see congress using it as a catalyst to finally impeach him. At least by removing Trump from office, they’d have someone who would actually listen to counsel.

But if Trump remains in office, he’d inevitably end up doing whatever is best for Russia. And that means he’d likely end up with the US in a war of attrition, dragging things out as long as possible, with each side taking large losses while Putin sits back and watches it all play out (and quietly takes Ukraine while everyone is distracted by their own wars).

Yeah, mods on proton get weird sometimes, especially if they require things like Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable packages/runtimes. I think ProtonTricks allows you to install those directly in the prefix, but I personally haven’t had any success with that. Every time I try something that involves stuff like that, I end up getting white screens, black screens, or just full CTDs.

Yeah, the sad reality is that there are some critical pieces of software that just outright refuse to support other OSes. Personally, I’m forced to use Macs at work because QLab is the industry standard for my line of work, and that software is only available on Mac.

The US Military “Simple Sabotage” handbook literally says that if you can’t overtly sabotage things (like attacking supply lines, bombing factories, etc.), then you should try to covertly sabotage things by getting a job in middle management. Then just do your very best to embody the phrase “middle manglement”.

Demand unreasonable deadlines from other departments, to force them to drop what they’re doing and focus on your stuff. Fail to forward things where they need to go. Miss your own department’s deadlines, so their projects are delayed. Fire too many employees, or “encourage” them to quit. Fail to hire employees to fill vacancies. Implement tons of repetitive busywork to force employees to spend extra time on projects. Make sure vendors don’t get paid on time. Etc, etc… Basically, do everything you can to gum up the works.

Ratcheting taxes for unoccupied houses and apartment units. Allow a grace period of one year, to allow for flips. But after that, every home you own after the first is considered unoccupied if it is vacant for more than three months of the year. And taxes on vacant homes become increasingly expensive as you own more and more of them.

Like the first vacant house you own may be near a normal tax rate, the second makes both more expensive, the third makes all three super expensive, etc… And these tax penalties should get expensive fast. Like up to (or even over) 100% if you’re sitting on more than like five or six properties. Then take the proceeds of these higher taxes, and put them towards first time homebuyer assistance programs. I’d even go so far as to say that renting a single family home shouldn’t totally eliminate the tax, only reduce it. This would solve the three largest issues with the housing market right now.

First, it solves the “sitting on vacant houses to drive up the price of rent” problem. Actively force landlords to keep their apartments and houses full, driving down the price of rent. If the unit is occupied, the tax is lower. And again, even the most expensive landlords should only be able to feasibly own three or four extra properties before the taxes get prohibitively expensive, even after being mitigated by occupation.

Second, it solves the “buying a dozen houses and only selling one of them” problem. Corporations do this to be able to game the market and drive up prices on the few they do sell. But by making it prohibitively expensive to sit on vacant houses, you preemptively wreck any kinds of profits they would make by sitting on them.

Third, it would allow for more low interest loans for first time home buyers, and could even be used to offset the potential downpayment costs.

But of course, this will basically never be implemented, because the lawmakers are all bribed by the corporations that own thousands of vacant homes.

Which is a concern, but can largely be mitigated by encouraging work-from-home jobs. If people are able to reliably WFH, (and COVID proved that many jobs can be done entirely from home), then the local job market doesn’t tend to matter as much.

If you like that about Picard, you’ll probably hate Kirk. Kirk frequently wipes his ass with the Prime Directive. His relationship with Spock frequently boils down to some variation of the following:

Kirk: “I’m gonna break the rules cuz it makes my job easier.”
Spock: “No, please do not. That is against the rules.”
Kirk: Does it anyways.

I will say that the Kirk/Picard contrast is largely due to who they are paired with on the bridge. As individual characters, Kirk is a giant nerd while Picard is basically Indiana Jones. But their first mates make them seem like the complete opposites…

Kirk is a giant nerd. But he’s paired with the even-tempered and by-the-book Spock, and frequently goes on away missions… So Kirk seems super wild and impulsive in comparison, because Spock is constantly nagging him about the rules. Picard is a dude who goes hiking through alien jungles for fun. But he’s paired with the handsome and impulsive Riker, who tends to go on away missions in Picard’s stead… So Picard looks super calm in comparison. But if you put the two captains together without their first mates, Picard would 100% be the wild one. The only real outlier is that Kirk can’t seem to keep it in his pants, (often during his away missions), while Picard tends to be picky about who he beds.

I actually tended to dislike the holodeck episodes, because it always seemed to boil down to some variation of “the holodeck is {malfunction} and the ship will {bad thing} because {technobabble}, unless we go in and manually turn it off. But oh no, {malfunction} means the holodeck controls are disabled and the safeties are turned off!”

I know they were struggling for human plots in the deep of space, and the holodeck was usually their way to have humans surrounded by other humans in places that weren’t distinctly alien. But that meant a lot of the holodeck plots usually needed some sort of broader impetus to get the crew to engage with it. Because the stakes are low if the holodeck is working properly and the safeties are enabled; Whenever things get tense, the crew can just pause the simulation and exit the holodeck. So lots of the holodeck episodes ended up putting a proverbial gun to the crew’s heads with “shit’s broke, and it’ll do bad things to the ship if you just refuse to enter the deck. Now go pretend to be {period character} for the plot!”

So can a mini-M&Ms tube…

Restoring old business laptops will usually get you a better laptop than buying a budget new one that costs the same.

Retired business machines are also fantastic for “server in a bedroom closet” types of setups. When IT retires an entire department’s desktops, they’re forced to list them for sale, because the bean counters want to see that they got something back from them. IT doesn’t care how much they sell for, and are just listing them to get them out of the way. And since they’re listing like 50 of them at a time, the listings end up competing with each other to lower the price. No gamer is selling their two year old battle station unless they need the money, which means they’ll be looking to get top dollar for it… But the bored Help Desk 1 worker got assigned the task of selling them because nobody else wanted to do it, sees it as busywork, and knows they won’t personally see a single cent of the resale price. So they don’t care what the final price is.

The machines are usually very lightly used. Typically only used for running MS Office, answering emails, and browsing Facebook. This can be true even for the top-of-the-line laptops… Because the CEO will throw a fit if he notices his laptop is older or cheaper than the graphic artists’ laptops are… Even though the graphic artists need a dedicated GPU and lots of RAM for their CAD, video editing, etc… While the CEO only uses it to answer like three emails a week. So the C-suite tends to get upgrades to the newest model every year, even though they don’t need it. And last year’s model gets listed for sale.

Yeah, there really hasn’t been a good alternative for fabric. Lots of people were quick to jump on the “lol join the 21st century and just buy it online” side of the argument, but buying fabric is an extremely tactile experience. You need to feel it to know that it will have the correct texture, weight, see it will hang, which direction(s) it will stretch, how much it will stretch, how easy is is to stretch, etc for what you’re trying to make, because all of those qualities will heavily impact the end product. Those things are difficult to quantify, and nearly impossible to judge purely from photos on an online listing. Two fabrics that look identical online can have vastly different weights, stretch, textures, etc…

Yup, they estimate the 80th percentile.

Basically, civil engineers estimate the top speed that 80% of drivers will be comfortable going on the road. And that estimated number is now the speed limit. That’s also the number they use to time traffic lights for ideal flow. That means 20% will naturally feel like it’s too slow, and will naturally end up speeding unless they constantly watch their speedometer. Because the number is estimated off of comfort, and 20% of drivers naturally feel comfortable going faster… And anyone below that 80th percentile will end up causing congestion as they crawl along below the limit and cause traffic lights to stop drivers who otherwise would have had a green.

And it’s worth noting that, in many cases, very little actual math or real world data goes into that estimation. It frequently boils down to a civil engineer basically going “well other streets like this one have a speed limit of 40, so 40 will probably work for this one too…” Civil engineering does have a lot of math for traffic, (for instance, turn lane length is determined by how many vehicles they expect to use it per hour,) but speed limits are often just a best-guess situation.

The article clearly states that the mod only allowed paying users to actually play multiplayer. So the mod devs were clearly looking to make some money off of it.

Final_FINAL_Project_V3_Master_Rev4_DAVEUSETHISONE.doc

Yup. The reverse proxy takes http/https requests from the WAN, and forwards them to the appropriate services on your LAN. It will also do things like automatically maintain TLS certificates, so https requests can be validated. Lastly, it can usually do some basic authentication or group access stuff. This is useful to ensure that only valid users or devices are able to reach services that otherwise don’t support authentication.

So for example, let’s say you have a service called ExampServ running on 192.168.1.50:12345. This port is not forwarded, and the service is not externally available on the WAN without the reverse proxy.

Now you also have your reverse proxy service, listening on 192.168.1.50:80 and 192.168.1.50:443… Port 80 (standard for http requests) and 443 (standard for https requests) are forwarded to it from the WAN. Your reverse proxy is designed to take requests from your various subdomains, ensure they are valid, upgrade them from http to https (if they originated as http), and then forward them to your various services.

So maybe you create a subdomain of exampserv.example.com, with an A-NAME rule to forward to your WAN IPv4 address. So any requests for that subdomain will hit ports 80 (for http) or 443 (for https) on your WAN. These http and https requests will be forwarded to your reverse proxy, because those ports are forwarded. Your reverse proxy takes these requests. It validates them (by upgrading to https if it was originally an http request, verifying that the https request isn’t malformed, that it came from a valid subdomain, prompting the user to enter a username and password if that is configured, etc.)… After validating the request, it forwards the traffic to 192.168.1.50:12345 where your ExampServ service is running.

Now your ExampServ service is available internally via the IP address, and externally via the subdomain. And as far as the ExampServ service is concerned, all of the traffic is LAN, because it’s simply communicating with the reverse proxy that is on the same network. The service’s port is not forwarded directly (which is a security risk in and of itself), it is properly gated behind an authentication wall, and the reverse proxy is ensuring that all requests are valid https requests, with a proper TLS handshake. And (most importantly for your use case), you can have multiple services running on the same device, and each one simply uses a different subdomain in your DNS and reverse proxy rules.

Yeah, Putin could release 100% verifiably true proof that Trump rapes kids every Tuesday… And nothing would change. Trump would continue raping kids every Tuesday, while republicans circle the wagons, Trump fires any investigators who try to dig into it, and maybe the democrats would write some strongly worded letters (to be read by nobody). Fox News would report that it’s all a hoax made up by the evil dems (if they reported on it at all) and Trump’s voters would believe every word of it.

I mean, hate crimes are very real. But you don’t typically get charged just for hate; the “hate crime” charge is a modifier to an existing crime. For instance, if you attack someone, it’s assault (or battery, depending on where you live). But if you have a history of posting about hating black people, you attacked a black person, and witnesses heard you drop the N-word while you were attacking them? Now it’s a hate crime, which is an upgraded form of the same assault charge, with steeper penalties if you’re found guilty.

Let’s say you’re in America, posting on Facebook about how much you hate black people. You wouldn’t have been charged with hate just for posting about hating black people, because that would violate your first amendment right to free speech. Maybe you’d be banned from the site, (if the company refuses to platform you and your speech), but that’s not protected by the first amendment; private companies aren’t required to give you a platform. The government isn’t censoring you in that scenario, so it’s not a violation of your first amendment right to free speech.

The “crime” part of the “hate crime” is the key factor. You wouldn’t be charged with a crime until you actually committed a crime, and hateful speech by itself (as long as it isn’t inciting others to violence), isn’t criminal. The “inciting violence” part is the difference between “I wish the POTUS would die” and “you should kill the POTUS”. The former is legal, while the latter is not. So posts about hating black people would be legal, but posts calling for attacking black people would be inciting violence.

And if you attack a black person, then that criminal charge could be upgraded to a hate crime charge, if the prosecutor believes they can prove that you committed the crime out of hate. And they can 100% use your previous “I hate all black people and wish they would die” Facebook posts against you, to build a case that you targeted the victim out of hate.

Phew, I’m sure the automod is going to have a field day with this comment…

Worth noting that dementia often affects fine motor control, like the ability to independently control your fingers. It usually becomes apparent when people lose the ability to dress themselves, (buttons, zippers, and buckles become hard or impossible), cook for or feed themselves, (chopping ingredients, using utensils, etc. becomes difficult), and write/type.

For real though, I’d be wearing that like a god damned badge of honor. I’d be making t-shirts that said “The President of the United States told me to f*ck off after I called him a pedo protector.” I’d get enamel pins made from the grainy footage of Trump throwing the bird, to wear on my gear. I’d have that photo printed as a vinyl sticker to keep on my water bottle. I’d be writing and/or drawing children’s books about how adults making you keep secrets from your parents is bad, and those adults should be reported. I’d be doing interviews and podcasts, where I can call him a pedo protector with the widest audience possible.

I hope that dude’s pillow is always cool, his socks are always dry, his teeth are always healthy, and his cock is sucked so hard (by a consenting adult!) that he gains an inch and a half.