I tend to think of and describe myself as a conservative, but don’t align myself with the Republican party at all (I am registered to vote Republican to try to weed out the worst of their lunatics in the primaries, but it’s gonna be a cold day in hell before I vote for one in a general election with the way things are going)

In my view, which absolutely isn’t the view of the Republicans or conservatives as a whole, the point of conservatism is to just pump the breaks and slow things down to make sure all the "I"s are dotted and "t"s crossed to make sure things are actually going to work as intended.

Liberals/leftists/progressives should basically be the “idea guys” coming up with big general plans for what they want to happen

Then the conservatives would be sort of the bean-counters/logistics/nuts-and-bolts sort of guys. They shouldn’t be there to outright oppose the liberal ideas, they’re there to point out the problems with their plans and make sure they’re addressed before we commit to some half-assed plan.

I’m certainly no expert on Namibian history and culture, most of what I know comes from just now skimming the Wikipedia article

But a couple things jumping out at me

The area was at one point a German colony (and also at one point they carried out a genocide against the Herero people that some think may have been sort of a model for the Holocaust)

They also had apartheid similar to South Africa.

And to this day a whole lot of Africa doesn’t exactly have stellar access to education, the internet, etc. and even in some parts of the world that do have better access, there’s a lot of people in other parts of the world outside of Europe and the Americas who don’t quite grok* just how bad the Nazis were because it’s not something they cover so extensively in their history classes. I feel like every couple years I see some story come out of Asia somewhere where some business opens up with a Nazi theme and they don’t get why so many people in the West are mad about it.

So kind of taking a couple stabs in the dark here

It could be that his father named him after Hitler maybe trying to soften things up for him, like maybe the white people at the top of the apartheid heiarchy would be a little nicer if he was named after the biggest whitest racist he could think of.

Or maybe they were in a bit of an information bubble where he just really didn’t fully understand how bad Hitler and the Nazis were and went with it because he thought it had a nice ring to it

Maybe it was a way to give a giant middle finger to racists. Sort of a “haha, how do you like your leader’s name when it’s on a black kid? Suck it Nazis.”

Or maybe it was something else. That’s just a couple thoughts off the top of my head.

*fuck muskrat for trying to steal this word for his own bullshit.

Went after a worm on a hook, easily the biggest mistake of many fishes lives.

I actually looked up the actual (alleged) French quote, and it’s “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”

So I actually hit the nail on the head, it’s literally “let them eat brioche”

Still can’t really be attributed to Marie Antoinette, and it’s not unlikely that the entire anecdotal was just made up entirely

It’s actually not terribly uncommon for people to take roadkill if it’s fresh and in decent shape.

In my state (PA) you’re supposed to report it to the game commission within 24 hours, and you’re supposed to surrender the hide and antlers to them unless you pay for a separate permit.

Same boat, my computer is basically the computer my wife built probably about 12 years ago before we got together, it was pretty beefy for its time. I basically stuck her old components in a new box (and also stuck a newer graphics card in it because I got a really good deal on a used 2060)

Still manages to run most games out there on acceptable (to me) settings.

Made the switch to Linux about a week ago, no major issues, some things are arguably running better now. It’s not without its hiccups but so far things have gone pretty smoothly.

EDIT: went with Mint over Zorin though.

As far as terminal tutorials, so far the best I’ve found is LabEx, but I feel like it’s lacking in a lot of ways.

First of all it definitely feels designed to push you towards paying for a subscription. And while their pricing honestly isn’t too terrible, it’s more than I want to spend on this. Nothing against companies and people being paid for making a product but it feels a little against the FOSS spirit to me.

Second I’ve mostly been trying to use it on my phone and that experience is just kind of shitty. Personally I kind of want to learn in short bursts here and there throughout the day when I have downtime at work or whatever. If I have time to sit down in front of my computer it’s probably because I want to be doing something fairly specific with it and it’s probably not to just practice my terminal use, so a better phone experience would be great.

And finally, it just seems a bit over-engineered, at least for what I want to use it for. It seems like it’s spinning up a whole Linux VM with a desktop environment and such for me to interact with through my browser just for me to type stuff into a terminal and read their tutorial. It does have other courses and maybe all of that is more useful there, but it seems like a bit much for me.

Which kind of shows how easy it is to take certain things as “obvious.”

I’m a new convert to Linux. I played around with it a bit probably about 15 years ago, but never did much seriously with it. Finally bit the bullet about a week ago between the windows 10 EOL and deciding that Linux gaming is finally in a place I can live with.

I’m a reasonable tech-literate person, I’m no sys admin but I’m the family “guy who’s good with computers” I did a few semesters as a computer science student and was reasonably good at it before deciding to go in a different direction.

And while things are working just fine for most of my general computing needs, I feel like I’m in a bit of a weird place right now, kind of like I’m back to being a kid with my family’s first Compaq in the 90s. I can play games and do my homework and make my computer do some cool things, but I know there’s more cool stuff I can make it do but I don’t know how yet.

I have about 30 years of know-how and tips and tricks built up on how to make windows bend to my will, but I don’t have that for Linux yet, and it’s not exactly a great feeling.

And I feel like there’s sort of a gap in the Linux community to help the slightly-above-average-computer-person Linux-convert like me to build up to where they were as a windows user.

Like there’s a wealth of knowledge on choosing a distro and installing it, alternatives to common windows programs, etc.

And then a big gap

And then people who have a whole home computer lab, self-hosting everything, doing serious programming as a hobby, etc.

And in the middle are a bunch of forum posts where someone asks a question, and some kind of computer sage emerges from the ether, tells you to transcribe a magic spell into your terminal, and all your problems will be solved, then vanishes in a puff of smoke.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m glad those magical Linux wizards exist to fix my problems. But I have almost no idea what the hell what the magical commands they told me to run are actually doing.

And I’m slowly piecing some of it together, googling things as I go, and that’s a fine way to learn things, but it is slow and I wish there was a better way to power through learning some of this stuff without needing to go take a whole actual course on it. I think my ideal would be sort of a Duolingo-type app for terminal commands.

Also at the lower end of the spectrum, I feel like maybe there’s a need for sort of a basic tutorial program for the kind of people who are not computer people to learn the absolute basics. I feel like back in the 90s I encountered a few introduction-to-windows sort of programs that would walk you through “this is your start menu,” “here’s what click/double-check/right click/etc” means," “here’s how you turn your computer off” kind of stuff.

And while that kind of thing is almost insultingly basic for anyone who’s going to install Linux for themselves, I think that kind of hand-holding might be needed for some other people we might try to convert.

Also don’t get me wrong, I like doing stuff in the terminal and don’t want it to go anywhere, when I know what I’m doing it is really efficient, but that shit is straight-up intimidating for a lot of average and below-average computer people, not to mention how truly abysmal a lot of their typing skills are. I feel like a little less emphasis on the terminal and building out some more control panel -like GUI menus would go a long way to getting people to switch.

Maybe these sorts of resources exist and I haven’t found them yet. If they do please point me towards them. If they actually don’t exist, maybe one of those wise Linux sages will see this and take up the task of building it.

I had a French teacher who claimed that “let them eat cake” was a bit of a mistranslation and that “cake” was just a different, maybe fancier, type of bread.

Like the situation was more like someone said “Marie, the people don’t have any baguettes to eat.” And she replied “Well then let them eat brioche”

Still probably apocryphal, but I think maybe a little more believable if it were true while still showing the tone-deafness.

It also just feels very French to me.

What they were actually using prior to the space pen, and what the soviets used, were grease pencils, which really basically are crayons

It’s really all over the place depending on the student, the parents, the homeschooling program they’re using, etc.

I once worked with a guy who homeschooled his kids because their housing situation was a little unstable. It probably provided them a bit of stability they wouldn’t have had otherwise since they probably would have had to change schools a lot with all of the moving around.

Other kids may benefit from it if they’re not doing well in a regular school environment, have disabilities, are gifted, etc.

In other cases it can be very isolating and they miss out on a lot of socialization with other kids their age

And some parents use it to control what their kids are learning to force political or religious agendas on them.

If you’re going to give it, you have to be able to take.

Any reporter, media personality, and random schmuck who has an opportunity to interact with trump had better seize this opportunity to only address him as “Piggy” from here on out.

If we want to get a little nitpicky, the Moroccans kind of have it right

Sure there’s advent leading up to Christmas

But “christmastide” really begins on Christmas day and continues on into January (January 5th for Epiphany, or slightly longer if your Catholic because they technically count the feast of the baptism of the lord as part of christmastime.) When you talk about the “twelve days of Christmas” the first day is Christmas.

The lyrics to “Good King Wenceslas” (otherwise known as “that Christmas carol whose tune you recognize, but have no idea what the lyrics are if you even know that it has lyrics”) starts with the titular king looking out his window “on the feast of Stephen” which is the day after Christmas.

Different branches of Christianity, countries, cultures, etc. of course do things in all kinds of different ways, and I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know much about Moroccan Christians, nor much about Islamic attitudes towards Christmas there (though since they were doing Christmas events, I think it’s fair to assume that these weren’t exactly hard-liners who believe that no Muslim should ever have anything to do with Christmas) so I can’t really say why they do their Christmas stuff the way they do there, but it could be they just never got the memo that how we celebrate Christmas has changed a bit over the last few centuries.

Honestly, even when I was in middle and high school (so we’re going back around 20 years now) I don’t remember a whole lot of that

The main topics of conversation I remember were sports, video games, music, movies, TV, weed if you were a stoner, vacations, parties, and other plans you had and things you’d done recently, etc.

Pretty much the same shit I’d talk about now.

My personal experiences of course may not be representative of everyone, and like I said, it’s been about 20 years so it’s very possible my memory is faulty.

“locker room talk”

Most of my friends and I are pretty traditionally “manly” men. The kinds of guys you turn to if you need to build something, fix something, need to cut down a tree, want to drink beer and smoke cigars, shoot guns (not after drinking the beer,) go fishing (beer is ok for that,) etc.

I have basically no clue what’s going on in any of their sex lives. We never really comment on women’s appearances, and when we do it’s kept to just a very quick observation, “man, she’s hot” kind of thing.

Damn near any time some sort of sex talk comes up it’s our female friends stoking the fires.

I’m pretty sure my wife and her friends talk more about sex in an afternoon than I have in my whole lifetime.

Maybe it’s because we very rarely find ourselves in a locker room, most of aren’t exactly the gym or team sports type.

And what came of any of that?

The (wrong) lesson that much of the US took away from the cold war is that we’re basically untouchable. For all the fear of nuclear war, it never happened, and we came out on top. We never had war on our country, or even on our borders, and probably the tensest moment of the whole cold war, the Cuban missile crisis, we were able to diffuse peacefully and in a way that from many angles made Khrushchev look weak and like we came out on top.

Oh yeah, it’s absolutely primarily an infrastructure issue. Some proper bike lanes would go a very long way.

There’s a good smattering of the usual things- some people are dumb, some parents suck at parenting, etc. also at play, but that’s not particularly unique to bikes.

It sounds like you need to think about your word choice better then, because that’s exactly the kind of thing many gun owners have in mind when they talk about modding their guns.

And a lot of our gun laws are already incredibly stupid without people trying to drum up stupid ideas like “you shouldn’t be allowed to modify your guns”

Our roads are designed around cars, it’s very often extremely frustrating and unsafe to have to share the road with bikes.

As an example, most of my commute is along a 2 lane road (1 lane each direction) that’s winding, poorly lit, and has almost no shoulder. The speed limit is 35mph, which isn’t a speed most cyclists can keep up for very long if they can reach it at all.

If there’s traffic coming the opposite direction, it’s often difficult or impossible to pass that cyclist safely so very often I’ve been stuck driving 10 under the speed limit around a cyclist I can’t get around.

And again, it’s a windy, poorly lit road, coming around a corner it would be very easy to hit a cyclist if I wasn’t being careful (which I am, but many are not)

To add insult to injury in my particular case, there’s actually a very nice bike path that runs directly parallel to the road, you can actually see it from the road for much of its length, and there’s lots of places to get on and off of it, it’s paved, it’s actually almost as wide as the road itself.

There’s also the issue that a lot of them don’t always follow the rules of the road, you see a lot of the lane-splitting, running red lights, etc.

And there’s good reasons for some of that behavior, I’ve heard them, I don’t disagree with them, but the fact of the matter is that it makes them unpredictable, which is the last thing you want to be on the road.

Some also ride at night without proper lights and reflectors, which is really a problem with some idiots and shouldn’t be generalized to bikes in general, but some people are going to do that

There’s also Americans’ love of big SUVs with big blindspots that makes bikes harder to see when they’re around you in traffic.

As for ebikes, I have a love-hate relationship with them.

They can keep up with traffic a lot better, which helps my first point a lot.

They’ve also gotten a lot of people out on bikes who wouldn’t have otherwise, which is great, but it also means that a lot of those people are going from not having ridden a bike since they were like 10 years old to feeling bold enough to be out in traffic because their bike can keep up but never really learned how to coexist with traffic on a bike, so we’re doubling down on the unpredictability.

There’s also the issue that out of traffic, in spaces where e bikes coexist with pedestrians and regular bikes on trails and such they’re often zooming around at unsafe speeds.

And there’s the usual patchwork of laws and regulations from one state to another, and a lot of shady imported brands selling bikes that don’t meet those regulations. A lot of the e bikes on the road around me are overpowered and too fast for what the laws allow. And people also let their kids ride them which also isn’t allowed.

I’m all for more people riding bikes in general , but the current situation with infrastructure, regulations, enforcement, and education here make it a really unsafe and frustrating to share the road with bikes.

Alright, I’ll bite, why shouldn’t you be able to mod guns?

I’m not talking about something like converting a semi auto to a machine gun

I’m talking about stuff like choosing a different stock or grip that feels more comfortable.

Or maybe you’d prefer a lighter or heavier trigger pull, or maybe you find that your gun’s not cycling properly with a certain kind of ammo and you’d like to swap out some springs or other internal components to address that?

Or maybe there’s a part that wasn’t deburred properly from the factory that is making your gun jam and it needs a little filing or polishing to make it move properly?

Or maybe you have a shotgun for hunting, maybe you’d like to have just one gun and swap between a rifled barrel to fire slugs for deer and a smoothbore barrel for bird shot?

Maybe you want to add a different optic, a scope more suited to the distances you shoot at, or iron sights with colored dots on them so they’re easier for you to see?

Maybe you’d just like to add a sling?