I think the entire equity debate is confusing many of the inputs for outputs - which they are not. They are inputs, and are therefore equality-based, not equity based.

Take, for example, the old meme:

This meme is actually entirely wrong.

In the above meme, the left panel is an example of inequality. because the opportunity provided - the ability to see the game - is unequally provided across the three spectators. There is no equality of opportunity here, no equal ability to see the game due to the differing heights of the viewers despite the addition of boxes for all three.

It is the right panel which is the ideal example of equality - the ability to see the game. Here all three spectators have anny individual deficiencies that they cannot control and cannot overcome without outside help - their heights - made irrelevant by the equalizing effect of the boxes. All three heads are brought to equal and sufficient height for them to achieve equal opportunities to view the game.

Equity doesn’t even factor in here, because the enjoyment of the game is impossible to force across all spectators. To force equal outcomes - equal enjoyment of the game - would be monstrously inhuman and downright evil.

The issue isn’t safe spaces. I mean, in the context you used, you are entirely correct - society in general is largely a safe space for white men.

The issue here is actually men’s-only spaces. And it is in that context that the anti-male bigotry comes boiling out of the societal woodwork under the weaponized mantra of “misogyny”.

As in, women can have all the women’s-only spaces they want or need, because to force them open to both genders is “misogyny”. And honestly, I am willing to let them have that olive branch.

However, they then turn around and demand that all men’s-only spaces be opened up to women, because to keep them men’s-only is also, somehow, “misogyny”.

Sorry, but that’s not how that works. That isn’t how any of that works.

The single most effective tool for determining if bigotry exists is to change the terms in contention, and see if things read identically to before, or oppositely to before.

If the two examples read wildly differently from each other, then congrats - you found a bigoted pattern.

So when you hear about men’s only gyms being cracked open for women to attend, consider how wildly different it would read if it was a women’s only gym being forced to admit men. That sure reads wildly differently, doesn’t it? That’s because there is deep bigotry in having the former being forced through while the latter is being defended against.

And honestly… if true equality in treating everyone with the exact same rules is “misogynistic”, why call it equality in the first place? Just call it for what it truly is: anti-male gender bigotry.

Downvoted you for this stunning example of cultivated ignorance:

I think their claim is nonsense, grossly exaggerated at best.

One only needs to look at the scouts of America to see this in play.

Boy Scouts were sued to open their ranks to girls. That suit won, forcing them to open their org to girls.

Girl Scouts were then sued for the flip example - to open their ranks to boys. The suit was almost immediately thrown out for “misogyny”.

After that “victory”, the then-head of the Girl Scouts admitted in private and off the record that she would rather destroy the org in its entirety - essentially razing it to the ground and permanently locking up the name “Girl Scouts” from being used by anyone else - before admitting a single boy.

Now, because they have both boys and girls, the Boy Scouts have tried to drop “boy” from the name, to be called only “Scouts”. This precipitated another lawsuit from the Girl Scouts in that dropping that part of the name will only accelerate their own membership decline.

You literally cannot make this sh*t up.

Men’s-only spaces across the country, like private gyms, are being attacked from all sides on the claim that their very existence is “misogynistic”, and yet service-identical women’s-only spaces in the same city are immune from those same “rules” under the claim that any attempt to apply those same rules to them is also “misogynistic”.

One of the best ways to uncover bigotry is to flip the term in contention and see if it reads any different after that from before. If it does, you’ve found a bigoted pattern in play.

True equality reads identically regardless of how the term in contention is flipped.

Edit:

I have zero issue with women’s only spaces. They are needed. But FFS you cannot eat your cake, and have it, too.

Real equality can only be achieved by applying the same rules equally. If women are to be allowed to have their own women’s-only spaces, men must also be allowed to have their own men’s-only spaces.

Hence the term, equality. Because if things aren’t equal, why even use that word? You might as well call it for what it truly is - anti-male gender bigotry.

I like RustDesk. If you’re worried about connectivity, you can even run your own relay server.

And this is why I would never own a vehicle made after 2006.

The objective is not to win. Winning against America’s imperial might is impossible.

The objective is to make them bleed as much as possible. To make victory as phyrric and as painful for them as possible. And when going up against the most expensive war plane in human history, this means choosing the aircraft that can get as technologically close as possible with as many units as possible on a per-dollar-spent basis.

We can make them bleed much more with 420 fully-functional Gripens than we can with 88 partially-functional F-35s that can be remotely shut down against our will.

We can already figure much of that out from the technological specifications of the F-35. Simply looking at the capabilities can give us strong clues on how to neuter or at least limit the inherent F-35 advantages from a tech standpoint.

The rest of that comes down to how the pilot behaves, and what tactics they have been trained in. And this is where differences in training, corps attitudes, and even pilot personalities can dramatically affect performance.

And while I fully agree with you in regards to pilot training, our problem is that a Canadian fighter pilot is likely to behave (tactic chain, decision trees, emotional responses, etc.) considerably differently than an American fighter pilot. As such, while we need to train our pilots in Gripen jets against F-35 jets in combat-like scenarios, we need to do so against American pilots, not Canadian ones.

And that’s the tough part - how do we get the American administration to willingly play along with activities that are obviously meant to train our pilots to fight theirs, and gain a consistent toehold against pilots in F-35s even if it means losing a few Gripens for every one of their F-35s. It needs to be done with a great deal of subtlety and subterfuge.

Canada needs to put the Gripen factory on an accelerated track, cancel the entire F-35 order, and move ahead with an immediate purchase of min. 50 Gripens using the F-35 funds to cover the gap and train up pilots until Gripens start rolling out of the factory.

Canada’s complete F-35 promise will cost the country $28,000,000,000 ($28B) with billions more needed to bring them up to full operational efficiency, and yet the Gripen costs only $65,000,000 ($65M) per aircraft, allowing us to buy 430 fully-functional Gripen jets instead of 88 partially functional F-35 jets.

Remember: tech superiority does not win battles. Sheer numbers do. WWII demonstrated this overwhelmingly on many different fronts, with many different technologies.

As just one example, the Germans had Tiger tanks that could face off against 6-8 Shermans at a time and win with barely a scratch on their hull, but when 10, 20, or even more came roaring over the hilltop for every Tiger that was fielded, their tech superiority ended being absolutely useless. They got overrun and overwhelmed with sheer numbers.

The F35 can be rendered equally as useless with enough Gripens in the air.

And the Gripens don’t come with a remote kill switch like the F-35 does.

For many places, it’s operational inertia. If you’ve had a hosting account at the same place since 1998, you’re bound to still have username/password access to services like FTP even though other (and better) options exist.

And then there is the issue of sole control. Many greybeards like myself still run traditional username/password auth on services because,

1. We have whitelisted our IP address, and if dynamic, keep that whitelist updated
2. That outside of said whitelisting, the service is a quasi-honeypot meant to protect the machine as a whole. Any connection made from outside the address space of my ISP, by anyone else, is by default considered malicious, and is banned instantly as a precaution. They don’t even get the opportunity to attempt a login; merely connecting to said service is sufficient evidence of hostile intent.

So while my setup is not ideal, it is ideal for myself. if I had anyone else as co-admin, or even clients, things would get stupidly complicated very quickly. But since it’s just me…

Israel is currently on an absolutely bloodthirsty genocide bender right about now. The fact that it doesn’t give two shits about women’s rights is quite a bit further down the priority list from where it doesn’t give two shits about life in general, and is violently unaliving most everyone not like them in the region

Pretty ironic, actually.

PowerPC performed much better and made design changes that made much more sense long-term.

There were also volume production issues and architecture advancement issues.

Essentially, they couldn’t get volume guarantees and they were at the mercy of a much slower improvement cycle than they would have liked.

PowerPC was absolutely an excellent top-tier processor, and the current Power11 line absolutely smokes anything else out there from either Intel or AMD, at the cost of being 100-200× more expensive. Like, think $30,000 USD for a single entry-level workstation, or $70,000 USD for the high-end one.

Windows 11 refusing to install on hardware it can absolutely run on.

RUFUS is not only a great tool with which to build your USB installer (it has an option to download the correct and latest ISO directly from Microsoft), but in the subsequent steps it also asks if you want to modify the installer in some pretty useful ways. Such as bypassing a Microsoft account in favour of a local account, and neutering some of the more recent requirements. IIRC the TPM 2.0 requirement can still be nerfed.

OpenBSD does not have a docker engine. Can this be installed without docker?

At this point, I wouldn’t blame any company that immediately ceased expansions in America and started to consider moving existing production facilities to adjacent countries, like Canada.

I kept reading about people having trouble during the restore process.

It is Duplicati, and IMHO restores work best if they aren’t restores-in-place. As in, dump the restores in a central location then drag-and-drop the data into place. Most of the issues I have heard of involve restoring data and settings back to where it originally was backed up from, and restoring directly back to those places - other than fully user-controlled directories, such as Documents or Photos - seems to be problematic.

Other than that, I have been using it for nearly a decade and have done a number of restores - after total drive deaths, so not just accidentally deleted files - to great success.

The downside is that tweaking backups from within the hidden C:\Users\[username]\AppData\ directory involves many days of whack-a-mole to exclude untouchable normally-in-use files so you don’t get scads of errors in the backup process. Plus, there are a fair number of entries in there that don’t really need backing up. But once you get that to settle down, it’s largely smooth it’s-set-so-forget-it sailing.

The Socratic Method tends to be effective in many cases so long as the other person remains open to reason and logic, especially the requirement for evidence.

Brainwashing gets increasingly easy the younger the subject is. Children, in particular, have an evolutionary need to automatically trust adults and what adults tell them, as they don’t yet have the cognitive tools to handle the world around them. Trusting adults have been baked into that part of childhood development because, historically speaking, it gave a distinct evolutionary advantage. Those children that listened to adults had a much stronger probability of surviving until adulthood.

It’s why religions so strongly proselytize the young – get them young, get them for life.

All you have to do is make it illegal to expose or proselytize religion to anyone under 22, and religion would likely die out within 2-3 generations.

When you have been raised as a rationalist and know, at a fundamental level, the bullshit detection system called the Scientific Method, you need to have some pretty powerful mental illness in play to willingly grasp at religion.

Meanwhile tomatoes rot on the vine on U.S. farms because ICE has deported most workers and the rest are too frightened to show up. Plus, pay is far too low to actually attract American workers.

That’s some real 10-dimensional thinking, there.

Nineteen people died on the ground.

Technically 260 people died on the ground. Because that is where the plane crashed.

However, nineteen people on the ground died.

There is a critical difference in that word order. The former includes everyone who had reached the ground by the time they died, the latter only includes those who were on the ground to begin with, and not those who were on the plane.

Or in other words, the first phrasing highlights destination, the second highlights source. Everyone died on the ground after the plane impacted it, but only 19 were already on the ground when the impact killed them.

The placement of the word “died” is what makes all the difference.

Isn’t English fun?