I mean, they certainly didn’t lose any battles that one time Phillip II of Macedon marched in… because they never offered any and just let him take what he wanted. Can’t lose if you never fight, right?

Not even. There is no evidence for special training. Their battle record was average and their reputation mostly manufactured. This entry of a blog series on the myth of Sparta dissects that particular justification frequently offered for all the inhumanity laid out in the preceding posts.

I love this

I hate it too but I love it.

Arse nemesis

Prepend “in” to the name of the two Sith first invented.

Glaub die Kirche findet das nicht so lustig, aber ich bin voll dafür. Und die Küken sind auch süß, ja.

Maybe the targeted advertising got your location wrong?

Yeah, well, it’s awful and annoying and shitty and I wish it’d stop doing that. I wish it’d stop doing a lot of things, to be honest, but that’s beside the point.

I don’t use it, but my GF does. She’ll have the volume up for some video that does interest her, then be scrolling through and treat me to the audible part of that trend without even seeing the funny / cute / insightful / boring picture to accompany and potentially compensate the acoustic pollution. She’s thoroughly numbed to it, but I’m not and I hate it.

(I’ve dropped the idea of getting her to quit the app, that battle just isn’t worth fighting.)

Half the time, people seem to upload otherwise perfectly complete still pictures as reel with some dumb music over it because if you’re not constantly assaulted by the same popular song snippets over and over on every post, are you even paying attention?

Particularly pernicious are ones with some sad or bittersweet content that will have some variant of “generic slow piano with a female, breathy voice singing some words that sound sad but you couldn’t actually tell what it’s about without listening to more than the five seconds used in this looping video”.

You need a link to the post to prove the tweet is real, and an archived link to prove it was real in case it gets deleted.

Donors get honors

I mean, this is the Catholic Church we’re talking about. They’re not particularly known for fair hiring policies.

Corporate management often seems to think of changes as isolated, independent events, where the measurable impact of each change can be attributed to that change. I think it’s a symptom of the pathological need for KPIs and Data-based decision-making. Making big decisions is scary, and data can help with informing them, but I get the impression some managers grow so dependent on using numbers as a crutch to spare them from having to justify their decision with their own best judgement.

They didn’t fully hand it to Linux yet. We still have to earn that. Ideological appeal / privacy concern alone isn’t enough for many people if the jump seems too scary, particularly if it feels like a one-directional leap of faith. What if they don’t like it on the other side? Better the devil you know…

We need to build bridges, in both directions: help and encourage people to switch to Linux, but also promise them help to get back, basically an “out” if they don’t like it. I see plenty of guides for migrating to Linux, but how about getting back to Windows?

It’s okay not to like Linux, it’s okay to be scared or apprehensive, and it’s okay to get cold feet and return to the familiar. Maybe some time in the future they’ll try again.

Hard to argue with results, and most military approaches that survived did because the people using them did.

More to the point, uneven terrain is an obstacle, and digging ditches to build a berm is a logistically cheap and technologically uncomplicated way to produce it.

Unlike Tom, it might actually hit.

The scientists deny any testing.

That’s active voice tho

Shouldn’t that be exothermic oxidation?

That’s the usual case with arms races: Unless you are yourself a major power, odds are you’ll never be able to fully stand up to one (at least not on your own, but let’s not stretch the metaphor too far). Often, the best you can do is to deterr other, minor powers and hope major ones never have a serious intent to bring you down.

In this specific case, the number of potential minor “attackers” and the hurdle for “attack” mKe it attractive to try to overwhelm the amateurs at least. You’ll never get the pros, you just hope they don’t bother you too much.

Still illegal. Not immoral, but a lot of our laws aren’t built on morality.