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Donald Trump gets bad news about his tariff plan from Americans in new poll
  • It was an election season where the race was polling around 50/50 pretty much throughout. Even when one candidate had a lead, with margins of error, no they didn't. A ~50% probability of losing is huge, even if many polls did show her slightly ahead. Consider a 20-sided die. 9 sides are red, 11 are blue. You wouldn't be surprised if you rolled red.

    News media has no idea how to talk about polls because they don't want to talk about probability, they want to talk about which number is bigger as if it's a scoreboard. I didn't want him to win, but the polls weren't wrong.

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    Rule
  • As an Old, I started with an Apple ][ and learned BASIC. We did get the classic B&W Macintosh computers when I was 12-13.

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    I mean...violence is bad.
  • Ah, good. So the corrupt, evil, and greedy tactics of health insurers are finally mitigated to... checks notes oh, to what they were last week.

    You know they're sitting on a wish list of awful policies while they're waiting for this to blow over so they can implement them when we aren't looking. Fuck that.

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    Windows VS Linux (part 2)
  • Weird, I would expect Steam to be in the Ubuntu repos (assuming that's what you were using, since you mention apt), but maybe not. As for apt, or apt-get, they are just the terminal equivalent of the GUI package manager (synaptic? it's been a minute since I ran ubuntu), so if something isn't in the repos, apt at the terminal won't find it either. If it's not in the repos, you should be able to download and install steam from the website just like you would in windows. It gives you a .deb file which will launch just like an executable installer in Ubuntu. But to your point, yes, sometimes things in linux take a little extra thinking to get to work. Getting accustomed to the way Linux works can help overcome hiccups like this. Windows has many quirks as well, it's just that if you use WIndows often you know your way around them.

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    It's all tied together
  • To what end? To pee? Who cares? Go ahead. When the line's too long at one, people regularly duck into the free restroom in an emergency anyway. If you have to go, just go.

    If someone goes into a public restroom with the intention of harming someone inside, it doesn't matter what gender any of them are, or what they look like, or which bathroom it is. None of that matters. Don't go into a bathroom with the intention of harming someone. That's wrong. The end.

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    This world is cruel…
  • Astronomy is pretty cool :) Yeah, the H-R diagram plots luminosity vs. temperature (decreasing), so the biggest, brightest stars are at the top left and the smallest and dimmest at the bottom right with the red giants hanging out in the upper right corner. Most stars (the main sequence) can be found along the diagonal from top left to bottom right.

    To talk astronomy on a first date, I might suggest asking about a favorite constellation and then pointing out some of its neighbors in the sky and some of the more prominent stars.

    You can have some fun with Orion, for example. Find Orion's belt and follow it down and to the left until you get to a bright blue star. That's Sirius, and the constellation is Canis Major, Orion's hunting dog. From Orion's belt again, follow it up and to the right until you come to a red star at one tip of what looks like a "V" shape. That V is the face of Taurus the bull, and the red star is Aldebaran. Following the line of Orion's shoulders up and to the left you'll come to three stars in an elongated 'V'. That's Gemini, the twins, the two stars at the top are Castor and Pollux. Pollux is the brighter one, on the left. And Castor looks like a single star, but is actually six binary pairs!

    If your date things that's cool, maybe one day you can talk to them about the different fusion reactions that occur in the core of a star, but I wouldn't lead with that. :D

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    This world is cruel…
  • Astronomy is one of those things that people think they like until they find out it's mostly math, physics, and chemistry, and looking at cool pictures of space is not directly involved.

    source: astronomy minor. I liked it but being able to discuss the various types of variable starts and plot them in a Hertzsprung–Russell diagram is not going to win me any dates.

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    Discovery will be the first Star Trek show in half a century to end without a single Jonathan Frakes appearance
  • I understand what you're saying, but I'm not sure if I agree. I think of what Ira Steven Behr said about the portrayal of LGBT issues on DS9, he really feels they missed the mark because they went with a 'technicality', because Jadzia was married to a woman while in a male host, and those thoughts and feelings carried over, and he didn't feel it was actually a portrayal of a lesbian romance, but a cop-out.

    There are other episodes which, while groundbreaking at the time, clearly used their allegory to soften the message somewhat. Frakes has lamented that Soren in "The Outcast" was played by a female actor, for instance. Using a female made the relationship more acceptable to the viewer.

    I will say, however, that in Enterprise's "Stigma", which on the AIDS crisis via Pa'nar Syndrome, the allegory does allow them to hold up a mirror to intolerance and prejudice. Maybe that's what you're getting at? By showing the relationships and nonbinary gender identities as normal, rather than couching them in a metaphor so they could show the ugliness of intolerance, the writing doesn't go far enough?

    It's an interesting point. My instinct is that we're mature enough to see things like gay relationships now without needing to obfuscate them in metaphor, even if the point is to highlight the flaws of intolerant views.

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    Discovery will be the first Star Trek show in half a century to end without a single Jonathan Frakes appearance
  • I like Discovery, but I have to agree. So many of the narrative problems could have been solved by simply giving the line(s) of dialogue in which Burnham solves a problem to someone else on the bridge. Easy peasy. Mix it up.

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