> I had no idea that people still thought that being a woman made it impossible to be physically strong,

Not impossible. Just more difficult. Women are built differently. That's an objective fact you cannot escape from. That will cause the best male athletes to be better than the best female ones.

Although SKILL may alter the situation for sports where that can be a factor.

> I mean, face it, men are just more willing to be the trolls and make life miserable for each other. Women see that and avoid the whole issue altogether.

Are you kidding? Women love politics and backstabbing. In fact, they are much better at it than men are. They just like to pretend that they are better. If anything, all of this committee nonsense sounds like the sort of thing fueled by women rather than something they would flee from.

Before you can pay for it or get it for free it's got to be authorized first. While actually being responsible for yourself can be a burden it also allows you to take command of the situation. That's something that is typically overlooked by people rushing to worship nanny state polices.

See the VA.

Back in the day, my enterprise storage vendor warned us that tape was not terribly reliable and to no reuse tapes. The more consumer oriented formats were especially failure prone. Something like LTO was much more reliable but still not something you want to reuse a lot of times.

Hard disks don't have that problem.

So... you should probably compute TCO based on how your software vendor tells you you should use your tapes and not just gloss certain considerations over.

> You're dreaming if you think HDDs don't fail without warning.

More often than not, they fail WITH warning. Or rather, they give you some indication that it's time to replace a drive and you aren't stuck scrambling at the last minute because it was a surprise.

If this stuff is sneaking up on you, you are probably not paying attention.

Well for one thing you are conflating two very different groups of activities commited by two very different groups of people. You are conflating the actions of soldiers with the abuses committed by spies.

As far as "destroying all the surrounding stuff", that's just basic warfare. Whatever propaganda you've been feeding yourself has got you convinced that there's such a thing as "surgical military action".

Combat is not surgery. Never was.

This is something that I addressed in my original post and something that you chose to ignore and remove.

> So, live your entire life as though you're going to get fired tomorrow. Sounds like real fun.

If you work in IT, the whole "disaster recovery" thing should not be new to you. It doesn't just apply to technology. If problems are readily forseeable then certainly you should try to plan for them and be as prepared for them as possible.

You don't necessarily have to go overboard. With many things, the most effective measures are the initial ones that are just past total apathy.

Being slightly more prepared than the next rat is a very useful thing.

Plus, if you are a slightly more prepared rat then the thought of being fired tomorrow won't weigh on you quite so heavily.

Slave is a pretty accurate term for that arrangement. It also works for midieval European peasants too.

...and the Easter Island heads "walked" into place.

They actually could have. A team of scientists actually worked out how this could be done and did a trial run with one of the heads.

The "walked it" down one of the roads from the stone quarries.

> You're talking about totalitarianism under the false guise of socialism.

What's what you tend to get when you grant the government ever increasing powers. If not outright genocide you will end up with more and more meddling and the expansion of government power.

That's what beaurocracies do. They seek to expand themselves.

Also, they don't seek to be efficient. So they will seek the most costly path possible. They are not run by altruists but by the same greedy crass types that fuel capitalsm. They're out to increase their personal power, wealth and influence.

You have the same problem with corporations but they aren't supposed to be monopolies. You should have the possibility of playing one off the other in order to get what's good for you and the public in general.

Of course "net neutrality" is ultimately a (natural) monopoly problem much like AT&T before it.

Communism in practice devalues labor. This is especially true if you aren't in one of their selected groups. Then your labor gets really devalued.

Just about everyone here would be a victim of Maxist-Communist labor devaluation. You think it's bad being a geek now. You don't even want to know what it was like when the Soviet Union was still around.

> They ate meat when they could get it, which wasn't 100% of the time, and the meat they got was lean.

Um... no.

If they had an animal, they used all of it. They didn't waste any of it. They would not have turned up their nose at any part of the animal because of modern diet fads.

They would have eaten the fat and been happy to have it.

You can see how the same pragmatism manifests in older food cultures where pure fat may be eaten as a delicacy. Humans for the vast majority of history have eaten whatever they could acquire and digest. Doesn't matter if you're talking about a farmer or a hunter/gatherer.

We might not need to relent from any of those allegedly "bad foods". We may just need to lay off the recently invented industrial food chemicals.

I have a family member that's just fine with white wheat flour products as long as the flour in question is not brominated. This easily could have been misread as "gluten intolerance". You gotta wonder whether these "allergies" are the real thing or just chemical sensitivity.

Plus there is always moderation to consider. Just about anything is harmful in excess.

> Barring allergies, most humans are fully capable of assimilating anything they throw at their GI system

No they aren't. This can be readily apparent as inappropriate things leave your GI tract. A lot of this boils down to individual variation. We aren't machine stamped machines, but modern political correctness has us thinking we are. The idea of "being equal under the law" has been perverted into "being exactly the same".

We aren't all the same. Some of us do better with some things than others. Some cultural traditions actually acknowledge this.

A little science and some self awareness goes a long way. Both of these are actively discouraged by American consumer culture.