I never served, but it boggles my mind that troops would be allowed to carry such things anywhere they please. If I were a soldier I wouldn't want anyone near me carrying one that wasn't supposedly totally secured and authorized either.

And then of course you've got the problem of troops posting potential war crimes on social media.

Israel troops continue posting abuse footage despite pledge to act

Israeli soldiers deployed in Gaza post their abuses on social media

Israeli Soldier Shares Evidence of Torture on Social Media

Trending: Israeli Soldiers Document and Proudly Post Their Own Abuse of Palestinians

It's really quite simple. They were getting too close to a deal.

I suspect you had no problem with Assad doing that and probably cheered as Israel murdered far more as well.

The fact is that Israel has been attacking Iran, Syria, Palestine for decades. They are the problem.

They even murder Americans with impunity. Look at the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh.

How do you feel about Israeli Zionists calling for genocide?

Marchers chant ‘death to Arabs’ and ‘may your village burn’ in Old City’s Muslim Quarter ahead of Flag March

So much for "Never again".

At Jerusalem Flag March, chants of ‘Death to Arabs’ and assaults on Palestinians

If you look at Israel they far more closely resemble Nazi Germany. One Israeli Jew described what they are doing in the West Bank as Kirstallnacht every night

There was plenty of Zionist terrorism before their founding.

I'm too chicken to step into an actual boxing ring. I'm not too chicken to admit that though.

How about substituting Punch-Outfor the actual boxing?

I don't want to risk hurting anyone even though I never actually had my hands registered as lethal weapons. I've been openly carrying them all my life.

I've voted for "the other candidate" numerous times and never felt this way about an incoming president. I started hating trump ~35 years ago. It's not political for me. trump is evil. He always had been.

And I will never forget or forgive him for violating his oath of office on January 6th.

That's funny because most of my actual jobs have involved working on Unix systems of one flavor or another even if I accessed them through Windows most of the time. It might skew the results, because it might look like I'm coming from a Windows machine when I'm at work - because I am. But they pay me to do stuff on the Unix (and database) side. The Windows is just a convenient means of accessing it all because...well, I guess that way we don't have 30 different variants of different operating systems on everyone's desk and it's easier just to standardize and hire a few Windows sysadmins. I dunno.

But at home I've been Windows almost all the time. Right now I've got Keith Richards on one monitor, Slashdot on another and a third is just showing me what's going on outside - my security cameras, just in case the SWAT team decides to raid my house on New Year's Day.

I'd like to be able to say I had some wicked Linux configuration here, but I have other things to spend my time on when I'm home. I only became a geek because I didn't have anything else to do at the time, but now I have more things to do than I have time for. Oh well.

I got to use NeXTStep at a job for a time and really liked it but it was different enough from my previous experience on mostly System V Unix that it was hard at first and then I switched jobs again and never really played with it again.

It wasn't so much the operating system that was hard for me, but the whole Objective C vs standard C and I wanted to make everything perfect when I should haven't tried to be such a perfectionist. For example I spent way too much time making little things work just exactly the way I thought they should rather than just making it good enough for a user to get their job done.

And for some reason our database was on a Sun Solaris machine and the backup tapes were all unreadable. My predecessor had dutifully backed up the system every night but had done nothing to make sure the tapes were still usable and I guess after a few years of that none of them could be read without errors.

You know you're in trouble when you ask about their disaster recovery plan and they point to a shoebox full of unorganized magnetic tapes in your new office. Just kidding - I was too naive to ask about any disaster recovery plan back then. I just expected at least one tape would work. And I'm not even the one who deleted the thing I was trying to restore - that was my predecessor's mistake.

My boss was paranoid about the idea of someone being able to access our network via dialup and there were NeXTs two with modems, one in my office and another for someone else who needed one for some reason. I "tested" security one night from home. I just wanted to see if failed login attempts would generate any kind of logging for me to notice. I dialed into my co-worker's machine and entered her login (her first name which was the standard there IIRC). Then I entered a password I didn't think could possibly be right (also her first name, the same one I just typed for her username). I don't think I need to explain that no log was generated for a failed login attempt because that was her password.
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I almost forgot to mention this part. Part of that business was basically a media department and they published a magazine specifically for the business who were our clients (mostly landlords). They ran their own little network of Macintoshes and they liked it. I think there were only 4 employees in that department but they were incredibly low maintenance as far as I was concerned. In fact, they didn't need me at all which was good because I was running around trying to do everything else at once.

One time my boss even had me up in the ceiling pulling old cable that was leftover from some ancient computer older than NeXT, I can't even remember what exactly. All I ever saw of that system was leftover cables and a few 8" floppy disks.

I don't think Amazon is better. They routinely misdeliver items. Seeing their drivers run around it seems they're under extreme time-pressure too. My mail carrier sometimes makes mistakes, but not nearly as often especially considering the volume. My mail-carrier knows my name too. I don't know about the Amazon drivers. UPS and FedEx drivers often seem rushed too.

I think I would have benefitted from getting a Masters. My father encouraged me to get an MBA and I did take the GMAT and did well, but I wasn't excited about that and was enjoying my first "real job" after graduating from college. I have a similar undergrad degree as my father, but he did get an MBA and has done better financially than I have, but I'm not unhappy.

If I could I'd advise my younger self to do a few things differently I'd have probably gotten a Masters, but maybe not an MBA. I might have wanted to delve deeper into tech. I still enjoy that more than business or financial stuff. I'd tell my younger self to buy Apple stock and Bitcoin when they were really low and also exactly when to sell them.

Remember the sports almanac from Back to the Future? I'd prefer to gamble on the stock market than sports - seems more lucrative.

  I bought Enron stock when I should have been dumping the Enron stock that I did NOT buy years earlier when it was at a much lower price. I cannot blame my investment in Enron on my lack of an MBA though. My father thought it was a good idea and lost money as well. Just because you're smart and well educated doesn't mean you can't make decisions that in hindsight were bad.

/It seemed like a good idea at the time.

If they do, they're fancy "smart watches". I'm wearing one that was about $45. Unfortunately it doesn't have all the features of the cheaper ones I've used. I bought a couple for around $20 too. I had a telehealth appointment with a doctor and when asked if I had anything to take my BP with I mentioned one of those cheap watches - and how unsure I was if it could be trusted and the doctor told me not to bother. Sometimes it seemed accurate, but I wouldn't trust it for health purposes. Maybe if I had spent $600 on one. No thanks.

I bought it to track my sleep but I would probably do better by writing it down in a notebook because although it detects when I fall asleep most of the time if I wake up and go back to sleep it often misses that last part. Not only that, but after years of not wearing any watch at all I often don't even think to look at it when I want to know what time it is - and sometimes when I do, like earlier tonight, the battery needs to be recharged and I didn't notice the alert.

And just because I'm sure it phones home to China, I only put the app on an old phone which doesn't have service anymore. Basically, I hardly check the app anymore because the data is bad and it's not as easy as it should be to see.

No, it's because they call everybody communists/socialists/Marxists It's all just a pejorative to them much like "woke".

I do agree that those temps seem like a good compromise to save electricity, but I really see a difference between summer and winter. In winter my gas bill goes up and my electric bill goes down and I start being more efficient than the average neighbor. Typically from June through September I use more than the average neighbor. I do like my A/C, but the fan I bought helps. Oh my, that uses electricity too. I'm sure it doesn't use as much as the A/C.

I noticed a box for a fan in my neighbor's trash last week though, so they're not only running their A/C but also a fan. They got a box fan and I bought a tower fan though. I wonder if I can hijack this thread to have a discussion of which is better and why and the optimal placement of such fans.

  Also, from much personal experience including sleeping under ceiling fans I can assure everyone that I'm either dead or fan death is not a real thing. I did know someone who got hit in the head with a blade that came off a ceiling fan but it didn't kill him. I suppose it's theoretically possible though. What great timing for a freak accident - it was the last day of summer camp when all our parents came to pick us up. He was fine - they slapped a bandage on him and profusely apologized to his parents.