Mod parent more Funny. Best of 3 currently modded Funny, but my feelings are mixed.

On the one hand I think the story is a rich target for dark humor. (Even though your joke wasn't so bleak.)

On the other hand, I just wrote "A Farewell to Voting" about why I gave up. Short summary is that Franklin's republic didn't die with a flash-bang of orange BS. Rather it was with whimpers (from Democrats begging for more donations), cowardice (of the fake Republicans), and burps (from the super-greedy who still desperately "need" more imaginary money).

No, he was from <cue the eerie music> Spaaaaace Fooooorce.

s/weight/weigh/

But I tried the same joke and still no Funny around here.

Sock puppet's Subject was propagated about 80% of the way down a fairly active discussion--but still no Funny.

But don't be rude and ask the new astronauts how much they weigh.

However if you have to feed the sock puppet, do you also have to propagate the troll's irrelevant Subject?

Wrong and rather vacuous. Perhaps you are projecting?

But still not deserving of the censorship moderation, hence the quote of your content.

My new theory is that mod points are only given to AI-driven sock puppets. Part of how Slashdot is keeping up with the times. Though the website lacks the resources to resolve any of the major (and ancient) problems, they have managed to implement a behavior-based anti-CAPTCHA test. So now the mod points are only given to accounts that have proven that they are not human beings.

(I keep hoping that I'll grow a sense of humor one of these years. And I even dare to hope the story has a funny comment or two. Such a rich target.)

From context and common (but increasingly rare) sense I think you meant the defense attorney, not the prosecutor.

And you sound like a typical puppet dancing to your strings. Don't you ever wonder who is jerking you around?

But it definitely doesn't seem like we have anything to discuss here.

Nazism isn't an internet insult. It was an actual, real thing that happened in this world, with an actual, real ideology, and the core of this ideology was racial-based social Darwinism.

BTW, re: the Congo in particular: the most common traditional type of fishing is basket fishing with woven funnels suspended in the rapids. You sure as hell better know how to swim if you want to do that.

Famous angler Jeremy Wade referred to the local Congo fishermen as nearly suicidal, just diving into the rapids to get nets unstuck and the like.

SIGH.

There were 10 people chosen and people with dark skin in the USA make up about 1 out of 8 Americans.

1 in 8 is 12,5%.

African-American without mixed race in 2024 is estimated at 46,3M, or 14,2%
With mixed race, that rises to 51,6M, or 15,8% of the population.
Some hispanics have dark skin, some light. In 2023 there were 62,5%, representing 19% of the population (though there's a small overlap with black - doesn't affect the numbers much).
In 2023, Asians were 25,8M people, or 7,7% of the population. This is again a diverse group with mixed skin tones (for example, the Indian subcontinent)
In 2023, there were 1,6M people (0,49%) of pacific island ancestry and 3,3M native Americans - again, mixed skin tones.
People of Mediterranean European ancestry often have so-called "olive" complexions.

With a strict definition of dark skin, you're probably talking like 1 in 6 or so (~16,7%). With a looser definition, you could be talking upwards of 40% or more of the population.

The chances of the 10 people to be a perfect representation of the racial demographics of the USA is quite small.

Here are the actual odds of selecting no dark-skinned people at different population percentages being "dark skinned", by one's definition of "dark":

15%: 1 in 4
20%: 1 in 8
25%: 1 in 17
30%: 1 in 34
35%: 1 in 73
40%: 1 in 165

Then consider that NASA astronauts are required to pass a swimming test

It is not a test of swimming prowess, just of an ability to not drown. You have to be able to do three lengths of a 25-meter pool without stopping, three lengths of the pool in a flight suit and tennis shoes, and tread water for 10 minutes while wearing a flight suit. This is not some massively imposing task. You don't have to be Michael Phelps to become an astronaut.

and as a general rule those with African ancestry tend to have less stamina in swimming than those with lighter skin

Yes, white athletes tend to have an advantage in swimming. A 1,5% advantage. While a 1,5% advantage may be of good relevance at the highest level of a sport, it's hardly meaningful in a "can you tread water with a flight suit on" test.

Think of the different races as just really big families

That is not how genetics work, and is instead the pseudoscience that drove fascist movements, and in particular, Nazism.

There is far more genetic diversity within a given "race" than between them. Certain genetic traits tend to have strong correlates - for example dark skin and sickle cell anemia - but that's not because races are some sort of genetic isolates, but rather for very practical reasons (dark skin is an adaptation to not die of skin cancer in the tropics, and sickle cell disease is a consequence of a genetic adaptation to not die of malaria which also happens to be found in such climates). But the vast majority of genes don't have such strong correlates.

The concept of "race" as a distinct biological category is not supported by modern genetics.

If we are to ignore skin color and just put one big family up against another big family on swimming ability then just due to random mutations, perhaps some Darwinian selection way back in the family tree, one family will swim better than the other

The main "racial difference" in swimming ability in the US is "inherited", that is, parents who don't know how to swim tend to not teach their kids how to swim. As a result, white children are 56% more likely to receive swimming lessons than black children. One can expect that to directly correspond to an advantage in adulthood. But again, the ability to tread water is not out there knocking 90% of astronaut candidates out of the race - especially given that astronaut candidates tend to be athletic and motivated to learn new skills.

People with light skin tend to have ancestors that had to go fishing for their protein

Utter tripe. Fish consumption has no correlation with skin colour. How much fish do you think your average herder or plains horseman ate? And fish is massively important in much of Africa - in coastal areas (Gabon, Ghana, Sierra Leone in particular note), along the Congo (it's literally the world's largest river, people have been fishing it since time immemorial), Lake Victoria, Lake Chad, the Niger Delta, etc etc. What sort of racist stereotype world are you living in where black people don't fish?

Having a large candidate pool relative to the number chosen makes it easier to show bias and still get high-quality candidaes, not harder.

Are you sure that you actually cancelled your Prime account? How long until you are sure that you really did it?

I think this is a sort of joke, but my guess is that you only got far enough to convince yourself that you could cancel it, but somewhere along the way you changed your mind and decided not to. Sort of like "I can quit gambling/drinking/gaming whenever I feel like it, so I'm not addicted." If you had gotten too close to actually cancelling your membership, then they would have pulled out the big psycho-weapons until you backed down.

In general I think psychology and psychiatry are full of BS, but the applied psychologists have gotten too good at pulling people's strings for the sake of selling deodorant, laundry soap, and politicians who really stink to high heaven notwithstanding any amount of deodorant and soap. The applied psychologists have an enormous advantage. They are basically behaviorists and they don't worry about the value of the human soul, the nature of evil, or collateral damage. None of that trivial stuff matters when you have widgets and snake oil to sell.

Disclaimer needed: I haven't had any direct contact with Amazon in decades. My second and final Amazon purchase was that long ago. I evaluated what Amazon was doing with my personal information and decided that I wanted no part of it. Nothing that I have seen in the years since has improved my opinion of the cancer.

Even though you're apparently feeding a troll, I think there is a more substantive answer involving a solution approach that would involve 'light AI' technology. It's actually a topic I've been researching for some years, even though the doctors have never really convinced me I need to worry about my blood pressure.

So the fundamental problem is that most direct (external) measurements of blood pressure involve comparing the blood pressure to air pressure, so they take a substantial amount of power to pressurize some kind of balloon. Major problem for small battery devices like watches.

An alternative approach would involve timing, based on the variation in pulse timing, though maybe the approach flopped. Key term is HRV (Heart Rate Variability), which allows you to track and time individual pulses as they reach different parts of the body. Last research I read was a couple of years ago and I still don't haven't seen any products on the market. However the basic idea would be to take timing data from different locations and use it to calculate the blood pressure. You would need a couple of separate pulse detectors with stable locations, but the real problem is that the arteries are not uniform, either over distance or time. That means that you would need to train a fairly sophisticated model to figure out what blood pressures really correspond to what timing differences. Probably need to train it for each person, too.

Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Okay, you got your funny mod points, but did you have to propagate the vacuous Subject, too? On the grounds of your Funny, I forgive you for getting me to look at AC's tripe, though I didn't actually try to read it. Enough to know he was too ashamed to even attach a handle to the tripe...

(Now if I was an actual humorist I would have figured out a way to work a wind turbine into my joke, but that was just a replacement/filler joke because I couldn't figure out how to create a Subject full of punctuation in response to your joke. (And my replacement joke is really due to a similar joke I saw on another website.)

What?