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.

there are lots of those, often with their own "store." I find batteries like that a lot.

But this was explicitly a Walmart listing, by Walmart, rather than a 3d party listing.

I know it is easy to rag on the F-35, but in the last 75 years, has any high performance aircraft been "on time and on budget and on mission"?

It's not just amazon.

I ordered a thermostat for my mustang last week. It was described as "sold and shipped by Walmart."

A couple of days later, I found an Autozone box on my porch. And not just the box, but the shipping return address was to auto zone!

??

the real tragedy of Viet Nam was that the US achieved *exactly* what it set out to do--which was a really stupid thing to do and waste lives upon.

The mission was *not* to defeat the north Vietnamese, but to keep them on their side of an imaginary line. US troops that went over the line got called back.

When the US finally decided it wanted to stop playing, the north wouldn't let them simply leave. To get them to talk, the US bombed them into submission, for crying out loud.

By any *military* standard, Viet nam was an overwhelming success for the US. US troops controlled whatever ground they chose, and won all of the battles.

But "resist aggression and stay on your side of the line" is a *stupid*, even criminal, thing to ask of a military. As is the lives it through away for idiocy.

Isn't this like a once a month thing across Europe?

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I have been saying for decades now that the F-1 (student) visa should be able to convert to a resident visa upon graduation.

The whole idea of it not being a resident visa was a cold war notion that after graduating, the international student would return to their country and spread the gospel of how wonderful the United States was, and how their local country needed to oppose the Soviets. I doubt that ever really happened.

Today, weâ(TM)re just training people and then at best turning them into indentured servants for a few oligarchs, or even worse (and now the policy of the Trump administration), throwing them out so theyâ(TM)ll build up some other competing country, while weakening our own.

>They didn't say whose value it strengthened.

LG's, Westinghouse, GE, and so forth!

Actually, if they had the testicular fortitude, your Samsung would display an add reading, "if you had bought LG, you wouldn't be seeing this!" :)

hawk

>Has about the same importance as smart tech in a fridge for me.

I live in the desert, you insensitive clod! :_)

but seriously we doohave many days of 115-117F most summers. Self-replenishing ice is *important*.

it's not why we bought it, but our LG actually has two ice makers; one in the refrigerator door, which you can actually clean out, and another for larger square tubes in the upper freezer drawer (which we turn off for the cooler half of the year)

>A fridge will last for a decade or more,

you would *think* that, but my prior fridge was a Samsung.

The ice maker died of its own buildup just out of warranty, the drip tray for the water dispenser caused rust lines through the paint below it, and the whole thing failed at 4 or 5 years--we came out one morning and it was at 50.

Compare to the Samsung dryers whose stainless steel barrels tend to crack and go out of round, wanting a $400 replacement!

The refurbisher who came out with our temporary dryer told us that from his experience (primarily washers & dryers), Samsung had the highest failure rate, while the other Korean brand, lg,had the lowest, with everything else in between.

>Agree, and don't even allow my TStat's to connect to wifi.

Have you *read* the license on those?

I brought home a wifi thermostat, thinking it would be nice to be able to change it half an hour out when coming home, and then read the terms.

It was like a parody of the terms you find offered sarcastically around here.

Pretty much, "you agree that we can send armed goons into your house, torture your dog, rape your cat, and sell your children into slavery. We may do anything we want with your data, and even more so if someone is willing to pay us for it."

It went back.

They tried that, briefly.

Then they gave up . . .

I just stick the installation DVD or USB in the drive, it go BRRRRRRRR, computer now Linux.
Once I needed to do a web search on a bios setting for a system I inherited from a 'secure' environment.
The hardest one I ever did was Batocera on a 2006 iMac, and that was still only a day of fiddling around while I drank beer and marathon-ed Bobs Burgers in the background.

I'm a janitor. IT's not that hard if you put your mind to it.

Sorry, forgot the /s at the end of that.