People surprised: 0.

DON’T BE FOOLED! This post was made by the cat! It wants narrower TV stands so it can knock them over easier when its owner forgets to feed it!

It’s a bit more complicated, really. The islands weren’t usually politically united. China lost actual control of the Ryukyu kingdom well before the first Sino-Japanese war, but maintained a claim on it for quite some time.

The US took over administration during WWII and converted many of the Japanese bases to American ones. The US doesn’t claim any of the islands anymore and has closed some installations, but a lot of bases are still active. The US is responsible for Japan’s defense. Japan would rather have the bases in Okinawa rather than in mainland Japan (although there are a few bases there as well), which a lot of Okinawans feel is unfair. Okinawa is very well placed strategically though and Japanese people don’t like foreigners (sort of… It’s weird), so don’t expect the situation to change any time soon.

BTW, if you ever want to visit Japan, Okinawa’s a great option. It’s beautiful there and it’s not hard to get by on just English.

Except the ones that aren’t.

If he votes too much with the Republicans he’ll lose party support. There’s a reason party members tend to vote the same. Without party support he’ll have a hard time getting reelected in a red district unless he flips parties again.

Oh, I’ve got no complaints about the article or even its title. Few people learn Perl or Raku these days so it would be surprising for most people.

I thought it was interesting myself - Perl’s my go-to scripting language but I never used Raku. I might consider it next time I have a non-trivial scripting project.

I’m not sure why that’s surprising. Raku started out as Perl 6. Perl was designed primarily for use in a shell environment. Convenience features like the arguments to MAIN bit are in line with Perl philosophy.

I’m sure the low flow toilets thing was written for him. Cheap low flow toilets have problems flushing. Mid-range and high end ones - i.e. any his ass has actually touched - flush just fine.

That’s why you never go for the cheap option when toilet shopping. It’s not worth it.

I hate that logo. I glanced at the subject and thought the X Window System was standardizing remote audio over the X protocol.

I think your sentence trailed off down those stairs and into the water :) Personal what?

(nice picture, BTW)

Yes, they do. So do I, for that matter. While my part of the company focuses more on government projects like water plants, fuel depots, and utility management, the rest of the company does process automation in the energy sector. That’s a fancy way of saying they build control systems for refineries.

I disagree with your assertion that more thought leads to less conservatism. The particular coworker I’m talking about does quite a bit of thinking, and is quite eloquent. He’s still wrong, of course, but it’s due to his opinions, his priorities, and what he chooses to believe more than a lack of thought.

Yet I continue to constantly hear from my conservative colleagues about how bad Biden is for the oil industry…

I don’t believe so - the docs mention several ways to boot a pi but most only work for newer models.

An option might be to boot an SD card read-only and run everything over NFS. It’s trivial to do that sort of thing with some UNIX clones (OpenBSD, for instance), but I don’t know about a modern Linux.

Or make your own, like the tankie mod is doing.

It might be too outdated to do major services, but it’s still fine for its original use - interfacing with electronic components.

You could build a weather station, monitor temperature and humidity in your attic and crawlspace, automatically water plants, etc. You don’t need much electronics knowledge for that sort of thing.

Strange use of the term. I always understood a “doomsday weapon” to be one that destroys everyone involved. It’s not a weapon for winning a war, it’s to not lose at any cost.

A weaponized virus that kills indiscriminately, for instance.

Why vegan/vegetarian specifically? If it makes them cannibals, it makes everyone who swallows cannibals.

Ukrainian aid is doable. Decent health care is not.

That’s true. Without economic pressure it’s a lot harder to get governments to cooperate, though. If economics favor you it’s easier to get the right laws passed.

Economic reasons are the best reasons. They’re the reasons that work.

I don’t think it matters why we move away from oil, as long as we do.