I was home schooled from childhood through highschool. I got a GED before I joined the military, then used the GI bill to go to university and took placement tests for everything, which put me at the same level as everyone else except for trigonometry, which I had to take a remedial class in.
Yeah, the US grade system up to highschool. I haven’t done those grades at all.
Never have I ever gone to school in grades K-12.
Thanks for the PTSD flashback. It was delightful.
Just wait until they start serving ads for things that don’t exist and then throwing manufacturing together to make them on demand.
No one I fought with was helping kill brown kids either. You could argue that we were indirectly helping, since we were fighting for a country that was also sometimes bombing areas with civilians. If that’s how you would like to approach this, then everyone helped.
If you’ve worked in retail then you’ve sold goods to soldiers, if you work in agriculture then you’ve fed them, and if you’re a teacher then you educated them. Some small fraction of those soldiers went on to bomb kids somewhere.
If you want to criticize the US policy of invading other countries on a pretext and then propping up governments that do what we want, go ahead. I’m right there with you. If you want to live in a fantasy where all soldiers are merciless baby-killers, I guess you can do that, but that’s where we part ways.
Soldiers are individuals, and they sign up for all sorts of reasons. A very common reason is an education that gives them a better shot at a high paying job so that they can care for their family or start one. Is it fucked that people feel the need to do that? Sure. Would it be great if there was a straight forward way for a person with no resources to get an education and a better job? Yes.
But currently, we’re in an environment where risking your life to fight for your country in an unjust war is the best option some people have. And pretending that the reason they do it is because they’re Bad People doesn’t help solve the problem.
None of the veterans I know killed any brown kids. The people we shot were generally either shooting at us, or had just set off an IED with a car battery. Most of our interactions with kids involved someone getting in trouble for giving away MREs to the kids that would walk up to the vehicle.
Women are you doing the same thing for me
It’s also 60", which is absurdly large to me lol. Glad I could help, though.
I hope someone shook her hand and thanked her for her service before they put her away.
Ah, my bad. Sorry.
I have one. It’s 4k, which gave me some trouble from an Ubuntu media server, and the refresh rate is ~144, I believe. It cost me something like 300-400 USD.
Try a Spectre t.v. they’re made for digital signage. I got one and hooked it up to a media server.
I wonder if you could make a donation platform for artists that also provides torrents. You would have to tie up the money pending proof of identification from an artist who participated in creating the work, then release a portion to them. I’m just speculating here but it seems like something that could be made.
Absolutely my favorite characters. I really like the lonely mountain comic where they make a dragon dildo.
Just have them read an essay on camera and then write a short summary.
I disagree both with your characterization of my position as well as your assertion that it is “grotesque”.
Skin color and sex can be used as indicators for hidden, hard to ascertain traits. It may be racist to assume that the indicator perfectly predicts those traits, or that skin color and sex predict hidden traits when they do not, or to assume that sex and race cause the traits to occur when they don’t. But it’s not racist or sexist to make assumptions based on race or sex if there is a real correlation.
Sickle cell anemia is much more prevalent in blacks than in whites. It’s not racist to suggest that blacks should be tested at higher rates than other communities.
Women experience more sexual assault than men do, and the vast majority of the perpetrators are men. It’s not sexist to assume that a woman who is assaulted was likely assaulted by a man.
If we created some sort of viral genetically engineered cure for SCD tomorrow, race would stop being a predictor of that particular trait. If we found a way to bring male sexual assault down to the same rate as female sexual assault, continuing to assume the sex of a predator would be incorrect.
And obviously, in legal or scientific contexts, we need hard evidence of the underlying traits themselves rather than assumptions based on sex or race.
Assumptions of this sort can be racist or sexist when the person making them is motivated to come to a particular conclusion, but making assumptions is not inherently bigoted.
In the original scenario, the assumption is that a group of people of various sexes and races have had different life experiences. There are relatively few downsides to this assumption. If you’re wrong, then you’ve mistakenly formed a group that is slightly less “diverse” than you hoped for. The upside is that you don’t need a full biography from everyone involved in the group in order to promote diversity of experience and opinions.
To be clear, I find most manufactured diversity to be asinine, and I think that it can certainly be taken too far. That doesn’t mean that the actual assumption is incorrect.
Yes, of course many people are virtue signaling. But measuring true diversity of opinion and experience is difficult and time consuming, so people use race and sex as a proxy because it often does lead to diversity of opinion and experience.
Red lights don’t reflect the true state of an intersection, but when the light is red it is a bad idea to drive. Similarly, a group of men and women of several races may have all been raised in the same neighborhood, but it’s unlikely.
I attended a federal contracting conference a few months ago, and they had one of these things (or a variant) walking around the lobby.
From talking to the guy who was babysitting it, they can operate autonomously in units or be controlled in a general way (think higher level unit deployment and firing policies rather than individual remote control) given a satellite connection. In a panel at the same conference, they were discussing AI safety, and I asked:
(Paraphrasing, obviously, but this is close)
The panel members looked at each other, looked at me, smiled, shrugged, and didn’t say anything. The moderator asked them explicitly if they would like to respond, and they all declined.
I think we’re at the point where an AI could be used to create strategies, and I would be very surprised if no one were trying to do this. We already have autonomous weapons, and it’s only a matter of time before someone starts putting them together. Yeah, they will generally act reasonably, because they’ll be trained on human tactics in a variety of scenarios, but that will be cold comfort to dead civilians who happened to get in the way of a hallucinating strategic model.
EDIT: I know I’m not actually addressing anything you said, but you seem to have thought about this a bit, and I was curious about what you thought of this scenario.