Big grants and research money connections are typically only accessible because your paper got published in a “reputable” journal, which of course you only have a chance of getting if you publish with a “reputable” system.

I think this all but confirms HTS is just another uncle sam project with some help from Turkey, meaning they will likely do jack all to Israel on their border and also likely end up the same as Iraq.

Xfce 4.20

On my way to attempt an upgrade from Xfce + Compiz to Xfce + Wayfire lol

Meanwhile every Muslim country government bar Yemen: Nah, I don’t really feel like it

Actually if it were Fox, they’d have called them nuclear powered autonomous flying boats designed exclusively to fly up only the Potomac river to launch a nuke at the Whitehouse.

BBC

Go back to sleep, this is just repeat cope for failing to handle a pandemic and shifting the blame to another country.

I thought it was weird too because the only current foreign user is Pakistan, and Egypt is even more of a US shill state.

3 years before they even allowed sale of 3rd party F-16s and a nonstop barrage about how effective the 90s era surplus we sold to Ukraine was gonna magically win the war.

I got banned from NCD for sharing this sentiment saying that there was literally no outcome where the US would allow Ukraine to join NATO, regardless of the acting government.

Security articles and blogs slapping “for fun and profit” onto the end of all of their titles

Alexandra Doten is a science communicator and astronomy content creator who rose to fame on TikTok during the COVID-19 pandemic. Doten, a Vanderbilt graduate, interned at NASA for two summers and worked as a communications specialist after graduation. She later transitioned to the U.S. Space Force. Doten is known for her storytelling, which she says has inspired people to pursue careers in astronomy and space, and to invest in astrophotography equipment.

Not to give credit to Twitter verified assholes, but comms specialist is not a specific astronomy or aerospace field.

A former space communications specialist with NASA and later, the U.S. Space Force, today, I am an independent consultant to space organizations around the world. I write and develop brand strategies, educational presentations, speeches, and social media content.

And I harbor some pretty strong opinions about NASA’s public and internal administration for the past 30 years.

Two preventable shuttle disasters and a hacksaw outsourced attempt to return to the moon are not what I would consider quality projects. Modern NASA is the epitome of wasted talent.

Haha I meant for WWW forums.

Dunno how many people here remember BBS or having to look up stuff in the library.

That being said damn it’s been 25 years already :O

A lot of it comes down to genre, target audience, and writer’s personal experience. Even MC and DC are characters written decades ago. Batman is basically from the 1930s/40s.

Compare that to last decade’s best selling YA novels. Hunger Games was constructed to be very balanced from the start including a female main lead, same for Percy Jackson.

My hot take is that most of these instances are actually fine as is because Hollywood in general sucks total ass at writing new characters into existing franchises, especially for the exact purpose of introducing diversity without any depth.

There’s literally a 3+ hour series on youtube of how bad the new star wars trilogy is, and a solid third of that rant is about how poorly written the female lead is.

The issue here is that having an equal or majority female (or any other metric) set of characters wouldn’t automatically make your story or writing better. You have to develop each character just like the rest, otherwise you end up with inserts that have no purpose other than to equal out a fraction.

Whether that is due to the writers being able to create male characters easier, or just a perceived audience target, you’d much rather have a well written character than a soulless one.

And that is likely not even correlated with male vs female writers. So much so that some critics even believe female writers are better at writing male characters than male writers, which is funny to think about. Ex: Harry Potter is still a 2:1 ratio.

Again though, there are plenty of good examples (mostly books) with very successful stories with equal or majority female characters.

If it makes you feel any better, this argument is old as hell lol. You can find ye olde forum posts discussing the exact same things mentioned in this entire thread from as far back as early 2000s, with plenty of in text examples from books and screenplay.

The general concencus though, is that if the characters are good, the plot is good, and the writing is good, no one really cares about the number because you’re absorbed into the story. Your attachment to the story is a direct reflection of your own personal identity. If you notice the lack of X whatever while reading/watching and it breaks your immersion, then it’s probably a viable critique of the writing. If it’s something you notice after outside the story, then it might not matter as much as you think.

Remember when Hamas was democratically voted into power in Gaza because everyone knew the PA was a full of shit organization run under the complete control of Israel?

And then the PA refused to recognize the vote outcome, which was shortly followed by a military incursion by Israel because God forbid the Palestinians actually form their own government.

Not to discredit their achievements, but the DoD won’t give them anything of value related to defense in a million years because India’s primary military source and partner is Russia.

They have a mutual interest in keeping China in check, but they don’t seem to want to invest in trying to flip India when they already have Pakistan.

Not to mention US arms are fricken expensive. India already had issues paying for the Rafales from France, they couldn’t afford to buy overinflated US gear even with their rather large economy. Even collaboration is annoyingly hard if you aren’t in NATO.

Broke Pakistan only got it by hiding OBL and making the US go on a goose chase handing out free money to search for one guy, which is why they haven’t bought anything new from the US after 2011.

I don’t know why this is getting downvoted because the current implication that everyone is reporting is that Trump’s administration was involved in this ceasfire deal in some capacity.

You could maybe argue that perhaps Biden leveraged the threat of Trump continuing to support Israel which would prevent any ceasfire deal after he takes over. But then it doesn’t seem to match the Israeli response, especially those who did not want a ceasfire. Why would Biden be able to suddenly strongarm Israel on his last few days in office?

The other option is that Trump for whatever reason did not value continuing to supply Israel with arms similar to how he’s about to drop Ukraine. Netanyahu sees value in negotiating it under Biden to get the most he can out of it before Trump takes over. But then his former lobbying for Trump doesn’t make sense.

Could also have just been pressure on Hamas that they perceived which caused them to cave in, since the agreement isn’t exactly permanent, nor does it address the wider issues of who will eventually control Gaza.

Why is every secretary of state trying their hardest to beat Kissinger’s high score record of crimes against humanity.

“Yeah we need to figure out how to split a foreign nation up before they become a threat to our expansion. Can’t have sovereignty on our ever expanding borders. Let’s assassinate the HTS leadership so we can throw Syria back into anarchy.”

Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to work for the CIA division that sets up these activities.

Gotta be next level lame for controlling the media in your favor because public opinion of the government is definitely worth sending MIC funding after.

At least in the NSA, you get to do cool stuff for crappy purposes.

The CIA is always stuck halfway between a bad joke and an international usurper.

The problem is it’s usually a mix of both.

“Pro western” candidates are almost exclusively less democratic but installed by foreign backing.

The goto strat is usually to bribe the military to install the candidate so it doesn’t look like a coup.

Ex: Sisi in Egypt.

inxi saves you time 90% of the time that you would use for lsXXX commands and grepping. Really useful for quick hardware and kernel module checks.