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You Up? College in the Age of Tinder

Frankly, dating apps can also just make things incredibly awkward. My freshman year I swiped through hundreds of people. At one of the last tailgates of the year, a random man walked by me and yelled: “Hey! We matched on Tinder! You are Tinder girl!”

I was mortified. Suddenly everyone around me knew that I was on Tinder. And I had swiped through so many people, I had no idea who this guy was. He was just another nameless “match” that I would never get to know. Because, needless to say, I walked away and never spoke to that guy again.

[...] The same Snap asking to “hang out” sent at 2 p.m. can have a completely different meaning when sent at 2 a.m.

[...] You don’t want to be mid-makeout while the jewel-encrusted crab from “Moana” is singing about how shiny he is.

So, most people know I've been using Linux since mid-2004, and that I started with Gentoo...which, yes, is the equivalent of learning to swim by donning a bacon bikini, rubbing yourself in A1 Steak Sauce, and jumping in the Amazon in the middle of piranha season.

Over the last 13+ years, Linux has...changed. A lot. I am sorry to say that I don't believe most of the changes have been good ones: GTK 3.x, the fiasco that was the KDE 4 series, RedHat aiming to become the next Microsoft, and the crux of the former, SystemD. Yes, I am a SystemD hater, and I make no apologies for it. It does things wrong, it does not even pretend to follow the Unix philosophy, and its syntax and "feel" remind me more than anything of PowerShell, which has to be the most bloated, flabby, weak, user-hostile CLI environment in history.

I also don't have a lot of money for hardware; this post is being typed on a used Thinkpad T440s I was lucky enough to acquire for $200 on EBay from a trusted source. And, being that i work 55+ hours a week *and* do anti-human-trafficking stuff, I don't have endless time to piddle around with Gentoo any longer. Much as I love the near-insane levels of control and configurability it offers, my poor ULV mobile i5 CPU just can't take that level of abuse for long.

So...I'd been distro-hopping for a while, playing with Devuan, Slackware, Artix, Obarun (unsuccessfully; the fucker just wouldn't install and I have no idea why), even FreeBSD.

And then a friend from college, the one who got me into Linux all those years ago, suggested Void.

Now, I'd heard of Void before, but had never even visited the homepage. Doing so left me somewhat underwhelmed, but intrigued; it was very businesslike. There wasn't the patronizing aura of the *buntu family, the slightly notionally-cabbage-smelling, half-baked feeling around Debian, or the complete unprofessionalism of umpteen hojillion other flavor-of-the-week distros.

If anything, it felt like FreeBSD, which I had limited success with and mostly enjoyed, but which didn't let me do a few things I really had gotten used to on Linux. So with Matt's encouragement, I downloaded the Xfce installer, backed up my stuff, cleared out my HDD, and booted it up.

It was a revelation. I don't know how else to describe this. Aside from the slightly WTF choice of using CFDisk, the installer was a no-nonsense NCurses-based affair that reminded me in all the good ways of the Slackware and FreeBSD bootstrappers. It was one of the most painless and ye-gods-FAST installs I had ever seen. Rebooting worked immediately; I was presented with a vanilla Xfce desktop and a very minimal set of programs, which is how I like it.

Two things immediately stood out: the first is the package manager, the XBPS suite (xbps-* commands). I can't say enough good about this; it's like Arch's Pacman for adults. it feels like the lovechild of Apt and Pacman in all the best ways, and it is *blazing* quick. It also has an xbps-src build system, which is to xbps something like the *BSD ports tree is to FreeBSD's pkg utility. It even acts a lot like the ports tree.

The second, and the thing that has made me a Void fangirl for life, is the Runit init system.

OpenRC isn't bad, and I'll take just about anything over Gawdawful SystemD, but Runit feels like alien technology. It is incredibly fast, it's very simple to administrate--just symlink stuff from /etc/sv to /var/services--and it will even, something like the Minix reincarnation server for its drivers, automagically restart crashed services for you!

Did I mention fast? Because this thing goes from "pushing Enter on the GRUB prompt" to "SDDM login screen ready for my credentials" in 10 seconds. 10. I counted. 9-and-a-bit, actually, but close enough to 10 to say 10.

If you run Linux, if you *love* Linux, try Void. You won't regret it. It will change the way you think about Linux. It sweeps away all the bad decisions of the last half a decade. Stuff Just Works. It's the most stable Linux I have ever used, and this despite being nearly as bleeding-edge as Arch. Runit is the star of the show and I wish it were standard on every distro. Do it. You won't b disappointed. Enter The Void.

Meet the Writer the New York Times Hired and Fired In Just Six Hours

After a Twitter Storm, The Times and a New Hire Part Ways

I've been thinking about time this morning. How just a little of it can make a world of difference.

When I was a wee little kid, David Allen Coe put out a song called If That Ain't Country. The song's got nothing to do with race but somewhere in it there's the phrase "workin' like a nigger for my room and board". That phrase, and the change in its meaning over the years, is a particularly interesting example.

The song was released in 1977, so forty years and change ago. Back when it was released, there was no question in anyone's minds that "workin' like a nigger" meant working your entire ass off. Say precisely the same words today and (aside from getting screeched at by social justice types, physically attacked by any black folks in earshot, and receiving disgusted looks and head shakes by pretty much everyone else) it's going to convey the exact opposite sentiment. I find that intriguing. And, frankly, quite depressing.

Depressing because of the way the change in meaning came about. Let's talk about that for a bit.

An adult black man black in 1977 expected to have to work his entire ass off if he wanted anything other than ghetto life for his family. Make note of that entire sentence there; every word and clause of it is extremely important.

Essentially not one bit of that applies to an average adult black man in 2018.

The prevailing wisdom in the black community in 2018 is that no matter how hard you work, "institutional racism" will keep you from ever getting ahead in life if you follow the rules. The quotes around that phrase are there because, while it is said on a remarkably frequent basis, it is a fundamentally disingenuous concept. "Institutional <type of discrimination>" essentially means "we need something to blame for <group>'s lack of success but lack any proof of actual <type of discrimination>, so we're going to call it institutional and eliminate the need to back up our claim".

Why do they believe that? Because it's all they've been told since MLK was murdered. Anyone claiming to support the black community and spouting anything except "oppression, oppression, oppression" has been vilified and cast out. Non-black people not toeing the party line are called racists and black people who dare disagree are called Uncle Toms. After several decades of this, the black community has almost entirely lost what MLK was essentially the last one to be allowed to preach: Hope.

Let's be real clear on this, no group or individual is ever going to succeed at anything in life without hope. If you do not have hope, you will not even try, which guarantees that you are not going to succeed. Making no effort to succeed does not go unnoticed by those around you either, thus the change in assumption regarding the work ethic of a generic black man.

Thus also my utter contempt for those who profess the loudest to support the black community while nothing but doom and hopelessness passes their lips when speaking to said community. They have robbed entire generations of a race of the hope of a better life that should be their birthright as Americans. And they've done it while lining their own pockets.

Don't get me wrong, I'm fully aware of a large group of, let's call them fools for kindness's sake, who genuinely believe the black man is oppressed to the point of hopelessness. I have nothing to say to them, because trying to convince a fool that they are foolish is itself foolish. I really wish they could be made to see that taking someone's hope away absolutely ensures their failure though.

That's pretty much all I have to say about the changes in conventional wisdom on their work ethic but do you remember that sentence I told you to remember? I'd like to address another part of it while I'm at it. Specifically the bit that said "if he wanted anything other than ghetto life for his family".

Unfortunately, that desire no longer exists on average. Primarily because it is based on the assumption that he has or even desires a family. This is not in fact the case anymore. Of the black babies that dodge Planned Parenthood's stated anti-black eugenics agenda long enough to be born (and in NYC one year this decade (I forget which and can't be arsed to look it up), that was less than half of them) , over three quarters of them are abandoned by their fathers.

Being raised in a single parent household is the single largest predictor of future poverty in the US. So, unlike imagined oppression, this actually does put future generations of black children at a factual and serious disadvantage in life.

And, no, the absent black fathers are not all victims of the justice system and in prison. Factual, verifiable numbers call you an idiot for even thinking that.

Now, I don't know precisely why most black fathers are not living in a traditional nuclear family with their children and children's mother. I believe that a good chunk of it is their self-destructive culture but I can't honestly say how much. I can say it's a fucking tragedy regardless of why it's occurring though.

What does all of the above boil down to? That the black man was objectively better off when he was actively, openly, and legally discriminated against than he is now. And that there are a whole lot of people in this world that are in desperate need of a good ass-whooping.

- a method." -- Caltech mathematician Tom Apostol

        sleep( 10 ); // MDC try to fix fast user switching with a horrible hack

I’m a 29-Year-Old Pregnant Virgin

"This is me giving a middle finger to the people who told me I couldn’t do it because I’m not married yet."

Forty-five minutes later and it's still installing dependencies. The hell is goffice?

All I wanted was to do my income taxes on my Mac. Perhaps if I settled for my Windows box those taxes would have been done by now.

Russians are mocking their space program after the SpaceX launch

Some dove head-first into Russia's rising inequality and the excessive wealth among the country's billionaire elite. One user noted the millions of dollars and years of effort Musk has plowed into pioneering space technology, and lamented the comparison with the kinds of things Russia’s notorious 96 billionaires tend to spend their own money on.

His example: Roman Abramovich, the Russian oil-and-metals magnate who spent some $233 million buying the U.K. soccer team Chelsea.

Abramovich, who’s worth $11 billion according to Forbes magazine, also splashed out some $400 million for the world's second-largest yacht in 2010, which he named Eclipse, ironically enough.

Others used the SpaceX craze to poke fun at Moscow’s standard tit-for-tat diplomatic approach to disputes with Washington, with one user photoshopping a mobile missile launcher flying through the cosmos as Russia’s “symmetrical response.”

How Elon Musk Beat Russia's Space Program

The Soviet Union tried something similar in the 1960s and early 1970s. Sergei Korolev, the rocket designer who launched the first satellite and the first man into space, began the development of what came to be known as the N-1, a 30-engine superheavy rocket capable of taking a 75-ton space station to orbit and perhaps to the Moon, Mars and Venus. Finished after Korolev’s death in 1966, the N-1 was test-launched four times. Each of the launches failed, largely because of the difficulty of running so many engines at the same time.

Now SpaceX has pulled off a similar task, and even though it’s not clear yet who will contract for the Falcon Heavy’s services, SpaceX founder Elon Musk now has the most capable missile in the world: It can deliver up to 64 tons into orbit. Russia’s plans to build such a rocket, capable of flying to the Moon or to Mars, aren’t even complete yet, and certainly not fully funded, though Igor Komarov, head of Roskosmos, the Russian space agency, has promised a first launch in 2028. Even China is likely to have a superheavy launch vehicle before Russia. But it’s the success of upstart Musk that smarts. Roskosmos has the full power of the state behind it, after all. And yet here’s this boyish-looking showman launching his roadster into space, David Bowie blasting from the car’s speakers and “Don’t Panic” -- a quote from Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” -- lit up on the central console.

The Memo: Knives come out for Kelly

Kelly’s most vehement critics even suggest the episode could herald his demise within the administration.

“We’ll see this as an inflection point when he is fired,” said one source within President Trump’s orbit. The source, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, blasted Kelly as “tone deaf and politically inept.”

A second source close to the Republican Party complained, regarding Kelly, that “everybody knows he limits access and information flow to POTUS on a daily basis; this could be the beginning of the end of that — and maybe Kelly as chief.”

Trump's self-imposed shackles are coming undone!

Banned From Election, Putin Foe Navalny Pursues Politics By Other Means

He said he doesn't have any doubts that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election because similar methods have been deployed against members of the Russian opposition: hacked emails, the publication of false personal information and attacks on social media accounts by armies of bots.

"Putin is conducting a creeping expansion into the Internet — extremely effectively and cheaply," Navalny said. "Of course he had fun hacking those servers and meddling, but it didn't have any significant effect on the elections."

Amid all the hostility between the U.S. and Russia, Navalny said the affinity between Putin and President Trump is inexplicable, especially considering that the Kremlin has based even its domestic policy on anti-Americanism. "This makes no sense, and there is no rational explanation for it. But maybe one day there will be a new Watergate and we'll learn a lot about these amazing ties," he said.

Beyond the personal relationship of presidents, Navalny said that the strategic interests of Washington and Moscow are largely aligned, and that instead of squabbling the countries should be pursuing nuclear non-proliferation and fighting terrorists together. A key move to bettering relations would be for Russia to stop its involvement in the war in eastern Ukraine, he said.

"We're a Western country," Navalny said. "Russia — based on its size, population, nuclear weapons and intellectual potential — should strive to be a leading European country."

Russia should aim to join the European Union and work on participating in a joint security system with NATO members like the U.S., Britain and France, he said.

Navalny's only job is to keep doing what he is doing now without getting assassinated, and eventually mount a real attempt at winning the Presidency after Putin retires from politics.

I buy them quite a lot so I can fabricate an excuse to chat up the cashier at a certain convenience store.

It's ready now, and my apartment is fragrant with the appetizing scent of gravy and salisbury steak.

The mashed potatoes aren't so good but the green beans are of far better quality than those found in cans.

But I don't feel like I can eat it.

I got very little sleep last night. I was awake until four in the morning, then had to get up at 6:30 so I could take the bus to my witch doctor appointment.

I don't feel so good.

Maybe I'll just put it in the fridge.

The cashier is always happy to see me. The other day I folded a Peace Crane before her very eyes. I demonstrated that tugging its tail leads it to flap its wings, then said "This is for you." She was quite pleased.

Unfortunately whenever I see her I lose the ability to speak. So quite commonly I just pay for my Hungry Man and then leave.