Total War: Empire. I’ve previously played Rome 1/2, Medieval 1/2, and Atilla. For anyone who’s played other total war games, there are a couple of game mechanics that are new in Empire.

There are actual naval battles, where you put ships into a battle line, and you can board enemy ships. It’s cool but hard (for me) to control. Also many of the buildings in a territory aren’t located in the capital because it’s meant to represent colonial holdings, so you can have a sugar plantation or something outside the protection of a city, and a lot of the warfare ends up being small skirmishes sacking outlying buildings.

The new campaign missions seem a lot longer than what I remembered of the original campaigns. I like that they tutorials now give you some strategy, too.

My front loading clothes washer. It frequently doesn’t drain right. If you create a fault tree on what causes that, you can have:

• Faulty water level sensor
• Clogged water level sensor hose
• Clogged filter
• Clog around the heating element
• Broken check valve
• Faulty pump
• Clog between drum and liner
• Faulty control board

The pump can clearly be heard running when the water levels are too high, so I know the sensor, sensor hose, controls, check valve, and pump are all functioning. Sometimes, the pump runs for way longer than you’d think necessary, with only a small trickle of water coming out little bit by bit. This indicates to me that there is a clog upstream from the pump. Multiple times, I have squeezed myself back behind the washer to take the back off and access the filter (which should be accessible from the front). I’ve found no clog there. Ive taken out the heating element to check for clogs around it, and found nothing there. Ive shown a bright light from inside the drum to highlight any potential clogs between it and the drum, and seen nothing there. Despite all of that, the problem remains, and when I manually spin the drum with nothing inside, I can hear what sounds like stuff moving around inside.

I assume it must be ghosts or something at this point.

For me, the “power burner” is so weak it can’t bring a pot of water to boil or properly saute anything. Everything online says that it must be because the gas outlets are dirty, but they are spotless.

The cost of a TV is subsidized by advertisements and deals with different apps for prominent placement.

One thing to keep in mind with a lot of responses is often when someone says “we didn’t learn about x in high school”, what they should be saying is “I didn’t learn about x in high school”. I’ve certainly heard former classmates claiming not to have learned something even though they were sitting next to me when I learned it.

When i was a preteen, we learned about WW2, mainly from a US perspective, and had a fairly large focus on the holocaust, including a visit to a holocaust museum.

As a teen, I had a class on specifically European history. In there, we learned about lot more about the rise of the nazis (though not much on Italian fascists).

Here’s the tl;dr on what I remember learning about then:

WWI ended with the treaty of Versailles which was not a realistic, sustainable peace. We learned about the economic trouble like hyperinflation. We learned about the beer hall putsch, and that it was effectively unpunished. We learned that Hitler then sought power through legal means by allying with a broad range of groups unhappy with the current government. As he rose to power, various elements were purged from the government. Concurrently, political violence from the stormtroopers suppressed minorities and other enemies from organizing against them. This culminated in Hitler being elected chancellor, and then the enabling act gave him ultimate power. In the night of the long knives, all the allied elements in the party were purged. After that was kristallnacht, the remilitarization of the rhineland, annexation of Austria and the sudetenland, and then finally the invasion of Poland.

Yeah, I think this is the most reasonable approach. Everyone else is suggesting that falling on your sword is the first line of defense, and it really shouldn’t be.

If you are the attorney general, and the president asks you to fire someone prosecuting him, sure, resign.

If you are just some person trying to get by, shooting yourself in the foot isn’t going to help anyone. If you refuse to do a job, and they just hire someone else to do it, you’ve only really lost a lot at the cost of a small moral victory immediately rendered nil.

Not to get too utilitarian, but the ultimate goal should be to have the best outcome for everyone, not to just make the first decision that seems to be right.

There’s a saying about fascism “Do not obey in advance”, and the idea is that during the rise of fascism, the fascists don’t actually have to make people do what they want. Lots of people comply with their goals well before being forced to. We are seeing many companies eliminating DEI objectives because it’s what the fascists want, even though they don’t have to.

This could be one of those situations where a frank conversation with the project lead to see if that’s what’s happening because there is a chance to convince them not to obey in advance. It could also be that the training is going for federal agencies that have been “legally” required to eliminate “gender” from any training materials.

I think it would be foolish to turn down the job without at least establishing that.

Plenty of federal facilities have garbage reception. I think it’s probably due to the bureaucracy involved in telecoms installing their hardware on sensitive property. The White House in particular probably has lots of thick walls/armor attenuating signals, too.

For a disease to be prevented from spreading, you need a certain percentage of people to be immune. It’s different from disease to disease and also depends on the vaccine itself. Some diseases like Covid can still be spread to people who are vaccinated (though obviously the worst of the symptoms are mitigated).

For the sake of example, let’s say you need 90% immunity for a disease to not spread. Maybe 5% of the population cannot be vaccinated due to immune conditions, being too young, etc. That gives 5% of wiggle room.

Then there are acolytes of the fraudster, Andrew Wakefield, who faked data to get a flashy headline to get published in a prestigious journal. That includes RFK jr., Jenny Mccarthy, mayim bialik, etc. Clinging to their views for so long makes them unable to change them even if you show them proof that they are wrong. That might be another 1% of people.

There are a very small percentage of people who shun vaccines for lets say “true” religious reasons. Most of the people who try to claim religious reasoning for refusing vaccines are members of religions that are completely fine with vaccines. They are usually just really stupid people who are scared of needles and/or don’t think it’s that big of a deal with modern medicine. That’s probably another 1% of people.

Then there are people that are homeless or otherwise outside of the system. Vaccines are one of the most cost effective methods to improve health of a country, so despite the nightmare that is our healthcare system, you typically should never have to pay for a vaccine. It may be a bit more work than someone who is homeless and/or has substance abuse or mental health problems can prioritize. That might be another 1%.

All together, that would put us at 92%, above the threshold for a widespread epidemic, but all of those categories of people who don’t get vaccinated tend to be in communities, and so we can have outbreaks in those communities.

They weren’t intentionally infected, they were just deliberately not given the cure. It doesn’t make a difference at the end of the day, but it is important to distinguish because that is probably part of how those involved in the study justified their actions.

E.g.,

“I didn’t give them the disease, so I’m not responsible for what happens to them”

There are a million of these throughout the US. I think it’s done intentionally as a shibboleth.