Several members of the Police Benevolent Association allegedly approached him, one telling him that he had to obey the courtesy-card customs or the union wouldn’t protect him.

Looks like they were correct about that. The police union protects almost anything, except giving those with union ‘courtesy cards’ a traffic ticket apparently. That is just too far.

I saw the dumb defender say he was conflating immigrant and migrant but I replayed that part a dozen times. It really, really sounds like an ‘N’ as the first letter. It definitely was not him beginning to pronounce ‘immgr’. You can plainly hear it.

But even if we gave him the benefit of the doubt, the fact that Megyn Kelly completely ignored it and the fact that he didn’t apologize immediately and explain it says volumes about both of them. Why didn’t Kelly even say anything? Maybe she’s so used to hearing it in her circles, maybe even saying it, that it didn’t even register as something unusual to her and she didn’t notice it.

Time to move the unacceptable line farther away again.

Bank checks and account balances.

They won’t because there is an old sewer main that runs underneath and according to the town is prohibitively expensive to reconcile all of that with the bridge lowering.

The rail line won’t increase the height anymore because then it will cause a hump in the train tracks there.

It isn’t going to be one or the other (if they don’t offer a 401k, then you can use IRAs), unless you just make a bad choice. An employer can contribute to a 401k and also provide a pension (mine used to but I’ve been around long enough that I get both the pension and 401k with matching) but if I had a choice, I could pick a pension for example but also put money into an IRA for retirement that would normally go to a 401k.

If you absolutely had to pick one, it isn’t going to be the same answer for everyone. Amounts, what you’re able to contribute, matching, risks and tax situations are going to vary from person to person and their employer.

As far as controlling your money, some 401k’s allow some extra control, some don’t but most have a middle ground except for their company stock which you can usually directly buy. If you’re 401k allows general different ‘markets’ and/or ‘lifecycle’ buckets (they get more conservative on investment risk the closer you get to your retirement age) is, at the end of the day, all controlled by a broker and they are making the actual decision as to what to invest and how. Some plans may allow you to invest into individual stocks through the 401k’s brokerage though.

At the end of the day though, if all you had was a pension offered which you aren’t going to be contributing your income to, then you should invest in some sort of retirement plan yourself, be it an IRA, money market, bonds, CDs or whatever.

I don’t want to keep replying to this but in response to your ‘this is from a .mil site specifically …’ I linked to the DOD’s actual gov website.

This article is relevant for NAVPERS 18068F because the Navy has all of this annoying traditions, like referring to ‘-’ as Tack like they are pretending to be a flagman from 1835 on a ship and refer to a snackbar as a gedunk and blah blah blah.

But they still have a military rank. Sure, if you ask someone enlisted person what their ‘rate’ is they are going to respond with “PO1” if they are a Petty Officer First Class but if you have a CAC ID, under RANK it is going to say PO1 with the USN’s seal in the top-right. Because it is their military rank. The USN can call it a rate as well and traditionally it can be known as a rate in the USN but it is still a military rank. It will even say that on your ID card if you have one or have had one. As I recall, this is also true for the old green ID cards.

OK, let me just break this down for you. Rates are a job in the Navy. For example, in that wikipedia article, a Fireman recruit is a rate – their job. Their rank would be a Seaman Recruit. Their paygrade would be an E-1.

In your example, a Constructionman would be an E-3. Constructionman would be their rate. Their rank would be Seaman.

You can see this better at https://www.defense.gov/Resources/Insignia/

They don’t list rates, because there’s many, many, many different jobs in the different branches. The Navy is odd in that they usually refer to each other by rates, not ranks. In every other branch, people usually refer to each other by rank and not their MOS/AFSC/Whatever. It would be weird in the USAF for example to refer to some Airman First Class as 2A33C or whatever.

You can see this further explained at https://www.military.com/navy/enlisted-rates.html where they list the rates and talk about them but then they list the ranks and talk about them. They are tied together by paygrade.

And once again, in the US Navy, an enlisted person can literally not have a rate and be called Unrated until they are assigned a rate. Usually this happens to very junior enlisted.

They have pay grades, rank and rates in the Navy, though there are actually also unrated enlisted that get all assigned all the crappiest jobs until they get assigned a rate.

A CMDCM, so an E9. No Congressional approval is needed to bust down an E8 though.

In the navytimes article, they said some of the Cheif’s Mess installed a bunch of wired ‘repeaters’ all over the ship (probably wireless access points and not repeaters though).

Effectively they did through obfuscation. The Command Chief renamed it to look like their wireless printers. She did that because so many more junior people (relative to the Chief’s Mess) complained that the officers tried to check (with their phones) for some wifi Internet. They couldn’t find it because they thought it was a printer. The Command Chief is obviously trusted since she’s the most senior enlisted but she’s also the one that lead the entire scheme. When asked directly by the Commander, she denied it existed, so after not finding it, they just assumed it was a rumor. So, they had a ship-wide call and told everyone that there was no rogue Internet access point on the ship.

It took months because when a tech from a port they were at was installing a Starshield transceiver they physically saw the Starlink transceiver.

Clark on her own personal account likes a post on Twitter.

MAGA: Keep politics out of sports!

Chief’s Kicker (Butker): Makes a misogynist and politically charged speech at a Christian college graduation.

MAGA: Way to tell them like it is! Keep it up.

I think the issue is that you look like you are talking about health insurance in the US. There is basically a zero percent change the person you are responding to is talking about insurance from any plan in the US.

They can spend as much time as they want with the patient. The insurance simply caps how much is billable.

It’s not different really. Either it is obvious and you don’t need them or its your hardware vendor’s fault (according to them). Still better than Oracle’s software support, which is not a high bar.

Yeah good point. I’m definitely guilty of looking at it through an NA centric lens on my post. Thanks for the perspective.

I doubt this happened because of busses that’d leave or parents wondering where the hell their kids are while they are waiting.

I doubt a private school would put up with a consistent disruptive student or with a teacher losing control of a class so bad that they keep everyone behind while also having to deal with angry paying parents.

It’s possible but I doubt it’d happen more than once with that teacher.

If we’re doing Wikipedia as the sole citation then:

In 1806, Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. By 1807, he began work on a more extensive dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language, which took twenty-six years to complete. To evaluate the etymology of words, Webster learned twenty-eight languages, including Old English, Gothic, German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch, Welsh, Russian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit. His goal was to standardize American English, which varied widely across the country. They also spelled, pronounced, and used English words differently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Webster#Blue-backed_speller

As time went on, Webster changed the spellings in the book to more phonetic ones. Most of them already existed as alternative spellings.[34] He chose spellings such as defense, color, and traveler, and changed the re to er in words such as center. He also changed tongue to the older spelling tung, but this did not catch on.

Furthermore your quote doesn’t actually have a relevant citation:

He was very influential in popularizing certain spellings in the United States, but he did not originate them. Rather […] he chose already existing options such as center, color and check for the simplicity, analogy or etymology”

Though in context of the previous paragraph seems to imply that this was an opinion that the wikipedia article came to simply because there was a previous work that argued specifically for ‘or’ in place of ‘our’ but again, it appears to simply be their opinion based on an assumption.

It depends on the genre of course because of the mechanics in play. Sure, FPS with bots are hard but a lot of genres are as challenging because the mechanics usually surround mostly running and gunning with bots (if you’re playing with bots). Making the ‘AI better’ is going to be extremely difficult, especially when balancing resources out for your minimum requirements.

But for say an 3D action game, enemy ambushes, tougher environmental challenges, harder puzzles, more platforming, increase gear rarity for ‘normal’ gear and stuff can add a real challenge. Bullet sponges seems like the path of least resistance to development time. Especially if the 3D action game is single player.

Counter-strike specifically is a tough one because what other mechanics can be involved in it? In the original CS:S there were actual environmental concerns like you could shoot off boards on the rope bridge denying that path. When it released, the rope bridge was static and was always there. I’d imagine this was due to resources on the physics vs. 31 other players having to have a reasonable sync with the server and their updates.

Battlefield has done this over the years but instead of making it really dynamic it has been fairly static, even if it changes the map, it always does it the same way. Blow up a building in BF:BC2? The walls will always fall the same way and the destruction will always be the same, so it’s like a state on or off update for that location for everyone. BF3 which was newer seemed to have even fewer instances where this could happen as just an example but they also doubled the player count. There have been other games that have done more dynamic updates but every engine, fidelity, language, updates/ticks expectations are all different.

Not every genre or game has to be focused on just your targets. The more mechanics that are offered or can be offered are going to be different but certainly, it seems like many games still do not take advantage of that even though they could.