I was referring to PlexAmp. It’s decent, works well, but I just liked the interface for Symfonium better. It seemed more functional than PlexAmp when I switched over to it.
I actually haven’t used PlexAmp in a few years, so maybe it’s gotten better lately. I guess I’ll have to compare apps.
In the US, pensions have almost completely gone away, in favor of 401K programs. A pension is (typically) a monthly fixed income given by your former employer for the rest of your life upon retiring from a career.
The 401K program is more like a retirement savings account; you contribute a portion of your paycheck toward it each month and your employer will match your contribution up to a certain pre-designated amount. Whatever money is in that account becomes your own personal “pension” that you live off of after you reach retirement age. Instead of your employer putting aside money to pay retired employees, now you’re responsible for setting aside that money yourself, with a little extra contribution from your company.
Employers prefer the 401K program because they invest a little extra money into you initially, but then they don’t have to pay out a pension for the rest of a former employee’s life. So they save money in the long run. Meanwhile, your retirement depends on you being fiscally responsible early in your career instead of expecting a fixed income to cover you later in life.
All right, now I’m convinced you’re just a burner account for my wife. You’re still arguing semantics, distracting with irrelevant information, and are willingly misunderstanding instead of contributing to the actual conversation. Looks like you care more about arguing than having an actual productive discussion, so it’s not really worth my time to try and rehash this in even simpler terms for you.
But I will condede, I meant 90 days, not 30. That was an honest slip of the fingers.
EDIT: Fine, because it’s bothering me how poorly you’re following this discussion, here’s an actual response:
Congress in Iraq 2003 authorized before, rather than after. […]
Irrelevant. My point was that the president can act on his own. Period. That was the whole discussion, from the very start. Congress is not needed. Just because Congress has been consulted with, and approved further action before the president gave the order, doesn’t mean he can’t do it.
You’re trying to say the president can’t send troops overseas into enemy territory without approval from Congress and that is simply wrong. You’ve been quoting the War Powers Act in every thread here, and even corrected me on the 90 days rule, yet you still act like the president’s hands are tied without Congress signing off on everything he does. That’s literally the point of the 90 day rule!
The name of the medal was official. I’m not going to re-litigate the entire subject, but if your point is that there was an aversion to using the word “war” in public, that simply wasn’t so. […]
Okay, let me simplify this for you, since you’re struggling with reading comprehension. Publicly, it was called the Iraq War. Because that’s the term the civilian population latched onto and we couldn’t shake that perception. Same with Vietnam War, Korean War, Gulf War, etc. Not official wars, but the public named them and we didn’t argue semantics with news agencies, lest it ruin our credibility. (Like arguing with trolls about semantics online. Hmm…) We do not have an aversion to using “war” publicly. We actually prefer to use that word publicly.
In an official capacity though (read: behind-the-scenes military documentation/records/discussion/etc.), it’s always been the Iraq Campaign. We do not call it a war because Congress never declared war. It’s literally as simple as that. Our written military history will officially have it documented as a military campaign and nothing more. The medal awarded for participation in the Iraq War is literally called the Iraq Campaign Medal.
The medal you’re referring to in your comment is the Global War on Terrorism medal. Not related to the Iraq War, or any war in particular. It’s a stupid declaration by a former president who wanted to make a statement about standing up to the 9/11 attacks, and award any service member who takes part in this so-called “War on Terror.”
And again, we use the word “war” publicly, so there’s no reason we can’t have it on that particular medal. It’s not referencing a specific military campaign, so it can be named the Global War on Terrorism medal. Refer to the “War on Drugs” comment in my last reply.
I usually don’t have to deep dive into the specifics about these things with civilians
Perhaps an assumption?
An assumption about what? You obviously didn’t serve in the military, or else you would know all this and I wouldn’t have to spell this out multiple times for you. So yes, I’m assuming you’re just a civilian who read a few articles and are now struggling to follow actual information from someone who experienced it first-hand through the military, because it didn’t align with whatever comprehension you took away from the subject.
Man, you sound just like my wife. Always arguing semantics when the overall point I’m making is pretty clear. ;) Now it’s my turn to point out the (ridiculous) semantics of the GWOT.
The Global War on Terrorism was a (rather ignorant) blanket statement made by then-president George W. Bush Jr., implying the concept of fighting terrorism across the globe. It had nothing to do with the Iraq War; it actually predates that campaign. It was a direct response to 9/11, with the Iraq War being the first active military campaign justified under it. We’ve been awarded the two GWOT medals for various military campaigns around the globe. I earned the expeditionary medal from a humanitarian deployment to Africa, of all places, and earned the service medal while stationed in Japan. And they’re still being awarded today, even though we’ve completely pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Despite using the word “war” in the medal’s name, the concept behind it was akin to the “War on Drugs.” It’s not an actual war against a particular nation or people; it’s a war on a concept. How can you fight a concept?!
Terrorism is a very vague word that applies to any situation in which someone uses fear and/or intimidation to get their way. We’ve definitely used that specific definition to justify stepping into situations we had no reason to be involved in. Like Iraq.
Much like the War on Drugs, I’m sure we’ll eventually see that there’s no possible way to win against the concept of terrorism, and we’ll silently phase it out. Heck, we’ve been ordered as of 2021 to start restricting the award of the GWOT-Service medal, so we’re already beginning to phase it out. It was a stupid statement, made by a stupid president who constantly flubbed his words, and shouldn’t be taken at face value.
To your other point, yes, I used the word “just” when referring to the president’s decision. The reason being, it is solely his decision, as the highest ranking leader of the Department of Defense (DoD), to implement the military in “campaigns” across the globe. He does not need anyone’s permission to deploy us.
However, you are correct that the War Powers Act restricts how he uses the military. He can send us out on a whim, but without that approval by Congress, he’d have to pull us back within 30 days. And he’s not allowed to actively order us into hostile situations without approval by Congress.
If we encounter hostilities while out on various campaigns, though, we’re authorized to respond appropriately to the situation via the Rules of Engagement (RoE). Kind of a loophole, which I have definitely seen used before. “Oops, we just happened to be passing through on a patrol and terrorists jumped out of nowhere and opened fire on us! We ended the initial threat, but quick, approve our sustained operations in the area so we can identify and neutralize lingering threats!”
Also, the public referred to the Iraq War as such, and news agencies latched onto the term, so politicians started using it too. And our Public Affairs office instructed military officials who were authorized to speak officially to the public to use common lingo.
But as military members, operating in an official capacity, we were required to use the “correct terminology” in our discussion and documentation, so as not to give off the wrong impression on official records. Which is why we were expected to use Iraq Campaign instead of Iraq War in our official lingo. Future generations will see our official records documented during the Iraq War, and the DoD prefers it’s framed in a certain way, so it doesn’t seem like we were intentionally encouraging a war in the region. As much of a failure as that campaign was, and as paper-thin our excuse was for deploying there, we don’t want people to also think we were just war-hungry terrorists or something. Right?? 9_9
Apologies if my semantics are not 100% accurate; I usually don’t have to deep dive into the specifics about these things with civilians, so I tend to “handwave away” the details, as you put it. I’m sorry if was a bit loose with my verbiage.
I mean, my point still stands. They weren’t officially declared wars, and they were the president deciding to get involved in foreign affairs. The only difference is that Congress decided to vote on our involvement from 1973 onwards.
So our latest presidents have been more generous about sharing the decision instead of steamrolling ahead on their own. Probably a better move politically; he won’t take the full blame if the decision isn’t popular, like Vietnam.
Technically only Congress can authorize a war. However, the president can and often will undertake “peacekeeping efforts” or “counterinsurgency operations” or “targeted strikes” without congressional approval.
I served in the US military during the Iraq War. Everyone refers to it as a war, but within the military, it was officially called the Iraq Campaign, as it was a military campaign sanctioned by the president. We couldn’t officially call it a war because Congress didn’t approve a war in the Middle East.
Technically, the last war Congress approved was WWII. The Korean War, the Vietnam War, even our first foray into Iraq with the Gulf War… none of these are official wars. Just the president deciding to step in and get involved in foreign conflicts.
I’ve been maintaining a self-hosted music library for so long (30+ years now), there used to not be any tools for editing metadata. I used to have to go into file properties and manually edit the data for each individual MP3 file. Nowadays, I use Mp3tag to manually edit entire albums at a time. I have ADHD though (the hyperfixation kind), so I’ve literally dedicated thousands of hours to manually fixing metadata.
I guess I never bothered to look for more advanced tools to auto-update metadata. I had to go in and manually fix stuff that updated automatically from the Internet in the past, so I guess I stopped trusting online databases. But they’ve really advanced since the last time I went searching for tools, and their databases are a lot more complete in this day and age. I’m gonna play around with some of these programs and see how well they work.
I host my music library through Plex, then use Symfonium on my phone if I want to stream my Plex music remotely, just because I like their interface a little better than Plex’s.
It’s the other way around; you connect to seeders.
In the example of 2 (3), there are 3 total seeders and you’re connected to 2 of them.
Although in your screenshot, you’re at 100%, so you’re not connected to any seeders at the moment and are, yourself, a seeder. You have peers (leechers) connecting to you. Same principle applies; in an example of 2 (7), there are 7 peers in total, and 2 of them are actively leeching off you.
When I was a kid, it was one and done. I grabbed a clean towel from the bathroom closet every day. Even though I was clean coming out of the shower, I also knew that showering loosens dead skin cells, which I was rubbing all over the towel. Over time, those skin cells would decompose, giving off a musty smell. I learned that from my dad, who almost never changed his towel. Ick. It made me extra paranoid about reusing them, so I swapped towels daily.
When I became an adult and had to do my own laundry, I realized just how miserable it was trying to wash 7 towels every week. (Why did my mother let me use so many towels as a kid?!) So I started reusing them. I used a towel for a week before throwing it in the laundry.
Now, I’m recently retired in my late 30s and shower every 2-3 days (or anytime I leave the house). Since I’m not showering as frequently, I will reuse a towel for about 2-3 weeks before replacing it. If I go to dry off after a shower and the towel smells a bit musty, I’ll toss it on the floor and grab a fresh towel instead. I think I’m on week 4 with my current towel, but it still smells clean, so I’m not too worried about getting a few more showers out of it.
For me personally, video games are interactive stories. I love movies and TV shows, and being able to have some level of control over the action is an amazing experience for me!
I’m also not competitive and don’t care so much about scores, rankings, or online multiplayer vs. games. Just give me an intriguing plot and let me be the protagonist in it. I’ll play that game for hours on end.
I don’t like games that are essentially movies with a few interactive scenes between clips, though. It has to be really interesting if I’m going to sit through a game like that. I’m here to play, not to watch. The only series that’s been interesting enough for me to deal with hundreds of cutscenes dispersed every few minutes throughout is the Metal Gear Solid series.
I realize I don’t speak for the whole gaming community, but this is my personal view.
The hair is styled differently.
I spent 20 years in the US military. I had to quickly learn “military time” in order to function, as we were taught 12-hr time growing up in school. I was surprised when I traveled the world and discovered that everyone else uses “military time” (read: international time) as well. I guess Americans just really wanna do their own thing.
I exclusively use military time nowadays. If someone doesn’t understand the time I stated, I’ll correct it to 12-hr time on the spot, as converting is super easy. Just count back 2 hours and drop the 10’s digit by one; e.g. 1600 = 4 PM. 2200 = 10 PM. Etc.
I browse Lemmy from my phone with Sync for Lemmy. It shows me every federated instance in one scrolling feed, including kbin.
I watch several channels where people just mow lawns or do other landscaping work (it’s my version of ASMR; doing yard work was a nostalgic childhood memory of mine).
One of the guys I watch bragged about how amazing his riding mower was. He swore up and down he wasn’t a shill for the company, and he even painted over their logo so he wasn’t inadvertently advertising their brand on his channel. But he said it was the best mower he’s used in decades of work.
I wonder if this has anything to do with my Starlink connection dropping out in the middle of the night. Maybe a handful of the lost satellites would’ve been passing through my area in the night.
Several times in the night, between 2 and 4 AM, my connection blips for a few minutes. Which is normally not a big deal, but I’m a night owl and usually awake all night. Plus it interrupts any online services I have running overnight, so I’ve lost progress on projects I’m working on throughout the night.
Meh, Starlink is just a temporary fix anyway. I live out in the countryside, where I’ve been lucky to get 20-30 Mbps speeds for years. Starlink brings high speed Internet to my home (100-200 Mbps speeds), but it’s been kind of unreliable. And their single public IP address for my entire network messes with my home servers that require their own independent IP addresses, so I can’t run any of my online services from home. Not without buying a dedicated VPN server out on the Internet somewhere that I can route my traffic through.
Thanks to Biden’s high speed Internet initiative, I’m finally getting a dedicated fiber line out to my house. Gonna take at least a year before the local ISP wires my region, but once that’s in place, I’m throwing out Starlink.
When you switch to any sort of tire that doesn’t have pressurized air in it, the dampening can only occur by deforming the tire in contact with the ground, and it’s not going to be anywhere near as good.
I mean, these new tires do deform with the ground. That’s the “revolutionary tech” they brag about; the rings are designed to compress a bit and deform to compensate for impact, but always bounce back to their original shape no matter how much force is exerted on them. So you get a simulated air pressure.
Same, large hands here. Smaller phones are uncomfortable.
On the flip side, my wife gets the smaller version of our phones because she has tiny hands. Her hands get cramps from holding up larger phones and she has mild tendonitis in her wrists from previous large/heavy phones.
She also has to shop for shoes in the kids’ aisles, so you know… she’s kind of a petite person all around.
I spent the last 20 years in the US military, most of it being referred to as “Sergeant [cobysev].” The past year since I’ve been retired, I’ve been trying to get used to being called “Mr. [cobysev].” It’s really weird, especially since I joined the military at 18, so no one called me Mr. previously.
Metal Gear Solid 4 is the only MGS game I’ve had an itch to play for years now. But my PS3 broke years ago and that game has never been ported anywhere else. I was sad to learn that the first Master Collection didn’t include it, so I’m hopeful this second collection makes it playable on Steam.