blackbrook

Yeah but this kind of salt they only taste test every half million years or so, so the expiration dates cant be trusted to be that precise.

pretty sure I've seen ducks shooting up in the park...

It's not mangy, its exuberant! Give it time, it may grow on you. (pun not intended...honest)

They were carried by knights who didn't have horses.

Maybe, but if true it means that whether the child is choking on feathers or bowling balls, they are ejected at the same speed, which is a great advantage of this technique.

Ooo, rub that butt! (It looks like you did, what did you use?)

The solution to this is either reform from within, or by regulation. The former requires that involvement that I talked about, starting at the local level. That is how grassroots works. Reform has happened before. We did not use to even have democratic primaries.

We could argue about which of those two approaches is more feasible, but I would argue that any regulation from above is going to be incomplete and imperfect, and the people involved are going to game the new system just as they have before to their advantage and to hold onto power. The only long term solution is more involvement from below. Democracy cannot work with the minimal level of involvement that we have come expect.

Not at all, nor am I saying it's a good system. But the realities of how individuals shape the system and determine who is making discisions starts at the local level, and happens over time, and it does come to reflect the interests of those who choose to participate, and not those who don't. This is just the reality of how power operates.

Where do you think 'the party' comes from, the people who make these bad decisions? Are you active in local politics? Do you educate yourself and vote in local elections? Most people act like the only election there is, is the presidential election, and wonder why they feel disconnected from the choices. Well there are a million small choices going into who that pool of bad choices is winnowed from, and who is making backroom decisions playing into it, and most people are clueless how any of it works, uninterested to learn, and completely checked out. Well that's how we end up here.

Automated package testing before each update rolls out to users.

In the event that an update does break your system, you can roll back to the last snapshot from the grub menu (using the smart btrfs setup that is the installation default).

Also generally, maintained by very smart people, community is not toxic, corporate overlords more benign than most, IMO.

Or while bending over and sticking your butt out.

That's how that language construct works. That's pretty much the point of it.