During the US occupation, the Taliban absolutely did attack civilian targets to further political goals. They attacked everything from restaurants to embassies to a university.

That happened at my university, though not to someone affiliated with the university. He was trying to break up a fight. He had a gun and it fell out its holster. He was grabbing for it as campus police were shouting not to. They shot and killed him. While you can argue about whether the police response and training was appropriate, one thing is definitely true. If he had not had a gun on him that day, he would not have been killed. A country awash in guns is not a better country, despite what the “a well armed society is a polite society” people claim.

Place names in general in the Pacific Northwest. Alaska is from an Aleut phrase. Out of the 36 Oregon counties, 10 have roots in indigenous language or culture.

You don’t need to look hard and long enough. You just need to insinuate hard and long enough, then people will believe it eventually.

Yeah, that definition of “master” is different than master/slave from what I can tell. Think the master copy of an audio recording. There are plenty of perfectly legit uses of “master,” but there’s no reason to use master/slave in this day and age. It was stupid to start doing so to begin with.

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Plenty of activists, even those with radical opinions, take that approach. They have a long term goal in mind, but to get to that goal they try to make incremental changes with the power they have.

Hermione got involved in house-elf welfare as an adult and was successful. I am not sure where that is covered, I think maybe Cursed Child? I don’t know much about what happens after the series is over, so I can’t speak to that in detail.

The fatphobia is real, but I’ve never bought the bit about the books being against Hermione’s anti-slavery stance (I assume that’s what you mean by a woman who speaks up as well). My interpretation was that Hermione was always assumed to be in the right because slavery is almost universally condemned in modern society. But she’s standing up against a system where even one of her two closest friends has been indoctrinated into it. Standing up to “others” is hard, but standing up to peer pressure is harder.

That said, the depiction of chattel slavery is of course inaccurate. Slave revolts were common, whereas the house elves want to be subservient to humans. I guess that could be marked up to house elves being a distinct species that may have been manipulated to be subservient, but that’s never explained.

I work at a university IT department. It’s been a struggle with our auditors to loosen up the password expiration requirements. At least with the students they let anyone with 2FA to go without password expiration, which acts as a nice little carrot-and-stick. But for staff it’s two years (2FA always required), regardless of password quality. I’d rather be able to base password expiration on password quality, personality.

LessPass and similar software has some problems. Things like you can’t simply change your master password, you must then recompute and change every site. It’s also not strictly stateless, since you need to know which password iteration you’re on and the user name. Full fledged password managers also typically provide other secret management features, like API keys, SSH keys, credit/debit cards, and identity cards.

The most mediocre dining experience (for the money) I’ve ever had was at a restaurant called “Smallwares.” Emphasis on small, it turns out. Case in point, we ordered duck breast, which cost a fair bit. I was picturing at least a fair amount, but it was the smallest smidgen slivered up with a dollop of sauce. It was the same with every dish, high prices for not much food.

Sure there were other places that had worse food. One remote dinner lacked any fresh food, but you can’t really help that when you’re in the middle of nowhere. But never have I felt like I was being fed by Famine from Good Omens.