• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 5th, 2023

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  • I was in the military from 2010 to 2022. If all you’ve known is living on post then you weren’t trying to be a member of the community and that’s at least part of the problem here. When you live “on post” you’re isolated and that’s at least partially about control (and damage control).

    I’ve served both active duty and as a reservist and I gotta tell ya, the shortest I ever lived in one place was about 6 months during C-school. You don’t make a whole lot of connections in 6 months, but you absolutely can in 4 years and my first duty station was literally a 4 year stint. It is what you make of it, but it’s also down to what kind of person you are, where you’re from, hundreds of other things besides.

    The people I have known (deployed and from my home town) who were Guard rather than military seem to have had similar experiences to me. Not all of them are even stationed in their home towns. Plenty of the ones I’ve known have been deployed.

    I was also stationed in CA. I hate the state, but the community where I lived and worked wasn’t the worst. I had neighbors and friends, people who gave a damn. That’s perhaps rare in the military, but for the purposes of the conversation about the differences between the Guard and the Military branches, I can’t say that I would consider the National Guard to be a Civil Service, even if on paper it might technically qualify. The National Guard has more in common with military than it does with just about any other civil service and bonds to the community don’t do much to protect you from living in a hut in Djibouti or a tent in the sandbox.

    I wouldn’t be so quiet to discredit sacrifices those people have made just to make a random claim online.


  • Joining the military, you would expect to be living separate and apart from the local communities.<<

    As someone who joined the military, that’s not really how that works and if you’re getting your information from memes and content creators, perhaps it might be a better idea not to continue this conversation because I really don’t want to have to go into detail about how flawed that first sentence is, let alone the rest of it.






  • How does the boosting work? Because I was never a major Twitter user, and on Tumblr, the “retweet”. Option makes things a bit of a disjointed mess because (at least with new Tumblr and the app) it treats each share as a separate post and they aren’t linked properly together. So, say someone responds to a comment you made on the reshare ten reshare ago. You may or may not even be able to access it. You may not even be able to find it.






  • I opted out when they first introduced it. So it’s not in use on my phone and never has been. My smart home devices are all older so nothing with Gemini built in. This may be the difference for me. I dunno.

    The main smart speaker I use is a Lenovo Smart Display and it hasn’t received updates in years. It’s got physical switches for the mic and camera and my smart home stuff is on a separate network from everything else in my house on purpose.

    I think the newest speaker I own is the set of Google home max’s and they don’t even sell those anymore. They’ve been disabled for mic so they’re only for casting to.

    This works for me but my home is small and all I’ve really got is some Philips hue lights and a couple of smart blinds. I set up routines early on so I’m not really asking the assistant to do a lot of things using voice controls.

    On my phone at work I use it when my hands are occupied, and I use it I’m the car (but my car isn’t equipped for Android Auto etc). So I think for me it’s probably just limited in what it can interact with to the point I don’t notice it much.


  • What we have now in America is a system that is volunteer or conscript (commit a crime and you may be given the option to join the military or do prison time). This takes advantage of the poorest and most vulnerable in our society.

    I am generally for the idea of mandatory service. But the actuality as I experienced military service is not something I would wish on other people. The military is kind of broken in many ways.

    Suicide rates are higher than the national average.

    Rapes/sexual assaults are higher than the national average.

    They have a blind spot where mental healthcare is concerned.

    Leadership often employs and elevates people who will actively take advantage of their position. This is often detrimental to the members who serve under them.

    The military often does a horrible job of allowing injured people the time and conditions to fully heal.

    The military also treats everyone as if they lack common sense and the ability to reason. As a result it does not promote the type of people who think outside the box. There’s multiple ways that military service infantalizes its members instead of treating them like adults.

    There are many reasons I think it could be a good idea and a good experience for the vast majority of people. But not as it is now. The system would need an overhaul.