I think my old man had much the same, or at least somewhat similar thoughts, when he came home from Vietnam. He was a UH1 door-gunner/crew-chief with the 4th ID in the Central Highlands, survived being shot down, was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross, a purple heart, a fistful of air medals and came home with a giant chip on his shoulder.

In the first movie he is searching for The Ark of the Covenant, but otherwise you are correct.

Especially since those guys are pretty much all lard-asses. There’s a reason why every competent military on the planet emphasizes physical fitness before anything else; it’s because real combat --as opposed to playing paintball with your fatbody friends-- is one of the most physically and psychologically punishing activities known to man.

I am a union member so this isn’t a thing that happens. If management does something unacceptable, we do a strike authorization vote which, if passed by the membership, starts a clock ticking down to strike time and management knows that they are on notice and need to start negotiations.

All of which is just to say that unions are good for workers, regardless of what kind of bullshit you may have been led to believe.

A lightweight Linux distro can get you the same results with current software. Hell, even Ubuntu will. The deterrent has always been that you have to tinker with it to get it to work right, but that’s a lot less true now then it was in the past. I recently installed Ubuntu 22.04 on my wife’s old iMac and it’s lightening fast and worked straight out of the box with no tinkering whatsoever. It’s about 20 times faster than it was running iOS.

Scarcely. Read the majority opinion. It specifically carves out an exception for “creative works” (or whatever the exact term is, I honestly don’t remember) which in effect says that you cannot be forced by law to create something that espouses a position or creed with which you disagree.

As of right now I don’t have a strong opinion on the ruling either way, but I think it’s worth getting what it says right before we condemn it.

I lean towards thinking that it makes distinctions with which I agree, but I’m going to withhold judgement until I learn more about the arguments and we have a better sense of how it’s going to play out in practice.