Originally Posted by bassmadrigal

You say "exactly" then go and mention something completely unrelated to what I posted? Going into that...

Do you realize how many people get out after their first enlistment? Usually more than half. According to that article, which links to this study, in 2008 only the Army and Air Force sit in the 40s (42 and 47 respectively), while the Navy is at 26% and the Marines are at 34%.

If we go back to 2000, the Army ranges from 24%-42% of first term retention, Navy is 21%-42%, Marine Corps is 19%-36%, and the Air Force is 33%-52%. If they really wanted more people to reenlist (and they were having problems reaching their goals), they would throw out more money with reenlistment bonuses. But, at least in the Air Force, those are few and far between. I've never gotten one with my 2 reenlistments.

And sure, there was experimenting done with soldiers decades ago (last I could find anything on was in 60s and 70s with LSD), but do you have any proof it's happening now? Because I certainly haven't seen any signs of it. I get my annual flu shot, but they don't care if I get it from the base or go to a local CVS and then just show proof of it at the base, so it is highly unlikely they are using it as some crazy experiment. Or is this just coming from conspiracy land?

Originally Posted by BW-userx

cut there losses, it is not a full proof ideology to the applied psychology behind it.

You fail to see what psychology they are using, money saved is money saved in having to retrain others to take the places of the one that do not stay. For one thing, and they do not want to keep them that are in it only for the money, they are wanting the ones they can control easier by their psychology that they "need a place that makes them feel like they belong, and have a hard time readjusting to the civilian life. they will fall into place and follow orders without questing them no matter what, making them easier control because that is all they know and it is all they can ever know. the become the little puppets on a string to be manipulated how ever the higher ups deem necessary,

ollie north, he was just following orders, and they used him for a patsy.

Originally Posted by BW-userx

after the atomic age, and what radiation does to people. A small town somewhere in USA a family of 8 children, all of them mongoloids, everyone of them, that is statistically impossible. further investigation show that "someone' planted depleted uranium through out the town square and other various areas in the town. to see what the long term effects would be on people exposed to depleted uranium over a long period of time. when brought to the USA Government, nothing said, nothing done about it.
source:
some documentary I seen on TV a long time ago,

what other experiments and atrocious is the US Government doing to its people, and other countries that is not talked about or known by the public?

go to where it list United States
Unethical_human_experimentation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethi...xperimentation

Originally Posted by bassmadrigal

This is just sadly and grossly incorrect (at least with the modern day military... I can't speak for times that I was not enlisted)! What on earth did you experience that made you so jaded on the military? Yes, you are correct that they like to have people stay in so they can get a return on the money they spent to get them trained compared to the years it would take for them to train someone else and have them get to the same level of experience.

But beyond that, you are incredibly misinformed. There is no big push in trying to get people to reenlist (short of the critically manned career fields that are hurting for people, and that is where reenlistment bonuses come in). Once their enlistment is coming to a close, they can either choose to reenlist or to separate (or retire, if they've been in long enough). They may get a supervisor or mentor to talk to them to make sure they're making a proper decision, but there is no huge push to try and get people to reenlist. In fact, the military can't have everyone reenlist, because they don't have enough manning positions for it. Having worked with all the branches of military over my almost 12 years of service, I've never heard of anyone being coerced into reenlisting or to try and get talked out of reenlisting. Out of the 50 or so people I worked with daily at my first base, I think there's probably only 10 of us serving now. (Out of the ones I keep in touch with, the ones who have gotten out seem to be doing plenty well for themselves in a civilian world and don't seem to be suffering from any "brain washing" the military did on them.

And if they were wanting these people so bad, it would be a lot easier to have members who got out rejoin the service. But I can tell you that the Air Force hired a little over 30,000 active duty members last year, and only 500 or so were "prior service". Seeing the process for prior service applicants, it is extremely difficult to get them back in the military, even if they just separated due to their original enlistment ending and they just chose to not reenlist (having a reenlist code of 1 meaning they're fully qualified for reenlistment). I have to break that news to a lot of prior service applicants that it is very difficult to get back in and it may not be a job they're interested in doing (since we typically only accept them into critically manned fields).

And to trounce this idea even further, the military has changed the old retirement system to the new Blended Retirement System, lowering the pension for serving 20 years from 50% of your base pay to 40% and then offering up to 5% matching into that member's Thrift Savings Plan (TSP - a 401k-like retirement account). They offer the matching because they realize that many members won't be staying in until retirement and this still gets them some additional benefit beyond only what the member saves. So, for people who come into the military now, their benefit of retiring has dropped almost $500/month if they retire as a E-7 with 20 years (E-7 with 20 years is $4797.60/month, so the old system would give them $2398.80/month retirement and the new system would give them $1919.04, a difference of $479.76). Now, I wouldn't say they changed this to encourage people to *not* retire, but rather realizing that many people don't stay for 20, and taking that extra $500/month and instead using it to match contributions into 401k-like savings, it allows members who don't see 20 years to still get something towards retirement.



Did you miss the part where I agreed that testing *did* happen? What I'm now questioning is whether it still happens. I couldn't find anything beyond the 70s of any testing done on military members. Do you have any proof anything is happening *today*? Because I don't see any signs of it. I'm not required any vaccinations beyond my annual flu vaccine, and they don't care if I get it done on base by immunizations or off base at something like a local CVS, as long as I provide the record that it was done.

Originally Posted by SCerovec

Wouldn't we all benefit if Slackware got significantly trimmed down:

There is that one point where from one can just fire up slackpkg or sbotools and get to install a complete category, environment or suite without too much effort (thanks to hoorex and other dependency scanning tools)

I can imagine KDE and XFCE being shipped separately and not used at all in certain (more than just few?) cases.

Since Gnome was dropped, there is no point claiming Slackware is bound to any particular desktop environment over any other.

Maybe we are not ready for that yet?

Maybe we are?

Originally Posted by bassmadrigal

.......But beyond that, you are incredibly misinformed. There is no big push in trying to get people to reenlist (short of the critically manned career fields that are hurting for people, and that is where reenlistment bonuses come in). Once their enlistment is coming to a close, they can either choose to reenlist or to separate (or retire, if they've been in long enough). They may get a supervisor or mentor to talk to them to make sure they're making a proper decision, but there is no huge push to try and get people to reenlist. In fact, the military can't have everyone reenlist, because they don't have enough manning positions for it. Having worked with all the branches of military over my almost 12 years of service, I've never heard of anyone being coerced into reenlisting or to try and get talked out of reenlisting. Out of the 50 or so people I worked with daily at my first base, I think there's probably only 10 of us serving now. (Out of the ones I keep in touch with, the ones who have gotten out seem to be doing plenty well for themselves in a civilian world and don't seem to be suffering from any "brain washing" the military did on them..........

Originally Posted by Poprocks

Yes metapackages are empty packages that include nothing but dependencies. They are not implementable with pkgtools for obvious reasons. Slackware does have package groups though, of course. Patrick Volkerding has stated they are a historical relic, but I think they are a very useful concept and I know a lot of people feel that way.

It's great because users who want a minimal system can just omit entire package groups altogether, such as 'kde' and 'e'.

Originally Posted by OldHolborn

Please unset

CONFIG_RANDOM_TRUST_CPU=y