After being hated by gamergate chuds for over a decade, she pulls this shit. I have to assume that being loathed is just a fetish at this point.

A conductor performs a number of essential functions for an orchestra:

• Offering a pulse. You may think this is trivial if your experience with music is through rock bands and smaller ensembles, where the musicians can just listen to eachother. But keep in mind that a large orchestra takes up a lot of space, to the point where the speed of sound becomes a major barrier. A symphony orchestra easily spans an area of more than 30 meters, meaning people on the left hear what people on the right play 0.1s late. The 'beat' shown by the conductor arrives with the speed of light, keeping the musicians more together.
• Setting the tempo. Orchestral music tends to have more deliberate tempo changes and fermatas (points where a note is held longer than the implied beat would require).
• Controlling the dynamics and timbre that people play with. A lot of that tends to get ironed down during rehearsals, and sometimes it will be explicitly mentioned in the score, but it can be really helpful for players to reminded that, hey, perform this bit light and playful, and over here, be loud and solid. Especially in longer pieces.
• Cueing players when they have to start playing. In orchestral music, some instrument groups may have large swaths of time where they don't have to play anything (especially percussionists).

Generally the conductor is also responsible for the interpretation of the music. Orchestral scores don't tend to be black&white, and there are a lot of decisions to be made in how to approach a piece. The conductor is the one who makes those decisions.

I'm assuming you own these machines and are forced to pick them open because you lost the key

That definitely would be my assumption. Otherwise it would be stealing from the land-lord, hoo boy, we wouldn't want that would we?

The problem with the anti-SJW grift was always that there were like 5 videos of 3 different activists that kept going through re-runs, at the end of the line there wasn't enough fuel for the fire of outrage that it fed upon.

As a Dutch guy, I just can't relate. Not that I needed extra reasons not to emigrate to TERF island, but this would definitely be one of them if I did.

Support for victims of genocide, if they are recipients of pell grants and operate a business in a minority neighbourhood for at least two years.

<3

Being able to swim when stationed on a ship sounds way more useful than it actually is. In a 'man overboard' situation, it doesn't help you much, you get fucked by the inertia of a massive ship that can't just turn around and pick you up. By the time they manage to turn around the ship, the real problem is actually finding you. Even if you're an excellent swimmer, your chances of survival are very low.

We have two Christmas Days, on December 25 and 26. For people in relationships that usually means one day celebrating with your parents, and the other with your inlaws. Lately a lot of people have started observing an unofficial third Christmas Day on the 27th to celebrate with friends.

The sad thing is, this isn't even a shocking up-set. The Netherlands has been flirting with right-wing populists ever since the rise of Pim Fortuyn. And PVV was already getting a significant number of seats in previous elections. The balance was now just slightly changed because the neoliberal right in the form of VVD fucked up governing so hard that a fair number of liberal votes that used to go to them ended up getting split between neoliberal center-right (NSC) and neoliberal center-left (GL-PvDA).

In somewhat better news, other chud-adjacent parties (FvD, BBB) also didn't really perform well. Which means any extreme agenda items PVV may have aren't going to survive a coalition.

I feel personally attacked.

This is valid late 90's critique on Windows. In the modern day, it's valid critique on the entire state of computer software. There used to be a time where I could run "ps axuw" on a then modern Unix system and understand exactly what the fuck was going on and what each process was for. These days the nerd-favoured systems are also a big mess of complexity.

I think a lot of older nerds also under-appreciate the position tech has taken in the world in the meantime. Look at it like electricity. When that first popped up, people involved with it knew all the ins-and-outs, they -had- to know all the ins-and-outs. But by the time I grew up, electricity was a done deal. You flip the button, lights go on. Same has happened for the rest of the world with IT. You click the icon, facebook pops up.