The Queer Kiwi on YouTube uses "Guys, gals and non-binary pals.". Only watched two or three of her videos and I couldn't for the life of me tell you what they were about (I hope I learned something anyway), but that one phrase is currently living rent free in my head.

Were I to come up with something on my own, it would probably be along the lines of "dear(est) sapient beings", but it's in the realm of clunky, scientific, pretentious, etc. and needs work. Likewise, things like "esteemed fellow humans", read like an alien pretending to be human. The point being to include everyone with a single term rather than aim for two plus extra.

The problem, as always, is one of money. Either a local council has to provide them for free at cost to taxpayer or they need to be pay toilets. And if you want clean public toilets, you also need at least one full-time attendant (or equivalent).

The first thing to go - if there was ever one in the first place - is the attendant because the council sees a £20+k a year bill they can save and instead send one person around in a van to all the public toilets. "Only one person and one dirty mop required! The public will never notice!"

Then the serious vandalism starts because there's no permanent presence to discourage the vandals. And then: "Oh no, who would have thought this would happen? These toilets must be in a vandalism hotspot and need to be closed permanently!"

This leaves pay toilets, and guess what? The companies and councils that run these still hate having to pay attendants because its a case of wanting to keep that money for themselves, and/or else the price has to be jacked up so high to cover the running costs that people wouldn't want to pay to use them.

The last pay toilet I used was 20p and that was a long time ago. I expect they're 50p or £1 now.

Everything is a package

I mean, pretty much. Or rather, everything is in a package. Back in the old days they were called source distributions or .tar.gzs and you compiled everything yourself. Gentoo, for example, still does everything that way, but uses the name 'package' anyway.

The coreutils package, or something like it, contains multiple commands that a bare bones, command-line-only system would need, but some things are built into the shells. e.g. cd is always shell-based. echo may or may not be. ls (dir) is in coreutils.

There are also things like busybox that, in a single executable from a single package, contains a stripped-down version of everything in coreutils, a shell and a handful of other things too.

(Caveat: I'm currently on medication that helps with getting off to sleep, and might also be helping me with anxiety/depression, but it's really hard to gauge that side of it. Anyway, sometimes I try these if the effects are wearing off in a morning and my mind starts spinning, and used to use them before being on the medication at night too.)

Breathing exercises sometimes work. The old deep breath, hold for a little too long and then let it go in a measured manner. Two or three cycles and then relaxing / applying some or all of the following might work.

Other times, telling myself that what I'm thinking about can wait until morning / later, basically trying to trigger "save and quit" in my brain. I got quite good at that before the change of medication.

Another weird trick is to convince myself that the room is the other way up and if I don't relax and sink into the sheets and mattress that I'll fall away from the bed onto the ceiling. I know this doesn't make any kind of sense. File it under "so stupid it works (sometimes)".

Practically speaking, try not to be too warm or too cold. A surefire way for me to not fall asleep is to have cold feet. I might not even realise that my feet are cold until I think about it. An electric (under-)blanket that warms both body and feet has proven invaluable, as did the hot water bottle that preceded it.

Finally, if none of these work, get up and do something to distract yourself for a while. Plan to get back in bed 10-15 minutes before a multiple of 90 minutes before the time you've set your alarm. Hopefully, you'll be tired enough to sleep before 105 minutes (15+90) to go, because that's basically the last chance for meaningful rest. Anything less is a short nap and you'll probably be groggy when you wake up.

The next advice you need to seek is how to wake up when you're tired and/or groggy.

Should we tell them about the US Army's Commander-in-Chief...?

While the palindromic structure of that command is pleasing to mine eye, LMDE basically called me a frickin' idiot for trying.

I know it always asks Continue [Y/n] and there's no yes | or echo | to force that, so I was reasonably sure I'd get away with it, but I don't think I could argue with the sentiment had it actually said that.

(Also, I have Timeshift, so that would have saved my bacon but for the inconvenience of having to go through a rollback.)

Anyway, here's what it said (scrolling may be required to see the last line which is clearly code for "you're an idiot"):

REMOVING:                       
  apt       apt-utils          mint-meta-cinnamon  mintsources  mintupdate       sudo
  apt-file  command-not-found  mint-meta-core      mintsystem   python3-repolib

WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed.
This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!
  apt

Summary:
  Upgrading: 0, Installing: 0, Removing: 12, Not Upgrading: 1
  Freed space: 52.3 MB

Error: Removing essential system-critical packages is not permitted. This might break the system.

The earliest message I have accessible in Thunderbird is from the 25th of May, 2001. It's part of a conversation with old work colleagues who I had remained drinking buddies with when I started a new job nearby. (There are actually two messages with earlier dates, but one is an imported message from March of 2001 that wasn't actually sent or originally received by me, and another that's an old Usenet post, probably also imported, that doesn't have a datestamp at all, registering as 1/1/1970.)

If I go digging around in my university backup, I have messages from 1998 in there. I would have earlier e-mails, but quota was limited on the University systems, so I expect I deleted everything at the start of every year.

Whenever it cost £35 for a 256MB stick. The Internet suggests 2003 or 2004 which tracks.

Let's say Usenet.

When I gained access at university, search engines hadn't really taken off yet so if you wanted to access something, you had to know the http address, and if you didn't know any web addresses, you were stuck. (Maybe the actual, actual first thing I visited was the university website, because that was at least fairly easy to figure out the address of, even if visiting it was somewhat redundant.)

However, the university also provided Usenet access.

Usenet at least had a small, finite number of newsgroups and any decent Usenet server could list all the groups it had available. A hundred or more web.server.like things right there. And thousands of people who already knew several actual web addresses elsewhere in the world who also had access to those newsgroups.

I can see sister or cousin for sure.

If you want Pluto to be a planet with no modifier adjective, you can't then just have the nine that were taught in schools for decades as "the planets of the Solar system", because we've discovered several out there beyond Neptune that qualify in the same way that Pluto does.

Most pro-Pluto arguments boil down to "there are nine because I was taught nine and nothing will ever change that (but maybe I could be convinced to allow one extra one at the end because the newspapers love a good planet X story)".

The mnemonics, whatever they'd be (or become) would need to account for the letters MVEMCJSUNOPSHQMGES and there would be the expectation that it could change at any minute if something new is discovered due to the rate of progress that simply didn't exist when the nine were set in stone.

And most arguments against Ceres being in the list would rule out Pluto for the same reason (and there's at least one that would qualify Ceres and not Pluto - orbiting along the ecliptic.)

Because Quark's brother won't return his calls.