BeautifulMind ♾️ @ BeautifulMind @lemmy.world

Late-diagnosed autistic, special interest-haver, dad, cyclist, software pro

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2 yr. ago

I grew up and rode the bus to school in Iowa.

I rode the bus in Alaska. The buses ran well below -50f. It turns out that it's not that hard to keep your batteries and oilpans heated if you bother putting plug-in heaters (literally, electric blankets for the purpose) in your fleet vehicles, winterize your vehicles, and plug them in when it's cold.

I get that it's uncommon to be that cold-prepared in places that don't expect to see temperatures below -20 for more than a few days in a given calendar year- at some point, it makes sense to just call it off when it's that cold. After all, do all (or even most of) the kids have proper clothes to deal with real cold?

Really cold weather can be adapted to, it's just that when you don't need it that often it makes sense not to spend the resources doing it.

"We're tracking you for your privacy 🙄

Because of course that's the top priority for Kentucky Republicans right now 🙄

Well maybe the intelligence community is gonna turn against you when you had access to info on sources and methods and those sources started turning up dead. Giving Trump access to classified material and not expecting him to monetize it for himself is insanity, really

Good, smaller federal government

This isn't about the size of government, it's about who rules- and whether or not they answer to the public. The buzzword-talk you hear about 'burdensome regulations' revolves around pretending that if you get rid of regulatory agencies that there will be no regulation in the spheres they regulate- but that's not how that works. Taking away the authority of a regulatory agency really means handing regulatory authority back into private hands, the way it was before regulators answering to the public were authorized.

So, what happens when you take away the SEC's power to regulate banks, or the EPA's power to regulate environmental matters? Power to regulate banking reverts back to trade associations made up of... banks, and the people who will be in charge of protecting the environment will be the people profiting by polluting it. https://prospect.org/economy/rise-of-neo-feudalism/

For those of you who haven't been in a school bus in years, do you remember how loud they are? Reducing diesel pollution is a win, but being in a less-noisy environment for however long each day is also a win.

As a cyclist and occasional user of public transit, I really like the idea of most buses eventually being at least plug-in hybrid-electric if not entirely battery electric. I'm curious about the mass difference between a diesel, diesel-electric, and battery-electric bus (after all, the heavier the vehicle, the harder it is on the road). I expect some of the fuel-and-maintenance-cost-savings from the bus fleet will have to go to road maintenance in the end, but I'd rather spend money that way (locally) than spend it on pumping fresh hot carbon out of foreign wellheads

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley claimed the US has “never been a racist county” pandered to racists during an interview with Fox News on Tuesday.

fixed it

They’re not the ones being affected by the boomers.

My dude, they've been riding us our whole lives

Rhetoric of this sort just promotes distrust in election systems, which of course prompts demagogues like Trump to promise voters they can fix it if they gain power. The fun thing here is that the right here needs you to believe things that aren't true in order to justify them doing a coup, the stupid thing is that stupid people take this kind of talk seriously.

But seriously, American voting is relatively secure- it's just that where lawmakers don't want voters deciding the 'wrong' way they've gerrymandered them into districts to prevent them doing it, and they've done things to strip voters of their voting rights and to suppress voting and to make it inconvenient or difficult to vote. This has been a bipartisan thing in the past, but today the GOP are the chief offenders.

Also, Putin's Russia is in the stage of democracy where elections are an exercise in flaunting the death of democracy itself, and nobody should ever take his talk about elections as being in good faith, ever

Simple jinx should cause most firearms to fail or jam In a universe where guns exist and level-1 wizards can cast magic missile/fireball and cantrips like firebolt, setting fire to things (like gunpowder), my bet is that low-level magic users aren't going to be trumped by steampunk-grade tech that easily

nOboDy wAnTs tO WoRk aNy MorE

It could, depending on how the court is feeling about it that day, and on whether or not congress writes legislation to provide specifics to just what Article IV, sec4 means. (This seems to have been one of those clauses the framers left as a to-do for future legislators to fill out)

Article IV, section 4 : "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence." [~https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S4-1/ALDE_00013635]

The 'guarantee clause' was both a promise that the federal government would help suppress state-level insurrections and protect member states from foreign attack, and a requirement that in order to be a member state, you had to have a government in the form of a republic (i.e., no monarchy-states, no dictatorships). This can be read to mean that democracy of some sort is required, as republics implicitly derive their public authority from the people living in them.

What seems to be going down is that tech firms are laying off AI teams that aren't based on large LLMs like ChatGPT. My read: they're thinking it's time to lay off those workers in anticipation of replacing that functionality (in siri, cortana, echo/alexa) with a large LLM stack

Yeah it's kind of amazing that the domination and expense of regulations and taxes is unbearable, but the domination of water being scarce and expensive just could not have been anticipated

That means its working

It's useful to consider both sides of a political controversy when both sides actually fall within the realm of respecting and sustaining the democracy and social contract keeping people bought into it.

When the choices are between 'you get some human rights' and 'you get no bodily autonomy', one of these doesn't fall within the bounds of reasonable discourse, where 'reasonable discourse' isn't lighting the basis for democracy and individual rights on fire.

The exercise of gamely considering 'both sides' like it's genuinely for the good of democracy when one side is actively hostile to democracy is... gaslighting, hostile to said democracy and to the social contract.

"Can't tell if obviously-criminal things are illegal", and "still thinks he should be president" 🤡

It's wild to me that when the phone companies need to bill for a phone call they know exactly who to bill for it, but when it's something like this everyone is helpless because you can't track these things

good journalism should be impartial

Neutrality in situations of oppression amounts to aligning with the oppressor.

Neutrality in situations of straight-up violating norms and standards and telling lies... aligns with the liar.

Neutrality to a fault... is a fault.

At some point, if you're neutral to the point that you're unwilling to take a critical stance of anything, you could save yourself the effort as a journalist and just forward along everyone's press releases and quit pretending that the role of the journalist in the 1st Amendment is to hold the powerful accountable and to tell truths they might not want told- and get on with that business of licking those delicious boots