SatanicNotMessianic @ SatanicNotMessianic @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

I don’t use screen protectors and have rarely noticed an issue, even on phones. I do use a phone case partly for the occasional drop accident, and partly because the phones today have such a low friction coefficient that they’re a pain to hold or place on a smooth surface. I considered ordering one for the deck, but when I travel it’s in a case and when I’m at home it’s not being used as an air hockey puck, so I decided it didn’t really need it.

When the OLED Switch came out, I ordered one as soon as they became available. It was my first handheld, and the advice at the time was that you didn’t need it if you already had one, but if you didn’t the OLED was the one to get. I enjoyed the switch, and ended up buying a deck not long after that.

I’m going to treat this update to the same advice that they made for the switch. Since I already have one, and since the internals are essentially the same, it doesn’t make sense to update after less than a year, and it’s not worth the hassle of trying to sell the old one.

I understand the sentiment, but the reason is that most voters don’t have the bandwidth to even really learn about their federal representatives, much less their local politicians. Having a letter next to your name is probably the least amount of relevant information you can convey. It’s basically one bit in a two party system.

It takes a lot of time and effort to be an informed voter. When ballots arrive, I can spend hours on sites researching the legislation and candidates, and even then most of what you’ll find are press release types of statements with generic phrasing. You end up learning to hear dog whistles and using those, unless the candidate/initiative is big enough that it gets attention in the local press.

At this point, if someone is running as a Republican, I am going to assume that they’re a supporter of the LGBT-phobic, misogynistic agenda embraced by the national party. It is the party of Trump now, and they take a firm stand against everything I agree with. I appreciate the signal, even if it is a single bit of information, just in case I can’t find anything on the candidate.

The Ars Technica write up pretty much demolishes the device in both form and function.

Not really, no. From what I read the first shipments are kind of a stunt because they still haven’t worked out their production issues. They are having to do a lot of work on each vehicle by hand. Which means each unit is going to have costs like a Bentley but be expected to sell for the price of a Ford.

I really think this is a Potemkin delivery.

Look, if you have 50 starving families and you give them a Subway foot long roast beef sandwich, you shouldn’t be patting yourself on the back because it’s better than nothing and some dude on the internet asks Google and finds out that they get 8 calories each, which is enough for 30 seconds of metabolic activity, which is better than nothing.

And I am not addressing the morality of Hamas operational decisions or the veracity of their claims in any way. I suspect that the majority of their resources are occupied (no pun intended) with combat operations and are unavailable for civilian resupply efforts.

But the immorality of Hamas’ operations (if it is such) is not a justification for immorality on Israel’s part, except insofar as it has an operational impact on Israeli forces. Israel cannot say they are capable of supplying basic aid (or allowing the international community to do so) but the fact that Hamas is choosing not to themselves give up their food and fuel reserves justifies prevention of supply. I don’t know of any moral framework that would permit that.

You initiate an operation that you know will significantly disrupt civilian infrastructure including critical supplies. You know that the enemy organization you’re supposed to be concentrating your efforts against will be hoarding supplies to continue operations during lockdown. Therefore you know, before the first plane takes off, that you either need to take responsibility to maintain or create a supply line, or you’re doing what Israel is currently being accused of doing, which is starving out the civilian population indiscriminately. You can’t simply say “Someone else should do it” and have a morally defensible position, especially if your actions brought those conditions about.

From what I read, Musk’s insistence on the stainless steel design as well as his overriding his design engineers on multiple aspects of the program are forcing the first set of trucks to ship to have a significant amount of hand assembly, pushing the unit cost towards $200k.

I’m going off of memory here, but the low end version of the truck was supposed to be in the $40-50k range. While they can bump those prices (I assume - I’m guessing the reservations people got let Tesla change the price), they’re going to see a lot of people dropping it.

I can’t look at it without remembering the Simpson’s episode where Homer says “In the 80s, this is what the future looked like!”

If you’re talking about the hospital bed math, then that comment can be completely ignored. It’s some random dude on the internet who googled how much electricity an ICU bed uses, and how much electricity some generator they found generates per hour per unit of fuel. That’s literally it.

Hospitals are complex systems that require a ton of power to run. Others who have experience in operations have said it would power minimum operations for about 30m.

If Israel wanted to demonstrate that the donated fuel was stolen, they could have had footage of people hopping out of a truck and loading up the fuel. If it just disappeared into the hospital and they think it was just added to the reserves they think are under the hospital, then their “proof” isn’t worth anything in this case.

Of course they are. Why else would you set up in a hospital? Doing so (turning hospital into a command post or using a marked ambulance to transport fighters or weapons) is against international law. If it is true that Hamas is doing that in these exact examples and not merely as a general practice), those buildings and vehicles are legal military targets. I was in the business and I’m familiar with all of the arguments and justifications.

What it comes down to, legally, is whether the response was proportional to the threat and whether every attempt was made to restrict damage to civilian infrastructure and persons. Just as a hypothetical example, using an F-16 to drop two bombs on a populated hospital because there’s a couple of snipers on the 6th floor would be a disproportionate response. Using a rocket propelled grenade against that window/room is more proportional, even if there were patients in the same room. Killing them with counter-sniper fire so as to save those patients but still eliminate the threat is the most proportional.

The other dimension, though, is the moral culpability (if you believe in free will) or at least the functional responsibility (if you do not) of designing and launching an operation in which massive amounts of civilian casualties and misery will be caused. I don’t see that enough.

I think it was Aquinas who laid out one of the early versions of just war theory. One of the main points is that the intended outcome must be proportional to the harms caused.

What people are questioning is whether a particular encounter or the operation in general were necessary and proportional.

I realized my omission and put it in my edit. The term generally used is “spiritual but not religious.”

It can include everything from atheistic humanism alongside the Gaia hypothesis to Wicca.

I think this is a very fast growing segment of the US population now. It might have been in a recent Pew survey.

So some anonymous person on the internet did a couple of web searches and some back of the napkin simple multiplication, and suddenly for you that becomes the last word on the subject?

There is a fuckload more in a hospital that needs power in addition to an ICU bed. We don’t know what generators they’re using, the fuel consumed per hour, and how far a minimum power draw can go. We do know that the hospitals are so far over capacity that patients are everyplace, as are people seeking shelter.

It is fuck all for a single hospital.

For most people, I think that the problem isn’t with Hamas being held responsible. The problem is that people bearing the brunt of Hamas’ and Israeli actions aren’t members of Hamas - they’remedical personnel and patients and civilians in general.

Don’t read the tl;dr. It misses almost everything. Read the article.

I’m a strong atheist, which means I have a positive belief that no gods exist, just for the record. The way I would put it is that I have never heard of nor have been able to come up with a god concept that I believe is an actual being.

I prefer to use the term “god concept” rather than god to make it clear that we’re talking about a specific idea of a god rather than an actual being. So Odin is a god concept, as is Minerva. Multiple god concepts exist in the bible, including the original regional father-deity El, El’s wife Ashera, their children including Yahweh, and so on. When the Israelites started to move from polytheism to henotheism (many gods exist but you should only worship one), and then to “monotheism” (in scare quotes because there are enough different god concepts as well as divine beings who would be counted as gods in any other pantheon).

In any case, I don’t think having a god concept which you believe refers to an actual being in itself is an indication of anything, good or bad. In my opinion, there’s a feedback loop between the disposition of people and their religions. The problems come in when the religions around the god concepts become extreme. The Amish have a fairly strong god concept, and while I’m not Amish (thank god), I don’t think they do harm unless you think of their actions within their community. 90% of UUs are great people. Sponoza’s Watchmaker would suggest we have to study ourselves to discover what constitutes good. And so on.

So I’d say that your belief is absolutely fine, but you also might be interested in the neurophysiological, social, and anthropological bases of humans so often having god concepts.

In my experience, at least in the US, non-denominational when associated with an institution generally means “Christian” but not affiliated with a sect. They’re (typically) still quite Christian, and the phrase can be and is applied to churches ranging from the ones flying Pride flags and declaring that they’re open to everyone to ones like Westboro - some of the most radical Christian churches are non-denominational because their views are too conservative for even the more conservative right wing religions.

The phrase itself is an organizational status and does not indicate what kinds of beliefs a person has. It’s not unlike someone describing themselves as “politically independent.” You don’t know if they’re Greenpeace types, libertarians, or far right of the republicans.

Edit: The usual term in the US for what I think you’re describing is “Spiritual, but not religious.” That’s the way it’s usually written in census and survey forms.

It literally has nothing to do with being ashamed about who you are. You should read my more complete explanation to the other person.

Judging from the voting, I think it might have confused a lot of people.

What I was saying was this:

Literally everything about your life was determined at your birth. If your mother drank, was living in poverty, was being abused in a relationship, and had adequate nutrition and medical care has a huge effect on your earliest formative development. There’s epigeneticic effects of malnutrition of the pregnant mother that last for two generations. You will have a vastly higher probability of drug and alcohol abuse, you are less likely to have an advanced career, you are more likely to be arrested, and the list goes on. All of those things are also influenced by the genes you inherited, some of which influenced your mom’s behaviors that affected you as you were developing. Genes of course influence an incredible amount of what makes you you. They affect your propensity for violence or for pro-social behaviors. They affect how you respond to people, romantically and physically.

And then there’s the environment you grew up in, which again is a direct consequence of where you were born. Was it in a community of poverty and crime? Were there other kids your own age and safe environments for play? Did they have good schools, or schools at all? Are predatory animals that attack and kill children a large concern? Did you grow up in Texas honor culture where you can’t be gay and if someone calls you gay, you have to fight them to prove you’re not? Did you grow up a woman in a radically religious society?

It has nothing to do with loving ourselves, for Christ’s sake. It was an attempt at wry humor that was effectively saying that it would have been nicer to be born to Bill Gates than to a single mother in a trailer park. I worked for LGBT rights since ACT UP, and still stayed in the closet for more than a decade afterwards. I’ve been bashed to the point of hospitalization. I constantly advise LGBT kids who come looking for advice to accept themselves and to take their current living situation into account when coming out.

I don’t mean this in the way it’s normally used, but I’m sorry if you or anyone were offended by what I said. I think that even if you’re not a believer in biological determinism, we can agree that, given the circumstances of our genetic and social histories, there are things outside of our control that could have gone better.

It sucks that we don’t get to re-roll our character before starting the game.

And as someone who does not believe that free will exists, I think the only thing anyone has ever done wrong is being born to the wrong parents.

Yep! I’ve studied extensively on this. The only part you might have left out is that the reason the evangelicals suddenly cared about politics is because the US government was forcing them to racially integrate their all-white Christian bible colleges. They made abortion the wedge issue, but the reason they needed a wedge issue was racism.

Great reply, and I completely agree with your points. I also have to say I know of no reason why sexuality would affect rates of pedophilia one way or another. I suspect that they’re completely independent of each other. I also suspect that we’re going to be seeing a surge in self-identifying gay men in the next 20 years which might be a better background indicator than current self-assessments. In other words, many people of my generation would never have responded as gay if asked in a survey. The Gen Z LGBT numbers are surging, though. We would have to demonstrate a reason for this change, which might simply be as LGBT becomes more accepted, more people are willing to answer “yes.”

So I wasn’t actually arguing that gay men, drag queens or not, are less likely to offend (except maybe in a sarcastic sense). I do think there’s a correlation among hyper-religiosity (becoming a priest/pastor, belonging to an extremely enthusiastic church, etc) and pedophilia because I believe that a significant percentage of that class consists of individuals who have internalized feelings of shame and self-loathing, possibly over their pedophilia and/or homosexuality.

The only study I generally see that’s cited as indicating there’s no correlation between priests and pedophilia turned out to be funded by the religious organization, if I’m thinking of the right study.