WoodScientist @ WoodScientist @lemmy.world

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Yes...officer...those are special bottle rockets. You see unlike normal bottle rockets, these are sealed on both ends! It makes them fly further.

Don't worry. If a fridge can protect Indiana Jones from the heat and radiation of a nuclear explosion, I'm sure a fridge will be able to contain a few pipe bombs if they go off.

Most states allow minors to consume alcohol in some manner if parents are consenting and present. I mostly hearing about that applying at home or in bars and restaurants, but I'm not sure how it works for baseball stadiums.

I mean, I'm not going to leave the cats to die in a collapsing burning house either. If I think being vaporized is the best possible fate for myself, why would I deny that mercy to my cats? And yes, in case it's not clear, we're driving to the reactor gates, with the cats in the car. They're joining us for the blast. They're going with us.

The plan is: grab cats and mind altering substances -> load up car -> drive to reactor ->park in front of gates -> get out of our minds, pet the cats tell bombs fall.

I mean, it's not an irrational stance. Better to thoughtfully and rationally consider it and plan accordingly.

Really, it's another manifestation of that whole, "which would your rather meet alone in the woods, a lone man or a lone bear." A lot of guys simply couldn't understand why most women would take the bear. But the worst the bear is going to do is eat you. And there are many fates worse than death.

I am "lucky" enough to live within a few miles of a place I'm pretty sure would be a ground zero in an all out nuclear attack. I live in a university town. And the university I attend has a nuclear engineering program along with an accompanying research reactor. In any all-out nuclear exchange, anything related to nuclear technology is at the top of the target list. A facility that trains new nuclear engineers is definitely on the target list. We've actually talked about this. If we get this message, our plan is to round up the cats, throw then in the car, grab every mind altering substance we can get our hands on, and go get wasted outside the front gate of the reactor building. We won't try to break into the building or anything; the alert could always be in error and we don't need a felony for trying to break into a nuclear facility on our records. But when hydrogen bombs are involved, the front gate of the reactor building is close enough to ground zero to do the job.

Sorry, but there are indeed fates worse than death. For one, we would be unlikely to survive the initial bombing anyway. But most people have this idea that you'll get vaporized by a bomb. That's not how these things actually work. If you're killed in the first hour by the bomb, odds are it will be from being slowly cooked alive in the burning collapsed remnants of your own home. And sure, we could drive out into the country, but that would only ensure that we would die slowly from fallout induced radiation sickness, slow starvation after the complete collapse of all supply chains, or worse.

Trust me. If that alert comes, the ones close enough to ground zero to be atomized will be the lucky ones. This is something that you do not want to survive. I would encourage anyone that if they ever get that alert, to try to travel as close to whatever you think is your most likely ground zero as possible. You'll be doing yourself and your loved ones a favor. Unless you're already an off-grid survivalist type living in a self-sufficient compound way outside of any blast or fallout zone, all you're doing by escaping the blasts is stretching out your own misery. Do you and yours a favor by making it quick and painless.

On another note, Happy New Year!

Try working in a restaurant. I worked as a server for awhile, right at the tail end of when they still had smoking and nonsmoking sections. It was awful.

As long as they had a sample of his hand writing, which wouldn't be too hard to get, it would be easy enough to take. Discrepancies could be blamed on his back injury. Any police officer can pull up drivers license records, and those usually have a signature in them. You could extrapolate a handwriting style just from a signature. Or maybe it's just in block lettering so hand writing is less distinctive.

And again, we're dealing with a department that has literally been caught on camera planting evidence on people. They're not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer.

Every civil right you enjoy was fought and died for. The world can change and it has changed. I don't remember the last time I had to swear an oath of fealty to my local Lord.

Yeah I agree, I'm not even convinced it is Luigi. The killer deliberately dressed in a way that hundreds of people in NY are dressed as at any given time. I'm skeptical of the trail they've pieced together from video camera footage. It's unlikely they have continuous shots of him going from one side of the city to the other.

And the thing is, I'm extremely skeptical of anything the NYPD says. They just recently had a case thrown out when they were caught on camera planting evidence. How many times do you have to plant evidence before you get caught on camera doing it?

I don't know if Luigi did it or not. But if he didn't do it, here's one plausible scenario for how he didn't do it that would still account for all the evidence we've seen publicly:

He's reportedly bisexual and from a wealthy and likely conservative family. And he hadn't talked to his family in months; they were actively looking for him. He got some severe back injury, and maybe he decides to just get away from unaccepting and overbearing family, perhaps for awhile, perhaps permanently. He wants to get away and find himself, just walk the Earth for awhile. So he's been living out of various hostels and homeless shelters for awhile in various cities. To keep his family from tracking him down, he gets a fake ID and travels under an assumed name. He wears a hoodie and mask almost everywhere, as he doesn't want his family to track him down. And he is genuinely worried about covid living in a hostel.

He's staying in NYC. A few days after the shooting, to his horror, he sees his own picture on the news listed as the killer. He freaks out and flees the city. He eventually gets picked up by the cops in Pennsylvania.

Unbeknownst to him, he was struck with the combination of terrible luck and a corrupt police department. Luigi happened to be dressed like the killer, and he happened to be near the scene of the crime within a few hours of the killing. A camera catches him placing a wrapper or bottle in a trash can. And his DNA is on it. The cops falsely conclude the killer is the one that put the wrapper in the trash, and they now are certain they have the DNA of the killer. (Another possibility is that the actual killer stood by a public trash can and waited until someone dressed like him happened to drop a wrapper in the trash, and then deliberately planted it near the scene.) They do some detective work, and find that Luigi has been living in an assumed name with a fake ID in a hostel.

So the cops are 90% certain they have the guy. They have a guy that vaguely looks like the killer, is using a fake ID, and whose DNA was found near the scene. In their minds, that's an airtight case, and they convince themselves that this makes it OK to fake further evidence to seal the deal. When they arrest Luigi, they plant the untraceable gun on him along with that manifesto, that was conveniently had written, and not published electronically like you would expect a software engineer to do.

And moreover, if the cops were going to just pick a convenient scapegoat, who better than Luigi? He's a young kid, estranged from his family, living in hostels and homeless shelters. He was basically living as a drifter. That's the exact kind of low social status person that cops would be tempted to foist something like this on.

I can't prove any of this obviously. But the one thing that sticks with me is Luigi's only public statement. He hasn't issued any public statement. But there was that one time, before he started working with his lawyer, where he shouted to the crowd of reporters. He didn't shout, "this was for the the innocent victims of Brian Thompson!" Or "I apologize for nothing!" Or some other statement that you would expect a proud martyr for a cause to make. Instead, he shouted, "this is an insult to the intelligence of the American people!"

That's the kind of thing an innocent man would shout. That's the kind of thing one would shout if you had just been framed by the NYPD. That is the cry of a young man who knows he is being framed and faces literal execution for a crime he didn't commit. I would be enraged too.

And again, this isn't outlandish, the NYPD has been caught faking evidence many times before. If they already had a decently strong case due to the DNA at the scene, I could absolutely see them trying to wrap it up quickly by planting the gun and manifesto on him.

People like to share these "Saint Luigi" memes. But if he actually is innocent, literally not the man who pulled the trigger? If he were to be still convicted, executed, and later the truth come to light? He would be a completely innocent martyr. That's the kind of thing that actually could get some one canonized as literal official Saint of the Catholic Church.

I of course can't prove any of this, and it is possible that Luigi really did do it. Cameras and lighting can make people look very different. Or maybe the cops have a lot stronger evidence that they just haven't released yet. But this is the kind of theory of the case I could see the defense making. And ultimately, they don't have to prove Luigi didn't do it. They just have to show reasonable doubt. And based on the entirely circumstantial evidence we have, combined with the NYPD's predilection for fabricating evidence, at least right now with the publicly available evidence, I think reasonable doubt absolutely exists.

Can you imagine the timeline where Luigi gets off through jury nullification, and then he does it again? That would be something to see.

If they are actually trying to create a unified and moderate government, Israel will likely have every top official killed within a few years. It's a deliberate long-term strategy of Israel to turn neighboring countries into failed states and to keep them that way. It's hard to seize Lebensraum from a peaceful democracy next door. But if you turn your neighboring country into a no-man's land of violent anarchy where the only order is through warlords and militant groups, it's easy to claim territory for a "buffer zone." Well, a buffer zone to replace the previous buffer zone that you let your people settle inside.

Correct the headline. Biden expressed regret. He doesn't actually feel regret.

Yeah, but there's something a lot more gross about spraying yourself with a bottle than just turning a knob and letting the plumbing do it.

Wow. I'm an idiot. Read this as NFTs. Ugh. I need some coffee.

Historically, in the US at least, violent movements are a precursor to peaceful social change. People protest and protest peaceful for decades, and little to nothing actually changes.

I mean think about it, do you think for example that an insurance company that is run by people freely willing to kill tens of thousands of people have any problem just ignoring any number of protesters? No one ever got any rights by asking nicely. Every social change we've experienced has had both peaceful and violent components.

This doesn't morally justify violence, but it does show that violence doesn't just keep escalating until we go full on civil war. Whenever inequality or injustice gets to critical levels, some desperate people decide that nonviolence doesn't work and that more extreme actions are needed. Suffragettes were involved in many arson campaigns. Slavery didn't end until the Union army forced it to end. Unions got their rights to organize through armed battles and by torching factories with their bosses locked inside. The black civil rights movement required both non-violent resistance, but also violent groups like the Black Panthers waiting in the wings, offering a more violent solution if a peaceful one wasn't found. Stonewall was a riot.

America tends to go through periods of increasing wealth and social inequality. Things build up until some people feel so pressured, either by personal circumstance or ideology, that they believe violence is the only option. This doesn't make this violence right or just, but it is simply part of human nature. It happens again and again and again. When the elite push the masses far enough, eventually they start killing elites and setting their property on fire. And there's not a whole lot that can be done to prevent it, as these tend to be random crimes by detached individuals acting on their own. The elites will always overreach and respond with harsher criminal penalties. But when someone is willing to throw their life away for something, there's really no penalties that will make a difference.

And ultimately, that kind of violence, or threat of it, is usually what breaks the dam that previously prevented peaceful social change. Elites rarely give a single iota about the common man. In order to acquire that level of wealth and power, you pretty much have to be a sociopath in some form or another. That is as true now as it was in the age of hereditary nobility. But eventually the elite learn that something they actually care about - their own wealth or their own lives, are at risk. And even if the elite can hide themselves behind private armies, they inevitably find that their vast holdings of property aren't so easily protected. Arson has historically played a huge role in these types of social inflection points.

So pressure will continue to build, but society isn't going to break. Rather, crimes against life and, especially property, will continue. I sadly expect to see a lot of arson carried out by incendiary drones in the near future. And these acts of violence will continue to grow ever more common until the sociopaths at the top realize, "wait, it's actually costing me more money NOT to improve things for the common man, let's throw the people some bones."

That's pretty much how every right or liberty you enjoy today was achieved. Rarely does outright revolution completely overthrow the old order and bring out the literal guillotines. The French Revolution was the exception, not the rule. What we are seeing now is just the normal and inevitable course of history, that has happened time and time again. The people get pushed and exploited past a critical level, and the more unhinged among the population start taking violent action. This violence builds and builds, and eventually the elite realize it's more profitable to accept some of those quite reasonable reforms that the non-violent folks have been politely asking for for decades.

Take heart. This has all happened before. It is happening now. And in the future, it will happen again.

What you miss is people aren't arguing from a constitutional perspective. They're saying that it's fucking ridiculous that sites like reddit censor perfectly legal speech while also billing themselves as bastions of free speech.

There is a certain logic to it. If you want to bill your site as a public square, then maybe you shouldn't censor anything other than speech that is actually illegal. It is not illegal to say things in support of Luigi Mangione. In fact, it's perfectly legal, and totally Constitutionally protected, for me to go right now and hold a big sign in front of NYPD headquarters saying, "Luigi Mangione is a saint, and I hope to see a hundred more like him!" The law restricts true threats, but those are defined way, way narrower than many on social media seem to think.

People aren't saying that reddit or other platforms can't censor content on their platform, they obviously can. But you also shouldn't bitch about people pointing out the rank hypocrisy of sites that bill themselves as public squares censoring content to serve their corporate overlords.

Filthy money launderers.

Whoops.

We just finished a big holiday trip, 2 weeks visiting both sides of the family. Stayed with one family and then the other. After that....yeah...seriously considering getting everyone bidets next year for Christmas...

How much money do they actually spend on the development of Firefox? That's a figure I haven't been able to find. However, in 2023, they had $1.5 billion in assets.

The only justification for a high-paying CEO is if they need to coordinate some large scale fundraising effort - schmoozing with other rich fucks to gain further donations, and plotting elaborate strategies to get more donations.

They have $1.5 billion in assets. How much more do they really need? Need someone to manage Mozilla's assets? Make me the CEO. I'll do it for you. In fact, I'll do it for free. That will be my contribution to the Firefox project. I'll stick that $1.5 billion in simple bond and index funds and withdraw at a very conservative 2% rate. And that will provide $30 million a year to spend on developers to improve Firefox and other projects. And we can just keep doing that forever. I'll purposefully withdraw funds at a rate lower than the market averages, so the real value of the endowment grows over time. And that will allow us to slowly expand the scope of operations and start new projects. And while I won't spend any time or effort to schmooze and jet set across the country to kiss the ass of some billionaire, if one wants to throw some money in the pot, we'll have a donation button on the website.