merc @ merc @sh.itjust.works

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2,982

Joined

2 yr. ago

Yeah. I mean, "star" is subjective. But, to me, "star" means at a bare minimum someone who plays professionally or has the potential to play professionally. Really it should be the best player on their pro team, playing in a good league too.

To be fair, if he were really an up and coming star, he wouldn't still be in the US at 19.

If you were standing on the Liberty National Golf Club in New Jersey about 2km from the Statue of Liberty (height 93m), from the bottom to the top it would be about 2.5 degrees.

If you were looking at the Eiffel Tower at 6000 km away from NJ, and the earth were flat, the Eiffel Tower (height 312m), from the bottom to the top it would be about 0.003 degrees from bottom to top. If you could line it up so that you could see the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower at the same time, the Eiffel Tower would appear to come up to the first 10 cm of the Statue of Liberty's base. That's actually a little bigger than I would have expected, but still tiny.

I wonder if, even with binoculars, someone could even resolve something that small. Ignoring everything like ocean waves interfering, vegetation getting in the way and atmospheric interference, my guess is that it would be just too small to be seen from that far away without some ultra-powerful telescope.

Is reading comprehension really that bad? The argument is that Iran is on the verge of having nuclear weapons. The justification for attacking them is that they need to be stopped before they cross the line.

I'm not saying I agree with this line of reasoning, but the clear idea is that Iran doesn't currently have nuclear weapons.

But where are the costumers supposed to change costume if not in a stall?

I think you nailed it here. The successful religions are the ones that are useful as tools for the powerful. It's not the cause of evil, but it's something that lets powerful people convince people to do awful things.

On the other hand, for the believers, it's a source of community and comfort. They're given simple rules to follow and promised that their suffering is not in vain. It gives them simple answers to complex questions.

It also allows people to get over feeling bad. A bad thing is "part of god's plans". A bad thing you did is not really your fault because a trickster god made you do it, or the devil made you do it, so you don't need to do any self-reflection. Or, a bad thing happened to you or someone you love, that's just a bad god, or a devil, or a complex part of a god's plan, so you don't need to worry about it. This is all really useful for leaders, because they're inevitably closer to the gods than the people they control, and they get to use excuses like "you're suffering because the gods are unhappy with you" or "it's your lot in life, because you were born to that caste" or "this was all because of this wicked group of other people who believe in a different god, so we should kill them and take their land".

Humans are flawed and sometimes evil, but religion is a very useful tool to manipulate those people.

Note that he says: "just ask her out".

Don't try to find out anything more about her. Don't try to see if maybe she might be interested. Don't do anything other than ask her out.

Now, sure, it's going to be hard to get someone to go out with you unless at some point you ask them out. But, if you follow his advice you're probably going to face a lot more rejection before you get a yes... unless you look like him.

The last major American privacy law, the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act was passed in 1988 by Reagan. The only reason it happened is that politicians realized that their privacy was affected. Robert Bork was going through his Supreme Court confirmation hearings and someone got a hold of the tapes he had rented and published them.

Politicians were worried about their own personal privacy, so they passed a new law to protect the privacy of people's video tape rentals.

Maybe the fact that the targets here were politicians will mean that something will happen with data privacy, for once.

There is probably also money wasted because they're using old tech. Not that upgrading is free, but often upgrades have far more features and maintaining them is much cheaper than maintaining something that was obsolete decades ago.

But, you can't just parachute in a contractor or a "whiz kid" to upgrade the social security or internal revenue systems. The upgrades will take a decade, and that's not because government is inefficient. It's because people's lives are literally on the line. If you "move fast and break things" then Grannie Jones doesn't get her check and she can't afford food.

I do wish governments put more of an effort into staying up to date on computer systems. It would make hiring people easier. And, ideally, governments could be part of the open source / free software ecosystem. I think it would take a few decades of pain to become more modern. But, once it was done I think hiring would be easier and the software would be more efficient and easier to run. Most of the time when a government publishes something, it immediately enters the public domain. So, you could potentially have the government running Kubernetes clusters and adding features to Kubernetes itself. I think you'd also find a lot of open source / free software devs would like to work for the government, getting a steady paycheck and good benefits while contributing good code to open source projects. Right now those people don't want to work for the government because having to work on decades-old stacks is soul destroying.

You're the only person who mentioned the window.

An efficient way to drain dishware is great, but looking out the window when you're in the kitchen brings much joy.

Yeah, I did basic training decades ago, and could probably do it right with maybe an hour-long refresher course. Even without that I'd probably be be fine just marching, it's more the "eyes left", "present arms", handling turns, etc. that would need work.

That said, you tend to follow someone's lead. From what I remember, they declare it like "by the left, quick march" and that means you're marching at a standard "quick" pace and you're lining up with whoever's to your left, and the left column follows the person in front of them, so basically led by whoever's in the front-left position of the formation. That means if people to your left, or people on the left-most column are out of step, it will have a cascading effect through the ranks.

But yeah, it's pretty standard to call out the march, and they'd definitely do that if they cared.

What's also funny is that at one point as the soldiers were marching past, they were playing "Fortunate Son" on the PA system. Now, that's massively ironic given that the song is basically about Vietnam-era draft dodgers who used their family's wealth to get out of Vietnam service like Trump.

But, making it worse is that the song has a slightly faster pace than your typical rock song at 135ish BPM. The US military generally marches at 120 BPM. It's actually really hard to hear a song at 135 BPM and march at 120 BPM. That's why generally marching music is at 120 BPM so you march to the beat. The result is that some soldiers kept marching at 120 BPM, others adjusted to match the song, and it all generally looked like shit.

That's true, but it's very hard to come up with a system that can't be gamed. The fact that you're not aware of Australia's system works means it's probably even more vulnerable to exploitation because nobody in Australia is paying attention.

Really, all political systems are based to some extent on people acting honourably and acting in the best interest of the country rather than themselves or their political party. Eventually that always breaks down.

Keep Goodhart's law in mind:

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

No, it's because the opposition is the establishment, and violence is a tool the establishment uses to... well, stay established.

Okay but who's the one defining a protest as violent?

The same people who write the history books. History is written by the winners, and when they write those books the protests that led to them winning are written up as being non-violent. It's like "terrorists" vs. "freedom fighters". If they succeed, they get to write the history books and they're freedom fighters. If they lose, the other side writes the history books and they're terrorists.

It's like it just gives up after about 8 results. "These 8 results don't contain what you want? I give up. Here, just watch one of these videos instead."

Screw you, just show me the rest of the results, I swear it's in the top 30 results.

You search for "blah", Google gives you a bunch of bad results, and serves up 5 ads. Nothing matches what you want, so you search again "blah but not foo" and you get another 5 ads. If search were good you'd only see 5 ads, but because it sucks you get 10 ads.

If Google had real competitors, bad search results might mean people would give up and use a competitor's search, but because they have a search monopoly, they can enshittify their results and show even more ads without losing users.

It's also the #1 story on nbcnews.com, #4 on abcnews.com (after the Israel-Iran conflict, millions protesting nationwide and Trump's birthday parade), #1 on cnn.com, #1, #2, #3 and #4 on nytimes.com.

I mean, why do people say bullshit like "why is this not a bigger story" on something that's one of the biggest stories being covered by national news?

I imagine that they could find that leeching is illegal if you upload anything to any other torrent clients. I think Meta was claiming they were literally in the clear because they were being assholes and configuring their clients not to share at all.

But yeah, keep your ratio above 1, or you're a jerk.

e-note be like telegram memorandum memo but not on paper, on computer magic blinky box.