pulsewidth @ pulsewidth @lemmy.world

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6 mo. ago

One of the people that handed Trump his 2016 win by announcing an investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server just a couple of weeks out from the election - while mostly sitting on all the information that Russia was assisting Trump's campaign for fear of looking biased/conspiratorial?

Can't think of a more appropriate leopard for Trump to eat the face of.

Your customers have noticed the decline in quality, guarantee it.

"My only regret is that as a felon I can't vote for Trump" apparently

I hated him. No character development, same asshole from start to finish. Whenever I had to do Trevor missions I often walked away from the game for the day, resulting in taking many months to actually finish the kind of game I usually enjoy.

Franklin was boring too, sterotype with no strong opinions on much - just went with the flow on everything. The only character I kind of enjoyed playing was Michael, and that's because he was aware that he was a piece of shit and decided to try to change. His approach to mending his relationship with his family was terrible and often put them in riskier/worse situations, but hey it's GTA it's not meant to be entirely realistic.

I remember being a lot more invested in GTA4 and thoroughly enjoyed that narrative, but maybe it's rose tinted glasses?

I tried to access the study but can't find it at the usual mirrors (yet). They usually just have a line like 'the study authors and funding partners do not have any conflict of interest in this area of study' so it requires a journalist or some expert to dig into the funding sources. AFAIK.

I think you underestimate people's drive for a bargain.

This was a decade back, but the satellite paytv system here was not cheap. $50/m for base, up to $150/m for full. A technical crew worked out how to pirate it by hooking the verification card up to a dongle on a PC and sending the verification requests from each set-top box over a VPN back to their master device. They sold access to the system for about $100 (for the dongle & setup) and then $10-20/month for full access to the Fox-based service. Went on for years before loose lips sunk the ship, and their were thousands of users when it got busted. No marketing, no Internet presense, just word of mouth "I know a guy".

The modern Internet-based streaming pirate services that people can buy cheap devices for on ebay preconfigured, and pay $5-10/m for access to all movies and TV? Cheaper and faster access, all online, nobody has to visit your home. Everything is easier and the barrier of entry is lower.

If Netflix and others don't stop being so greedy, they'll be reminded that people only play by the rules when the terms are reasonable.

The US is still helping Israel because Israel is effectively the largest US military base in the middle east, and monitors and protects many US interests in the region: ie makes sure the oil, gas, minerals, and rare earth materials keep flowing and in addition the Suez canal and trade route keeps clear to ensure international trade and transfer of these materials continue without any interference - terrorists, local warlords, or even just populist leaders that want better deals for their populace.

In short, Israel assists as an enforcer for capitalist wealth extraction from the middle east to the rest of the world.

As former US army general and secretary of state (under Reagan) and long serving white house chief of staff (under Nixon and Ford) Alexander Haig famously said, "Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security".

So that's the main reason little kids continue to get bombed and shot in Israel. The US is addicted to oil & middle east resources, and the capitalists don't care what the human cost is as long as order is maintained.

I never said they don't leak, all those systems have leaks with enough time and a certain failure rate right?

If they have increased their failure rate since being offshored largely to China and SEA I would not be surprised, as the manufacturing standards there are infamously lower than USA/EU/etc, but it seems like something where evidence is scant - I can't find anything in my searches. I'm not saying your experience is not valuable, I believe you when you say you service more of the new ones than the old ones, but there may be other reasons for that than those models having a higher failure rate.

For example, it could be that people are buying fridges more often nowadays (like every 7-8 years instead of every 15+ in the 90s) because so many components on them are made cheaper and fail earlier.. Everything is made to me more disposable nowadays (for the worse, IMO). If there are surviving models around from the 90s and earlier then you get survivor's bias - you don't see all the ones that failed as they went to scrapyards 25 years ago, etc.

That's a bad reason to make (or keep) something illegal. Having legal weed does nothing to stop enthusiasts breeding their own strains or propagating 'heirloom' varieties - because they were already doing that illegally since forever before it was legalized.

Put another way, swap weed for alcohol. Should alcohol be banned because Anheuser-Beusch ans InBev exist and lobbies the government for favourable legislation? No... Fighting against the crap legislation is a better idea, and who would be better positioned to do that than an industry growers union or an independent growers union or similar.

Making something legal or illegal doesn't magically make it immune to capitalism, it just goes back to a black market where you have no protections as a buyer nor as a seller.

Many of them literally called it the German equivalent of 'fake news' after Hitler spent many years persecuting the independent press, which he and Himmler would smear with the derogative term 'Lügenpresse'.

One of the many reasons that Eisenhower forced Germans from towns nearby to tour the camps, and had army documenters and media film the camps to later force adult German citizens to watch while under occupation. Many of them simply chose to believe the obvious lies, and ignore all the evidence they'd seen - it was easier than the awful truth.

https://archivesfoundation.org/newsletter/see-for-yourself/

And while their was some backlash from a few people, the majority of their fans shrugged and kept on watching them, judging by their subscriber and view counts.

Absolutely pathetic from the 'facts don't care about your feelings' crowd that purports to bravely face uncomfortable truths.

Yeah the limit at my library is 14, which is more than generous even if you happen to be researching a topic for a report / thesis etc.

Show us where the government in Australia has banned music / artists? I cant find anything about this.

Yep, so in Australia NSW police have been contacting Spotify/YouTube/etc with requests to delist certain songs from Sydney drill rap bands that glorify and promote gang violence against Spotify's/Youtube's/etcs policies, the streamers have in some cases agreed and delisted the music, in other cases they have not and the music remains. This is after the groups theyve had issues with (eg One-Four) have caused multiple riots and had several charges and convictions, so it's arisen from a desire to serve public good. Only certain tracks have been targeted from what I can see, not whole albums or artist catalogs.

That's a far cry from the government deciding what art people can or cannot listen to in my opinion. They have only asked some streaming platforms to adhere to their own policies, and then tbe platforms have made their own decisions on case by case basis.

Is there other actions I'm not aware of? The govt hasn't passed any laws to block the sale of drill rap nor banned its play on radio etc?

There's chicken, and then there's the weird, chlorine-cleaned, antibiotic-pumped meat that the US calls 'chicken'.

The ones that are dumb enough to do this won't be getting jobs to be replaced anyway.

Freon is a brand name that covers a bunch of refridgerants, but when people talk about freon with negative connotations they are usually referring to the original CFC-based Freon products such as the widely-used refridgerant R-12. Fridges haven't used CFCs since the early 90s, when they were banned and phased out world-wide due to their ozone-depleting potential.

They were replaced by R-134a (tetrafluoroethane) which is less harmful, and other non-CFC refridgerants but those have since also being phased out for even better options. Modern fridges of the last 10-20 years use butane (R600a) and alternatives which are the current least-harmful options for both health and the environment. Butane is burned as a fuel by the millions of tonnes every year, so an ounce or two leaking from a refrigerator is of truly minimal concern.

In short, if you have bought a fridge since circa 1994 you don't have to worry about it "leaking freon", that is a non issue.

The ozone hole is being actively & closely monitored and has been closing since the ban, projected to completely close & return to 1980 levels by 2075. https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ozone_depletion&wprov=rarw1

The US doesn't need to "get it's house in order".

It also needs to (and seems on the path to) be destroyed in its current form.

This is just semantics, those two statements essentially describe the same thing.

I was explaining why Israel is in the position its in now and what's needed to change it at present - hard to see into the future.

The foundational legal and institutional structure of the USA is a good model for democracy. There is no perfect model. What needs to happen there is stuff that progressives have been asking for decades: expansion of the supreme court to proportionally match the size of the congress - which any democrat president could do if they weren't cowards. Then repeal Citizen United to get the billion dollar political slush funds quashed, and a massive anti-corruption campaign to prosecute all those who have broken the law over the last few decades. The US is backsliding hard towards a Russian kleptocracy, controlled by billionaires and their useful idiots - but it can be mended if laws are enforced. A lot of work, but to wipe the slate clean and start again with a new model would be far far more work and no guarantee that it's even an improvement at the end.

TIL that a ~50% improvement in energy use is 'absolutely negligible'.

I agree that the energy star system may be flawed but the premise of your comment is wild.

Still blows my mind that there are vocal and active 'gays for Trump' and 'gay and Republican' groups that have somehow believe they've found a venn diagram overlap of GOP beliefs and theirs - despite all evidence to the contrary.