Server indexes of places for newcomers to join can be instrumental for Fediverse adoption. However, sudden rule changes can leave some admins feeling pressure to change policies in order to remain listed.
South West Water is claiming it has no legal obligation to keep rivers and seawater clean of sewage in its defence against a Devon swimmer who is taking the water company to court....
There are two ways to think about rights: there are legal rights and then there are human rights. Legal rights are conferred by some piece of legal document (legislation, constitution or common law) that a person is able to seek legal redress if their right has been revoked or diminished. Then there are human rights - what we as individual humans believe that each humans should expect as a basic right. The two are not always aligned, predominately because human rights vary greatly from one person’s interpretation to the next.
I think what the company is probably (accurately) arguing is that there is no legal right to swim in the UK, as no specific document states this with any specificity, so the complainant isn’t due compensation or redress of behaviour under the law. This is what the courts will examine as they are the interpreters of law but not the creators of law.
Now, does she have a human right to swim there free of sewage? I damn well think so, and I don’t think that would be a controversial opinion either. The problem is that what we think the law should be and what it is are often different, because legislation can’t represent every view simultaneously. There’s no law that could be drafted that makes forced birthers and pro choice people agree - someone will always lose out.
All of this is to say that while fighting this in court is a shitty thing to do (pun very much intended), it makes sense based upon the way our legal system is set up. There is no incentive for private business to respect rights that are not legally conferred, but there is a financial incentive to do the ‘cheaper and technically legal’ thing. Until we overhaul our legal systems to be inherently protective rather than inherently exploitative, this behaviour will continue.
Not all rights are won through violence. In Australia, the union movement has managed to secure the following through peaceful means, specifically through lobbying, striking and peaceful protest:
40 hour work week; overtime for hours worked beyond this
sick leave and annual leave
maternity and paternity leave
Medicare, our semi-universal public healthcare
enforceable safety standards at work
compensation for injury at work
our ‘award’-based system of minimum pay and conditions per field
federally mandated superannuation (forced retirement saving paid by your employer, tax free)
protections against unfair dismissal
While not all rights are gained through violence all rights are limited and revoked by violence, in particular state-sponsored violence.
Holy shit, is this why lowly assistants are colloquially called gophers?!? I never drew the connection. Sometime we just take weird words or phrases for granted without thinking about their etymology.
I think something the other poster’s comment (as fantastic as it was) didn’t touch on was that antidepressants are also being prescribed to treat symptoms of societal collapse. Poverty, wage slavery, lack of access to basic amenities and necessities, lack of access to secure income, economic divide, societal divide and many other factors are becoming more common and driving some of this apparent need for antidepressants. There’s a genuine mental health crisis - not of people who are born with issues of neurochemistry that need to be alleviated with medication but people whose needs are going unmet so they become depressed. Quality of life, and perceived quality of life, are strong protective factors against the development of many mental illnesses.
Forgive my uneducated arse but is this a problem that cold fusion could solve? Like, could we theoretically create stable isotopes to use in significant enough quantities by fusing atomic nuclei and chucking in or subtracting some electrons from the mix?
What you are suggesting is cornering an animal, and then saying “Hey, we should corner it more because it’s acting aggressively.” And then acting surprised when it attacks you.
I really like this line of logic because it highlights how the insipid manosphere’s propaganda directly targets the most animalistic part of the brain - the amygdala - and uses fear and anger to propel antisocial behaviour much as a cornered animal lashes out against its captor. It’s a very apt metaphor beyond the simplistic reasoning it suggests.
So it looks like the frogs mentioned in this meme are microhylids, and for some further info:
Crocraft & Hambler (1989) noted that the frog seemed to benefit from living in proximity to the spider by eating the small invertebrates that were attracted to prey remains left by the spider. The frog presumably also benefits by receiving protection: small frogs like this are preyed on by snakes and large arthropods, yet on this occasion we have a frog that receives a sort of ‘protection’ from a large, formidable spider bodyguard. Hunt (1980) suggested that the spider might gain benefit from the presence of the frog: microhylids specialise on eating ants, and ants are one of the major predators of spider eggs. By eating ants, the microhylids might help protect the spider’s eggs.
This is also super cute behaviour:
Young spiders have sometimes been observed to grab the frogs, examine them with their mouthparts, and then release them unharmed.
Apparently the spiders’ protectiveness can also be pretty overt:
Karunarathna & Amarasinghe (2009) reported how several Poecilotheria were seen attacking individuals of Hemidactylus depressus (a gecko) after the latter tried eating the eggs of the frogs the spiders were sharing their tree holes with.
And some ideas on why this might be an example of mutualistic behaviour rather than commensalism:
…the spider seems to benefit in that the frogs eat the ants that might ordinarily attack the spider’s eggs. Due to their small size, ants are presumably difficult for the spiders to deal with, and they might be effectively helpless against them.
I’m not sure that your two categories of gamers are necessarily mutually exclusive. I’d consider myself somewhere in both of those camps. For instance, I have hundreds of hours logged each on a range of open world games like Skyrim, BotW, WoW etc. but I also love to play incremental games which satisfies my mathy brain. I’m generally a min/maxer and completionist and in RPGs this often means exploring every location, killing every enemy and collecting every item before progressing the main story, so as to be maxed out at all points in time. I’m not a big PvP fan, but when I do engage in PvP I tend to find some balance between whatever the meta is and whatever my personal playstyle ‘feels’ is right.
Anyone who’s studied high school physics will also remember one of the biggest blunders of modern experimental physics: the Michelson-Morley Experiment which infamously attempted to prove the existence of the aether but rather gave them a pretty clear confirmation of a lack of the aether. It actually ended up helping form one of the basic tenets of Einstein’s Special Relativity, which is that the speed of light is constant within an inertial frame of reference.
They floated their interferometer setup on a sandstone slab measuring 1.5m x 1.5m x 0.3m in a giant circular trough of mercury in order to provide near-zero friction and reduce vibrations.
It can be confusing, tracking the multiple lawsuits journalist E. Jean Carroll filed against Donald Trump, who sexually abused her in the 90s and then lied about it. This is no doubt why U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote a brief that bluntly laid out the main takeaway: Trump raped Carroll, as the word “rape” is...
The US needs a a legitimate grassroots movement that is well-funded (fucked if I know how to be honest, hopefully it’s just a lot of small donations from regular people) that consistently lobbies for voting reform. The following changes should be up for debate:
Replacing FPTP voting with ranked choice voting
Instituting proportional representative voting where appropriate, particularly for state senates
Referendum on changing the number of federal senators per state to better represent population
Referendum on abolishing the Electoral College and instituting a simple, ranked choice popular vote for president
Systematic review of every single electorate by an independent organisation to unwind gerrymandered districts; this organisation then sets the districts on an ongoing basis in an apolitical way
Expanding ease of access to voting by every sensible measure possible (much of what AG Garland is doing now) and then considering mandatory voting
Real-time full disclosure of all political donations to all political bodies (especially PACs)
Sensible caps on political donations
Truth in political advertising laws
I’m sure there are plenty of others but if all of those things were managed to be achieved, the body politic’s state and Overton Window of the US would shift dramatically.
This article says that NASA uses 15 digits after the decimal point, which I’m counting as 16 in total, since that’s how we count significant digits in scientific notation. If you round pi to 3, that’s one significant digit, and if you round it to 1, that’s zero digits....
I like your idea of using 3 as an approximation to get ballpark figures - if you wanted to add a smidge of extra accuracy to that you can just remember that in doing so, you’re taking away roughly 5% of pi.
0.14159265 / 3 ≈ 0.04719755
Add in around 5% at the end and your approximation’s accuracy tends to gain an order of magnitude. For your pizza example:
108 in^2 x 1.05 = 113.4 in^2 which is accurate to three significant figures and fairly easy to calculate in your head if you can divide by twenty.
You could even fudge it a little and go “108 is pretty close to 100. 5% of 100 is obviously 5, so the answer is probably around 108+5=113”
What percentage of all games released before download updating became the norm had game-breaking bugs? I really don’t remember that many, certainly not so many that it was considered to be a widespread issue.
Yeah, unpatchable games tended to be buggier in general, but there’s also a sense of charm and intrigue that comes with discovering a bug or exploit and utilising it to your advantage. I still remember playing the fuck out of Morrowind and discovering that you could exploit the Corprus disease to get essentially infinite Strength and Endurance which was awesome.
I think stating that “many” games were unbeatable is hyperbolic, but I guess that depends on your definition of “many”. If you define it as being more than five, then sure. If you define it as being a statistically significant percentage? Maybe not.
My copy of Beetle Adventure Racing on N64 went through the washing machine after it got picked up with my bedsheets. Left it in the sun for an hour afterwards and popped it back into the console and it kept working perfectly. I don’t know why any console devs ever decided that discs were better than cartridges; it’s just objectively untrue.
I think a change that’s very easy to make, will have some impact, and would draw far less pushback than more extreme measures would be to have landlords forced to report all of their costs, earnings and capital gains related to their property either directly to the tenant(s) or on a publicly accessible register on a regular basis. Prospective tenants would be armed with more information and would be able to know if their landlords are bullshitting with related to costs. Companies could create lists where they rank landlords based on how much profit they leech from their tenants. People would be able to know if they’re renting from someone who owns one additional property or fifty-three.
It won’t make a massive difference, but it’s a low-cost and fairly easily implementable measure that could be taken as part of a broader suite of measures.
At this point Trump is trying to delay everything he can until the presidential election, because he’s hoping that he’ll win again which will give him some kind of immunity against civil and criminal prosecution for another four years. I assume he thinks he’ll get into power and arbitrarily change laws to try to exonerate himself, despite the fact that that won’t really work because he’s being sued/tried under state laws, but I don’t think he’s smart enough to figure that out.
The top advocate for the gun industry in Washington is spending more than ever to influence the federal government. The group accuses President Joe Biden of waging war on the Second Amendment. It resists any effort to create universal background checks and argues that attempts to crack down on untraceable “ghost guns” are...
It’s pretty simple, just have a new real estate investment tax that is only levelled on residential properties you own but do not reside in, and that tax needs to be set at a rate higher than the property market is expected to gain. E.g. (with made-up numbers) if the property market gains 5% value per year on average, set the tax rate at 10% of the value per year. There’s an insanely slim chance you can still make money on the investment, but 99+% of investors would dump their properties immediately, leading to a massive crash where average people could suddenly afford to buy the home they’ve been renting.
A policy this significant would cause a market crash so massive that it would entirely reshape the market. I don’t think any of us could genuinely guess how it will work out.
My hope is that it would cause a crash so significant that essentially all owned properties that are not lived in enter the market, causing homes to be sold for insanely low prices in order to avoid paying taxes, causing rates of home ownership to skyrocket. The government then needs to buy up anything leftover to rent as social and affordable housing to low-income people who can’t afford a mortgage at that time. Crashing house prices also mean that the value of these taxes drops in absolute terms as well.
Then we have a situation where everyone who has a stable income owns a home, and those who can’t will rent directly from the government at extremely affordable rates. Homes are the object we as humans own that we regularly lease to one another the most - particularly for profit or capital gain. It’s super weird and it needs to stop.
The main issue is that economists would shit their pants because so much GDP growth is locked up in our property markets. It would cause at least a recession, if not a depression, and depending on which country did it, the effects could ricochet throughout the global economy such as during the GFC.
What you say also seems extremely unlikely to me, given that humans who have sufficiently advanced to the state we live in now will be unwilling to accept subsistence lifestyle.
I didn’t predict anything; you’ll note I said that this is what I would hope happens.
I’m not talking about a market failure; I’m talking about trying to take away the whole concept of a ‘market’ applying to residential real estate altogether. Because it’s so intertwined with the value of our economies, taking it away will cause a significant, permanent shrinking of GDP and other economic measures, and I think that’s appropriate given the circumstances we’re in now.
It’s a big and bold move, and as I’ve said before none of us can be exactly sure how it would pan out, but nothing is gained in life if nothing is ventured. We need to try something. I say this as someone who is lucky enough to be able to have a mortgage: it’s inherently unfair that my fellow citizens have to miss out on that opportunity.
No one is going to crash the economy so you can buy a house I’m sorry.
I think you might have missed where I said this:
I say this as someone who is lucky enough to be able to have a mortgage: it’s inherently unfair that my fellow citizens have to miss out on that opportunity.
Fedi Garden to Instance Admins: "Block Threads to Remain Listed" (wedistribute.org)
Server indexes of places for newcomers to join can be instrumental for Fediverse adoption. However, sudden rule changes can leave some admins feeling pressure to change policies in order to remain listed.
Public has no right to swim in sea, claims firm that dumped sewage at bathing spot (inews.co.uk)
South West Water is claiming it has no legal obligation to keep rivers and seawater clean of sewage in its defence against a Devon swimmer who is taking the water company to court....
‘Worst' NYC landlord attacked upon arrival at Rikers, may have broken bones in face: source (www.nbcnewyork.com)
Bring em back (slrpnk.net)
This dude has no chance (lemmy.world)
Their new single (lemmy.world)
degree in bamf (mander.xyz)
there's a reason it's "hard out there" you know (OC) (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
This comment section: “Actually I’m pretty sure the bike fell over for reasons unrelated to the stick”
Spider cats (mander.xyz)
"Women of Distinction" award named for Ruth Bader Ginsberg goes to Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, Sly Stallone (www.wonkette.com)
What in the name of all the Earth and its domains and the heavens above is this asshattery?...
Helldivers 2 director turns to community for advice on how to get meta-enthusiasts to stop kicking other players (www.gamesradar.com)
brilliant as silver (mander.xyz)
Republican women don't care about rape victims: Forget the theatrics of Katie Britt, Nancy Mace and Marjorie Taylor Greene — supporting Trump means backing abusers (www.salon.com)
It can be confusing, tracking the multiple lawsuits journalist E. Jean Carroll filed against Donald Trump, who sexually abused her in the 90s and then lied about it. This is no doubt why U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote a brief that bluntly laid out the main takeaway: Trump raped Carroll, as the word “rape” is...
Chocolate eggs in little egg cartons (aussie.zone)
What field do you work in, and how many digits of pi do you use?
This article says that NASA uses 15 digits after the decimal point, which I’m counting as 16 in total, since that’s how we count significant digits in scientific notation. If you round pi to 3, that’s one significant digit, and if you round it to 1, that’s zero digits....
What a feeling that was (lemmy.world)
Rental affordability has gone from record highs to record lows in the space of three years. What went wrong? (www.abc.net.au)
Trump posts nearly $92 million bond in E. Jean Carroll defamation case | CNN Politics (www.cnn.com)
Wow, someone actually finally managed to force Trump to pay a bill.
As the NRA struggles, the gun lobby has a new leader in D.C. (www.nbcnews.com)
The top advocate for the gun industry in Washington is spending more than ever to influence the federal government. The group accuses President Joe Biden of waging war on the Second Amendment. It resists any effort to create universal background checks and argues that attempts to crack down on untraceable “ghost guns” are...
Does this plan make sense? v2 (lemmy.world)