Mnemnosyne

@Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works

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Mnemnosyne,

Voting does sort of make you complicit, honestly.

But guess what? Not voting also makes you complicit. So does voting in a way that has no chance of having an effect based on the current rules.

Basically, existing as an eligible voter, at least in a country where voting isn’t rigged (so like, Russians are off the hook here, for example) makes you complicit in your government’s actions.

That’s kind of a big point of being in a democratic society - we are all, every one of us, responsible for the actions of our government.

And if you don’t like that responsibility, I get it, I totally sympathize, because I agree. I hate that responsibility, especially cause I know damn well I’m not qualified to make those decisions. But I still am responsible, and pretending I’m not doesn’t change that.

Mnemnosyne,

Some of them, sure, but there are a lot of stories of how many lies recruiters will tell you to get you to sign on, so a pretty significant number are genuinely bad people.

Mnemnosyne,

So one thing I don’t fully understand is this: the secret service is required by law to protect the former president, but…is there anything that actually requires the state of New York to accommodate the secret service in doing so?

In theory, couldn’t the state of New York just actually throw Trump in prison, no special privileges, and also no special accommodations for the secret service?

Mnemnosyne,

Sad thing is that a lot of these sovcit type people are actually willing to stand up against crazy odds, be put in jail, and all sorts of things to stand up for what they see as right.

If only they were standing up for something real, they would be valued and brave members of the cause. It’s just a shame they shackled themselves to this insanity.

Mnemnosyne,

Although that case is real, it did not happen in the US; I believe it was Russia or some other former Soviet Republic. Under systems of law evolved from British common law, it is generally held as necessary to inform the other party of such a change to the contract.

Sending bills for services not rendered can actually result in payment from large corporations because they are constantly receiving bills, so if it looks right there is a chance someone will just pay it. However, I believe it is also fraud if they notice and can thus get you in trouble; remember, the law is primarily there to protect companies and rich people.

Do non-vegans really refuse to date vegans?

I decided I would be willing to date a non-vegan since despite the conveniences and shared ethics of other vegans, it can be hard to find them in general, and maybe I could influence people positively, though probably without any expectation for them to go vegan (but still hoping society will move toward it one day anyway)....

Mnemnosyne,

Is being vegan a moral thing? Most that I’ve heard say yes.

This means that regardless of outward harassing them about it, your mindset is one in which they are doing something immoral and do not care to change it. It is inseparable: the position that it is morally correct to be vegan is inseparable from the corollary that those who are not are less moral.

Knowing that your romantic partner judges you as a bad person does not really make for a positive relationship, I would say. I doubt I would be willing to date someone who holds that position.

Mnemnosyne,

I find the opposite more annoying. If your memory of those events is accurate there’s plenty of things to point to to back it up.

But then you have older people like my father who…I don’t know, something has completely rewritten their memories of significant events to the point where he claims many things happened differently than verifiable recorded history. It’s impossible to argue with that because of him seeing me pointing out that’s not true as an attack and accusing him of lying.

Mnemnosyne,

The administration will not endorse the widespread use of march-in rights, and is not expected to take action against any individual medicines, said the people familiar with the matter, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal decision making.

Important bit from that, lest anyone think they’re actually going to do something.

I would be delighted if they did, but I would also be very surprised if they actually assert these rights on medicines developed with public funds, which is what they should do - just all of the medicines developed with public funds, patents seized, end of story.

Mnemnosyne,

Basically, every promotion of every officer in the military apparently needs to be confirmed by the Senate.

Normally these are confirmed via unanimous consent - the entire Senate agrees and they’re confirmed with no further procedure.

But any senator can insist that the full normal procedure be followed, which means committee hearings, discussion time, and an actual vote at the end of it. He would not be able to stop them from being confirmed on those votes. But the normal procedure requires a lot of time during which the Senate would be able to do nothing else because the procedural rules require all this discussion and voting time.

Really, the problem isn’t that he had a lot of power; it’s the absurd situation where every single officer in the military needs to be confirmed by the Senate. I’m not sure that made sense in George Washington’s day, much less today with the size of the military.

Mnemnosyne,

Joe Biden has already beat Donald Trump in an election. More electable makes no sense in this context.

The only way Biden could lose is if some of the people who voted for him last time, after everything that’s happened since Trump lost the election, decide ‘ehh, that Trump guy wasn’t so bad, let’s give him another shot’ and decide not to vote against Trump.

Mnemnosyne,

Some of these actually do have an effect, but it’s difficult to impossible for a person to know whether this particular one is a placebo button or not.

This is especially the case with elevator close door buttons. Those buttons are always hooked up, because they are needed during emergency operation with the fireman’s key. They are sometimes programmed to cycle the doors marginally faster under normal circumstances, but more often aren’t.

Also, some of the traffic crossing buttons don’t make the walk cycle come sooner, but they occasionally are needed to insert a walk cycle at all, because some intersections don’t trigger a walk cycle unless the button has been pressed.

Mnemnosyne,

Makes me think of Vault 11 from Fallout New Vegas where the population has to sacrifice one person every year or everyone would be killed.

Only it was a test and if they refused then nobody is killed. But they send sacrifices for almost 200 years.

Mnemnosyne,

The app she used to find the victim likely had enough of a digital trail to link back to her, so body disposal or no, she would likely have been investigated and caught sooner or later.

Mnemnosyne,

The weird thing about this to me is how someone who has watched all this crime stuff, which generally (at least the English ones I’ve seen) portrays the police as being competent and successful at catching criminals, doesn’t come up with a far more detailed plan to not get caught.

The interesting thing is she could genuinely have done a murder to see what it’s like, just as she wanted, and probably never gotten caught. If you murder someone with no motive, no connection to you, chosen at random, in a place not close to your home or place of work or any other frequently visited locations…the police have little to go on. As a fan of these shows, she would surely be aware of this. But instead she chose to do things that would basically guarantee she’s caught if the police are even minimally competent.

Mnemnosyne,

Yeah, if I remember correctly. He sold the rights straight up to the developers of the game, no royalties or percentage or anything because of his anti-game bias, then when the game was successful and that decision bit him in the ass, he tried to change the deal and get more money out of them. As I understand it he lost and still receives no revenue from the games.

Even then they’re still benefitting him tremendously because while he was popular in Poland, it’s the games that have really made his work popular overall, and people are buying his books and all because of it.

Mnemnosyne,

That’s one of those paradoxes with human behavior around problems. If you put in effort to resolve the problem before it becomes significant, either no one notices, or they claim your effort was unnecessary because it wasn’t a problem in the first place.

Y2K bugs are a great example. Lots of effort, time, and money was spent ahead of time to prevent it from becoming a problem…and you get people claiming the whole thing was just nothing to be worried about at all and the expense was pointless.

Mnemnosyne,

You know, this explanation makes it make sense to me a lot more than most of the others I’ve ever gotten.

Judge indicates she may delay Trump trial on charges he hid classified documents at Mar-a-Lago (apnews.com)

A federal judge in Florida indicated Wednesday that she may delay the start of the classified documents trial of Donald Trump, pointing to the other criminal cases the former president is facing as well as the mounds of evidence his attorneys need to review....

Mnemnosyne,

This is absolutely untrue. Trump doesn’t deserve his trial delayed, but it is absolutely the case that sometimes people who are actually innocent need more time for their defense to be prepared, and this idea shouldn’t be perpetuated in general as it can bias potential jurors.

Mnemnosyne,

This shouldn’t be a problem based on how they think abortions work…the woman didn’t go out FOR an abortion, she was out shopping and decided to get one, like picking up a snack on your way out of the market!

Seriously it’s deranged. If they behaved generally like they care about the ‘children’ and the women, I could accept they’re at least acting in good faith according to their dumbass beliefs, but they don’t seem to care except for outlawing and restricting women’s activities, so it’s clear that those who say the point is just to subjugate women are right.

Mnemnosyne,

I’ve actually tried to do that with pictures/art, but none of the tools I have to do so make it easy. The Windows photo viewer from Windows XP, which I can’t seem to get anymore, was actually pretty okay at it.

But the truth is that even then it required more effort than I was willing to put in, and I was never able to anticipate every tag I would eventually want. If I didn’t feel like tagging something the moment I saved it, it generally never got tagged.

At this point an AI to do it would be amazing. I have thousands and thousands of pieces of potential character art, but when I want something with specific features it’s not easy to find.

Mnemnosyne,

Anything and everything that politicians propose to protect children, I am automatically against. It doesn’t matter how good it sounds, if they say anything about protecting children, I’m opposed to it.

This is because they know that ‘protect children’ are magic words that let them get away with almost anything, and that’s genuinely about the only time they say that anyway. Basically nothing the government does is actually to protect children.

Mnemnosyne,

While language does evolve over time, we shouldn’t encourage unnecessary and somewhat negative evolutions of it, and especially not encourage it to change over less time.

When two previously distinct words come to have the same meaning, this can be a problem. First, older written things become less comprehensible. Few of us today could read and understand old english because so many words have changed. The evolution of language has taken a long time to get to that point, at least. But if we encourage the acceleration of this change, something which appears to be happening even without encouragement, how long will it be?

Today, we can still pretty clearly understand things written 200 years ago; some bits are confusing but for the most part it is still clear. If language change accelerates enough, in the future, people may struggle to understand something written only a hundred years ago, or even less.

The second problem is that if the word for a thing goes away, it becomes more difficult to express that concept. Consider the word ‘literally’ whose meaning has become extremely muddled. In order to express the original concept, we now require additional emphasis. There are other, more difficult to think of terms like that - a concept for which a particular word would have been perfect had the word’s meaning not significantly changed.

So when a word’s usage is corrected, do not be so quick to defend the misuse of the word through ‘language evolves!’ If people accept that ‘oops, I used that word wrong’ and then see if there is already a better word for what they were trying to express to correct themselves with, that is probably better - in most cases.

Even more notably, new words should be used when possible, if an older word doesn’t quite fit a newly emerging thing, or even a concept that has existed for some time but has not had a word to describe it precisely. One of my favorite examples of this is the word ‘cromulent’ which expresses a concept that did not have a specific word for it in common use at the time, even though the concept of ‘understandable and linguistically correct’ certainly already existed. Also consider the now common word ‘emoji’ which was coined specifically to represent this concept. This is an excellent evolution of language because it took nothing away. It arose in response to something which did not exist, and described that thing with a word created specifically for it.

That said, fighting against the evolution of language that has already happened and is far too entrenched to ever change is nonsensical. My father, for instance, insists ‘cool’ should be for temperature description only, even though that word possessed its non-temperature meaning before he was even born. Similarly, sometimes the change is resisted for bad reasons; like the word ‘gay’. In these cases, it is best not to try to fight the change, but instead embrace and encourage it.

So ultimately, when a word is used wrong, consider whether the word evolving to the way it is being used is a positive change. If it does not make things better, it’s probably best not to encourage it.

Mnemnosyne,

The ‘job killers’ argument is kinda bullshit. I want to kill jobs - I want to eliminate all labor that can be automated, such that in the ideal perfect future, no human ever has to work; they can spend every moment doing things they enjoy without worry.

But self checkout is not automation. No human work has been eliminated. It is the same exact fucking checkout process, only now the customer does it instead, and the store doesn’t pay the cashier. And no they don’t pass that savings on to you because of course they don’t, they just pocket the difference.

Mnemnosyne,

Deer usually have ample power to prevent their death; most of the time they have sufficient time to get out of the way, but they do not do so.

Which really makes the comparison even more on point, since as a whole our civilization could have taken action but chose not to.

Mnemnosyne,

Only reason he’s leaving is he’s not going to get reelected. He did shit that pissed off the trumpies and there’s too many of them in his state for him to win the primary; he’s probably already got a really credible (for certain definitions of credible) primary opponent who he knows he can’t beat.

Also he might have something resembling principles, but those principles are themselves still monstrous and harmful.

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