Pipoca

@Pipoca@lemmy.world

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Pipoca,

Schulze is great, but good luck explaining how it works to my mother.

Schulze is good for elections at STEM organizations. For the general public, something like approval voting or STAR are better.

Pipoca,

They tried banning landlords in specific neighborhoods in Rotterdam.

It lead to gentrification.

The people who bought the units, on average, were more wealthy than existing renters, but less wealthy than existing owner-occupiers. Basically, it forced poor people out of that neighborhood, and replaced them with middle class people.

There’s a lot of reasons why buying a house is expensive. In many places, it’s less because of corporate landlords, and more due to population growth outpacing housing growth.

Pipoca,

Or, better yet, we could just build more units.

Pipoca,

If that’s something that regularly happens in the US, do you have any examples from the last decade, instead of three examples from 55-60 years ago?

Pipoca,

If you’re rigging an election, it can be better politically to give yourself 65% of the vote than 97% of the vote.

97% is obviously fake. 65% is easier to make people beleive in.

Pipoca,

This is also why the stereotypical NJ Italian-American pronunciation of things sounds so unlike Italian.

It’s not that Americans somehow turned “pasta e fagioli” into “pasta fazool”. They turned “pasta e fasule” into “pasta fazool”, which is a much smaller leap.

Pipoca,

Western Europe used to be much more of a dialect continuum. Every village had their own dialect, and you could understand everyone around you.

But if you went from Castile to Paris, you’d go from hearing Spanish to hearing French. It’s just that between them, you had dozens of intermediate languages/dialects that transitioned very smoothly. It’s not like today where if you cross a border people go from speaking French to speaking Spanish.

A large part of the nation-building project in Western Europe was to force everyone in the country to learn and use some standard dialect. So very few people now speak Occitan, Picard, Burgundian, etc., and instead speak standard French.

Pipoca,

Grass really, really depends on location and climate. I literally never water or fertilize my lawn; it looks fine.

The worse thing here is ecological. I keep my mower set to 4", and keep my lawn a bit longer than my neighbors. I see a ton of fire flies in my yard in the summer, and see a fraction as many in my neighbors yard.

Short lawns are terrible habitat, which makes them good for sports or a children’s play area. But 80% of my neighbor’s lawn is just aesthetic, which is something I really don’t get. Lawns are about as visually exciting as a beige wall. They’re a waste of space.

Pipoca,

Yeah, there’s a pretty big difference between a lawn in Vermont or Ohio, and one in Nevada or southern California.

Pipoca,

Ivermectin is a general antiparasitic drug used in dogs, horses, sheep, cows, reptiles, and humans. It’s on the WHO’s list of essential medicines, and it was the 341th most commonly prescribed medication in the US. We use it for lice, scabies, whipworm, etc.

These people use horse paste because it’s available off the shelf at Tractor Supply, whereas to get ivermectin for humans requires a prescription from a doctor. Which they’re not gonna get, because it doesn’t work for covid.

And they shouldn’t get it, because we don’t want to overuse it and end up with ivermectin resistant parasites. Hell, I wouldn’t be opposed to ivermectin for horses requiring a vet prescription and doing fecal egg counts so we don’t end up with resistant strongloides.

Pipoca,

Not in the right clade, basically.

They look similar, but aren’t directly related. It’s similar to why legless lizards aren’t snakes, and bats aren’t birds.

Pipoca,

Fair. I should have said that many legless lizards aren’t snakes.

Pipoca,

I mean, it’s kinda like judging America based on Pat Robertson, the Westboro Baptist Church, Steve Bannon, Steve Miller, and Trump.

Yes, we should beleive people like Trump when they say how awful they are. The fact that he was elected and is the presumptive Republican nominee says a lot about the American right, right now. But it definitely doesn’t mean that Americans in general are awful people.

Pipoca,

There’s a story in the Talmud about Hillel the elder, a rabbi who died in 10 CE:

There was another incident involving one gentile who came before Shammai and said to Shammai: Convert me on condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I am standing on one foot. Shammai pushed him away with the builder’s cubit in his hand. This was a common measuring stick and Shammai was a builder by trade. The same gentile came before Hillel. He converted him and said to him: That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.

Pipoca,

No?

Proportional representation is where parties get a number of seats proportional to the percent of votes they get.

Proportional voting methods are often nation-wide, although there’s also e.g. mixed member

Pipoca,

The last three third party candidates who won more than one state were Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and Theodore Roosevelt.

The first two won the south on account of regional anger at the civil rights movement.

Roosevelt split the vote. 50.6% of the country voted for the Republican candidate or a former Republican, but the Democrat won a landslide with only 41% of the popular vote and 81% of the electoral college vote.

The closest a third party candidate has ever come to winning is Breckenridge, who got 18% of the popular vote and 23.8% of the EC vote running as a Southern Democrat because the south didn’t like Stephen Douglas (who got 29.5% of the popular vote but only won a single state).

Voting third party basically doesn’t work. Any time its been significant, it’s just caused a spoiler effect.

Pipoca,

Dinosaurs are currently defined as anything that descends from the most recent common ancestor of triceratops and the pigeon.

Which, as others pointed out is mostly due to dinosaurs being originally defined before we found the first pterodactyl.

If you want to refer to dinosaurs and pterodactyls, you could use avemetatarsalians (anything more closely related to birds than crocs) or ornithodirans (dinosaurs + pterosauromorphs).

Also fun is that there’s a number of crocodillians that look suspiciously dinosaur- like, like Shuvosaurus. Convergent evolution is wild.

Kibbutz Be’eri Rejects Story in New York Times October 7 Exposé: “They Were Not Sexually Abused” (theintercept.com)

Two of the three victims specifically singled out by the New York Times in a marquee exposé published in December, which alleged that Hamas had deliberately weaponized sexual violence during the October 7 attacks, were not in fact victims of sexual assault, according to the spokesperson for the Kibbutz Be’eri, which the Times...

Pipoca,

According to the UN

In the context of the coordinated attack by Hamas and others of 7 October, the UN mission team found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations, including rape and gang rape in at least three locations in southern Israel.

The team also found a pattern of victims - mostly women - found fully or partially naked, bound and shot across multiple locations which “may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence”.

In some locations the mission said it could not verify reported incidents of rape.

Or is the UN an Israeli propaganda machine, now?

Pipoca,

There’s biking and there’s biking.

In the Netherlands, for example, people wear helmets if they’re doing bike sports like road racing or BMX.

But if they’re just cruising down the street on their granny bike to get groceries, they don’t bother because that’s fairly safe.

It’s rather like the need for a seatbelt on the highway, vs the need for a seatbelt on a 25 mph neighborhood street.

Pipoca,
Pipoca,

Many more accidents than what?

More accidents than traditional bikes per passenger mile, or passenger hour?

More accidents on ebikes than 5 years ago on account of more people buying them?

Pipoca,

I see e.g. nltimes.nl/…/trauma-surgeons-express-concern-e-bi…

Dutch trauma surgeons have raised concerns over the rising number of elderly people suffering severe injuries from electric bicycle accidents, AD reported on Tuesday.

While some injuries result from collisions, most accidents are unilateral, caused by incidents like falling from a stationary position or losing control due to high speed,

It sounds like it’s particularly impacting 65+ year old men - the same types who die from breaking a hip slipping and falling while walking.

I’m not sure to what degree this is caused by ebikes encouraging them to keep biking when they should have stopped, or ebikes just being more dangerous when they fall over.

Pipoca,

Can, sure. I’m having difficulty finding the fatality rate for unseatbelted people in car crashes at 25 mph, but for pedestrians it seems to be somewhere in the single digits.

Pipoca,

I mean, this is mostly about treats, so…

Cats being obligate carnivores means most of their calories must come from meat because they e.g. can’t synthesize taurine like a human or dog can. But eating a bit of cat grass isn’t gonna kill them.

Pipoca,

Yeah, it doesn’t really belong in the ‘no’ column. It’s not an appropriate cat food because it’s not nutritionally complete.

So it’s rather like how just eating bread or cornmeal that don’t have added vitamins will give you scurvy or pellagra. But obviously they’re not poisonous or anything and most of the world eats them without a problem.

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