Pipoca

@Pipoca@lemmy.world

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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.

Lauren Boebert's son was arrested over a spate of thefts as his mom tries to convince voters to look past her chaotic family life (www.businessinsider.com)

Rep. Lauren Boebert’s 18-year-old son, Tyler Boebert, was arrested on Tuesday afternoon and is facing 22 charges, including several felony charges relating to a string of crimes in her Colorado district....

Pipoca,

She’s a 37 year old divorced grandmother.

You’re essentially correct, there, but slightly off on a couple details. About a month before her divorce finalized, she was kicked out of a musical for vaping and being rowdy with her new boyfriend.

Pipoca,

You can argue, sure. But people have actually studied this, and you’re factually just plain wrong.

You’ve seen the centralized waste. But you haven’t picked through a neighborhood’s worth of trash cans to put that centralized waste into the larger decentralized context.

Pipoca,

Keep in mind: the largest source of food waste is residential. The second largest source is restaurants.

Food waste is bad for the environment, sure. But the rent being too damn high is a lot more of the reason why people go hungry than me letting a bagged salad in my fridge go bad.

Pipoca,

Crosswords have clues going across and down.

The words just use common letters so they’re things puzzle creators wish were real words. They’re not currently words.

Pipoca,

According to etymonline,

Lax. Noun. “salmon,” from Old English leax (see lox). Cognate with Middle Dutch lacks, German Lachs, Danish laks, etc.; according to OED the English word was obsolete except in the north and Scotland from 17c., reintroduced in reference to Scottish or Norwegian salmon.

It’s weird in that lax died ~400 years ago, then was borrowed back ~100 years ago into American English from Yiddish-speaking immigrants.

It’s a weird loanword in that it was a loaned obsolete word that underwent some semantic narrowing in the loan.

Pipoca,

Light trucks is kinda a crazy category. It’s lighter vehicles that

(1) Designed primarily for purposes of transportation of property or is a derivation of such a vehicle, or (2) Designed primarily for transportation of persons and has a capacity of more than 12 persons, or (3) Available with special features enabling off-street or off-highway operation and use

Vans, minivans, SUVs, and crossovers are mostly categorized as light trucks. Most vehicles on the road are light trucks; they outsell cars right now 3 to 1

Pipoca,

One poll this year found that almost one in three Americans say they may never retire. The majority of the nevers said they could not afford to give up a full-time job, especially when inflation was eating into an already measly Social Security cheque. But suppose you are one of the lucky ones who can choose to step aside. Should you do it? …

But can anything truly replace the framework and buzz of being part of the action? You can have a packed diary devoid of deadlines, meetings and spreadsheets and flourish as a consumer of theatre matinees, art exhibitions and badminton lessons. Hobbies are all well and good for many. But for the extremely driven, they can feel pointless and even slightly embarrassing.

That is because there is depth in being useful. And excitement, even in significantly lower doses than are typical earlier in a career, can act as an anti-ageing serum. Whenever Mr Armani is told to retire and enjoy the fruits of his labour, he replies “absolutely not”. Instead he is clearly energised by being involved in the running of the business day to day, signing off on every design, document and figure.

Who exactly is this article being written for?

Clearly, it’s not written towards anyone working the average job. It presupposes that your job must be the most fulfilling and useful thing you could do.

It even calls out tech professionals as retiring early. But how many programmers can’t think of a more useful or fulfilling open source project to work on than what they do at their day job?

Pipoca,

The idea of a Pokémon clone isn’t protectable, but existing Pokémon are.

You can make a Pokémon clone with entirely novel monsters, but if a judge thinks they look too much like an existing Pokémon they’re gonna have a problem.

Pipoca,

There’s a pretty good Wikipedia article on it

As mentioned, it’s the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. It’s been used by Palestians since at least the mid 60s in a number of different chants, e.g. “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free/Arab/Islamic” (technically, the latter two are “from the water to the water” because otherwise the Arabic doesn’t rhyme).

Hamas’s charter says

Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea

While Netanyahu’s far-right Likud party’s 1977 manifesto says

between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty

It’s historically been somewhat controversial, with Zionists typically saying that it calls for the destruction of the state of Israel and/or the expulsion of Jews from the area. CNN fired a political commentator for saying it ~5 years back, and it’s regulated as hate speech in some places in Europe. Most pro Palestinian activists think that’s ridiculous, but it’s worth being aware of.

Pipoca,

Keep in mind, 80% of that is private spending on insurance premiums and out of pocket expenses.

Americans spend a lot on mediocre healthcare because we have to line the pockets of insurance companies and drug companies.

Pipoca,

What exactly is your alternative?

Have 4, 8, 12 years of Repubican rule in the hopes of getting a better Democrat? 4 years if Trump was awful enough, and did quite a lot of long-lasting damage.

If you’re offering me the certainty of a lot more long-lasting, hard to undo damage against the uncertain hope of a bit of progress, you’ll forgive me if I accept the certainty of the status quo combined with pushing for voting method reform at the state and local level.

Pipoca,

Cruise ships are pretty big polluters, yes. Cruise passengers have about 8x the emissions that they’d have from a comparable land-based vacation.

But when people talk about ship pollution, they’re usually talking about non-carbon pollution.

For example, ships often burn heavy fuel oil, which produces tons of sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain, and NOX, which depletes the ozone and causes smog and asthma.

Cruise ships are bad for the environment, but there’s honestly bigger fish to fry. Gas power plants are way, way worse for the planet.

FBI Labels Anti-Fascists and Anti-Racists as Violent Extremists (unicornriot.ninja)

A recently released Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) document titled “Domestic Terrorism Symbols Guide”* links common protest symbols to “terrorism” — another marker in a common theme of conflating militant protest for social justice with deadly terrorist violence within the United States. Groups like the American...

Pipoca,

vault.fbi.gov/…/view

No.

The document lists symbols that violent extremists use, but explicitly calls out that not everyone who uses those symbols is a violent extremist.

The punisher skull is also in there, but that doesn’t mean they’re claiming every asshole with a punisher skull on their truck is a terrorist. Just that if someone with a punisher skull on their truck shoots up a mosque, that the punisher iconography is evidence that it was an act of right-wing militia terrorism.

Pipoca,

American cheese is one specific cheese made in America. It’s essentially cheese made into a cheese sauce, then chilled back into a block. There’s a number of quality levels of it based on how much they skimp on the cheese. And when eaten melted, it’s actually pretty decent, if mild.

Most grocery stores in the US have two cheese sections. There’s the cheap shredded/sliced cheeses, and then there’s a separate section with the fancier cheeses, both foreign and domestic.

Cheese in the US is weird. We make both Velveeta and Humboldt fog. An American cheese won the World Cheese Awards a few years ago, but most of the cheese eaten in America is cheap, mild, mass produced, pre-sliced/shredded semisoft cheese. Most of it isn’t “american cheese”, though.

Pipoca,

It’s because Colorado water law is based on ‘prior appropriations’.

Colorado was settled around mining and ranching, both of which can be water-intensive. It’s also a fairly dry place. Water rights have been serious business for a long time.

So the rule was that the first person there had the right to start using river water for their mine. Then, if a second person starts a mine upstream, they had the right to use river water only inasmuch as it didn’t impact the prior downstream mine. If there was a drought, the upstream mine had to use less water so the earlier mine wasn’t impacted. Rain barrels were prohibited because that water “belonged” to some downstream rights holder, just as using the water from a stream might be prohibited because it belongs to a downstream rights holder.

This isn’t really late-stage capitalism. The law in Colorado goes back to some court cases in the 1870s and 1880s.

Pipoca,

Robert Byrd was the longest serving senator. He was a leader of his local chapter of the KKK in his 20s, but left it when he got into politics.

He voted against the civil rights bill of 1965, but started supporting civil rights in the 70s and 80s.

When he died, the NAACP said:

“Senator Byrd reflects the transformative power of this nation,” stated NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous. "Senator Byrd went from being an active member of the KKK to a being a stalwart supporter of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and many other pieces of seminal legislation that advanced the civil rights and liberties of our country.

Senator Byrd came to consistently support the NAACP civil rights agenda, doing well on the NAACP Annual Civil Rights Report Card. He stood with us on many issues of crucial importance to our members from the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, the historic health care legislation of 2010 and his support for the Hate Crimes Prevention legislation," stated Hilary O. Shelton, Director of the NAACP Washington Bureau and Senior Vice President for Advocacy and Policy. “Senator Byrd was a master of the Senate Rules, and helped strategize passage of legislation that helped millions of Americans. He will be sorely missed.”

Byrd certainly wasn’t perfect, but he wasn’t Strom Thurmond, George Wallace or David Duke.

Pipoca,

Portal fantasies aren’t exactly new.

The Chronicles of Narnia, Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz are classics that aren’t generally considered lazy.

Isekai tend towards the lazy, self-insert escapist portion of portal fantasy, sure. Most don’t have great writing. But keep Sturgeons law in mind - every genre has a few gems in a sea of turds.

Pipoca,

Genetics and ancestry is a lot more messy than that.

Both Jews and Palestinians seem to have substantial native Levantine DNA with moderate admixtures from different groups.

If Ashkenazi Jews are indigenous to Israel despite having a significant amount of European maternal DNA, so are Palestinians. Genetically, Ashkenazim and Palestinians are cousins.

Tlaib refuses to apologize for blaming Israel for Gaza hospital blast, attacks Biden (abcnews.go.com)

Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib refused to apologize Wednesday for saying on Tuesday that Israel is to blame for the hospital explosion that day in Gaza, an accusation that sparked political backlash against her from Republicans as Israel denies fault....

Pipoca,

From the article:

“Our office cited an AP report yesterday that the IDF had hit a Baptist hospital in Gaza. Since then, the IDF denied responsibility and the US intelligence assessment is that this was not done by Israel,” she wrote. “It is a reminder that information is often unreliable and disputed in the fog of war (especially on Twitter where misinformation is rampant). We all have a responsibility to ensure information we are sharing is from credible sources and to acknowledge as new reports come in.”

Omar called for a “fully independent investigation to determine conclusively who is responsible for this war crime.”

It sounds like she acknowledges Israel probably isn’t behind it, but also isn’t apologizing for her initial remarks like some Republicans were calling for. The story should probably mention that higher up and more explicitly, rather than burying the lede.

Pipoca,

Misfires happen, but “rocket falls short of target on empty field” isn’t a news story; you’ll never hear about it. You’ll only hear about them when they result in tragedy.

Pipoca,

It’s not saying that the top row can support at most 100 people.

Just that if you have 100 people per hour, you need something like what’s in the picture. The train tracks aren’t being fully utilized in the top pic, either.

As an aside, you’re forgetting that cars are ~15 feet long on average. So you’ve got an hour of traffic with consistently 1 car following distance, which is fairly unrealistic. Real world capacy of a lane is closer to 2k people per hour, or 4k both directions.

Pipoca,

In the US, an apartment you own is called a condo.

Pipoca,

A lot of people are in denial about the effects of policies they support.

Just look at the cost of housing. There’s a ton of NIMBY homeowners who are deep in denial that zoning huge swaths of cities to be exclusively mcmansions could possibly cause house prices to be artificially high.

Pipoca,

Ironically, trucks have gotten larger precisely because of regulation. In particular, emissions standards are tied to vehicle size. So if you make your vehicles bigger and bigger, you don’t have to make them more efficient.

Also, regulation makes it difficult to import small Japanese kei trucks, and regulation is the biggest reason that the Ford F series truck is the single most popular model of vehicle in the US. In particular, we’ve taxed foreign-built trucks at 25% since the mid 60s, so there’s dramatically fewer models of truck than SUV or cars.

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