I managed to amass a pretty good horde of downvotes the other day with a sentiment that mirrored this comic. I probably meandered and missed my meaning but the comic author nails it
You arrest the leader of a belligerent faction by forming an army and defeating their army. Not by knocking on their door and serving papers. The ICC really doesn’t have any purpose except punishing the losers once the war is over. The winners always seem to walk free, no matter what heinous shit they did to get that win.
Play out the game theory of that in your head and think about what effect the threat of war crimes prosecution for losers (only) has on how and when leaders commit war crimes. (Hint: it strongly encourages doing ANYTHING to make sure you win)
I mean the problem is that on an international level might will always make right. You cannot solve that unless you force every human being on earth to submit to some single authority…
So I suppose it will be solved up all nice and tidy if an alien race comes and enslaves us. Until then, we surf the rising and falling waves of human empires just like we have been doing for 10s of 1000s of years.
Making institutions that have “authority” but no power to enforce that authority except against the defeated isn’t really doing anything except encouraging some of humanities worst instincts (revenge, feuding, and making all conflict existential)
If you want to maximize peace and safety for civil populations, you de-escalate conflict by offering face saving off ramps to the belligerents. Affording grace and forgiveness to people who are probably complete shitbags who don’t deserve it. Humanism is hella hard though, I’m not sure we’re up to the challenge.
He has a gold record for an album he appeared on as a trombone player. Apparently the band phish saw an unusual mailbox when they were driving up to meet a record company guy and the guy from the label told them that his neighbor with the strange mailbox was in fact Lt Riker. Knowing he played trombone from the show they asked to be introduced and invited him to join them in the studio on a record they were working on (Hoist). Well as Jonathan tells it he got to the studio and pretty quickly realized that the charts for the part were probably beyond his ability, but he bravely recorded a few attempts and everyone was very nice about. The band did not use the his takes for the intended track but they did cut them up and make a track out of them called “Riker’s mailbox”. When the record went gold the band made sure that a gold record plaque was also sent to Jonathan.
Story pieced together from interviews with Jonathan and Trey, heard on a podcast at some point but I would have a hell of a time sourcing it further. The song, which also feature bela fleck on banjo, is pretty much just noise and not worth the effort to chase down. If a phish fan tells you NOT to listen to a phish song you should listen!
I mean it’s only 30ish seconds so it’s not a lot of investment, BUT, it really is just noise, you can barely pick out the trombone until the last 3seconds.
It is grating and unapproachable, but the rest of the album feels like it could have had half a dozen radio hits in an alternate version of the early 90s.
Edit: just re-read my comment and noticed the ambiguity in my closing sentence. Sigh… sloppy writing. Anyway I was playing with the fact that phish fans are known to be a little bit evangelical (not unlike trek fans tbh). And if one tells you not to listen to a song you should listen to THEM, and avoid the song.
People’s take on this stuff always seems so naive to me. All war ever can be viewed as an attempt to arrest the leader of another group for “crimes”. When you get arrested… that means you lost the war. Winning a war means you didn’t get arrested.
The ICC is such a silly stupid waste of human attention. It’s like an idea that children came up with after watching Star Trek. It has no utility whatsoever for our species. We fight, we have winners and losers. If you start a fight with somebody stronger than you, you are gonna have a bad time. If you start a fight with someone weaker than you, others will think you are dishonorable. That doesn’t mean you get arrested.
Anybody who tries to arrest him will be at war with Israel and probably the US and probably a lot of other nations. They will break their treaty with ICC before they start that war and everyone fucking knows it. Why do we pretend?
The average lifespan for wild passerine birds is probably a lot longer than 3 yrs.
In general, birds live a weirdly long time. Banding studies show us song birds that have lived up to 15yrs or so. Assuming they make it to adulthood, a cardinal can probably expect to live 6-8 yrs but that is a wild guess since it’s almost impossible for us to really measure that.
Anyway, that’s enough zoology time, back to the memes!
RTS did go mainstream and it indeed turned into games very different from old school SC et al.
Plants vs zombies and LoL are the descendants of the genre and are or at least were, HUGE. Tower defense and moba are the two evolutionary paths that RTS took.
Tower defense is super mainstream, but moba, while huge isn’t really mainstream in my opinion. But one things for sure, they don’t have much in common with SC except the lineage.
No place is free by that standard. The people sets the policy and when you transgress the people will push back via their representatives in the government. The government that they chose.
The problem isn’t the system, the problem is that most people don’t agree with you. Start changing people’s mind and quit looking for shortcuts.
“Privacy” means two different things depending on the audience. For me privacy means that my information is not being used to advance some organizations commercial interest. For others it means that my information will never be shared with a government.
Don’t advertise to me
Or
Don’t narc on me
I guess I don’t really expect a company to resist pressure from government agencies on my behalf. Especially if I have been using their service to commit crimes in my country. If you are doing things your government would prefer you didn’t, hire a good lawyer and consult with them about what should be sent via email (spoiler, it’s nothing). The mafia doesn’t send emails, or put anything in writing, if you do crimes, you shouldn’t either.
There is no world where a 3rd party ticketing company should be able to own, or develop exclusive relationships with a venue operator.
The promoter, act, and venue operator should negotiate how tickets will be distributed when they draw up contracts. In this fucked up reality, the ticketing company owns the venues and controls all access to tickets and their distribution.
TM would still do tons of business in that world. They actually offer a compelling product to acts, venues and promoters, but they should always be in competition with the act and the venue box office.
TM and live-nation should be competitors but they have been allowed to form a vertically integrated monopoly. THIS is the actual shit the FTC was built to combat.
It’s the same thing the right does with government. It is a truism that there is all sorts of “inefficiencies” where the money is going to the wrong people for the wrong stuff.
In both cases, it’s sort of correct and sort of wrong. Corporations, governments, and any human institution beyond a certain scale (a few hundred people), will leak wealth into places it shouldn’t. It’s an unavoidable feature of our species as best I can tell.
It’s fine to accept it, it’s fine to be angry about it. It’s silly to blind yourself to it in some places and whinge about it in others.
My dude, never underestimate wall streets ability to ignore tsla failing. They will hold that stock. Shorting tsla is a fools errand. The people who own tsla are immune to reality.
Everything good that tsla owners were banking on has already happened. The gravy days are in the past but… the insane valuation persists.
I have no diagnosed neurodivergence and I’m looking at that list with surprise. Like, you know how fucking hard I’m working to pretend I can do that stuff?
A person who can do all that shit looks like a superhero to me. No talent… fuck… if that list had telekinesis on it’d feel about the same to me.
This is pretty interesting. Americans seem to be convinced that their president is the king of earth and they can, with a wave of their finger change anything. This is total bullshit
Presidential power inside the country is extremely limited by the constitution and they rarely have an opportunity to “just do what they said they were going to do”.
Outside our borders… it’s so fucking complicated that no one person really understands the global web of power and influence. At the bottom of the pyramid though, always force of arms. If America is willing to fight you, then you do what they say.
So… should we start a war in every place on earth that genocide is occurring? Really channel our inner dick Cheney and waste life and treasure in regime changes? Should we really cede all power in the Middle East to Iran so that we can stop our (fucking asshole of an) ally Israel from using those weapons on a highly immoral war? Should we start WWIII with china to save the Uighurs? How many African nations should we currently be bombing?
Which of those wars do you want to fight? Have you enlisted yet? What are you waiting for?
Me too. Shame is that doing that would empower Iran, which isn’t great. It’s all tough choices and I’m pretty tired of listening to idiots pretend they have all the answers.
Sending weapons to Israel is part of a very old US strategy to check Iranian power. You can argue that we should stop trying to check Iranian power, I could probably be convinced of that. Being an enemy of Iran has led us to some of our shittiest “allies”. Remember when US presidents shook hands with Sadam Hussein? That shit happened!
We can stop sending them weapons and money. We should. We should try to make those shipments conditional on changes to the Gaza war strategy. But letting Iran run wild is not going to be super great for US interests and is going to be VERY unpopular with US citizens. It’s not that I like the way everything is happening, it’s that it isn’t simple. Iranian troops in Israel, SA and Iraq isn’t an outcome we can handle so taking our foot off the pedal almost certainly leads to a hot war with Iran. That sucks a lot.
Re millionaires: I think that it’s probably time to update your understanding of a millionaire in the US in 2024. See that retired couple in sweatpants at the grocery store? They could easily be millionaires. See that farmer looking guy in line at the drive through? Probably a millionaire. GM line worker closing in on retirement… millionaire
A very large chunk of Americans will end up being millionaires by the time they get into their 50s and 60s. It just doesn’t mean what it used to.
There is a BIG gap between billionaires and millionaires. Becoming a millionaire no longer requires being born rich or getting some special deal. Just getting lucky enough to have steady work for 4 decades.
The idea of virtualizing computer interface displays and being able to lock them to physical locations in space is really cool. But there is no fucking way I would wear a headset just for that. I’d love to have an intangible screen that magically hangs above my stove to help with cooking tasks. But again… headset? No thanks.
I ended up making an awesome esphome rig for my garage door. An esp32 board, a magnetic switch for position detection and a little relay that closes for .5s connected to the wall button wires.
Super simple and it works crazy well. It also cuts out all the proprietary shit the manufacturer would prefer I use.
A router cannot do that. A router connects two networks together and routs traffic between them. That is it.
A home “router” is a combination device that includes a router, a wireless access point, maybe a modem, a managed switch, a dhcp server, a firewall, and more.
If you need a managed switch with more than 4 ports… you buy a managed switch. It is simple.
Renting a ICE for your road trip is probably a better plan than buy an EV with only that use case in mind. Renting a truck the day you have to haul shit is a better idea than driving a truck everyday.
People need to stop shopping for a vehicle based on the .01% task and focus on how they drive 99.9% of the time.
The ICC Arrest Warrants (Chappatte) (lemmy.world)
Resistance is futile (lemmy.world)
EXCLUSIVE: ICC seeks arrest warrants against Sinwar and Netanyahu for war crimes over October 7 attack and Gaza war | CNN (edition.cnn.com)
Fear (mander.xyz)
The RTS genre will never be mainstream unless you change it until it's 'no longer the kind of RTS that I want to play,' says Crate Entertainment CEO (www.pcgamer.com)
The US is a Hybrid Democratic-Authoritarian Regime (lemmy.world)
Oxygen (mander.xyz)
Proton Mail Discloses User Data Leading to Arrest in Spain (restoreprivacy.com)
Fix The Tix: 300 Musicians Back New Senate Bill for Reforming Concert Ticket Sales in the ‘Fans First Act’ (www.goodnewsnetwork.org)
Americans Are Open To Cheap Chinese Cars. That’s 'Scary' For The Rest Of The Auto Industry (insideevs.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/15089465...
Tesla to lay off everyone working on Superchargers, new vehicles (arstechnica.com)
high energy (lemmy.ml)
Biden Says He Told Nigeria to Kill Fewer Civilians — but Nigeria Keeps Killing Lots of Civilians (theintercept.com)
Nigeria has gotten billions of dollars in U.S. security assistance, even as its counterterrorism campaign has a massive civilian death toll....
Applies to a lot of millionaires as well (lemmy.world)
Apple Vision Pro Customer Interest Dying Down at Some Retail Stores (www.macrumors.com)
The best and worst decisions I made for my smart home - YouTube (youtube.com)
WTF is up with switches?
cross-posted from: lazysoci.al/post/12597342...
Nio ET7 With Semi-Solid State Batteries Drives 665 Miles In Real-World Test (www.carscoops.com)