cabbage

cabbage, 2 months ago

She's only 69 though. Four justices are younger than her, three are older. She's closer in age to Kamala Harris than she is to Joe Biden.

I get the concern, but at some point it gets silly.

cabbage, 2 months ago

I think this is a huge problem in American politics, and Americans really need to get around to elect younger officials asap. Obviously it's not that easy, and the problems run deep.

The supreme court, however, it's the one institution that's kind of intentionally old. They are supposed to be experienced ageing justices at the end of their career.

The problem is not that the supreme court is old as much as that politicians are even older.

cabbage, 2 months ago

This is key. Also try to figure out which relevant hashtags are being used, and follow and use them.

Finding relevant groups can also be an idea. Tag and follow for example @scifi@a.gup.pe, or even consider if it's worth sharing your post on Lemmy (by tagging for example @sciencefiction@lemmy.world).

Anything can be a group in a.gup.pe, by changing what's been the @s. When you search for a group in Mastodon you'll see how many followers it has. A more integrated group functionality will probably be implemented in Mastodon in the future, but for now that's what we've got. :)

cabbage, 2 months ago

Two shortcomings:

The first is Hur’s description of Biden’s memory, which really does do Biden a bit of an injustice. The second, and more important, of the flaws is Hur’s analysis of a February 2017 comment by the then former vice president that serves as the nexus to some key evidence Hur cites for Biden’s supposed wrongdoing.

In the memory one, Hur writes about how Biden misremembers who said something back in 2009, but fails to mention that Biden corrected himself.

In the evidence one, Hur fails to give context to a quote about "documents downstairs" that is actively used in his report, arguably rendering the use of the quote intentionally misleading.

cabbage, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Freia milk chocolate is the shit. Especially the one with salted almonds.

In continental Europe (except Benelux) I find milk chocolate often gets too sugary, while dark chocolate is usually more expensive but maintains a high quality. I have never been to the US, but I am inherently sceptical of what they might pass as chocolate over there.

As far as Norwegian chocolate goes, I share my favourite chocolate with a lot of senior citizens: Mokkabønner are amazing. Dark chocolate beans with a hint of coffee, amazing with a cup of java in the morning.

cabbage, 2 months ago

Ethically sourced and not too sugary. I make sure to grab a selection of Tony's Chocolonely bars whenever I'm in the Netherlands. It's second to none.

Belgian chocolate is of course also great. I love Galler, it's good but not overly pretentious/expensive.

Dark chocolate in small doses; if I want to go wild a milk chocolate with something salty (sea salt, salty roasted almonds, salty caramel, freaking corn flakes for that matter) is always a treat.

cabbage, 2 months ago

If you eat several bars of chocolate every day you probably have other things to worry about than lead poisoning.

cabbage, 2 months ago

I like the idea of having Easter eggs like this hard-coded into the platform, making it more difficult for bigots to use it.

It it's meant to be a yearly thing the theme might benefit from being a bit more subtle though - reading text on a bright blue background is not the easiest on the eyes.

cabbage, 2 months ago

The EU is pushing antitrust against tech monopolies for all it's worth. For anyone with half an eye on the EU it's glaringly obvious why Meta is doing this, and all the conspiracy theorists stumbling over each other on the Fediverse just look like clowns.

It's not about EEE, it's not about flooding the Fediverse with trolls (?) or about taking over the market share of Mastodon (??). It's about making a genuine-looking claim that they are not monopolist. Same reason they are working on the Signal protocol for WhatsApp.

It's not exactly rocket science. It's just successful regulation.

cabbage, 2 months ago

I guess another course of action is to turn it into a discussion. Like "I don't know, do you think birds have blood circulation in their legs?". Admitting not to know stuff and to ask follow-up questions is generally pretty good conversation making.

cabbage, 2 months ago

I disagree actually. Be an informed consumer. Ask questions in open forums. Buy quality, use for a long time. Avoid fast fashion.

That said, I don't know the first thing about leggings.

cabbage, 2 months ago

He has the power to create his own instance with his own rules; he has the power to leave for an instance run by like-minded people.

And other people have the power to block that instance should it poison their internet experience. :)

cabbage, 2 months ago

Please do share your content though! Doesn't mean your entire presence here needs to be centred around it. :)

cabbage, 2 months ago

Will the meta tag federate to other Piefed instances and, more importantly, to Lemmy/Kbin? I guess the posts (and even possibly profile) might still appear on Google as seen through a lemmy instance?

cabbage, 2 months ago

Block instance vs. hide communities from instance?

I think it's a good idea to have both options, but defederating from an instance in its entirity is by far the most important to me. Using kbin and having to individually block hexbear users was a drag. Still, I wouldn't want to see lemmynsfw communities although I have no issue with seeing users from there post elsewhere, so both options serve a purpose.

cabbage, 2 months ago

Which history though?

I mean, Netanyahu has built a successful platform on fear, but he struggled like hell to gain a majority now, and his genocide does not seem to be popular at all with the Israeli voter. I don't think he would have received many votes had they known it would end up like this.

The Germans never gave the NSDAP a majority, and the whole genocide thing probably wasn't that clear to the voters either. The main thing putting Hitler in power was arguably the weak leadership of the German center right, not the electoral success of his platform.

I can't think of a single genocide where people actively voted for it in a direct way and it won a majority. Contemporary Israel is the closest example I can think of. Netanyahu showed his true colours long ago, and the Israeli voter - much like the American Trump supporter - really should have known better.

cabbage, 2 months ago

This takes more guts than it should. Good for them.

It's a good movie - worth a watch.

cabbage, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Let's not forget that US/Israeli relations were at an all-time low during Biden's presidency because he didn't want anything to do with Netanyahu.

Not saying the US response to all this hasn't sucked, but I'm pretty confident any other president the US has had the last 50 years would have been worse.

It's not your president. It's your country. You allowed this to happen over decades, not months or even years.

And in a race where the other candidate is firmly pro genocide... Yeah, I struggle to interpret this shit in good faith. Kindly fuck off.

cabbage, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Marxism-Leninism.

Lenin was a scholar and developed his own take on Marxism, which has its own understanding of the communist society. Marx wrote very little about what a communist society would look like, but he had an understanding of history as moving towards an end: The classes will fight, over time the result of this fight will lead to them approaching each other, and at the end of this struggle we will reach a classless society. This classless society is the communist society in a traditional Marxist sense.

Lenin figured he'd make a shortcut to get there: Never mind thousands of years of class struggle, let's just put in place a powerful ruling class imposing communism on everyone, designing a classless society from the top down. Which is a bit counter-intuitive, but the Leninist part of Marxism-Leninism basically boils down to trying to figure out what that could look like.

So then you get the Soviet Union, very much founded on the ideas of Marxism-Leninism. Today people who identify as Marxist-Leninist tend to not be the sharpest tools in the shed: Despite insisting that they have studied the texts carefully, a brief interaction with them reveals that they have never read neither Marx nor Lenin. What it boils down to, rather than anything theoretical, is either a longing for some imaginary version of the Soviet Union or a unshakable commitment to lick Putin's ass.

The Soviet Union of course never did become a classless society, so you could argue that the greatest achievement of Marxism-Leninism was to destroy the traditional meaning of communism in a Marxist sense.

cabbage, 3 months ago

I guess there's this American sense of capitalism as an ideological commitment to letting the forces of the marketplace run wild, and that once you regulate the markets it's not capitalism any more. That's laissez-faire though - there are other forms of capitalism as well. In the broadest sense capitalism basically boils down to having a market economy, which a lot of leftists are in favour of.

cabbage, 3 months ago

State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes business and commercial (i.e. for-profit) economic activity and where the means of production are nationalized as state-owned enterprises.

cabbage, 3 months ago

Of all the random things people downvote, I find this to be the most fascinating.

Not only are you correct, but you're so obviously correct as well. There's the old Jewish joke with "two Jews, three opinions" - that certainly holds true for leftists as well. Even more than the bootlickers I'm getting tired of the people who are so goddamn sure they've figured it all out.

cabbage, 3 months ago

And the People's Front of Judea needs to fuck right off, what a bunch of traitorous scum

cabbage, 3 months ago

Check out Kbin.earth and the Interstellar app! :)

cabbage, 3 months ago

Everything is just vibrations; vibrations are just waves. Vinyl records make a physical copy of the sound wave. As the needle drags across it at the correct speed it starts vibrating, reproducing the sound that went into the groove in the first place.

Sound files are more tricky: Basically you need to measure the wave as it goes up and down, store it into a file, and then have a computer convert it back into vibrations with the help of a loudspeaker. The more times you measure the sound wave per second, the better quality your recording will be.

As we know that sounds are waves, it's not so hard to imagine a text file containing sound. Below is a very simple wave form represented with numbers:

- _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ _ - - ⁻ ⁻ - - _ _

1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 0 1 1 2 2 1 1 0 0

In theory, a computer could convert this into sound. It would sound awful.