Comments

fiat_lux, to news in DOJ: Ex-IRS employee who leaked Trump's tax returns intentionally got job to disclose records

It sounds like Charles Edward Littlejohn is a fucking badass and overall rad dude worth celebrating. Additionally, if he gets the maximum sentence of 5 years, that will be drastically longer than many of the January 6th rioters. I can't change the outcome for him, but I do wish him luck.

fiat_lux, to technology in Meta being fined $100k a day for personalized ads in Norway

From the linked techcrunch article:

will face fines of up to one million NOK (~$100k) per day.
unless it obtains users’ consent to the processing

From the order itself:

The order applies from 4 August 2023
we may decide to impose a coercive fine of up to NOK 1 000 000 (one million) per day

Misleading title.

fiat_lux, (edited ) to science in Definitely Do Not Put Plastic in the Microwave

I'm not sure food blogs are the best choice for this. The article goes on to talk about BPA and phthlates, but neither of those exist in pure HDPE or PP.

BPA is found in polycarbonate plastics (acrylic) (Edit: brain lapse, acrylic is PMMA) and epoxy resins. Phthalates are in PVC (vinyl). Using the word 'plastic' as a monomer mononym (Edit: lol wrong mono) is dangerous for many reasons, and causation vs correlation is one reason why.

I mean, definitely go with glass if you have the choice, sure, but let's also actually try to be accurate if we invoke the scientific method.

I would also love for there to be really robust testing of food containers of all varieties direct at the manufacturers, with heavy fines involved if they're using additives but claiming it's a food-safe plastic.

fiat_lux, to news in Alex Jones must pay $1.1 billion of Sandy Hook damages despite bankruptcy - court

He made very specific defamatory statements accusing fellow citizens / parents of murdered children of participating in a government conspiracy and those people were able to prove they experienced harm as a consequence of his words.

The plaintiffs also had enough financial backing from (understandably horrified) strangers, and a high enough chance of winning for lawyers to want to represent them. Those factors allowed the plaintiffs to survive the legal system long enough to get a ruling, and the severity of the situation maintained their motivation to keep pushing for it instead of accepting settlement so they could somewhat move on with their lives.

Sometimes, the planets align to create the trifecta of enough energy, money, and evidence to force the justice system into enforcing justice. And I am grateful that can sometimes still happen, as rare as it feels.

fiat_lux, to politics in Trump melts down on Truth Social after judge says his denial "rings hollow and untrue"

He's been calling her that for years, and it's kind of wild nobody really mentions it. Michael Cohen tried to play it off as "oh its probably commentary on how she handles lawsuits" (paraphrased) but it's pretty clear from this list of nicknames that Trump just likes rhyming nicknames for bullying people about things he thinks makes others inferior, including but not limited to racism, ableism and sexism.

fiat_lux, (edited ) to kbinMeta in Is there anything that can be done about troll powermods?

I actually disagree with this being an example of why seeing downvotes is bad. I also think it's good we can see which mod is doing the banning; I've noticed the standard lemmy moderation log doesn't show that. This kind of transparency allows for poor behaviour to be discovered more quickly and remedied with less speculation about who did what.

Edit: For example, I can also see this person has gone through your entire comment history and downvoted every comment. I didn't see any troll-like comments from you though. I hope this person is doing OK mentally, but this isn't OK community leader behaviour on their part.

Edit 2: I can also see that OP has downvoted every single one of the other person's comments too. On the same day as the other person did to OP. Uh... I don't know what conversation spawned this entire exchange, but I dont think that downvoting all someone's comments outside of their contexts is productive.

Edit 3: And for the couple of other accounts who are going through the post histories of the people involved and downvoting because of this thread? Also not helpful behaviour. Be better.

This is why we can't have nice things.

fiat_lux, to news in ‘The Wire’ Creator David Simon Rips Into Baltimore Bridge Conspiracists, Calls Marjorie Taylor Greene A “Complete Submoronic Pratfall Of A Human Being’

I don't consider a TV producer insulting a (obviously terrible) politician to be news, but I do enjoy this particular insult. It's nicely crafted. It's a pity he continues to use Twitter.

fiat_lux, to politics in Eric Clapton helps raise $1 million for RFK Jr. campaign

Always has been. Here's his drunk on-stage rant from 1976 in Birmingham.

** Content warning: Racism and racist slurs. **

"Do we have any foreigners in the audience tonight? If so, please put up your hands. So where are you? Well wherever you all are, I think you should all just leave. Not just leave the hall, leave our country. I don't want you here, in the room or in my country. Listen to me, man! I think we should vote for Enoch Powell. Enoch's our man. I think Enoch's right, I think we should send them all back. Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white. I used to be into dope, now I'm into racism. It's much heavier, man. Fucking wogs, man. Fucking Saudis taking over London. Bastard wogs. Britain is becoming overcrowded and Enoch will stop it and send them all back. The black wogs and coons and Arabs and fucking Jamaicans don't belong here, we don't want them here. This is England, this is a white country, we don't want any black wogs and coons living here. We need to make clear to them they are not welcome. England is for white people, man. This is Great Britain, a white country, what is happening to us, for fuck's sake? Throw the wogs out! Keep Britain white!" - Eric Clapton

Enoch Powell was a conservative party politician running for election, incidentally.

Clapton has always been truly awful and this is completely in character for him.

fiat_lux, to technology in Cerabyte Ceramic Storage Poised to Usher in 'Yottabyte Era'

Ceramic storage, I love it. We've looped all the way back around to reimplementing cuneiform tablets, just on a microscopic level.

I look forward to storing the complaints about the quality of my copper deliveries on them.

Yours faithfully,
Ea-nāṣir.

fiat_lux, to worldnews in US tourist destroys 'blasphemous' Roman statues at the Israel Museum

The photo looks like it's of their Head of Athena which was found in Israel despite being made from Greek marble and representing a Greek goddess. It is hard evidence that non-judeo-christian belief systems existed and interacted, and were at least somewhat allowed to do so, before the Talmud but still inside Jewish territory. Specifically, groups like the Cult of Zeus-Akrios, which some people say influenced the development of Judaism and the writing of the Talmud around the time Judaism and Christianity split.

When your worldview requires that you follow the Talmud and that it is the foundations of Judaism and divine law handed down through Moses and oral rabbinic tradition only, but you have evidence that predates the Talmud which demonstrates visible and open polytheistic religious integration in a society you believe was only monotheist judeo-christian... it gets really difficult to dismiss some uncanny similarities between the religions. Similarities that are otherwise easily explained by religions stealing things from other older religions they encountered.

The very idea his God was created partly from pieces of a polytheistic religion is against everything he was raised to believe as truth. His brain probably broke trying to process it.

fiat_lux, to news in Veterans Burn Their Uniforms at Vigil for US Airman Aaron Bushnell

I feel ashamed of how I used to think and act.

Hey friend, I would like to offer you a reframing of this situation. Despite being exposed to some of the strongest cultural indoctrination into warmongering and the military, you made it out and embraced empathy and learning. That's huge. I'm proud of you, that's a positive change most people never make. You should be proud of it.

I just hope that is makes it’s way down the ranks

You have a powerful and important story. Sharing it like you did just now helps more than hopes can. Keep sharing it, you never know who might be reading it and encouraged to question the lessons they were taught.

fiat_lux, (edited ) to worldnews in US tourist destroys 'blasphemous' Roman statues at the Israel Museum

For anyone interested in why the guy lost it, it's because similarities between the Ancient Greek stories and stories found in Hebrew scripture used to be explained away some Jewish followers as "Both were independently inspired by (my) God and it is testament to His Power".

They claimed that there were almost no Greeks in ancient Israel, and that no worship was of other religions was really tolerated by the rulers then anyway, so the Greeks couldn't have even have had their own temples even if there were enough followers of a Greek god. If there were enough people for it to be a thing, there would be... you know, archaeological evidence of Greek temples and religion and worship in Israel predating the Judeo-Christian split. Right?

The followers claimed that because of all that, when the Talmud was written by a group of rabbis arguing about what the exact teachings of God really were (because it used to only be handed down through spoken word and Christians were being all "lol no, He never said that"), each Rabbi who contributed to the Talmud could not have been influenced enough by man-made beliefs for it to have hugely affected what the group agreed God definitely said and did. And they definitely couldnt have put things from multi-god religions in there. Therefore the basis of modern Judaism is and always has been rock solid, even though there is a huge chunk of time between when it happened and when it was written down.

And all was well... until 1978 when someone dug up the 2.5m tall statue of Athena imported from Greece and attached to a purpose-built Greek temple in Beth Shean / Scythopolis from 200 years earlier than the Talmud, 37km / 22mi from Nazareth (in the opposite direction of Greece) - in a pretty unavoidable place on the road to Jerusalem. Oops.

tl;dr You got your many-God filthy religious icon in my certainly pure, true, and original single-God belief system that we declared 200 years afterwards!

Edited to add: a little extra context. This Museum keeps the Dead Sea Scrolls and has an entire separate building of the museum, away from the archaeology collection, that is very religiously targeted where those Scrolls are shown. The Scrolls have also not been on display for a long while because of conservation work, but they just started exhibiting them again. So this guy was likely a religious zealot who came to see the Scrolls exhibit, but he stumbled into the archaeology department where they're a little more... science and evidence-based. And the museum is state funded. And the government owns the statue, Scrolls, and basically every Jewish religious artifact in existence. There are a lot of layers here, like everything in the region's history.

fiat_lux, to asklemmy in What is the most "Thankless" job?
  • Waste pickers in the clothing canyons of Ghana, or any other landfill/wasteland

  • Volunteer caregivers for people with disabilities, especially in places where there are limited or no social safety nets

  • Street vendors like the children hawking goods in Yemen or Samoa or Zimbabwe...

  • Cleaners, such as the Sewer divers in places like India where there is no protective equipment provided

  • Food services workers.

  • "Domestic" services workers like childcare, housekeeping, etc. I include victims of forced marriages here.

  • All other exploited, outsourced, trafficked, and/or forced labour, such as the cobalt miners in Congo, or the clothing sweatshop workers in Bangladesh, or the Phillipines call centre workers, or the hazelnut pickers in Turkey, or construction labourers in Qatar, or the chaingangs in the US.

Our supply chains for everything are filled with slavery. 49.6 million people were living in modern slavery in 2021, of which 27.6 million were in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriage. That's an estimated increase of 10 million people from 2016 to 2021.

fiat_lux, to mildlyinteresting in This is an Octobass

I have no idea if this is the same as the one at the Montreal Symphony Orchestra but for anyone else who was curious about the specs on this beast:

  • HEIGHT: 3.6 m (11.10 ft.)
  • LENGTH OF THE SOUNDBOARD (uppermost board): 2.06 m (6.76 ft.)
  • WIDTH OF THE SOUNDBOARD: 1.11 m (3.64 ft.)
  • LENGTH OF STRINGS: 2.18 m (6.56 ft.)
  • NUMBER OF STRINGS 3: (A-E-B)
  • DIAMETER OF STRINGS: 5/16 in. (7.94 mm). 1/4 in. (6.35 mm) et 3/16 in. (4.76 mm)
  • WEIGHT: 131,54 kg (290 lbs.)
  • NUMBER OF PARTS: There are hundreds of parts, of which 237 make up the complex mechanism of this precision instrument.
  • SPECIAL FEATURES: The octobass is the lowest-pitched and largest-sized instrument of the entire string family. The performer must climb up on a small stool in order to access the neck of the instrument, and it is only by means of levers and pedals - not with the hands that the strings can be reached and sounded. The octobass bow is longer and heavier than the bow of an ordinary string bass.

Apparently it can do as low as 25Hz. That would be badass to experience in person.

fiat_lux, to asklemmy in Does anyone remember a logo that looked like this? None of us can place it but we all think we remember.

This but the pre-2005 version of the logo was also my first thought.

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