• 4 Posts
  • 56 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • There is a blue van in the right lane,

    *car in front of a blue road sign

    at 270 km/h (168 MPH), he’s going to be right behind it in a second.

    The bollards on the right side of the road are at a distance of 50m from each other, by which we can estimate that the other car is at least 250 to 300 meters away. 270km/h equals 75m/s so they are about 4 seconds behind (if the other car was stationary).

    Therefore the lane is not – in fact – free.

    To answer this question it is much more important to know what is on the right lane next to or behind the car, which we do not see in this image anyway.



  • I don’t know if there is any single takeaway here, this story is just fucking ridiculous on every single level.

    1. They bullshited themselves into a search warrant based on typical cannabis “investigation methods”.
    2. In a state where recreational cannabis use is legal.
    3. Persisted in the search even after their main argument for it, high energy usage indicating a grow-op, fell away when it was clear it was indeed a medical facility.
    4. Made the motherfucking “Gun flies to MRI” TV trope a certified reality. This is a thing that verifiably happened now.
    5. Instead of getting help, used a sealed (!) emergency shutdown button…
    6. …which damaged the machine. And released thousands of dollars worth of helium gas.
    7. Forgot their loaded magazine on the ground.

    This can’t be real. I’m fucking dying over here. Please let there be bodycam footage of the cop speaking in a high pitched voice after. (I know the helium was probably not released into the room, but one can hope I guess)




  • Muehe@lemmy.mlto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneAI Rule
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    2 months ago

    I’ll have you know that this is famous sci-fi author Charles David George Stross posting an excerpt from his seminal novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus. The warning is right in the title, I’m sure nobody will be dumb enough to ignore it!


  • […] a public institution is really not a great example of the general population […]

    Which I touched upon in my disclaimer, but in some ways it is a great example. Public institutions are defined by the general population, indirectly through their representatives creating the rules that govern them, and directly through contact with the public at large. Now if all our institutions still use this very outdated technology, and you can have trouble convincing them - during a global pandemic mind you - that using email is just as safe as using fax (so not safe at all basically), then that speaks to a larger mindset in the general population.

    Many in the general public are also a lot quicker, some might even say careless, with adopting new technology of course. But as a society we are rather slow, and there are surprisingly many individuals who are hesitant or entirely resistant to adopting new technology. The fediverse usage is a bubble in a bubble here.

    The internet infrastructure is another good example for this on the societal level, as there were plans in the 1980ies [!] to lay out a glass fibre network between every publicly used building in the country, which would have gotten us a good part of the way towards adopting this new material at scale. But in the end it was deemed unnecessary and too expensive and the project got canned (mixed in with rumours of “close friendship” between the chancellor and a major copper producer). Instead now we have people running around thirty years later and collecting signatures at the door for last-mile fibre network projects that seldom make quorum and thus almost never materialise public funding.


    1. […] But also how are Germans technologically behind regarding common personal life?

    I bet you wherever in Germany you are, if you go to the website of your local city government right now they will have a still active fax number in their contact information. I guarantee it. Well if they have a website that is.

    Which is a bit silly as an example but highlights the central problem, which is that adoption of new technology happens at a glacial pace, especially in public institutions. There are many reasons for that of course, some good, like the aforementioned inclination towards privacy, some bad like whatever allows fax machines to still be around.

    And don’t get me started on internet infrastructure… In an international comparison we certainly aren’t leading the field regarding adoption of new technologies.


  • Muehe@lemmy.mlto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRule
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    3 months ago

    Depends on the kind of colour blindness you have I guess. I think I have the congenital red-green blindness common among men, and saturate Just Works™ for me. Plus I don’t have to fiddle with setting a rotation degree there.



  • I don’t think capitalism is necessarily at fault, nor must the working/middle classes be struggling for fascism to emerge. If anything, quite the opposite. It is the better off countries that end up turning fascist. All fascist countries are/were first world countries, in various states of advanced development.

    That’s not right, at least not for the fascist regimes in Europe that emerged prior to WW2. The countries where it happened (specifically Germany/Italy/Spain) had all seen civil unrest or even civil war in the recent past, they were hit hard by the global financial crisis in the twenties and had high unemployment and widespread poverty. This was the very thing the fascists used to ingratiate themselves to the public at large, by creating jobs through massive public building and rearmament projects.

    By the way “first world countries” is post-WW2 terminology and didn’t originally have a connotation of superior economic status, but was referring strictly to ideological alignment. Whether a country belonged to the capitalist/communist/unaligned block in international politics during the cold war.



  • I said Sulla gave up his dictatorship in response to a rhetorical question I took the liberty of answering.

    In an effort of tying that aside back to the topic of the thread I then tried to state that it remains to be seen if Trump will be the one to kill the republic (Caesar), or the one setting the precedent to make it possible (Sulla).

    I have no delusions that Trump would willingly give up power. He has already shown that he will not. But what he hasn’t done (yet) is kill the republic. And as the assassination attempt happening a few days after my post should have made clear, he might yet fail to. What I’m worried about is whoever is going to fill the power vacuum that comes after his departure. This shit won’t stop even if death rids us of him.

    But fair enough, I can see how that might have been misinterpreted. Hence my disclaimers in said post, and my efforts at explaining following your accusations. Which you have so far only answered with more insults. So I really have to wonder who is the one saying stupid fucking things here.




  • If Trump is elected to a second term it will be a disaster and there is no ambiguity as to the nature of Trump for he has already declared civil war against the will of the American people.

    And please show me where the fuck I ever doubted that. Do you not know who Sulla was? Did you not read me saying he fought a civil war and was the first general to march on Rome? Like right above the section you quoted out of context?

    What I said is Trump might not turn out to be the one to kill the republic but the one to irreparably damage it instead. Think for example him getting elected to a second term and then dying a month into it without achieving much of his dictatorial agenda.

    You are an idiot.

    That I am, given that I am still arguing with you.



  • Wow, ok. User name does not check out.

    Jokes aside though I feel attacked and my defence mechanism is to braindump, so consider what is to follow to be on you.

    you should shut the fuck up with your ‘well actually’ de facto dictator apologia

    As I was trying to make clear with the implicit disclaimer at the beginning of my comment and the explicit disclaimer at the end of my comment, that was not my intention. What I was trying to do was expand on the historical context as @Soulg@sh.itjust.works already pointed out (thanks btw). I am well aware that the term dictator has lost its connotation of “temporary office” long ago, and it is today used pretty much in the sense of absolute monarchy.

    Rome didn’t have that many ‘dictators’ give up power

    The GP asked “how many do you know”, and essentially I replied “at least two but pretty sure it’s more” to that.

    But ok, you posit I test. Here is my counterargument. With knowing Wikipedias love for lists and a search you land here: List of Roman dictators.

    List starts 501 BCE, ends 44 BCE, with Julius Caesar by the way. I would eyeball its length at ~80-100 entries. That would amount to a dictatorship once every five years roughly.

    The article helpfully explains a few Latin terms it uses, among them “abdicavit – abdicated, or resigned”. Ctrl+F says 7 occurrences, minus the one explaining it that are 6 mentions of the term, so my new guesstimate would be there are at least 6 dictators (in ancient Rome) who relinquished their office willingly. And I would bet you could get that number higher if you dig into the details, and start looking at term limits and stuff.

    So all I’m saying is essentially the dictatorship was an office that was regularly employed for nearly 500 years by an ancient state, and was then abused to bring about the destruction of its system of government. Remind you of anything? Like the presidency? Trump?

    the vast majority of societies with authoritarian dictators are dysfunctional

    Like those that exist right now? Not only the vast majority, all of them are dysfunctional and I never doubted that. Seriously you are preaching to the choir here. I was literally at court today because a number on a piece of paper was too low, and I couldn’t pay to get a newer piece of paper. Luckily the case was dismissed, so I’m pretty fond of the rule of law and separation of powers at the moment, but also equally aware of the monopoly on violence the state claims for itself and how fragile that makes it.

    I sense that you are angry, and most likely afraid, and I empathise with that. And due to that level of distress I would assume you are from the US. I’m not sure what to tell you except trying to resist the slide into dictatorship the best you can. Caesar was assassinated, and Hitler only narrowly escaped assassination several times is all I’m saying.

    again: shut the fuck up.

    Yeah, no, you little dictator. :P