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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • Or did we become okay with being ruled by tyrants all of a sudden?

    If so, what’s the point of federation?

    The point of federation is not to prevent tyrants.

    The point is the option to exclude or include any instance due to whatever metric you want.

    If you don’t like tyrants, you can defederate your instance from any tyrant-ruled instance.

    And, obviously, you can run your own instance as tyrannical or democratic as you want - users who don’t like that are free to leave, instance-owners who don’t like that are free to defecate from you.

    If you’re just a user on the relevant instance, all you can do ist petition the people who have that power.

    I understand that’s basically what you’re trying to do, but your argument shouldn’t be about federation or lemmy’s inherent structure - the question should be “is anyone else annoyed by that behavior?”


  • foyrkopp@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    5 months ago

    This isn’t about guys’n’gals.

    This is simpky about how people work:

    If your peers (friends, colleagues, family) have an opinion (any opinion), their default expectation is that you share that opinion - this is what being a peer is mostly about.

    You can demonstrate solidarity by agreeing - this is virtually always the safe option.

    You can demonstrate backbone by disagreeing - this can generate respect or animosity.

    You can refuse to weigh in - this is mostly a middle ground between the two above.

    How it actual shakes out in reality will depend on a myriad of factors, many of which you’re not even consciously aware of.

    Thus, this random internet stranger can give you only three pieces of advice:

    • Trust your instincts on how to handle this. Your subconscious is very well wired to navigate social situations as best as possible.

    • If you ever change your opinion or “change your opinion”, announce it clearly and give/make up a reason. People disrespect people who are inconsistent, but they respect people who can admit to mistakes / learn.

    • Sometimes, you can’t win. Sometimes, someone will be pissed off, no matter what you do. It’s no fault of yours, some situations are just not salvageable to begin with.



  • Question from someone outside the US who’s genuinely curious about why law-abiding citizens feel the need to carry guns to begin with:

    If you’re aware of this, how often are you carrying a gun in the first place? When/Why?

    Following what you say, there’s obviously the scenario where you have to defend your life (not your property).

    On the other hand, as I see it, the victim in the article would not have benefited from a gun in the car and the odds of a shell-shocked BF turning the whole thing into an actual shootout would’ve been >0.

    I’m not trying to argue crime statistics or morals here, I’m genuinely interested in a gun owner’s perspective.


  • Suburbs can’t be a ponzi scheme

    Genuine question: Why not?

    While the article indeed barely touched on its headline, the way I’ve seen the “suburb infrastructure upkeep problem” described seems indeed reminiscent of a ponzi scheme.

    The way I understand it:

    Suburbs have a relatively low initial cost (for the city) compared to the taxes they generate. However, their maintenance cost is relatively high because Suburbs are huge.

    Thus, US cities have long had a policy of paying the rising cost of their older Suburbs by creating new Suburbs - which is pretty analogous to a Ponzi scheme.


  • A subjective perspective from outside the US:

    If I follow your argument that illegal firearms are the problem, I still believe that the amount of illegal firearms in circulation is a direct function of the legal arms market’s size.

    And as long as the threshold for acquiring a firearm is low, so is the threshold for injuring someone with one.

    This goes for a criminal using an illegal one in a robbery, a frustrated teenager emptying their uncle’s poorly secured gun locker for a school schooting or even for suicides: An abundance of guns makes these things easier, so they happen more often.

    Mandating stricter controls, safety training or weapon-lockup procedures can alleviate this some, but any process that relies on a lot of not strictly organized individuals to be applied will be fallible and permeable by nature.

    Selling more weapons to private citizens will always lead to more gun-related deaths and injuries.

    The only way to reliably reduce the amount of weapons in circulation is to sell less of them (and keep removing illegal ones).

    Naturally, this is unpopular with an industry that relies on selling as many as possible.

    (I’m also aware that something like this would have to be a very slow process. Even if the pool of legal weapons were drained overnight, all those illegal guns would still be around.)




  • In particular I really like the episodes that deal with interacting with other civilizations, diplomacy, and exploration more-so than say, an anomaly episode.

    In light of this, and since you were able to work through the not-so-stellar episodes of ST, I’d strongly argue that Babylon 5 should be your next stop.

    It has a slow start, some more mixed episodes, dated special effects and both main characters (they switched after season 1) are plain “heroic American leader” types, but virtually everything else is top tier even today. An excellent political plot, humor, great characters with genuine growth.

    Just be aware that it is different from DS9 (personally, I like both).

    Battlestar Galactica (the new one) and The Expanse are probably worth pointing out, too. To me, they’re the best high-production-value sci-fi shows that didn’t sacrifice their plot. Nevertheless, both are far more grim than the shows you’ve mentioned and overall “feel” different.









  • All the advances in execution methods haven’t been made to make it more humane to the victim - they’ve been made so it seems more humane to everyone else.

    AFAIK, statistics-wise, the execution method with the lowest quota of horrible mishaps is the guillotine. A sufficiently fast 4t weight to the head would probably be even quicker for the brain to go, although it’d also require more cleanup.

    (Yes, even overdosing on narcotics has more mishaps - and there are little to no narcotics abailable for executions, because the producers don’t want them to be used for that.)

    All of the more reliable methods are… grisly, and civilisation doesn’t want grisly. We want to press a button and the victim goes to sleep to never wake up, because that makes it easier on us.


  • I had something vaguely similar happen to me.

    We got called out of the line for a manual luggage inspection because, as a surprisingly bored security agent informed us, X-ray showed a knife of about a foot length in our luggage.

    We had no idea what they were talking about.

    We were half-way through unpacking the whole pack when my SO lit up and asked “could it be my ice skates?”

    Agent took a look at the X-ray, nods, and lets us pack it back up without any further checking.

    Overall, turned out harmlessly, but the sheer confusion of where that supposed knife had come from, combined with how blasé that security person was about the whole affair from start to finish stuck in my mind.