booly
@booly@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Shamelessly stolen from Reddit 1 day ago:
Why are you forgiving student loans?
That’s the federal government’s administration of a federal government program, so no, that’s not the same at all.
Why do you tip servers in America?
That’s the basic deal. If a restaurant implements a no tipping policy, they’re allowed to do that. I don’t see how that’s the same or different from a restaurant implementing a “discount for veterans” or “no discounts for veterans” policy. It sounds like we’re in favor of a system where the restaurant chooses what they want to be about, whether it’s a tip-based system or not, or a discounts for vets place or not.
So in a sense, it sounds like you agree with me that we should let the restaurants choose. Neither choice is a “punishment” of anyone.
- Comment on Shamelessly stolen from Reddit 1 day ago:
But really you’re just punishing veterans with PTSD
Failing to give special treatment to someone is not punishing them. Especially when we’re talking about special treatment for an entire category of people, most of whom don’t have PTSD (estimates range from 6-27% of those deployed to a war zone, and not all veterans served in a war zone), many of whom are financially well off.
Maybe the VA and the federal government should do more for vets. Maybe the military itself should take care of the troops a bit better. But asking private businesses to prop up veterans at their own expense seems like a misguided approach.
- Comment on Anon breaks up 2 weeks ago:
defend yourself criminally
Robust criminal defense
These court proceedings aren’t criminal cases. They’re more like hearings on restraining orders and things of that nature. Like I said, this is generally less than a single day’s work for a lawyer, 2-5 hours.
I’m comparing middle of the road prices for handguns ($500-$1200) to middle of the road prices for a lawyer who can handle one of these hearings ($500-$1500). I still think it’s financially irresponsible to own more than 3 guns and not have a $1000 emergency fund.
- Comment on Anon breaks up 2 weeks ago:
If you can’t see the difference between buying one gun every x months and paying a lawyer 4 to 5 figures all in one go that’s on you.
You’re off by an order of magnitude. I’m saying the lawyer would cost between 3 to low 4 figures, generally less than a single gun.
Time is linear and you can’t sell what was taken from you.
The ownership of the gun hasn’t changed. That owner can sell the gun even if they can’t physically possess it. Federal law requiring relinquishment of firearms (like upon conviction of a disqualifying felony or domestic violence misdemeanor) explicitly provides for selling the guns as a way to comply with the order. Each state is different in their rules on selling weapons already in the police’s possession, and states require that transfer to go through an FFL, but most do not.
Look, I’m a gun owner. And I think part of being a responsible gun owner means having the financial means to actually deal with the consequences of owning, and potentially using, that firearm. I think it’s a defect of American gun culture that there are so many people with concealed carry licenses who wouldn’t even know how to contact a lawyer if they were to actually fire a gun in a real situation, whether it’s a legitimate self defense situation or a negligent discharge. Gun ownership carries important responsibilities, and there is such a thing as someone who is too poor to responsibly own a gun (much less enough to where the phrase “all my guns” carries its own implicit meaning).
- Comment on Anon breaks up 2 weeks ago:
The issue with red flag laws is that they completely bypass this.
It’s my understanding that every state with a red flag law imposes a procedure similar to involuntary commitment: a court weighing evidence presented to it under penalty of perjury, with a heavy presumption that these orders are only for extremely rare situations.
Florida’s procedure, for example, requires a petition from the police to the court, and requires the police to show the court that the person is suffering from a serious mental illness, has committed acts of violence, or has credibly threatened acts of violence (to self or others). In ordinary cases the person whose guns are being taken away has an opportunity to be heard in court before the judge decides, but in emergency cases the court can order the guns be taken away for up to 14 days, and requires an opportunity for the person to be heard in court.
So in practice, in Florida, someone would have to convince the police they’re a danger, and then provide enough evidence that the police can persuade a judge. Private citizens aren’t allowed to petition the court directly, and the process requires proof of a serious enough set of facts to justify taking guns away.
- Comment on Anon breaks up 2 weeks ago:
Gun suicides are a huge problem, so there is a legitimate need for interventions in the appropriate circumstances. Suicidal ideation is also usually an impulsive or fleeting idea, so removing the means of suicide only temporarily can be a solution to that temporary problem.
The Swiss saw suicide rates drop with reduced access to firearms in shrinking their military, and the Israeli military has seen weekend suicide rates drop by simply having troops check in their weapons into armories over weekends, without a corresponding change in weekday suicides.
Anti-suicide nets on bridges work very well, too, because simply making a suicide more inconvenient, or require a bit more planning, is often enough to just make it so that the suicide attempt never happens.
So yeah. I’m generally against restrictions on firearm ownership or access for people who can be responsible with them, but I’m 100% on board with interventions for taking guns away for mental health crises, and restrictions on those found by a court to have engaged in domestic violence. And, like, convicted criminals, too.
- Comment on Anon breaks up 2 weeks ago:
Do you really believe that “all my guns, bullets and reloading material” is cheaper than a lawyer for a hearing like this? In my mind that phrase represents thousands of dollars worth of gun stuff, and a lawyer who can represent you in a TRO hearing might be about $500-1500 ($200/hour, maybe 2-8 hours of work for that first hearing).
- Comment on Anon breaks up 2 weeks ago:
Florida seems to be the state most likely to use the law.
I wonder if the stat is skewed by the fact that Florida has the largest population of Florida Men.
- Comment on When will we have reached enough productivity? 2 weeks ago:
Increasing productivity of workers is met with demand for more production-intensive products. It’s like how every time hardware improves, software becomes more complex to take advantage of that increased capability. It’s like Jevon’s Paradox, but applied to productivity of workers.
One prominent example: our farmers are more productive than ever. So we move up the value chain, and have farmers growing more luxury crops that aren’t actually necessary for sustenance. We overproduce grains and legumes, and then feed them to animals to raise meat. We were so productive with different types of produce that we decided to go on hard mode and create just-in-time supply chains for multiple cultivars so that supermarkets sell dozens of types of fresh apples, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, etc., and end up eating much more fresh produce of diverse varieties compared to our parents and grandparents, who may have relied more heavily on frozen or canned produce, with limited variety.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
apparently then it was around 20% to 25% as well
No, the unemployment rate was around 20-25% under the traditional definition. It’s currently 4.2% under that definition.
If you want to use this LISEP definition, fine, but recognize that it’s been above 30% for most of its existence, and has only been under 25% since COVID. Basically, if you go by the LISEP definition then you’re saying that the job market after COVID has been better than it has ever been before.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
When the definition of unemployed is changed to exclude the majority of working age people without jobs then it is no longer a helpful statistic.
U-3 has used the same definition of unemployed since 1940.
Whatever metric you want to use, you should look at that number and how it changes over time, to get a sense of trend lines. LISEP says the “true” unemployment rate is currently 24.3% in May 2025, which is basically the lowest it’s ever been.
Since the metric was created in 1994, the first time that it dipped below 25% was briefly in the late 2010’s, right before COVID, and then has been under 25% since September 2021.
Under this alternative metric of unemployment, the unemployment rate is currently one of the lowest in history.
- Comment on AI Training Slop 2 months ago:
Don’t paparazzi make plenty of money off of selling unauthorized photos of celebrities? Celebrities can control some uses of their likeness, but not all of them.
- Comment on Anon describes past 2 months ago:
About 40% of that generation was in the military. 8% were drafted, but a lot of the 32% who voluntarily joined did so in order to exercise some control over where they ended up. Even those who didn’t serve, often had to deal with the overall risk hanging over their head, or were actively committing crimes to avoid the draft. The draft might have only directly affected 8%, but the threat of the draft, and people’s decisions around that issue, was a huge part of that generation’s lived experience.
- Comment on Anon describes past 2 months ago:
Cars were somewhat cheaper back then, but they were also a lot shittier. Most odometers only had 5 digits because getting it to 100,000 miles was unusual.
Advances in body materials made it so that they no longer disintegrated into rust by the 1980’s, and advances in machine tolerances and factory procedures made it so that cars were routinely hitting 100,000 miles or more by the 1990’s.
A 1969 Plymouth Roadrunner MSRPed for $2,945, in an era when minimum wage was $1.60/hour. That’s 1840 hours worked at minimum wage (46 weeks of full time work), for a car that could probably drive about 100,000 miles, and required a lot more active maintenance.
Now that cars last longer, too, the used car market exists in a way that the 1960s didn’t have. That makes it possible to buy a used car more easily, and for the new cars being purchased to retain a bit more value when they’re sold a few years later.
And that’s to say nothing of fuel economy, where a Roadrunner was getting something like 11 miles per gallon, or safety, back when even medium speed crashes were deadly.
The basic effect, in the end, is that the typical household in 2025 is spending a lower percentage of their budget on transportation, compared to the typical household in 1970.
The golden age for being able to buy and use cheap cars was probably around 2015-2020, before the used car market went nuts.
- Comment on Anon describes past 2 months ago:
Page 45 of this PDF has a good chart. It shows that about 26.8 million men were draft eligible in that generation, and about 8.7 million enlisted, 2.2 million were drafted, and 16.0 million never served, including about 570,000 apparent draft dodgers.
About 2.1 million actually went to Vietnam, and about 1.55 million were in combat roles in Vietnam. 51,000 were killed.
So roughly:
- 41% of that generation of men were in the military
- 8% of that generation went to Vietnam
- 6% of that generation fought in Vietnam
- About 0.2% of that generation died in Vietnam
- Comment on unleash your humanities 4 months ago:
- Comment on World travelers 4 months ago:
They’re basically the proto Pacific Islanders. It’s believed that their civilizations all trace back to a group of people from the island of Taiwan/Formosa, who learned how to sail over the deep ocean and set up new communities.
They settled modern day Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, as far west as Madagascar, and as far east as Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, and most of the other Pacific Islands. Native Hawaiians, Samoans, Guamese, etc., are all Austronesian. Most ethnic groups considered native to these islands trace back to Austronesian expansion.
There are shared linguistic and cultural ties that showed that they had recent comment ancestry, that has since been confirmed by DNA genealogy.
- Comment on Anon reads a depressing book 5 months ago:
Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
- Comment on Are Autocracies more powerful than Democracies? 5 months ago:
No.
Autocracy moves faster at marshaling the resources it has, but is significantly worse at accumulating resources than what economists Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, and Simon Johnson describes as inclusive political and economic institutions, which broadly allow members of the public to engage in political and economic activity. (Note that their work on these things won them the Economics Nobel last year.)
Distributed, decentralized power is important for maximizing the potential of a population.
Autocratic political systems are brittle. They’re also poor. They tend not to survive more than a decade or two before the strongman is deposed, one way or another, whether from internal coup or revolution, or simply external invasion of a weakened state. And a successor strongman might be weaker. All the while, the inclusive states continue to grow in their own power and influence.
So any short term gain in consolidating power into smaller groups is going to be up against time, and the fragility of the whole arrangement as the autocratic country falls behind its competition.
- Comment on fuck this asshole 5 months ago:
You heard the man, fire any employee and expel any student who participated in the January 6 insurrection.
- Comment on Psst, the Americans are asleep, post some eggs 6 months ago:
I didn’t know eggs come in metric outside of the US.
- Comment on The one drawback to walking at night 6 months ago:
I get that Lemmy skews young and male and not on 2010s social media (like old Twitter) but it’s almost like they weren’t around for the discussions that the “NotAllMen” hashtag generated, or the coining of the term sea lioning.
- Comment on I will take no arguments 6 months ago:
Microplastics are stored in the balls.
- Comment on Amazon Artificially Discounting Items $0.01 Below the Free Shipping Limit 6 months ago:
Amazon is worse for those communities, though. They undercut retailers by even more, and then don’t hire local employees at all. In the communities where they do set up warehouses, the working conditions are even worse than Walmart.
- Comment on Amazon Artificially Discounting Items $0.01 Below the Free Shipping Limit 6 months ago:
That kit is $40 on their site. Weird that it’s cheaper on Amazon in the first place.
No, Amazon does this on purpose. If you want to sell on Amazon, the search and recommendation algorithms will make your product hard to find unless you have Amazon fulfillment. But if you sign up for Amazon fulfillment, not only do you have to give Amazon a bigger cut of the price, you have to agree to never sell your product for less than Amazon does, even on your own website with your own fulfillment.
The FTC sued Amazon for this practice, and that case is progressing. But who knows if the Trump administration is going to maintain the lawsuit, or if the court will rule against Amazon.
- Comment on S̵̢̡̠̣̜͍̘͍̈́̿͒̈̎̉͌͂̎̾̓Ḩ̶̡̛̯̰̤̻͖̹̝̼͍͔̰̃̅̋̍̈̆̋̋́̔͝Ǫ̴̺͔̫͈͉͎̤͎͗͂̅͒̀͒W̶̛͖̺̰̠̙̲̓͆̋̉̌̆̂͛̀̒̕͘ ̷̨̦̤̇̀̓̉́̅͒̄͝M̶͓̗͚̩̬͈͎͗̓̈́́͜͜Ẹ̵̢̢̺̞͓͓̤͙̙͖̈́̈̉͝ ̶̧̡̲̺͓̮̰̘̮͚͉̝͈̝̀͒́̎̾̓͜͝͝͠T̷̡̟̘̫͋͋̑͊̓͐̊̐̎H̸̪̋͛̓̀̍̂̐̂͐̾̈́̒̃É̵̛̾̅̀͛̃̄̏ 6 months ago:
In static electric fields, sure. But the real world has rapidly changing electric fields, and mapping concepts like voltage or resistance to a time dimension starts to require imaginary numbers (and the complex analogue to resistance goes by a different name of impedance). And once you’re modeling electricity through those concepts, you can have high current in a particular moment in time where the voltage might not be high. Or where the implied voltage is very high but was actually more of an effect than a cause.
In other words, if you’re simply talking about “resistance,” you’re already in the wrong domain to be analyzing electrical safety properly.
- Comment on S̵̢̡̠̣̜͍̘͍̈́̿͒̈̎̉͌͂̎̾̓Ḩ̶̡̛̯̰̤̻͖̹̝̼͍͔̰̃̅̋̍̈̆̋̋́̔͝Ǫ̴̺͔̫͈͉͎̤͎͗͂̅͒̀͒W̶̛͖̺̰̠̙̲̓͆̋̉̌̆̂͛̀̒̕͘ ̷̨̦̤̇̀̓̉́̅͒̄͝M̶͓̗͚̩̬͈͎͗̓̈́́͜͜Ẹ̵̢̢̺̞͓͓̤͙̙͖̈́̈̉͝ ̶̧̡̲̺͓̮̰̘̮͚͉̝͈̝̀͒́̎̾̓͜͝͝͠T̷̡̟̘̫͋͋̑͊̓͐̊̐̎H̸̪̋͛̓̀̍̂̐̂͐̾̈́̒̃É̵̛̾̅̀͛̃̄̏ 6 months ago:
Voltage and current are related, of course, but Ohm’s law is just a simplification of circuit theory for static circuits, and the version most are taught early on assume zero inductance and zero capacitance in the circuit. Drop in an alternating current, some capacitors and inductors, and you’ve got yourself a more complex situation, literally, with the scalar real number representing resistance replaced with the complex number representing impedance.
And when you have time variance that isn’t a simple sinusoidal wave of electric potential coming from a source, even the definition of the word “voltage” starts requiring vector calculus to even be a coherent definition.
So when I take a simple battery of DC cells to create a low voltage power source, I can still induce current using some transformers and inductors (which store energy in magnetic field) and abruptly breaking open the circuit so that the current still arcs across high resistance air. That’s the basic principle of how a spark plug works. In those cases, you’re creating immense voltages for a tiny amount of time, but there’s never any real risk of significant current being pushed through any part of a person’s body. And as soon as you draw off some of the current, the voltage immediately drops as you deplete the stored energy wherever it is in the system.
And anything designed to deliver an electric shock to a person (or animal) tends to be high voltage, low current. Tasers, electric fences, etc.
So it’s current that matters for safety. A high voltage doesn’t always induce a high current. And current can cause problems even at relatively low voltages.
- Comment on If you can’t discriminate based on age, how are there 55+ neighborhoods? 7 months ago:
I’m going to answer from the perspective of U.S. law, because that’s what I know.
age is a protected class
The idea of protected classes comes from whether Congress or a state legislature protected that class by passing a valid law prohibiting that kind of discrimination. We can describe that generally with protected classes, as a broad summary, but if you’re actually going to get into the weeds of whether some kind of discrimination is legal or not you have to figure out the specific laws.
First, you have to ask what the context is. Is this employment discrimination? Public accommodations discrimination? Housing discrimination? Education discrimination? Each is governed by its own laws. For example Title VII prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, or national origin. Title VI has the same protected classes, but applies in programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance (like universities and hospitals and others). The Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibits discrimination in providing credit on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, and sex (like the Civil Rights Act) and adds on marital status, age, receipt of public assistance.
The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, family status, or disability.
The Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act add protections for discrimination on the basis of disability.
The Pregnancy Discrimination Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act prohibits discrimination against those over 40 on the basis of age.
So if you’re talking about neighborhoods, you’re only looking at housing discrimination, and not public accomodations or employment or schooling or anything like that. The Fair Housing Act doesn’t prohibit housing discrimination on age. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act doesn’t apply to housing discrimination (and is one of the few that only goes one way, in protecting only people above 40).
How is that not the same as an “active white living” community that bans other races?
Because the Fair Housing Act prohibits whites-only neighborhoods, or any other kind of race discrimination in housing.
On a side note, there’s also constitutional Equal Protection claims for governmental discrimination that comes from the Constitution rather than any law passed by Congress. Those aren’t discussed in terms of “protected” class, but rather in “suspect class,” where non-equal treatment on the basis of race, color, or religion is reviewed by the courts with “strict scrutiny” (and almost always struck down). Unequal treatment on the basis of sex or citizenship is subject to “intermediate scrutiny,” which sometimes survives court review. Unequal treatment on the basis of pretty much anything else, though, gets “rational basis” review and basically survives if the government can come up with any rational reason for the rule.
- Comment on Anon's in trouble 7 months ago:
We have mmHg at home (feet water)
- Comment on These dames wanting inclusivity 7 months ago:
Using scientific terminology in colloquial speech is weird and creepy in most contexts. Calling kids “juveniles” and women “females” carries certain connotations, most of them bad.