DomeGuy
@DomeGuy@lemmy.world
- Comment on Does it get windy in New York City? 4 days ago:
Yes, it absolutely gets windy in NYC.
Remember that Manhattan is laid out in a very regular grid. This is equally useful if you are a poetic zepher of wind or a becaped superhero, as these long passages make it really easy to (traffic allowing) rush forward at full speed and little chance of hitting a wall.
- Comment on How much more progressive are European views as compared to progressives in America? 5 days ago:
Political parties are creations of the electoral and governmental systems in the nations they exist in
“Most European nations” is an imprecise way of saying “dominant parlimentary unicameral legislatures”. To use the UK as an example, all sovereign power is asserted by the lower democratically elected chamber of parliment. Neither the house of lords nor the king counter the assembled majority of parliment,.who from its own members appoint those who direct the government day to day. While there is a sub-national distinction, these are essentially creations of parliment and have no inherent power on their own.
Since the only thing that matters in national UK politics is parliament, all of the political energy is focused there.
In the United States this is not at all the case… national power is split as I described before, and a similar pattern repeats at the state level with distinct difectly-elected legislators and executives. The national government was historically a creation of the states, and each state has substantial ability to act in defiance of congress’s preferences.
Since there are so many different things that matter, the value of a third or fourth party is dramatically reduced. When minor parties start to win elections on their own, the major parties either adapt or die quickly. (I have remarked elsewhere that in American politics “there is no prize for second place”, and a worthwhile collolary here would be “and there are so many games to play.”)
You are technically correct in that if God came down and reworked all of the USA into distinct european-style nations with separate languages we would likely have similar party arrangements, with both the Democrats and the Republicans splitting into multiple parties. But if God also remade Europe into a single USA-style mega-nation made up of states with similar governments who shared a single first-language, European parties would likely congeal until there are only two.
As a practical matter, of course, neither is not a useful observations. And simplified observations of the differences between “Europe” and the USA like “the USA is far to the right of Europe” were part of what led the UK to devolve into a place where you can be threatened to silence for accurately describing a rich transphobe.
- Comment on How much more progressive are European views as compared to progressives in America? 6 days ago:
Your analysis completely ignores the impact of the US Senate’s wonky “cloture” rule, which is a compromise from the prior practice of the US Senate filibuster.
As depicted in way too many movies, the filibuster let any single senator (or small team or senators) essentially veto any piece of legislation by putting the whole thing to a halt. The modern rule instead (in essence) requires any act.of Congress to clear a 60% vote threshold in the Senate.
There hasn’t been a time in my entire life when the modern democratic party held the presidency, a majority in the house, and 3/5ths of the Senate. (Clinton had a party with segregation-era racists still in power; Obama had “blue dogs” who were nearly Republican, and Biden had a coal baron and a green party scam artist in the Senate )
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
GoG actually implements something the rich tool* behind steam once said: “piracy is a customer service issue.”
Broadly speaking, folk only private games for three reasons: either the DRM limits how they can play their game, they don’t want to make such a purchase sight unseen, or they haven’t the funds to purchase the games they want.
There’s very little that will turn the third type into paying customers, but the first and second can be converted by some combination of.the straight removal of DRM and a generous return policy.
It’s also worth noting that pirates of all three groups will on occasion make a game purchase, due to a desire to support an especially liked game or studio or behavior.
- Comment on Why are children always portrayed as the epitome of "innocence", when a lot of kids are evil af and bully their peers, and name-calling runs rampant in schools? 1 week ago:
Because “innocent” and “good” are not synonyms.
- Comment on When did Cash for Chritianity become a thing? When even Jesus the son of god wouldn't stand for it in a church? If they preach why don't they practice from the bible? 2 weeks ago:
Jesus was the word of God. As understood by most denominations, Jesus of Nazareth WAS God born as a man, and Jesus rules in Heaven now. (But it gets confusing after that, and agreement drops off.)
Going just off my memory, Jesus said about five things about money:
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He chased for-profit money changers out of the temple, who were in effect stealing from the temple and parishioners by insisting a gift of goods or other currencies had to be converted.
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He answered a question about if His followers should give taxes to Rome by pointing that Ceasar’s face was on the coin,.and that they should “render to God what was God’s, and render to Ceasar what was Ceasar’s”
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He extolled a poor woman’s gift of a few coins as a greater gift than the numerically larger gift from others,.since it was a larger share of the woman’s wealth.
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He marked that one cannot “serve two masters” and could either seek wealth for its own sake or serve heaven, but not both.
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When a rich man asked what it would take for said rich man to enter Heaven, Jesus told him “sell everything you have and follow me,” at which the rich guy went away sad.
There may well be others, but at no point in the gospels did Jesus forbid commerce or currency, or suggest that it was somehow improper to pool money together to fund a common house of worship.
Some modern self-described Christians are very money focused, to an extent that I’d argue they’ve abandoned.thr gospels like the rich man in that last bit… But Jesus wasn’t ever explicitly against cash.
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- Comment on When did Cash for Chritianity become a thing? When even Jesus the son of god wouldn't stand for it in a church? If they preach why don't they practice from the bible? 2 weeks ago:
Martin Luther was more than 1000 years after the start of Christianity. Heck, he may have been 1000 years from the conversion of Rome.
- Comment on Insuranace is a joke 2 weeks ago:
To be salty: you seem kinda bad at math.
2019 was.six years ago, not “basically ten”. Which wouldnt matter, if the rest of your post didn’t have such “if the raise put me in the next tax bracket I’d actually lose money” energy.
Car insurance is typically for the market value of your car as-s. Not the price for a car from the same model year that has a dealer’s warranty behind it.
Or to put it another way: insurance should pay out the amount you could get if you sold your car, not the cost to buy another similar car.
Now, there are insurance companies that will sell you “replacement cost” insurance, but this always means they’re charging a higher premium than they otherwise would.
And you’re absolutely right that insurance companies categorically suck. Auto insurance is actually the friendliest one that regularly has to pay out. Health insurance is even worse.
(Sorry for being so salty.)
- Comment on Mr. Pope 3 weeks ago:
Holy fuck, thats even worse that I imagined. Most places I’d seen that just cropped to just the first line of the reply, delightfully skipping all of the “sin of empathy” heresy.
As depicted in the gospels, when Jesus was asked what the most important part of the law was our Lord And Savior literally said “love.”.
- Comment on Politics in America has always been dirty. How does trump really stack up? 4 weeks ago:
If the Pope was in charge health care would be single-payer, abortion would be emergency-only, and both gay marriage and capital punishment would be illegal.
I wish I had the faith in human competency that conspiracy theorists demonstrate, but I think the truth is that humans are far stupider than that.
- Comment on A real question about trans athletes and records 2 months ago:
No, we absolutely should not mark the records of known transgender athletes in any way. Because once you start down that road you wind up asterisking cisgender athletes whose development is outside the norm.
We could get into a long discussion of transgender persons who do or do not undergo HRT, or how there are already rules against transgender women competing professionally if they aren’t on HRT, or whether or not such rules or gendered sports at all are justifiable.
But all of that is just a distraction. The elite in any competitive sport are ALREADY several orders of magnitude beyond the norm, to the point where any advantage a trans woman might have for going through male puberty is essentially a wash with “are you just naturally well-formed for this sport”.
It’s worth noting, by the way, that there ISNT broadly an athletic benefit to having gone through wrong-gender puberty before medically transitioning. Plenty of athletes have done exactly that, and as far as I know exactly none of them wound up being relatively better among their true gender peers post-HRT than their standing among birth-gendeR peers pre-HRT.
And there have been more instances of cisgender women being wrongly accused of being trans than there are transgender women athletes at all.
- Comment on Excel having a stab at dates 3 months ago:
If you think that’s bad, look at what “1” means.
(And, honestly, at least windows’ “last big calendar change” and excel’s “start of the century when we wrote it” are reasonable points. The unix “let’s make it recent so we can fit an absurdly small unit as an integer!” Epoch is just… Weird.)
- Comment on What is with the obsession with gender neutral language on relationship topics ? 4 months ago:
If you’re dealing with relationship advice, the differences from one person to another are substantially greater than those which separate men and women. Even if we ignore transgender and same-gender relationships, or how a huge portion of western society’s gender differences are just toxic sexism.
“How can I (M) suggest $FETISH to partner (F)” is essentially the same question if you swap the genders, make them both F, or make them both M. And to the extent that they aren’t, many of the answers and clarifying questions will be.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
And “dance”, “on”, “the head of”, and “pin”.
“Can” weirdly enough doesn’t have sufficient variation to introduce uncertainty here.
- Comment on Why do so many piece of Hardware come with windows only software requiring admin right for installation 5 months ago:
The customer for anyone selling PC components or accessories is whomever owns the PC. And if you dont have admin rights, you essentially don’t own the PC.
Would you let your teenage kid approve a mechanic you don’t know making changes to your car?
- Comment on If I cut up pictures to arrange things in a way that when traced over create something "new," is that a copyright violation? 5 months ago:
That’s like asserting that a self-defense claim is an argument that you didn’t hit the other guy. You really did hit him (copyright infringement / assault), but you have a defense that admits the literal facts but absolves you of liability (fair use / self-defense.)
You don’t need to argue self-defense if you can convince the court that you didn’t actually hit the other guy.
- Comment on If I cut up pictures to arrange things in a way that when traced over create something "new," is that a copyright violation? 5 months ago:
Fair use doesn’t even enter the picture unless it’s a copyright violation.
When you use someone else’s copyright work in a way that they could take you to court to stop you, you can in some situations argue that the way you infringed on their copyright should be allowed: that is, that your use of the thing was fair.
OP’s question smells like a software development question. Which would be well served by a straightforward answer of “if the parts you cut out are still protected by copyright, then your assembly and trace would be a derivative work”.
- Comment on Nintendo Anti-Piracy Policy Device Lock Update Warns of Console Bricks for Unauthorized Use 5 months ago:
If you think either Apple or Microsoft wouldn’t do that,.you’ve likely too young to know about “hackingtosh” computers or too nerdy to have read the windows 11 coverage.
That neither company would do it without a profit motive is a good argument to ban both from running “app stores”.
- Comment on sus 5 months ago:
No apologies necessary*. I certainly wasn’t trying to offend, just be accurate in model setting.
A more accurate umbrella term for “affair tolerant monogamy” would probably be “non-monogamous”, with the dividing line between that and “polyamory” being exactly what you said : all persons in the relationship cluster knowing the stances of all other participants.
Accurate and non-offensive terminology can be hard.
It does circle us back to OP, though. The answer to “what happens when one couple breaks up in a polucule” is a loud and emphatic that depends on what type of polucule you’re in.
(*: no apologies needed from you. To the extent that I caused you any distress I sincerely apologize. Causing pain was not at all my intent.)
- Comment on sus 5 months ago:
While this is certainly a valid form of romance, it’s more accurately described as “non-exclusive simultaneous relationships” than a single “polyamorous relationship”.
Some people really do live in multi-partner committed households, but those seem most often to be dominated by a single person, such as fringe Mormon polygamy. And the most common form of "polyamory’ is probably “affair-tolerant monogamy.”
It’s a big complicated world, and variations of how humans with form intimate relationships fills all possibilities when there is no enforced legal prohibition. (And,.sometimes, even then.)
- Comment on Do people really think setting up domestic manufacturing in the USA is easy? 6 months ago:
Assume that, for the first time in his life, Donald meant what he said. Pretend that he won’t change his mind or panic, and assume that the same GOP which keeps missing Speaker of the House election layups won’t break and let the Democrats take the tariff power away
The midterm congressional elections are always a swing to the other party. The Democrats are more likely to take at least one chamber of Congress than Trump is to say something dumb. But let’s assume that for some reason they only take one, and you get gridlock enough to preserve the tarrifs until the next POTUS takes office in January 2029.
A factory would need to break even by that time to be worth a quick investment. And not just break even, but leave you with more wealth than if you just bought a bunch of crypto and stayed home until this all passes. And if you signed an deal today, your break even points might be as soon as only 45 months away.
You can’t even get a car loan with a team that short.
- Comment on trapped in the middle with u 6 months ago:
Exactly.
- Comment on trapped in the middle with u 6 months ago:
It says something about modern physics that possibly the two most famous bits of it were named by people trying to call bollocks.
What it says, though, is too many STEM folk skimp on humanities and are just really bad at naming things.
- Comment on What's so important about keeping military operations secret? 7 months ago:
D- day is a great example of why opsec matters so much. The Germans knew that the allies were going to invade, and if they had been prepared they very well might have rebuffed the invasion. But the secrecy worked, and operation overlord succeeded instead of being a bloody failure.
If the target of the military raid had known when it was coming, they could have simply relocated anything actually important away from the target zone.
A useful analogy is probably a boxer and a ring: your opponent knows that you’re going to throw a punch, but you really don’t want him to know exactly what punch you’re going to throw when.
- Comment on "There comes a time when we all declare the war is over": Former PlayStation Studios boss Shawn Layden on the future of video game consoles 7 months ago:
There is a mythical “Sony fan” customer who pays extra for their video game consoles, and justified that by believing it comes with a right to be special and awesome and play games no one else is allowed to.
It’s a pantomine of a Nintendo fan, who pays for an underpowered console for first-party games that use unique controllers. None of whom would ever complain if their games were sold on PC so long as they could bring the controller over.
AFAIK, the only real people who want exclusives on PlayStation are Sony employees and shareholders.
- Comment on Gen Z is ‘task masking’ in the workplace. How harmful is it? 7 months ago:
“task masking” happens for only one reason : managers value appearance over honesty.
Gallant writes code and documentation quickly and efficiently, then pulls out a Gameboy while waiting for new issues to come in = must be a bad worker.
Goofus mutters all day and types furiously, but produces no usable code = obvious the backbone of the team.
- Comment on Can Christians, Muslims or Jews worship or pray to pagan gods? 7 months ago:
This really depends on what you mean by “pray.”
Sincerely worship and praise a pagan godhead as if they were responsible for the deeds Scripture attributes to God? No. It’s as bad as lying in court, stealing, or killing someone.
Falsely go through the motions of pagan prayer, such as in a game, as an actor, or under threat of death? Usually. Some are sticklers, but most are OK with leaving cookies for Santa.
Sincerely giving praise or worship to a being other than God, for things asserted as being done in God’s service or things not done by Her? It depends. Some may be hard no, some may be open yes.
There are something like 3 billion nominal followers of the God of Abraham alive today. With such a large population, it’d be hard to find a statement that they all agree on, including “water is wet”.
- Comment on Can Christians, Muslims or Jews worship or pray to pagan gods? 7 months ago:
There’s plenty of references in the OT to Jews doing the same thing.
And European Christianity chased out worship of anyone save the God of Abraham rather violently after a generation or two.
- Comment on What's wrong with a technocracy? 7 months ago:
It sounds like you’re not proposing a technocracy, and are instead proposing a direct democracy with a bureaucratic civil service chosen by popular vote.
Which is a fancy way to have an inefficient and easily gamed democracy. As is done in Iran and Russia.
If “people vote” is a core and meaningful part of any system, that system is democratic. And inefficiencies in democracy are always and only ways to prevent the people from getting what they want.
If you don’t see how avoiding bloodshed for power changing is a fundamental advantage of democracies I think you may want to re-read your histories. The ONLY way power ever changed hands from one group to another prior to the American election of 1796 was through violence or the threat of violence.
- Comment on What's wrong with a technocracy? 7 months ago:
The American political system occasionally having a terrible choice is one of the tradeoffs for having power be changeable without bloodshed.
Because of lifetime appointments the US legal system is nearly a technocracy as you describe. It arrived at a decision in 1971 that a wide swath of the body politic was so opposed to that they essentially lost all faith the status quo. What followed was a decades long campaign to shift that pseudo-technocracy. Not a bloody insurrection.
You and I may disagree with their position, and we both dislike some of the results of their movement, but the worth of a government form is how well it responds to such discontent.
I don’t think you’ll get any disagreement that the current administration is exposing some flaws in the American political system. But the potential fixes for those flaws are numerous, while a brand new system as you propose would have its own expected and unexpected flaws.
Let’s talk about those goldbugs, since anything else urges trolls to show up. If they’re in power what stops them from declaring that their opponents are “fake” economists? How would we remove them from power?