SwingingTheLamp
@SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
- Comment on Why Didn't Democrats Do More When They Controlled Both Houses of Legislature, The White House, and The Supreme Court During Obama's First Term? 1 month ago:
Right, which is why I’ve been saying that the Democrats should restore the filibuster. What they have now is not a filibuster, in practice, it’s more akin to an administrative hold. One Senator indicates an intent to filibuster via email, and they move on to other business.
Make 'em do it. Pick a popular issue, and lean into it. Make the Republicans actually stand up there at the podium and talk for hours. Get them on camera on the news every night as obstructionists, blocking the will of the people. Yes, it will waste Senate session time; that’s a perfect opportunity for all of the Democrats to roast them non-stop to reporters. It’ll be painful for a while, but at least has a chance of breaking the log jam. (And if the GQP doesn’t take the bait, hey, popular thing gets passed!)
- Comment on Pancakes 1 month ago:
It’s one of the earliest memes, from over 20 years ago. Google “rabbit with pancake on its head.”
- Comment on Pancakes 1 month ago:
Little-known fact: These crabs sometimes camouflage themselves on top of the heads of rabbits.
- Comment on Phones have unique phone numbers, why dont computers have unique computer-numbers? 1 month ago:
I haven’t read all of the replies to see if somebody else had said this, but it’s because the Internet was designed to be completely decentralized, whereas the phone system requires your line or device to be registered with the network operator(s). Any device that can get a valid Internet address for the local network can communicate with the whole Internet, but a phone will only work if it’s explicitly known by the phone service provider, and that information shared to all providers.
We could set up a system, layered on top of the Internet, by which each computer could register itself in a central directory each time it connects, and thus be reachable at the same address no matter where it connects, even on a NAT connection. In fact, it’s easy to do with a VPN and Dynamic DNS (both of which require the cooperation some centralized authority). It’s just not universal, because, well, what’s the utility of doing so?
- Comment on Police at UCLA face off against left-wing mob as nationwide anti-Israel protests escalate 1 month ago:
I saw protests in my city first-hand in 2011, and Fox News reported bald-faced lies about them.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 months ago:
One that gets just about everybody, including me, is the Availability Heuristic. That’s estimating the prevalence of something based on how easy it is to remember examples of it. Like, for instance, crime. It’s hard to compare the number of criminal acts to the size of the population to get a true picture of how prevalent crime is. It takes a lot of mental effort, so our brains just estimate it based on the number of incidents we’ve heard of using the heuristic that something must be more common if we can recall more examples of it.
That’s why Americans in general think that violent crime is exploding, despite it actually being way down over past decades. The 24-hour news channels fill airtime and the Internet brings us the aggregated crimes of a whole nation, so it’s easy to remember lots of instances. Meanwhile, we don’t worry about heart disease, it doesn’t feel prevalent by comparison, because it doesn’t make the news, and we don’t have easy recall of all the heart attack deaths every day.
- Comment on Weather has stopped making sense. 5 months ago:
As one who has studied weather and climate somewhat, this makes total sense. Fucking climate change…
- Comment on YouTube is doubling down on its distracting ambient mode 6 months ago:
The irony of complaining about distracting features that nobody asked for in an article on a site that pops up a video player over the text…
- Comment on What's the deal with buying single cans out of a multipack at a bottle shop? (Australia) 6 months ago:
That notice is not a legal restriction, nor a rule to stop stores from breaking up multi-packs. What it’s there for is to alert buyers and cashiers that the barcode printed on each unit contains the product code for the multi-pack. If stores want to sell individual units, they just have to re-label them, or at least not scan the barcode.
The store in which I used to work sells individual bottles of beer, or build-your-own 6-packs. The liquor department manager just puts a slash through the barcodes with a black marker, so they won’t scan on the registers.
- Comment on Jragon 7 months ago:
We already have UTC, and nothing stopping anybody from using it to coordinate global activities.
- Comment on Pro Pain 7 months ago:
It’s a cargo platform on an extended-frame bicycle. The seat is out of frame.
- Comment on 100, here I cum 10 months ago:
I like the energy, but this is still a dumb take, even if it’s common. Where TF did the idea that middle= midpoint come from? So does “middle age” last just an instant?
We have young, and elderly, so what do we can the span in the middle when you’re neither of those?