To reduce centralization. The more spread out things are the less vulnerable Lemmy is to a major loss if an instance shuts down and the less power any single admin has.

In the article it says that immunocompromised people spoke during the public comments on the bill and Republican senators said that the bill would criminalize their wearing masks but they just won't be prosecuted for it.

https://www.billtrack50.com/legislatordetail/20814

That's his record of votes and proposed legislation for the current Congress.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/2034

That's a bill he supported in committee.

He has also worked with Sanders and Warren to convince Biden to expand debt relief granted through the executive branch. As far as congressmen go, he's a good one.

The criticism isn't about a fair fight, it's about the unnecessary cruelty in the treatment of the animal. An important part of hunting ethics is minimizing the suffering of the prey. Kills should be as quick and efficient as possible.

My mind can't comprehend those walking and biking numbers. The walking is about 70 miles a day. That's more than double the average distance of a one day ultra marathon done everyday for a month and a half. The biking distance is about 255 miles a day. Roughly 2.5x the average daily distance for the Tour de France. I want to meet the people who can do that.

Making fight decisions based on "could I kill it" is a convenience of human technology. The ability to seclude ourselves during healing and medicine allowing us to avoid infection, heal faster, and heal from more serious wounds has skewed how we think about fighting. Most animals make fight decisions less on "can I kill it" and more on "how badly can it injure me".

Sure a human can kill a house cat, absent technology can the human do it without having the skin on an arm or leg shredded? Will the injuries be significant enough to make you unable to protect yourself from other predators? Will the injuries set up infection and kill you?

Cats are basically the perfect land predators. Even with their small size domestic cats are the most deadly and destructive hunters on earth.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cats-kill-a-staggering-number-of-species-across-the-world/

They are ambush predators. They are really good at evaluating prey, identifying strengths and weaknesses, figuring out how, when, and if they should attack. Cats know whether or not they can win a fight. Cats will sometimes charge into fights they can't win, like attacking the bear, because they know that they can inflict damage and that the other animal is making a similar fight decision. The hyper aggression of a 10lb claw tornado flying toward a 200lb bear is usually enough to convince the bear that the fight isn't worth it.

!newcommunities@lemmy.world helps. You can also post about them in related communities if the community rules allow and communities can partner with each other to link in community sidebars.

The Vice President doesn't certify the vote count, the Senate does. The VP usually presides over the counting because the VP is the head of the Senate but if the office of the VP is vacant or the VP chooses not to preside over the vote count then the president pro tempore or the Senate leader elected under SR1 is the presiding officer.

It's not just phrased poorly, it's not a true statement. It's a conservative talking point that does not bear out when you look at the federal budget. Republican Presidents and Congresses increase spending at least as much as Democratic Presidents and Congresses. Both parties are big spenders. Despite this and related talking points, Republicans are the less fiscally responsible party because while increasing spending they tend to enact policies that reduce growth in revenue.

Sounds like it would conflict with the ADA.

Using scaled sorting really helps with getting smaller communities on the front page. I still see the political and news communities but I also see communities for cities and niche hobbies.

It's fake. It looks like that so she can bring the same one to every picnic.

I've never been much of a social media user outside of reddit and lemmy and I've never had an Instagram account so maybe it's my lack of familiarity but does that page list some really unimpressive stats? The original post had "more than 3,000 likes in less than three years" and for the second Instagram post it says"Within seven months, the post gained over 4,000 likes." Do Instagram posts continue active participation for years? I felt pretty good the few times I've posted something that got thousands of likes but it's more personal achievement 'than this is going to be bigger than two broken arms".

It’s crucial to note that our bias scale is calibrated to the political >spectrum of the United States, which may not align with the >political landscapes of other nations.

From their methodology page.

They aren't rating for any and all bias. They are rating for political bias within the context of the US political landscape.

I'm not convinced that Biden hasn't slowed down. Dude's old but his speaking style, history of gaffes, and his stutter makes it hard to really gage a change in his public speaking. I definitely don't think he's struggling nearly as much as Trump but ultimately I'm not sure how much difference it makes for how I will vote. Even if Biden was as bad as Trump he would be the better choice because he builds teams and listens to experts whereas Trump collects sycophants and listens to whoever best flatters his ego.

The job of the President is complex and involves dealing with incredible amounts of information. No one person can meaningfully process the amount of information Presidents get presented with everyday nor have the background to understand and properly contextualize the variety of types and sources of that information. The person that recognizes that they aren't experts on every subject and who builds teams of subject matter experts to help them process the information and make the most informed decisions possible will always be the better choice.

He's pro choice and proposed federal legislation to guarantee the right to both medication and surgical abortion and to require insurance to cover it. He has sponsored bills to protect IVF and other reproductive treatment, to give everyone paid sick leave specifically including parents taking leave to care for sick children, to expand Medicare to cover all citizens.

I'm not sure how much more he can support the right to bodily autonomy.

I've seen Highlander, you can conceal a full size katana in the inside breast pocket of a trench coat. You can even go for a run with it there and the coat will flap and move like the sword isn't even there.

Introducing, from the makers of bigot chicken, bigot TV!

Harris is very unpopular with a large portion of the democratic base because of her very close ties with law enforcement and resistance to criminal justice reform while Attorney General of California.

We used to have laws that decentralized control of media. An entity could only own a certain number of newspapers, tv stations, or radio stations. There were incentives for smaller news companies to insure that there was competition in each market. Congress kept chipping away at those laws letting larger companies buy up more and more of the market, allowing mergers that restricted competition. Now radio is nearly a monopoly, TV and newspapers are oligarchies. The Internet fell into an oligarchy disturbingly quickly.

The only way to get the media serving the people again is to break up the big companies and restore the guardrails that protected and supported small local companies.

We also have a problem on lemmy that there is a subset of users who think that votes are how you curate your feed. They downvote anything that they don't want to see instead of blocking communities that they aren't interested in.

Who's going to invade, occupy, and rebuild the US like the Allies did in Germany? The US is the most powerful country in the world, is the third largest by both land area and population, nobody has the resources for either the invasion or the rebuilding. American fascism would be a long lasting fascism with civil war as the only hope for restoring democracy, as much as we have it now.

Socrates answered this. If morality is objective or has an objective basis then it is necessarily independent from any God or god's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_dilemma

Edit to add: If you're interested in the concept of an evil God in the context of Christian beliefs I recommend reading "Answer to Job" by Carl Jung. He doesn't exactly make the Christian God evil but ascribes moral failings to God and frames Jesus as the redemption of God instead of the redemption of man.

Brooklyn is in New York. Also, actual book bans are unconstitutional under the first amendment. What these laws do is prohibit state funded entities like public schools and public libraries in the state from having the books available. The books are still available in privately owned places.

We are rapidly approaching the point where it is an open question as to whether the Supreme Court can make its rulings stick in jurisdictions that don’t fall along the current majority’s ideological bent

Recently the most significant refusals to follow court rulings are in jurisdictions that do agree with the court majority's ideological bent. Alabama's voting maps fight and Texas's current border fight being the two biggest ones. At least for now democrats still generally believe in the American system and respect the rule of law.

A Martha Stewart/Snoop Dogg ticket would be interesting. I kinda want to see Snoop in the debate though so maybe a Snoop Dogg/Martha Stewart ticket.

If you want to guarantee a win though Oprah is the answer. Just to maximize Trump's rage I say we need Oprah/RuPaul 2024.

Mostly us.

It's a really good topical antiseptic.

They are being tried in military tribunals so the Defense Secretary is in the position that the Attorney General would be in if it were in civilian courts. He didn't, and can't, override the court. He overrode the military prosecutors who initially agreed to the plea deal and withdrew the deal before it went to court.

The President appoints people to the USPS Board of Governors for a term of 7 years. That board selects the Postmaster General.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvinism

You probably don't want to read all that so here's a what I think is the important take away as far as your question is concerned. American Christians have always been a bit different from the mainstream religion elsewhere. The largest Christian group to come to America in the early colonial period were called the Puritans. They believed that the English Reformation did not go far enough. They were staunchly anti-Catholic and were very upset that the Church of England had adopted so much theology and tradition from the Catholic Church.

The Puritans believed that the Bible is the complete revelation of God rejecting the papacy, the concept of continuing revelations, and the related concept of the Divine Right of Kings. They believed that individuals forged their own covenant with God and that their belief and acceptance was all that in required for their salvation. That sin is so pervasive in our corrupt world that it was unavoidable, no person can be "good" or worthy of salvation and so salvation is only available through God's mercy. They believed that it was their role as Christians to fight against the corruption of the world by spreading their theology and enforcing their concepts of sin and redemption on each other and on the greater community. The narrative is that they fled Europe to avoid religious persecution. The persecution that they faced was that they were not allowed to make laws banning things like alcohol or "revealing" clothing that they considered sinful or forcing people to go to their churches.

They adopted most of there theology from a reformist movement called Calvinism that sought to expand the Protestant Reformation further stripping away the power of the clergy and empower believers to enforce theology. Calvinists adopted an extremely socially conservative interpretation of the Bible and supported strict adherence to their moral ideology and severe punishment for violations of their concept of morality.

The modern Christian movements that trace themselves back to that foundation are still the largest Christian groups in the US. In the 1960's the Republican party began the "Southern Strategy" which was shift of political focus to conservative social issues and attacking secular institutions. Republicans used this strategy to unite the philosophical descendants of the Puritans under a political ideology that is strongly focused on conservative social issues and on pushing their concepts of religion and morality into all aspects of society enforcing adherence through government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology

Prosperity theology is a newer theological concept that was popularized by Oral Roberts, has been embraced by the Republican party, and allowed the rise of the megachurch and celebrity preachers. Basically Prosperity theology gives an answer to the question of how you know that that someone is "living right" and a solution to the problem of evil. You know that someone is "living right" because God rewards their righteousness with material wealth. Evil exists as a punishment for the corruption of the secular world. Bad things primarily happens to the unholy but evil spills over to the righteous because secular corruption is so pervasive as to make sin unavoidable in our fallen world. Poverty is the primary form of punishment God visits upon the unholy.

You say you are from a predominantly Christian country so I assume that you are sufficiently familiar with the Gospels to recognize that this is a significant departure from the teachings of Jesus as presented in the Bible. I dare say that the departure is significant enough to be called an outright rejection of the teachings of the purported source of their morality and salvation.

Honestly I super disappointed in Cheney. Don't get me wrong, I never had much of a positive opinion about him, he was Darth Sidious hiding in the shadows and wielding all the power in the service of evil during the Bush presidency, but I did believe he had some version of family values. When, as a former VP and respected elder of the party, he didn't step up to support and defend his daughter after she became a MAGA target I lost what little positive regard I had for him.

That's way too much work. I just logged into my original account on kbin.social and tapped on the activity button to see votes before that instance went down. If I want to see votes again I can set up an account on any kbin or mbin instance in less than a minute and do the same thing.

She covered up that a state crime lab employee was falsifying evidence leading to hundreds of false convictions. She opposed police reform including opposing body cameras. Her office, she claims without her knowledge, argued that prisoners eligible for parole shouldn't be released from prisons so overcrowded that a judge ruled them cruel and unusual because it would reduce the availability of prison labor. She argued on two separate occasions that prisoners who had had their convictions overturned on the basis of actual innocence shouldn't be released from prison because they hadn't filed the motion for release quickly enough.

Her record is staunchly pro establishment and she has participated in acts of overt corruption to maintain the status quo.

Honestly, I don't get it. I saw the total eclipse in '17 and I've seen a couple of partial eclipses and they weren't particularly exciting. I live about 10 min outside of the total eclipse path and I'm not even sure I'm going to walk outside for it. What am I missing? Why are people spending thousands of dollars to see it?

Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, did not have wmd's, and was the only major Sunni power in the region. Saddam Hussain was not a good guy by any means but he actively worked against Iranian influence and was a stabilizing presence on the middle east after the first Gulf War. Pre-invasion Iraq was good for US policy. The invasion led to the growth of Iranian influence in the region and the rise of the Islamic State terrorist organization. We should not have attacked Iraq.

I was in support of attacking Afghanistan at the time and still think military action to go after Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Ladin was warranted. The diversion of resources from that conflict is another reason we shouldn't have attacked Iraq. We probably should have extended that conflict into northern Pakistan where we knew Al-Qaeda's leadership and the bulk of their fighters were hiding.

We definitely should have invaded Saudi Arabia. They provided training, equipment, travel, and money to enable the 9/11 attacks. 9/11 would not have been possible without Saudi Arabia's support. Saudi Arabia was(is) in the curious position of publicly allying with us while plotting terrorism against us. Curious because by siding with us publicly they gave up Iran's advantage of attacks against them potentially leading to conflict with Russia. Iran had some part in 9/11 but between their having a lesser role and the risk of Russia coming to their defense it would not have been worth it to attack Iran. Saudi Arabia had our backing instead of Russia's. When they used proxies to attack us we should have leveled their royal palace. So far we haven't even pulled our support.

Top Gun for the nes. I never actually finished the first mission. I could beat Mike Tyson but that aircraft carrier kicked my ass.

As a small silver lining, about a third of the Israeli aid package was humanitarian aid for Gaza.

The lyric is "I owe my soul to the company store". Sold requires a conscious choice, willingly entering into the agreement. Under a company script system children are forced into labor as early as possible to help pay the family debt. In less than a generation teenagers are given the "choice" to go to work or see their families already meager income reduced to cover "their portion" of the family debt.

Op is talking about accounts that upvote spam content. For the most part those accounts will be the spammer's alts that will be posting spam when the current account gets banned. Blocking them while they are still being used for vote manipulation means you wouldn't have to see their spam in the future.