Pipoca

@Pipoca@lemmy.world
0 Post – 306 Comments
Joined 11 months ago

From the article:

"Our office cited an AP report yesterday that the IDF had hit a Baptist hospital in Gaza. Since then, the IDF denied responsibility and the US intelligence assessment is that this was not done by Israel," she wrote. "It is a reminder that information is often unreliable and disputed in the fog of war (especially on Twitter where misinformation is rampant). We all have a responsibility to ensure information we are sharing is from credible sources and to acknowledge as new reports come in."

Omar called for a "fully independent investigation to determine conclusively who is responsible for this war crime."

It sounds like she acknowledges Israel probably isn't behind it, but also isn't apologizing for her initial remarks like some Republicans were calling for. The story should probably mention that higher up and more explicitly, rather than burying the lede.

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She's a 37 year old divorced grandmother.

You're essentially correct, there, but slightly off on a couple details. About a month before her divorce finalized, she was kicked out of a musical for vaping and being rowdy with her new boyfriend.

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If you're rigging an election, it can be better politically to give yourself 65% of the vote than 97% of the vote.

97% is obviously fake. 65% is easier to make people beleive in.

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Misfires happen, but "rocket falls short of target on empty field" isn't a news story; you'll never hear about it. You'll only hear about them when they result in tragedy.

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What exactly is your alternative?

Have 4, 8, 12 years of Repubican rule in the hopes of getting a better Democrat? 4 years if Trump was awful enough, and did quite a lot of long-lasting damage.

If you're offering me the certainty of a lot more long-lasting, hard to undo damage against the uncertain hope of a bit of progress, you'll forgive me if I accept the certainty of the status quo combined with pushing for voting method reform at the state and local level.

The idea of a Pokémon clone isn't protectable, but existing Pokémon are.

You can make a Pokémon clone with entirely novel monsters, but if a judge thinks they look too much like an existing Pokémon they're gonna have a problem.

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Light trucks is kinda a crazy category. It's lighter vehicles that

(1) Designed primarily for purposes of transportation of property or is a derivation of such a vehicle, or (2) Designed primarily for transportation of persons and has a capacity of more than 12 persons, or (3) Available with special features enabling off-street or off-highway operation and use

Vans, minivans, SUVs, and crossovers are mostly categorized as light trucks. Most vehicles on the road are light trucks; they outsell cars right now 3 to 1

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Cruise ships are pretty big polluters, yes. Cruise passengers have about 8x the emissions that they'd have from a comparable land-based vacation.

But when people talk about ship pollution, they're usually talking about non-carbon pollution.

For example, ships often burn heavy fuel oil, which produces tons of sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain, and NOX, which depletes the ozone and causes smog and asthma.

Cruise ships are bad for the environment, but there's honestly bigger fish to fry. Gas power plants are way, way worse for the planet.

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Portal fantasies aren't exactly new.

The Chronicles of Narnia, Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz are classics that aren't generally considered lazy.

Isekai tend towards the lazy, self-insert escapist portion of portal fantasy, sure. Most don't have great writing. But keep Sturgeons law in mind - every genre has a few gems in a sea of turds.

https://vault.fbi.gov/domestic-terrorism-symbols-guide/domestic-terrorism-symbols-guide-part-01/view

No.

The document lists symbols that violent extremists use, but explicitly calls out that not everyone who uses those symbols is a violent extremist.

The punisher skull is also in there, but that doesn't mean they're claiming every asshole with a punisher skull on their truck is a terrorist. Just that if someone with a punisher skull on their truck shoots up a mosque, that the punisher iconography is evidence that it was an act of right-wing militia terrorism.

If everyone is putting in one book, for you to get 36 books, 35 other people have to get 0 books.

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Transcription is usually something done for deaf people. Like people transcribing memes for the blind.

More confederate monuments were built in 1999 than in 1869. The year with the most confederate monuments built was 1911, 46 years after the end of the war. That's like as if there were now a sudden spree of building Vietnam War monuments everywhere.

Confederate monuments were overwhelmingly built during the Jim Crow era. The Daughters of the Confederacy built most of them as part of their revisionist lost cause project, trying to write slavery out of the war. Then there was also a lot of them built during the civil rights era, to send a message to civil rights activists.

Sure, it's worth saving a few of them to put into places like the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, the National Civil Rights Museum, America's Black Holocaust Museum, or the National Civil War Museum. But there's many more monuments than appropriate museums for them. Getting rid of the least historically s significant ones isn't a big issue.

Yeah. Power plants are nowhere near 90% efficient.

It's worth emphasizing, though, that they're still way, way more efficient than car engines are.

Also, regenerative breaking saves a lot of energy. Basically, instead of using the motor to increase the cars speed, you use it as a generator to recharge the battery.

Prices are a matter of supply and demand.

Housing starts plunged during the Great Recession, and recovered to only mediocre levels. However, over that time the population continued to grow.

We fundamentally have a housing shortage, particularly in places people want to live. One massive problem is that it's currently quite difficult to build net-new housing in places people want to live, due to a combination of overly-restrictive zoning and NIMBYs who ate empowered to block new projects.

The problem is particularly bad in popular urban areas. Either you build outwards or you build upwards. But if someone wants to live "in Boston", "in NYC", etc, they probably don't want to live in a new build an hour's drive away from the city in traffic. And infill development is generally highly regulated.

Adding a price ceiling without fixing the underlying shortage is going to benefit the people currently living in an area, but it will make it harder to find a new unit. Adding units isn't the only important thing, but it's pretty important.

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Kinda sorta not really.

One problem with units is defining them precisely.

For example, a meter is ostensibly "one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle". That's not exactly precisely defined because the earth isn't a perfect sphere.

So currently, a meter is defined to be the distance light travels in a vacuum in 9192631770 / 299,792,458 hyperfine structure transitions of caesium-133.

Rather than doing the same sort of thing with updating the standard definition of a foot or pound, the US just piggybacked off the work precisely defining metric units and defined imperial in terms of metric.

So now a foot is officially the precise distance light travels in some number of hyperfine structure transitions of caesium-133, and the US government didn't need to do a thing.

Disney+ lost 1.3 million subscribers in the final quarter of 2023 amid a hefty price hike that went into effect last fall, but managed to narrow its streaming business’ losses by $300 million during the October-December period.

That doesn't really sound like it backfired to me. They lost subscribers but made more money.

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This is specifically talking about mitigation for highly pathogenic avian influenza. HPAI kills chickens fairly quickly, so to contain the spread and minimize the risk of zoonotic spread to people, they kill every bird on every property that it's detected on.

This is one of those situations where no one thinks it's a great solution, it's just a pragmatic one that minimizes the risk towards workers while quickly depopulating the barn. The problem is that this is one of the cheapest and least humane ways to depopulate a barn, and shouldn't be allowed. We should insist that barns allow humane depopulation, or at least less inhumane methods.

You can argue, sure. But people have actually studied this, and you're factually just plain wrong.

You've seen the centralized waste. But you haven't picked through a neighborhood's worth of trash cans to put that centralized waste into the larger decentralized context.

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This basically comes down to how you define literacy.

Nationally, 21% of Americans have level 1 or below literacy on the PIAAC literacy scale. That's probably where the 85 people came from.

12% are at level 1, meaning they can only read at a basic level. 4% are functionally illiterate, and 4% had some kind of cognitive or physical handicap or language barrier that kept them from being surveyed.

About 34% of illiterate Americans were born outside the US, so they're possibly literature in another language.

Ish.

Many religions are more "don't be a dick to your fellow brothers in faith, but feel free to be a dick to others". In-group out-group dynamics were historically quite important.

You know - "don't murder", but at the same time Deuteronomy says

10 When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. 11 If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. 12 If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. 13 When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. 14 As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves.

Also

(19) “You are not to lend at interest to your brother, no matter whether the loan is of money, food or anything else that can earn interest. 21 (20) To an outsider you may lend at interest, but to your brother you are not to lend at interest, so that Adonai your God will prosper you in everything you set out to do in the land you are entering in order to take possession of it.

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It's a simple idea, but it's not quite that simple.

When it gets to be around freezing outside, you have to deal with frost buildup on the outdoor unit.

And as temperatures fall, output and efficiency generally falls. So you need an oversized unit to heat your house on the coldest days, but an oversized unit isn't great the rest of the year.

Historically, heat pumps were only good if it never got down below freezing. Now, modern cold- climate heat pumps are efficient well below freezing and Mitsubishi's models advertise that they deliver 100% of their output down to -23F/-30C. Between adding variable inverters, better defrosting, etc they've come a really long way in the past decade.

Ray tracing isn't about AI, it's about the physics of photons.

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Lead-acid batteries aren't lithium ion? And the car starter battery isn't equivalent to that of an EV?

You might as well say that I have trouble starting my gas weed wacker, therefore cars are hard to start.

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The DoE was preceded by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The organizational structure has changed substantially over the centuries, sometimes being a standalone department and sometimes being an office in a larger department. But that is essentially window dressing.

Ultimately, the DoE goes back to 1867. It's been around for a while.

Ramaswamy isn't suggesting shuffling it into another department. He's suggesting getting rid of those functions entirely. Getting rid of the $80 million it spends on student loans, grants, anti discrimination enforcement and national education statistics, and "putting it in the hands of parents".

Netanyahu's popularity tanked after October 7th.

70% of Israelis want him to resign. But only 25% want him to resign now - most want him to wait until the current war settles down. Which unfortunately gives him and Ben Gvir some perverse incentives, because there's no way they remain in power after the dust settles.

The Netherlands is so bike-friendly right now because of a wave of backlash in the 70s to the harms of their post WW2 car-centric design. The protests were literally called 'Stop de Kindermoord', which is Dutch for 'stop the child-murder'.

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Keep in mind: the largest source of food waste is residential. The second largest source is restaurants.

Food waste is bad for the environment, sure. But the rent being too damn high is a lot more of the reason why people go hungry than me letting a bagged salad in my fridge go bad.

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Animal agriculture is very inefficient, because of tropic levels.

Looking on Wikipedia, dressed broiler chicken carcasses have a feed conversion ratio of about 4. That is to say, a 4lb whole chicken you buy from the butchers case would have required about 12 lbs of feed over its ~2 month life.

An online calorie counter says 4lb of raw whole chicken is 3856 calories. By contrast, a 1lb bag of cornmeal has ~3300 calories. 12 lbs of cornmeal have just over 10x the calories of 1 chicken.

Even comparing the differences in yield between chickpeas and corn, we get way more calories per acre from hummus than Buffalo wings.

In the US, we get 36% of our calories from animals, but use an order of magnitude more space to raise them. We grow more acreage of feed crops than crops that get directly eaten by humans. Fully 40% of the continental US is devoted to raising livestock, which is insane.

We don't factory farm because there's 8 billion humans to feed. We factory farm because we want "a chicken in every pot".

No, not really. Nazi Germany lasted from 1933-1945.

From 1933 to 1939, things were mostly non-lethal: boycotting and vandalizing shops, banning Jews from public service or practicing law, harassing Jews, etc. The basic idea was to get Jews to emigrate out of Germany.

The first open ghettos were established in 1939, while the massacres really started in 1941.

If you're going to compare Gaza to part of Nazi Germany, the best comparison is to the closed ghettos that were established in 1940, like the Warsaw ghetto. The period between the establishment of the closed ghettos and the beginning of the mass killings was way, way shorter than the mass killings. Of the 12 year span of Nazi Germany, the best comparison is to a period that lasted for about a year or so, 7 years in.

Nazi Germany really isn't a great historical comparison to Israel. Honestly, a better comparison is to the US's treatment of Native Americans, though it's still not a perfect analogy. The dream of Israel's far right isn't to murder every last Palestinian, it's manifest destiny; an Israel stretching from the river to the sea even if there's a few small reservations on it.

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Married With Children would have ended when millennials were somewhere between 16 and 1.

It doesn't really matter how strict your parents were with TV. Most millennials weren't really in the target demographic for it when it was airing; they'd have been more likely to be watching Rugrats, Power Rangers, All That, Dragon Ball Z or whatever if left to their own devices.

They'd have watched it if it were something their parents watched. I literally never deliberately turned on Friends or Will And Grace, but since my parents watched them, I saw a bunch of them. Married With Children wasn't a show my parents followed, though, so the Futurama episode would have gone over my head.

It really seems like a reference aimed mostly at the oldest millennials, gen X, and boomers.

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That's what holocaust museums are for.

There's many, many better exhibits there than something like this would be. Pictures of holocaust victims, stories from survivors, artifacts, etc. Auschwitz has a room with tens of thousands of shoes in a heap that had been taken from murdered children.

We shouldn't forget history, but that doesn't mean we need to preserve every Nazi memorial and every peice of Nazi propaganda.

The fact that they have it on this blatant of a propaganda poster means that unions work.

Not necessarily.

A poster this blatant means unions are bad for management.

It doesn't prove that unions aren't bad for both workers and management alike. Business isn't a zero sum game. To show that something helps workers, you need to demonstrate that it helps workers.

Which is to say, this poster is a bad argument for unions. The success of the writers strike, on the other hand, is a good argument of how unions protect workers from the bad deals management offers.

So the late head rabbi there was beleived by many in his movement to be the messiah. He died in the 90s, and ownership of the building has been tied up in court cases for a while.

He said something about expanding the building before he died, and his messianic followers think that part of triggering the messianic age is fulfilling that. But due to the court cases, that's been impossible.

So the idea the yeshiva students apparently had is that if they hollowed out the basement expansion, the easiest solution would be for the synagogue to just finish constructing it.

In other words, the tunnel isn't really practical. The point of it is just to trigger the messianic age.

In particular, by day 5 it's over a million dollars per day, and by day 15 it's over a billion dollars per day.

If they sat on it for a month, it'd be a ~50 trillion fine that day.

There's a reason it only took them 3 days to comply.

Living to 120 would be great if that comes from getting four more decades of what my patents and grandparents were in their 60s and 70s: fine day-to-day, but maybe they needed a scooter to do a full day at Disney closer to the end. Not as young as they used to be, but still basically able to do everything they used to, just maybe a bit slower.

Living to 120 would be terrible if you get an extra 40 years in a memory care unit.

The problem is mathematical.

To win the presidential election, you need to win a majority of the vote in enough states to win a majority of electoral college votes.

If no-one gets 270 electoral votes, then the House of Representatives meets. Each state delegation gets 1 vote. Right now, that means that the Republican wins, due to e.g. Wyoming and Alaska getting just as much of a vote as NY and California, and Republican gerrymandering of swing states.

There's literally no way for third party candidates to be elected president. The best that a third party has ever done was in 1860, a 4 way race between a Democrat, Republican, Southern Democrat, and Constitutional Unionist.

Lincoln, the Republican, got 39.8% of the vote but won 18 states and 180 electoral votes. The Democrat, Douglass, got 29.5% of the vote but only won a single state. Breckenridge got only 18.1% of the vote but carried most of the southern states. And Bell got 12.6% of the vote and carried 3 states - Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.

So Douglas ended up with more than twice as many actual votes as Bell, but got over 3x the electoral vote. And Breckenridge only got less than half as many electoral college votes that he'd need to win, and could realistically have only picked up Bell's.

The last time a third party candidate won a single electoral college vote was in 1968, when George Wallace won Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. He was the former governor of Alabama, and had left the Democratic party after the 1964 civil rights law and 1965 voting rights law were passed by Johnson.

The Democrats are also more of a big tent than most parties in counties using party list PR would be. In Italy, AOC and Manchin wouldn't be in the same party, while in the US they basically have to be to win.

The two party system exists for structural reasons. Plurality only works well in two candidate elections; third parties only do well in districts where they functionally replace a major party. Getting rid of the two party system is possible by changing the structure - switching to e.g. STAR voting in the senate and presidency and using e.g. MMP or STV in the House. But burying your head in the sand to pretend the structural issues don't exist just doesn't work.

According to the EPA,

The primary sources of greenhouse gas emissions by economic sector in the United States are:

Transportation (28% of 2021 greenhouse gas emissions) – The transportation sector generates the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation primarily come from burning fossil fuel for our cars, trucks, ships, trains, and planes.

And

The largest sources of transportation greenhouse gas emissions in 2021 were light-duty trucks, which include sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks, and minivans (37%); medium- and heavy-duty trucks (23%); passenger cars (21%); commercial aircraft (7%); other aircraft (2%); pipelines (4%); ships and boats (3%); and rail (2%). In terms of the overall trend, from 1990 to 2021, total transportation emissions have increased due, in large part, to increased demand for travel. The number of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by light-duty motor vehicles (passenger cars and light-duty trucks) increased by 45% from 1990 to 2021, as a result of a confluence of factors including population growth, economic growth, urban sprawl, and periods of low fuel prices. Between 1990 and 2004, average fuel economy among new vehicles sold annually declined, as sales of light-duty trucks increased.

In the US, cars and the car-centric sprawl it encourages is absolutely the largest single contributor to carbon emissions.

There's a reason that the per capita emissions of the Netherlands are literally half of what they are in the states. It's the cars.

The problem is when you mention Nazis to Jews, the first things they'll think of are Zyklon B, Babi Yar, the piles of children's shoes at Auschwitz, Mengele, that sort of thing.

And while what's going on in Israel is terrible, it's not Mengele terrible, Babi Yar terrible, or Treblinka terrible. So they write you off as just another antisemite, rather than listening to your point.

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Not every church is the Westboro Baptist church. Most big denominations are pretty socially conservative, but some very left wing churches exist.