Rottcodd

I deliberately avoided having kids and I don’t have any particular existential dread, so I’m just sort of sitting back and bemusedly watching it all play out. I just read the latest bit about one or another obscenely wealthy and/or powerful blatant psychopath doing or saying something gibberingly insane and I marvel yet again at the fact that the world is run by literal lunatics and nobody seems to even notice.

And when it stops being cynically amusing, I shut it off and go do something else.

What the fuck are you on about?

It’s not necessarily the case though that fewer crimes are being actually “solved,” in the most precise sense of the term.

It could be that the current heightened interest in police oversight and focus on investigation of (and huge lawsuit payouts as a consequence of) wrongdoing by the police has made it less likely that people will be railroaded/framed for crimes they didn’t actually commit, so the rate at which crimes are marked as solved has declined, even as the rate at which they actually are solved hasn’t.

That’s everything I said, right there. What part of it are you not understanding?

evidence is necessary. otherwise, it’s just speculation

Of course it’s fucking speculation! What the fuck else did you think it was?!

i didn’t expect equivocation

It would be equivocation if there was a disjunct between the intended meaning of what I said at one point and the intended meaning of the same thing at some other point.

But I’ve been entirely consistent in what I’ve said. The disjunct is between what YOU thought I meant and what I actually said, and that’s your fucking problem - not mine.

Eh?

I said that it’s “not necessarily the case that” one thing and “it could be that” something else.

Logic and plausibilty are all that’s necessary.

It struck me after I posted that that modern technology and investigative techniques would also contribute to such a decline.

It’s undoubtedly more difficult to falsely convict someone (whether deliberately or not) in the era of GPS, cell phone records, video surveillance and DNA tests.

It’s not necessarily the case though that fewer crimes are being actually “solved,” in the most precise sense of the term.

It could be that the current heightened interest in police oversight and focus on investigation of (and huge lawsuit payouts as a consequence of) wrongdoing by the police has made it less likely that people will be railroaded/framed for crimes they didn’t actually commit, so the rate at which crimes are marked as solved has declined, even as the rate at which they actually are solved hasn’t.

I prefer “used-to-be-twitter.” I think it captures the context better, and it’s clunky, as it should be.

Money wins, every time.

And right there, you answered your own (presumably rhetorical) question.

The money people jumped on AI as soon as they scented the chance of profit, and that’s it. ALL other considerations are now secondary to a handful of psychopaths making as much money as possible.

Pshew - look at that pendulum swing…

Ironic that the thread is about men dying on average younger than women, and the majority of the responses are people completely ignoring that fact and instead just taking an opportunity to negatively stereotype men so they can shit on them collectively.

Or you could just not care so much.

If you post memes that are likely to offend someone somewhere, then there’s a risk that one of those someones is going to be a mod, and they’re going to delete it. And really, that’s just the way it goes.

Certainly you might prefer that they have explicit, precise and closely followed rules so you can accurately predict what they’ll do, but there’s really no requirement that they do so - if they want vague rules arbitrarily enforced, that’s their prerogative.

And really, what are you out if they do delete a post? It’s not like you paid for it or you have some sort of quota you have to meet. You just toss things out into the internet, and some of them float and others sink.

Firefox.

Seriously. Every app I’ve tried has come up short in one way or another. Lemmy is best in a browser and the best browser is Firefox.

It strikes me that, sort of ironically, “infinite” is only a difficult concept to grasp if you’re smart enough to understand it.

Stupid people just sort of take it for granted. “Finite” is the thing they can’t seem to wrap their heads around.

It doesn’t matter how much money he has - every time I visualize Musk posting to Twitter, I see him as a teenage edgelord in a shabby suburban tract house, hunched over an off-the-shelf desktop PC in a room with green shag carpeting and fake wood paneling, lit only by the glow from the screen, giggling to himself.

Right, but that doesn’t answer my question. If anything, it makes me more curious, since this isn’t the first time he’s been singled out for doing the same thing that virtually all of them do as a matter of course.

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing - quite the contrary. Charging (and preferably removing from office and imprisoning) corrupt politicians is not only a good thing, but arguably the single best thing we could do as a nation right now. Official corruption is at the heart of virtually every single ill that this country currently suffers.

But it’s notably a thing that’s almost never prosecuted, in spite of the fact that it’s not only widespread, but often brazen.

So again, I’m just curious what’s special about him - why a government that generally turns a blind eye to corruption has chosen to prosecute this particular instance of it.

I wonder what this is really about.

I have no doubt that the corruption is real, but that’s sort of beside the point, since corruption is essentially universal in Washington. There has to be some reason that they focused on him specifically when they legitimately could charge pretty much anyone and everyone. Charging one Washington politician with corruption is sort of like charging one Burning Man attendee with drug possession.

Yeah - I used to check in on it from time to time, and there were always new responses, and new people trying to argue with him, and he’d just run them in circles with hilariously overly literal (mis)interpretations of whatever they said. It went on for years.

I’m pretty sure I remember the admin deleting part of it while it was still active, and eventually deleting it entirely. It’s a shame - it should’ve been saved for posterity.

Years ago, on IMDb, a poster called rabbitmoon kept a thread going for years on the Rambo board that is still the best I’ve ever seen.

The whole thing started with him posting that he was shocked when, about a third of the way through the movie, there was a scene in which a character was shot with a bullet from a gun. Then he countered, completely earnestly and deadpan, every response he got.

The original thread is long gone, and the only thing I could find of it is an excerpt that was posted on Reddit - LINK

And not only will you make everyone’s lives better - seemingly ironically, by simply accepting the fact that you’re often wrong, you actually make it more likely that you’ll be right.

That’s the part that I think people especially need to understand, since a refusal to admit that you’re wrong is generally rooted in an ego-driven need to be right, and refusing to admit that you’re wrong guarantees that right is the one thing that you won’t be. You’ll just keep clinging to the same wrong idea and keep failing to fulfill that need to be right.

If, on the other hand, you just freely admit that you’re wrong, then you’re instantly free to move on to another, and better, position, making it that much more likely that you’ll actually be right. And if you don’t get it that time, that’s fine - just freely admit that you’re wrong again and move on again. Keep doing that and sooner or later you actually will be right, instead of just pretending to be.

So you’ll not only make everyone’s lives more pleasant - you’ll actually better serve your desire to be right. What more could you want?

I hadn’t thought about it before, but on reflection, I do too. And I wouldn’t be surprised if most people do.

Exaggerated a bit for effect, it would me more or less:

There = thehr

Their = thayr

They’re = thay-r

“There” is just simple and straightforward with a pure short ‘e’ sound and no particular stresses.

“Their” has more of a long ‘a’ than a short ‘e’ sound, and a bit of stress on the vowel sound.

“They’re” also has more of a long ‘a’ sound and it’s pronounced just a fraction longer than in “their”, and there’s a very slight pause between the vowel sound and the ‘r’.

Huh… learn something new every day.

Decentralization isn’t an ideal - it’s a fact. It’s the reality of the fediverse.