Also every manic pixie dream girl

So much this.

Also, its not just Bart Simpson, it is Homer too.

• Homer: (wakes up from a daydream about “the land of chocolate”). “What? Huh? Oh, uh we were talking about chocolate?” – Boss: “That was ten minutes ago!”
• At a Stone Cutters meeting, he uses the Sacred Parchment as a napkin. When everyone starts yelling at him for that, he gets nervous out and starts using it as a napkin even more.
• “You have my undivided attention” (watches a cartoon in his head)
• “What would my life be like if I robbed the Quick-E-Mart?” (imagines himself living in a mansion, wearing a tuxedo, spinning his gun on his finger, Marge in a swimsuit doing a 60’s dance beside him.) “I’ll do it! I’ll rob the Quick-E-Mart…D’oh!” (he has already walked out to his car and is driving home).
• When marge spends the whole day cleaning the house to host a party for friends, homer plays with a toy racecar track in his underwear. Marge says to him: “Homer! The only thing I asked you to do for this party is to put on pants and you didn’t do it!”

What I want to know is, how much energy was used to create these floors, install them, and how much energy will be required to service them (the electronics) if they break down over the useful life of the installation, including how much energy was spent on resource extraction and processing.

Then I want to see that number compared as a ratio to the amount of energy these floors can generate over their expected useful life span, say 15 years in high pedestrian traffic areas.

I am highly skeptical that the ratio would even approach 1:1, I expect a net energy loss. But I could be convinced otherwise with some good data.

Adding Solar to More Devices

I never understood why this wasn’t more common already. … Why not? Seems like an obvious solution…

Good question, with a simple engineering answer: often times the energy cost of creating these solar panels and installing them into devices is considerably higher than the amount of energy those devices could possibly except after many decades of constant use. The point in time at which the solar energy collected by the device matches the energy cost to create and install the device might actually be longer than the life of the solar panel or the device itself. So adding solar to every last little thing will actually cost a lot more money for consumers while causing more harm to the environment.

That is not to say that solar is always bad, in fact solar is incredibly good when used at industrial scales, especially in power stations, and on the rooftops of factories, parking lots, shopping centers, data centers, and warehouses.

We see too often on the news stories about how some amazing invention might help solve global warming, but this is often just propaganda. The oil and car companies want you to think buying more technology from these tech companies (which are often their own subsidiary companies) will solve the problem. But really it is just another way of profiting off of people, tricking them into buying their stuff rather than reducing consumption, reusing, and recycling, and without those companies doing any of the hard work on the energy transition themselves.

How can you pirate Photoshop and Elements? They are WebAssembly binaries that phone home before you are allowed to use them.

She had a history of horrible policies.

The idea that voters vote based on policy rather than loyalty is totally incomprehensible to the Democratic party.

If you get the government to simply declare everyone else “terrorists” then there is no need for rule of law anymore, you can do whatever you want! Because they are by definition worse than anything we do to them. How convenient for those states with plans for committing genocide, it doesn’t count as genocide if you are mass-murdering terrorists.

This strategy of the government calling every troublesome minority ethnic group anywhere “terrorists” got kicked into high gear when the US government started using 9/11 as an excuse to commit war crimes and remove restrictions from police forces (like the right of habeas corpus), and it has been a constant slippery slope since then. Nowadays the Biden administration officially considers the “Anti Fascist” movement in the US “terrorism,” although no one in government refers to fascist mass shooters as “terrorists.” Gee, I wonder why they would do that?

I know, this one is so plausibly something those psychos in the various school board across the fucked-up state of Florida would actually do, I honestly thought this was real for a moment.

They have already shut down entire school libraries, and censored several other public libraries, and are trying to make it illegal to speak freely about slavery or genocide or generally being critical of the US or the glorious military. And there is no shortage of 100% serious, 100% unironic talk (“protected free speech”) among ordinary Florida folk about how the slaves actually had it pretty good since they never had to worry about paying for rent or food, and anyone could have done the unskilled labor they did, “I mean, they never had human rights, but what would animals I mean black folk want with those.”

I mean, this Onion headline is really, really plausibly real, and might even become real pretty soon.

That looks like artwork from The Lispy Gopher Show. I love it!

EDIT: yep, artwork by Tomas Prahou a.k.a. @pmjv@lemmy.sdf.org .

According to the story told by Schwarzenneger’s character in part 2, Skynet started out controlling only in US Air Force drones (hence the name), and was soon after connected to everything else. Eventually human decision making was removed from the control of the system.

It was also the plot of the Terminator series of films. Well, except for the detail that the AI controlling the aircraft (called “Skynet”) became “self aware” and that is what caused it to launch all the nukes to kill all the humans.

So how it differ from Terminator’s “Skynet” is that these real life AI are being controlled by genocidal maniacs (the largest concentration of whom seem to live in the US and Israel at present) and they are setting these things to “auto-kill” mode, like what happened in Gaza recently. And the genocidal maniacs gleefully ignore international law, saying “you want to stop me, you and what army?” So who is to keep them from turning the robots against you and me?

Came here to say this. I once cut open a 9-volt battery and discovered it was really just 6 AAAA batteries wired in series.

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Why are you trying to distract from that?

I am not trying to distract from that, I thought I made myself clear:

this particular report seems to be more concerned with anti-Trans and neo-Nazi propaganda which is indeed a real problem, and their research here would otherwise probably be very useful

But if Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL is defending the genocide of Palestinians, that is some pretty important context. If there happens anything in the report about pro-Palestine protests being equated with neo-Nazis, you need to take those parts with an extra few grains of salt.

I am upvoting this thread for being relevant to the discussion, but man, this article makes me sick. They are completely ruining Star Trek.

they’re not really illegal at all, are they?

If a police officer commits murder but the D.A. covers it up and the officer is never charged with a crime, does this make murder by the police legal?

Yes, it is illegal, and the government does not enforce laws consistently. The point is, this is a moral failing of Starfleet/the US government. This is an injustice.

“Illegal?” DS9’s S31 was protected by Starfleet Command. They were completely untouchable.

They can be both protected and illegal. Sisko noted that the organization was completely antithetical to the laws of Starfleet, e.g. committing genocide against the Changlings of the Dominion (they used the actual word “genocide” to describe what Section 31 did in the show). But their existence was neither denied nor acknowledged by Starfleet. This is part of the reason why he asked Bashir to act as a double-agent.

It was clearly analogous to the CIA, which for decades has been collecting money from the illegal drug trade and supporting terrorist organizations around the world, all in the name of “national security.” It was a critique of the US government, like most of the Star Trek episodes that deal with the moral shades of gray within the laws of Starfleet. It is clear from their political commentary that the shows morality was staunchly anti-fascist.

And this new film on Section 31 completely reversing their former politics and joining with and celebrating the fascists is more than I can stomach.

Poisoning the well

Yeah, that seems to be the M.O. of the Anti-Defamation League with regard to anti-zionism: poison the well against anyone who might feel empathy with the Palestinian people before they have a chance to speak, by equating them with antisemitism and Nazis.

Ironically, the Palestinian people are technically Semitic people also, but their wells are being literally poisoned by white Phosphorus bombs “made with [white] pride in the USA,” and dropped by different Semitic people who have the privilege to do that.

This is why white supremacy is so evil, it is so arbitrary. Who gets counted as “white” and that dividing line between enjoying privilege and being a victim of mass murder changes from day to day, and place to place. Zionism just happens to include Jews in that definition of white (while also excluding Palestinians), where as antisimitism excludes Jews, but both are white supremacy.

Deep Space Nine made it absolutely clear that Section 31 is an illegal black-ops org with garb somewhat reminiscient of Nazi storm troopers, they were the bad guys.

Yeoh has described it as “Mission: Impossible in space,” and likened the tone to the Guardians of the Galaxy movies.

Mission: Impossible, the longest-running, pro-CIA anti-socialist propaganda series in US history. OK… so now Star Trek is about making illegal black-ops Nazis look cool?

Fuck these fucking producers. I want my gay space communism back.

Until the ADL gets rid of their pro-genocide leadership and spokespeople, I can’t take any of their reports seriously. Its a shame, since this particular report seems to be more concerned with anti-Trans and neo-Nazi propaganda which is indeed a real problem, and their research here would otherwise probably be very useful. They have really damaged their own reputation this past half year by equating support of Palestinian victims of genocide with antisemitism.