@memfree - eviltoast
  • 105 Posts
  • 346 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • memfree@beehaw.orgtoMemes@sopuli.xyzCan anyone confirm?
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    3 days ago

    Does not work for ANY phrase. It seems to be presuming that the person asking is referencing something. Sample results copied here in order of AI’s least theorizing to its most.

    • horses before giraffes meaning

    “Horses before giraffes” has no scientific meaning because giraffes are not ancestors of horses…

    • put your horses before giraffes meaning

    “Put your horses before giraffes” is not a recognized English idiom. The similar and well-known idiom is “put the cart before the horse,” …

    • always put horses before giraffes meaning

    The phrase “always put horses before giraffes” is a variation of the well-known medical aphorism: “When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras”…

    • titrated solutions beget relief meaning

    The phrase “titrated solutions beget relief” means that carefully adjusted or fine-tuned treatments can bring about an end to a problem…







  • memfree@beehaw.orgtoPolitics@beehaw.orgDeath of a Troll
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    7 days ago

    Thank you for the excellent essay.

    a conservative might believe the egghead democrats would want to kill a simple truth-teller

    I’m so sad that this is true. Not only did Musk himself tweet “The Left is the party of murder,” but various random accounts have called Democrats responsible by demonizing conservatives as fascists and Nazis… which would only be demonization if the people accused weren’t spouting Nazi/fascist talking points. Further, we’ve no idea what percentage of the random accounts are bots or actual humans – but surely the volume of hate will sway too many conservatives to become increasingly hostile.

    Minor quibble:

    it is extraordinarily difficult to hit a person-sized target at all from this distance

    I disagree. It’d be hard with a pistol or AR-15 style weapon, but this was an old style bolt action hunting rifle. I haven’t seen a report saying it had a scope, but that’s how you’d generally set it up. If you hunt, you practice hitting much smaller targets (deer heart, etc.) at that distance, and may well actually hunt well beyond that range. Also, the guy missed. You don’t aim for the neck. He probably aimed for the head, but possibly the chest, and had his shot miss his target.

    I’m hoping this push to make Kirk an angelic martyr of the Trump movement is forgotten as quickly and Kirk resumes his rightful place in obscurity.

    Same here. Perhaps tomorrow we can remind people that we still want to release the Epstein files.


  • the goal for me is co-operation

    I asked a sincere question and you reply with snark. I don’t know why you commented when you weren’t willing to advance the discussion. You failed at your goal.

    I don’t care for individual greatness and competition

    That’s sweet, but it has nothing to do with the topic. It also doesn’t help you any when you need to punch a Nazi. I was talking about the government paying civilians to work for the common good (irrigation, bridges, etc.) and a population with a high standard of living. For whatever internal reason, it seems you decided to thrust imperialism into the definition of “great” – or redefine the word to mean something outside its definition, like “nice”.

    Know what’s great? Great White Sharks are great. They aren’t the whitest or largest, but they are the biggest of the commonly seen ass-kicking sharks. Know what’s not great? The Little Blue Heron – but it is much bluer than the Great Blue Heron.


  • Well then the Roman Empire could never have been Great, nor the Greek, Persian, Ottoman, Chinese and various dynasties therein. Cleopatra wasn’t Egyptian. She and her lineage of rulers were greek conquerors subjugating the locals, if you want to look at it that way. You are denying all of South America the right to ever claim greatness.

    I think I made it clear in my post that we all know there’s a history full of problems, so you seem to be trying to redefine terms without making any argument about the current case. Per the OED there are 85 definitions for “great”. Why skip the intended usage (powerful/eminent) for an informal meaning (good)?


  • The U.S. used to be known for high literacy, excellent schools k-college, high standard of living, countless innovations in sciences from health care to airplanes, and a presumption that you could improve your position in society rather than being confined to a class. All that sort of stuff combined is what I think of when the idea of U.S. greatness comes up.













  • Hey OP, you gotta give us a quote or synopsis or something. This is an archive of an Economist article from Aug 13th 2025 about a new English law and older protestors who have the free time to go out and make frail, wobbly, noise.

    The government placed Palestine Action on a terror list in July after its members vandalised two aeroplanes on a British air base. Most were arrested for holding a placard reading “I oppose genocide” (which is legal to say) and “I support Palestine Action” (which contravenes section 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000). Yet it revealed an overlooked facet of British politics. At street protests, it is often the boomers who are on the barricades.



  • It has always been strange to me that anyone would think animals don’t have a wide range of emotions. I understand that a scientist can’t ask how an animal is feeling, and must instead record avoidance/seeking behaviors, but it also seems vanishingly improbable that emotions aren’t part of a long and useful evolutionary methodology to get to the next generation. Cows have friends. Sure, it took effort to prove, but why wouldn’t we expect that? We see mothers nurture their offspring, and we could easily call it love and concern. It is good to see we now have proof that it isn’t just the cuddly creatures with emotions, but at least as far down the scale as fish.



  • agrivoltaics projects typically envision animals grazing underneath solar panels — not hundreds of thousands of confined chickens packed into sheds.

    I presume “free range cage free” means hundreds of thousands of confined chickens packed into shed because the law allows it.

    There’s a smaller operator near me that charges about twice the standard price for eggs to afford making things nicer for their birds. They keep hundreds of chickens (maybe a few thousand?) in big sheds/coops with roosts, nest boxes and screened retractable roofs that give the birds sunshine when it isn’t raining. It isn’t free range, but it is cage free and less crowded than typical commercial operations, and it costs more than just packing the birds in a warehouse.

    Unfortunately, there’s no obvious way for consumers to know how animals are treated without doing more research than practical for the average busy person. There’s also a commercial egg factory near me (long windowless warehouses), so I checked and found cornucopia gives them a 3 out 5 score when I expected a 2 or less. The nicer place seems too small to even get listed. https://www.cornucopia.org/scorecard/eggs/