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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I’m one of those people who knows we should standardize, bit also finds Fahrenheit just very convenient.

    Like, when people say it’s 50 out, I immediately know that it’s going to feel about halfway between what I know 0 and 100 feel like. No one can even put up the pretext of doing that with Celsius, because not even the most pedantic person ever bothers to tell you when it’s 100 c out.

    In seriousness though, the Fahrenheit scale isn’t non-sense, it’s just addressing things we don’t much need help with anymore. The zero point was chosen as a temperature you can create reliably without particularly sophisticated tools, and the range is so freezing and boiling are 180 degrees apart, putting them on the opposite sides of a dial.


  • Ugh, I’m one of those people who will defend imperial as not being irrational, just built ad-hoc for purposes that aren’t in alignment with modern ones and … No, that’s not what Fahrenheit is.

    Fahrenheit was trying to make a temperature scale that was easy to recreate to ease the calibration of thermometers. Zero is a temperature that can be created in your garage with some ice, salt and water. 100 was his best, ultimately inaccurate, attempt to measure human body temperature, since it’s another easy calibration point, and from there water was defined as 32 and 212 so that they were 180 degrees apart, which would fit will on a temperature dial.
    Not irrational, not a comfort scale, and not in alignment with current needs.

    It’s pure coincidence that it kinda lines up with comfortable outdoor temperatures in the opinion of a good chunk of a population living in the northern part of the western hemisphere.


  • Are you asking me why I have an opinion on something? Because I do. You don’t need special reasons to make comments on a forum.

    You aren’t listening. They depicted black people in the fashion that they depicted Greek people. They didn’t find them a weird novelty. The nature of ancient Greek prejudice wouldn’t have them depict people as Greek that they didn’t consider Greek. That intrinsically says something about the cultural integration, because that’s what the Greeks got weird over. If it was uncommon for them to be there they would have mentioned it because they mentioned all manner of uncommon things.
    If they were a part of the society, and common enough that it wasn’t worth mentioning “…and then the one black guy in Athens showed up…”, then it seems clear to me that that’s “plenty”.

    Nothing is being spun. I and others have given you evidence. You haven’t and are just making vacuous claims. Why do you have the opinion you do about the skin tone content of ancient Greece? Is it the enlightenment era paintings of Greek philosophers as white as could be? That the paint fell off the statues so now they’re just white marble? That all the black people in the pottery are “obviously” artistic choices, but the white people just … Are?
    I’m sure you have a reason for thinking what you do, so what is it?
    Neither a conversation nor a debate works by one person demanding evidence, denying it, and then refusing to elaborate In their beliefs.


  • Alright, demonstrate that the demographics are as you assert they are. I’ve shown you that they’re depicted in their arts and culture, both as they depicted outsiders and as they depicted themselves, as well as that they had unremarkable interactions with Ethiopia and beyond.
    The link also details the history of using the racial composition of ancient Greece for all manner of racial weirdness that wasn’t representative of the Greeks themselves, up to and including Internet race weirdos who get bent out of shape about a black person being depicted in a movie set in the Mediterranean.

    At this point you’ve been given plenty of evidence that there sufficient numbers of dark skinned people that it wasn’t remarkable. If you disagree that it would somehow have been remarkable, or that this isn’t a perfectly workable definition of “plenty”, then show some reason why beyond “well everyone knows”.
    Hell, demonstrate that there were plenty of white people.







  • You may be conflating the quakers with a different religious group.
    While still a religious group, the quakers are largely one of the most accepting. They were initially given trouble by the Dutch. Their numbers have never really been high enough to have the type of social sway that you’re thinking.

    Maybe you’re thinking the puritans or pilgrims? They’re the ones who kinda took over. Shame, inherent sin and all that.
    The quakers are the pacifist abolitionists who think church should be a group of people quietly thinking in someone’s home until someone feels moved to share an idea.

    While it would be better if our country was less religiously locked in, I’m pretty sure if it was the quakers that rose to prevalence we’d be way better off, even if only from the “not my job to enforce your morality” part.


  • Hey, let’s not turn dislike for the technology into dislike for people.

    You saw someone copying and pasting back and forth between email and chatgpt, message coworkers and then work on a chart in Excel.
    For all you know he was using chatgpt to translate the emails, not as a prosthetic mind.

    group that all had very Indian looking names

    What does the ethnicity of who he messaged matter? If anything it lends credence to “guy used translation software for work email”.

    At no point in the 3 hour flight did a conscious thought enter his mind

    completely dependent on AI. Without it their lives and careers would fall apart. This guy would pay anything for it. He cannot function without it

    That’s a mighty leap to make from what you described.
    Saying someone else didn’t have conscious thought reeks of “I’m the main character and everyone else is an NPC”.

    There are people who use it. There are people who pay for it, and there are people who over use and over pay for it. That can be true and you can be upset by it without demoting people below “consciousness”.


  • You are one dense person. You’re literally asking me to understand what I said to you.

    What part of anything I said to you implies I’m not taking it seriously? That I don’t understand the dangerous path we’re on?

    You’re saying it’s an American problem, so we should fix it ourselves. I’m saying that we quite likely don’t have the ability to hurt the people in power meaningfully before they escalate things further.

    Saying you should stop giving us money because it’s one of the only things that might hurt them or get people desperate enough to depose them before they start a war with Canada or Denmark isn’t failing to take it seriously or not understand it.
    I’m truly confused how you’re ending up in that place.

    Are you going to explain to the drone, you didn’t support Trump? Complain about the democrats for the situation you’re in? Stop being stupid. All of your bullshit excuses don’t matter anymore.

    Are you just using me as a punching bag because you’re mad at Americans as a whole?


  • Why are you mad at me? I’m not the one saying we should do those things, nor did I vote for him or support him. I’ve done damned near everything an individual can do.

    Americans aren’t a monolith. Some of us are terrified of the things that are happening and want them to stop. You’re mad at the people who want it to stop and are desperately saying “we might not be able to stop this, please help”.

    You’re arguing that people you think are stupid wouldn’t do something you think is stupid. Think about that for a minute.

    America’s ability to occupy is more complicated than you think. We regularly set unattainable objectives, but it’s not like we were forced out of Iraq or Afghanistan.
    An invasion of Canada would definitely go poorly, but do you think it would go worse for Canadians or Americans?
    Our invasion of Afghanistan lasted 20 years and cost us around 2,000 lives. It cost the Afghans more than 100,000. In excess of a million if you count non-direct deaths.
    Failed occupations because they didn’t complete their objectives, not because of an ineffective military presence.
    I have no idea if we’d succeed or not in an annexation of Canada, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that optimistically millions of people would die, and they would be disproportionately Canadian civilians.

    You’re assuming that a whole bunch of countries aren’t busy acquiring nuclear weapons right now.

    I make no such assumption. The reality is it takes time to actually produce them. It can take years to build the equipment needed to start production on the materials. A nuke in 4 years isn’t a deterrent to an attack in less than 3.

    Y’all get emotional and want to do stupid things for the sake of your pride. Worrying about pride while you have a goddamn child molester as a President. Stupid people.

    What are you even talking about here? Do you think my comment was in someway a statement of pride? You’re mad at the people who are saying they need help because they don’t know if they can stop them from hurting you.
    They’re threatening me with economic hardship, my neighbors with deportation to a random country, and my friends with erasure. They’re threatening you with starvation, bombing, death by infection, and being arbitrarily shot because your car was a convenient target.

    It’s our problem, but that doesn’t mean it won’t hurt you.



  • ricecake@sh.itjust.workstoPolitical Humor@lemmy.worldwe should
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    12 days ago

    Yes, writing off the nation where everyone is an idiot, that’s armed with nuclear weapons, and has expansionist ideals and deciding to just leave them to their own devices because pushing back is possibly difficult or risky will work out great.

    It should only be a problem is you’re a nation in the western hemisphere without nuclear weapons, so I’m sure it’s fine. Mexicans, greenlanders and Canadians aren’t worth causing a fuss over, and I’m sure they’ll stop there. Just ask Poland.



  • ricecake@sh.itjust.workstoPolitical Humor@lemmy.worldwe should
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    12 days ago

    “it’s not my responsibility to not support something bad because it’s your fault. I’m going to keep giving the source of the problem money until you make it go away. Hurry up and do something, as long as that something doesn’t involve asking me not to financially suppor the problem.”.


  • So for the first part, I don’t disagree at all. I just don’t think the logistics or theoretical necessity is a bearing on the symbolic-ness of it. Same for the effectiveness of it. Even if it changed literally nothing and no one would ever know I still wouldn’t shake hands with someone I considered evil.

    I don’t see defining a subset of what you consider evil, like dissemination of hate speech, to be a downside.

    There’s a lot of complex questions around a platform curating ideological content which could possibly make them loose certain platform protections. Right now most platforms are roughly content neutral because it allows them to be viewed as platforms, rather than publishers. This is more a response to the claim that there’s no reason for them not to remove ice. It may or may not be compelling, but it’s a real reason.

    As for the use of the word “service”, sometimes my hands type slower than my brain thinks. My intent was to convey “those who develop and control the mastodon license”. Hopefully my original statement makes more sense in that context.
    Those are the people providing the printing press schematic analog. Obviously an idea can’t support an ideology in that sense.

    I’m not of the opinion either supports them in a way that’s worth getting angry over.
    We also aren’t talking about being angry at ISPs for being willing to deliver packets to and from ice or Nazis, or any of the other entities that do less then the most they could possibly do to distance themselves.