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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I think this is why Trump could win. “I don’t believe the polls”.

    Democrats need to wake the fuck up - Biden is not a good candidate and time is running out to select someone else. Don’t ignore the polls because you don’t like what they say - that is utter stupidity.

    Democrats are going to let Trump back in by their own stupid machinations pretending that everyone thinks an 81 year old president is a good idea.

    This is like Hilary Clinton all over again - it was “her turn” to run so big hitters sat out the primaries. She was a bad candidate - she won her own vote well but in the US system you have to win the electoral college and she didn’t do it.

    Please Democrats - wake up. Not Biden.



  • I think your second half is bang on the nail for the missing part of this story. It is not just to drive search directly, it is also to control the browser market long term.

    That’s what Microsoft did very successfully with Internet Explorer too. They have it away for free and bundled it with Windows, killing all competition and then used that to leverage MSN. They also didn’t follow standards and through market dominance shaped the internet.

    Google sort of follows standards but they have also forced through proprietary standards or have broken code which is why some websites don’t work well in Firefox or Safari even now.

    Chromium may be open source but it is a tool used by Google to control and dominate the internet.

    Apple is exactly the same with WebKit - they talk about privacy and security but the real motivation is surpressong alternate routes to the internet from their devices whic then keeps iron control over payment methods particularly in iOS. Yet people in the apple eco system buy into the narrative that the one piece of software you’re not allowed in iOS is a non apple web browser, as if that is an acceptable approach. It’s just another manifestation of anti competitive behaviour and the power and money you can get by “free” software.



  • BananaTrifleViolin@kbin.socialtoPolitics@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    9 months ago

    I find the logic behind this uncomfortable. This may help people try rationalise issues in the US or other colonialised regions but it’s actually a fairly absolutionist view of the issue - the chain dismisses any argument or discussion about what it means to be indigenous vs a settler as invalid.

    At first glance that may not seem to be a big issue but lets invert this for a moment: I’m a white person living in Europe; does this stuff apply to me too? This absolutionist view is problematic - it’d also excuse the anti-immigration rhetoric of white nationalists in my continent. I’m an “indigenous” person in my country but I would not argue in favour of this chain or logic.

    I can understand the motive - a deep sense of injustice and dismissal of one group by another “majority” group. But this is not the solution - this just stifles discussion and frames any discussion as if there is no valid opinion that does not conform to one narrative.

    Indigenous vs colonial/settler/immigrant issues are not simple, they cannot be reduced or distilled in such an absolutionist way. You do not solve injustice or right the wrongs of the past by replacing it with a new type of injustice.




  • Read the text they wrote in the newsletter (I’ve posted is in this thread) and make up your own mind. Bear in mind this was not sent as private email expressing her views; they wrote it for (and published it in) the weekly Student Bar Association newsletter and signed it as SBA President.

    I doubt the NYU Law Student Bar Association is a political organisation.

    It is what was actually written and the context that matters in this story, both of which are largely missing from the theintercept.com coverage. The reaction was for them to lose their position as SBA President and have a job offer rescinded.

    EDIT: To be clear I don’t see how freedom or democracy has been curtailed here. People are free to say and do what they want, but actions have consequences. The SBA membership is entitled to remove their student president and the law firm is entitled to rescind a job offer.


  • Yeah this is exactly right; an inability to separate their own political stance from their professional role. For the law firm, there is also a lack of insight and common sense around wading into such a controversial and difficult issue in such a way.

    This is the text from their newsletter:

    Hi y’all.

    This week, I want to express, first and foremost, my unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians in their resistance against oppression toward liberation and self-determination. Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life. This regime of state-sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary. I will not condemn Palestinian resistance. Instead…

    I condemn the violence of apartheid. I condemn the violence of settler colonialism. I condemn the violence of military occupation. I condemn the violence of dispossession and stolen homes. I condemn the violence of trapping thousands in an open-air prison. I condemn the violence of collective punishment. I condemn the violence of phosphorous bombs. I condemn the violence of the United States military-industrial complex. >I condemn the violence of obfuscating genocide as a "complex issue.” I condemn the violence in labeling oppressed people as “animals.” I condemn the violence in removing historical context. I condemn the violence of silence.

    Palestine will be free.

    Your SBA President,
    Ryna

    This was in the NYU LAW Student Bar Association’s SBA Weekly newsletter.


  • So the way evolution works, the design we have works well enough that it doesn’t cause problems. It might be the best possible design or it might not, all that mattered is that whenever it arose in evolutionary history it was either an advantage over what camebefore in terms of survival so propagated or it was not detrimental and paired with something else genetically that propagated.

    We can’t definitively answer your question but we can speculate on why it’s a good idea to separate urine and faecal matter. Urine is a reasonable medium for growing bacteria. That wouldn’t matter in the colon but would matter if bacteria from the colon could ascend into the kidneys and diarupt it’s function. Valves could help or a bladder that drains into the colon, but complete separation may just be better.

    It may also be that the acidic nature of urine would disrupt the helpful bacteria we rely on to colonise our guts to help digest foods.

    Another possibility is the constant flow of urine would mean our faecal matter would never dry out. It’d be like having diarrhoea all the time and we’d need to poop constantly. The colon retrieves enough water - but not all water - that’s why poop isn’t hard as rock. If it was flooded with fluid it may not need to retrieve fluid.

    The fluid might even be stuck in a cycle between the colon and the kidneys and make it harder for the body to keep homeostasis - as the kidneys excrete more fluid to try and regulate fluid volume the the colon could just resorb it. Basically the colon could end up working against the kidneys and cause even more work for thenl body. It may just be less efficient than discarding water as needed.

    Drier faecal matter in the colon and a reservoir of fluid in the bladder does also give us freedom to release when it is safe to do so, which may protect us from predators (having to stop to poop even a few times a day is dangerous compared to only going when you know it’s safe to as there are more opportunities to be attacked by a predator). It would also be very easy to track an animal that leaves a constant trail of poop and urine uncontrollably behind it.

    All or none of these may be reasons why we have separate urinary and alimentary tracts; it’s impossible to know and would always be speculation. But regardless these do seem like reasonable reasons why we may have separate tracts.


  • I agree but I think ultimately this shows how broken the US electoral system is.

    The two parties have such control over the electoral apperatus that no other party can conceivably get a look in. Instead the two parties have broken down to form parties within parties but the overall bi-partisan set up makes it so unstable

    Effectively the MAGA republicans get disproportionate power - 8 representatives can cause chaos because the republican party cannot do anything but work with them.

    The debate is always about Republicans or Democrats when it really should be about electoral reform to break the duopoly. A dose of proportional representation even at local and state levels would be a huge step in the right direction in breaking the hold the two big parties have over the US.


  • Its usefulness as a laptop replacement may be limited. Remember it’s a locked down read-only version of Linux. The steam deck uses an a/b model to update. Basically there are two separate versions of the OS on the machine - when it updates it replaces one copy and makes that the default, and uses the other as the backup. Next system update it replaces the other copy and switches to that. It switches back and forth that way, putting a stock image on with each update. So you’d probably want to go down the route of running your own OS on it.

    Without that it does limit a little in how useful it is as a laptop like device. It depends what you want to do on it of course, and your Flatpak apps and personal files will stay but any other customisation you do to the device will get wiped each time it does a major update. That would include any installed software outside the Flatpak route if you unlock Pacman.

    It seems like a capable machine though. I have mine hooked up to my TV at 4K when at home. I use it to stream 4K game content from my desktop to my living room, but I’ve also played with the desktop mode in 4k and it’s been good. It renders 4k video well, and we know it’s capable of playing video games at 720p directly which is still generally intensive.

    I can’t see why it wouldn’t be able to do basic graphics work, but no idea about more intensive work like 3D modelling and video encoding.

    Personally I’d get a dedicated device for work but if you can’t afford that or you dont want to carry more than one device around then I guess it’s worth a try?

    Just remember if you do use it for work that also entails setting it up to back up your personal data. Your game data is largely backed up by Steam but if you put your work stuff on there then you’ll need to be protecting yourself in case of damage or theft.