Oil CEOs pay fines for bringing about a global climate catastrophe. Fascist politicians are given slaps on the wrist for an attempted coup d’etat. Government officials openly commit gross violations of privacy and suffer no consequences.

But a guy hacks a university network and downloads a hoard of scientific articles that should have been freely accessible to begin with and he gets 35 years in prison. I’ll admit I wasn’t familiar with this case before I saw this picture. Which is kind of insane in and of itself.

It would sure help a lot if we would sufficiently fund education programs so that class sizes weren’t massive and teachers weren’t wildly overstretched. Children are the same as they always have been, plus a little early life trauma from the pandemic and the rising cost of living crisis.

“If you, my friend, are not acquainted with the juvenile justice system, you will be very shortly,” the officer told the child.  Earlier that day, the child allegedly spit at a teacher. Now, he was in handcuffs and a police officer was saying he could end up in jail.  That child — a second grader with autism at a North Carolina school — was ultimately pinned on the floor for 38 minutes, according to body camera video of the incident. At one point, court records say, the officer put his knee in the child’s back.

Jesus christ that is so fucking disgusting. What kind of line is that? Does he think he’s in a movie or something? Cops literally live in an alternate reality where they’re some kind of action heros or something as they physically assault second graders with autism and threaten them with institutionalization.

I have adhd and definitely relate to craving familiarity and routine. This is a good general reference, though. I think the overlap between autism and adhd is vast and poorly understood.

I never said it wasn’t. I was originally writing this as a response to a commenter who said the error was ~15%. My comment initially started with “He was actually significantly more accurate than that.”

The accuracy he achieved and in that time period with the information available to him is frankly staggering. The degree of his error is slightly complicated by the stadion not being a historically exact figure, but his calculation showed the Earth to be 252,000 stadia in circumference. Accounting for the variability in the exact length of the stadia dependent on what definition was used in the calculation, that gives us in kilometers 39,060km on the lower end and 40,320km on the upper. The actual circumference of the Earth is 40,075km. This gives him an error range of between -2.4% and +0.8%.

He also didn’t just use a stick but used extensive geographic charts to calculate the distance between the 2 cities where he measured the shadow. It was a monumental achievement and is shockingly accurate. I also believe this knowledge was lost to time and for quite a long time after we did not have any measurements even close to this accuracy.

Here is a picture visually demonstrating how he performed his calculation.

It’s hard to explain how significant the Voyager 1 probe is in terms of human history. Scientists knew as they were building it that they were making something that would have a significant impact on humanity. It’s the first man made object to leave the heliosphere and properly enter the interstellar medium, and this was always just a secondary goal of the probe. It was primarily intended to explore the gas giants, especially the Jovian lunar system. It did its job perfectly and gave us so many scientific discoveries just within our solar system.

And I think there’s something sobering about the image of it going on a long, endless road trip into the galactic ether with no destination. It’s a pretty amazing way to retire. The fact that even today we get scientific data from Voyager, that so far away we can still communicate with it and control it, is an unbelievable achievement of human ingenuity and scientific progress. If you’ve never seen the image the Pale Blue Dot you should see it. That linked picture is a revised version of the image made by Nasa and released in 2020. It’s part of a group of the last pictures ever taken by Voyager 1 on February 14th 1990, a picture of Earth from 6 billion kilometers away. It’s one of my favorite pictures, and it kinda blows my mind every time I see it.

Yeah I can definitely see how the argument about “original semites” is coming very close to outright hatred and antisemitism. We have to be more conscious of the language we use than that. We shouldn’t be making arguments in this vein but instead focusing on anti-colonial arguments. When discussing the colonialism of relocating European Jewish communities to Palestine there’s no reason to be using this kind of “race politics” language.

The relationship between Ashkenazi jews and the communities that were already present in Palestine is not something I understand very well, and more broadly the history of Ashkenazi jews as a whole is something I’m only familiar with as it relates to early 20th century European politics. It’s something I’d like to do my own research on from reliable sources to better understand how these kinds of arguments feed into genuine hatred of Jewish people.

I’m not as educated on the broader nature of antisemitic arguments as I should be. I appreciate you adding context to why some Jewish students feel unsafe with the discourse going on at the moment. Anti-Zionist action has an obligation to protect Jewish people as much as it has an obligation to protect Muslim people and ethnic Palestinians. Our goals ought to be to separate ourselves from race hierarchy and protect human rights for all. It’s critically important that in advocating against the Israeli government and the IDF that we do not tolerate anti-semitism in any form and that we reject the support of ant-semitic people wherever it appears.

It is here. We did the math, and a mortgage on a brand new house was literally half our rent at 20k down. The barrier to entry is the down payment. Those “good terms” entirely have to do with how much income you make and how much debt you have.

I pay for maintenance on my apartment. This is essentially universal where I live. Also, maintenance costs do not come anywhere near the gap between mortgage and rent payments. Mortgage is literally less than half on a very, very shitty apartment. We didn’t even have proper heating when we first moved in to our last apartment. We both work full-time jobs. The building was very close to being condemned. It was the cheapest in our town of less than 100k. Mortgage on homes less than 10 years old was legitimately half our rent. Including HOA, including insurance, including taxes and utilities, it was literally half the cost.

But 20k we do not have. And we have not been able to save even a quarter of that, as our cost of living has doubled in the last 4 years. Entirely due to profiteering by corporations and landlords.

Long and gist of it, no, unless it’s a government run property rent is literally 0 out of 10 times going to be cheaper. Do you not understand the fundamental purpose of being a landlord? Are you under some kind of delusional belief that any measurable amount of landlords are in the business of renting properties out of the kindness of their hearts? No, being a landlord is just like being a company that sells water. You’re going to charge absolutely as much as you can possibly get away with, because literally the entire purpose of being a landlord is to make money while doing as little time investment as possible. Our last landlord did literally nothing for over a year while the house fell apart around us. We gave him over 20 thousand dollars in rent. The land tax there was peanuts. He pocketed at least 10k for doing literally nothing.

The point of being a landlord is having enough net money at the start to literally not work. To literally do no labor for which they are beholden to someone. To collect tax from the serfs that occupy their land. They are part of a separate economic and social class. And profiteering is the entire reason anyone chooses to do it. There’s literally no other measurable reason. There may be one or 2 mythical landlords who are running themselves into debt cause they love their tenants or whatever the fuck, but they’re not even a thousandth of a percentile. Literally statistically irrelevant.

So morality of crime is defined by the success of the victim?

Close, the morality of a crime is defined by the impact that committing the crime has on the lives and rights of others. Killing someone is a vile crime. You’ve taken away someone’s inaliable right to life. Stealing from the poor is a vile crime. You have taken the means of survival from someone who struggles to survive. Stalking is a vile crime. You’ve interceded on someone’s inaliable right to privacy and safety.

How does downloading a cracked video game or a TV show impact others? Who is being victimized, and how are they being victimized? Say, for instance, that today I download a game for free. What tangible impact does this have on others?

So if our ‘victim’ is a multi billion dollar corporation that is one of the fastest growing game companies in the world and is quickly approaching income levels rivaling some small nations, the tangible impact that me downloading their game for free has is literally none. There is no impact. They will never even know that I did it, and I do not consider the “right to commerce” as a fundamental human right. I do not think that me taking potential profits from billionaire investors is in any way interceding on their human rights and also do not believe that the action causes any harm to them.

So if you become incredibly successful for what you created there becomes a point where it’s moral for you to lose all rights and control over your art?

Corporations are not people. The designers artists and programmers at Nintendo do not direcy profit from game sales. They are paid a salary by their company. Again, it’s relative. There is no such thing as a moral absolute, we have to consider the context in which actions happen and the effects those actions cause. Stealing from the poor is vile. Stealing from Walmart isn’t.

So then the moral of the lesson is that art is worthless and creating new things serves no useful purpose?

I do not consider the primary purpose of art to be profit for shareholders, if that’s what you consider “useful purpose”. Art is useful in that it communicates human emotions and experiences. It’s useful in that it delights us, it inspires us, and we take great enjoyment in it. Even if all art was free, this would still be true. Free games are fun. Free books are worth reading. Free music is worth listening to. Paintings don’t lose value because I can see them without paying. Your view of art and your view of capital are so intertwined that you are ignorant of the reality that art is not capital.

Almost like the game companies learned that same lesson from people like you and just started making shittier games to accomodate their shittier fans.

Every single corporation on Earth will cut as many corners as possible to generate the maximum possible revenue for the minimal possible cost. Shitty games still sell exceedingly well. They have a profit incentive to invest as little money into their games as possible. Games as products are less enjoyable than games as art. We love games whose creators felt passion in creating them. We love games whose designers believed in what they were making, and felt connected to their product. Faceless corporations lose this entirely. Games are how Nintendo makes money. Therefore, even if no one wants to make this game, it must be made. For Nintendo must turn profit. This is part of the reason some games are amazing experiences and others are clear, transparent cash grabs.

I’m anti capitalist and explicitly anti commerce, especially with regards to large corporations, so. Whether it’s for piracy or not doesn’t matter. When I buy a game, I should have a legal right to do whatever I want with the data comprising that game. Including creating software to play it on other devices. It, therefore, should absolutely be legal to create and use emulators. Whether a particular end user is using it on legitimately purchased copies is beyond the scope of control of the creator of the emulator. This was already settled in courts in the 90s.

Piracy is also moral. It’s always moral to pirate content created and/or distributed my international corporations with income in the billions.

The very beginning. The emulator scene has existed since the 80s. The emulator scene has fought against Nintendo since literally the NES. And they have frequently won.

Painting nails different colors has always been a thing lol

Actually, that’s assuming that the track is a straight line. The distance from the beginning to the end of the track could be just a few feet, and the distance along the rail and thusly the number of people infinite.

Move to the end of the track and undo the constraints of people on the track. You will have infinite time until the trolly reaches the end, and can thusly save infinite lives by doing so.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

I never made any comment on my opinion towards the application of the term. I only pointed out that it’s used differently, for reasons determined by social factors, and that more specific language eliminates confusion.

What you’re describing sounds like verbal and emotional abuse. You can call it that. It’s okay to say that you have been verbally abused before. I don’t know you, nor can I make any kind of sweeping declarative statements based on 2 sentences a random person has sent me. But I assume that you feel you were abused and I am in no way invalidating that.

I think a significant part of this is rooted in how those two sentences are usually used socially to denote different things. Men routinely describe their wife being upset at them in any capacity as yelling at them. When a woman says her husband is yelling at her she usually doesn’t mean that he got upset that she said something insensitive about him, she usually means that her husband had a bad day and came home to hurl misogynistic slurs and vague threats at his wife. Or that she didn’t want to have sex and he became enraged at her.

Verbal abuse is a serious issue that also happens to men but would usually come with some kind of clarification from the speaker. As it is socially less common for men to feel comfortable enough to talk about their experiences with physical and emotional abuse. Women by and large suffer on an almost entire class basis from these things, and our language reflects that. Nobody decided it is that way, it’s a byproduct of violence against women. The most accurate application of the language would be “my spouse is verbally/mentally/emotionally abusing me” and it does yield pretty consistent results for husband/wife.

That’s become a whole rallying call for queerphobia lately. They also have beef with the words diversity, equity, and inclusion? I don’t even fucking know they can’t make their thoughts coherent and they don’t even bother trying.