I’m looking forward to the James Bond crossover, Quantum Entangled.

I haven’t seen it, but do you get the sense that the movie wants us to think of Marin as a narcissist, or is she presented as sympathetic? I don’t often enjoy movies with protagonists who are shitty people, but it’s a valid choice.

Because I think it’s pretty much self-explanatory that separation on purely ethnicity/looks is not constructive where people are artificially treated as if they were different even though they’re not. I think the damage clearly outweighs here.

Justifying racism by saying ‘this is what we always did and it worked like that’ is not the right way forward imo as we can’t be stuck in the past and make the same mistakes that could be successfully improved.

What I’m trying to get at is that while appearance is not any kind of enlightened reason for distinct communities to have arisen, through accidents of history and genetics they did, and they are still relevant and appreciated by the people who are part of them. The color terminology is shorthand that acknowledges history. It’s not “justifying racism” to accept that in many places your ethnic background, especially if visible, means that certain experiences will have been more or less common for you. You can engage in this, even light heartedly, in good faith and as a way to understand your neighbors better, and indeed to think of them as your friends and neighbors instead of “Other.” People who are trying to do right by their fellow Americans are not using it to “separate,” but acknowledging that separation gave rise to proud, distinct communities and there’s no value in snuffing that out. The dialogue can be a way to unite us.

I believe we can agree that using visible “racial” markers to treat someone as less valuable than someone else is disturbing and evil, and still sadly common. I’m just saying that it’s not the mere use of the terms, or creating media that acknowledges them that results in the continuation of racism. Hell, in some ways, refusing to acknowledge differences gives a person with bad intent the license to settle on a single definition of what it means to be a “proper” American and to decide that anyone who doesn’t act the right way is less valuable: “I didn’t refuse to hire him because he’s black, but because he dresses and speaks differently. All he has to do is be exactly like me and I’d be more than happy to hire him!” (coughJDVancecoughcough)

So, good for you, but the particular dynamics of being a colonial country that had a massive portion of its economy based on race-based slavery has resulted in an approach to diversity that has much deeper roots and has been wrestling with hard issues for much longer than Germany has, and Germany’s own record with dealing with identifiable minorities in the last hundred years has, shall we say, not always been great.

Many European countries are only now hitting levels of diversity America had fifty years ago, and America has been made of statistically significant communities with distinctive origins for hundreds of years, and this in a colonizing country where there is no historically continuous monoculture. Historically, people tend to become dicks to the “Other” among them when faced with hardship, and much of American history reflects that sort of thing, but also its aftermath and attempts to heal.

Diverse and defiantly distinctive communities formed and persisted because that was how people got by and found support and could make their way, admittedly often because opportunities to assimilate, into whatever soup of dimly remembered pan-European customs that passes for a privileged culture here, were intentionally blocked. Yet even if the reasons for them are shameful, they are real and important, and the American dialogue on race simply cannot be color-blind even when well-meaning. Instead, it has to be a dance, where people of goodwill celebrate both differences and similarities and do not set groups above one another but also do not pretend they don’t exist.

I wish more Americans would understand that our approach rarely translates well, and for fuck’s sake I wish we had fewer people who were stuck in the bad old days where reconciliation and healing were very much not priorities. That said, I also wish that people from countries with a very different cultural and historical experience would not assume that their countries have shit figured out, when a lot of it simply boils down to “we don’t have many people with darker skin shades here.”

It never was, but unlike the current batch of LLM assistants that are now dominating the tops of “search” results, it never claimed to be. It was more, “here’s what triggered our algorithm as “relevant.” Figure out your life, human.”

Now, instead, you have a paragraph of natural text that will literally tell you all about cities that don’t exist and confidently assert that bestiality is celebrated in Washington DC because someone wrote popular werewolf slash fanfic set in Washington state. Teach the LLMs some fucking equivocation and this problem is immediately reduced, but then it makes it obvious that these things aren’t Majel Barrett in Star Trek and they’ve been pushed out much too quickly.

FJM = Father John Misty?

If so, OMG you could gaze at ALL THE NAVELS!

Jason Isbell released a new album, and it’s definitely a divorce album. Maybe not as many all-time greats as usual, since it’s so personal and occasionally pretty raw, but some beautiful turns of phrases and guitar work.

Stove, microwave, and two battery-operated dial clocks here. I didn’t go anywhere today, so I’ll find out in the morning if the car needs it. I honestly don’t remember. The Rice cooker just cycled back to correct. :-)

Aerocart from Worx looks a little gimmicky, but might be closer to your needs.

If budget is no object, then maybe a Polymule at USD1000+.

Inbetween, there’s something like a “Foldit Cart”.

Try searches for folding wheelbarrow, folding garden cart, or folding “vermont” cart. Your options get better if you can live without it being collapsible.

They literally said that they don’t want to tell, because it will lead to users gaming the system. 😒

…Revolt is the FOSS alternate for discord right?

Yes, or for a more limited feature set, Matrix.

So, what? Are they just crushing your muscle fibers with meat tenderizers and hoping it heals back better? That looks… unsettling.

Oddly, though, you can’t just cut it out from shows that have it, especially if they actually film in front of a live audience, though even those with canned laughter are playing in the same sandbox. The pacing and the vibe gets completely thrown off because the writers and actors have to account for the laughs, and it becomes eerie without them. It’s a different style of making TV that’s seeking a different type of reaction from the TV audience, and has different limitations. Understanding that can let you enjoy the best examples of the form (admittedly almost all 20 years old or more). Stock characters slinging zingers and potentially doing pratfalls can be amusing (though the form has a direct lineage to radio shows so it tends to be light but verbal – the physicality is a huge part of what made I Love Lucy groundbreaking), but it doesn’t shine when trying to do cringe, nuance, dramedy, or densely packed humor.

This is not to say that you should watch The Big Bang Theory. You should not. It’s awful. The easy tropes and low cost of production (other than stars’ salaries if a show takes off) means that so much garbage has been done in this format, I daresay higher than single-camera “movie style” shows. It’s just that it’s not quite so simple as “write more funnier.”

IMO, it’s almost like telling a musical theater writing team that their play would be better if the characters weren’t constantly breaking into song. For the record, my instincts and tastes leave me sympathetic to that last point, so I just don’t watch many musicals, live or recorded. It’s not that they’re bad; the appeal is just lost on me. Same with multi-cam sitcoms with laugh-tracks.

Technically, I guess this was twice, but <HankHill>the mari-hwanas</HankHill>.

Smoked a little in a perfectly lovely part of Amsterdam with my wife, who importantly is NOT a chronic overthinker who was raised by uptight Southern-fried Mormons, but I just immediately got paranoid and was obsessed with the likelihood that two random Dutch guys were staring at me and planning something bad. The fact that ten years later I still think it was possible they were eyeing us, while she is completely dismissive, tells me I do not need to be smoking pot.

Also tried some edibles in the hotel room, but that just made me sleepy with nothing particularly fun happening, though admittedly nothing bad happened either. Very “Meh.”

I recently had a dream that involved a suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin. I have never been to Green Bay Wisconsin. I know it as a rather small city that is the home to the Green Bay Packers, an administratively anachronistic NFL team that draws a large plurality of its fan base from the greater Milwaukee area. Off the top of my head, I don’t know if Green Bay has “suburbs” in the usual American sense at all.

I googled the name of this completely nonexistent community, along with the words “Green Bay,” and the AI very confidently hallucinated it into existence, describing it as a lovely shopping and residential area just over the bridge of the same name.

Everybody here is kinda right, but there are other factors to consider, and the net result is that it’s usually not a case worth bringing.

The “Impossibility” defense says that in most cases, the “factual” impossibility of committing the crime is not a defense, but taking an action that is not a crime is a defense, and if raised must be proved by the prosecution. Even with “Factual,” the line gets muddy (the article cites a person whose appeal won after they were convicted of poaching after shooting a stuffed deer). Many jurisdictions have a “reasonable person” standard for that as well, where if the act is the sort of thing that might normally be expected to result in a crime (the most infamous case is two US military personnel who thought they were raping a passed out woman, but really she had died from a heart attack) then you get no benefit, but if no reasonable person would believe that their action would do anything, then it’s more likely to succeed. To answer one of your questions, being told the button sets off a bomb would be more problematic for our hypothetical asshole than being told it “just kills” somebody that would be a bigger problem than a Death Note notebook, but it’s not a simple yes/no.

So anyway, this then raises some questions. Was this button setup convincing? Who did the convincing? Why did they do so? Other defenses might arise out of these conditions: e.g. they were told that pushing the button would save a bunch of other people, trolley-problem style, or it was the police egging them on and telling them they needed to for XYZ good reason. Many of them will turn on the defendant’s thoughts, so in any jurisdiction where they are not obligated to testify (e.g. the United States), our very interesting defendant simply doesn’t, and their attorney argues that there’s reasonable doubt they thought the button would actually do anything.

Add on top of this prosecutorial discretion. A prosecutor knows all of this, and knows this is a loser of a case, so apart from truly bonkers hypothetical, they will not bring it.

TL;DR: By the letter of the law, very probably yes, but no one will ever get convicted for it.

You say “looming data apocalypse.”

I say, “free high quality neodymium magnets!”

Honestly, even as a kid, it just underlined that this is a guy who exists in a dangerous world, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, if you will. He’s coded as friendlier than the average Mos Eisley denizen, and he didn’t shoot until he was threatened, but we are to infer the threat was serious. That Han still counts as “close enough” to a good guy just lets us know how dire Ben and Luke’s situation is. It was a nice bit of show-don’t-tell storytelling and the SE made it less so, in addition to being visual garbage.

I’m a little confused about what states in US are. Are they more like their own countries united in alliance, or are they districts of one country?

They’re closer to districts, but with more constitutionally described rights. Definitely much more independent than French provinces, and even more than German states or UK constituent countries (devolution is at Parliament’s discretion, for instance), but much, much less than EU countries.

I would just say that the key part to include is that the North knew slavery needed to die on the vine and was uninterested in helping the South preserve it, specifically by opposing the addition of new slave states, or at least abandoning the notion that the two should be intentionally kept in balance.

So nominally, yeah, few with any influence were proposing emancipation, and to be clear almost every white person in the country was super racist by modern standards, but slavery was doomed over the medium- to long-term. The South could see that the writing was on the wall, so they decided it was time to shoot their shot to preserve slavery, in a form particularly at odds with the world around it by the way, for as long as possible, and secession was the only viable path for them. No other issue of the day would have driven any significant region of the country to secede, though ironically if it had, no other issue would have given the opponents the moral high-ground like slavery did.