“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: […] like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • Jesus christ, dude, we already do this on food packaging. What’s up your ass? Read two paragraphs into the article:

    “They will have to disclose ingredients including milk, eggs, shellfish and tree nuts […]” That’s basically just what we already do on food packaging: list common allergens. Fucking no shit they’re not exhausting every single possible allergy. Again, what problem do you actually have here besides the fact that people with food allergies might have easier lives?

    And by the way, the California Prop 65 joke you’re making isn’t indicative of government overreach or myopia; it’s indicative of how extremely present carcinogens are in the products we use. The list of Prop 65 ingredients is very thoroughly vetted, and items are only included when a clear, causal link to cancer can be reliably established.


  • with less interpretation of social cues and a greater ability to focus.

    “ability to focus” is more accurately described as “tendency to focus”. “ability to focus” connotes control over focus, which… from lived experience and what I’ve read, just isn’t generally true. Autistic inertia – the inability to defocus and then focus on a new context – is very real. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder not just because of an ignorance of social cues but because of how rigid, inflexible patterns of behavior often interfere with daily life.



  • and the Supreme Court did nothing because

    Because the SCOTUS has no enforcement mechanism for what you described. Even just for Worcester v. Georgia, what is the USMS supposed to do against the state of Georgia without support from the Executive? Jackson literally wrote in 1832: “the decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.” Jackson did eventually threaten enforcement as part of what became known as the nullification crisis.

    But either way, Worcester v. Georgia wasn’t directly about the 1830 Indian Removal Act or 1835’s Treaty of New Echota; it was about the freeing of Worcester etc., which did eventually go through. The Treaty of New Echota should’ve been illegal on the basis of Worcester v. Georgia, but again, the SCOTUS doesn’t just go around enforcing cases it didn’t rule on unless it gets back to their court to rule on that separate case; that’s the Executive’s job.

    “The Supreme Court did nothing because they hate Indian Americans” is such unfounded bullshit that you just made up because it sounded right. You can correctly argue all you want that this shows separation of powers is just an illusion because one single person has to agree to enforce laws and can only be removed (theoretically) with a supermajority of Congress if they fail to do so.




  • I agree with that, and I think that one comment below has it wrong. My comment wasn’t a defense as much as it was a neutral clarification for readers at home™. I try to offer additional context when Wikipedia stuff gets brought up on Lemmy, because 1) selfishly, I think demystifying it makes it more likely that new people try editing, and 2) with Wikipedia being a major anchor of the modern information ecosystem, it’s healthier for said ecosystem if people better understand what goes into it.


  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldWikipedia at it again
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    10 days ago

    I guess people don’t read anymore?

    You hopefully saw that I linked the article size guidelines above alongside the 21,000 words figure. That page is only 1700 words, so feel free to give it a read and see if it soothes your curiosity for why we have them (definitely feel free to ask if any claims made seem dubious or terminology is unclear).

    Keep in mind that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and that this singular “article” represents nearly 50 pages of prose in 12-point, single-spaced print – the size of a novella. Wikipedia articles are meant to be encyclopedic treatments of their subjects, not dissertations on them.

    Edit: just checked, and the “Download as PDF” of this article is 153 pages long.


  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldWikipedia at it again
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    10 days ago

    Okay, I can give a bit of insight into why this isn’t just a shitpost on behalf of Wikipedia’s editors. For various important reasons, we have guidelines on article size, and while it’s not hard-and-fast, 10,000 words is generally the point where most editors will start wanting to trim material from the article or branch it off into more specific subarticles. An article with more than 15,000 words should “almost certainly be divided or trimmed”. For context, the article on “World War II” has 13,000 words, and that’s because there are literally tens of thousands of other articles about that war containing offloaded details within details within details.

    The article “False or misleading statements by Donald Trump” currently has 21,000 words. It’s utterly giga-fucked compared to any other article I’ve ever seen on the English Wikipedia. And when e.g. the “COVID-19 pandemic” section already has the listed “further information” articles of: “COVID-19 pandemic in the United States”, “COVID-19 misinformation by the United States § Trump administration”, and “Communication of the Trump administration during the COVID-19 pandemic”, what are you even supposed to do? It’s fucking impossible.


  • Ignoring for a second all the controversy around the term “two-spirit”, even if we say that two-spirit is the extremely Western concept – detached from indigenous culture – of a male and female in the same body (or even just generically two genders in one body), that still doesn’t apply, because all of the entities are male. In set theory, if you keep adding the same element to the set over and over, the set doesn’t change.

    Moreover, even if there were the kind of history you’re talking about, I’m not sure why dissociative identity disorder is being brought up here, because that categorically isn’t how God as multiple entities works within the fiction of the Bible. We see God and Jesus talking to each other back and forth multiple times, and that’s not how DID works. DID – a controversial diagnosis – isn’t a sitcom where two flatmates hang out inside your mind and banter. You’re dissociating so badly that you lose continuity, but God is clearly able to work as all three just fine at the same time.



    • The Father, God, is referred to as “He” consistently thousands of times in modern translations of the Bible, and he’s either literally or metaphorically “the Father”.
    • The Son, Jesus, is unambiguously male in his earthly incarnation, and he’s either literally or metaphorically “the Son”.
    • The Holy Spirit is referred to as masculine in English translations of the Bible, while Greek translations treat the Spirit more like an object-force-of-nature type whose pronouns change at any time to coincide with the type of object describing it (e.g. “comforter” is masculine, but “spirit” is neutral) and Hebrew just sticks with the feminine pronoun of the noun “spirit”.

    If you read a modern English version of the Bible, you have three entities in one which all are all consistently identified as masculine. Trying to treat God as non-binary with regard to modern English translations is more mental gymnastics than arguing why Kris Dreemurr isn’t non-binary.

    Given this is all fiction, it’s safe to say that death of the author is in play here, namely that 99.99% of the modern Christians who’d get offended at non-binary people existing would also not think of God as non-binary even after pondering on it, because their culture and holy book categorically treat God as masculine.


  • It’s technically more money upfront, but you’re not just buying the printer itself: you’re also buying the starter ink/toner cartridges that come with the device. The starter toner gives you vastly more pages than the starter ink, and it basically never goes bad. According to Brother, the size of a starter toner cartridge is 1000 A4 pages. According to HP, their Deskjet and Envy starter cartridges print about 150 and 250 pages, respectively.

    So that higher upfront cost doesn’t just go into a better, more efficient machine; it also goes into quadruple the starting pages or more. There are people who could seriously never print more than 1000 pages, whereas the starter for a Deskjet is so small that you practically ought to buy a spare cartridge alongside the printer for when it near-immediately runs out.

    Basically, if I’m not flat-ass broke, I’m paying another $63 upfront for an XL ink cartridge from HP for one of these printers. And what’s the page yield? 430. I’m still not even near the starter toner cartridge page capacity after spending an extra $63 on ink. To me, the upfront cost of an inkjet printer is pragmatically higher unless I’m so boots-theory-of-economics broke that all I can afford is the printer unit and only print a few pages a month tops.






  • EDIT: To be 1000% clear, they should not be using personal cell phones for this, which they probably did because everyone in this admin is braindead gutter trash. I’m suggesting that self-hosted Signal over government servers is probably fine for security with potentially some tweaks to the app. Something I neglected to think of however is that this sidesteps record keeping, and probably deliberately so. My contention here was solely about security, but this fact makes Signal use unconscionable in my book because it impedes accountability.


    Okay, let’s just be clear here: Signal isn’t just another “private app”; the amount of information they have about your communications is zero (0) with the exception that I believe they can see if you have an account and the last time you connected to the server. Governments absolutely do rely on Signal. The Signal protocol is open and highly robust, the app code is FOSS and has eyes from a shitload of security researchers globally due to its importance, its server code is FOSS (although you don’t have to trust this due to the robust E2EE, and you can even self-host IIRC due to the FOSS server code), and it has reproducible builds.

    This fuck-up was strictly due to the fact that they’re incompetent morons just randomly inviting people to group chats and shit with no guardrails. If I had to guess, they’d probably want to self-host the fork the Signal app and make it so that you can only invite people with some form of clearance, but this last thing is total speculation on my part. I’m sure there’s some way to sanely do this. The part about Signal being secure is just objectively true; it’s audited like absolute crazy, both the FOSS app and the protocol. I would trust it more than whatever the US government could homebrew, even.

    If you, as a citizen, are looking for secure, private messaging, Signal should be at the very top of your list of possible candidates alongside Matrix, SimpleX, and Session (keep in mind that Element and Session do not yet support forward secrecy, although the Matrix protocol does).