This isn’t entirely unreasonable to determine, since the galaxy is a big disk and you could map that as a 2D plane. For the most part, ships are traveling across the plane between planets, in the same way that a ship flying from Earth to the Moon or Earth to Mars would be flying through a plane perpendicular to the two bodies. Not a lot to visit above or below the plane, and the shortest distance would be between two points, so…
This is also an idea behind the Dark Forest Hypothesis
I think that’s less about warp-speed weapons and more about natural resource constraints and the unpredictable nature of technological advancement causing advanced civilizations to preemptively obliterate one another.
But yes, the only practical defense against superluminal weaponry would be to avoid getting spotted.
Swings in polls are notable, and there’s reason to believe Trump’s conviction hurt his approval among independents.
Will this last? Idk. Hillary was up by 10-pts in October and crashed to a dead-heat on election day. But it should be worth considering what current events have a positive or negative impact on a candidate’s approval.
In the moment, sure. We’ll see how much people care about his conviction when its four months in the rear view mirror and “Hunter Biden Newest Dick Picks” bombard the latest media cycle.
But maybe - just maybe - the Dems will see prosecuting high ranking conservative crooks as a boon rather than a hazard as they run into the next election cycle. Maybe someone will have the bright idea to bring federal charges against Ken Paxton or Ron DeSantis or even Elon Musk.
Or maybe not. Maybe we’ll just scratch Trump off as “Uniquely Prosecutable” and never do this again.
They gave him a 1/4, with a bunch of caveats like “If we see these midwest states start trending red, that’s a good sign for Biden”. And then Hillary lost Pennsylvania, and 538 basically called it for Trump on the spot.
But polling in 2016 was generally stronger, because we had more professional pollsters and fewer partisan polling operations. Modern polling is increasingly polluted by unreliable narrators, push polls, and polling-as-propaganda for partisan news sites. The problem with 538, structurally speaking, was that it got people to stop doing their own polls and fixate on aggregates to the exclusive of internal research. This, combined with the ongoing consolidation of domestic media markets, means we have fewer and fewer people doing professional polling research.
So the data firms like 538 use has degraded. The interest in their results has faded, as a consequence. And the trend towards eye-polling click-bait headlines has resulted in pollers being defunded in favor of automated screen scrappers and headline generator scripts.
Assuming you’re actively participating in GOTV, its useful to know what talking points engage people and what don’t.
Assuming you’ve got some vested socio-economic interest in the winner of the next presidential race, it might inform personal financial or business decisions.
Polls illustrate popular sentiment in the moment and give a picture of changing ideological trends over time. This informs people about likely possible futures and assists in long-term decision making.
I just do not understand how anyone is on the fence about DJT…
Gotta consider which fence we’re talking about. For some folks, the fact that he let his daughter marry a (((Kushner))) means he was just too Woke. For others, the fact that he got successfully convicted means he’s a big stupid loser. Some people just love an underdog and will vote for anyone who isn’t currently in office.
You have to keep in mind that “independent” doesn’t mean “in the middle of Democrats and Republicans”. In the same way people abandoned Hillary over the Comey Letter, I’m sure there’s a certain number of independents who are scared off of Trump entirely because they don’t like the idea of someone being a convicted felon.
I know more than one woman who fled one of these convenant marriage states. One still can’t get the divorce officialized because her toxic abusive husband keeps insisting on an endless parade of marriage counseling, via answers to the divorce court.
I don’t know if forcing her back into the marriage because that same abusive husband started working for a legislative lobbying outfit would be productive.
Literally had to be protected by the military. It’s weird how that lead got so heavily buried. Imagine if this story had been written about Mexico or Brazil or China.
Curious to see a deep and detailed explanation of current events get a moderate mix of love and hate, but a generic “lemmy.ml is pro-genocide” post get universal love.
Almost like folks are more interested in Lemmy internal politics than world events.
Nobody commenting on this has ever visited Xinjiang. Nobody writing these articles has ever visited Xinjiang.
It’s funny, because you absolutely can get first-person accounts of journalists visiting Xinjiang. And you can get information directly out of social media published in and around Xinjiang, particularly if you’re fluent in their native languages. But sending journalists to China is expensive and travel logs from these regions don’t make for explosive click-bait articles.
in China, media literacy is mostly “what is the media not telling me?” while in the US, media literacy is mostly “which media source is telling me the right thing?”
The privatization of US media means you can pay someone to tell you whatever you like. So you can get your own heavily polarized view of world events to reinforce your biases and cement your neuroses. But if we’re talking reliability? Idk, man. Is CNN really more reliable than FOX or MSNBC because its “centrist” or does it just have a different set of sponsors?
The Chinese state media gives you the party line, which is fixated on whatever the Chinese state government considers the highest priority. Chinese social media is still rife with rumor and innuendo and agitprop. Its just not as slickly delivered or authoritatively presented as American corporate sponsored infotainment. Harder to sell people on Migrant Fentayl Caravan Killed 50 Israeli Babies when its just some Fwds From Grandma email, rather than a baby-faced news anchor delivering it on a professional set.
These institutions have two very different goals. Chinese media exists to sooth, while American media exists to agitate. But the theory that one of them tells only truths and the other tells only lies hinges on the theory that any of them have a vested interest in doing real journalism.
Such senseless loss of life in the name of religion.
If they’d died in the Saudi heat to a secular activity - at an F1 race event or inside a poorly A/C’d movie theater or trapped on an overheated bus - would that have been better?
There is also this weird video which talks about how they plan to revolutionize the hajj to make it safer and accessible to more people - using technology in a weird blend of old world meets new.
So much of the modern Saudi state sees the Hajj as little more than a massive tourist attraction. They’re heavily invested in Disney-fying the experience, such that the maximal number of high-paying visitors can slide through the building frictionlessly.
Which is a shame, because the Hajj as a cultural event was originally intended as this class-agnostic unifying practice social event. You aren’t supposed to visit these holy sites encapsulated into these exclusive expensive little bubbles. You’re intended to mingle with people from the rest of the world and revel in a certain shared experience common to the faith the world over.
What we’re seeing isn’t some toxic religious ideology that Saudi administrators need to cleanse for mass consumption. Instead, we’re seeing a commercialization and stratification of ideology, by which elites get a bespoke Hajj experience and Saudi officials get to operate as gatekeepers of tradition at some astronomical markup.
Yeah and all the communist states are super ecologically friendly
Historically, planned economies have had a better track record preserving ecologies and building sustainable infrastructure. That’s largely because the economic planners deal with long-term timelines (five year plans being the standard) rather than quarterly business cycles.
When you’re running a logging company and you have to ask where you’re going to get your next batch of trees in five years or fifty years, you engage in more sustainable harvesting practices than a for-profit fly-by-night that only cares about growing the number of trees chopped down after every round of investment is depleted.
You can’t just pretend capitalism is responsible for everything bad
Capitalists do a much better job of scaling up industrial infrastructure rapidly, because they do fixate on the short term much more narrowly. Profit-driven practices have rapidly converted our coal-based electricity economy to a natural gas economy. And private speculation has created a booming industry for new technologies - from batteries to cryptocurrencies to LLMs.
But when you run up against the limits of your natural resource supplies, that rapid growth isn’t an economic advantage anymore. You generate far more waste than your communist peers. You spark lots of international conflicts attempting to increase your rate of extraction. And you end up with a very top-heavy unprofessional administrative state, as power consolidates into the hands of financialized aristocrats with little real expertise in the businesses they administer.
In the modern moment, that produces a lot of problems directly attributable to capitalist business practices.
I would love to transition to a decent type of communism but I’m not going to pretend it’ll fix the climate on its own.
If the US were to adopt more Communist-championed energy, housing, and transportation policies, it would immediately benefit the global climate.
He knows China doesn’t have the capability to invade Taiwan
Large scale ground invasions are generally a losing game.
But the Chinese strategy towards Taiwan has always been the same strategy as Hong Kong, Tibet, and Mongolia. Become economically invaluable and set policy through soft power.
The only real incentive to send in ground troops would be to respond to a Cuba Missile style escalation. And it no longer looks like the Americans are interested in installing short range missiles on the island, now that they have exhausted themselves arming Ukraine.
Court Packing has been on the table for a while. Also, state prosecution is possible, if the judges are breaking state laws.
Nobody is going to try and do anything, because American politicians are generally fine with reactionaries running the courts. But they could do something if they wanted to.
The Greek coastguard has caused the deaths of dozens of migrants in the Mediterranean over a three-year period, witnesses say, including nine who were deliberately thrown into the water....
Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak”. On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.
Starfield could have been a way better game if all they did was fuck it up like 45% less.
Compared to the KOTOR series, it was lifeless. Compared to Mass Effect, it was very boring. Frustrating for a game with such strong precedents to land so weakly. But they put so much energy into quantity of content that they forgot to invest in quality.
They could have alternatively just delivered on their promises of making the game easy to mod and let the community handle the rest but they fucked that up too.
The goal was to create a game that procedurally generated itself, not one where individual hobbyists expanded it manually.
“I have noticed that there have been a lot more events with creators, but the creators that are getting invited are the creators who are very pro Biden and just parroting talking points or sharing photo ops of them smiling with the President. Not the creators who have been critical,” said Kahlil Greene, a history content...
There’s a theory that democracy is just going to end if Trump is elected. But I’m more prone to see it as a continuation of the current trend - more intense gerrymandering, courts picking winners and losers, fewer and fewer people enfranchised.
The form of election is still around, just like in Russia or Israel. But only the oligarchs and their cronies really get to participate.
I think turning popular democracy into a Hong Kong style of corporate board votes will fit their tastes nicely.
Plenty of ethnic cleansing has occurred democratically. I don’t think one strictly precludes the other. If anything, a popular voter endorsement of eugenics and concentration camps helps facilitate the atrocities. Just look at what’s happening in Israel. Or what happened under Bolsonaro in Brazil.
It's like a more challenging version of the trolley problem (lemmy.world)
The Insiders: The 3 Men at the Core of Biden’s Brain Trust (www.nytimes.com)
Multiple times each day, President Biden dials up Mike Donilon, a close adviser since the 1980s, to chew on the latest polls and headlines....
Israel ready for ‘all-out war’ in Lebanon (www.aljazeera.com)
The Israeli military says its Northern Command has approved operational plans for war with Lebanon....
Up is an illusion in space (lemmy.world)
New Fox Poll Has Biden Leading Trump: ‘His Best Result This Election Cycle’ (www.mediaite.com)
"It doesn't take a big swing": Expert says "one group" ditching Trump over conviction — independents (www.salon.com)
The Christian right is coming for divorce next (www.vox.com)
Before the 1960s, it was really hard to get divorced in America....
Ukraine just held its first Pride event in years despite Russia's continued invasion (www.lgbtqnation.com)
China has renamed hundreds of Uyghur villages and towns, say human rights groups (www.theguardian.com)
More than 300 Egyptians die from heat during Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, diplomats say (www.cbsnews.com)
UK’s richest family on trial in Switzerland for human trafficking, confiscating staff passports, paying as little as £7/day (www.bbc.com)
Jenkins. (lemmy.world)
China's Xi accused the US of trying to trick him into invading Taiwan, but said he won't take the bait, report says (www.businessinsider.com)
Xi Jinping accused the US of trying to trick China into invading Taiwan, the Financial Times said....
What can Democrats actually do about Thomas’s and Alito’s corruption? (www.vox.com)
Greek coastguard threw migrants overboard to their deaths, witnesses say (www.bbc.com)
The Greek coastguard has caused the deaths of dozens of migrants in the Mediterranean over a three-year period, witnesses say, including nine who were deliberately thrown into the water....
Sinclair floods local news websites with hundreds of deceptive articles about Biden's mental fitness (popular.info)
Bethesda Is Charging $7 For A New Starfield Mission, And Players Are Upset (www.gamespot.com)
In Snap Election, French Left Forms Alliance To Counter Far Right and Neoliberals (www.commondreams.org)
Gen Z influencers who supported Biden in 2020 turn against him (www.washingtonpost.com)
“I have noticed that there have been a lot more events with creators, but the creators that are getting invited are the creators who are very pro Biden and just parroting talking points or sharing photo ops of them smiling with the President. Not the creators who have been critical,” said Kahlil Greene, a history content...
better part of valor (fedia.io)
This will be YouTube in 2025 (lemmy.world)
(this is not real obviously) artist: Soren Iverson