chiliedogg

@chiliedogg@lemmy.world

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chiliedogg,

Well, he didn’t speak to her again for like 30 years…

chiliedogg,

I can’t be racist because that would be hurtful and wrong.

chiliedogg,

So I missed y’all’s argument, but I really appreciate how you both realized that you’d made thoughtless posts, apologized, and removed them.

It’s a rare thing to see online.

chiliedogg,

I also love how they have different types of leaders.

Kirk is the Captain you’d love to have as a boss. He gets stuff done, but also has fun with it. He’d inspire loyalty through Charisma.

He’s the captain you want standing by your side in a bar fight.

Picard is the perfectly-distantly, dignified leader. He’s a diplomat and archaeologist who loves exploring not only space, but culture and the nature of life. His love for his crew is shown through his desire to develop them into better officers.

He was the captain who kept you from getting into a fight.

Sisko is the most militaristic of the Captains. We first meet him in a battle, and he doesn’t back down from many fights. When Picard was annoyed by Q he complained. When Sisko met Q he punched him. But Sisko was a great tactician who also had to be a diplomat in charge of a station inhabited mostly by people outside his command structure.

He was the captain who punch someone in the throat if he thought there would be a fight.

Janeway was a scientist and diplomat. She could be hard as iron, but she was absolutely devoted to her people and would do anything for them. Her loyalty would cause her to occasionally cross the line, however. More than any of the captains, she wanted to develop her crew into leaders. They had limited options for advancement, but she tried to give them all opportunities to grow. She also didn’t see any sense in playing fair if she was in the right.

She was the captain that would bring a gun to a knife fight.

chiliedogg,

Chiquita has been bad for a long, long time. Even among the banana companies, they’re famously evil.

chiliedogg,

If you’re ever on the opposite side of Dolly on an ethical or moral issue, you’re on the wrong side.

chiliedogg,

My one true MMO addiction in my younger days was City of Heroes, where I was an Empathy Defender (healer/buffer). I played pure support and never attacked enemies at all, because my attacks weren’t strong enough to be impactful, and enemies would aggro me and kill me off in 1 hit.

When people asked why I didn’t contribute to damage, I explained that staying alive and helping the other 7 people on my team to do 20% more damage and stay in the fight was a much bigger contribution than adding another percent or 2 to damage before I got 1-shot and the team wiped.

chiliedogg,

In this case, they absolutely did. They had a CDL in place specifically to comply with copyright law, and they willfully and intentionally disabled it.

The publishers also had arrangements with local libraries to expand their ebook selections. Most libraries have ebook and audiobook deals worked out with the publishers, and those were expanded during the lockdowns. Many of the partner libraries preferred those systems to the CDL because they served their citizens directly. A small town in Nebraska didn’t have to worry about having a wait list of 3000 people ahead of the local citizen whose taxes had actually bought the license the Internet Archive wanted to borrow.

The Internet Archive held a press conference right before the ruling comparing the National Emergency Library to winter-library lands, but that’s simply not accurate. The CDL they had in place before and after was inter-library loaning. The CDL was like setting up printing presses in the library and copying books for free and handing them out to anyone.

Under the existing CDL, they could have verified that partner libraries had stopped lending their phycical copies of the books and made more copies of the ebooks available for checkout instead of just making it unlimited and they’d have legally been fine, but they did not, and the publishers had every right to sue.

The publishes also waited until June to file suit: well-after most places had been re-opened for weeks.

IA does important work, but they absolutely broke the law here, and since they did it by intentionally removing the systems designed to ensure legitimate archival status and fair-use of copywritten works, they have pretty much zero defense. It wasn’t a mistake or an oversight. And after reopening they kept doing it for weeks until they were sued and were able to magically restore the legal system the same day the lawsuit was filed.

chiliedogg,

Their counter-argument isn’t a legal argument. They’re saying they did it because they think the publishers aren’t being fair.

And they’re talking mostly about format-conversion, which isn’t the problem here.

You can absolutely make format conversions to digital for archival purposes. What you cannot do is them make a bunch of copies and give them away for free simultaneous use. That is not fair use. That’s 100% piracy.

The CDL was built specifically to ensure that only one digital copy was on loan for each owned copy of the material because the IA absolutely knew that was the law.

chiliedogg,

The biggest changes have been the social acceptance of homosexuality.

Looking at the question of people’s perception on homosexual relationships in the GSS between 1973 and 2022, the percentage of Americana who view homosexual relationships as being “Not wrong at all” went from 10% to 61%. And for the first 20 years of that period, it pretty much stayed around 10%.

The question of homosexual sex itself has only been included 5 times on the GSS. The earliest in 1991 and the most-recent in 2018. In 1991 is was 11% and in 2018 was 55%.

In 1973, 1/3rd of people believed a gay person shouldn’t even be allowed to speak in public.

The somewhat scarier number is reagrdining homosexual books in public libraries, simply because there’s a slight uptick in banning them between 2020 and 2022, and while more-recent GSS numbers aren’t out, we have been seeing lots of book-bans in the news…

Other fun stuff from the GSS:

40% of white reponsants were in favor of a law banning interracial marriage in the 70s, and - more interestingly - up until they stopped asking the question in 2002 more democrats supported laws prohibiting interracial marriage than Republicans.

Support for abortion “for any reason” didn’t cross the 50% threshold until the Trump Presidency, and it’s pretty much entirely a trend on the Democratic side. The Dem and Rep voters weren’t that far apart until very recently.

chiliedogg,

A lot of people don’t consider the future even when writing helpful posts. I’m as guilty as anyone.

If you link the correct answer, the person finding your post in 6 years better hope the link is still good. That’s the legitimate reason scholarly papers needs to cite specific book editions and journal page numbers instead of using hyperlinks in a bibliography.

If a copy of the book or journal can ba tracked down, the citation will still work.

It’s also why online-only published journals are still often formatted like a book with static pages instead of websites. If you find a journal article that’s important, you’ll likely still be able to find an achived copy in PDF somewhere even if the journal stops publishing or they change domains or whatever.

chiliedogg,

When I was I Niagara they did the opposite. They’d divert water into pipes bypassing the falls and “turn down” the falls at night.

chiliedogg,

What of there were a model for video games where the games themselves were free to download and play, but things like cosmetics, weapons, stat boosts, and character unlocks were sold piecemeal to those willing to pay?

That model certainly wouldn’t become a cancer on the entire industry and ruin online gaming, making us beg for the days when you could just buy a fucking game and play it.

chiliedogg,

I think a lot of people don’t understand the implications of saying it’s genocide out loud.

Since 1988 (when the US officially joined the Convention on Genocide), if the US officially says genocide is occurring, it’s supposed to directly intervene. Several states are immune from the convention, including the US, but not Israel.

It puts the US in a delicate position. Cutting off all support to such a major ally basically requires saying they’re committing genocide, which commits us to war.

There’s a lot of people that are opposed to what’s happening in Gaza, but don’t want to get in a shooting war with Israel over it.

chiliedogg,

That describes the 2/3rds that’s watching or being killed. Our complacency is what makes us vulnerable.

chiliedogg,

I think the anti-war movement - more specifically specifically the anti-draft movement - caused a lot of unintended damage. By effectively ending the draft it removed many young people’s connection to world events.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars would have been met with a lot more resistance. If all those years of stop-losses and quadruple deployments had instead been years of drafting young people, a lot more people would have stood up the the Bush administration. That would have gotten a generation politically active and would have prevented a lot of what’s happening today.

chiliedogg,

Bush would have been voted out in 2004 of the young people had actually voted.

chiliedogg,

Is that the guy a jury found liable for sexual assault?

chiliedogg,

But they’re essentially illegal. CAFE standards are based on vehicle footprint since the late 2000s (you know - when they suddenly quit making small trucks). As the standards get stricter they just make trucks bigger to keep from failing to meet CAFE.

chiliedogg,

Though the benefit of the law is that the standard engine on the Ford Maverick is the hybrid, since having the ICE as the standard wouldn’t meet CAFE.

If the Maverick had been possible to obtain when my Colorado died last summer it’s definitely what I would have bought.

Instead I got an NV200 mini cargo van, and I’m pretty happy with it. Though the smash cargo vans just all got discontinued by all the manufacturers too because of CAFE.

chiliedogg,

Had a coworker that was going through some stuff when I started. On my fist day, she breaks down about her situation.

She and her husband had been extremely happy and decided to adopt. The kid turned out to be violently agtessive towards her. He’d tried stabbing her, burning her house down when she slept, etc. She told her husband she couldn’t live with the kid. He said he completely understood that she couldn’t live in that situation, and there was no way they could raise the kid in those circumstances.

So he filed for divorce. He said he’d agreed to take on the responsibility of raising the child and he couldn’t walk away.

“…so, I’m Chilie. I was told you had the key to the supply closet.”

chiliedogg,

Throughout history, most people have lived within an hour of work.

The biggest difficulty is retrofitting cities that have developed in the last century. Places that have been around for centuries were developed with walking in mind. Places that were developed around the automobile and climate contril are very difficult to convert.

The world has both quadrupled in population and urbanized over the past century as the car became the primary mode of transit in much of the world.

The only thing that makes transitioning even possible is that the landlord class would love to return to feudaliam.

chiliedogg,

Your examples are cities that are hundreds of years old and we’re absolutely initially designed around walking.

chiliedogg,

Okay. Great. Downtown is now walkable.

How do people get downtown?

The thing about auto-centric design is that it covers transportation from end to end. Other methods require a much more complicated network of fist and last-mile solutions that aren’t easily adapted.

“Just use park and rides” doesn’t solve the problem. It just moves the traffic to the transit stations. And now it’s more expensive and slower than the existing system.

Houston put in a light rail system that costs 1% of every dollar spent in the city, costs a ton to ride, adds 45 minutes to a trip downtown, and drastically increases the odds of your car getting broken into at the park-and-ride. So yeah - there’s pushback against expanding it.

chiliedogg,

There’s also inherrent difficulty when the city is so spread out (The Grand Parkway outer loop has a 60-mile diameter, compared to Paris’s 15), and walking outside is a health hazard 3-4 months out of the year.

chiliedogg,

What’s a concrete, real way to fix these cities that doesn’t require millions of people to give up their homes to move into more-expensive apartments they don’t own, addresses the fact that being outside for more than a few minutes simply isn’t safe for a significant portion of the population for almost half the year, and doesn’t significantly add to commute times?

chiliedogg,

People can’t travel 30 miles from their home to the office entirely using public transit. Walkable cities and light rail are Last-mile. Heck - throw in high-speed for the majority of the transit and you still have a huge first-mile problem, which is by far the hardest to solve.

The reasons modern cities are designed around cars is because cars are flexible. Add a street for a new row of houses and every single one of those points is connected to every end point in a single step. No new scheduling, routing, or transit lines required. Problem solved with a little asphalt.

It’s an easy solution, and backing out of it is very, very difficult because it must be replaced with a complicated, expensive solution that’s less-convenient for most users.

I’m not anti-transit at all, but people around here seem to believe that a city can be fixed with the power of wishes and fairy dust just because another city that covers 1/10th the area and was developed hundreds of years before auto-centric decelopment ago managed to do it.

chiliedogg,

Do you think we don’t have offices, schools, and C-stores in the suburbs?

We also have sidewalks, bike lanes, walkable shopping districts, etc, but in Texas they don’t get used because it’s 110° for months at a time and you don’t want to have to take a shower every time you change locations.

But the problem is those C-stores and small offices don’t bring the jobs required to support the suburbs. Most people have to work in the city, so they have to commute, and getting from their house to the office is what creates traffic.

chiliedogg,

Absolutely. I work in the planning department of a municipality that’s a tiny enclave for the super-wealthy. The average new home here is over 10 times the price of the regional average. I recently issued a permit for a 5,000 square-foot guest house with a tennis pavillion on the roof.

Our residents don’t want neighbors. They don’t want a sense of cummunity. They want their special enclave with a police force that exists to keep out the homeless people from the major city that surrounds us.

I don’t live here of course. I have to drive 90 minutes every morning because my annual salary won’t cover a week’s mortgage for some of these houses.

chiliedogg,

1st day availability on Gamepass for all AAA games simply isn’t a sustainable strategy. They can’t give away multiple games with a 9-figure budget along with everything else for the price of the sub.

chiliedogg,

Loose ammo can creep into all kinds of nooks when a box spills open. I’ve found rounds tucked into the fold of a range bag years after the spill.

It’s exactly why my range bags and my travel bags nexer mix.

chiliedogg,

Somebody goes on a hunting trip. Among other things they pack ammunition. The cardboard box of ammo breaks open and 100 rounds spill all over the inside of their bag. A year later they go on a different trip and bring the same bag with them, and there’s a loose round in the folds of the bag they don’t know about, but the dog sniffs it out.

That’s why I have separate bags and cases specifically for traveling with ammunition.

chiliedogg,

That’s exactly what I’m fucking saying.

chiliedogg,

I’m saying that people screw up and explaining a simple way to avoid the same mistake.

Here on Lemmy saying that you have bags just for carrying ammunition will get you labeled as a baby-killing MAGA extremist because you’re so into guns you accessorize with custom luggage for your murder-toys.

I’m explaining that those ammo bags and cases are there specifically to avoid accidents just like this - not as a tacticool fashion statement.

chiliedogg,

I’m Christian, but have given them money.

Separating church and state makes better government AND better churches.

chiliedogg,

I’m a United Methodist and former clergy, and the last 5 years have been whiplash.

We’ve spent 50 years trying to make the denomination more inclusive and accepting towards homosexuals, but for some organizational reasons (primarily a heavy-African vote in the worldwide governing body of the church) it’s been difficult, and the more “traditional” wing of the church has been dragging us backwards.

We have our global conference (basically the legislative session of the church) every 4 years. In 2012 it got very heated. In 2016 the debate got downright nasty to the point where they had to calm a special session just to debate homosexuality in 2019 simply so the church could move on with the rest of the conference.

2019 was really, really bad. The traditionalists got their way on every issue.

The biggest blow was changing how church trials worked. As it was, “practicing” homosexuals were barred from the clergy, and officiating over a gay marriage was a de-frockable offense under church law. But that wasn’t that bad in reality, because Methodist Clergy are very educated and overwhelmingly disagreed with the rules, so when it came to a church trial the jury (made up of other clergy) refused to punish. In 2019, they changed the rule to remove clergy’s option to not punish.

The only ray of hope was the recommendation of a path to allow individual churches to leave the church but keep their land. It was basically the admission that the church was going to go through a schism. It looked for all the world that those who wanted to be more inclusive would have to start a new denomination.

But then the weirdest thing happened.

The ultra-conservatives were still mad even though they’d won. They were so mad, in fact, that they wanted to get rid of those who had opposed them. But there was no way to kick out churches who weren’t controlled by Fox News. So they huffed and puffed and got so angry they decided to start their own super-bigoted Republican church anyway. They called it the Global Methodist Church since they figured the rest of the world would follow them and they left the denomination starting in 2021 when the path for disaffiliation opened up. In all, they got about a quarter of the US churches - mostly small rural churches that depended heavily on funding from the larger organization they were leaving…

A few weeks ago the 2024 conference was held. Due to Vivid it was the first real conference we’d had since 2016.

Gay marriage, gay clergy, and accepting homosexuality as being a-OK all passed with over 90% support. Everyone who had voted against it before had either left the denomination or been so repulsed by the fringe actors who had that they changed their position.

It’s been a ride.

chiliedogg,

I broke down in tears when the changes passed. Just a few years ago we were positive we’d have to leave the denomination to get change, but then the bad actors left instead, so the thousands of congregations “in the middle” that didn’t want to leave their historic denomination didn’t have to, so in the end way more churches are officially accepting of homosexuality.

The new rule for marriage is 2 consenting adults, where it used to be a man and a woman. So we also managed to officially prohibit child marriage in the church. On the US side that was mostly from high school kids getting married because the girlfriend got pregnant. The church will no longer recognize or participate in those marriages.

It also clarifies that clergy are free to perform or refuse to perform any marriage ceremony of 2 consenting adults, so homophobic clergy aren’t required to perform the ceremony. I’m fine with that, because a preacher performing a wedding should support the marriage, and a gay couple should know that the person performing the ceremony is supportive of the union.

Devout Christian Mike Johnson shows up to hush money trial to defend a guy accused of cheating on his wife with a porn star (www.vanityfair.com)

House Speaker Mike Johnson describes himself as a Christian before anything else. He has said his “faith informs everything I do.” He has told people curious about his views to “pick up a Bible.” His wife reportedly runs a counseling service whose operating agreement, which he himself notarized, states, “We believe and...

chiliedogg,

Feel pretty sure that I was right that a loving God wouldn’t sentence anyone to eternal torture and damnation.

chiliedogg,

On hand? Household sharpies disappear a day after purchase.

It’s why I stopped buying them in packs. I no longer lose 5 at a time.

chiliedogg,

Rainbow Six Vegas did it really well nearly 20 years ago. Lots of the ads and posters scattered around Vegas had real ads they’d change out. It really was more immersive.

chiliedogg,

Interestingly though, on average, gay and lesbian married couples both make more money than heterosexual married couples.

chiliedogg,

And it was Flavor-Aid. I don’t know how they expected to spend the money they saved buying the cheap shit.

chiliedogg,

We can and have improved things massively. What we cannot do is fix everything at one time. The most we can realistically hope for is marginal improvement. Demanding perfection or nothing results in us sliding backwards.

But look at 60 years ago. Racial discrimination wasn’t only legal, but state-mandated in much of the country. Interracial marriage was illegal. Being homosexual was illegal. A woman could be fired for not sleeping with her boss or for becoming pregnant. Businesses couldn’t operate on Sundays because it competed with church. Firearms could be purchased by anyone without a background check at any store. Politicians openly ran on the platform that the white race was superior. Poor kids and minorities were drafted and forced to fight in useless wars while rich people could get college deferments.

We’re so, so much better today than we were then. I don’t want to rant forever, so let’s focus on one issue and go even more recent:

30 years ago the general public was so homophobic that a Democratic President signed a law banning openly gay people from serving in the military. Clinton then followed it up by signing the Defense of Marriage Act barring federal recognition of same-sex marriage and allowing states to refuse to recognize marriages granted by another state - even though no states allowed it at the time.

20 years ago gay marriage was still illegal in all 50 states (next Friday is actually the 20th anniversary of gay marriage in Massachusetts!). It wasn’t until 2012 that the first states legalized gay marriage through popular votes.

It’s been less than 10 years since gay marriage was legalized nationwide.

In 2010 the majority of the country was opposed to gay marriage. Today nearly 80 percent supports it. That’s remarkable.

We’ve improved so much very, very quickly. It’s just hard to see when there’s so much more work to be done.

But it took work to make the progress we have. If we’d given up and simply chosen not to vote we’d have empowered those who fought change.

Please vote.

chiliedogg,

If they play it exclusively, sure. But people play tons of games on Gamepass. HiFi Rush and a dozen other games splitting that $15/month/account is a lot less rosy.

I’ve had Gamepass since the beginning, and since it was launched it I’ve bought maybe 1 or 2 Xbox games that weren’t on gamepass, whereas I used to average 2-3 a month. My overall spending on games has dropped massively since getting gamepass - especially on Xbox.

chiliedogg, (edited )

I think they expected more casual gamers to sign up for game pass while the more dedicated among us would still be buying new products.

Honestly, they’d probably be doing better if they didn’t put games on there day 1. Sony doesn’t put their biggest titles on PS+ at launch for a reason.

Halo and starfield had shit sales because we didn’t have to buy them. If they required people to buy the triple-A in-house titles at launch, the double-A stuff like HiFi Rush could still be released on gamepass day 1 as an incentive for people to subscribe.

As it stands, Starfield and Forza burned the money that should be used for HiFi Rush and Ori.

chiliedogg,

Not just any old malware, but insecure rootkits that allowed ANYONE to have total control over the system with their own malware above the OS-level with no way to even know the malware was there.

chiliedogg,

…except for the part where he directly called for a pause due to the humanitarian crisis.

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