Or did we become okay with being ruled by tyrants all of a sudden?

If so, what’s the point of federation?

The point of federation is not to prevent tyrants.

The point is the option to exclude or include any instance due to whatever metric you want.

If you don’t like tyrants, you can defederate your instance from any tyrant-ruled instance.

And, obviously, you can run your own instance as tyrannical or democratic as you want - users who don’t like that are free to leave, instance-owners who don’t like that are free to defecate from you.

If you’re just a user on the relevant instance, all you can do ist petition the people who have that power.

I understand that’s basically what you’re trying to do, but your argument shouldn’t be about federation or lemmy’s inherent structure - the question should be “is anyone else annoyed by that behavior?”

This isn’t about guys’n’gals.

This is simpky about how people work:

If your peers (friends, colleagues, family) have an opinion (any opinion), their default expectation is that you share that opinion - this is what being a peer is mostly about.

You can demonstrate solidarity by agreeing - this is virtually always the safe option.

You can demonstrate backbone by disagreeing - this can generate respect or animosity.

You can refuse to weigh in - this is mostly a middle ground between the two above.

How it actual shakes out in reality will depend on a myriad of factors, many of which you’re not even consciously aware of.

Thus, this random internet stranger can give you only three pieces of advice:

• Trust your instincts on how to handle this. Your subconscious is very well wired to navigate social situations as best as possible.

• If you ever change your opinion or “change your opinion”, announce it clearly and give/make up a reason. People disrespect people who are inconsistent, but they respect people who can admit to mistakes / learn.

• Sometimes, you can’t win. Sometimes, someone will be pissed off, no matter what you do. It’s no fault of yours, some situations are just not salvageable to begin with.

Suburbs can’t be a ponzi scheme

Genuine question: Why not?

While the article indeed barely touched on its headline, the way I’ve seen the “suburb infrastructure upkeep problem” described seems indeed reminiscent of a ponzi scheme.

The way I understand it:

Suburbs have a relatively low initial cost (for the city) compared to the taxes they generate. However, their maintenance cost is relatively high because Suburbs are huge.

Thus, US cities have long had a policy of paying the rising cost of their older Suburbs by creating new Suburbs - which is pretty analogous to a Ponzi scheme.

In particular I really like the episodes that deal with interacting with other civilizations, diplomacy, and exploration more-so than say, an anomaly episode.

In light of this, and since you were able to work through the not-so-stellar episodes of ST, I’d strongly argue that Babylon 5 should be your next stop.

It has a slow start, some more mixed episodes, dated special effects and both main characters (they switched after season 1) are plain “heroic American leader” types, but virtually everything else is top tier even today. An excellent political plot, humor, great characters with genuine growth.

Just be aware that it is different from DS9 (personally, I like both).

Battlestar Galactica (the new one) and The Expanse are probably worth pointing out, too. To me, they’re the best high-production-value sci-fi shows that didn’t sacrifice their plot. Nevertheless, both are far more grim than the shows you’ve mentioned and overall “feel” different.

(Warning: Might be coded by German extremism culture)

Right-wing extremists burn immigrants. Left-wing extremists burn cars. The latter is worse, because it could be my car while I don’t own any immigrants.

(from the Cangaroo Chronicles)

To clarify:

Even if an unambiguous majority of Texas would say “we’d like to turn Texas into an independent country”, you’d rather force them to stay by force of arms?

I had something vaguely similar happen to me.

We got called out of the line for a manual luggage inspection because, as a surprisingly bored security agent informed us, X-ray showed a knife of about a foot length in our luggage.

We had no idea what they were talking about.

We were half-way through unpacking the whole pack when my SO lit up and asked “could it be my ice skates?”

Agent took a look at the X-ray, nods, and lets us pack it back up without any further checking.

Overall, turned out harmlessly, but the sheer confusion of where that supposed knife had come from, combined with how blasé that security person was about the whole affair from start to finish stuck in my mind.

Good to know, thanks.

Whatsapp is encrypted. The problem is the Metadata they want - i.e. your whole address book.

I do not agree to Facebook having my phone number, but if you use WA and have my number, they have it, too - even if I don’t use WA myself.

If you can convince your family to switch, use Signal or Matrix.

Otherwise, use Shelter on your phone with a limited, WA-ony address book.

I really hop you’re trolling, because you’re letting out some pretty crucial parts here.

Democracy is also when you vote and your voted-for result doesn’t happen. More than 40% of the state just had that experience.

Democracy isn’t about you. Or me. It’s about the majority.

You’d need to significantly increase overall education (both among voters ans legislators) on how science works to make the latter feasible.

Scientists are human. Scientists have opinions. Scientists require funding. Scientists disagree.

Simple example: The heliocentric model didn’t become accepted knowledge because the “earth is the center of the universe” crowd (who *were? scientists) was convinced by scientific argument - they weren’t. It did when they died.

Science holds a lot of high-likelihood facts. This is what we call the “generally accepted body of knowledge”. We know that the earth is round. We can predict gravity in most circumstances. And yes, we know that anthromorphic climate change is real.

But there’s also a lot of “game-changing” studies/experiments out there that are still to be debunked without ever making it into said body of accepted knowledge. This is normal, it is how science works.

Yet it also means that for virtually any hair-brained opinion that is not already strongly refuted by said body of knowledge (flat earth, for example, is refuted), you can find some not yet debunked science to support it.

Separating the wheat from the chaff here requires insight into the scientific process (and it’s assorted politics and market mechanisms) most people (and voters) don’t have.

And no, just telling people whether a fact is broadly accepted in the scientific community or fringe science doesn’t work. We tried that with the topic of anthromorphic climate change.

I’m fairly certain that’s the same area where wild hogs no longer find enough food in the wild and are currently enthusiastically reclaiming said golf courses.

I, for one, am rooting for the four-legged pigs on this one.

Hypothesis: what matters here is a social toolbox for engaging with “attractive”/compatible women in a non-romantic/sexual way.

I.e. someone who, even as a teenager, had lots of female friends, is likely to have a learned how to deal with them as persons, beyond “I’d like to hit that”.

(Paradoxically, such a person is more likely to find a romantic partner, because they might have lots of M-F acquaintances/friendships that can potentially become something more.)

Someone who never learned that, can only interact with (to them) attractive women through the lens of “I’d like to hit that”, which has a much higher risk of ending in failure.

If someone in the second category was always raised on the values of romantic success being a requirement for a non-failed life, and possibly with a touch of chauvinism/misogyny, they might wind up caught up in a frustrating loop of failure.

This is how incels can happen.

When I DM, I always keep the idea in my back pocket that an enemy that has been distracted by a familiar too often will ready an attack to get rid of it the next time it is in range.

It’ll still eat their action, might miss, and I telegraph it sufficiently that an attentive player might adapt their familiar’s behavior, but it’s a thing that can mix up combat and keeps players on their toes.

Politicians who know that their political career is about to end have the nasty habit of doing favors for their big corporation of choice, knowing that they’ll receive a cushy board position in return afterwards.

If you want to establish term limits, you also need to establish some sort of accountability for the time afterwards.

But at this point, the conclusion of either interpretation should be the same:

The Bible is not a workable moral guideline for modern life.

Neither “Thou shall not sleep with men like you would with women” nor “Thou shall not rape men like you would women” are acceptable.

I don’t know about you, but to me, the fact that he showed genuine humility and willingness to step beyond his initial chauvinism (after some hands-on lessons about fighting women) had a lot more to do with that than his charm.

I genuinely believe that all the tabooisation around sex is a holdover from the days where birth control wasn’t readily available.

There was an economic incentive for People Who Own Stuff to control procreation, because this allows them to control who inherits their stuff.

There was a personal incentive for most people to control procreation to prevent their children of making A Mistake™ by getting stuck with The Wrong Person™.

Where there’s incentives, they’ll wind up being followed. Story as old as time.

Cloaking all that in religion is just window dressing so one doesn’t have to admit their true reasoning, but a purely secular pre-contraception society would also have tried to regulate sex.

Players Decide, PCs act.

You tell me what your PC wants to achieve and how. I set the DC to check how well they perform at that attempt (or declare “no roll needed”, because it’s trivial / impossible).

You want to persuade an NPC? Tell me the gist of your argument and I’ll consider how receptive your target is and set a DC for checking how well your PC can present said argument.

(In some cases like “I want to hit them real good with my sword” or “I want to climb up that wall”, no detailed description is necessary, we both know what you mean.)