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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • Is this legal?

    Yes, it’s called “opposition research” (frequently abbreviated “oppo”) and the political parties do it constantly to one another. Because they’re doing it this much, and because they have a LOT less scruples than you do, they’ve probably already uncovered everything you would. But maybe not all.

    In addition, doing this publicly would put the target on alert, so they’d specifically run interference against whoever you hired. This wouldn’t make their job impossible, but definitely harder.

    And, finally, whatever new dirt you do manage to gather might not matter. The things Trump has done that the public already knows about should be enough to put him in prison for life, and yet he’s still in the current US presidential election instead of incarceration.







  • Mostly it’s just CYA for google since cycling is more dangerous than driving (due to the people driving), so there’s more surface area for them to get sued.

    But yeah

    • turns and crossings that look safe on a map don’t have very much data on whether they’re actually safe, because google has a thousand times as much information about drivers than cyclists.
    • google sometimes suggests routes that can’t be traversed, legally or at all, by a bike. Same reason.
    • sometimes google suggests avoiding something a bike doesn’t actually have to worry about. This is actually the category of error I see the most: google sends you around something when you could simply walk your bike through it, or ride through it, because you’re not a car.


  • xantoxis@lemmy.worldtoData is Beautiful@lemmy.worldWho Stops a "Bad Guy With a Gun"?
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    11 days ago

    This one actually demonstrates some flaws in this graph format. Maybe it’s just how it’s expressed this time, but, here are some insights you might gain from this presentation that aren’t actually the case:

    • “the police shot the attacker 98 times” which just sounds like a normal headline about how police handle things.
    • Very near that branch, you can accidentally see “the police died by suicide 38 times”
    • and, similarly, “the police surrendered 15 times” which is a surprise because I thought that only happened at Uvalde.

    Like, I get what is trying to be conveyed here but the format requires a lot of work for my brain to parse and makes it harder to understand.


  • Also: This chart only shows what happened to the attacker. It doesn’t give you a picture of the innocent people on the scene shot by cops, the cops shot by cops, the “good guy with a gun” who shoots another good guy with a gun, and so on. 12/433 may be accurate, but by the time you deduct points for innocent deaths caused by people with guns on the scene, you’re creeping back down to zero again.



  • xantoxis@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzJackhammer
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    12 days ago

    You wouldn’t, of course. Hearing, the way we hear, in such an environment would be useless. We wouldn’t have evolved that. This is like saying “ultraviolet radiation from the sun would be everywhere, all the time, can you imagine?” It is everywhere all the time, but as such it isn’t a useful sense to possess, so we don’t.

    This also makes some very weird assumptions about what the sound would be like. If space were a medium sound could travel through then it would–like all mediums capable of carrying a sound wave–alter the wave in many ways. Intensity, frequency, etc. But since we don’t know what kind of medium that would be, and since the comment doesn’t posit any particular medium, we don’t know what the sound would sound like or even how loud it would be.