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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • …it would be if in your analogy GMail blocks Yahoo because they don’t like the politics of their CEO, Outlook blocks both GMail and Yahoo to create a safe space, and you left Protonmail out of the list entirely because almost everyone else is blocking them for not banning users who email the wrong kind of porn to each other.

    It’s not a big deal until you realize the notion that they all talk to each other is mostly a lie and all the big ones block dozens of instances each. Hell, the threads on the larger instances about whether or not Threads and Truth Social should be defederated if they ever enable federation were some of the highest activity topics on Lemmy for a bit. So was people cheering about Burggit shutting down their lemmy server.




  • North Carolina. There was a requirement to post notices in 3 major newspapers running for 4 weeks.

    This sounds like one of those very old requirements no one has ever bothered to remove - like once upon a time this would be a genuinely useful requirement to keep everyone in the region on the same page as to who people are, prevent county or city records from losing who you are, etc.

    And something about appearing before a judge who could reject the change for any reason they wanted, including reasons like “I don’t like what color shirt you are wearing today”.

    So, like everything else in or adjacent to family court complete with judges that are tyrannical despots over their tiny fiefdoms, who are fully allowed to apply whatever prejudices they might have unchecked for any reason or no reason at all?

    There were a lot of other requirements too, like background checks, fingerprints, character witnesses, etc.

    More very old-school requirement to ensure you aren’t trying to create a new identity to escape previous legal entanglements. Perfectly reasonable for an era before easily searchable digital records, less necessary now.


  • And then when women decide to protest this by not getting married there will be an economic bill that will be passed that states unmarried women will be taxed at a higher rate - and they will use the excuse that we need to shore up the “traditional family” to fight against all this “God-less liberal brainwashing”.

    Historically, when countries do this kind of thing it’s more often targeted at unmarried men. The English have done it, the Ottomans did, even ancient Rome did at one point (though Rome taxed both men and women for being celibate or childless, but men were subject to the tax for a wider span of ages). A bunch more places around the world have at various times either tax unmarried and/or childless men or flirted with the idea - it’s a shockingly long list. Most of them didn’t do the same to unmarried women, or if they did the tax applied to women for fewer years or was higher for men. Most of those have been dead for decades at this point, in large part because they’re not effective at getting people to breed.

    In the US, Missouri briefly taxed unmarried men, before replacing it with a poll tax the next year. Montana did as well, though it got struck down by their courts (not because of gender inequality but because of phrasing in the state constitution that was interpreted to prohibit that kind of tax). New York, Connecticut, Wyoming, New Jersey, Delaware, Georgia, Minnesota, and California all flirted with the idea of taxing bachelors but never passed it. Michigan proposed a bachelor tax 9 different times but never managed to pass it.

    I don’t know of any cases where unmarried or childless women were subject to a punitive tax but unmarried or childless men weren’t (or even cases where it was seriously proposed), barring a few cases where the age ranges were different, typically with the tax applying to women starting at an earlier starting age but for men to a later final age (for example women 20-50 vs men 25-60 by the Romans, or women 20-45 vs men 25-50 by the Soviets). I’d be curious when, how often or to what extent that has ever happened.



  • As you said, STAR is arguably better in some ways but Approval being dead simple to explain to people and technically already supported by existing voting machines is worth a whole lot on its own as far as being a good voting system.

    Try explaining STAR or Approval to someone who is only familiar with FPTP, see which one they understand more quickly.

    Because “Vote for everyone you’re OK with winning the office and it counts as a vote for any of them, whoever gets the most votes wins” or “It’s just like what we’ve been doing, but you can pick more than one person and your vote counts for all of them” explains Approval voting.

    As opposed to having to do a cumulative total across all ballots to figure out if your ballot counts as a vote at all, before figuring out whether your vote actually counts as a vote for someone you voted 5 for or someone you voted 2 for.


  • and the stuff about apple seeds being dangerously poisonous is just some bullshit

    The short version being that apple seeds are in fact poisonous, but you’d have to eat much more of them than you’d find in a single apple, and you’d have to break or crush the seeds in the process to release the poison. The dose makes the poison and all.


  • SSNs are reused. Someone dies and their number gets reassigned.

    Not even that. If you were born before 2014 or so and you’re from somewhere relatively populous theres a pretty good chance there’s more than one living human with your SSN right now. SSN were never meant to be unique, the pairing of SSN and name was meant to be unique but no one really checked for that for most of the history of the program so it really wasn’t either. The combination of SSN, name and age/birthdate should actually be unique though because of how they were assigned even back in the day.




  • Almost everyone. Most of his team doesn’t actively hate him, except for Foreman and sometimes Chase. But yeah, broadly everyone hates him for being an asshole but he’s also a profoundly capable asshole which means they also want to keep him around despite being an asshole. His entire department essentially exists because of Cuddy’s guilt over giving him the limp.

    Three Stories was probably my favorite episode. House is forced to teach a class, he sets up three hypotheticals of patients reporting leg pain at the same time. One of the cases is his own story of how he ended up with the limp. He also managed to diagnose what’s wrong with the normal teacher of the class while teaching it (lead poisoning).




  • I mean, that was literally the elevator pitch for the show - Sherlock Holmes as an American doctor. They even made a point in casting of not wanting a British actor which makes it even funnier that Hugh Laurie got the part.

    Holmes = House Watson = Wilson 7% solution of cocaine = Vicodin

    The biggest difference is that he’s essentially his own Moriarty, and his Reichenbach Falls involved a burning house, heroin and hallucinations of dead former team members.


  • (If I’m understanding you correctly they’ve shown some light on mental issues, which is prob a good thing if actually done correctly & not just for bs character credibility/growth.)

    Specifically he starts season 6 in a psychiatric hospital and season 8 in prison. As always he tries to cheat his way out of the system, but ends up being humbled in season 6 and committing to treatment. He fakes his death at the end of season 8, because he’s going to go back to prison (damage caused by a prank gone wrong), Wilson has cancer and House would be in prison well past Wilson’s estimated remaining time.



  • How many people could one cop realistically know?

    Presumably somewhere around Dunbar’s number (or some other number with a similar goal likely calculated in a better way), which is wildly unrealistic from a practical perspective.

    What problem would this “knowing people” actually solve?

    They likely believe that police that are “members of the community” are much less likely to react based on vague heuristics built up over time because they are more likely to directly know the people involved and thus be less likely to need to rely on a snap judgement of strangers. It’s right up there with “maybe we should train them better”, except training is several orders of magnitude more manageable from a practical standpoint than having more law enforcement per capita than Bible belt small towns have churches per capita.