Yes, the old “hebephilia is not pedophilia, and is normal” shtick.
Obviously yes, there is a very big (biological) difference between sexual attraction to pubescent vs pre-pubescent persons.
That has nothing to do with the Age of Consent, which is a legal standard set in order to account for social dynamics (power dynamics, education differences, etc) that also factor into consent, which is most of the situations he’s talking about, e.g. Roy Moore.
If Stallman wants to do the whole, “there’s no difference between being attracted to a 17-and-364-days year-old and an 18 year-old” bit, I don’t think anyone would care outside of the fact that being hung up on that when you’re not yourself in that dating range just makes you seem creepy. When you’re 18, that discussion is much more relevant. Not so much at Stallman’s age.
But him clearly talking more about the 13-14 year old range, where even someone going through puberty is much closer to pre-pubescent than post-pubescent, just makes him seem like he’s actually a pedophile who wants a loophole.
Some people seem to think that 3 years (from when AAA companies normally drop their first teaser until release) is the full game development lifecycle duration, and anything past that must be abandoned.
A subsidy-fueled boom helped build China into an electric-car giant but left weed-infested lots across the nation brimming with unwanted battery-powered vehicles.
Sure, in the same way that a central characteristic of Communism is being a Stateless society, even though that part never seems to happen either (thanks, Lenin). “True Capitalism has never been tried before!”
China is an instance of State Capitalism, where the government owns the means of production, and uses it for profit-generation. The only reason that anyone in the West actually believes it’s at all Communist is because we’re so indoctrinated by Red Scare propaganda that most people can’t tell the difference between “workers own” and “the government owns”, since the only kind of private ownership we recognize is ownership by oligarchs/corporations.
I got bad news for you: no one cares what an economist says about how they should feel, they only care about how they DO feel, and most Americans feel worse off.
That’s not Biden’s fault, obviously, it’s Capitalism’s, but try explaining that to your average American.
This study in serotine bats (Eptesicus serotinus) shows that the penis is used as a ‘copulatory arm’ rather than an intromittent organ, revealing a novel copulatory behaviour in mammals. DOI:doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.0
It’s a social media site, and they’re not trying to oppose it via courts or something, they’re attacking it via social engineering and exploiting badly-designed re-post bots. This definitely seems more at home here, imo.
In fact, for short trips, an electric bike or moped might be better for you—and for the planet. That’s because these forms of transport—collectively known as electric micromobility—are cheaper to buy and run.
Ok, so this article is actually combining e-bike numbers with electric mopeds, and while you might be able to argue that e-bikes somehow aren’t electric vehicles because they’re partially human-powered, anyone who thinks a moped isn’t one can sod off. They are fully motor-driven. They require a license. They have the same road-legal requirements as any other “electric vehicle”: turn signals, head and brake-lights, license plate, etc.
they are actually displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present
Yeah, show me those 2 broken out individually, because I bet you it’s far more about mopeds than e-bikes, but of course the article title doesn’t even mention mopeds at all.
Yes, but that is not what are being sold now as electric mopeds/ scooters that account for e.g. the 9.7 million annual unit-sales in China. Fully-motorized mopeds are. Which just makes using the ambiguity of the category in order to lie about carbon offset achieved by e-bikes even worse. The accurate headline would have been to say that electric scooters have likely proven to be far better than electric cars, but instead the author chose to make it about e-bikes.
That an especially important distinction when talking about the US, because electric scooters can already navigate our car-centric infrastructure far better than e-bikes can, which means that we can shift people to those much more quickly than we can to e-bikes (which we don’t have the infra to support an explosion of, since they need their own infra), and without the environmental re-construction costs to build that infra that would offset any gains for a LOOONG time.
I get that people wish we could shift to a European-like model of city transit, but we can’t without some pretty major tradeoffs (and heavy drawbacks). Electric motorcycles/ scooters are much more feasible and practical for most individual commuters than e-bikes, and electric cars for families. Most people are either not willing, or not financially able, to have both.
Suburban areas are usually not linked to urban ones with corridors that support (e-)bikes, so you’d often need to literally construct a completely new set of bike-friendly routes to support them.
That electric motor decreases your delta with prevailing traffic substantially
People currently aren’t commuting in from suburbs on 30mph residential roads, they’re on 50-65mph highways. I live in the Bay Area, and there is not a good way to bike into the city currently from either the East Bay or from the North, both of which are where most of the actual suburban sprawl is. You’d literally have to get on BART if you’re in the East Bay, because the Bay Bridge doesn’t have bike or pedestrian pathways. And BART can’t handle that many more riders; it’s already a mess during rush hour.
stop building financially and environmentally unsustainable, ugly, unsafe cities
If your solution requires completely restructuring the way we build cities (how are you planning to change the ones already built), it’s not going to work in any meaningful timeframe. Our current model of city planning evolved over the past hundred years. We don’t have that long to move people to electrics.
Cities are not being designed the way they are (highly compact downtown area with majority of jobs) in order to cater to cars, they’re doing it to cater to businesses. Rather than trying to get people to commute in a better way, we should be focusing on what we’ve already seen deal the most damage to urban business: remote work. That has removed, and will continue to remove, far more cars from the road each day than e-bikes will.
No, our current model of city building stretches back to the early 1900s, and really took off around 1916 when the first modern zoning map was created, for NYC, that set the precedent for how we carve up land around urban areas. But the suburban sprawl that took off in the 20s and post-WW2 era was an imitation of the extra-urban residences of the old-money families.
The creation of HUD in 1965, which is what I assume you are referring to, long post-dates the commute-centric downtown+suburban-sprawl model.
(Have to run, will add more on cities changing/ etc in a bit).
Cities are definitely changing, but they’re not all moving in better directions. We need solutions that don’t rely on 10+ year infrastructure projects that may or may not ever even happen. City planning will cater to the demands of how people use the city, so the best way to get 2-wheel-friendly infrastructure is for people to use 2-wheel vehicles, so while e-bikes are great for people who are at short distances already, they don’t help for people living at medium or long ones (i.e. the suburbs), and if only the short-range commuters change, that won’t be enough to drive infra changes.
My personal preference is always trains, but unfortunately that has even less chance of happening anytime soon, and even worse is that in order to grow it requires reclaiming a LOT of land, and the land they eminent domain or low-ball mandatory-purchase ain’t gonna be rich peoples’ homes.
Ultimately though, they will only stop building centralized, dense downtowns when people stop working in high-density office buildings. Barring that, it’s just a question of how we’re mitigating the impact of the commute.
We should be pushing for divesting from urban centers entirely, in favor of smaller communities that are walkable and largely self-contained(as in, they each have all essential services within them, e.g. grocery, medical, leisure), with transit that connects them like rail and buses similar to towns in Europe, but that’s definitely a LONG ways off.
I’m not sure how you turned “post-war” into “post-1956” and just erased the 11 years in between, but the 1956 Federal Highway Act did not create suburbs. Suburbs existed pre- war, and exploded in the mid-to-late 40s as veterans returned with GI money and bought cars and suburban homes.
The groundwork for that explosion started much earlier, in the late 1890s and early 1900s as Federal agencies were created to establish guidelines for paved roads, such as the Office of Road Inquiry in 1893, and the Office of Public Roads, and the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 that established both federal oversight and state agencies for public roads, including interstate roads, which had been declared the purview of the federal govt in 1907 by SCOTUS.
The Highway Act in '56 was a major boon to longer-distance suburbs, which otherwise shared no connection to existing city roads (i.e. rather than growing outwards from the city edge, they could be built at a distance from the get-go), but those were by no means the first suburbs.
Israel is trying to pull a “if the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit” sleight of hand here.
Even if it were a Hamas command center, that does not justify withholding food and medicine from the hospital.
Even if it were a Hamas command center, that does not justify conducting their brutal attacks on civilians elsewhere.
Even if it were a Hamas command center, that does not justify destroying the infrastructure that civilians require in order to survive.
They are going to make sure there is a command center there, because their entire narrative has become that if Hamas uses civilians as human shields (even if there is literally not enough space for civilians to go anywhere else anyways), then Israel is justified killing civilians.
That’s is false on its own, but more importantly, they are not only attempting to kill Hamas, they are also attempting to kill and displace large numbers of civilians, and we know this because their own government ministries and employees are putting together reports and doing news interviews about how they should displace Palestinians from Gaza.
They would not be making those reports and statements if they thought the government was against it; that would be career-ending. They feel comfortable making those reports and statements precisely because they know that their government is on board with that. They are getting people comfortable with hearing it, for when they actually do it.
My guess is he hid a security breach from the SEC and the board. That makes the most sense as to what would prevent the board from being able to execute on their legal duties.
I was watching a video from two years ago about different social norms and this showed up. Found someone questioning the same eight years ago on reddit (when it seemed less normalized). It feels so weird not being aware of this shift, even as a foreigner.
makes me think that a problem was expected, or that even there might be problems soon
We’re using “problem” to mean “imposition”, not “difficulty”/“error”.
“I had no problem with having to do this for you”, not “I encountered no problems while doing this”.
‘No problem’ is me telling you that I was happy to do the service for you, such that it wasn’t an imposition to do. When I do something for a person I like, I have ‘no problem’ expending the effort to do it.
If I have to do the same for someone I don’t like, I will have a problem with having to do it, but since it’s my job I will not begrudge them whatever it is: they are welcome to it, since it’s my job to provide it. But I don’t have to be happy about it.
‘Sure thing’/ ‘ya no worries’/ ‘ya of course’, etc are neutral phrases.
Bear in mind though that tone and body language are ultimately what you should be cuing on. When I deliver an unhappy “you’re welcome”, it will be deadpan, and I won’t be smiling.
I absolutely LOVE the concept of Caves of Qud, but I literally suck at it so badly that I cannot actually experience it. I leave the starting town, and insects kill me, every time. I have literally started over 50 times, and I never get further than some reeds where insect things kill me.
Yep, and the worst part is that it’s proving that as long as you do a genocide slowly, and through systems like cultural erasure, forced abortions of Uyghurs, and ‘reeducation’ camps rather than straight deathcamps, world governments won’t put any real effort into stopping it.
Imperialists like America don’t like China’s imperialism, but not because they’re opposed to Imperialism, only because it threatens their own hegemony.
Meanwhile, anti-colonialists who should know better, like Mbembe, fall for China’s positioning of themselves as a counter to Imperialism simply because they’re opposing American and European hegemony with their own hegemony.
The Right has always imitated the rhetoric of the Left in order to push their viewpoints once people stop engaging with their ideologies directly, including using right-wing minorities who will claim being discriminated against by the Left if they are called-out for their own anti-minority rhetoric.
I won’t speculate on the personal reasons the people in LAG have for collaborating with ideologies that in actuality hate them as well, because I think there are actually a lot of different potential reasons (e.g. being just plain bigoted, hoping to be left unharmed as ‘one of the good ones’, somehow believing that their societal acceptance is actually more threatened by trans people than conservatives, etc), but it is always sad to see, because I feel like they often deny their own oppression in order to do it.
The right-wing leader appeared on multiple cable news shows to speak on the current state Israel’s monthlong siege on Gaza, which human rights experts have warned amount to ethnic cleansing and war crimes....
Netanyahu is going to bomb the hostages and then blame Hamas, saying they were used as human shields, just like he’s been doing with Palestinian civilians. 200 Israeli hostages “murdered by Hamas (using Israeli bombs)” is more useful politically to his war-machine than 200 live hostages.
Hamas wouldn’t have done 10/7 if not for Israel’s colonialism and genocide, and Israel has never had a true “ceasefire” in Palestine. They for years have done bombing campaigns that they euphemize as “mowing the grass”, against Gaza. You can’t divorce the current conflict from the history that led to it.
Turns out that desperation breeds extremism, and Israel is the one who made Palestinians desperate.
People don’t denounce slaves who revolt as being too brutal, but continually murdering and starving peoples’ children apparently is not bad enough to justify revolt when it’s only Palestinians being murdered.
Are you by any chance in denial of the PIJ missile which misfired into the hospital carpark a couple of weeks back? The one which Hamas lied was a direct hit by Israeli bombs killing 500?
No, I think it is likely that it was a rocket that misfired. Israel has been responsible for all the intentional bombs hitting hospitals, schools, places of worship, etc though, so I’m not sure what significance you are attributing to what someone believes about the one unintentional one?
“Yeah, but if there’s one Hamas guy inside a densely-populated refugee camp, what possible other choice do we have than to bomb literally tens of buildings in there? He could have been in any of them! We gave those civilians ample warning that they are subject to murder at any time, anyways! How can you say we’re not merciful and restrained!?”
And it’s being used to try to distance themselves from the long standing international opposition to their illegal occupation and annexation of Tibet, and the genocide done to achieve it.
I love how you Tankies just assume everyone but you is pro-US or something.
Yeah, absolutely; the Chinese government is evil just like Israel and the US’s governments. Glad we agree that they’re all imperialist genociders! Good talk!
Regardless, this is the same Tibetan government that…
Yawn. Nothing but whataboutism from you, huh? “Who cares if China did multiple genocides and illegal annexations and disappears people who protest the government, the Tibetan government is also bad, so China should be allowed to ethnic cleanse them!”
No government is good, but other humans being bad isn’t an excuse to go and be bad as well. And let’s not pretend that China gives a crap about anything except expansion of their resources and influence. You’re not impressing anyone by defending a genocidal regime, it just comes off as being incapable of actually critically assessing your own side. You’re no different than the MAGA crowd who think America can do no wrong.
What’s saddest about this is that it took me literally 3 minutes to find images of tanks in Tiananmen running over student barricades, and blood streaks left on the ground afterwards, and bodies on the ground, but you don’t actually care at all, you’ll just cover your ears and push your narrative. You’re no better than people downplaying what Israel and America do, but you are so wrapped up in the righteousness of your ML rhetoric that you’ll just deny it and make up excuses for your side doing the same stuff.
It’s very funny to me that you keep bringing up Gaza like it’s some counterpoint to what I’m saying, when all you’re doing is pointing out another bloodthirsty regime’s crimes. Do you think that Israel’s government being evil is somehow a rebuttal to China’s government being evil?
Not quite what it refers to now, but I’m sure you’ll inform us that you know better.
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to communists who express support for one-party communist regimes that are associated with Marxism–Leninism, whether contemporary or historical.
what it means (people in support of that use of force and tanks to suppress civilian revolution)
This ^ is the incorrect part of your statement. That is not what it means now.
edit: Also
Tankie refers to those people who supported the Soviet use of tanks to quell the Hungarian revolution.
Emphasis added. If you meant “referred” in the past tense, that was a typo on your part. Otherwise, you are just trying to reclaim the term to an earlier meaning.
“Five kids in the pediatric [Shifa Hospital] ICU left alone in Rantisi Hospital, and we don’t know what’s going on with them. The communications were lost, so they might be dead or alive,” one of the doctors said....
Newspapers have been in consolidation and contraction for decades, with no sign of recovery.
If you are talking about printed newspapers, yes of course. If you are talking about Newspapers as in the organizations (NYT, Atlantic, etc), news consumption is actually way up, they have just been struggling to monetize effectively in the digital space, especially since the corporate-backed non-newspaper news media orgs like CNN and Fox don’t have to rely on website ads or subs, and can create the expectation of free news content, which directly discourages casual news consumers from paying for it.
The disadvantage is that not enough will pay.
This depends entirely on the size and scope of what is being made. There are tons of news content creators who operate through subscriptions just fine. They’re also not outputting print media which were always pre-printed based on demand estimates, never printed-to-order. If you think that there are no news sites funded off of subscriptions that are doing just fine, you are misinformed. They’re just not the big names you think of, who have lost their mass-appeal due to having to compete with the aforementioned corporate-backed news media outlets who can afford to undercut them.
Anyone who is trying to ask for a subscription in order for people to read the same news they can get on CNN for free is going to fail hard. The key is reporting on stuff that CNN et al doesn’t or won’t.
Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset' (web.archive.org)
By Anna Tong...
Richard Stallman's political discourse on sex (drewdevault.com)
Stardew Valley Expanded exceeded its creator’s wildest dreams (www.polygon.com)
WHO asks China for more data on respiratory illnesses outbreak (medicalxpress.com)
China’s Abandoned, Obsolete Electric Cars Are Piling Up in Cities (www.bloomberg.com)
A subsidy-fueled boom helped build China into an electric-car giant but left weed-infested lots across the nation brimming with unwanted battery-powered vehicles.
Far-right party set to win most seats in Dutch elections, exit polls show (www.theguardian.com)
These bats are the only mammals known to mate without non penetrative sex (www.sciencenews.org)
This study in serotine bats (Eptesicus serotinus) shows that the penis is used as a ‘copulatory arm’ rather than an intromittent organ, revealing a novel copulatory behaviour in mammals. DOI:doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.0
China is expanding its crackdown on mosques to regions outside Xinjiang, Human Rights Watch says (apnews.com)
Israel, Hamas agree on four-day truce, hostage release and aid into Gaza (www.reuters.com)
Note that this isn’t ALL the hostages – just 50 in exchange for 150 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. archive.org link...
Inside the Operation to Bring Down Trump’s Truth Social (www.wired.com)
The North Atlantic Fella Organization is trying to shut down Trump’s flailing social media platform before the 2024 election—by shitposting.
U.S. President Biden says "Gaza and the West Bank should be reunited under single government" and "extremist violence against Palestinians in the West Bank must stop" (feddit.de)
Cross-posted from: feddit.de/post/5830159...
280 million e-bikes are slashing oil demand far more than electric vehicles (arstechnica.com)
IDF evidence so far falls well short of al-Shifa hospital being Hamas HQ (www.theguardian.com)
OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman (openai.com)
Americans are explaining why they don't say 'you're welcome' in customer service settings after foreigners complained that 'mmhmm' comes off as rude (www.insider.com)
I was watching a video from two years ago about different social norms and this showed up. Found someone questioning the same eight years ago on reddit (when it seemed less normalized). It feels so weird not being aware of this shift, even as a foreigner.
Caves of Qud’s “Creatures of the 7th Plague” Update Released (youtu.be)
Live and drink, water-sibs
Separated From Their Families, Hidden From The World: China’s Colonial Boarding Schools In Tibet Come Under UN Scrutiny (feddit.de)
Cross-posted from: feddit.de/post/5674446
A nice debunk of the transphobic trope of ‘lesbian erasure’ (overland.org.au)
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu says Palestinian civilians being killed en masse are simply “collateral damage” (www.huffpost.com)
The right-wing leader appeared on multiple cable news shows to speak on the current state Israel’s monthlong siege on Gaza, which human rights experts have warned amount to ethnic cleansing and war crimes....
China is slowly erasing Tibet's name (feddit.de)
Cross-posted from: feddit.de/post/5651275...
Gaza’s Largest Hospitals Close, Premature Babies Taken Out of Incubators, Israeli Forces Reportedly Entered Hospitals and Fired at Patients (www.democracynow.org)
“Five kids in the pediatric [Shifa Hospital] ICU left alone in Rantisi Hospital, and we don’t know what’s going on with them. The communications were lost, so they might be dead or alive,” one of the doctors said....
Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist (www.404media.co)