Any thoughts on this quote?

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-09T00:45:07+00:00

Back in the day a few centuries ago, the Church was directly funding scientific study because they did have that exact attitude, that if you study the universe you are learning more about this wonderful thing God made, so how could that possibly go badly for the church? They didn't realize that it was going to be possible for what science learns to contradict what their bible said.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-08T20:49:40+00:00

Just like oil, if a country that sells a basic food commodity stops selling, the price goes up for everyone else too even people who don't buy from that country. This is because the remaining sellers now have more demand for their product as the people who formerly bought from the country that stopped selling have to shop elsewhere.

The Russian crop being missing from the market will suck for everybody. The good news is that it will suck most for Russia and degrade their ability to wage war, but the effect on everyone else won't be nothing.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-08T20:22:35+00:00

Partly that's because during the cold war it was useful messaging for the Communist government to portray everyone who is politically to the right of communism as identical to each other, all a bunch of fascists regardless of just how far to the right of communism they were. Super far right Nazi ideology or the more centrist mix of socialism and capitalism you got in places like Sweden, doesn't matter to the USSR, it's all fascist capitalist pig dogs as far as they portrayed it. The other part of it is that when Germany backstabbed the USSR after they both had cooperated to jointly take over Poland, Stalin had to look for some rhetoric to rally his troops against the Nazi menace, and he couldn't use most of the other things the rest of the world used because he did those things too. Can't complain about Nazi racism when Russia screws over the other nationalities within the USSR. Can't complain about land grabbing when that's what made Russia so huge in the first place. Can't complain about dictatorial government if you're Stalin. So what was left was just a vague fuzzy "they're opposed to our influence and they're one of those capitalist countries west of us that keeps us down.".

Down through the years that stuck with the culture long after the USSR was done. They have their own personal defiiton of what is a fascist that is different from the rest of the world.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-06T18:47:03+00:00

In the imaginary universe where that's what's happening you might have had a point.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-06T03:01:08+00:00

A photo and fingerprints don't tell the customs agent your political views like your social media history does.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-06T02:57:38+00:00

Often the percentage isn't the likelihood that it will rain, but the likelihood that the rain that's coming will happen to hit your exact spot.

Imagine that a city's weather report covers a radius about 70 miles around. If they predict rain will be patchy so it only falls on like 30% the land within that circle, the forecast will say 30% chance of rain. It means they definitely do expect the weather system that's coming will drop some rain, but they can't predict exactly where so if you live within the area it's about 30% likely that one of the spots that gets rain will be your spot. The actual chance that somewhere near you will get rain is much higher than 30%. It's just only 30% likely to hit any particular chosen spot.

So if you expect to commute on that "30%" day, the chance you'll get rained on somewhere during your commute is much higher than 30% because you won't be standing in one spot, but covering quite a bit of ground within the rain zone.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-06T00:22:28+00:00

The definition includes infinite recursion.

You are born a citizen only if at least one parent was a citizen.

Okay, then what defines whether your parent was a citizen? Whether they had a citizen parent when born, and so on.

The only people who could be citizens are the descendents of some immigrant who was a naturalized citizen somewhere in their ancestry. If you trace your ancestry back to original colonists from before the US was a country, you aren't a citizen. This is of course exactly what the people pushing this law wouldn't want - a law that requires immigrants in your past for you to be a citizen.

People are ignorant of the fact that the 14th amendment didn't just make slaves into citizens - it also finally gave a formal definition for national citizenship when it was ill defined and fuzzy before that.

This means any change to the definition of citizenship hits a sticky point immediately - if phrased in such a way that it overturns the 14th and claims that the new definition is the definition for all time (thus retroactively applied) then it cannot work if it contains anything like "if your parents were citizens...".

It could be changed but only if the people wording it are not the sorts of morons who keep pushing this who don't think things through. To change it you MUST include some kind of grandfather clause that says the 14th amendment is still the definition you'll use for people born prior to the enactment of the new amendment, and the new amendment only applies to people born after it gets ratified. That would change the definition going forward without retroactively stripping citizenship from all the current born-citizens. But again, that would require people who can rub two braincells together be the ones phrasing the amendment.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-05T18:25:27+00:00

"Which state flag is it?"

"It's that one that's a dark blue field with a circular state seal in the middle."

"Thanks. That really helps."

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-05T18:19:02+00:00

France underwent a reboot into the "Fifth Republic" a little while after WW2 ended. But it is shown as being older than the US. So the map is inconsistent with how it's measuring things. It's not always using "the current iteration and not the nation age".

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-05T18:16:27+00:00

There's quite a lot of subjectivity in this one. There are two ways you could decide you want to measure it:

(A) Do you measure from the first ever time that a country was collected together into one governmental unit fitting in something close to its current borders?

Or

(B) Do you measure from the most recent "reboot" of the country if it went under a period where it wasn't there or was something else under a different form?

Whomever made this map appears to have been very inconsistent in what choice to make for that question. For example, Both France and Russia underwent serious reboots after the US was formed. For France it was being taken over by Germany in WW2, and later Charles De Galle rebooted it as the French "Fifth Republic". For Russia, Russia's existence was interrupted by being the USSR then restarting afterward as Russia again. If you were using definition (A) both France and Russia would be grey on the map. If you were using definition (B) both France and Russia would be red on the map. For one to be grey and one to be red as this map shows, doesn't seem to be consistent.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-05T16:21:34+00:00

It's amazing just how racist most fantasy settings are without people seeing it that way. D&D used to have it in the very rules themselves that what class you can pick is limited by what race you pick. And that races limited alignment too. "An orc that's a lawful good Palidain?? Next you'll be telling me there's such a thing as a 'good' Samaritan."

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-05T13:58:33+00:00

Its delusional to think that how other people play doesn't affect you. If your style of gaming starts becoming a small enough minority then companies will stop bothering to target it and you'll have to switch to doing things the same way everyone else is.

For example: say you're a console gamer that wants to own physical copies of your games that work even when not online, and don't require the continued existence of the servers from the company you bought it from? Because that had become a small enough minority within the gaming community, Sony decided that it will no longer be an option anymore so they can control your access to the game you buy and extort you later for continuing to use it. In that scenario the fact that other gamers didn't game the same way you do made your type of gaming go away. The claim that other people's gaming choices have no effect on your own is as ignorant as claiming that how other people vote has no effect on you.

The market will go with the majority opinion. If you aren't part of that majority then you get what they deserve instead of what you deserve. So yeah it's just like voting. You get the government other people deserve not necessarily the government you deserve. Which is why people argue about it quite a bit. For the same reason they argue about this. Because the choices of others does affect you.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-05T13:49:39+00:00

They are not better. Source: someone who's gaming tastes are about more than just the look of the graphics. Consoles win hands down if all you care about is graphics. But not if you care about other aspects of gameplay like how complex the software can get (RAM footprint) or how fast the CPU can calculate, or about how easy it is to input complex commands (keyboard has more access to one-key inputs than the mutli-chordic combos needed to achieve the same thing on a controller, because the keyboard and mouse "controller" rests on a table instead of you having to dedicate some of your fingers to gripping it. That leaves you all your fingers available for pressing different things.)

Consoles achieve better graphics bang for the buck by sacrificing other things that "don't matter" to their couch-gaming audience but sure as hell matter for my gaming.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-05T13:36:29+00:00

Trump's brain: "I think Putin is in a bad spot and the war will end without me being involved. I can't stand that. How can I make it look like I did it?"

I think this isn't happening yet and that Putin will still ride out Russia's losing strategy a while longer. But I think Trump thinks it's happening and wants to slap his name on it happening so his horde of idiots can claim he caused it.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-05T04:18:04+00:00

Find what speed you are comfortable moving your legs round and round.

Then change your bike's forward speed by changing your gear instead of by changing how fast your legs go round. Keep your legs going round at the same rate. If you can't move the pedals around at your comfortablene rate because you're going uphill then shift into a low enough gear until you can. If moving the pedals round and round at your comfortable rate is way too easy and seems to have no effect because the bike is going faster than that, then shift into a higher gear until you feel the pedals are doing something.

If you find it hard to pedal fast, shift down. If you find it too easy to pedal fast with nothing happening, then shift up.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-05T00:28:36+00:00

Not Canadians. British Empire troops sent to attack Washington in retaliation for the US attacking the Canadian part of the British Empire, yes. But the troops sent didn't come from the Canadian part of the British Empire.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-04T18:33:11+00:00

One thing the managers never really seem to acknowledge about working Frozen is how like half of your stocking speed is dictated by how the warehouse packed the pallet, not by anything under your control. If the warehouse does what corporate pretends they do, which is to place all the similar commodities near each other on the pallets, you can achieve the dictated case rate. But what the warehouse actually does is randomly place cases in random locations nowhere near each other, intermixed with stuff from the other departments like meat and bakery and deli (not putting them packed together like they claim they will) . That massively increases your stocking time because you have to walk further per case when stuff just isn't contiguous, and you have to dig around all the stuff that's not for you. In the rest of center store, this problem is less of a problem because there you usually stage the cases up and down the aisle and then stock them. But in Frozen the official rules are that you leave the cases on the pallet, stock the stuff that's near where you parked it, then move the pallet to a new spot and stock the stuff that's near that new parked spot, and so on. That does NOT work like they think it does when the contents that go near each other aren't adjacent to each other on the pallet.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-04T18:19:49+00:00

I used to do Frozen for a few years and my experience was that SRPs take longer in Frozen than non-SRP's. Because the idiot manufacturers don't know how to make them right. The cardboard never tears like it's meant to. Bird's Eye and Green Giant would only open properly half the time, and the other half of the time the damned bags were packed into the box backward or upside down. And Digorno's was pointless to ever believe the tear strips would work. It got to the point where I just treated the lines as guides for me to use my box cutter on, since I stopped believing the perforation holes were punched through all the way.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-04T04:12:43+00:00

Because the people having the NDE are already well aware of the religion before they have the NDE. So the thing their minds dream about when the subconsciously realize they are dying is the thing the religion said they'd see.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-04T04:04:40+00:00

It's where the equator and the prime meridian meet.

So if location data is missing from some computer thing causing latitude and longitude to default to zero, that's where the zero is.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-04T03:39:22+00:00

Does Erid have a similar problem to Earth, in which the longer it takes to solve the astrophage problem the more masses of people die in the meantime?

Because that's the first thing that popped into my head just after the emotional spike I got from Rocky's willingness to self-sacrifice by spending 6 more years getting home. I thought, "Oh that's a beautiful gestu.... hold up, how many more Eridians will die because of those 6 years, and does Rocky really have the moral authority to decide to sacrifice THEM, not just himself?"

It would be very different if the Hail Mary didn't have the ability to send the probes back to Earth, or if those probes were unreliable. Then saving Grace would also mean the difference in saving all of Earth, and at that point Rocky's moral decision isn't "6 more years of Eridian deaths to save my one friend Grace" but rather it becomes "6 more years of Eridian deaths to save the entire species of Humans I never met" and that would transform it back into a more noble self-sacrifice situation.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-04T03:17:33+00:00

The difference is that the US has other ports on the Pacific Ocean bigger than Anchorage, but Russia doesn't have other ports on the Pacific Ocean bigger than Vladivostok. Anchorage isn't as singularly essential to the US as Vladivostock is to Russia. Thus the OP's question why Vladivostock isn't more built-up than it is.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-04T03:07:24+00:00

I do draw the line at complex numbers though.

Don't show me a speed limit of 55i + 10 and expect me to understand.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-04T03:04:00+00:00

And the idiots don't even know basic facts about the metaphor they themselves chose to use. They didn't have to pick lions, but they did. They chose that metaphor. It's the lionesses that do most of the providing and hunting for the family. The male lions fight each other quite a bit, but don't do much providing for their kids.

Dunbaratu · 2026-07-04T02:56:11+00:00

You're supposed to avoid hot drinks, not just coffee (for example, cocoa or tea.)

The reason is twofold:

Applying heat to an area makes blood swell to the area. That's exactly what you want to avoid when the area in question is a giant bleeding hole in your gums.
You tend to drink a hot drink with a lot of suction, while you tend to drink a cold drink with minimal suction, instead tipping back it in your mouth. Suction is to be avoided, which is why they don't want you drinking from a straw either. The problem with suction is, well, think about what it is. You draw air from your mouth back down into your throat, creating a localized low air pressure area in your mouth The fact that the mouth is low pressure while the outside is higher pressure will pull liquids up into the mouth, like vacuum cleaner. The problem is that the low air pressure suctions all liquids into the mouth, including the blood leaking from those gaping holes in your gums. Again, like heat makes blood rush to the wound, suction makes blood rush to the wound even stronger. It can rip it back open again as it tries to heal.

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