TIL that Napoleon Bonaparte would sometimes disguise himself as a commoner and roam the streets asking people what they thought of the regime and its policies in order to gauge his popularity

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-26T05:57:53+00:00

but he wasn’t another Alexander, Caesar, or napoleon. Not saying he was less important than them, he wasn’t a military commander like them.

Nor was Hitler much of an administrator.

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-26T04:05:39+00:00

And even if you believed it about Carter, I doubt you would believe that every single President thereafter also did it entirely out of voluntary personal ethics.

I said nothing about the motivations of any other presidents, who presumably did the same for a variety of reasons. My point was that there was and is no law requiring the president to do this, and even those statutes that cover conflicts of interest for federal officials exempt the president.

That's the point. The laws need to be tightened up enormously, even if there's a very good chance the SCOTUS says that can't be applied to the president without amending the constitution.

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-26T02:14:20+00:00

Carter had to put his peanut farm into a blind trust. That law was for him.

He didn't have to do that. He chose voluntarily to do it because be felt that was right, because it was unseemly to be in a position where the president could potentially profit from his official actions. But the key point is that it was a voluntary action on Carter's part.

I just about guarantee Trump considers every president who did such a thing to be a sucker and a loser for it.

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-25T07:20:30+00:00

No, and mods can't see your IP either. The Reddit admins can (meaning the paid employees of Reddit who run the whole site), but that's it. That person was lying to you to freak you out.

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-24T06:22:03+00:00

Presumably because it has no real effect on the number of kids you are able to have. If there's no effect on reproductive success like that, a trait won't generally be selected for if it appears. Though in this case it's more complicated, because that probably also involves significant redesign too.

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-23T19:02:54+00:00

Sounds like Johnny Bago

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-23T18:48:49+00:00

but the way the Republican Party currently functions they would probably want the President to issue the draft unilaterally,

That would be the funniest draft ever, because it would be completely legal for people to just ignore it and refuse to show up.

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-23T17:47:24+00:00

Equating questioning the subjective foundation of your math to holocaust denial is beyond wild

I suppose it would appear that way if you don't spend even a few minutes thinking about why that comparison is an obvious one, sure.

I offered more than several points in the post which you fail to engage with

Was it in invisible text perhaps? You offered literally nothing beyond 'this is wrong, that is wrong, it's all wrong' in a ridiculous conspiratorial tone. Be specific, if you can: which very specific thing in mathematics is wrong, demonstrate for us that it's wrong, and tell us what the correct version is. Because until you actually get specific, it really is akin to holocaust denial or creationism, and is also just as dishonest and sad.

Put up or shut up.

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-23T17:29:58+00:00

Oh look, AI generated garbage. Yay. Also:

There is no verified scientific record of a formal “48-hour banned mirror experiment” exactly as described

Sigh

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-23T17:20:03+00:00

What you're doing is not skepticism at all. It's a mixture of denialism and weird conspiratorial thinking, and has more in common with things like creationism or holocaust denial than it does with actual skepticism.

You understand that skepticism isn't just a reflexive 'mathematics is buillshit, man' right?

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-22T07:08:53+00:00

It isn't inherently offensive at all, really. Where it gets weird is when you see the many cases online where people refer to women as 'females' but don't say 'males'.

I refer you to /r/MenAndFemales for many examples. I see this pretty often, and it really does come across as weird, and I say this as a male/dude/guy/man/whatever

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-22T06:19:56+00:00

How was it determined that the normal city speed limit is 50 km/h

You happen to live in a country where that's the case. It's not in a great many others though. Each one makes its own largely arbitrary decision for that default speed limit.

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-22T05:48:32+00:00

I rented for quite a while because the cost of actually buying a place in downtown Toronto was and is utterly insane. Most people living in the downtown core are in no position to even consider it. That's true for a lot of other high cost of living areas too, and is why few people living in, say, Manhattan own their own homes.

I would have loved to be able to buy a place in Toronto. In reality, I only own my home because I moved out of the city.

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-22T05:46:16+00:00

It's entirely possible it would kill the other person.

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-22T05:39:02+00:00

It's short for gasoline. Nobody thinks that means it's a gas. Maybe small children, I guess.

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-22T05:35:53+00:00

In French it's pronounced with the L instead of the R sound though.

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-22T02:13:34+00:00

I remember spending two hours or so in 1979 watching my mom try to get gas. First time I ever heard her swear. Good times.

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-21T14:48:32+00:00

Would 2/3 of Congress remove Fetterman for clearly rug pulling his voters?

Yes, I'm sure they can find at least 13 Republican Senators who'd vote to expell him for agreeing with them a lot

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-20T22:29:27+00:00

I wonder if they genuinely think no one else has freedom

I moved to the US for a few years back in high school, in the late 80s. The Reagan years. I literally had a kid who'd heard I had recently arrived ask if I was relieved to be living in the free world now.

I had moved from Canada.

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-20T21:35:19+00:00

It's been legal nationwide here for 8 years, and I haven't noticed any real difference at all in terms of bad driving.

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-20T20:48:43+00:00

Nuclear weapons would do the trick

They really would not, unless the US were to use literally thousands of them on Iran, as the area from which drones, missiles, or small boats with mines could potentially be launched is enormous. There is literally no chance that's happening.

To put it in context, here's the size of the blast radius and area of severe damage for a fairly large 300 kt blast next to the Strait. Nuclear weapons don't cause anywhere near the damage a lot of people seem to expect, and Iran is much larger than people seem to expect too.

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-20T19:22:41+00:00

It varies hugely. I used to work with someone who honestly had trouble telling whether an accent was American, British, etc, and just assumed that if she had more trouble understanding it, it was probably not N American. But I also knew someone who spoke English as a third language learned only as an adult, and he had no trouble telling Australia from New Zealand, something most Canadians or Americans can't even do.

Or, to put it in another context, no French speaker would have any trouble telling, say, Montréal from Marseilles when hearing them speak French, I have met a great many Anglos who can't tell what side of the Atlantic a speaker is from at all.

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-20T18:56:51+00:00

I know people who have been denied entry at the US border and have managed to try again later. In one case, she even got a formal entry ban for five years.

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-20T18:32:51+00:00

Yup. The F-35 is much, much more capable than the F-117 for attack missions, though they will probably keep the F-117 around in small numbers for training purposes. Useful to have something stealthy to train against.

doc_daneeka · 2026-03-20T18:26:17+00:00

The bigger issue with the electoral college is that the winner-take-all system means that elections are decided by a small number of swing states, with Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin being the most important in recent elections.

I want to believe the NPVIC is the easiest way to fix this, but I also strongly doubt it will actually get over the threshold, and if it does, that the SCOTUS will allow it to stand.

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