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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneBiology rule
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    3 days ago

    Because English is a Germanic language that has half of it’s vocabulary as borrowed words from a Romance language (French) that then got chewed up and mangled for a few centuries.

    Not like Gaelic, which has to own the fact that most of it’s words are pronounced in the least sensible way one might think that series of letters is said.








  • The Constitution didn’t establish a right to vote for men in general or any men in particular. It left the question of which citizens were allowed to vote fully up to the states.

    Or to go deeper: The Declaration of Independence limited voting to landowners. The Constitution set no regulations whatsoever for which citizens could vote, leaving it wholly up to the states. There are various trends in state laws over time but nothing federal regarding who can vote (other than various immigration laws about who can be naturalized). Until the 15th Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

    Technically, men did not have a federally protected right to vote until women did, the 19th amendment. Though state laws had expanded to give essentially all free white men the vote in every state shortly before the Civil War, but that’s not from that federal point of view you’re so worried about.


  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtoMemes@lemmy.mlAR15's are not Hunting Rifles.
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    2 months ago

    While you can hunt with an AR-15, it’s not the best rifle for the task.

    It’s not the best rifle for any task. But it’s a good enough rifle for most tasks, and between real AR-15s and the various clones they are cheap, in common calibers, and have accessories widely available.

    Which is why it’s the most common rifle in the US by a fair margin.

    It being the most common rifle in the US by a fair margin is in turn why it’s so often used in public mass shootings, as those are usually done with weapons of convenience rather than something bought for purpose. Likely also why the guy who shot Trump used one.

    If a public mass shooter wanted the best gun for the job, they’d get something closer to a PS-90 (the civilian version of the P-90 which is a military rifle designed for urban combat).


  • In fact, women were not even considered full citizens then since they did not possess the right to vote.

    Like most things, this was up to the individual states. Like anything up to the individual states, it was all over the place depending on exactly where you were. For example, at the founding women in New Jersey could vote, presuming they owned 50 British pounds worth of wealth because the wealth requirement was the only requirement New Jersey had for who could vote. Ironically, the spread of Jacksonian democracy (aka universal male suffrage) actually cost women in New Jersey the right to vote in the 19th century.


  • Part of it is that various states require that all candidates already be registered before now, so it’s Biden or bust in those states - they can’t swap him for a different candidate on the ballots there and they can’t officially transfer any pledged electoral votes for him either if he wins.

    There are enough such states to win Trump the election if they go to him essentially by default. And if they all went to Biden despite Biden stepping down then we’d be in a one vote per state election between the top candidates, which leads to a Trump win.


  • I once tried to install Linux around then, not long after ISA cards with Plug n Play became a thing.

    Linux: So now to even pretend to get the card to work you have to download and run a tool to generate a config file to feed to another tool so you can then install the driver and get basic functionality from the card (which is all that’s available on Linux). Except the first tool doesn’t generate a working config file - it generates a file containing every possible configuration your hardware supports hypothetically having and requires you to find and uncomment the one you want to actually use. Requiring you to manually configure the card and thus kinda defeating the point of Plug n Play (though I guess that configuration was in software, not by setting jumpers).

    Same card in Windows at the time: Install card, boot Windows. Card is automatically identified and given a valid configuration, built in drivers provide basic functionality. Can download software from manufacturer for more advanced functionality.

    That soured me on Linux for a long time. Might try it again sometime soon just to see what it’s like if nothing else. ProtonDB doesn’t have the most positive things to say about my Steam collection, and I imagine odds are worse for stuff not available on Steam.




  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneyikes rule
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    3 months ago

    Could he? Wizards are apparently able to handle significantly more physical trauma than Muggles and have access to considerably more advanced medicine.

    Like, they teach 11 year olds to play sports on flying brooms several stories in the air in which they hit heavy balls at each other very fast. They teach 16 year olds to teleport with the explicit risk that they might mess up and leave part of themself behind (and we don’t even ask the question of what happens if there’s something physically blocking their target location, such as another person). Somehow, the school doing these things doesn’t have multiple fatalities every year which means that getting hit then falling 60 feet to the ground is generally not a death sentence, or even a particularly serious injury.

    You shoot Voldemort pre-horcruxes and he’s likely going to apparate away, drink a healing concoction of some variety, and try again in a few hours or days unless it’s a headshot. You shoot him post-horcrux, and even if it is a headshot that’s just a somewhat longer delay. And that presumes a lack of some kind of magical defense that would block a small projectile coming at you very fast.


  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneyikes rule
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    3 months ago

    I mean I’m somewhat interested in how the Wizarding world manages to keep hidden despite all the kids from the muggleworld supposedly having friends and connections and things before Hogwarts.

    I imagine the kindest answer to that involves magical law enforcement obliviating and confounding any witnesses, akin to how Gilderoy Lockhart had a career but perpetrated at scale on a large populous of second-class citizens (aka Muggles). Which is horrifying, but any other answer I can think of is somehow worse than wizard cops mind raping anyone who saw anything.


  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneyikes rule
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    3 months ago

    and letting children marry.

    Most still do so long as the line being drawn is “is there any hypothetical situation in which a 17 year old can legally marry?” Most of those specifically allow older teens (16 or 17 depending on the state) to marry under narrow circumstances, usually requiring any minor have parental consent and/or court approval before allowing it. All states allowed under-18 marriage in some conditions until 2018, and only about a dozen have set a hard 18 limit with no exceptions since then.

    With CA being one of the worst offenders in that it has no hard legal minimum age of marriage at all and relies on parents and courts to prevent serious abuse (no minimum but requires approval from one parent or guardian and the court). MA was very similar with no hard minimum at all until recently passing a hard 18 minimum.

    Which means if you have the right people in your pocket (a parent or guardian and a judge) you could hypothetically marry someone very underage in CA then cart them off to a state where marriage is an explicit exception to age of consent (such as NM) and engage in legal CSA.



  • You misunderstand the dynamic. Most GOP voters are going to vote and are going to vote for the Republican, regardless of how awful that Republican is. Voting is a civic duty and party above all are kinda core ideas for them.

    Dem voters are a lot more flighty in general. Any barrier to voting no matter how small (even having to rise from the couch) impacts Dem voters more than GOP ones.

    There are more Dem voters than GOP ones except maybe in very red states. It’s about turnout - US voter turnout is God awful and it’s worse among Dems than GOP.

    That’s why the debate was so bad for the Dems, because it’s not about whether or not it pulls voters to Trump but about what it does to Dem turnout.