America really biffed it,

Pretty decent summary of American history, that. With few exceptions.

That’s disappointing, but good to know. Thanks.

Whoa, that’s very impressive! The only one you missed was “p10y,” which is in fact “particularly.” (“Practically” would be “p9y.”) But honestly that’s still amazing.

Oh!

Cool!

😬

That would be…what, an ampliviation scheme? (since it’s longer than the original word)

A4y, t2s i0s n1t p10y r6e a1d t3s m2h l4r t0o c5e.

To be fair, that is almost exactly why I moved here. Luxon seems like a somewhat worthless lump, but his most extreme position appears to be a bit further left than Elizabeth Warren. And it’s not impossible that he won’t survive the year in his role.

Also reducing all politics to a left right thing is so stupid and probably the worst thing to do for political discourse

Absolutely agree. I hate that my first reaction to every conversation has to be “…but are they a fascist?”

I think it’s because they’re designed to look like big ol’ dogs. Their characterizations are also “gentle giants,” which is always an emotional gut-punch when they get weepy or show tenderness.

Hmm, I just realized that I (an American living in New Zealand) have no idea what Japanese politics are like. To Wikipedia!

Takaichi has been described as holding hard-line conservative and Japanese nationalist views,

uh oh

citing former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher as a role model and deeply influential on her personal political beliefs.

Uh oh

Like Thatcher, she is called the “Iron Lady”.

Uh Oh

Takaichi is a member of Nippon Kaigi, a far-right ultraconservative organisation

UH OH

that argues for a reinterpretation of Japanese history

RED ALERT

amongst ultranationalist lines.

WELP

Oof. Well, I guess it had to happen to Japan someday. It’s happened everywhere else. Here’s hoping it doesn’t last long and the damage is minimal.

If this is true,

I’m not sure what could be unbelievable about this. The date of the last snowfall in NYC is pretty easy to track down, and you could pretty easily find the place on Street View and see if it matches the photo. This photo was taken from the crosswalk across Park Ave at 70th. Facing southwest, incidentally.

About the only thing you can’t easily confirm in the photo is the date it was taken, but looking at the dirt level on the snowbanks and the state of the melt/thaw cycle of the slush on the road, I’d say it’s easily been a week since the snow in that photo fell. So even if it wasn’t taken after this current snowstorm (which would be a weird thing to lie about), it’s certainly plausible that it was taken a week or so after some snowstorm.

I’m not the OP (I don’t even live in NYC). It took me about ninety seconds to figure all of that out.

proves a ton about the new Mayor selling out.

He’s made remarkable progress, actually. Every news article about him is something along the lines of “Mamdani fulfills another two campaign promises before lunch.” It’s been pretty remarkable to watch. Again, I’m not a New Yorker, so all of this is just the news that’s made it to me; the reality may well be even greater.

New York City is huge, though, with a lot of problems; and he’s been in office for five weeks (one of which seems to have been fully dominated by a state of emergency). You can’t fix everything in a city of that size even in four years, let alone five weeks. And it seems like most of the problems he’s been working on so far have been more directly impactful to people’s survival; stuff that’s lower on Maslow’s hierarchy.

If he puts up a few months with no meaningful wins, or does something clearly corrupt, then maybe I’ll start considering him a sellout. But in the meantime, I’d say he’s earned a significant amount of goodwill.

That’s a good one. I was thinking, stop trying to make it seem like you’re helping agents improve, and just go with something like “HOLD THE LINE.”

I mean, it’s an odious slogan for an odious government org, but at least it’s better than suggesting the opposite of their stated mission.

Wait-- their slogan is “go beyond?” That’s so parodic I can’t believe it’s true…

… WHAT.

NOPE, IT’S TRUE.

How is this government so completely and entirely inept?

• Meaningful character development (not necessarily advancement, but at least exploration)
• Motivated decisions made by at least two people in the story: the protagonist and the antagonist (or just the protagonist if it’s a PvE-type movie)
• A challenge that challenges the protagonist(s)
• Dialogue that sounds at least plausibly like human speech
• Reactions that seem at least plausibly like human reactions

A plot that doesn’t have many holes is a nice bonus, but as long as everything else is present, not a deal-breaker.

Whoa, interesting!

So, I think you would run into a smaller version of the problem that you get with an item that enters a closed time loop.

Imagine that you pick up an apple off of your counter as a snack right before you travel back in time to yesterday. When you arrive, you put the apple back down on the counter and forget about it. The next day (“today,” from your perspective), your past self picks it up (from its perspective, again) and goes back in time. The apple is now in a closed loop. It experiences the same day over and over and over again until it rots and crumbles to dust.

Or rather, until it no longer looks appetizing to you as you prepare for your trip to yesterday. At some point, an iteration of you looks at the apple, thinks, “wow, that apple went bad quickly!” and picks up a banana instead.

If it’s an object more durable than a piece of fruit, that object won’t rot, but it will still degrade. A spoon, for instance, will rust to nothingness as it experiences a near-infinite amount of time all at once. Diamond would degrade into graphite over trillions of cycles through this one-day loop. A supermassive black hole in this loop would immediately evaporate due to Hawking radiation.

For the my-own-grandpa paradox, you’d run into a similar problem (though way weirder, and expressed through statistics). First, you immediately lose 1/4 of your genetic diversity. This is because your grandpa didn’t pass his genes into the family tree on the first loop, but even if we handwave that away and say that they stick around somehow, the infinite loop causes random chance to iterate over and over again an infinite number of times in an instant; with enough iterations, I think your grandmother’s genes win the genetic coin toss in the end, meaning that your grandfather’s genes don’t make it through that loop and vanish completely from your genome (we’re going to assume that this is your maternal grandmother, by the way, because otherwise your father will be born a woman as a result of not having a Y chromosome).

Also by the time the loop settles into a steady state, your mother will have become her own grandmother, and your father will also be his own grandfather-in-law.

I’m not a geneticist, just a time travel aficionado. So I don’t know for sure, but I think that all of this would make your mother a partial genetic clone of your grandmother. You would end up, genetically, as the child of your grandmother and your father. But I don’t actually think you would become inbred, incidentally, because the genetic transcription errors that cause inbreeding mutations would probably be replaced on the next iteration with fresh genetic material from your grandmother.

And we’re handwaving the question of how you still ended up as “you” through that entire process.

There are not only two categories for things. Possible categories are not just “moderation” and “censorship.”

These equivalences and wild bad faith arguments and accusations are getting really old. Sure, Viacom getting fined 1/1,000,000,000,000 of their annual revenue is totally the thing I was worried about, definitely. Yep.

Anyway, you go ahead and have a great time believing that you getting banned from lemmygrad for being a jerk (or at least while being a jerk) is exactly the same thing as a political dissident in Russia getting poisoned for speaking out against Putin. You’re such a hero. How do you do it.

Now who’s being semantic? But, ok, I’ll give you a couple of notes.

“There’s not necessarily a threat of violence!” Of course there is. In the US, it’s called “police brutality.” In other countries, you get disappeared or have an “accident.” Hexbear can make those threats, and they should probably be defederated for them, but they don’t necessarily have the power to carry them out. A police state by definition does.

“If you’re censored in one country you can still say that stuff in another country!” Sure, if you aren’t thrown in prison. And if you’re legally allowed to leave the country. And if you’ve got the financial means to do so. And if the country you go to doesn’t have an extradition treaty. And all that assumes you even survive the initial censoring.

Anyway, you’re trying to draw an incredibly spurious connection that isn’t merited. “Not having a Nazi bar is bad, actually, because then you can’t have an anti-Nazi bar!”

Honestly, amazingly straightforward and simple, if somewhat slow. My partner wanted to get a master’s degree anyway, so she applied at a few universities down here and was accepted. The process from there was just one of chaining together all of the visa stuff, and everyone we’ve talked to has been kind and helpful. It was one of the easiest parts of the whole endeavor, and everything they asked for made sense.

I don’t mind. I’m in New Zealand. It’s pretty great; I’m sure that it has its own problems, but so far they’re different problems.

No. There is no threat of violence, and the moderated are still able to make their statements on other, equally-federated platforms.

By “abuse disguised as dissent” do you mean it’s abuse to refute tankie propaganda and the bans for doing it

No.

Like I said in a previous comment, it seems you’re unfamiliar with the entirety of .ml, lemmygrad, and hexbear.

No. That’s what I mean by misuse of moderation. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t still exist, it means that people shouldn’t be on those instances.