Are you sure that you’re hiding under a pile of pillows at parties properly?

Bless you, comrade.

Was it Kant who thought that an act could only be good if done for good reasons? 🤔

Super interesting! I have a jar with a lid that I tried to scale up and the threads just fail. I wonder if I can try some overgang magic on it. 🤔

In America there are only two parties. The Republican party is actively hostile to the interests of black people, if not explicitly racist. Since the Democrats - while not generally taking any actions to, you know, improve anything - are not. So like 89% of black voters choose Democratic candidates.

The Supreme Court recently ruled that it is not illegal to change voting districts to prevent the other party from winning. A simple example of that might be taking a city and dividing it into three sections, each of which extends far out into the countryside. Now no single section has a majority of city voters.

In the latest rulings, the Supreme Court also ruled that anyone in such a district must prove that it was done for racial reasons, and not for a pure partisan power grab. States all across the South of the US immediately rewrote their election maps to favor Republicans.

This ends up taking away black representation. Some states have 40% black citizens, and will now have 0% representatives.

Sure seems racist, but the people in power say it’s not.

The chocolate brand Tony Chocolonely in the Netherlands has uneven pieces. It’s to remind us that the world is unfair.

You could ask the people in your union to help you survive, oh wait…

I pay the FNV (a sort of union of unions here in the Netherlands) because they kept taking the government to court because the government wasn’t following its own laws… and they kept winning. They don’t help my job because I’m in IT and class consciousness hasn’t reached there yet, but someday…

Which is why I push back when people complain about employees at non-profits making a decent salary.

If you can make 10% more working at a for-profit company, then you are asking people working at non-profit companies to donate 10% of their salary. So unless the person complaining is donating 10% of their salary to charity, they don’t really have anything to complain about… 😅

As a programmer I mostly hate AI written software.

But I do think it’s great that non-programmers can do a lot of things that they never could before.

I am never sure since I am American so know lots of Spanish from osmosis. But of course in any large European city there will be plenty of people who know enough English to help out. So yeah, he probably approached every interaction with stereotypical British arrogance and annoyed the people who would have been happy to help him otherwise. 🙈

My parents’ house had such a room! I always thought it was weird to dedicate a room as a shrine to some mythical guest who would someday come and honor it with their presence.

I believe it.

I worked with an Englishman who has lived in the Netherlands for more than 20 years without learning Dutch.

We had a work trip to Madrid, and he went the weekend beforehand for a short vacation. I ran into him on Sunday night and asked him how it went. He said it was terrible, because he’s a vegetarian and couldn’t eat anything because nobody spoke English. He didn’t know what to order or how to ask if something was vegetarian. He was outraged that nobody spoke English. In Madrid. The capital of Spain. 🙈

Political revolutions usually involve a wealthy class being kept away from political power, combined with a particularly unpopular and stupid absolute ruler.

In the US, the wealthy are the political class, and while Trump is stupid and unpopular he has only been in power a year. Most people think he will be gone in 3 more years, and even if he jettisons the Constitution and stays in as President, he is old and unhealthy.

Mostly accurate, although the flight delays tend to be announced one short delay at a time. “We’re going to be a few minutes late pulling out from the gate.” “We missed out takeoff window, so we’re going to have a 20 minute delay.” “We need to refile our paperwork, so we’re heading back to the gate.” “Ground crew changed shift, so we need another 45 minutes.” And so on…

Until there’s an easy way to have an algorithm other than date order, Mastodon will always be sort of “meh” for me.

One reply to this is that God can do anything possible.

Now, ideas about what is possible vary. For example Descartes could not conceive of a triangle where the angles did not add up to 180°. However, even in Descartes’ time it was known that a triangle on a sphere will have angles that add up to more than 180° (you can make a triangle with 3 right angles on a globe and those angles add up to 270°).

So the idea might be refined to be more that nonsensical things remain nonsensical. As in, you can ask the question, “Can God change the color of a flower to Tuesday?” But even though it is perfectly correct English, it doesn’t make sense, and your question is bogus, not God.

Nuclear wars before the UN: 1

Nuclear wars after the UN: 0

GPLv3 comes out to 5215 words, so pretty long.

I’ve read many contracts which explicitly state that any part being invalidated does not invalidate the remaining parts.