There was one weird agreement. During WW1, the Pope declared that a Christmas ceasefire should happen. Obviously, the Pope has no such power in these matters and the diplomats around the world failed to turn the Popes wish into any real ceasefire.

But then, a bit of Christmas magic happened. It turns out that WW1 soldier conditions were so shit, that many soldiers wanted to go against orders and proceed with the Christmas ceasefire anyway (as an act of rebellion against their commanders).

Legend has it that soldiers picked Still Nacht (aka: Silent Night), it being one of the few bilingual Christmas Carols. If both sides in the trenches started to sing the song, you knew it was safe to partake in the ceasefire, allegedly with another confirmation of Oh Come All Ye Faithful (another Christmas carol).

This all proves one thing. It’s not the leaders or diplomats that really matter per se with ceasefires. It’s the soldiers at the bottom. If they refuse to shoot, then the ceasefire will happen. With orders, or (in the Christmas miracle…) sometimes AGAINST orders.

It’s not a complete miracle, as some reports of fight / killing still happened during the Christmas Ceasefire. But there are reports of hundreds of thousands of French, British, and German soldiers exchanging Christmas gifts (coffee and other trinkets), playing soccer and more. So it largely was a success.

Heterogenous scheduler support for big.LITTLE CPUs seems like a big deal to me, especially with the Advent of P+E core Intels.

Be careful with the plastic spatula used to flip your eggs I guess.

Except you know, plastic isn’t a real chemical. There’s polyethylene, polypropylene, polyurethane, and silicone… of which there are food grade versions and non food grade versions of said plastics (and many thousands of formulations).

Anyone bullshitting with scare words like ‘Plastic’ are immediately discounted by me. Real scientists are at least specific with their terminology and not using weasel words that have effectively no meaning in a serious discussion

Meanwhile my buddy gets fucking arsenic poisoning and there’s not even a ruckus about it at all. Do you know what a REAL poisoning is like?

Ultraprocessed bullshit word by Make America Healthy Again bullshitters.

They think a can of corn is ultraprocessed. When in actuality it is just boiled corn in a can. The sooner the health food bullshitters are exposed for the crap they are, the sooner we get rid of RFK Jr. And his team of bullshit health advice.

We need to stop it with the fake science… And start to favor real science again.

Any methodology that labels canned corn and canned spinach as evil/unhealthy but labels fucking Five Guys as healthy is fully bullshit. Period.

You’ve got equities, debt and derivatives.

Equities are ownership into shares. These are the simplest to understand. You own a share of a company and thus are entitled to a % of the profits (though most companies today choose 0% as their decision).

Debt means funding… debt. SLABs (student loan backed securities), MBS (mortgage backed securities), bonds (government debt), bank loans etc. etc. These are surprisingly complex in practice but perhaps easiest to understand. There’s lots of different details to debt (callable, puttable, tax free, convertible, coupons, notes, bills, bonds, I-bonds, EBonds, 10Y, 3M, overnight repos). But in all cases, you lend money to someone, and later they try to return it to you + a little extra.

Derivatives (usually options but there are many kinds) are new inventions that are more complex. Ignore these as they are very very complex.

That’s about it.

The general recommendation is to buy an ETF for equities and an ETF for Bonds. ETF is just a combination of simpler investments that you pay 0.04% to 2% a year for convenience.

VOO takes the 500 biggest companies in the USA (aka the S&P 500) and buys mostly the biggest company and a very little bit of #500.

BND is a similar idea except it’s a whole bunch of different debts from across the entire economy.

So buy some equities (mostly equities), some bonds, and leave some cash in a high yield savings account. Done.

Stocks (aka VOO) make the most money on the average, but also loses money the most often.

Bonds (aka BND) makes middle amount of money but rarely loses money.

Cash / savings accounts never lose money (except inflation). But makes very very little. It’s still worthwhile to keep necessarily amounts as cash and this you should always be considering how much cash to keep.

Someone needs to tag this with git blame and it’d be the perfect programmer joke.

For the non programmers: git blame is a tool to figure out who on your team wrote a specific line of code. Inevitably, the answer tends to be ‘me’. Waaayyyyyyy too often.

Manual curation is the criteria. If you think something is best it’s enough for a topic.

If it’s problematic or low quality, we can discuss options. But manual curation and the feel of just talking about what interests a person immediately is the point of this place.

That being said, it seems like the original topic was deleted or something. I can’t read it… That’s certainly a problem but not the one I expected.

While Hercules is impressively wrong, I knew Aladdin was a fun original read when it began with ‘In the Far East Kingdom of China…’

Hercules, for all of its faults, actually takes place in Greece. Which is kinda sorta close to Rome (Hercules is his Roman name lol. Heracles is his Greek name).

On the other hand, Aladdin might be a fake story all together. As in, some French Guy may have made up Aladdin as part of his translation of 1001 Arabian Nights. IIRC, Arabs don’t know wtf that story is doing in the (French) book.

So Aladdin might be an entirely fake addition to the 1001 Arabian Nights novel. Canonically fake. So it’s in the true spirit of Aladdin (and 1001 Arabian Nights) to screw with the story anyway.

Btw: the original Aladdin story had no three wishes rule.

Aladdin just spammed the heck out of wishes. Got everything he ever wanted.

The only part of the Disney movie that’s accurate is when the sorcerer returns, teleports the Sultan (of China) palace to Africa, and Aladdin needs to use the weaker Genie of the Ring to steal the Genie of the Lamp back through trickery.

The princess of China (yeahhhhhh) helps Aladdin out a bit IIRC.

But yes, palace teleportation, sorcerer wishing to be Sultan, that’s the legitimate part lol

Unfortunately, this is not the appropriate place for a discussion.

BestOfLemmy aims to highlight good arguments / discussions / topics from across Lemmy. I don’t have the abilities to really do a fair and just debate here.

Now AI can sort through the hours of traffick camera footage

No it can’t, not without major hallucinations and/or basic errors (ex: Black People tend to be misidentified).

That’s the big thing about this AI push, it’s subtle mistakes are fucking people over right now. If AI actually worked reliably that’s another thing. But right now, people are mostly pretending that AI works and/or ignorant of its flaws.

I spent $5 dollars cash buying a hotdog from the Street Vendor last night during the fireworks. Was this written down somewhere or otherwise can this be traced back to me?

And yeah, street vendors raise prices around festivals lol. But I needed a snack so I paid up.

Okay, three days since this warning. Closing topic now.

It has been multiple days since this topic was created. The original poster has seen my moderator-tagged message on the top of this post by now, and has even responded to other posters in this topic.

I’ll give it a few more days before locking. As a new rule, I’d like to say that the original topic creator should be able to adequately explain why their topic deserves a “Best Of Lemmy” if pressed by the moderators or community. Upon failure to discuss or otherwise uphold the spirit of this subcommunity, the topic can be locked, deleted or otherwise killed.

This isn’t war. It’s political action.

It’s beginning to be violent political action though. Strategizing in these times and thinking ahead is going to become more important.

Sunset Riders SNES.

There are several powers that are just restated omnipotence.

Perhaps my favorite is Featherine Aurora from When they Cry. She is the author of the story you are reading. The world exists to please her (and her audience). She cares little about the pains any individual feels as they all serve her greater purpose.

It’s ‘Just Omnipotence’ but it’s written in a way for very meta interactions. But yeah, her power to create and change the world is ultimate, she literally can do anything.