Carl

Yeah, there is no such thing as an accidental discharge. Only negligence. Unless the weapon can fire without the trigger being pulled (some old guns can, but basically every modern firearm has mechanisms to prevent that) there is no such thing as an “accident”. You were negligent in handling the firearm, and your negligence caused it to fire.

And if you hit someone with that negligent discharge, your negligence caused them to be shot because you were negligently aiming it at them. It wasn’t an “accident” that they got shot, because it wasn’t fully preventable and you should have prevented it. The only reason the “accident” occurred is because your negligence directly allowed the chain of events that led to the gun being fired, and led to the person being shot.

We should treat “accidental” discharges as if the person intentionally ignored the safety guidelines that they undoubtedly knew to follow. And if you’re intentionally ignoring safety procedures, then you’re causing a dangerous situation due to willful negligence. And willful negligence can be a criminal act when it involves injuries and death.

Even in cases of a child getting a gun and playing with it, it’s not an accident when the child discharges the firearm. Maybe it was an accident on the child’s part, but it was the parents’ negligence that allowed the child to access the firearm in the first place.

I actually enjoyed the Pattinson Batman movie. It was a callback to the Detective Comics origins. Hollywood tends to focus on the action, but Batman in the comics is first and foremost a detective. So the Battinson movie was focused on that. And for most of the movie, he was basically just a dude in a hoodie with a bike, riding around town looking for clues. The Riddler was a great villain for that kind of movie, and doing it any other way would have reduced Riddler’s entire character to just another punching bag.

It’s an old meme, based on a series of Facebook screenshots:

Once the screenshots went viral, people started memeing about it, like so:

As for why the 5/7 was posted here? Probably because OP was asking about the Nolan trilogy, which is mentioned in the original 5/7 meme.

I guess we doin lean now

• Instances have disappeared with user databecause admins had no usable backups.

Some of us consider that a good (or at least impartial) thing. Many Reddit users discovered how difficult it is to actually delete your data when they migrated to Lemmy. Lemmy’s userbase tends to be very privacy-focused, so harping about “it’s easy for your stuff to get deleted” isn’t the win you think it is.

Admins can ban you after 10 posts because they decide you “look like a bot.”

I mean… I thought you were a repost bot when I first saw your content. And I don’t mind reposts, but I do mind untagged reposts. Leaving your stuff untagged feels deceptive at best. Like those “tales from Reddit” YouTube accounts, that just read old Reddit posts verbatim and call it “content”.

• Media uploads are ridiculously constrained on all instances. literally all. Tiny file limits mean you can’t even upload normal modern photos, GIFs, or videos. 5Mb limit on lemmy.world - and thats the largest instance.

I haven’t personally experienced any file size limits, but I mostly use external media uploads for in-comment images. But at least for me, (and I’d say I’m a fairly average user) the file size limit has been fine.

Admins can ban you after months of posts too. Just because - they didnt know hosting can get expensive. Months of contributions can disappear with the account. (already happened to me )

I’m actually a little confused by this one. Are you suggesting that people with post history should be immune to bans? Or that posts shouldn’t get deleted when a user gets banned? Because either one fundamentally breaks the reasons for a ban system existing in the first place. Imagine if you were an admin who banned someone for posting illegal content… But banning them didn’t delete the illegal content.

• Defederation can suddenly make you invisible to entire groups of users.

I don’t concern myself with who can see my posts. I post for myself and my own entertainment. If other people don’t want to see my posts, that’s fine with me.

• Users usually have absolutely no idea what infrastructure they’re trusting with years of their content.

Again, “content” is ephemeral. Lemmy doesn’t track your total karma like Reddit does, so what are you actually losing? I can see an argument if someone is a longtime troubleshooter. Because that kind of “help I’m having an obscure problem and the only Google result is a Reddit post from six years ago” content drives a lot of traffic to Reddit.

But I’m not worried if my shitposts vanish. In fact, I burn my Lemmy accounts after about a year and start fresh, specifically to avoid any accidental buildup of info that could be used to dox me. I even use red herring info in my “personal” posts. On this account, I live in the southern US and work as an audio technician for live events. You think that’s actually true though? It may be based on shreds of truth, (I have enough experience to be a competent audio technician, for instance,) but it’s not actually true. Every single new account gets a new persona. Having my old posts vanish is a benefit, not a drawback.

I’m not trying to say your complaints are invalid. On basically any other social media platform, your complaints would be perfectly justified. But you may be barking up the wrong tree, because the “drawbacks” you are complaining about are the exact reason many of us are here. I want my posts to vanish eventually. I want my old content to be purged after a reasonable timeframe. If a hurricane six countries away kills the server this is hosted on, and there are no off-site backups? Cool, I’ll take it as a chance to start fresh like I do all the time anyways.

The lack of tagging on OP’s account has been the biggest reason I considered blocking them. I don’t mind reposters, but tag your shit so people who don’t want it can filter it. I quickly gave them a bright red user tag instead. So I can at least see at a glance when a post is from them, to then decide if I want to engage.

Especially when a lot of their posts have been old Reddit content, (often from several years ago) which was clearly just meant to grab attention. Their posts always felt like the “tales from reddit” types of YouTube channels, where someone just reads Reddit posts verbatim and adds a few quips as “content”.

Oh, I agree. My point was simply that if a restaurant is trying to ditch the “mom and pop” vibes and get professional photos for their menus, it’s not something that is done on a whim. It’s not just a “snap a pic with your phone and post it on your menu” type of thing if a restaurant is trying to look like more than a family owned joint.

And that’s before we even get into the actual menu design, because a well-formatted menu is designed to draw customers towards the most profitable items. All of those highlighted and “chefs special” menu choices that are in big bold bright letters in the center of the menu, with accompanying pictures? Yeah, the restaurant has done the math on the raw ingredients and prep time for each menu item, and those featured choices are the items that are most profitable for the restaurant to make. The goal is to encourage people to buy the things that make the most money. Those small menu options that are tucked away in the bottom of the menu like a footnote? Those are the least profitable. A good menu layout can increase dine-in profits by upwards of 10-20%, simply by encouraging people to order the most profitable items.

And while I don’t agree with using AI for the food images, I can see how a restaurant manager would balk at a $10k professional food photographer bill. Especially when that also requires closing the restaurant for a day, (meaning a day of lost profits) so the photographer can work with the cook staff for the photos during a dedicated photography session. Why would they eat that massive cost, when they could generate a “good enough” (meaning the majority of people won’t notice or care that it is AI) image for free in a few minutes? Again, I don’t agree with it, but I can see why a restaurant manager would see it as an attractive alternative.

I used Google Timeline to prove I was at work one time. This was back when I was freelancing. My client tried to say I was stealing time, because I had an off-site meeting that ran long. They were threatening to withhold a few hours of pay, even though I was at the worksite the entire time. I pulled up my timeline and used it to prove that I was, in fact, at the meeting site for an extra few hours. Being able to de-Google that functionality has a lot of value to certain people.

Yeah, the 5v charging (especially if it says 5v on the label) is an immediate giveaway. Authentic controllers don’t use proper USB 5v. But USB circuitry is cheap and extremely easy to implement, and it uses 5v as the standard… So lots of Chinese fakes default to using that.

And this is true for a lot of things, not just PS3 controllers. If something doesn’t normally use 5v USB, the cheap Chinese one almost always will. Because (again) 5v USB is dead simple to implement. Those circuits are already figured out. No reverse engineering or custom chips required. They’re basically just drag and drop. So that’s what a lot of cheap Chinese knockoffs default to using.

Food photography is actually an entire branch of photography, and a lot of the photos you have historically seen haven’t been real edible food. For example, the milk in the bowl of cereal on your cereal box? That’s usually white Elmers Glue. Because real milk won’t sit below the cereal, and will be too watery. It also allows them to precisely set the individual cereal pieces (rings, flakes, etc) in place and the glue will help prevent it from floating around.

The ketchup on a burger is usually thick red paint, applied around the edges of the rubber pickle with a syringe. Because they want to make sure the ketchup looks like it’s squeezed around the pickle (rather than being squished into the burger bun), and they want to make sure the ketchup is showing around the pickle juuuust enough to be obvious, without obscuring the pickle.

The funny part about food photography is that the methodology is largely regional. For example, Japanese audiences largely expect a burger photo to have the bun sliding off of the burger, like so:

Originally it was done to prevent the bun from obscuring any of the ingredients. But now it is a sort of cultural thing, where lots of menus do it simply because that’s what the other menus do. But it also means that Japanese burger photography is done using different materials and methods than western burger photography. But to use the second image as an example, that runny egg yolk on the right burger is probably some sort of inedible yellow paint. Because the photographer wants controllable color and consistency, and cooking is rarely consistent enough for that. The glaze on the meat is probably some kind of clear-coat rosin or spray. The egg was probably cooked hard and then sliced with a scalpel to create that perfect wedge slice for the yellow paint to be added. Etc…

My partner is a clutz, and I always joke that her Coffee Table Detector (little toe) is working great. It always earns me a death stare while she’s reeling, but being momentarily pissed at me is usually pretty effective at distracting her from the fact that her toe hurts.

Hey, always glad to see the MECFS guy in the wild. My wife is suffering from major chronic fatigue, (it’s seriously life-altering), so I wanted to let you know that your posts don’t go unnoticed.

And yeah, the whole “jury vs grand jury” and “indicted vs convicted” thing is a pet peeve of mine. Because authorities prey on the public’s lack of knowledge about the legal process, to shift blame away from themselves. Once you know the difference (and understand the relationship between a prosecutor and the grand jury) you’ll consistently see news stories of prosecutors hiding behind grand juries to shift blame away from themselves. But it’s always framed by the news as “the prosecutor brought the case to the grand jury, who refused to indict” because the news is complicit in keeping the cogs grinding.

Worth noting that indictments are laughably easy to get, because there is no defense lawyer. An indictment isn’t a conviction, it’s just the prosecution going “yeah we probably have enough evidence to bother with a trial.” The old joke is that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich for murder if the prosecutor wants them to. The prosecutor has full control over what evidence the grand jury sees, and the rules around evidence are a LOT more relaxed than they are in court. The prosecutor could basically scribble out a “yeah I did it lol” note on a napkin and present it to the grand jury as evidence. It wouldn’t stand up in court, but it doesn’t need to if the prosecutor just wants the indictment.

The grand jury is just an arm of the prosecutor, and is used as a political tool whenever a trial would be politically inconvenient. Because the district attorney is typically elected, which means they need to pander for votes. So if it would be politically inconvenient to prosecute someone, they can simply refuse to bring any evidence to the grand jury. Because (again) they have full control over what evidence the grand jury sees.

For example, let’s say a cop murders someone in the street. It’s on video. The public is out for blood. But the prosecutor has to work with the police to do their job, and the police union is threatening to stop collecting any evidence at crime scenes if they prosecute this cop. Prosecutor is between a rock and a hard place, because they’d be torching future trials just to appease the public. So instead, they simply don’t bring any evidence to the grand jury. The grand jury is a faceless shadowy organization that can’t defend itself. It’s the perfect scapegoat. So when the grand jury refuses to indict (because they weren’t presented with any evidence) the district attorney can jump in front of the news cameras and go “I tried to prosecute them, but that big mean grand jury refused to indict. But remember, I did my best! Vote for me!” Cops are happy because the prosecutor didn’t indict, the public is placated because the prosecutor “tried” to indict them, and the cogs of the legal system keep grinding away as intended.

So with all of that being said… If he wasn’t indicted, it’s because the prosecutor didn’t want to bring it to trial.

A few reasons.

First is testing the response times, locations, scale, etc… If you intentionally violate air space, you can measure how long it takes for your future opponent to scramble their own response. You can see what kind of equipment they send to respond. You can see where the response comes from. You can see how many combatants they send to respond. That is all valuable info if you’re planning potential attacks in the future.

Second is creating a “boy who cried wolf” situation. Repeatedly violate their airspace, and they’ll begin to see the violations as routine. They’ll stop treating them as genuine threats, and will simply start treating them as just another annoyance. None of the violations ever result in an attack, so why would this one be any different? Then when the actual attack comes, your opponent is caught with their pants down because they weren’t fully responsive.

Third is money. In the grand scheme of things, flying a single drone around is a drop in the bucket. In contrast, a sudden scrambled response costs a lot. It’s a lot of sudden manpower and logistics to coordinate. Especially when the violation turns out to be a nothing-burger. If you want to begin straining your opponent before a war even begins, make them start counting pennies before you attack.

Fourth, it could be posturing. Look at how weak our enemy is! They can’t even patrol their own border. They’re afraid of us and let us into their airspace. Etc…

Fifth could be intimidation. Remind them that they’re within poking distance. Especially since they’de supporting Ukraine. Want to discourage that support? Encourage them to circle the wagons and bring their support home instead.

The TL;DR is that gold prices spiking is a major sign that people are completely losing faith in the dollar, and are attempting to buy assets that will hold value better. People expect major inflation, and are attempting to buy gold (which will hopefully hold its value) instead of keeping all of their funds as dollars (which will lose value when inflation happens). But this sudden surge in gold demand has caused the recent price of gold to drastically spike.

Yeah, pretty much this. In regards to tech, the fediverse often suffers from the average familiarity problem:

The average user barely even knows how to check their email.

Hah, yup. In my head, I stupidly went “Milli is 10^-3 so micro is 10^-4.” Somehow completely skipping that “micro” means “million”. Regardless, the rest of the post is correct because I wasn’t using 5 grams as the basis for anything else.

It depends on how you’re doing it, (and how it was stored, because the molecule is pretty fragile and breaks down easily) but typically a single hit would be in the ballpark of 90-110 micrograms. So 500x would be about 0.05 grams. Which is a truly astronomical amount of LSD. Probably not the highest ever recorded, (that honor goes to a couple of idiots who thought it was cocaine and snorted it), but still a mind-meltingly high amount.

That highest dosage (while technically unknown, because we only have the ER reports when they showed up completely comatose) is estimated that they had somewhere between 1000 to 2100 hits each. And they survived. So at least Toad isn’t in danger of OD’ing.

Also important to note, that he was given the option to convert the 5 months into a NT$150,000 fine and serve no time. That’s about the equivalent of USD$4700.

Ah, so the classic “it’s only a crime if you’re poor” response from the courts. Cool.