Timeshare (and MLM) salespeople are well-known for their ability to attract and then box-in a potential client. Delivering a pitch while in a fast moving car? That’s next-level diabolical, even for those people.

Basically all of the things I see other drivers doing when I’m not in their car.

• Distracted driving (e.g. phone)
• Resigning right-of-way in situations that are unsafe, like on highway entrance ramps and inside traffic circles
• Doing unpredictable things (e.g. quickly weaving through traffic, merging/turning without signaling)
• Zero clue about safe stopping distance for their vehicle, weight, and speed
• Cutting off freight, especially at highway speeds
• Generally unaware of what others are doing around them, only to wind up upset with others, then driving angry/aggressive
• Driving fast enough to overwhelm the car’s suspension and traction (wheels leave ground, springs bottom out)

The last one is particularly nauseating and terrifying if you’re in the car.

Not going to disagree with your cross-comparison here, but have you tried Korean-style fried chicken yet?

Real talk: do people just go nude/semi-nude at home on the regular? I had no idea.

Short distances should be meters, feet, inches, millimetres.

American machinists go a different way altogether: thousandths of an inch. So no binary fractions, but still imperial-ish. :/

And milk is often actually in litres and half litres, we just assume it’s in pints.

That one makes sense.

**For some reason Lemmy is adding a ‘25’ between the % and s. Those numbers shouldn’t be there, just fyi.

The URL as shown is actually valid. No worries there.

The value 25 happens to be hexidecimal for a percent sign. The percent symbol is reserved in URLs for encoding special characters (e.g. %20 is a space), so a bare percent sign must be represented by %25. Lemmy must be parsing your URL and normalizing it for the rest of us.

Exactly. It’s a local minimum/maximum optimization problem as applied to genetics and evolution.

When I worked in an office, I used to regularly take breaks with the smokers, even though I don’t smoke. Not unlike following a bird or deer through the woods to a source of food or fresh water, the smokers really do have a line on togetherness. That and getting up from your desk regularly to take a damn break.

I’m kind of blown away by this too. The sentiment here on Lemmy following the US presidential election was palpable by people in other countries, and how this might have ripple effects in Europe and beyond. I suppose it’s easy to underestimate the influence of US military, trade, and soft power abroad from within these borders. Still, the idea that politicians and leaders elsewhere would just freaking copy our homework, especially when we’re doing our best to fail the class, is mind-boggling.

It really exemplifies the fragility of democracy and civil rights, and the need for active defense of them.

Jefferson was quoted as recommending a re-write of the constitution every 19 years. So the fragility of all this stuff, and the need to keep with the times, was well-known by the founders at the very start. By that clock, we are decades overdue for some amendments. Then there’s the really famous quote:

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” - Thomas Jefferson

For the record, I appreciate how absolutely metal this quote is. At the same time, I greatly dislike it because it suggests that violence is the right choice right out of the gate. I prefer to take this advice as, eventually, violence is the only option remaining.

I’m trying to wrap my head around this, partly because I haven’t been following Korean politics as of late. From Reuters on an earlier article :

SEOUL, Dec 3 (Reuters) - South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law on Tuesday for the first time in the country since 1980. Below is a Reuters translation of the military decree: "In order to protect liberal democracy from the threat of overthrowing the regime of the Republic of Korea by anti-state forces active within the Republic of Korea and to protect the safety of the people, the following is hereby declared throughout the Republic of Korea as of 23:00 on December 3, 2024

Maybe it’s too early to know, but does anyone have the faintest idea what is meant by “anti-state forces”? Is this just a ham-fisted power grab that failed, or is there any legitimacy to that claim? I’m missing ALL the context here.

Force these shitters to make their products healthier for all age groups.

There’s a lot of nuance here, but in general I agree. Hank (of vlogbrothers and SciShow fame), summed this problem up brilliantly. To paraphrase: social media is engagement based, not quality based. Upvote/like content on all you want, but misinformation, propaganda, rage bait, and doom-scrolling fodder will dominate any platform where the only valued metric is eyeball time.

So, the top-down solution would be to somehow strictly define how for-profit ranked media feeds and news aggregators are allowed to operate. Unintended consequences of such a law aside, I think it’s possible to legally define a “well-behaved” social media site, but it won’t be easy.

Real question: how is anyone supposed to implement this without eliminating anonymity for those services?

A hypothetical neutral reserve currency would be a fiat-style monetary system. It would also require some kind of central bank and governance over it. It’s not impossible to achieve, but the politics around such a thing would be impressive to behold.

Also, I doubt the US would embrace either before seeing the dollar crash. It would take too much power away from the Federal Reserve, and by extension, global leverage.

For those with enough wealth, it’s a win-win. Either the dollar stays strong and you continue to trade assets/stocks/bonds accordingly, or it craters and you invest in cost-competitive labor on par with India and China.

In the latter case, while foreign goods are priced out of reach, a booming manufacturing sector will come in and “save the day” in states with poor worker protections/rights. The real magic trick is making sure you (the 1%) are in the room when the decisions are made to hold or fold before the general public knows anything about it.

Brilliant. Use your pressure cooker InstaPot and save time!

Did… did he actually say this? I knew this guy was full of it, but that’s a whole other level.

I love that “Uh, guys?” is a real in-character reaction and moment in many episodes of SG1. This story easily could have been a plot in the show.

While Star Trek had these wonderful “this is why we explore the galaxy” moments, SG1 wasn’t afraid to place characters face-to-face with something or someone that would just erase existence or end humanity if the next moment wasn’t handled the right way.

This, of course, is after the hygenist is done raking your gums with a prison shiv.

Lately, I go on a 30-minute “Not Interested” spree on the recommendations feed when I need to weed things out. I burn everything that I know I’m never going to watch. I have 500+ subscriptions and the ratio of those with new content to trash the algorithm hands me is too damn low. So I have to set it straight some times. After this correcting action, things are noticeably better for about a month.

Another move is to right-click and open unfamiliar stuff in an incognito/privacy window. This helps keep similar material out of your feed.