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wjrii

@ wjrii @lemmy.world

Posts
4
Comments
17
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • The Grim Reaper Patch Circulating Among Guards at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’

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  • It may have been "designed" by this guy, who seems to be from San Antonio. He seems like a peach among peaches.

    Visibly upset, Martinez told Prokopas that he previously worked for the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office in Texas. He said he had just been discharged from Critical Response Strategies, the private contractor that provides security at the detention center, after a physical altercation with another guard inside the facility.

    EDIT TO ADD: In Texas, Sheriff's offices in big counties like Bexar, Dallas, Tarrant, Travis, and Harris aren't even regular day-to-day cops. They run the jail and serve process if the constables don't have the manpower.

  • Callers to Washington state hotline press 2 for Spanish and get accented AI English instead

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  • Always grimly funny when you can basically suss out the lazy-ass prompt: "Now do the same message, but Spanish."

  • Mattel launches its first autistic Barbie

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  • Jolanta Lasota, the chief executive of Ambitious about Autism, said: “Theoretically any Barbie can be reimagined as autistic, because autism doesn’t have one look. But representation is powerful and Barbie is an iconic toy, so we hope many autistic children feel pride at seeing some of their experiences reflected in this new doll.

    Per the article, they tweaked the eyes so they look away slightly, made sure to use one of their fully articulated sculpts so she can move her arms to allow role-play of stimming, dressed her in clothes that would be loose and comfy, and gave her a fidget spinner, noise-canceling headphones, and augmentive-communication tablet.

    To a certain extent, every Barbie is a cash grab, but this doesn't seem any worse than average, and not every family is going to take it as their mission to rise above every consumerist influence in their lives.

  • Dog shoots owner in the back after jumping on shotgun left on bed: Police

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  • A Dog Took My Face And Gave Me A Better Face To Change The World: The Celeste Cunningham Story

  • Palantir CTO says AI doomerism is driven by a lack of religion

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  • Palantir CTO says AI doomerism is driven by a lack of religion

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  • I don't recall the link for now, but there was a fairly long piece a couple of weeks (months?) ago that went into the Thiel religious awakening. The short version is that he doesn't necessarily believe in Jesus so much as he believes that organized religion is so important as a binding agent in society that you're better off pretending to believe in it, advocating for it, and imposing it by force if it seems necessary, all to satisfy the human need for mimesis, or imitative desires and behaviors.

    Society's movement away from Christianity in particular as a uniquely humane and sophisticated global-ready religion means it's okay to fall back on older "tribal" religious patterns like assertive scapegoating to reimpose the world order. There is room for regions of the world with independent traditions to impose them as a means of having a safe and orderly society, because it allows the Christian region to interact with a relatively small number of competing ideologies, which satisfy similar psychological needs for their populations, and therefore a balance can be maintained. It's better for the system if most people hold sincere beliefs about the supernatural aspects, but it's not utterly critical, particularly for elites, as long as folks legitimately buy into the societal repercussions of failing to rely on religion for social control. It's like Pascal's wager on meth, which is appropriate because a lot of it dates back to a German guy who was a Nazi apologist through most of the thirties until being discarded by them right before WW2. Some of this is strictly IIRC, so be on notice, LOL.

    Conveniently, all this allows the Christianized advocates for this worldview to declare any systemic threat to the triumph of their vision for world peace to be accurately-enough referred to as the Antichrist, and the things you're allowed to do to oppose the Antichrist are quite broad.

    JD Vance is thought to be well-ensconced in the ideology.

    EDIT: Found it, plus a couple of others that discuss the same thing. Thiel is absolutely nuts, but not quite the way he's sometimes portrayed.

  • Waymo CEO Says Society Is Ready for One of Its Cars to Kill Someone

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  • This is interesting to consider. One of the reasons car centric countries make their peace with fatalities is that there is a regime and cultural expectations in place for assigning blame and imposing punishment, both criminal and civil. We know that other drivers are assholes and idiots, but there is the grim solace that if something happens they (or their insurers) will compensate us and that if it’s bad enough they may even go to jail. Furthermore, we presume that the assholes and idiots know that as well, and they will at least try not to do something stupid, especially since they could get hurt/killed too.

    Given the available tech, a system relying on driverless cars is pretty much guaranteed to be safer overall, but people will resist it if there is a sense that no identifiable human is incentivized to minimize harm. If somebody gets killed in an accident and you just have Waymo (or whoever) stonewalling any efforts at compensation or justice, it becomes further dehumanizing and people will continue to prefer to take their chances with the assholes and idiots who might actually be held to account.

    You come up with a regulatory regime that ensures proper insurance coverage with equal or preferably lesser friction (lord knows the American system has its issues), and also meaningful punishments to actual humans for reckless code/maintenance/routing/etc, then cultural acceptance will come.

  • Kew woman fined £150 for pouring coffee down drain in Richmond - BBC News

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  • Can't contaminate the motor oil, soot, rubber, broken glass, microplastics, litter, and accidentally-spilled coffee with purposely-spilled coffee! I hope the enforcement officers didn't damage their pearls, or let them slip into the drain, from all that clutching.

    More seriously, this smacks of citation quotas to me.

  • Furious MAGA Customers Say They Got ‘Scammed’ by Trump Watches

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  • I wonder if this is just because it was made cheaply in Asia and not designed for the average heft of a trumpet.

    I'm sure it's this. Everything about this, down to the variable delays that different customers endure, screams out that this is a shady, shoestring operation stalling until they finally hit minimum order quantity with their drop-shipper in China.

  • Fox News "expert" says Hitler went to heaven

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  • My theory is that it's less that they're truly dumb as fuck, but rather that they're not particularly special -- or does that make them dumb as fuck, LOL? -- and there's almost a dunning-kruger like effect. They see how powerful they are, able to act with near-impunity, and they don't realize how much of that has to do with whatever distribution of power and hesitance to use state violence exists in the flawed but democracy-ish systems they're currently dominating.

  • ‘Maybe we should go after you’ Trump threatens ABC reporter asking about free speech

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  • Somebvody posted a link from Australian ABC about this story, but it was American ABC.

  • Mildly Infuriating @lemmy.world
    wjrii @lemmy.world

    I did not look up how progressive lenses really work before getting some.

  • Airbnb host suspended after rejecting Cwmbran guests because they are Welsh

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  • No, they exploded, as the Welsh are wont to do.

  • B.C. brush fire sparked by bird dropping fish on power lines, firefighters say

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  • They said it was an osprey, but let’s be honest, it was probably a bald eagle wearing a mask.

  • Purdue's Boilermaker Special mascot train involved in fatal vehicle crash in Indiana

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  • I guess there is a Ford F-350 chassis under all the train shit and somehow it's street legal. I also read that the stretch of highway where it happened is poorly designed, and it's completely possible that a overcorrecting to avoid something in the road could lead a large vehicle to jump the very narrow median.

  • Man, 71, arrested after 7 ’emotional support’ tigers found in his house

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  • I'm never gonna financially emotionally recover from this!

  • Judge Uses D&D’s Failure To Make Him Worship Satan To School Florida On Social Media Moral Panics

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  • I don't know why Techdirt is so concerned about the so-called "COVID denialism." They call it themselves when they suggest it might be mocking. Judge Walker was an Obama appointee and has been remarkably sane in his judicial career, including on COVID. He is clearly trolling the state's attorney at several points throughout, letting their previous positions hoist them on their own petard. I particularly like the point he raises about how Florida handles parental rights:

    THE COURT: Well, we’ve empowered parents to control what books our kids read in school. Why is it far-fetched to empower parents and think they know best for their individual children about who they are engaging with socially on social media platforms?

    MR. GOLEMBIEWSKI: Well, parents certainly have a role, but the key is these controls. And the controls have proven ineffective. So these platforms —

    THE COURT: You are taking the control away. Because if I’ve got a 13-year-old child and I want him to — does my kid get to sign up if I want him to be able to sign up and have an account in a social media platform on Facebook?

    MR. GOLEMBIEWSKI: You can register for an account and a kid can use your account, and you can monitor them. THE COURT: I don’t want to monitor them. Just like I want them to read the book about the two penguins raising an egg together. The two male penguins raising an egg together. I don’t want to sign up on my account. I want to have my own Facebook account. I want my kid — you’ve taken that choice away from me; right?

    MR. GOLEMBIEWSKI: I just think it’s an irrelevant issue because their — I mean, the degree of control that parents have is irrelevant. What’s —

    THE COURT: The point, Counsel — and I don’t think it’s particularly far-fetched — is the State of Florida picks and chooses when they want the parents to be making the decision. And when it suits their purposes, they do; and when it doesn’t, they don’t.

    But I’ve got it. Fair enough.

    It's not that there's no argument against letting children on social media. There are strong arguments, but the science is not mature maybe never will be, and the experiences parents permit their children to have can vary wildly. The point is that under the US system, you can't make laws that limit free speech and private family behavior based on "this is probably not a great idea," and if you can, then social conservatives will not always like where that leads.

  • College Football @fanaticus.social
    wjrii @lemmy.world

    SEC Shorts - Spiraling SEC hires motivational speaker

  • College Football @fanaticus.social
    wjrii @lemmy.world

    Article on the history of the NCAA (spoiler: crooked since the beginning)

    origins.osu.edu /read/big-business-amateur-intercollegiate-sports
  • College Football @fanaticus.social
    wjrii @lemmy.world

    SEC Shorts - Teams fight to get into the College Football Playoff