Also failure of public works, like a train crash that kills 20 people, means that trains are bad. Clearly this program isn’t working and should be privatized. But 20 people killed daily on the highways, well those people are just idiots. Never mind the structural issues.

This message brought to you by the people who stand to benefit and also, by coincidence, own the newspapers.

The A. americanum (lonestar) tick larvae are insane this year. I blame the wet summer. At least it’s hot and dry now, and I can imagine them dying by the truckload!

I think some of the Reddit refuges honestly think Reddit sucks because Spez Man Bad. There’s no analysis of what creates Reddits and Spezes, and therefore they don’t recognize who made this platform and why.

I have to believe ultimately some of these people will come around, so that’s good at least.

Like this: https://forgejo.org/faq/#where-does-the-name-come-from

The rampant mental illness in the USA really does make this a negative feedback loop. I’d say a quarter of the roommates I’ve had over the years had some serious mental issues. I’ve had a knife pulled on me, a friend of mine was murdered by his roommate.

After you have a few bad experiences like that the goal becomes to get a small family together and isolate as soon as possible. Any commune here is basically assumed to be a religious cult because nothing else makes sense.

It’d be amazing if they all shared the same cell. Gates and Clinton slap the shit out of Trump because he snores too loud and won’t sleep on his stomach. Trump and Gates thump Clinton because he’s afraid of the shower block and won’t wash his ass. Trump yells at Gates so much about his eye-watering gas that he farts in the toilet out of fear. They deserve nothing less than each other.

I think Americans can perceive how fucked up and corrupt their government is but they lack any theoretical analysis to determine the nature of it. So all they have is a general perception that the government doesn’t work for them and that creates an inherent distrust of any government program, no matter what it does.

So an American might believe that universal healthcare is a good policy, but they also believe that in practice if such a policy were enacted it would mean that money being siphoned off by the ultra rich, with nothing fundamentally changing. They would be paying the taxes of a universal healthcare state, but the actual system would continue as-is, and they would still need to pay ridiculous prices. Thus getting double-dicked for no benefit.

The thing is this is probable. Section 8 is a massive subsidy to landlords. The ACA is a massive subsidy to insurance companies. But if you asked Americans why this keeps happening they would just spout some nonsense about R’s and D’s, or some particular politician, or whatever.

This cynicism spans both “blue” and “red” America. I think it’s the heart of the rot in our society. It’s not really a society at all in the sense that people have lost the belief that we, collectively, can work together to achieve more than what’s possible working alone. When that breaks the only motive people still believe in is the extractive motive of corporations. They believe that only the rich can make things happen, and thus are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy by electing venal politicians who believe the same.

Obviously I’m generalizing here, but just an undercurrent I’ve observed. It’s not coherent, but it is consistent across the “spectrum” of American politics. This ultra wealthy magnify this narrative since it suits them.

I don’t know if it’s still a thing in the digital age, but having even just a few seconds of dead air back in the analogue broadcast days could mean that “silence detectors” all over the country would start going off and radio engineers everywhere would think there was some kind of problem with their station. So there had to be talking, music, something at pretty much all times.

If you wanted intentional silence you could play comfort noise in the background.

It looks horrific to me. Like a film prop from Cronenberg or Lynch. I think it’s the mix of mechanical motion, a material that reminds me of Jean Jacket’s stomach from Nope, and a structure like a severely prolapsed rectum. No way could I get off in this thing.

Seems like basically every company is covering up crimes that happen on their properties, and lots of those are sex crimes. I have no data, just anecdotally it’s been almost every company I’ve ever worked for and the experience of virtually every woman I’ve known well enough to talk candidly about this shit. I’m not talking about “nice ass” comments either, I’m talking like, “blow me or you’re fired” type shit.

Not an excuse for Ubisoft, but it’s kind of like how Covid is now endemic so we’re like “oh well”. This disease is so common we apparently don’t give a shit. There was a brief window of hope with “Me Too” but then reactionaries shut that down.

I worked in a place where you dialed in to the PA system, and NOT using your finger to hang up was a rookie move, since the rattling of the receiver was deafening over the speakers. Definitely worse to use a sensor.

You’re fucking incredible, Cowbee. I’ve watched you spend literally days patiently and politely responding to dozens of confrontational, probably bad-faith posters in thread after thread with nothing but solid information. I really admire it.

I was surprised when I read the OG time machine story by Jules Verne and this was a main plot point, and only later stories hand-waived it. You’d think it was something from later analysis of the idea. Almost like that Verne dude was clever.

Basically, it’s complicated. It depends on your soil/rock type, the water table, and the amount of poop. You want outhouses to be at least six feet deep for parasite lifecycle reasons, but at that depth you could be shitting directly into the water table and if the water is moving through cracks in the rock it could go quite far. Pooping in the top few inches of organic soil is much better for groundwater, but worse for surface water and then also hookworm can spread. And with enough people any primitive system totally breaks down.

Also, there are a lot of uneducated people. The people who owned my parent’s property before them built their outhouse directly over the stream because “water make shit go away”, I guess. In countries without sanitation people shit directly into the river or ocean for the same reason.

After a bunch of water quality data came out in the late 2000s, states and counties tightened up requirements but now to build anything you need to spend at least 10-15k USD on an “advanced” septic system which is completely out of reach for many people. It also requires electricity which could be another 10k. So you either subsidize it or people shit in the creek again.

@SOB_Van_Owen@lemm.ee mentioned composting. Laws are way behind on this. I looked into this before building septic and essentially no states around allowed it for permanent dwellings. I think Alaska and West Texas were the only regions where they still didn’t care. If you truly couldn’t afford it your best bet would be to do composting for your own health and just be illegal because you probably won’t get caught. But that means no mailbox, no address, hiding your camper, essentially boondocking on your own land out of sight. One angry neighbor and its over.

In the USA this is illegal too but it is mostly a health thing, eg you can’t live somewhere with no place to shit because you’ll end up shitting in the river. Not that “health and safety” isn’t constantly abused to brutalize the indigent, but it does also kind of make sense to not let people live long term where they can’t shit, knowing what we know now about outhouses and groundwater.

That said, local governments in rural areas can barely keep fire departments and schools open. Nobody is checking on your vacant land unless someone complains, and they’d have to drive past fifty other shanties to get to yours.

KDEnlive is improving, however Resolve is still more powerful and mature. That said, DaVinci’s business model seems precarious. It feels like they could, at any moment, enshittify Resolve and force users into a subscription just to maintain access to old edits. I think for that reason KDEnlive is better for almost all users. If you are a professional filmmaker then the color and vfx workflows of Resolve are probably worth paying for, but in that case it’s probably a FinalCut vs Resolve question anyway.