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Cake day: March 10th, 2025

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  • If a country doesn’t produce their own fighter jets (which only ~20 countries do) but needs to buy some, they don’t have a lot of options. And while it’s private companies that manufacture and sell the jets, the government of the manufacturing country isn’t going to let a business sell weapons of war to just anyone. The US doesn’t want to sell jets that might later get used against the US. So any weapons sales have to be approved by the US government first. Just like they don’t want to sell to an enemy, they don’t want the weapons they agree to sell to get stolen by an enemy. So they include technology (kill switch) than can prevent that from becoming a problem.



  • Mostly because the only real exposure to electricity the people who came up with the “classical” elements had was lightning. I’m sure they experienced static electricity from time to time, but they probably didn’t associate it with lightning.

    From their perspective, lightning is a very brief moment of extreme light, then maybe a fire if they can actually see the impact site. So it seems a lot more closely related to fire than we would suppose.

    maybe there is a scientific explanation of why it isn’t

    Nothing about the “classical elements” is rooted in what we would understand as science today. It was just people making guesses about how the world around them worked without the rigor of the scientific process. It was little more than wild speculation.



  • After the obvious mistake on the first attempt, I really wouldn’t trust that this is any more accurate or fool-proof.

    I once tried to get ChatGPT to make me a spreadsheet of all 50 states paired with their population, minimum wage, and a couple other pieces of easily searched data. I was mostly just trying to get the AI to do the tedious searching and data entry so that I could then manipulate the data as I wanted.

    It could not give me a list with all 50 states. The first attempt only had like 41 states. When I pointed this out it was all “Oh, I’m so sorry. You’re absolutely correct. Here’s a list with all 50 states.” But it only had like 45. I kept correcting it over and over and it kept giving me a new chart, claiming it had all 50. After like 15 attempts I just gave up. I think the worst it ever gave me was 33 states. It got up to 48 one time, at which point I noted exactly which 2 states were missing. The next list included those 2, but only had 46 total.

    It’s so unbelievably bad at simple things that I have 0 confidence it’s any good at anything more complex.



  • In my experience, a LOT of commercial construction companies prefer to hire inexperienced workers in order to teach workers “their way” of doing things. Residential tends to go for more experienced workers because they don’t have the time or money to train workers.

    If you go union, the union will set you up with apprenticeship school and help you find a company to work for.




  • I don’t agree.

    These fascists are all following the political ideology and strategies laid out by Curtis Yarvin under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. He’s been in the orbit of people like Peter Thiel for 10+ years and has been very influential among the tech oligarch crowd.

    His vision centers around creating a tech-oriented monarchy for America. At the top would be the president who would operate more like the Chairman of the Board in a corporate structure. Rather than governing on a day-to-day basis, this President/King would appoint a CEO to oversee the actual management of government. That’s the role Musk has taken on.

    Trump appoints Musk to do the actual running of the country to accomplish what Trump wants accomplished while letting Trump seem above the fray (at least that’s the intention, Trump is too incompetent to actually stay above the fray). Musk isn’t a red herring. He’s not diverting from anything. He’s just the guy doing the job so Trump can go golf all day.



  • I agree with the overall point here, but starting it off with “Someone on TikTok said…” (or really, any variation of “Someone said…”) just completely undermines your credibility. Just say “There are more kids with measles…”

    Don’t bother with the wishy-washy “someone said” nonsense. Confidently assert your point rather than attributing it to someone else. If you’re unsure of the facts and don’t want blowback for posting something inaccurate, either verify the facts yourself (it’s not hard or time consuming) or just don’t post it.



  • Obama was only voted into office because he is an extremely charismatic and charming person.

    I think it had more to do with the conditions at the time. He was one of the few politicians with a national following from either party who had always vocally opposed the Iraq War. His chief opponent in the Democratic Primary was Hilary Clinton, who had voted for the invasion in 2003 even though she was opposed to the war by 2008. On the Republican side, McCain was still saying in 2008 that his vote to invade was a good decision and that he’d do it again.

    It’s hard to remember now, but the Iraq War was a MASSIVE issue in the primaries and early general election in 2008. The country was almost unanimously opposed to it by that point, including Republican voters. W Bush was massively unpopular, and that was dragging down the entire GOP. Then the Great Recession hit and Bush/the GOP took the entire blame since they’d he’d been President for 8 years and they’d held the majority in both houses of Congress for most of the Bush presidency.

    By that point, a corpse with a (D) next to their name could have defeated McCain. Obama is absolutely incredibly charismatic and a once-in-a-generation political mind. But 2008 was also a perfect storm of factors against the Republican Party. There was virtually no way a Democrat could lose that election.