themeatbridge @ themeatbridge @lemmy.world

Posts

9

Comments

7,504

Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

---

Good. The Penguin was great, but it was great because it was well crafted. The writing, the acting, the cinematography, it was experts given the tools to do something great. Gotham is a fantastic setting, and the sheer number of worthwhile characters makes anything they do potentially fascinating.

It is entirely possible for a person to be on the right side of one issue and the wrong side of another issue. We support positions, but we elect politicians. Those politicians are not always going to be on our side, and in fact they rarely are.

Gavin Newsom is not on our side. I do not want to vote for him, because I believe we have better options.

But he is better than any Republican. Newsom is not openly racist, defending pedophiles, attempting to murder foreigners, or trying to end civil rights. He and I disagree on economic policy, but if his name is on the ballot across from a fascist, then I'll accept the lesser of two evils.

Still, let's not pick him as the nominee for president. He's not the guy we'd like him to be. Newsom is an oligarch, but at least he isn't a Republican. Governing is the slow boring of hard boards, and sometimes progress is merely reducing the harm.

The mask is off.

Funny, I would have thought she is too old to play a love interest for Pattinson, but she's only 41 while he's 39. I suppose that's my Hollywood gender bias showing. I just think of Robert as the eternally young vampire.

Faith is a big word with many different meanings. Faith in people means trust, but it's not the same as a faith in god. Putting your faith in a person is making yourself vulnerable to be hurt by them. Putting your faith in god is to abdicate your personal responsibility in favor of an ideology attributed by religious leaders to imaginary friends.

My go-to is the biblical definition, which says pretty much the same thing. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. Things hoped for have no substance. So you plant your feet on faith instead of substance, and insist the things you hope for are true. Your evidence for unobservable things is faith. You cannot prove they exist, so faith is your foundation and your confirmation that you're right.

Of course! You've hit the nail on the head, in that anyone can get used to anything if you grow up with it. Your brain wraps itself around your environment, and the language and descriptions you grow up with are the framework for your understanding of things.

It's like naming colors of the rainbow. The number of discrete colors you see depends on the number of discrete names your language has for those colors. Roy G Biv is just one method of delineation. Some languages don't separate blue and green, or red and orange. We actually see millions of colors, but our brain structures categories based on the words we have to describe them.

We use base 10 numbering, because we have five fingers on each hand. Imaging what the metric system would look like if 360 million years ago, some polydactyl mutant managed to win the evolutionary tournament of reproduction, and we all had an extra thumb on the opposite side of our hands. Baseball gloves would look super weird, and we would have a duodecimal metric system where 100 cm could be evenly divided by three or six, but not five, and a foot would be 10 inches without changing either length.

It's my go-to controversial opinion when I want to practice arguing against a consensus. Most people who have an opinion on the matter think that they are being rational about it, but in my experience people have strong emotional responses to feet and inches because of the psychological trauma of math tests in primary school.

You think about feet and miles, and you probably think of a worksheet with word problems, with Henry and Jessica travelling on two trains going in different directions. Or maybe your mind goes to a detailed chart you have on a refrigerator magnet for how many pints of milk you need to buy for 16 guests if 60% of them put two tablespoons in their coffee every day for a three day weekend. You're probably angry just reading that sentence, and I know it raised my blood pressure writing it. You don't actually need to do that math, you just buy a gallon of milk and run to the store if you need more. It's not even really easier if it's liters of milk and 35 mL per coffee.

And that's for people who live in the USA. I've also found that people outside of the US resent Americans for using such an objectively inferior system. It reinforces the perception of an arrogant, impetuous, lazy and selfish nation of obliviously uneducated consumers forcing the rest of the world to accommodate our obstinate fat-ass ignorance.

So either way, people who have an opinion probably have strong emotional reactions to that opinion being challenged.

Sure, so Imperial units aren't like one set of cohesive measurements, they are based on units of measure that can be easily estimated without a measuring tool. A foot is about the length of a foot. A cup is a cup. A mile is a thousand paces. 0 degrees Fahrenheit was the coldest outside temperature in the place where Fahrenheit lived, and 90 was the temp of a human body.

All of these measurements were standardized and adjusted for accuracy and precision when standards were determined, but the idea was that people didn't need to have a set of calibrated instruments with accurate measurements marked on them in order to use them. Most people didn't carry rulers and graduated cylinders around, and even though those things are widely available now, you still probably don't carry them with you. They are in your house, in a drawer, waiting to be used only when certainty is required.

And even the conversions are meant to be functional without tools. When they standardized the length of a foot and an inch, it could have easily been adjusted to be 10 inches to a foot. 12 was used because it is easier to divide 12 without accurate markings. If you have a string that is 12 inches, fold it in half to get 6 inches, fold it again to get three inches. Or fold it in thirds (three equal lengths) and you have four inches. Fold that in half twice over again and you have an inch. Likewise, a gallon is 16 cups, because 16 can be divide in half 4 times to get a cup. Conversion by division means you don't need to have as many different tools. A pound of sand and a balance can be used to find an ounce of sand without any additional tools, and you could probably get pretty close without the balance.

It is rarely important to be able to convert inches to miles. The ratio between them is arbitrary, because they are meant to measure vastly different things. Both are length, but an inch is the ground covered by a worm in a single contraction, and a mile is the ground covered by an army after a thousand paces. It's dead simple to convert milimeters to kilometers, but how often do you actually need to do that accurately?

100 degree F is very hot outside. 0 degrees is very cold. Upper third is beach weather, be careful about overheating. Lower third, might snow, be careful about freezing to death. Water boils over a fire, and that's about as accurate as you need to be most days. Modern digital tools and electronics have simplified all of these processes. The only time people actually need to use Imperial conversion rates is in school when you learn (and are tested on) how many feet are in a mile or how many BTUs it takes to raise the temperature of half a cup of water by 7 degrees. Of course that's going to suck because it's like mining for coal with a garden trowel. That's not what it's meant for. But you also wouldn't use a backhoe to plant petunias, either.

I grew up using both Imperial and metric. Both have their uses, and both have pros and cons. Personally, I hate trying to describe the weather in Celsius. The differences between too hot and too cold are crammed between -20 to 40 degrees. What kind if scale is that? The difference between 38 and 43 is life threatening. Why should the boiling point of water be relevant to choosing between a sweater and a tee shirt? I don't need to find the joules it will take to defrost 17 grams of ice on my car window. The benefits of the metric system are not relevant to my everyday existence, nor are the disadvantages of the Imperial system.

Base 12 and base 16 are superior to base 10 for use without measuring tools. The only reason we use base 10 is that we have 10 fingers.

If metric were objectively superior, then we'd all be using metric time as well. But it's easier to divide hours and minutes into halves and quarters in a base 60 system.

Free busses would be fantastic for any city's economy. Infrastructure encourages development growth rather than inflationary growth. See, money flows through the economy like a river, and the more money flowing, the more life the economy has to support people. But growth comes in two forms, development and inflation. Development is like new people moving to new spaces and opening new businesses. Those new businesses create jobs and foster innovation. Inflation is like when resources run scarce, so the cost rises as demand increases. Parking lot owners can charge more per space and pocket more money, choking out customers who cannot afford to pay extravagant costs of living. This type of growth does not create new jobs or encourage innovation. It merely concentrates more wealth into the control of a small group of people.

"Narco-terrorists" isn't a thing that existed until Trump and Hegseth wanted to murder people on a boat with missiles from the stratosphere without involving any available legal system.

I feel like kinks ought to be private anyway. Sharing them feels intimate in a way that is a violation of shared civil spaces. What people do in private doesn't bother me in the slightest, but if your kink requires making me uncomfortable by telling me what you're into, I have every right to decline to be a part of your sexual gratification.

To be clear, I'm not talking about LGBTQ+ communities or people who like to wear revealing clothing. That's not a kink. But if you're dressed like a puppy and being led around on a leash with a visible erection, then you should be a little bit ashamed for involving me without my consent. There are private spaces for private conversations and private activities. I should be able to ride the bus without getting jizzed on by a masturbating homeless man.

The Imperial system is easier to use for every day things. Metric is good for science and engineering, when precision and conversions are important, but for things like estimating, baking, driving, and weather, Imperial units are functionally more useful.

Humans can't make a utopia. It simply isn't possible, because satisfaction always requires sacrifice. The closest we can get to utopia is a world in which every person has their basic needs met, either through personal effort or collective effort. Food, shelter, safety, healthcare. If those needs are met, every person is fully free to pursue their own destiny without fear of mortal danger. Some people will still try to take advantage of others, because some people are never satisfied. So it will never be a utopia. But it will be objectively better than anarchy.

Oh yeah, getting banned puts you in a weird in-between space where you basically have no control anymore. Makes me want to just avoid participating altogether.

I never bothered deleting any of my comments, but my understanding was that the best way to get rid of them was to use a script to automatically edit the text content to some static message like "This comment has been removed by the user in protest."

I wasn't banned, I just hate the official app and the overwhelming number of bots and ads. So I gave it up, and Lemmy fills that commenting niche for me. My account is still live on reddit, though. There's like 12 years of old comments and sometimes I like reading through them to see how stupid I used to be.

So, murder. America murdered Venezuelans in international waters. As Americans, this was done in our name, and we are all responsible for it.

I don't want him dead. I want him to live long enough to see the world reject him. I want him to understand that his life and his choices were wasted, empty victories, and I want him to recognize how he will be remembered as a tyrant and a ghoul.

Unfortunately, I expect him to die of old age, happy, powerful, and as comfortable as anyone with money can be at his age. That's the shit-cherry on the garbage sundae that we all have to eat at the sunset of American greatness.