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[-] frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 167 points 3 weeks ago

Try to learn Russian really quickly.

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[-] frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 55 points 1 month ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

No. Vote Biden.

UPDATE: Vote Harris!*

If you can spare the time or money, volunteer and donate to the campaign in places they can actually win.

EDIT: Also, vote Democrat if there are any other elections going on at the same time. If Trump does win, the only chance of holding him to any kind of account is to have as many Democrats in positions of power as possible.

Sincerely, someone who can't vote in your elections but still lives with the knock-on effects!

*EDIT 2: Absolute necro-editing to change this to say Vote Harris.

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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by frankPodmore@slrpnk.net to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

Three possibilities come to mind:

Is there an evolutionary purpose?

Does it arise as a consequence of our mental activities, a sort of side effect of our thinking?

Is it given a priori (something we have to think in order to think at all)?

EDIT: Thanks for all the responses! Just one thing I saw come up a few times I'd like to address: a lot of people are asking 'Why assume this?' The answer is: it's purely rhetorical! That said, I'm happy with a well thought-out 'I dispute the premiss' answer.

[-] frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 73 points 2 months ago

FIFA. Every man and boy in England loves FIFA, except me. I find it totally boring and pointless.

[-] frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 200 points 2 months ago

No. But physical proof is not the standard we use for determining someone's historical existence.

[-] frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 126 points 2 months ago

You cannot achieve any good by hurting people.

People are so convinced that if we're more cruel to criminals, they'll stop committing crimes, or if we're harsher to workers, we'll work harder, or if you're tough on border controls, immigrants will go away. It does not work and it cannot work.

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[-] frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 69 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I kinda think that if you can imagine a one-line fix to a plot hole, it isn't really a plot hole.

I remember someone insisting to me that there was this huge plot hole in the film of the Fellowship of the Ring, because Merry and Pippin don't get told about what Frodo and Sam are actually doing until the Council of Elrond, but still willingly run around risking life and limb to help them. Now, not only is this not a plot hole in itself (I'm pretty sure I'd help anyone fleeing a demonic horseman, just on principle, never mind if that person was my lifelong friend/cousin), it's also quite obvious that they could have been told everything offscreen. The audience didn't need to hear all that explanation again, five minutes after we first heard it.

A lot of plot holes people like to complain about are basically of this nature. 'Can you imagine a fix?' Yep, easily. 'Did the audience need to hear it?' Nope, because I could easily imagine it. 'Well, there you go, then.'

[-] frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 63 points 4 months ago

It's funny how cosplaying is seen as this weird niche nerdy activity... unless it's as an athlete.

Although, having said that, we do have the term 'full kit wanker' in the UK, for anyone who buys the whole kit (not just the t-shirt, scarf or hat). Because, you see, there's an acceptable quantum of cosplaying.

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submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by frankPodmore@slrpnk.net to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

Let's say you have multi-member constituencies. You hold an election with an outcome that looks roughly like this:

  • Candidate #1 received 12,000 votes

  • Candidate #2 received 8,000 votes

  • Candidate #3 recieved 4,000 votes

All three get elected to the legislature, but Candidate #1's vote on legislation is worth three times Candidate #3's vote, and #3's vote is worth half Candidate #2's vote.

I know that the British Labour Party used to have bloc voting at conference, where trade union reps' votes were counted as every member of their union voting, so, e.g., if the train drivers' union had 100,000 members, their one rep wielded 100,000 votes. That's not quite what I'm describing above, but it's close.

Bonus question: what do you think would be the pros and cons of such a system?

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Follow-up question: was it controversial at the time?

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submitted 6 months ago by frankPodmore@slrpnk.net to c/fuck_cars@lemmy.ml
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submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by frankPodmore@slrpnk.net to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

I was thinking about how the American and French Revolutions are sometimes seen, especially by Marxists, as more 'successful' versions of the English Civil War and the Commonwealth.

Nowadays, whenever people suggest even mild leftwing ideas, someone pops up and says 'Sure if you want to end up with STALINISM' so, I was wondering if people said the same thing about Cromwell and the Roundheads before the American Revolution? Like, 'If we get rid of the British, next thing you know they'll be cancelling CHRISTMAS!'

The parallels between Cromwell and Washington are pretty obvious: 'successful revolutionary general defeats the monarch's forces in a war that started as a dispute about tax, then becomes the new head of state' applies to both. Did people at the time see the comparison or were the two men and the two conflicts seen as very different?

[-] frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 73 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

This isn't a strict proof, but Occam's razor applies here.

If we claim the Universe is a simulation, we're supposing, on no evidence whatsoever, that there's a whole other unknown universe running our Universe. That certainly makes us guilty of multiplying entities beyond necessity!

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A paper summarising 'car-related harm including crashes, pollution, land use, and injustices'.

Some key remarks from the report:

  • 1 in 34 deaths are caused by cars and automobility with 1,670,000 deaths per year.
  • Cars and automobility have killed 60–80 million people since their invention.

While some people benefit from automobility, nearly everyone—whether or not they drive—is harmed by it. Slowing automobility's violence and pollution will be impracticable without the replacement of policies that encourage car harm with policies that reduce it.

Although switching to electric vehicles may be less politically controversial than reducing car use, electrification fails to address a majority of the harms described in this paper, including crashes, intentional violence, sedentary travel, car dependence and isolation, unequal distribution of harm, inaccessibility, land use, or consumption of space, time, and resources.

It also has a handy list of interventions that can reduce car harm drawn from this meta-analysis of 'effective interventions to reduce car use in European cities'.

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I just read Dr. No by Percival Everett. It contains a maths riddle that I cannot get my head around. I tried searching online but I couldn't find any answers.

Here's the riddle:

There are three sheepherders who come to a bridge controlled by a troll and his two sons. He demands of them thirty sheep before they can pass. Each shepherd cuts out ten sheep from his flock and they give them to the troll. Once they have crossed, the troll decides that he should only have asked for twenty-five. He sends his sons after the men with five sheep. The sons decide to keep one sheep each and give three back to the herders. They do. Now it is the case that each shepherd has paid only nine sheep. Nine times three is twenty-seven. The trolls kept two. Twenty-seven plus two is twenty-nine. Where is the missing sheep?

Can anyone help me understand?

[-] frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 90 points 10 months ago

Not a line, but in Ratatouille there's a point where Linguini is trying to explain to his love interest that he's being guided by a rat in his hat and he's saying, 'I've got a tiny... little...' We see the reaction shot of her looking confused/disgusted and very quickly glancing down at his crotch.

It's just a fraction of a second, but a great gag for the grownups anyway!

[-] frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 53 points 1 year ago

They actually teach reverse parking as part of driving instruction here in the UK because, as many people have pointed out, it's safer, easier and more convenient.

[-] frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 107 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

So, fun fact, St Augustine, who is considered one of the Church Fathers, explicitly argued that if the 'Antipodes' (i.e., southern continents not connected to Europe, Asia or Africa) actually existed and had humans living there, that would prove the Gospel was untrue.

The reason for this is as follows: Christians of his era believed that the reason God had allowed the Romans to destroy the Second Temple and push the Jews into exile was to prepare the men of all nations (as understood at the time) for the coming of the Gospel. The idea was that the Jews had taken the Old Testament, and the prophecies of the Messiah therein, across the whole world. Augustine argues that if the Antipodes contained human beings who had never had any kind of contact with Jews, and therefore no contact with the OT, and no contact with Christians, and therefore no contact with the New Testament, either, that must mean the Gospels are false. Why? Because there's no conceivable reason that a just God would have deprived entire civilisations of the chance of redemption.

Of course, we now know that at the time Augustine was writing (4th-5th century AD), there were literally millions of people who had never had the slightest contact with the Jews or Christians and, furthermore, wouldn't do so for another millennium. So, per Augustine's argument, all those millions were condemned to Hell (the concept of Purgatory didn't exist at this point, but condemning them all to no chance of Heaven, just because they were unfortunate to be born a long way away from Jersualem, is clearly also unjust). Either God is incredibly unjust and unmerciful, which means the Gospels are untrue, OR the Good News wasn't actually spread to all men, which must also mean that they're not true.

The upshot of this is that one of the Church Fathers has, in retrospect, irrefutably argued that the Gospels are untrue. The amount of special pleading required to make out that, actually, the Maori or the Easter Islanders or [insert any other uncontacted peoples here] had an opportunity to accept Christ and somehow missed it entirely is far beyond any sane interpretation of the evidence.

Now, as you might have noticed, this hasn't stopped people from believing in the Gospels. I don't see why the discovery of life on another world would dislodge people from a belief that is transparently false when nothing else has.

[-] frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 67 points 1 year ago

Capital 'N' is written differently; 'U' and 'u' are unambiguous.

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frankPodmore

joined 1 year ago