fiat_lux

I never want to hear anyone try to say NATO isn’t just an international military that is guided / deeply influenced by American foreign policy ever again. One of the few good things to ever come from the Trump fiasco is that they’re finally saying the quiet parts out loud, but the fact that this will receive no coverage, let alone criticism, means that might just be even more dangerous for all of us, even outside the Atlantic.

The world is on fire and humanity is prioritising manufacturing our own suicide above investing in fire extinguishers.

It’s a reference to one of the most culturally important stories in Buddhist countries. Not knowing about it is like consuming English media without knowing anything about Shakespeare’s plays.

The English name is Journey to the West and the monkey is Sun Wukong in Chinese or Son Goku in Japanese. You might notice the main character in Dragon Ball Z has the same name, but the monkey king is referenced constantly in all sorts of Eastern media. The synopsis and main characters sections in that Wikipedia link will give you the general idea, but I would recommend reading or watching any of the versions to get a better understanding of the vibe.

Your metaphor is basically just calling them arrogant and reckless, lacking a good strategy and rushing in to things.

You can’t just cover things back up. Archaeological digs have been slowly buried over time in environmental conditions that allowed for their preservation, or in Pompeii’s case, initially very quickly and then slowly. Covering it back up would not only ruin the discovery potential of future investigation that relies on identification by context (for example, dating a pot by the chemical composition of the surrounding and previously contained materials, but it would also endanger anything we’ve found by introducing an uncontrolled and entirely new environment. It’s not like we can layer on the ash and other stuff in the same order it was deposited and in the exact same location with the same chemical composition.

Conservation is a necessary and very active effort as soon as something is found, because the act of studying it aleays causes at least some initial destruction.

Or both. Like me. Having long covid has made me even more afraid of reinfection. I can’t afford to live like this, let alone potentially worsen it.

On the upside, perma-masking on the rare occasion I’m not at home has prevented me from getting all upper respiratory viruses for a few years now.

Forever, probably. This is just another in a long line of Israel’s atrocities since they were created from Britain’s discarded colony in 1948 with the most ridiculous borders decided by the UN

Israel immediately annexed more than half of the Arab territories in that map. The UN, Western Europe and the US just shrugged in response. These days the politicians have to at least mime disapproval because news travels fast, but that’s all they will do. People are just GDP to them.

TIL Digit grouping style variances are even more fucked than I anticipated. International Bureau of Weights and Measures along with International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry uses spaces, but different countries use commas or dots and some use spaces and comma OR dot?

Fuck this, we should redo the whole numeric system. Burn it all down and start from scratch.

Currency and numeric formatting works differently by location, it looks consistent and correct for US formatting.

Personally, I think it’s high time for a new global standard on this that abandons the dots and commas altogether, using new symbols so nobody can complain that it’s unfair that only some people have to change. But that’s… very unlikely to ever happen, for no good reason.

I’ve only ever seen a volcano once from far away, thankfully while it wasn’t killing people. It blows my mind I can watch one on the other side of the world with only a few seconds delay… I hope everything remains low level and doesn’t cause too much misery for those nearby.

Climate change was still a “this will be a big problem and we need to do something about it sooner rather than later” issue instead of “actively experiencing and watching the damage and misery on a near daily basis and knowing it will be getting much much worse” reality.

No amount of Captain Planet telling me to separate my recyclables is going to fix this shit.

Copying and pasting my answer from the same question just 2 weeks ago:

How do you know they all weren’t wearing it?

There are a lot of people who do wear it but continue to smell because of underlying medical conditions. For example, fruity smelling body odor can indicate diabetes. People with a rare genetic condition called Trimethylaminuria can smell strongly of fish. It all depends on what bacteria (which outnumber your own body cells by 10 to 1 even though they are only 2% of your body mass) and what balance of enzymes you may or may not have.

Reducing perspiration can and often does help, concealing the odor with different ones can help, but sometimes people’s bodies just aren’t right for whatever mass produced product they have bought. Sometimes that can be fixed with medication. Sometimes it can’t.

https://kbin.social/m/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/t/638513/-/comment/3647566

One time I went to this Afghani (Hazaragi) restaurant with friends in another city. Most of us were vegetarian, and they had heard this place had good vegetarian food, so that’s what we ordered.

There was this simple garlic dal that I still think about. It was so perfectly flavored and balanced and seasoned, with a depth of flavour that surprised the hell out of me. I suspect the vegetable stock they used was cooked long and slow for a very long time, but I’ll never know its secrets for sure.

Everything else we ordered was tasty enough, but this was next level. And it wasn’t just me, everyone at the table agreed. And it was just a bowl of lentils! It’s not like we hadn’t had dal before.

They’ve since changed chefs/owners. The closest sounding recipe I’ve found is this one from a thankfully decent UX site (ignore the coconut milk in the url, there is none) but using stock instead of water and probably much less ginger. I still mean to try this recipe but with more fried garlic… perhaps I have underestimated the masala.

I’m also a huge butter chicken fan. Friends laugh at me for ordering the stereotypical foreigner dish, but it’s just too fucking tasty. It has no right to be so good, especially with a fresh naan straight from the tandoor.

Well, we’re talking about home ownership here. If you’re renting then…

Yes, even as a mere renter myself I am extremely familiar with the workings of home ownership in my area and the legal rights and responsibilities of each. I just didn’t feel it necessary to elaborate on how I know. It didn’t seem relevant.

I am stating a fact, that in the US, HOAs started as way to enforce gentrification. There were actual racist deed agreements and binding covenants. This isn’t an opinion or speculation.

Yes, I am aware many home owners organisations were begun in the US out of xenophobic backlash after slavery was partially abolished. However, the concept of groups of owner-occupiers and investors/developers governing their community is not a uniquely US thing, and likely existed in practise before the term “Home Owners Association” was coined. I could have been clearer that i was speaking more globally and generally, but this is why I used the non-US-specific term “local governing bodies” which could cover everything from favella gang leaders to democraticly dlrected government councils.

OK but that’s not everyone’s opinion. My neighbors and I get along fine without an HOA,

Yes, most owner occupiers where I live also luve without being under an HOA, but they are still also subject to the laws and regulations of their local councils, state governments, federal governments, strata bodies and everyone else in between. Renters like me, or owner occupiers too are able to seek legal recourse through those courts. Depending on the value in dispute, they are able to do it without lawyers. In other communities, such as small towns where the sheriff is the mayor and the local judge was elected with no legal experience… this would be a much bigger problem for the person with little cash.

I wouldn’t even want to live again in a building where the majority vote on repairs was held by non-occupying investors. It leads to stupid amounts of decay.

I rent in a medium-high-density non-US housing complex. It’s obviously necessary after you live like this for a few years that there needs to be an organisational body to deal with building and land issues, especially when there are hundreds of people who occupy a shared structure that needs to be maintained and repaired. For example, if the water goes out for me, it could also be out for hundreds of other people, which makes it a more expensive and higher stakes problem than a single detached house with one family, and more than one person will need to make the decision on how it is repaired and by whom.

Local governing bodies are not necessarily based in racism or hyper-control motives either, even if American (and other country) housing organisations regularly use it for those purposes even today. These organisations are borne from the complex needs of living in a peaceful community of different people with different desires and needs.

But experience has also told me that this works better when the overarching legal systems are more accessible and corruption-resistant. The biggest problem is that it is very difficult to evaluate what patch of land (or walls and floor) has the best longitude and latitude to provide a decent probability of not being exploited for someone else’s gain or suffering from someone else’s bad decisions. It’s a constant global issue, and the consistent theme is that most places favour the wealthiest human in housing or other legal disputes.

I’d die pretty quickly without modern medicine, so I might choose the era with the easiest access to strong opiates to make the process less painful.

I used to see stories in the legaladvice subreddit regularly about Housing Owner Associations putting legitimate liens on properties for not following the rules. Even when the rules were as ridiculous as “air-conditioning unit can’t be visible from the street” or “only these specific plants can be grown and your lawn cannot exceed a few inches in height and must always be green” or “internal curtains must be pink or white”.

For a culture that prides itself on its freedoms, the miniature authoritarian regimes that HOAs embody are a great example of the evidence not matching the story.

To add to this:

List of lists of pejorative terms for people

It includes lists for men, women, lgbt+, disability, age, ethnicity, religion, location. The severity of the terms is varying and arguably location-dependent.

For example, while I (probably) wouldn’t use the word “wanker” in a formal professional large meeting in my current workplace without it being somehow contextual, almost no Australian or New Zealander in that company would blink an eye if I said it casually at lunch. But when I worked in the education sector I used the personal rule “if I don’t want it written on my gravestone, I shouldn’t say it”, because teachers have subsonic and lightning-fast swearing detection reflexes, even when they’re not at school.

He bought it because he couldn’t stop being an arrogant edgelord keyboard shit-talker, and he accidentally made himself personally legally liable doing so. The Twitter board called his bluff, seeing the most amazing opportunity to rid themselves of an expensive and slowly dying company, and Musk had already pissed off the SEC (or one of the other financial government services) enough that he was at risk of having his finances in other companies audited.

So he was forced to buy it because he’s an impulsive troll. Everything else since then is pretty incidental, and unsurprisingly dripping with hypocrisy like this.

Humans have emotional and often destructive reactions to information that conflicts with what they were always taught. No belief system or culture anywhere in the world is immune to that. Some cultures are a bit more flexible because their belief system doesn’t go as hard on the “this is the only possible truth” line, but there are still times when it happens.

For anyone interested in why the guy lost it, it’s because similarities between the Ancient Greek stories and stories found in Hebrew scripture used to be explained away some Jewish followers as “Both were independently inspired by (my) God and it is testament to His Power”.

They claimed that there were almost no Greeks in ancient Israel, and that no worship was of other religions was really tolerated by the rulers then anyway, so the Greeks couldn’t have even have had their own temples even if there were enough followers of a Greek god. If there were enough people for it to be a thing, there would be… you know, archaeological evidence of Greek temples and religion and worship in Israel predating the Judeo-Christian split. Right?

The followers claimed that because of all that, when the Talmud was written by a group of rabbis arguing about what the exact teachings of God really were (because it used to only be handed down through spoken word and Christians were being all “lol no, He never said that”), each Rabbi who contributed to the Talmud could not have been influenced enough by man-made beliefs for it to have hugely affected what the group agreed God definitely said and did. And they definitely couldnt have put things from multi-god religions in there. Therefore the basis of modern Judaism is and always has been rock solid, even though there is a huge chunk of time between when it happened and when it was written down.

And all was well… until 1978 when someone dug up the 2.5m tall statue of Athena imported from Greece and attached to a purpose-built Greek temple in Beth Shean / Scythopolis from 200 years earlier than the Talmud, 37km / 22mi from Nazareth (in the opposite direction of Greece) - in a pretty unavoidable place on the road to Jerusalem. Oops.

tl;dr You got your many-God filthy religious icon in my certainly pure, true, and original single-God belief system that we declared 200 years afterwards!

Edited to add: a little extra context. This Museum keeps the Dead Sea Scrolls and has an entire separate building of the museum, away from the archaeology collection, that is very religiously targeted where those Scrolls are shown. The Scrolls have also not been on display for a long while because of conservation work, but they just started exhibiting them again. So this guy was likely a religious zealot who came to see the Scrolls exhibit, but he stumbled into the archaeology department where they’re a little more… science and evidence-based. And the museum is state funded. And the government owns the statue, Scrolls, and basically every Jewish religious artifact in existence. There are a lot of layers here, like everything in the region’s history.