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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Exactly right. Honestly at this point I think the Dems should just drop gun control entirely as an issue.

    Let me preface this next section with the fact that I’ve been largely supportive of common sense gun control laws and think they would be a net positive. But give me a minute because this is a slightly more nuance point (the danger of bringing nuance to gun issues in America is apparent to me)

    Why? Let’s say they were successful and made it harder to purchase guns that we categorize as especially dangerous.

    1. This country is already awash in guns. Unlike other nations that have disarmed, there is no appetite for any kind of gun but back or gun seizure program, those dangerous guns will get into the hands of people that want to do dangerous things with them.
    2. The less dangerous guns are still quite dangerous. Humans are creative, bump stocks, self modification of less dangerous guns, having a couple loaded guns, all ways to make less dangerous guns equally dangerous.
    3. There are enough pro gun Americans and money in the gun industry that every change will have loopholes you could drive a semi truck through

    So the cost benefit just makes no sense. As a political issue the cost is enormous and the realistic potential benefit is basically nothing. I wish we had a population that cared more about this, but from a pragmatic point of view we simply don’t.

    I think it was sandy hook that really cemented this for me. If a grade school full of children gets shot up and the reaction from a significant portion of the population is apathy or to double down on gun rights, that’s not an issue you are winning.





  • The most poetic death for trump would be to suffer a stroke at one of his rallies. The stroke hits and he begins to mix up words and blather nonsense. He can sense something is wrong but his bigly words are not working, he tries to tell his faithful what’s happening.

    The meschia and windmilths are shooo shlaaaaad

    He slurs out, those weren’t the words he wanted, but with neurons misfiring the most used pathways are trying to help. He spends minutes, all recorded for history, dying in front of his bored onlookers unable to ask for help. His years of word salad and lies have finally achieved an awful goal, no one can tell his brain is broken. For this boy that cried wolf a million times, finally the fangs of an enemy he can’t bully or bribe have sunk in deep, years of kfc fried chicken grease now blocking bloodflow to his brain.

    It’s only been a few minutes, the crowd awaits some applause or laugh line, but for trump the time feels like an eternity. The pain is increasing, the fear all consuming, he collapses and dies there.

    A fitting end to the man whose greatest fear was that people would realize his weird incoherent ramblings were a con.



  • They banned single use a decade ago. My family switched to reusable bags. A lot of stores realized that they could sell “reusable” plastic bags, thicker single use bags, and get around the law.

    So the rollout went like this, stores gives you free plastic bags your entire life, about a week where people were told “no plastic bags, you gotta bring your own,” then the plastic bags were back but a bit different and the store would sometimes charge you a bag fee (although a lot of places effectively waived the fee). This meant that no one adapted and they continued doing what people had always done with their plastic bags, sone reuse, mostly discard.

    People always complain about unintended consequences of laws, I’ve always gotten the impression from those people they would prefer we don’t make the laws. I would love it though if we could iterate on our laws faster than, pass the law, every company finds a loophole a week later, close loophole after a decade of unintended consequences.

    And yea, having reusable bags is not difficult.



  • Hosting the image on discords CDN allows you not to give out your IP address to any person that comes across the link, prevents you from getting hammered with download requests if your upload becomes popular, and allows your content to be accessed when your own machine goes to sleep or has any kind of networking interruption.

    Before discord people used to self host teamspeak or some other software. One of the big things you don’t have to think about is the person you just made a joke about or beat in an online game trying to DDOS your machine, because they don’t know where you are.



  • immutable@lemm.eetoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldSide by Side
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    22 days ago

    That’s the neat part, if you aren’t American you can agitate and tell people “don’t vote, voting for the lesser evil means you end up with slightly less evil and that’s bad, instead you should not vote or ignore mathematics existing and vote third party which is a fancy way of not voting” and then suffer no consequences.

    Tell people not to vote and the party that wants to “hurt the right people” gets into power, doesn’t matter, those policies don’t touch foreign agitators.

    I’ve been in the depths of the leftist circle jerk about this. You see if we all sat home on Election Day reading Marx, then the oligarchs who rule over us would see that no one is taking part in the charade anymore. Then those oligarchs who wield tremendous wealth and power would just give up, you know, the turnout too low. All those people refused to endorse the democratic farce any further and so clearly those with power would be so red faced with embarrassment they would voluntarily give up that power and abolish capitalism.

    Those oligarchs certainly wouldn’t be delighted by the fact that the population is even cheaper and easier to control because people are sitting out. Nope, we will certainly show them by allowing them to dominate us with even more ease and at bargain prices, certainly that will end the system.


  • immutable@lemm.eetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDoes Wikipedia really need my donations?
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    25 days ago

    Lucky for you the wikimedia foundation files annual reports https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2022-2023-annual-report/

    I think this is the latest one available.

    As to whether they need your money or not I’m a bit conflicted. They have raised and spent more and more money every year. They have a lot of money and some have argued they spend it poorly.

    On the whole though, besides asking for donations, they have maintained their goal of being ad free. If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.

    I think for myself as someone that has worked as a software engineer for my entire life building out massive infrastructure that is on a similar scale to Wikipedia, I don’t really know how they justify such high development spend when the tech isn’t really evolving very much. I’m sure it’s not cheap to host, so that spend is fine by me, but I’m not sure what all they are building. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, I just have a hard time imagining it.

    I would encourage you to look at numbers and decide if they make sense to you. Also people have written on the subject, so some googling will likely bring you to more opinionated pieces than my own.


  • Really enjoyed Farcry 5 but Farcry 6 was ok gameplay wise but the story was really underwhelming especially with the amazing talent they got in Giancarlo Esposito.

    The real problem with Ubisoft games is that they are all 95% reskins. If you’ve played one farcry game you’ve played most of every farcry game, same with assassins creed, etc.

    Now those games often end up having relatively fun mechanics so when another farcry comes out I’ll still play it because it’s a fun game to me.

    I do wonder how much they are just hitting a saturation point where the same couple games reskinned over and over are just underwhelming




  • That’s a shitty way to treat someone, sorry that happened to you.

    If you have storage space though and look for good deals, ironically a Costco membership could help with your finances, and you could have cheap hotdogs again.

    The trick to Costco is that, while everything they sell is normally of very good quality, only some of it is a good deal. I’ve yet to encounter particularly bad deals at Costco, something where I feel like I’ve been ripped off. That said, some things are a better bargain than others.

    If you happen to have storage space, which isn’t the case for everyone, you might find that by purchasing some items in bulk and storing them that you end up saving more than the membership costs.

    Some items that I find Costco normally has stable good pricing on that you can easily calculate out if it would make the membership worthwhile

    • eggs
    • milk
    • toilet paper
    • paper towels
    • soda
    • beer (depending on brand, there’s normally something that’s a good deal but it might change month to month)
    • fruit
    • meat (depending on cut, ground beef is normally a pretty good deal if you have freezer space for a few pounds)

    Although if your bad experience with the food court person put you off that’s reasonable too. Anyways, just thought I’d share what I’ve found having a Costco membership for like a decade, I didn’t really want to pay upfront to go to a store but when I sat down and ran the numbers I came out ahead. But I have enough budget flexibility and storage space to make that viable and so I’m in a privileged position in that way so your mileage may vary.

    Anyways still sucks that the person decided to belittle you, no one deserves to be treated like that. Hope your days ahead are filled with nicer people.