Schadrach
@Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
- Comment on Tried naming the states from memory as a European 1 week ago:
Once read a forum thread on “how your state/region is depicted in media” and had to point out that aside from one movie about a college the biggest things I could point to were the Wrong Turn movies (slasher movies about inbred cannibal hillfolk) and the movie version of Silent Hill (which is set in WV but based on Centralia, PA while the game version of Silent Hill is in New England).
Centralia, PA is one of those places with less than a dozen residents and a neat history. It’s been on fire since 1962, the government tried to eminent domain all real estate in Centralia and a handful of extremely stubborn folks fought back leading to an agreement where they get to stay there for the rest of their lives after which the property reverts to the government via eminent domain. All seven of them. Five of which are still around as of 2020, having lived under that agreement for forty years. The church still holds services, and their graveyard are still maintained, even the one that’s in a perpetual haze as the ground releases smoke.
- Comment on Tried naming the states from memory as a European 1 week ago:
It appears like most of Appalachia is under “swamp racists” and the rest as “NYC”, which I strongly reject. Very little of Appalachia is swamp, it’s mostly forested mountains. And it’s far to rural to be compared to NYC.
- Comment on YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States 2 weeks ago:
I say #2, specifically because it can be done mathematically, as opposed to trying to agree on some definition of “fairness” that isn’t completely different for every office and doesn’t have to be wholly redistricted every election as a consequence.
Say, something like least split line. Basically, if you have an even number of seats for a region, draw the shortest length line that splits the region into two regions of equal population. If you have an odd number of seats > 1, then draw the shortest line that splits the region based on number per seat given one side gets the “extra” seat (for example, for 5 seats you’d split so that one side is 2/3 of the other side and give 3 seats to one side and 2 to the other). Repeat the process for each region created by these lines until each region represents one seat. If there are multiple shortest lines, you the one closest to a NS axis. The extra seat always goes to the west side of the line.
- Comment on They even got their own island 3 weeks ago:
The difference being you weren’t desperate enough to take “any hole is a goal” as a motto worth following.
- Comment on They even got their own island 3 weeks ago:
Apparently I married a unicorn. She explicitly didn’t want a diamond but a sapphire and explicitly didn’t want me to spend a fortune on it. Got her ring from an online jeweler on sale. Paid less than $300 for it. During the first Trump admin. We had talked about what she wanted and I found something close after shopping around. Then I held onto it for six months planning when to ask.
- Comment on They even got their own island 3 weeks ago:
In the US, age of consent varies by state. In most US states the age of consent to sex with someone who is not in a position of authority is 16. Often with a close in age exception. 18 gets used in US media so much because that’s what it is in CA and NY, and that’s where most media is made.
18 is also federal age of consent, but that only applies when an incident involves crossing state lines.
- Comment on We wouldn’t need the Epstein files to prove DJT’s guilt if society just trusted women in the first place. 3 weeks ago:
You only asked about rape/SA, so it was the only topic I responded to. According to FBI stats, the 8-10% is actually pretty typical for many other crimes too, but falsely accusing someone of most other crimes aside from something like murder is going to have consequences that are either shorter term or less severe (reputational consequences of being falsely accused of beating someone up are smaller than being falsely accused of rape, for example). Also, rape/SA often has the accusation itself as the primary or occasionally only evidence against the accused, and sometimes that is enough especially in older cases where any physical evidence would be long gone.
- Comment on We wouldn’t need the Epstein files to prove DJT’s guilt if society just trusted women in the first place. 3 weeks ago:
inconvenienced
“Inconvenienced” to several months in jail, or 5 years in prison and five of probation and registered as a sex offender until they were exonerated, and several of the ones in the Innocence Project archives are worse than that.
The 2006 Duke Lacrosse kids were “inconvenienced”, and even that involved threats, harassment and vandalism for a case where every piece of evidence except her claims worked against her claims - she also finally admitted to making it up, in 2024.
false accusations are a tiny fraction of accusations
In the 8-10% range by most studies, with some outliers going as low as 2% or as high as 40%.
- Comment on We wouldn’t need the Epstein files to prove DJT’s guilt if society just trusted women in the first place. 3 weeks ago:
The distinction between rape and sex is consent. Whether a given sex act is consensual or not exists only in the minds of those involved in it (consent is a mental state, not something directly observable from outside), unless communicated and when communicated only the communication exists which is likely not in any fixed form.
- Comment on We wouldn’t need the Epstein files to prove DJT’s guilt if society just trusted women in the first place. 3 weeks ago:
How bad does the damage from the false accusation need to be?
One I’m fond of pointing to as evidence that they happen is Tracy West accusing her ex Louis Gonzales. He spent three months in jail while it was being investigated, and only got out because he happened to have a very heavily corroborated alibi for the day that left only a 6 minute window during which he would have had to travel a total of 2 miles, obtain a duffel bag full of forensic countermeasures, subdue and rape the victim, dispose of said duffel bag in a manner it would never be recovered and return. And that 6 minute window was not when she originally said it happened, until they allowed her to revise her statement which became much fuzzier about when it happened. Also there was evidence that she was researching the way she was tied up in the days leading up to her being tied up exactly that way. By all appearances this case was about a custody dispute over their kid, and despite the case being dropped because it was physically impossible for him to have done it she still got to use it against him because fucking family courts. He eventually got a finding of factual innocence from CA courts and had the entire thing expunged from his record - to be clear, this essentially requires proving beyond a reasonable doubt that you could not have committed the crime. When he was interviewed by an LA paper about the case, he’d developed an obsession with being as publicly visible with as much paper trail as possible at all time, just in case because of how lucky he was with his alibi from this case (if he’d eaten before he left to get the kid, his alibi wouldn’t exist and that alibi is the reason he only spent 3 months in jail).
How about Brian Banks? Kid with a real chance of going into professional football, Falsely accused, threatened with 41 years, plead to 5 years + 5 probation + registering as a sex offender on advice of his lawyer. The accuser sues the school and wins $1.5M. 9 years later, his accuser contacts him on Facebook and they speak. He secretly records the conversation, in which she admits to having lied but refuses to tell authorities that because she was afraid that they might make her pay back the money. The video gets released publicly and the Innocence Project gets involved. He goes on to briefly join the UFL and then NFL after not having meaningfully played for 11 years (time that would have been the prime of his career if not for the accusation).
Speaking of the Innocence Project, what’s your opinion of them? It tends to vary for left leaning folks - either they like it because a lot of the people exonerated are POC or they hate it because a significant majority of people exonerated by it were imprisoned for some flavor of sexual assault. Go look at their list of cases: innocenceproject.org/all-cases/ According to the site when filtered for sex crimes 184 of the “more than 250” people were imprisoned wrongly for a sex crime. 124/184 of those exonerated by the Innocence Project that were imprisoned for a sex crime were misidentified by an eyewitness. For sex crimes, that eyewitness is very often the alleged victim.
- Comment on We wouldn’t need the Epstein files to prove DJT’s guilt if society just trusted women in the first place. 3 weeks ago:
SA is hard to get a conviction in.
Yeah. It turns out that something that usually has no witnesses beyond the accused and accuser, often has little or no evidence other than the accusation itself and the sole difference between it and an otherwise common and legal act exists solely in the mind of the accuser is difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
- Comment on Dik Piks 5 weeks ago:
It is. But the reality of those sites is that for a guy the vast majority of your messages will never be read. You are shouting at the void and hoping for the best. This does not incentivize taking the time and psychological investment to write thoughtful messages, because you will send comparatively few and the lack of response is harder to deal with when you’re more invested. It incentivizes sending the quickest messages that you care about the least to as many as possible. The guy didn’t send her a dick pic, he sent every woman in a 50 mile radius the same dick pic hoping that with enough sheer volume he’ll get a response.
It’s basically spam that wants to fuck you, because non-spam options don’t get you anywhere.
- Comment on shrooms 1 month ago:
Why I said usually. Most gay men and most straight women are the exceptions.
- Comment on shrooms 1 month ago:
I would assume they meant “of boobs”, but you present an interesting question of terminology. Unfortunately it begs the question, what exactly would we mean by “on boobs” in this context, so that we can question if “off boobs” is it’s opposite?
Also, boobs. The answer to boobs is usually yes.
- Comment on xkcd #3109: Dehumidifier 1 month ago:
I don’t know, I wouldn’t mind also being able to tell it to start to preheat while I’m on my way home. Would save a chunk of time if I could literally walk in the door and throw the food in the oven without the extra wait for it to preheat which is usually long enough to be annoying but not long enough to do anything else.
- Comment on No rational person would do this... 1 month ago:
The only rational response is to grab a can of spray paint and graffiti the door with “~355/113”
- Comment on Cheeto devouring his nation 1 month ago:
We already know from real-world AV elections that voters largely prefer to vote honestly, there’s no reason to think they would get more strategic when it gets harder to figure out the optimal strategy.
In plain AV, voting honestly is the optimal strategy - there’s no incentive to vote any other way. It’s not for SPAV. And yes, strategic voting in SPAV is harder to figure out than strategic voting in FPTP, but it’s far from impossible - basically you don’t vote for a popular candidate you support so your vote for other candidates counts for more, relying on the assumption that enough other people will vote for the popular candidate you support to allow them to win anyways.
- Comment on Cheeto devouring his nation 1 month ago:
He’s probably talking about the electoral college, and likely supports abolishing it in favor of a direct election which would mostly just shift the epmhasis away from the largest states that are close to flipping over to emphasizing a handful of the largest cities.
There’s actually a bill that’s made the rounds to several states that makes it so that once enough states (read a number equaling half plus 1 electoral votes) pass a similar law they will all switch over to assigning their electors based on the national popular vote rather than what they’re state does. Unsurprisingly, California and New York jumped on this, as did some smaller solid blue states that are willing to hitch their wagon to “whatever California wants” going forward, but it’s probably never going to actually take effect because if it could get to that point because if it could then we wouldn’t be worrying about the GOP winning another election for the foreseeable future.
Or they aren’t a fan of House apportionment. Or both. Though electoral college apportionment and house apportionment are related, so…
If they’re from the EU, I’d have a question for them: Do you feel like Germany isn’t given remotely enough power by the EU parliament, or that Malta has ridiculously too much to throw around? Because it’s literally the same problem - if you try to represent people with a fixed number of seats apportioned between territories, and you try to minimize the mean difference in voters/representative, and there are a couple of territories that just blow the curve on each end that’s what happens.
Still think merging the Dakotas and creating Montoming (merging Montana and Wyoming) is a good idea… Maybe go whole hog and if your state gets one House seat and is adjacent to a state with one House seat, you get merged to be one state from here on out. Where multiple options present, join the ones with the largest shared land border. Repeat until no examples remain, recalculate House seats and do it again if necessary. It probably won’t help California much just because of how much CA blows the population curve, but it would likely push the states with the worst population/representative ratio up by one. Should probably pull out the math and see.
- Comment on Cheeto devouring his nation 1 month ago:
Not a fan of SPAV, in part for the same reasons I’m not a fan of STAR:
- It doesn’t eliminate strategic voting. For example, imagine you support two candidates for a multi-seat election. Under straight AV you vote for both of them because there’s literally no incentive to do otherwise. Under SPAV, you might decide that since one of those candidates is much more popular and thus a foregone conclusion to win that you should avoid voting for them so the value of your vote for the other isn’t reduced. Too many doing this can cause negative effects, like strategic voting in other methods.
- You can’t tell me how my vote will actually be counted until every other vote is counted, because how the ballot will be measured in the end depends on every other ballot as depending on how everyone else voted your votes for some candidates may be worth less than your votes for other candidates. Straight AV doesn’t have this problem, your vote is exactly what is says on the ballot and is counted exactly as it is on the ballot. The extra math also makes it more complicated to explain to voters en masse, which is a problem with other systems that have transferable votes.
I get that the goal is apparently to make every state elect a split legislature/congressmen by making so that if any seats are even vaguely competitive the parties will essentially be forced to take turns.
- Comment on Elon Musk wants to rewrite "the entire corpus of human knowledge" with Grok 1 month ago:
Again, read the rest of the comment. Wikipedia very much repeats the views of reliable sources on notable topics - most of the fuckery is in deciding what counts as “reliable” and “notable”.
- Comment on HAAAAAAAANNNNKKKK 1 month ago:
I first watched it during University years, and I was very much of the camp that was doing the vicariously living through the power fantasy of Walt’s rise to power and the bitch wife and crying jessie ruining it for him.
I recently, like a year ago as a 31+ year old rewatched it again, and jesus christ what a top to bottom egoistic selfish asshole Walt is, all I did is feel sorry for Skyler and Jessie.
I think knowing where it’s going makes a big difference. Like, first time in going in blind Walt is a sympathetic for the first bit, and for most of the story is dealing with the unintended consequences of raising funds for his treatment. Knowing where it’s going it’s a lot easier to see him in a lot worse light earlier in the story.
- Comment on Elon Musk wants to rewrite "the entire corpus of human knowledge" with Grok 1 month ago:
that he just wants a propaganda bot that regurgitates all of the right wing talking points.
Then he has utterly failed with Grok. One of my new favorite pastimes is watching right wingers get angry that Grok won’t support their most obviously counterfactual bullshit and then proceed to try to argue it into saying something they can declare a win from.
- Comment on Elon Musk wants to rewrite "the entire corpus of human knowledge" with Grok 1 month ago:
More like 0.7056 IQ move.
- Comment on Elon Musk wants to rewrite "the entire corpus of human knowledge" with Grok 1 month ago:
Wikipedia is not a trustworthy source of information for anything regarding contemporary politics or economics.
Wikipedia presents the views of reliable sources on notable topics. The trick is what sources are considered “reliable” and what topics are “notable”, which is why it’s such a poor source of information for things like contemporary politics in particular.
- Comment on Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games” 1 month ago:
I mean, it’s being a mail carrier in a world that is maximum Kojima.
- Comment on Google is intentionally throttling YouTube videos, slowing down users with ad blockers 2 months ago:
I’ve noticed a lot of videos give me a still ad and make me click “skip” at the very start of videos through my ad blockers.
- Comment on Hertz, showing the difference between science and engineering 2 months ago:
He might have won the very first Nobel Prize, had he not passed away just a few years prior,
Basically the same thing happened twenty years later with Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who made a discovery that’s essential to figuring distances in space. She noticed something while working as a computer at Harvard College Observatory that eventually became known as Leavitt’s Law. Her Nobel nomination was halted because she passed away and the award is not given posthumously. Hubble’s work heavily relied on hers.
- Comment on Hertz, showing the difference between science and engineering 2 months ago:
and they have also moved me to be more open minded about some things I thought I would never agree with.
Such as? I’m curious.
- Comment on ChatGPT 'got absolutely wrecked' by Atari 2600 in beginner's chess match — OpenAI's newest model bamboozled by 1970s logic 2 months ago:
A lot of writing code is relatively standard patterns and variations on them. For most but the really interesting parts, you could probably write a sufficiently detailed description and get an LLM to produce functional code that does the thing.
Basically for a bunch of common structures and use cases, the logic already exists and is well known and replicated by enough people in enough places in enough languages that an LLM can replicate it well enough, like literally anyone else who has ever written anything in that language.
- Comment on ChatGPT 'got absolutely wrecked' by Atari 2600 in beginner's chess match — OpenAI's newest model bamboozled by 1970s logic 2 months ago:
So they are both masters of troll chess then?
See: King of the Bridge