In the books, Isildur turned invisible by putting on the ring, and dove into a river to escape a band of orcs. The ring, under its own will, slipped from his finger and he was spotted by orcish archers, who killed him.

I’ve always thought that the “invisibility” aspect of the ring was that it shifted the wearer into the shadow realm. The Nine were invisible without their cloaks, but were visible when the ring was worn. It also made the wearer more visible to Sauron, iirc.

If that’s the case, then the power granted by the ring might mean that magic users (such as Gandalf or Galadriel) would more easily draw on power from the other realm into this one.

Negative tip value.

I can’t say what their corporate culture is like now, but they’ve had a pretty poor reputation in the past, including the notion that the lowest performing 10% should be fired every year. The Amazon folks I’ve known have been great people - not at all the Gordon Gecko types you’d imagine from that - but culture in large corporations varies a lot by the team you’re in.

I came up with a saying back in the 90s when I was doing the startup scene - “Do you want it right, or by Tuesday?” Sometimes they do indeed need it by Tuesday. More of the time they have no idea why you need the extra days to get it right. But it’s really important for those in a leadership position - whether they’re managers or senior engineers - to push back and set expectations.

Smalltalk would probably make more sense than C++.

In 2012 I voted against Obama because I thought he was too conservative. I didn’t think his healthcare program went far enough, I didn’t like his foreign policy of continuing the Bush wars, and I thought he turned out to be far more establishment than he had indicated as a candidate in 2008.

I voted for Jill Stein. I said it wasn’t a protest vote and that I was voting my conscience, but it was totally a protest vote. Stein would have been the worst president in US history, and I even knew that at the time. I did it because Obama had a predicted 99% chance of winning my state, so I figured it was safe and would communicate to the democrats that there was a preference for more left leaning candidates.

What I did not do was try to campaign for Stein to try to get swing state voters to vote for her. I didn’t try to get swing state voters to not vote.

First “democrats” is doing a lot of work here. I’m assuming the voters that you’re talking about turning out were democrats. I’m assuming the politicians they voted for were democrats. So what you mean is some subset (eg Third Way types, which have already been mentioned).

Use numbers. What was the turnout for the previous years? What was the turnout for Obama? For Bill Clinton? Was it bigger when Dennis Kucinich was in the race? Other than Bernie, he was the leftmost candidate that I can recall - at least in the top 5 in recent years. State the point you are trying to prove clearly, then demonstrate it.

I’m a Bernie supporter - he actually helped secure a research grant I worked on, I’ve met him in person, and I donated to each of his campaigns since I started to be able to do that kind of thing. I’m a member of the DSA. I’m also a scientist, and I deal with this kind of thing all the time.

What you’re basically coming off as, to be honest, is that family member in the maga hat who keeps yelling that 2020 was rigged.

You gave no competing hypothesis. I offered several.

This is a hot take.

Here’s the problem with your hypothesis:

You’re mixing together people who don’t vote with people publicly advocating not voting. That’s completely unsupported. Let’s see some stats on why people don’t vote. Is it because they don’t have time because they’re working, because they’re uncomfortable with the process, because they’re being lazy? On the other hand, what are the predictors of voting? We know age is a factor, so that would encourage us to think about the time availability question.

The second part is that the disengagement approach you’re advocating has driven the Democratic Party to the right. The Third Way movement came entirely from seeing Reagan’s engagement numbers. Not voting casts a zero information signal. First, the numbers only move mildly from year to year, and even when they do it tends to come down to the charisma of the candidate, not the policy positions.

A surprising number of Americans want universal healthcare, support LGBT rights and are against racism, yet vote for Donald Trump or DeSantis because they can get the crowds riled up in the way that policy wonks just don’t.

I mean, when the republicans did that huge study that found that economic and demographic changes in the US meant they needed to adopt more progressive policies (eg not being openly racist) if they wanted to have a future, the gop said “screw that, we will just depress the vote.”

So, no, your policy is not evidence-based, and it’s unreasonable. It forces the country to the right. If that’s what you want, go for it.

What an absolutely believable conclusion announced by an absolutely credible organization that has no motivation except to publish the unvarnished truth.

The West is not “continuing the war at will.” That phrase has no meaning in this context. The West is supplying Ukraine with the means to continue to resist the illegal Russian invasion.

The West would in fact have the right under Just War theory to enter into combat operations in Ukraine against Russian forces, and to operate combat operations against Russia up to and including invasion. Because Russia is the aggressor, Just War theory gives other nations the right to participate in the resistance of aggression.

I like their trackpads a lot, but if you use the MacBook with an external monitor like so many of us do, it’s simply not an option. I stick with Logitech for mice though. Even their crappy mice are good, and their high end mice are great.

I also have to disagree with the author’s take on the evolution of the mouse. I like having buttons to navigate forward and back when browsing the web, I like the multifunction scroll wheels, and I even like the sideways scroll wheels when looking through large charts or tables of data. When I used to game more on services like WoW, I had a mouse with a ton of buttons mapped to all kinds of macros and skills.

The only people I don’t see using mice or external trackpads are PM types who don’t use external monitors and spend 80% of their days moving from meeting to meeting.

The Apple trackpad has remained in my opinion the best one ever developed and continues to improve generation to generation. They lost the script on keyboards for a hot minute there, and their mice have always been horrible to the point of deliberate non-functionality, but those trackpads are amazing. Their external trackpad has also come a long way in the past few years.

90% of the kind of content you’re talking about can be removed by blocking a couple of domains and a handful of users. I believe that they’ve been defederated from most of the larger instances. You will run into a lot of hot takes on lemmy but that’s not too different from reddit.

I think there’s a few reasons why they may be more prominent on lemmy, though. Communities like r/politics took a while to stabilize and had a large and active moderation team that helped remove the most extreme material, and the community itself was large enough that it was representative of a large swath of the US population. Hot takes would often get downvoted into invisibility, which frustrates people who use forums for trolling, and karma could be used to restrict posting. AFAIK those are not qualities or capabilities currently found on lemmy. I haven’t really read the docs - I prefer to just be a user here - but I have seen discussions that indicate that downvotes don’t get tracked as well as suggestions they be removed altogether.

Also, a new technology - especially one associated with sectors of the FOSS community and anti-centralization - are by their nature going to attract an initial user base that skews in certain directions. I think it was Eric Raymond who observed that hackers, politically, tend to be either socialists or libertarians with very little in between. ESR was being a bit tongue in cheek and the hacker culture back then was different than it is now - or rather computer culture as a whole has expanded so much that the old school hacker types form a much smaller percentage.

I think the most problematic part about lemmy which will ultimately limit its adoption is the chaos that comes in from having dozens of communities across dozens of instances that all cover the same topics. It makes discovery much more challenging than it is on Reddit, and it doesn’t help that many of the clients can make it challenging to identify which topics are actually the most used. One of my favorite clients keeps defaulting to ordering by a most recently created timestamp or something - I’m not really sure. It doesn’t have the support to sort or filter by number of users (although it displays the metric).

The other issue is that I end up having to remain on All rather than just my subscriptions because there’s so few users, so I end up with a ton of random anime, for instance, which I can’t effectively block because they’re all posted in new subs that crop up all the time, and I can’t block using wildcards (which would help a lot).

I do hope that between the lemmy devs and the app devs, they can address those issues.

The civilian shipping lines that were attacked without provocation were and are part of the international community, so I have no idea what you’re talking about. In addition, US military vessels were directly and repeatedly attacked, which international law permits as deserving of a military response. The US would be within its rights to start an attack using tomahawks as well as loitering drones over the territory to hit vehicles and personnel.

There are plenty of legitimate governments - and to be clear, by “legitimate” we usually mean the government recognized by the international community, whether or not any given people think they’re good guys or whatever - who do not control all of the territory they claim.

The point is that if a territory is under control of a foreign or rebel group and is attacking international civilian or military assets, then the international community can respond if the country that has claims to the territory cannot. I’m not even sure that the Yemeni government is in a position to coordinate strikes at this point, but that would be the standard approach otherwise.

If the Proud Boys took over south Texas and started launching military attacks against Mexican military facilities, and the US government was unable to stop them, Mexico and the international community would be within their legal rights to stop them.

It is in no way a breach of Yemeni authority. th government has no control over the territory in question, and it is being used to make repeated military strikes against US military and international civilian targets. This is entirely legal and justified under both US and international law. I’m just surprised it took this long.

Reality is more complicated than that. The crime bill and the war on drugs at the time had significant support in the black community, including political and religious leaders.

From their q&a:

gitspamdum is a bot, I just created a fake account and bid for 999 trillions, no verification were requested in the whole process and 1 nanosecond later gitspamdum bid after me, I tried this twice, my only purpose was to expose the absurdity of the whole thing, if Proton really take this thing seriously please just cancel all auctions and place them in a serious website

You can just immediately resell it to Elon for $44B.

businesspost.ie

I wonder if it leaked from one of their support centers in Ireland.