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RunawayFixer

@ RunawayFixer @lemmy.world

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1
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440
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • A pardon for a price? How Donald Trump has reimagined presidential clemency

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  • And Trump does the following: "President Donald Trump signed off on several eyebrow-raising pardons this week, including a man whose daughter donated millions to his PAC and a convicted fraudster he had already freed from prison for a different fraud scheme during his first term"

    Trump hands out pardons after blatant corruption & at the start of people's sentences. Biden did not do that. That you want to portray Biden to be as bad as Trump, shows that apparently your fairness compass is very broken.

    And that person who got pardoned after already serving 10 years of his prison sentence ... 10 years is already a freaking long time for non violent crime, which also didn't ruin anyone else's lives. Sentences have to follow a gradiant along the severity of the crime, if not you end up with a broken system (like the USA one). Prison should be temporary, a chance for correction and rehabilitation, where the person one day gets released with another chance at living a quiet honest life. That you want that man to die in prison ... Says a lot about you again.

  • A pardon for a price? How Donald Trump has reimagined presidential clemency

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  • I looked it up and there was a good rationale based on fairness behind Biden's pardons. Most of Biden's pardons also weren't really pardons, but commutations of sentences: "Context: The thousands pardoned on Friday were "serving disproportionately long sentences compared to the sentences they would receive today," Biden's statement said." https://www.axios.com/2025/01/17/biden-presidential-pardons-clemency-record Which seems fair and also needed to me. Imagine having 10 years left to serve of your 20 years sentence, while new convicts only receive max 5 years for the same crime.

    What Biden did with pardons was completely different from what Trump is doing with them.

  • Welp straight to the bin

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  • The surface of the salt grains reacts with what is in the air (moisture, smells), slowly changing the surface over time, and since it's that surface that touches our taste buts most, the taste of the salt will be different.

    Salts are also often not pure sodium, but have added elements that give it a distinct taste and aroma. That original taste/aroma will be lost over time, because aroma = smell = particles flying away in the air. Long exposure to a strong smell will also cause the salt to acquire that different smell as part of it's new aroma.

    Starting from larger grains and grinding them shortly before usage, would thus give salt that smells and tastes more like it's fresh from the salt factory. But I do wonder how many people would be able to tell the difference in a blind test.

  • Female mason in Berlin, Germany, ~1900

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  • If they were giant smokestacks further back, then they would be in the haze of the smog, like everything else in the background. There's a similar vertical object visible in the top right corner, far back and obscured by the haze, but I think it's a chimney just like those in the front.

  • Nazis cleaning up Nazi mistakes

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  • I just assume that every historical movie contains inaccuracies. Narrative reasons, budget constraints, dramatization, ... I don't always agree with the creative choices, but I understand why they do it and I'm not going to let it ruin my viewing experience. I can always jump into a wikipedia rabbit hole after the movie.

    I can only think of one movie where they went too far for my tastes: the Hollywood movie where it's USA soldiers who capture an intact enigma machine from a u boat.

    That said, the danish military was involved in the mine clearing, only not in the way how it was depicted in the movie. https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/cisr-journal/vol22/iss1/4/ The actual pdf contains a better description of who did what than the abstract.

  • Nazis cleaning up Nazi mistakes

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  • This was done by all the allies, not just Norway and Denmark. In 1945 none of the allies had motivation to stop Norway, since they themselves had decided to do it this way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_World_War_II

    Even mine sweeping at sea was done by German sailor POWs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Mine_Sweeping_Administration

    As legal justification as to why they could do this, the allied command claimed that these prisoners of war weren't POWs anymore after Germany surrendered, instead they were "Disarmed Enemy Forces" and thus according to them the Geneva convention no longer applied: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disarmed_Enemy_Forces

    There's also a Danish film about these POWs: Land of Mine. Good movie imo. And after seeing it a few years ago, I looked up the historical background, which is how I knew that your comment was incorrect.

  • Military Pressured to See ‘Melania’ Against Their Will

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  • I suspect that it's a reaction to the various successful media projects by Michelle Obama. In Trump's mind, the Obamas are making him look bad by being smart/successful/..., so this is Trump's attempt at showing that his first lady too can create a successful media project. Because the Trumps are tasteless and have surrounded themselves with sycophants, there wasn't anyone around to tell them how crap the movie was, so it got released as it is.

    The big tell that this was Trump's attempt at trying to one up the Obamas, is that once it became obvious that the Melania movie was bombing, Trump posted a super racist video about the Obamas. He tried to one up the Obamas creatively, failed, and then resorted to insults.

    Meanwhile Melania is 28 million dollar richer, so as usual she probably doesn't care that much about how bad this makes her look.

  • What happens when a neighborhood is built around a farm

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  • No mention of rules for pesticide and manure?

    If I lived next to a farm, then I'd be worried about excessive spraying of pesticides (cancer) and manure (the whiff).

  • Actor Timothy Busfield indicted on 4 counts of sexual contact with a child

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  • Meet the parents: The filing states that Rodis (the father) “is a former attorney who was convicted of federal conspiracy and wire fraud and was later disbarred following that prosecution for a multi-million-dollar scheme in which he used his law license to deceive vulnerable victims for profit.”

    Rodis previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud after the scheme, which “defrauded more than 1,500 homeowners of approximately $6 million,” was brought to light, according to the filing.

    The filing also included testimony from a director of photography on The Cleaning Lady set, who described Rodis as “pushy and manipulative” and said that he would “frequently encourage and tell the children to hug people on set, including Mr. Busfield.”

    The accusers’ mother, LaSalle, has an “equally disturbing history,” the filing states, citing that she “has had multiple civil judgments entered against her for fraudulent and dishonest behavior.” She was sued for “various claims including fraud, conversion, and fraudulent transfer,” including allegedly unlawfully repossessing a Bentley car after selling it and writing bad checks to Las Vegas casinos, according to the filing.

    https://people.com/timothy-busfield-lawyers-claim-parents-of-alleged-sex-abuse-victims-have-history-of-fraud-11887859

  • Russia’s terror by family: father and son get huge sentences on fabricated ‘Ukrainian saboteur’ charges

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  • Russia is a kleptocracy, it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that they employ the same governance style in the occupied territories. From a 2012 article: "In the last 10 years Russia has imprisoned nearly three million entrepreneurs, many unjustly". https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18706597

    The modus operandi always seems to be the same: the local security apparatus strongmen (almost always chekists afaik) identify a successful company that they want to raid, they lock up the business owners with bogus charges, if the business owners don't manage to bribe their way out, they get prison sentences because 99%+ of those prosecuted will be convicted & then the chekists plunder the company + sell of what remains for a pittance to one of their friends/family.

    The writer tries to find reasons as to why this particular family was targeted, but it could have been something as simple as having a successful business & not having a government patron to protect them from the government. Odds wise, most entrepreneurs that are locked up, will be locked up on bogus charges, so I'd expect that to be the case here as well.

  • What’s a cat behavior you secretly find adorable even if it’s inconvenient?

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  • When sitting on the toilet with my pants on my ankles, my cat would crawl into my pants and start his pre sleep wash.

  • Why Civilization VII is the way it is, and how its devs plan to win critics back

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  • Why Civilization VII is the way it is, and how its devs plan to win critics back

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  • A lot of words from the devs, but imo not convincing at all. It looks like they're trying to put lipstick on a turd and hope that that's good enough for people to give kissing the turd another chance.

    Imo civ 5 is still the best hex civ game, especially with the Vox Populi mod. Civ 6 is interesting for puzzling, but the ai is handicapped because it's not good at the puzzles, leaving it unable to compete strategically.

  • Pick European Chocolate

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  • It's actually the reverse. A bit of history:Belgium used to have laws concerning the composition of both chocolate and mayonnaise. Afaik, they've both been abolished for about 2 decades now because it was deemed protectionism by the EU.

    The chocolate law was replaced by a regional protection for "Belgian chocolate". By law, chocolate can only be marketed as Belgian chocolate if it adheres to the rules of the old law and is produced in Belgium. Which has been a huge marketing win for Belgian chocolate producers.

    If I remember correct, the loss of the mayonnaise law lead to a massive sales boost for Devos Lemmens because buying that brand was the easiest way to make sure that you were buying real mayonnaise. Nowadays, most mayonnaise for sale in Belgium is clearly marked with things like "made according to traditional Belgian recipe", but there's no law anymore that is stopping Germans from trying to sell their mayonnaise as mayonnaise in Belgium. Aldi did try selling German mayonnaise for a while, but Belgians weren't buying it, so they've given up and they're now selling both Devos Lemmens and a store brand that is made according to the traditional recipe.

    Edit to add: So there is a law for Belgian chocolate, but afaik there's no anti milk provision for dark chocolate in that law.

  • Pick European Chocolate

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  • They do, but it's not because the cacao percentage is less than xx%, that there's milk in it. For my country (Belgium) dark chocolate typically has no milk in it, but I'm not going to claim that there doesn't exist Belgian dark chocolate with milk in it. There's no law against it afaik and there's so many different recipes, that it's bound to exist.

  • Eternity is shorter than I thought

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  • After the Ottomans conquered Constantinople, they started styling themselves as a continuation of the Roman Empire. The eternal state motto is a reference to that: same state, different rulers. That makes the eternal state a lot older than 600 years, and the motto a few centuries younger.

    I also wouldn't be surprised if that motto was something that was said about the byzantine empire prior to it's fall (as far as states go, that state was very, very old), similar to how "the eternal city" refers to Rome, but I can't find a good source atm. The best I could find: https://politurco.com/the-myth-of-the-eternal-state-from-the-ottomans-to-the-ak-party.html

  • US accuses EU of seeking cheese ‘monopoly’ in South America

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  • No. There's always going to be additional restrictions, but I don't know any country that has outright banned it (there might be, but I don't know any). And an eu wide ban is impossible because France is against it, some of their most snobby cheeses are made with unpasteurized milk.

  • They want you to "quit demonstrating"

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  • It looks like a reference to Elon Musk to me. Around the time of his take over of Twitter, Musk claimed that he was a "free speech absolutist". Once statistics came in, it turned out that Musk's twitter had a practically 100% compliance rate with censorship requests from authoritarian states, far higher than it was before the take over.

    USA conservatives also do frequent calls for violence and claim freedom of speech when called out + then turn around and try to censor other peoples free speech when they don't like the message. The last bit was especially noticable after Charlie Kirk's murder. People who quoted Kirk to show what a vile person he was, were harassed and some even lost their jobs.

    The slogan for conservative free speech absolutism might as well be "free speech for me, but my rules for thee".

  • Steam Machine price leak suggests it will cost as much as an iPhone

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  • I expect the €799 to include vat, while the $699 will be without. $930 /1.25 = $744, which is a lot more reasonable. Sony using the same sale price for the whole eu when each country has different vat rates, is probably because of profit maximization. Too many people only look at the first digit in 799.99, so no matter if after currency conversion + vat the price is €720 (20%) or €762 (27% in Hungary), they'll just slap on the sale price of €799.99.

  • News @lemmy.world
    RunawayFixer @lemmy.world

    Serbia limits academics’ research time to just one hour a day

    www.chemistryworld.com /news/serbia-limits-academics-research-time-to-just-one-hour-a-day/4021399.article