Yesss

We can agree that China is a more stable partner than the US. My point is that party leadership can also change there, leading to policy changes - it just doesn’t happen as often and there’s usually no dramatic swings when it does. It’s a scale, not a binary thing.

I think the more realistic argument is that CEOs have an inherent incentive to take big risks. If they get lucky and succeed, they get credited for the win, can put it in their portfolio and then demand better pay or move on to another company which will pay them more. If they fail, they can quietly resign, take the golden parachute and move on to the next company after a year or two as though nothing has happened. A big salary incentivizes them to keep their job, thus disincentivizing them from taking risks.

Nah, if the US starts a world war it will suck for literally everyone, not just those voters. You’re likely to be drafted too, regardless of where you live.

In a sense that’s true for any country, though. The only differences are (1) how often the policy changes and (2) by how much. US used to have a 4-year cycle and much less variance in the policies and so it made some sense to get into long-term agreements. Even in the last 8 years, agreements reached by Trump were continued by Biden (e.g. NAFTA). Now though the cycle is like 4 days and the policy swings are 180°, so it only makes sense to enter into extremely short-term, transactional agreements, or if you have no other choice (like Ukraine).

There’s still a selection bias towards technically literate, privacy-conscious, left-of-center (or at least liberal) people. Lemmyverse represents such an unthinkably tiny fraction of Earth’s populace it’s not even an echo-chamber, it’s more like an echo-pocket. However, this allows me to feel comfortable here, which is a huge plus. You just have to keep in mind that every opinion that’s popular here is not representative of anything but the Lemmyverse.

TBH lemmy is the most comfortable social media for me, and yet I recognize that it is comfortable precisely because it’s mostly a leftist echo chamber (with a sprinkling of liberals). The political opinion of the majority of people (that is, conformism/lack of opinion) is not represented here at all, neither is the far-right (and I’m thankful for both).

Not the same, but they share are both serious behavioral disorders and share the same (or at least similar) physiological and psychological mechanisms. Some people who struggle with self-control will absolutely need outside help getting out of these kinds of addictive behavior loops. “Internet addiction isn’t real, get over it” has the same vibe as “depression isn’t real, it’s just in your head”.

This to me reads that you have a serious self control issue. If you need to use rehab to limit your use of heroin, you’ve fucked up. Learn and practice some self control. You don’t need rehab, you don’t need to stop buying heroin or cut off ties with your dealer, just stop using it. This is like needing to have your parents tell you to do your homework or something. You are in control of your life. You will feel much more empowered if you do it yourself.

Why -z? I have no idea.

From man test (note that [ <expr> ] is just sugar for test <expr>):

       -n STRING
              the length of STRING is nonzero

       -z STRING
              the length of STRING is zero

So, -z stands for Zero.

Hope this helps you remember it!

Not a surprise. Post-USSR Russian government is a conservative oligarchy, same as the US and Israel; it only makes sense for them to align to further their class interests. The reason for any previous disagreements was that Putin thought he could get a bigger piece of the imperialist pie, which he now did. BTW, he’s trying to sell Russian rare-earth minerals to the US now too.

self defense acts are not homicides

They absolutely are. There’s even a term for it - justifiable homicide.

Now I said let’s murder them?

You’re advocating for death penalty.

In countries that abolished it, if someone was executed it would be considered murder. So yes, you are advocating for murder.

Interestingly you still only talk about the perpetrators and not the victims.

What do victims have to do with this? I’m not proposing we kill them.

Surviving victims should of course be offered treatment, both physical and mental, as well as fair compensation. It is irrelevant to the question of the death penalty.

Yes :)

Hm, I don’t think the “gravitational force” (as in the thing that pulls you towards the Earth) is a result of a gravitational wave; rather it is a result of you being in a static vector field. Gravitational waves are waves that travel through that field, e.g. the stuff that LIGO is measuring.

I’ve tried thinking about how it would work with portals. The problem is that the definition for gravitational field is g = -∇Φ where gravitational potential Φ(x) = ∑_i(-G·m_i)/||x - x_i||, which depends on there being a single unambiguous “distance between two points” (x and x_i in this case). But think about two points on the opposite sides of one “portal entrance” (e.g. imagine a portal entrance on a wall in front of you, with your friend on the other side of that wall). What is the distance between you and your friend now? If we’re to say it’s the same as it was without a portal, then (1) we get straight back to our problems with energy conservation, (2) there is no physical path between you and your friend that matches this distance as there’s a rift in space on that path. It would also be weird to conclude that it’s infinity - you can just go around the wall in our example and be right next to your friend. So we almost have to conclude that the shortest path would have to go around the portal somehow. Let’s just say that it would be the length of the shortest path around the portal. By the formulae for the gravitational field, this means that the gravity will pull you towards the shortest path to Earth’s center. If you placed one portal on the surface of Earth (let’s assume that the center of Earth is sufficiently far away that the gravitational field can be approximated as uniform in direction and magnitude) and another one somewhere far-far away in deep space (where let’s say that gravitational field is 0 for simplicity) it would look something like this:

Note how while the gravitational potential (Φ) is defined along the red line, the gravitational field would be undefined as there would be no gradient in the gravitational potential.

Now let’s try thinking what would happen on the other side. I’ll assume that our portals are just flattened wormholes with short throats. Thus we’ll just assume that portal entrances are actually “two-sided” (e.g. if they are just floating in your room, you can walk around them and see whatever is around the other portal at all times), and that the distance between them is 0 (let’s not think about how that works for now). Now the distance between an object on “one side” of first portal entrance and “the other side” of another portal entrance is even more messed up - I think the shortest path would technically be one that travels from first object to one of the “edges” of the first portal entrance and then from the corresponding edge of the second portal entrance to the second object. Thus the gravitational field around the other portal would look like this (I’ve added eyes to clarify how I’ve linked up portal sides):

The red line once again means that the gravitational field there is undefined.

Whew, it’s complicated, right?

Now, let’s put the second portal close to the first one. Note that I’m assuming here that only the shortest distance to the center of the earth matters.

The two red lines from before now overlap, and there’s another one - there’s no gradient when the distance to the blue portal and to the earth is the same. It’d actually be longer than what I’ve drawn, and some sort of parabola in those areas, but I’m too lazy to do that. Hanging in the middle of that red cross would be a weird feeling - your top half would feel as though you’re hanging upside down, while your bottom half would feel normal, and your arms and legs would be pulled in slightly different directions.

Although, I think that Newtonian definitions of gravity are playing tricks on us here. We should probably try using general relativity instead, but I am too tired to even attempt that right now, and I’d probably fail given that the fields involved there are a lot more complicated.

To be clear, NVidia supplies Linux drivers, but they are proprietary semi-broken nonsense.

Hm, I have DoH in my Android settings. Isn’t it the case for all modern Android versions?

It’s not rotten but working exactly as intended. The problem is precisely the intention.

It already is in all modern societies except like the USA.

Given the original commenter was talking about “the left”, I’m critiquing AES countries (e.g. China) here. USA is a lost cause when it comes to human rights anyways.

You seems to root awfully much for these bad people

That’s just basic human empathy combined with practicality. They are still human and deserve humane treatment, and also most of them (like 80% if we look at Scandinavia) can be reintegrated into the society in some way.

I’d say let’s help them when we have helped all their victims

You won’t be able to help them if you murder them

I think they’ve majorly underestimated how much the world is going to condemn this. It was one thing to “protect it’s citizens”, it’s another thing entirely to outright invade another nation.

I think you’re majorly overestimating how much the world cares.

Israel has been invading other nations literally continuously throughout its existence. You can debate that it is to “protect it’s citizens”, and there may even be some truth to that sometimes, but it’s clearly generally been the aggressor since its founding. And (almost) nobody cared.

I’d be shocked if Europe doesn’t sanction Israel

Some strong-worded letters will surely be sent, and politicians will call on “all sides to stop the hostilities”, which in practice means Israel gets to keep whatever it could occupy. Maybe a couple of somewhat left-leaning countries (Spain, Sweden, Norway, etc) will sanction Israel individually, but then they don’t have much trade by this point anyway so they have no negotiating power. As for the rest, trading (including trading weapons) with Israel is profitable monetarily and beneficial politically, so not much will really change.