mcpackieh

If somebody asks you to buy half a ton of fertilizer on their behalf, I suggest you think twice about it. Why do they want you to buy it for them? Even if he's a farmer, with a rational use for that much fertilizer, why is he making such an unusual arrangement to receive fertilizer through his friend instead of buying it himself normally?

Who knows man, maybe feds caught him with some pot plants and now he's setting you up in some sort of bullshit anti-terror sting to cut a deal. Regardless of what kind of truck you have, casually buying half a ton of fertilizer for somebody else is an odd request that warrants some explaining.

Even between native English speakers, confusion between 'casualties' and 'fatalities' is common. However if anybody should be able to get this right, it should be journalists. They take a lot of English writing classes in university, don't they? What's their excuse? Knowing how to write is literally their job.

That link centers the map on Prince Ave in Athens-Clarke County. Look that road up, it's a 4 lane road. I would never bike on that road, of course it's dangerous. If you avoid roads like that, you avoid most of the risk. It's common sense but a substantial portion of adult male cyclists obstinately refuse to apply such common sense because they'd rather die as some sort of martyr for their right of way than stay alive.

In fact most of the roads on the map you just linked to are marked as green. If I zoomed out and the first red road I saw was Broad Street. That is four lane road as well. No surprise. Multi-lane roads are very dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians, so you should tell your children to avoid them. That's what I've always done, so I have much less to worry about than the crudest population-level statistics would suggest.

Most pedestrian result from pedestrians doing stupid things, like walking in the middle of the road at night wearing black while drunk. 77% of pedestrian deaths occur at night: https://www.vox.com/23784549/pedestrian-deaths-traffic-safet...

60% of pedestrian deaths occur on high-capacity urban roads: https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/pedestrian_safety/i...

The most dangerous roads are multilane roads e.g. highways: "among 60 roads that had the most pedestrian deaths during 2001-2016, all were roads with adjacent commercial retail space, nearly all were multilane roads" https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/pedestrian_safety/i...

30% of pedestrian deaths involve a drunk pedestrian: "About one out of three (30%) involved a pedestrian with a BAC of at least 0.08 g/dL.7" https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/pedestrian_safety/i...

Men account for 70% of pedestrian deaths, because men are more inclined to have a severe disregard for their own safety: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/males...

If you simply choose to follow basic common sense, then these population-level statistics don't represent the actual risk to yourself. You're getting yourself freaked out by numbers that don't actually apply to you (or shouldn't if you have any sense.)

Read the comment I responded to, then whine at him instead of me.

Both perception of risk and tolerance of risk.

> The population density in North American suburbs is too low to allow for children to comfortably walk or bike to their friend's homes, or to third places.

That's just your point of view, a point of view which results in helicopter parenting. When I was a kid I used to ride my bike 5 miles down country lanes into the nearby suburbs to play with my friends. The only rule was that I had to be back by dinner. This sort of thing remains a viable option for kids today, except their parents are too anxious to permit it.

And forget the "the roads are too dangerous now" argument. My elderly parents still walk those same roads with their dog every day. It's fine. They don't use reddit/etc so they aren't pumped full of hyperbolic propaganda about how dangerous walking in America is, and consequently, they're able to enjoy it just fine.

Lack of agency causing depression? Makes perfect sense to me. Helicopter parenting, particularly of teenagers, is like locking an animal into a cage.

It's so obvious, it's hard to believe this isn't the intent.

I've been watching live webcam footage of Gaza since things started to get hot. I've watched huge bombs level buildings in Gaza out of the blue with no preceding small explosions as warning. Whatever the IDF may say, they aren't "roof knocking".

FYI, most of what you say is true but the IDF uses the domestic Merkava, not Abrams. They have a similar "modern western MBT" aesthetic, but they're not related.

White American Evangelicals are insane, they think it is their religious obligation to support Israel no matter what as a precondition for the resurrection of Jesus. White American Evangelicals are far more fanatical in their support of Israel than, for instance, American Jews.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/10/03/more-whit...

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2005/04/15/american-eva...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/10/25/many-evan...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/05/14/h...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism

He's not confused, he's deliberately conflating them because he wants violent retribution against a civilian population. It seems all the wrong lessons were learned from WW2. Instead of "never again" it seems to be "this time by us."

In several of your comments in this discussion you seem to be suggesting that all Palestinian civilians are guilty and fair game for retribution.

Reminder that the large majority of Palestinians never voted for Hamas. Even in the last election, which was now 17 years ago, most Palestinians didn't vote for them. Any Palestinian adult who came of age after 2006 didn't vote for them. And not a single Palestinian child has ever voted for Hamas.

> Stewart informed staff Thursday that he and Apple executives agreed to part ways, according to multiple show staff members with whom Stewart discussed the matter. He told staff that the company had concerns about the subject matter Stewart planned for three shows during the upcoming season. Those topics included China, Israel and artificial intelligence.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/20/media/jon-stewart-apple/index...

Some of the other reports about this only mention two of those three. Make of that what you will.

https://www.businessinsider.com/jon-stewart-show-apple-tv-en...

Now this is a grim statistic.

> Why do there have to be so many different: [...]

Different shells/etc exist because people have different preferences. If all of these options didn't exist, then more people would be stuck with software that misaligned with their preferences.

> global man hours wasted

It's not effort wasted if the people who made all these things felt fulfilled in doing it; their effort was only wasted if they don't value their own work. There's no opportunity-cost to consider unless you think these people would have otherwise been devoting their manpower to some other FOSS project instead instead, which is a bad assumption. Somebody who wants to write a new shell does not necessarily have any interest in writing something else instead. Community FOSS development isn't like commercial software development, volunteer developers aren't "human resources" that get assigned to work on things that don't interest them. If for instance the fish shell didn't exist because it's technically redundant with bash, there's no reason to think that manpower would have gone to another FOSS project instead; the developers might instead have chosen to spend their time fly fishing.

If somebody's hobby was building model ships instead of unix shells and they built a model of the Titanic, would you say their manpower was wasted because thousands of other people have built similar models before? That's not really a reasonable way of criticizing hobby projects.

Even without tearing, a high framerate is very desirable for scrolling around a map or web page. For instance, iphones are widely praised for excelling in this regard. It's just easier on the eyes if things on screen move smoothly when you scroll/pan around, it's less fatiguing.

> I don't agree with the characterization that the policies are due to racism though.

Right, it's a clear contradiction. If European countries were "hyper xenophobic and or extremely racist" they would be turning away and deporting those refugees. They're not doing that though, so the characterization of European countries as xenophobic and racist doesn't fit the facts.

The gap is getting wider for a very specific reason: Wayland. Unlike X.org, it doesn't have a single reference implementation that virtually everybody is using. Furthermore it is under-specified so DEs are forced to implement their own proprietary solutions to common problems until Wayland comes along with a third "official" way of doing it several years layer. These two factors result in deteriorating compatibility between the different desktop environments.

It used to be that if you used Gnome but really liked some KDE applications or utilities, you could just use those KDE applications under Gnome and it was fine. People can and did mix and match whichever parts of the different desktop systems they liked the most. I remember when I first figured out that it worked this way as a teenager, it was absolutely magical. But now, thanks to those two properties of Wayland this interoperability is being ruined. Application developers are burdened to support one, the other, or write even more code to support both. In their pursuit of simplicity, Wayland designers burdened application designers with this complexity.

The graphics may be retro but the gameplay is lit. It's one of the most relaxing and satisfying games around.

> She was clearly expressing a sentiment that she felt to be true at the time,

Is that clear? She's a professional actress; if she were reading a line written by some PR hack that she didn't really believe was true, how can you be sure you could tell?

Maybe she believed it, or maybe she was told to say this sort of thing to promote the movie. Since she's a professional actress, I'm inclined to believe it's the latter. She probably wasn't totally ignorant of her own industry.

> Europe won't allow you to become an immigrant there, because they're hyper xenophobic and or extremely racist. [...] They usually call it protecting their culture, it's really just plain old xenophobia and racism.

> Just ask Sweden how their next 30 or so years are starting to look. France has entirely failed for decades at integrating their immigration populations, despite their vaunted welfare state.

You seem to be contradicting yourself. The way you put it, European countries are simultaneously closed to immigration and irrationally racist for being this way, and at the same time they're on doomed trajectories due to immigration. If the latter is true, that would be a non-racist justification for anti-immigration policies, but if they were as anti-immigration as you claim those faltering social conditions due to immigration wouldn't exist in the first place.

Compare immigration to France and Japan. It's clear which of these countries is actually hostile to immigrants.

There's violence, and then there's violence.

Broadly speaking (many exceptions), Americans are fine with young teens watching a movie about a man using kung fu fantasy tactics to bloodlessly shoot his way through a building of bad guys, like John Wick, but don't necessarily feel the same way about something that depicts violence in a more brutal and arguably realistic way, like Saving Private Ryan. Is there a little puff of red CGI mist blood coming out of somebody's chest, or does the movie show one of the 'good guys' with half his skull blown away? These are both hardcore violence in a sense, but most people see a large qualitative difference between the two.

I think it basically comes down to how likely a movie is to give people nightmares, which of course is a function of desensitization. The American public is broadly desensitized to unrealistic violence, but most aren't desensitized to realistic violence.

Incidentally, Saving Private Ryan has a lopsided depiction of violence. The deaths of Americans are shown to be gruesome and agonizing, while the deaths of Germans are mostly shown to be relatively quick and clean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4FeyONCtfc I re-watched Saving Private Ryan after watching this video and found it to be very apparent, but it wasn't apparent to me the first time I watched it.

It's not necessarily easy to draw an objective line between gratuitous and not. Particularly in the case of slasher horror movies; the nudity felt gratuitous, a cheap way to sell tickets that would make up for other production flaws. But such gratuitous nudity became a defining characteristic of that genre, and so in that sense it wasn't actually gratuitous. Modern horror movies seem to be more sexless now, and IMHO feel incomplete because of it. When it becomes apparent that a movie thinks no amount of explicit gore is too much but a nipple would go too far, it breaks my immersion by making me aware that the film was, in some sense, calculated to be inoffensive.

There's no real consistency in any of it. Sometimes breasts are PG-13 (Titanic) but usually any breasts are an automatic R (most other modern movies, except for those with sufficient "art cred"). In movies from the 1980s or earlier, breasts could be in a PG movie (Airplane, Logan's Run.)

The PG-13 rating was created in response to violence in PG movies (somebody getting their heart ripped out in Temple of Doom), not nudity.

European messianic dreams is an interesting way to describe three religions that all originated and were exported from from this general region, not in Europe.

I'm telling you that meat eating and fast fashion are not "global 1% issues". You are the one who brought up Americans, not me or the other guy. Meat eating isn't a 1% thing whether you're looking at the global 1% or the American 1%; meat is consumed by almost everybody in the lower 99% no matter which way you slice it.

Maybe it's this one:

> (6) reveal information, including foreign government information, that would cause serious harm to relations between the United States and a foreign government, or to ongoing diplomatic activities of the United States;

Maybe, or maybe not. It's complicated.

But what's certain is that it's politically polarized. SDI has support from [some/most?] republicans but not from [most/any?] democrats.