mcpackieh

The flipside is that people who were better suited for life in a small town have lost what the others have gained. Life moves fast everywhere now, your friends and family may step into your life at any moment of the day without notice, even though you live thousands of miles away. All of the big city hustle and bustle reaches out and touches people through their phones and stopping it requires people to deliberately and overtly snub people they'd prefer not to overtly snub.

Are they otherwise managing to go about their daily life in a civil productive manner? People believing stupid things isn't a failure of democracy, democracy is tolerant of this.

Make sure to check out Michael Mann's Thief too. It doesn't have bank robbing per se, but it has some very memorable safe-cracking scenes. Great movie all around.

On the bright side they're huge and terrifying, so they probably won't stay under the radar anywhere around people. Almost anybody who notices these will try to track them down and kill them.

> The authors claim that modern 15th century people already knew the "pre-historic" narrative about rocks being axes.

You're mistaken, the article does not say that 15th century people knew the rock was a hand axe. The article claims (correctly I think) that the painting depicts a hand axe but doesn't say the painter intended to depict an axe. The painter would have understood the rock to be a thunderstone and painted it accurately enough that today we can see that it was actually a handaxe.

> Ask Gen-Xers, specifically those who are not over-consuming news media and the harmful generalist social media

That's a pretty bad selection bias. You shouldn't exclude the perspectives of those who've been harmed by social media. That would be like asking people if alcohol has been a positive influence in their life, but excluding alcoholics.

xkcd #978 as a Service

I tracked down the book wikipedia cites for that self-cleaning claim (it's on Library Genesis).

Wikipedia presently says:

> However, the rifle was initially delivered without adequate cleaning kits[43] or instructions because advertising from Colt asserted that the M16's materials made the weapon require little maintenance, and was capable of self-cleaning.[67]

The book, The M16 by Gordon L. Rottman, says on page 20:

> Most Marine units began receiving the XM16E1 in April 1967 and immediately experienced problems arising from several factors. Most units received little if any cleaning gear beyond some cleaning rods and bore brushes. Some units had never heard of chamber brushes. Colt is said to have hyped the weapon as futuristic, requiring little maintenance owing to new materials. This was interpreted to mean the black rifle was “self-cleaning.”

So Colt supposedly saying the rifle requiring "little maintenance" was then subsequently interpreted (by the Marines I think) to mean the rifle was "self-cleaning". The book doesn't say Colt made the "self-cleaning" claim, but whoever wrote that part on wikipedia is attributing the claim to Colt.

Hard to say if even the book's claim is right.. "Colt is said to have..." said by who? The book doesn't actually cite any Colt marketing material or anything like that.

It seems to work even out in the open. This video shows some thermal camera imagery of it: https://youtu.be/euMNIu9a7ps?t=312

The two men have realistic skin tones, but the woman and baby look like they're carved out of marble or covered in chalk. I guess the latter reflect what the artist considered to be an aesthetic ideal and aren't intended to be true-to-life realistic.

If the lights stay on and food stays on grocery store shelves and people aren't getting dragged out of their homes by revolutionary militias, then democracy is still succeeding in broadly keeping the peace and keeping things humming along. If half the population wants to believe stupid conspiracy theories about the last election, that's fine so long as most of them don't act on it. So long as their attempted coups or revolutions die in the crib before they can do much damage, then democracy is working.

> It’s a failure of democracy with one party trying to take over and destroy all other opinions by all means necessary

Lots of people talk shit but almost everybody is still going about their daily lives in a normal civil manner. Obviously the state of American democracy could be better, but don't pronounce the patient dead just because he tripped and got his knee bloodied.

It's a trick question, reality and conspiracy theory are orthogonal. Some conspiracy theories are true and are backed by evidence. Some conspiracy theories are true but nobody can find the evidence. Some conspiracy theories are false and have no evidence. Some conspiracy theories are false but there is nevertheless some evidence that seems to support them. Explanatory examples:

True conspiracy theory backed by evidence: Criminal prosecutors present a theory about a gang of bank robbers conspiring to rob a bank. They have a lot of phone records and surveillance footage as evidence.

True conspiracy theories with no evidence: Crimes with two or more participants which have successfully evaded discovery. Somebody smells a rat but has nothing but their gut to go off of. Distinguishing these from false conspiracy theories is impossible (so no example), but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. Sometimes people get away with it.

False conspiracy theory with no evidence: wolverine876 is in league with Martians to take over Earth.

False conspiracy theory with some evidence: To understand how this could happen, you must understand that evidence is not the same as proof. Circumstantial evidence and eye witness testimony can often point in the direction of something that isn't actually true. In the case of the Second Gulf of Tonkin incident, radar and sonar evidence lead the Navy to believe that it was under attack from the North Vietnamese. Turns out they were almost certainly shooting at shadows. They believed something that the evidence then available to them supported, but it turned out to be wrong.

> In the case of the EV1 the conspiracy [...] was to get you to keep paying for repairs.

Can you expand on that? GM claims they took those cars back because they didn't sell well and so GM couldn't/wouldn't commit to providing spare parts and repairs into the future. Lessees countered by offering to release GM from such obligations and handle the repairs themselves but GM refused that offer. But why? It's not as though they might have set a dangerous precedent by allowing EV1 lessees-turned-owners to repair their own cars, since buying out car leases and third party repairs were already normal aspects of the car industry. GM were fine with this generally but in this specific case they refused to allow it.

To me it seems like some GM executives hated having been required by California into making the EV1 in the first place and wanted to destroy all of the cars for some feeling of satisfaction and finality. Pure spite in other words. Maaybe GM were egged on by oil companies who wanted to crush the spirits of people who thought electric cars were viable, but the oil company angle doesn't really seem necessary to explain what happened, unless you believe GM wouldn't make a decision like this out of pure spite.

> That is not really a conspiracy in the classic sense of something crazy.

"Something crazy" is not the classic sense of a conspiracy. That's the modern corrupt meaning.

It's unlikely to be the same people subscribing to both of those theories. And furthermore, many of the people who were saying that oil and car companies conspired to suppress electric cars probably still believe that. Quite frankly, GM's insistence that all EV1s be destroyed or permanently deactivated without lessees being given the option to buy their car stank to high heaven. Maybe it wasn't a nefarious conspiracy, but I can totally understand why reasonable people concluded it was.

It's popular to dismiss conspiracy theorists as reactionaries (re: lazide's comment), but here you have a case where the people who allege a conspiracy occurred were looking forward to something new and were allegedly stymied by a reactionary conspiracy.

Forget it Jake, this is Orange Reddit.

People respond not to what you actually said, but rather to what they think you secretly meant.

There's a clear contextual difference between a ball game and a bogus arrest. In the latter, he was deprived of his freedom and placed at the mercy of the police with few if any witnesses.

Xbox live rape claims are obvious hyperbole because neither party was ever in the physical presence of the other. In this case it's different, because the accuser was arrested by the police so the police did have the opportunity to rape him. Since that opportunity actually existed, I don't think the claim is obvious hyperbole.

I think nobody would believe the claim in the context of xbox live, but many people are inclined to believe it in the context of an unlawful arrest. Even one of the replies to my first comment about this seems to believe the claim. (He's now been flagged for this. What guideline did he violate? I hope he wasn't flagged because his perspective lends credence to my perspective that accusing cops of raping you after a baseless arrest is not obvious hyperbole.)

HN user strathmeyer seems to believe it.

Looking at the document about protective orders that Iowa distributes, it seems like protective orders in Iowa are not some casual thing. They require court hearings and can't be filed against random strangers (like that Letterman incident referenced elsewhere in this thread.)

https://www.iowacourts.gov/browse/files/1c1d1ecd62dc41a78794...

It would be nice if medical residents would unionize and force hospitals to stop using long hours (sometimes 24 hour or longer shifts) to haze them with sleep deprivation. This sleep deprivation results in medical errors that injure/kill patients, and also mades medical residents more likely to have car crashes when driving home after their shift.

"raped by the NPD all night" seems to clearly reference (evidently fictitious) off-camera events.

> Captions in the YouTube video that the counterclaim quoted read that [...] Galanakis had been “kidnapped then raped by the NPD all night.”

> In two decisions in May and September, U.S. District Judge Stephen Locher dismissed almost all of the officers’ claims. Locher deemed most of Galanakis’s captions as “non-actionable statement[s] of opinion” or “rhetorical hyperbole,” which are both considered non-defamatory. This included the caption where Galanakis said he was “raped” by the police department, which Locher said was “distasteful,” but non-actionable.

False claim of rape is distasteful but non-actionable? I don't get that.

An M72 is single use, so if the robot falls over after firing it that isn't the end of the world. It can probably right itself and get back on its feet, then return to base for another rocket.

Still, I share your skepticism of these robot dogs. They seem like a solution looking for a problem.

To be fair, the M72 was originally built as a light anti-armor weapon but many other versions of it have since been developed. Particularly anti-structure rockets with fragmentation warheads.

How is that not machine translation?

> If it was an intentional pre-meditated murder

From what I understand he was convicted for second degree murder, specifically "unintentional second-degree murder while attempting to commit felony assault". So he may not have intended for George Floyd to die, but he did intentionally assault George Floyd who died as a result. So that's not intentional premeditated murder, but it's nevertheless a form of murder.

(He was also simultaneously convicted for third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter, but not first-degree murder.)

What did the translation, a dog?

> I have no idea what an actual solution would be though.

Take these robocars off the roads until they're read to respond to emergency vehicles properly.

That is true that the python trade is somewhat problematic and is accordingly regulated, but there are also a lot of people who are legally selling pythons on facebook and evidently don't get banned for it. Search "facebook python breeder" and they're easy to find. My conclusion is that the filtering system is totally and inexplicably capricious. A braindead computer program making indefensible decisions that it probably can't even justify to facebook employees themselves, let alone to the people it's banning. Maybe mentioning pythons or pandas alone would be fine, but both together gets you classified as an exotic smuggler dealing in literal bears? Who knows. Probably not even facebook knows.