I thought the same thing at first. However after reading another comment here I realised that a community can essentially sack the property if a huge corp buys it. Not much you can do if everyone around wants you gone so bad they’ll commit arson rather than let you stay.
That was my initial thought as well, but after reading the other comment about how a community essentially sacked a house after the “wrong person” bought it…
The only thing that intimidates soulless corps is the threat of losing money. If it becomes clear to them that whatever they buy at auction will be burned to the ground, they probably won’t be very eager to keep buying.
Recalling the videos of a single male lion pretty much ripping apart a pack of hyenas… Tigers are even bigger and stronger than lions, and wolves don’t have anywhere near the bite force of a hyena. I think you’d need a lot more than three.
In all honesty, I love both rakfisk and lutefisk. They are fantastic and wildly underrated food. I will die on this hill.
Oh, and sursild, sennepssild, and all that other good sild stuff. That’s also awesome.
The swedes can keep the surströmning to themselves though. That shit is not fit for human consumption.
culturally appropriate tasty
Screams in northern Scandinavian
One might even say that dampening is making things damp!
I second this! I was in the US for a while and quickly realised that doing constant conversions was a PITA, so I learned some rough reference points in imperial.
I think it’s good to get some small and some large reference points, which make it easy to guesstimate other things based on what you know. Mine were (given in metric here):
Figure out some similar things for yourself, and it’ll be relatively easy to think along lines like “That walk was a bit further than my way to work, so it’s probably about 4km”, or “that box was heavy, but far from 100 kg, so it’s maybe around 30 kg.”
Bonus points if you try some guessing like that and double check afterwards to tune in your feeling for different measurements.
I think you’re missing my point: I opened by saying that I definitely believe the world is deterministic. I then went on to problematise the extremely unpredictable nature of the human mind. To the point where an immeasurable amount of historical input goes into determining what number I will say if you ask me to think of one.
Then, I used the argument of a chaotic system to reconcile the determinism of the universe with the apparent impossibility of predicting another persons next thought. A highly chaotic system can be deterministic but still remain functionally unpredictable.
Finally, I floated the idea that what we interpret as free will is in fact our mind justifying the outcome of a highly chaotic process after the fact. I seem to remember there was some research on split-brain patients regarding this.
By and large, I agree with you: I cannot see how free will fits into a deterministic universe. I still want to make some points for the case that there is some form of free will.
Think about scratching your nose right now, and decide whether or not to do it. It’s banal, but I can’t help being convinced by that simple act that I do have some form of choice. I can’t fathom how someone, even given a perfect model of every cell in my body, could predict whether or not I will scratch my nose within the next minute.
This brings up the second point: We don’t need to invoke quantum mechanics to get large-scale uncertainty. It’s enough to assume that our mind is a complex, chaotic system. In that case, minute changes in initial conditions or input stimuli can massively change the state of our mind only a short time later. This allows for our mind to be deterministic but functionally impossible to predict (if immeasurably small changes in conditions can cascade to large changes in outcome).
I seem to remember reading that what we interpret as free will is usually our mind justifying our actions after the fact, which would fit well with the “chaotic but deterministic” theory.
EXACTLY! I can’t believe that I’ve basically forgotten how the function of “social media” at a point in the not-too-distant past was actually to help real people stay in touch and organise real social events… how did we even end up where we are now? There was a golden age for a couple years where stuff like facebook brought a net positive to the world. Just makes me sad to think about where we ended up…
Tbh, to me, a replacement for facebook is what I’m looking most for. I used to use facebook a lot to organise stuff with different friend-groups, and now that most people don’t ever use it, that’s a lot harder.
Facebook was the de-facto primary communication channel for organising events or coordinating hobby groups. It honestly makes me sad that they broke it to the point where I have a hard time inviting old friends that live out of town to a summer party or something. Likewise, I have a hard time being invited to stuff because I practically never check facebook.
Friendica may take over facebooks role at some point, but it’s nowhere close yet. I made an account just to be on there for if/when it starts taking off. I hope the gap is filled sooner rather than later.
Years ago, I would have immediately recognised this as an Onion article. Today, I have to admit that I didn’t recognise it before clicking on the link and seeing the page.
There’s a reasonable probability that I’ll be heavily downvoted for this, but it’s my two cents, so here I go. For clarity, I’ll in the following use “male” and “female” to refer to biological groups identified by their reproductive organs (by far most people can clearly be identified as one or the other), and “man” and “women” to refer to groups of people that identify as such.
Sex (the action) is pretty fundamentally tied to your reproductive organs. As such, I think it makes most sense to define “straight” vs. “bi” vs. “gay” in terms of sex (the attribute). I would say that a male that is exclusively attracted to females is “straight”, while a male that is exclusively attracted to women “bi with a strong preference for women”, and that a male that is exclusively attracted to males is “gay”.
My reasoning here is twofold: First, a male that is attracted to women can have a range for how “female presenting” the woman has to be before they are interested. Some will only consider women that have gone through surgery and full hormonal therapy attractive, while others will find women without any surgery or hormone therapy attractive. This brings up the second point: A lot of sexuality becomes a lot easier to talk about (and de-stigmatize) if we accept that sexuality is a continuous spectrum. If we accept that, it makes sense to me to use one word for each extreme, and a more fluid language for the bulk of the spectrum. I know plenty of bi people that have more or less strong preferences towards one side of the spectrum, and some that are completely agnostic. I think a lot of stigma can be removed if we’re more open to people being “just slightly bi”, while we can keep the language clear by reserving “straight” and “gay” for the two extremes.
Finally, if we use “straight” to refer to e.g. males that are exclusively attracted to women, we open an unnecessary can of worms regarding males that are attracted to people who identify as women, but don’t present as female. In short: Sex (act) is fundamentally tied to sex (attribute), so it makes sense to me to define sexuality in terms of sex, rather than gender.
russia: Invades neighbouring country, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Ukraine: Defends itself.
Pretty much everyone: Tells russia to stop and to leave Ukraine.
Russia:
NATO started this lmao gottem
Do people like you really fall for this?
I had forgotten about that! However: That wasn’t sanctioned by the government though if I remember correctly, it was done by civilians that requested governmental military support which was refused.
I’m not quite sure if you’re disregarding the fact that Norway and Denmark haven’t had a war for hundreds of years because they don’t share a land border? In any case i can point out that there were plenty of Norwegian-Danish hostilities before the union time. With both Norway and Denmark being big on seafaring, the waters between Norway and Denmark have historically been seen much more as a highway (as you say about the Anglo-Portuguese waters) than anything else.
The distance is shorter though, so I would rather compare the Norwegian-Danish border to the Anglo-French border, and the lack of a land border there hasn’t really prevented any wars.
Why don’t you go ask the Nazi sympathisers we executed for treason after the war about that?
If a state permits its citizens to betray the country in favour of an adversary in the event of a war, it’s incapable of protecting itself. The most important task of any society is to keep its members safe. A crucial aspect of that is accepting the social contract that everyone on the society will help keep each other safe, even in the event that an outside adversary invades and threatens to kill you. If you break that social contract- guess what? The rest of society will typically (at least historically) brand you as a traitor and imprison or execute you. Why? Because you’ve shown that you’re willing to put their head on the block for your own benefit, so they see you as a threat (perhaps the worst thinkable threat) to the security their society provides, and decide to remove that threat to protect themselves.
No matter what oath you have or haven’t taken, societies obligation to keep you safe only extends as far as your willingness to protect the society. This is why treason, in most societies, is seen as one of the worst, if not the worst, crime you can commit. It’s literally stabbing strangers that are willing to die for you and your family in the back.
Quite a surprising one here: I think the Norwegian/russian border can actually match that. I believe Norway is the only country neighbouring russia that has never been invaded by them (sans WWII, where they invaded Nazi-occupied Norway and willingly left after the Axis was defeated).
I also think the Norwegian/Danish border has been conflict-free for some hundred years (to be fair, we were in a union for ≈450 years ending in 1814). We’ve had some skirmishes with the Swedes throughout the years, but I believe the last one was in 1814.
You had me until the “China/Russa/NK” part…
Do you really think a good solution to the US slowly going haywire over the past 20-30 years or so is snuggling up to dictatorships, of which two have boots on the ground in the first major European war of aggression since WWII, and the third is the only thing keeping the economy of the other two afloat? I think not. I think alienating said dictatorships is a good idea. I also think the US needs to be confronted and forced to make a decision on whether it wants to remain on good terms with the civilised world.
The point was more that a community can enforce that “if they don’t get it, no one will”, which I think would put a lot of companies off from buying.
It wouldn’t help the first few people get their home back, but after a couple rounds, the big corps will see that they end up losing money when the buy properties that are sacked a short time later. If there’s one thing that will make a company change its behaviour, it’s making them lose money through that behaviour.