Everyone get out your tiny violins.

Trump and co. trying so, so desperately to have their own braindead, low-rent version of the Reichstag burning that someone like MtG just insists that the Democrats created Helene.

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

Point of clarification: the article was semi-protected, and “locked” is an oversimplistic description of it (understandable, since a lot of people who report on Wikipedia don’t really understand how it works). Technically there’s a way to lock a page such that only the Wikimedia Foundation staff can edit it, but realistically, full protection (i.e. only administrators and those above them can edit it) is probably the closest thing to a proper “lock” that ever gets used.

Semi-protection (the grey lock with a little person in it) just means that you need to be autoconfirmed (technically confirmed works too, but that system is basically disused). If you’re autoconfirmed, that means you’ve made at least 10 edits on Wikipedia and your account is at least 4 days old – an extremely low bar to clear that largely keeps out spam from IP addresses and sockpuppet accounts. The semi-protection on this article is set to expire in three days.

There’s also extended protection (the blue lock with an ‘E’ on it) that you’ll generally see on highly contentious topics such as ultra-high-profile political figures, enormously contentious disputes between nations (Russia–Ukraine, Israel–Palestine, and India–Pakistan, to name a few), and then some miscellaneous ones like ‘Atlantic Records’ and ‘Whopper’ (the latter was because Burger King launched an ad which is designed to trigger your Android device to read out the first part of the Wikipedia article, making it red meat for vandals). This requires an account to have at least 500 edits and be at least 30 days old.

Every once in a while, a comment like this comes along and makes me wish Lemmy had awards.

Climate change is a bitch, huh, Republicans who’ve spent thirty years denying it? (My heart goes out to all the people in the southeast who actually didn’t spend decades denying its existence and hampering efforts to slow it.)

At least for right now it’s just a test on a 100-meter length of track, but this reeks of a startup trying to innovate its way out of NIMBYs not wanting to put solar panels where they actually belong without considering why nobody has put solar panels in the middle of a railroad track before (cough rocks, dust, wildlife, vibration, and vandalism cough).

PV Magazine is neat for reading about potential new innovations, but one thing I really dislike about it is that it basically just regurgitates what solar companies say about themselves in press releases in a way that’s completely uncritical. For instance:

Similarly, removal and installation tests will be carried out to demonstrate that the Sunways pilot installation is perfectly adapted to the constraints related to maintenance work and the operation of the line.

It isn’t, but to be fair, it absolutely does add an additional layer of irony that they weren’t even born there.

Knowing how much the Gaggle Of Pedophiles likes to project, maybe she showed up expecting something at that party.

Haha, ooooooooops.

(But hey, I guess Android users can get some mileage out of it.)

• NewPipe / Tubular
• ReVanced

The best way is to migrate away to other platforms wherever possible, but in the interim, fuck you, Google.

Here’s hoping they face many, many more.

• You want to elaborate on when and how this happened? Because it wasn’t “hundreds of years”; it was like 20 and limited to European Christians.
• Do you have even vague figures grounded in fact that can make this comparable to current deaths by all other causes? That scientists during this 20-ish year period would have discovered something groundbreaking? Because by this line, I can say the leading cause of death – moreso than others combined – is Grug tripping over a rock circa 40,000 BCE and hitting his balls, thereby preventing the greatest scientist of all time from being born and curing cancer.

Yeah, I have to agree it’s basically assuredly not true, even when accounting for:

• Wars, genocides, and individual people killed over religion.
• Suicides linked to religious abuse by institutions and by zealots.
• Religion stifling the advancement of medicine such as in the case of stem cell research.
• The brand of “god’s will” bullshit that leads to preventable deaths in lieu of treatment.

Undoubtedly religion is hugely harmful, and I’m its biggest detractor that I personally know, but we live in an era where heart disease and cancer exist. Even saying religion causes a plurality of deaths would be wrong; “more than all others combined” is bullshit on a level that I can’t believe it got so many upvotes.

We can say that religion results in a fuckload of unnecessary deaths without lying.

“Oh, you said abortion. I thought you said a bucket. My bad.”

For me personally, I think more cops isn’t the ideal solution. Instead, I think traffic calming measures should be introduced to make drivers feel less safe if they choose to speed.

Better enforcement is 100% necessary, and I think speed cams can be a good way to prevent dangerous driving through the threat of enforcement. That said, I also think in terms of cost efficiency that direct preventative measures such as speed cushions, bollards, trees, medians, sidewalk extensions, lane narrowing, roundabouts, etc. will be more cost-effective to some point than and should be used in conjunction with speed cams.

people treat speeding like an oopsie daisy

And often even this is too generous. Most drivers I’ve seen in the US treat speeding like a calculated risk that they feel out over time. They will with an unambiguous understanding of what the speed limit is choose to not just exceed it, but to actively target a speed that’s (usually 5 mph or 8 kph) over it.

Oh yeah, just to be clear, I’m a massive fan of urbanist channels like NJB and absolutely stan the shit out of traffic calming measures. Give me more trees on the sides of the road to make it feel narrower. Give me speed humps. Give me medians. Give me sidewalk extensions. Give me roundabouts. Inject that shit into my veins. I see speed cameras as just one tool in an arsenal to create safer driving conditions, and mercifully, it seems like the US is starting to warm up to those.

I’m pretty sure we’re 100% on the same page here as far as traffic calming measures go, and I think we’d both agree too that if there are fines, they need to be adjusted to account for income. (Here’s an upvote by the way to counteract that downvote; this is one of like two reasonable takes I’ve seen in this thread against speed cameras.)

It should feel like a “gotcha” moment, though, or it only properly enforces speeds near the speed camera. If you can’t be certain that you’re not going to run into a speed camera but you have a general understanding that they’re around, you’re going to be much more likely not to speed in general versus just when you see the sign telling you to slow down. The reduction in speed from the sign is still better than nothing, but it lets drivers compartmentalize where there are “safe” zones to speed, and that partly defeats the purpose.