Kichae

PMs are always technically appointed, but are chosen based on a vote by Members of Parliament. But also we just kicked off a general election yesterday, so *shrug*.

What makes you think he thinks Trump is going to call him? He was just asked a question by the press.

The measurement itself can’t be trusted. If you have a 1m stick and you measure it, its still is 1m stick. But if it’s moving really fast (close to the speed of light) the stick is somehow shorter. We have made models to predict that but still we can’t measure the true length of the stick. We can’t know the true length of the stick. Just the approximation within quality of our measurement device.

Emphasis mine.

You seem to be conflating a couple of things here. Relativistic effects and the finite resolution of our measuring tools are totally different things, and neither make a case for objective truth not being "knowable", unless "knowing" means "with absolute certainty". But if truth being knowable requires such, then "subjective truth" suffers from the same issue of lacking absolutes.

Sticking with the metre stick example, there are a number of reasons why we cannot know, with absolute, unquestioning certainty it's exact length, the major one being that, at the molecular level it has not absolute boundary. There is no firm boundary between "metre stick" and "not metre stick" once we look at that scale, just as for the Earth there is hard and firm boundary between "the atmosphere" and "the vacuum of space". In both cases, there is only a gradation of molecular density.

But let's stick to the macro scale here. Now, yes, we run into an issue with it not being possible to craft measuring devices with absolute accuracy or precision. The gradations printed or etched into them are not always totally and absolutely perfectly placed, and they are not perfectly thing. There will be some level of inaccuracy in our measurements because of this, and because of basic things like human error. This is where we get into the whole "just an approximation" thing. But it's also where we get into the "to what degree of precision do you give a shit" thing. We already know the boundary between metre stick and not metre stick is fuzzy. On some level we've decided to not care about that. So, what is the level where it is useful or meaningful for you to care?

Because when taking measurements, you want to make sure your measuring tools are at least as good as that threshold. And then, you follow a procedure to start eliminating lengths that the metre stick is not. Through repeated measurements -- usually a lot of them -- you can say with a large amount of (but not absolute) confidence that the metre stick categorically is not more than 1.1m long, nor less than 0.9m long. Or not more than 1.01m long and not less than 0.99m long. Or not more than 1.00001m long and not less than 0.99999m long. Or... you get the picture.

At some point, you will either decide that knowing that the length is quite definitively between two numbers is good enough, and/or you will decide that the metre stick has no boundary. Both are true statements, and both can be held within you without contradiction.

So far, I'm just repeating what you've said, but using many words when few would do, right?

But the thing is, none of this is related to the bit about relativistic effects. The fact that lengths contract along the direction of movement is not in any way a measurement accuracy issue. And it's not a mathematical hypothetical. It's something that can be measured directly, and has been. It's also something that can and has been measured by proxy, because length contraction is a corollary of time dilation.

The thing with relativity and relativistic effects is that all measurements require some kind of reference, and there is no universal reference. It can be easy to read that and think it means "my measuring stick will read something slightly different from your measuring stick, and so we cannot know what is the true number", but that's not what it's about at all. Using the same measuring device, you will get different measurements of the same object based entirely on what the relative velocity is between them. And, if we assume (for fun) that the boundaries of objects are not fuzzy at the molecular level, this would be true with an absolutely perfect, absolutely precise measuring device.

But also, if you know the relative speed between the measured and the measuring, you can transform that measurement back into the "rest" measurement, which is what you would get if the measurement device and the metre stick were moving with 0 velocity relative to each other.

This is known as a "rest frame" measurement, and it's the one we generally treat as both the natural measurement and the "true" one in daily life.

The classic thought experiment around this is the airplane and the barn. Imagine an airplane that is 10m long, and a barn that is 9m long. The barn has doors at the front and back large enough for the plane to enter/exit, but there is no way to fit that plane inside the barn with both sets of doors closed. But a funny thing happens if the plane is flying fast enough relative to the barn (131,000 km/s or faster): The plane fits totally inside. You can close both sets of doors, and the plane will not intersect them.

At least, you know, until it plows head on into the now-shut doors in front of it.

But the thing is, if this was just some trick of measurement, the plane just wouldn't fit.

I know you get this. You're subtly using this as a way of saying that there's no objective length measure. But there is. Everyone standing at rest relative to the barn will see the exact same thing. There will be total agreement on how long that plane is, with their infinitely precise, infinitely accurate measuring devices.

And when the plane comes to a stop and they measure its length, they will all agree once again.

Just on a different value.

It's not that the plane does not have a "true" length, it's that that length is a function of something else: the relative velocity between the measured and the measurer. You can -- and we do -- define a natural (or proper) length for an object by using the rest frame of the object itself, that is by measuring it when the object is at rest relative to measuring device. To the object itself, it will always be that length (barring issues of damage or molecular decay), so this is equivalent to its self-measurement.

None of this is to argue against the idea that we cannot get to an arbitrarily precise measure of objective reality. Just that you've presented two very different things in a way that conflates them.

Probably 2, 6, or 7. I've always loved the V5/V7, but the liquid ink is messy, a bic is a classic for a reason, and the PaperMate flair has been my go-to felt-tip for a long time now. Though, the ultra-fine version is much better for writing than the medium one.

Content aggregators are not forums. Just having categories doesn't really cover it. CAs are designed so that old posts fall away quickly, so that people will keep posting new top level content and keep people emgaged in the constant scroll, much like Twitter or Facebook. They are largely unstructured, with different "categories" behaving quasi-independently from one another.

Forums are structured spaces where the same people post stuff to the same categories, that are mostly offshoots of the forum's core theme.

People interact with and behave rather differently in these different contexts.

paying 100-180/month on transit

Do cars get free gasoline now? Why did nobody tell me!

To be blunt, believing that criticizing the actions of the government against minorities and being critical of the actions of people in the past because you got used to a hunk of stone or metal existing is fucking stupid, and being wounded because some names you were forced to read in some books you never bothered to understand have been called kind of shit people is wildly weak sauce.

You don't understand what people have been complaining about, or even what "the left" is. Maybe you should consider the idea that you know fuck all, and actually listen to the grown ups in the room when they're discussing issues of history and sociology.

Wanking over white power is neither history nor culture. Not understanding that that's what you're doing doesn't make you informed, interesting, or smart.

"I don't know what genocide is, so fuck the 'left'" is a hell of a take. Definitely doesn't paint you out to be unworthy of listening to on anything.

It's harder to see on a large Lemmy instance like LW, but most of the fediverse is very patchwork. The network of Lemmy sites is itself very patchwork, with the MLs, Hexbear, Beehaw, NSFW, etc. all having different defederation profiles, but the whole space is an incomplete mesh. Mastodon has more themed instances than Lemmy, more very small instances than Lemmy, and a much bigger anti-capital, anti-commerce bent than Lemmy, with many more people complaining on main about other instances rules and federation policies, so if you look, you can really see it.

But the whole fedi project is patchwork by nature.

Gen Z consumers, on the other hand, are almost six times more likely to switch to an American service such as a bank or telecommunications company, according to the survey.

This reflects an unwillingness to look, not an inability to afford. The credit union is the cheapest place I could find in town with respect to basic banking, and what are these American telecommunications companies that are doing anything to bring lower prices on that front? Something they saw on a YouTube ad?

Most of these communuties using Discord are better served by something that isn't a chatroom. So, so, so confusingly many of them use them as a store of permanent information. Like a website+forum.

Many times the benefit of Discord is the ability to paywall parts of it with Patreon integration. We need more foss and federated options that do this.