UnderpantsWeevil

joined 2 years ago
[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 points 1 hour ago (3 children)

where does one purchase a pair of superior jeans

China, ironically enough.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago (5 children)

Tapping a copy of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" on my knee, thoughtfully.

Notable how the industrial revolution spreading to the rest of the world has really leveled the playing field over the last century.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

These are off-cycle, deliberately to fix districts where incumbent popularity is waning fast.

Dan Crenshaw's needing to have his district redrawn for the third time since his first campaign, as people close to Houston downtown grow increasingly fed up with his podcaster bro bullshit and miserable constituent services.

So much of these redraws are fundamentally defensive as urban centers grow bluer and bluer. You're going to see Dems in districts that go 90/10 at this rate, just to keep them out of seats the GOP plans to win 53/47.

This is being paired with some monumental disenfranchisement, as well. Texas saw a 6% turnout drop between '20 and '24 thanks to roll purges and voting site shenanigans. It'll be worse in '26 and '28.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

In a better world, being highly motivated to contribute to your neighborhood's well-being and improvement would result in... a nicer neighborhood with happier, healthier people living in it.

But now we're all just miners, digging up gold nuggets and hoping it means we get paid a fraction of their worth, with no regard to what this giant strip mine will do to the land we live in or our successors inherit.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 26 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Y'all are getting a rebate?

I'm just paying more in tarrifs

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 points 21 hours ago

Dark hair bad

Light hair good

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 14 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Oh, that's just the tip of the iceberg

Former CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch and Two Other Individuals Charged with Sex Trafficking and Interstate Prostitution

So crazy that these are the same folks screaming about Jeffrey Epstein.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 6 points 21 hours ago

We all know that people who look like me are the only ones who deserve to be in a commercial

Looks like Curtis Yarvin

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I heard you could do it with a photograph with someone's face in profile. Also with the Death Stranding photo mode for taking screenshots.

Christian nationalists say that other people shouldn't watch porn but that they've figured out a curious caveat within the faith that exempts them, personally. Then they establish special repositories of pornographic material that serve as an incentive for membership and a form of blackmail against turncoats.

Porn becomes a more direct means of patriarchal control - both in how it restricts which senior members are allowed to buy it and (in turn) which women are allowed to sell it, and at what price. It is a form of societal monopsony intended to make sex work a privilege afforded to elites at below market rates.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

same as it can fail on people with very dark skin. No racism or discrimination needed to explain it

That's a classic case of implicit racism. The technology is tailored to perform optimally against lighter toned skin, because the people building and evaluating the software are all lighter skinned, themselves. Similarly, I'm sure, the developers of the technology didn't bother to evaluate how it would work on people with facial skin conditions, markings, or tattoos.

In classic "Move Fast and Break Things" style, they rushed an application to market that only half worked on some people, and then told anyone who would fail the check by default that this was an individual's problem to resolve.

"Who cares if this system works for ?" shows up in all sorts of lowest-bidder crap work, from medical studies to mechanical engineering. Whether its left-handed car drivers get fucked by a right-hand favorable design or clinical trials that just didn't bother including women as subjects or dark-skinned people failing facial recognition, the implicit bigotry of poor engineering is rampant in our modern world.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago (4 children)

If only there was a very easy, simple way to trick the system into thinking you are an adult.

 

Last week, Marathon Fusion, a San Francisco-based energy startup, submitted a preprint detailing an action plan for synthesizing gold particles via nuclear transmutation—essentially the process of turning one element into another by tweaking its nucleus. The paper, which has yet to undergo peer review, argues that the proposed system would offer a new revenue stream from all the new gold being produced, in addition to other economic and technological benefits.

 

Since May, more than 1,000 people have died while seeking food from the centres and other humanitarian convoys, according to the UN.


Mahmoud Alareer, a 27-year-old living in a tent in western Gaza City, says the opening time announcements for the aid site he uses – Wadi Gaza – have become useless, because of the distance from where he is living. Instead, he travels to the edges of the site in the middle of the night and gambles on it opening at 2am, as it has on every visit so far.

First he climbs on to the back of a truck for the long ride south from Gaza City through the militarised Netzarim corridor. Then he waits in the dark until Israeli forces allow him to enter. “You get there and you slowly, slowly advance,” he says. “You always know that it could be you who gets shot, or it might be someone next to you.”

Alareer says chaos always ensues when the aid point opens, as people start running towards the packages, which are left in the middle of the distribution zone. People trip over craters and tangled wires.

Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF) emergency coordinator in Gaza, Aitor Zabalgogeazkoa, says night-time distributions are particularly dangerous because so many roads in southern Gaza have been made unrecognisable by Israeli bombing, making it hard for Palestinians to stick to routes designated by GHF.

Zabalgogeazkoa is scathing about the GHF system. “This is not humanitarian aid,” he says. “We can only think that it was designed to cause damage to the people seeking aid.”

 

Thanks to bipartisan support for the vision of a border locked down by computerized eyes, Anduril has become a dominant player in border surveillance, edging out incumbents like Elbit and General Dynamics.

Now, that position looks to be enshrined in law: A provision buried in the new mega-legislation stipulates that none of the $6 billion border tech payday can be spent on border towers unless they’ve been “tested and accepted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to deliver autonomous capabilities.”

 

Thomas said the conditions and treatment by BoP were worse than Ice detention: “They were not prepared for us whatsoever.”

He and other detainees were placed in an area with dirty mattresses, cockroaches and mice, where some bunkbeds lacked ladders, forcing people to climb to the top bed, he said.

BoP didn’t seem to have enough clothes, said Thomas, who got a jumpsuit but no shirt. The facility also gave him a pair of used, ripped underwear with brown stains. Some jumpsuits appeared to have bloodstains and holes, he added.

Each detainee was given one toilet paper roll a week. He shared a cell with another detainee, and he said they were only able to flush the toilet three times an hour. He was often freezing and was given only a thin blanket. The food was “disgusting slop”, including some kind of mysterious meat that at times appeared to have chunks of bones and other inedible items mixed in, he said. He was frequently hungry.

“The staff didn’t know why we were there and they were treating us exactly as they would treat BoP prisoners, and they told us that,” Thomas said. “We were treated less than human.”

He and others requested medical visits, but were never seen by physicians, he said: “I heard people crying for doctors, saying they couldn’t breathe, and staff would just say, ‘Well, I’m not a doctor,’ and walk away.” He did eventually receive the psychiatric medication he requested, but staff would throw his pill under his cell door, and he’d sometimes have to search the floor to find it.

 

Denaturalization is a tactic heavily used during the McCarthy era and one that was expanded during the Obama administration and grew further during President Trump's first term. It's a tool usually used in only the most serious and rare of cases: dealing with Nazis or war criminals.

 

By studying samples from Kamo‘oalewa, researchers hope to determine whether it was once part of the Moon — and was chipped away during a collision event — or has escaped from the asteroid belt that circles between Mars and Jupiter. “This is still debatable,” says Marco Fenucci, a mathematician who studies the dynamics of small astronomical bodies at the European Space Agency, near Rome. No asteroids in the Solar System are known to come from the Moon.

The samples will also help researchers to understand how asteroids form and evolve, says Li.

 

Trump: Some of you have even pushed the limits a bit too much. So for any cadets who have not finished walking off their hours, as commander in chief, I hear by absolve all cadets on restriction for minor conduct offenses, and that is effective immediately. Congratulations. That's a nice one, isn't it? Don't you feel better now? Surviving the 47 month experience is never easy, but only the class of 2020 can say it survived 48 months. And when it comes to bragging rights, no one can boast louder than the class that brought Navy's 14 year football winning streak to a screeching halt. You did that. I happened to be there.

I happened to be there. That's right. That was a big day. I was there. You beat Navy and brought the Commander-In-Chief's Trophy back to West Point for two straight years. So we say, “Go, Army, go.” This graduating class secured more than 1000 victories for the Black Knights, including three bowl victories, 13 NCAA team appearances and a woman's rugby championship, with the help of somebody that I just met, 2019 MVP, Sam Sullivan. Fantastic job. Thank you. Fantastic.

...

Tomorrow, America will celebrate a very important anniversary, the 245th birthday of the United States Army. Unrelated, going to be my birthday also. I don't know if that happened by accident. Did that happen by accident [inaudible 00:24:59], but it's a great day because of that Army birthday

 

The radical libertarian city builders of the tech-bro set have an audacious new proposal: They want to convert Guantánamo Bay, host to the infamous prison, into the high-tech charter city of their wildest imaginations, which will double as a “proving ground” for migrants seeking to enter the United States. The Charter Cities Institute, or CCI, which has lobbied the Trump administration on setting up so-called freedom cities in the U.S, suggests the president take advantage of Guantánamo’s special legal status to convert the controversial detention camp into “a beacon of 21st-century prosperity.”

 

Artificial Generalized Incompetence

 

On Friday, president Donald Trump had signed an Executive Order, Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, directing severe cuts to IMLS, which provides resources to museums and libraries in all 50 states and territories, calling for it to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law” within seven days. Staff had already been reduced, said the employee, due to steps like the termination of probationary employees.

Word quickly got out Thursday morning on a whistleblowers’ channel on Reddit. “The Institute of Museum and Library Services is being raided by DOGE and the new Acting Director (also somehow DepSec of Labor) Keith Sonderling with the express intent to shut it down,” wrote one anonymous poster. “Sonderling was sworn-in in the lobby of the office building and they are proceeding with quickly and quietly dismantling the agency. There are Department of Homeland Security personnel present—to bully a bunch of civil servants who administer grants to museums and libraries.”

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