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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I’ve been to many protests, and oddly enough i enjoy the feeling of freedom. Normal traffic rules don’t apply and there are no cars, suddely you can walk in the middle of the street which is normally a forbidden space. You can dance, you can shoot fireworks in the middle of town, you can do loads of things that you normally can’t.

    Normally there’s a nebulous sense that this space doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to landlords and the state maybe? You don’t feel a sense of ownership. But when it’s being taken over by people in an unorganized way, now it feels like this space belongs to you.

    And yes i’m french lmao



  • It looks like the back of a bolt action merged with the front of a semi-auto. What the fuck is this thing

    EDIT: there aren’t many rifles that do bolt-action and semi auto, but some of them do. If that’s a real gun, then that narrows it down tremendously.

    It’s at this timestamp in the video, no additional angles, but you do get to see that the bolt opens straight up 90°, and also there’s a flash hider. I think this is a drama that takes place in east germany? That narrows it down too.

    The front sight really reminds me of an SKS, except not… It’s like an 8-shaped peice with three holes that do front sight, barrel, and gas tube.

    The rear sight looks like nothing i’ve ever seen. Doesn’t look like the leaf rear sight that i associate with bolties.

    The tube under the barrel is not bayonette storage because there’s a weird plug at the end of it, it looks like you could rotate it and disassemble the tube.

    Regardless if it’s a real gun or not, the fact is that someone made this at some point, and i can’t guess why they did it this way lol


  • Yeah i don’t have that kind of experience, so me troubleshooting parts would drag on forever. And then they could break months down the line.

    In my experience, when buying second hand you trade time and effort for the price; being able to fix things means more time and more effort for even more savings. That’s what this really is.

    I guess there’s something to how little i understand computer hardware making me imagine it as more fragile than it is






  • I have a passing familiarity with the politics of a couple countries, and they all fit this pattern: their constitutions say nothing of a two-party system, they don’t even say anything about parties at all. People just choose to create political parties, and then those parties coalesce into two major parties.

    The reason that this happens is because people, from voters to every level of politician, look at the rules of the game and make tactical decisions; their tactical decisions cause a two-party system to emerge.

    The USA is a really extreme case of this; in Europe there are more parties, and they even very occasionally come to power. Current french president Macron broke a decades-long streak of two-party governance in his country.

    Further viewing material:

    What is tactical voting

    Minority Rule: First Past the Post Voting

    The Alternative Vote Explained

    My takeaway from this is that there are things that can be done to improve the voting system, as suggested in these videos; but i don’t even like representative democracy at all, i think there’s better solutions in direct democracy (referendums and such). Representative democracy was designed to put elites in charge, voting was initially reserved for land-owning nobility. Extending voting rights to more people doesn’t change what the system is designed to do.



  • Yeah, i have a huge archive of music in .mp3 format and it keeps growing. There is no appreciable loss in quality between uncompressed and 320kb/s, with the potential to go reasonably lower depending on the source quality.

    I’m like this with my movies too, with some exceptions all 2000 of them are around 1-2Gb in size, which is considered small in the torrenting community. For those ones i can actually notice the low image quality, but it kinda doesn’t bother me.

    I have good headphones and a good TV, i just stopped believing in high fidelity. People adore the imperfections of vinyl and VHS media, and i kind of feel the same way towards digital artifacts, movies feel weird when the image is too sharp. For music, again, i don’t even notice.

    In this context, if a format can cut my library size in half and i can’t tell the audio difference, AND it’s patent-free, i see this as an absolute win.

    Not that most people would care anyway, in the age of streaming people don’t have libraries anymore





  • And at that point the question becomes, why bring these viewers to Twitch? If you can build an audience on YouTube, that’s your income right there, you don’t need to stream for Twitch where you’ll make a lot less money. Either you do it for the love or you don’t do it.

    Aside from those who have like 5k viewers (<0.1% of streamers), Twitch creators make less money than they would on another platform with another kind of content. This is good for me as an audience member because it means most streamers (that i watch anyway) are doing it out of passion, but it’s bad for the platform because it means they’re not profitable. Daddy Bezos can pull the plug on the Twitch money pit any day



  • thawed_caveman@lemmy.worldtoGreentext@sh.itjust.worksAnon is 33
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    5 months ago

    The nicest way that i can put it is that this has been true for most of human history until industrialization, let’s say that the 50’s is when industrial food starts to make poor people fat.

    The less nice way to put it is that this hasn’t been true for 70 years. You are completely clueless to health food and poverty in the 20th century, let alone the 21st. Nowadays, eating nothing but the cheapest food will in fact make you fat, this is one of the main concerns of nutritional science today.