• 15 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I remember around 2005ish, maybe earlier, there was a company that started selling Duff beer here in Australia with the same font as from the Simpsons and a complete clone of the cartoon can design. Everyone thought it was cool and it became very popular very quickly. People were surprised that The Simpsons name would attach itself to a real life beer given it was a family show and this would be ripe for controversy. It came to light after only a couple of months that The Simpsons brand had nothing to do with it and the company had somehow managed to go through all the steps of bringing this to market and just presumably hoped they wouldn’t get in to trouble. They were very quickly made to stop distributing those beers. Weird situation.


  • I really don’t think giving the head of state the power to pardon is a very good idea. I used to be totally baffled how it was a thing at all but the rationale has since been explained to me. While I sorta get it, the theoretical benefit is far outweighed by the inevitable grimy reality. Like others, probably mostly because of my own biases, I find it hard to summon a great deal of outrage about this understandable if blatantly hypocritical move after so much prior abuse of the lower had already occurred, but frankly if the option weren’t even there then nobody would even need to talk about this. If the justice system of the nation is supposedly well designed and theoretically trustworthy then there isn’t the need to have the ability for it to be arbitrarily overrulled in a manner that operates very much like the monarchical tyrants the United States was supposedly foundationally opposed to.


  • My parents have a well worn story of the time they were students and very poor and they saw a homeless guy outside the kebab shop and asked if he’d like a kebab to which he agreed. They brought it out to him and he examined it and threw it on the ground and yelled at them about something they now don’t remember exactly but they think was something to do with not wanting chilli sauce. Guessing that guy wasn’t in the best state of mind at the time, bit of a bummer for them though because they scraped together the last of their cash to pay for that and it would have been better if they could at least have eaten it themselves.


  • I really can’t see a downside. If they seem to be obviously homeless or they’re actively asking for help, they probably need it. Though it’s extremely unlikely that your meager contribution will be the change that suddenly allows them to magically overcome poverty and become middle class home owners with well paying jobs, that doesn’t really make them need it any less. Whatever they use the money on, it’s going to be what they need in the immediate term, be it drugs or food or anything really and unlike others this is the only way they can really get that money so they do need people to occasionally part with it. You’d only give it to them because you had it spare anyway and it’s not going to make them more homeless than they already were. If the concern is that it’s not addressing the root personal problems that put them individually on the street or the root social problems that put many on the streets, that’s completely true but if you’re serious about doing that you’re going to need more than the couple of bucks in your pocket anyway. That’s going to be concerted massive political will and financial effort and several people’s lifetimes worth of work all at the same time, besides you can always involve yourself in some way in such efforts and hand over spare change. The only times I can really think of where it makes sense not to give directly are: you can’t afford to do it, the physical circumstances of handing it over are dangerous/impractical, you don’t care about homeless people or other people in general or you subscribe to some nasty Malthusian ideas and think yourself somehow benevolent for condemning people to destitution as some kind of “cruel to be kind” doctrine in which case you’re unlikely to have given this a lot of thought anyway and don’t really face much of a dilemma.


  • Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.mltopics@lemmy.world1941 hipster
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    5 days ago

    I thought hipster was essentially supposed to be someone vapid and style obsessed at any given time. Dandies would have been hipsters by my understanding. It’s a focus on appearance and also whatever is a current trend of the times so they might also include interests or hobbies as well, the point is the term is used pejoratively because the interests or the style adopted by these people is considered surface level and inauthentic because it is primarily based upon the recency of widespread adoption of whatever it is.



  • Yeh, it’s not like virginity, the organisations chasing this data don’t live entirely off of new additions to their databases, the data is valuable to them when it’s a constant flow so if you are interested in guarding that data and stopping it from being shared too widely then there’s never a point at which it’s entirely too late. It is worth noting that it’s near impossible to maintain the type of privacy you might have expected maybe in the 90s, early 2000s but, if you succeeded in reducing how much data you give away even to some limited extent then you are successfully starving those that seek that data of something valuable. Information about you that’s years old is probably not worth very much. It all feeds in to the machinery of this surveillance economy so I’m sure it’s useful to some extent, but that machinery seems to be endlessly thirsty so it obviously needs a continuous supply.



  • Sounds romantically intended with some really fucked up and distorted ideas mixed in. I’ll take as given that she doesn’t actually hold any of the racism she expressed as sincere beliefs. Part of you twigged that though she seemed to be trying to be nice in a really weird way, something seemed off and it is a bit off. If you imagine she mailed you a knife and a key to her house and said now you have the power to attack me and I’m vulnerable you’d probably see much more clearly and obviously how unromantic and off-putting and psychotic that is despite following a very similar logic.

    In both these scenarios she’s putting her life in your hands to demonstrate trust, but there’s an implicit suggestion there that you would or could ever do something like that and only don’t because of your undying devotion. There’s a kind of twisted view of humanity there that that ruining someone’s life on purpose with kompromat is something people generally do to one another but for the power love to zovercome it. It’s sort of a red flag that she might think that way but really you know her better than any of us and also whether you think she’s good for you. That she decided this would be a good idea and a nice birthday gift is disturbing enough that it’s probably worth bringing up though. I think if it was me I’d probably express appreciation for the sentiment but also delete the video and tell them I had done so. Unfortunately you could never prove that you have deleted it so her messed up little game will always work in the manner that she intended but the extent to which this is something to worry about long term is something you can evaluate from her reaction to this news and your explanation of why it didn’t feel right. Sometimes people do dumb shit, especially when they think they’ve spotted an opportunity for comedy and can’t see their actions in a different light until after they’ve done the stupid thing. There’s a chance here for this stupid thing to be a memory between just the two of you that neither of you has to worry about again so long as you point out that it wasn’t as romantic as she thought it was and also delete whatever email or communication was used to send the video plus the video itself. If she’s able to feel a bit embarrassed and move on you’re probably fine, if she digs in and gets offended and tries to play similar fucked up games, then you might want to consider getting out before things escalate.


  • You deadly seriously didn’t know if they were talking about the Pacific Ocean? In a post about someone who has trouble speaking clearly, in a reply clearly establishing you were aware there were writing errors, zeroing in on a word well known to be accidentally substituted for the word “specifically” by some speakers. You deadly seriously didn’t know?