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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 3rd, 2023

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  • He’s not paying 1billion for a single defamation case. For one thing that’s the sum of multiple cases against him, and the more significant thing is that he lost because he did not fight it through the legal process and got a default judgement entered against him, and the most significant thing is that this amount is awarded due to punitive damages.

    The amount is not simply meant to compensate the aggrieved party. That would have been capped to a much smaller amount. However because of a continuous series of intentional deceit and fraudulent actions during the lawsuit itself, punitive damages were awarded instead, where the point is to set an example against such behavior in court cases.

    That extra punishment is for the benefit of the legal system rather than the aggrieved, it was something he could have simply avoided by just fighting the court case through the normal legal process. He would have simply lost and would only have had to pay a fraction of that amount.

    The point of the ability to punish subversion of the legal process is that otherwise, no legal consequence for ignoring the court, would mean that anyone could completely ignore the legal process (which is what he was attempting to do).


  • No, I interact more on Reddit. That’s where the community conversation is. Ideally, it would be on Lemmy, but the difference between our ideal state and reality isn’t bridged by wishing it to be the same. There’d need to be practical drivers that push the two into meeting and those drivers don’t exist for Lemmy to reach kind of critical mass that would allow it to be a replacement for incumbent social media platforms.

    Lemmy is for people who don’t want those social platforms, or an “also-ran” platform that exists in parallel with them. The federated model which gives it survivability and freedom is also the reason that it won’t have the broad appeal that would allow it to scale to incorporate input from all of society.

    Many will rationalize that it’s good to keep the rest of society out of Lemmy too, and I’m not getting into whether or not that’s good, but either way it means that Lemmy will not have the broad adoption that makes the big social media platforms interesting to most people.


  • This is correct. Real estate prices don’t mean anything to the vast majority of companies since most of them are not in the real estate business and likely even lease their office spaces. It could have a minor impact to the balance sheet if deemed impaired but it doesn’t amount to something that matters in valuation which cares more about P&L, cash flow, and working capital.

    Business leaders are human, they don’t know what the fuck is going on, or how to “increase shareholder value”. So for lack of better ideas they can just tell employees to go back to the office.

    Basically, if you don’t know how to stop a ship from sinking, you can at least change the curtains on the windows so you look busy on the way down.

    They first, make the decision to go back to the office, second, they tell their team to go find reasons to rationalize the decision. There isn’t a nuanced logic to arriving at the conclusion, they make these calls off-hand on gut feelings. The thinking comes in later from the direct reports trying to fill in the logical gaps, even if the decision wasn’t a logical one to begin with.



  • 2d art and pixel art survive well because of the inherent abstraction being part of it’s aesthetician. The greater the graphical fidelity, the less the game leans on abstraction, and instead on fidelity, and then a remaster adds more visual appeal.

    A game like slay the spire or katamari damacy gains very little from a visual remaster, but a game like Crysis would get a lot. Its worth noting that katamari damacy did get a remaster anyway…and its aesthetic is still what makes it look good, not the resolution. Crysis on the other hand had low aesthetic emphasis and heavy technical emphasis so refreshing the technical graphics does a lot for the game.



  • On barbell, it’s becomes a bit dangerous, you don’t want to fail asymmetrically and drop the bar, it’s a lot of weight. On a smith machine, a small weight variance is no big deal, go for it.

    With dumbbells, yes you can assymmetrically load, it will greatly decrease your overall power output but increase isometric demand on abs, obliques, and spinal erectors to maintain stability. For example, some people like to do lunges carrying a dumbbell on only 1 side at a time for that kind of challenge.




  • You might want to read about tooth to tail ratio on Wikipedia

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth-to-tail_ratio

    In a sense, war is mostly logistics. It doesn’t matter how strong your unit is, how clever you tactics are, or brilliant your strategy is. None of those things matter if the unit is not where they need to be, with the supplies to be effective.

    Most countries have limited ability to project military force outside their country because the logistics become so hard to support. Russian military relies heavily on rail transport, which doesn’t extend into Ukraine anymore, and trucks what it can’t rail…but the supply depots need to be hundreds of km behind the line because of long range precision missile strikes. With long supply chains supported to heavily stretched trucking, guys at the front won’t get everything they want.




  • Came here to post this one. I saw that movie on the airplane without knowing anything about it, and immediately thought, “This movie was made by the guys who filmed the ‘Turn Down for What’ music video.” I didn’t even know their names, had to confirm my guess after landing.

    Because the music video and their directorial style are that distinctive and memorable. It was not surprising at all that they got showered in awards, those guys are creative AF.



  • Rapid development has led to stark differences within that country, parts are modern, affluent, well-educated…and they live shoulder to shoulder with tribal, impoverished, and practically primal apes. It’s the same issues every country faces when rapid development comes their way. It’s going to be incredibly challenging for them to develop a healthy middle-class and egalitarian society.

    It’s more likely that the rapid modernization just leads to increased concentration of power to an oligarchy, and exploitation of the most vulnerable. Also fascist tendencies are all the rage these days on the international stage, of course those in power are looking on with interest.




  • Cheatcode for flavor is chicken bouillon. Powdered chicken stock has almost no calories but packs a ton of non-specific savory flavor (umami) that you can put into any savory dish. If you feel like a dish is bland, you salt it and it still feels not salty, try adding chicken bouillon and the flavor pops out. It’s why Australians go mad about their “Chicken salt” which is mainly bouillon and salt. (If it still taste bland after this point, you probably need some form of acid like a vinegar in the dish.)

    Tuna itself is pretty generic in flavor so just go ham with spices and seasoning. I like to mix my tuna into scrambled eggs (1 whole egg + 200g of egg white), mix it with gochuchang red pepper paste for big flavor, mild heat, and slight sweetness. You can also use Laughing Cow cheese wedges for about 45cal. Mix that into the pepper paste with a little bit of water to turn it into a creamy consistency. You can use the cheese wedge trick or cornstarch slurries to make creamy sauces/gravies for whatever dish you want with minimal calorie cost.

    There’s a lot of exercise programming you can do to optimize your fitness, but when we know diet is like 90% of the aesthetic outcome, leveling up cooking skill is probably much more important for creating tasty lean food you have no problem adhering to.


  • Yeah, looking at foods based on their raw components also provides a useful alternative perspective on foods. Would you want to eat 3 cups of flour, + 1 stick of butter + 2 cups of sugar? Cake is kinda gross from that POV. How about an onion, a bell pepper, and a pound of chicken? That sounds a lot more like food.

    There’s whole sections of the supermarket with shelves of stuff that would hardly be recognizable, and feels like a ripoff considering that they’re mostly just selling cheap components of sugar, flour, and fat