TheTechnician27

Obligatory Mad TV sketch

God bless you, ProPublica.

Counterpoint to that: assume I’m Andrew and only care about my legacy. I don’t think that applies to Andrew; I think that, while he’s alive, he wants to be out of the spotlight, as unaffiliated with this as possible, not to be prosecuted, and not to potentially piss off old Epstein buddies who might have deeper dirt on him. But assume.

If I do nothing, I’ll be a footnote in the history books. People will most often see me on some list devoid of context as part of the royal family. My crimes will be explored in as much depth as possible in any extensive biography, but who’s really going to be reading one of those? And to the extent they do, surely there’s some room for an overly skeptical person to doubt it. Meanwhile, my name is going to be overshadowed by other figures like Trump for anyone reading history about the Epstein case.

If I confess, then Epstein is not only the absolute foremost thing I’ll be remembered for, but my name is going to come up at the top of and all over any account of what’s easily going to be one of the most scandalous criminal conspiracies of the 21st century. Even the dumbest, most overly skeptical idiot won’t be able to deny my involvement – of which I’m sure I’m going to have to go into gruesome specifics under oath to be permanently documented. Sure, maybe the five people who read a biography about me might see how I stood up and brought down the conspiracy and think, “Wow, he sure was slightly less of a monster for doing that!”, but the reality is that I’m probably making it much worse for the incurious general public who would otherwise, at best, see and forget me.

You’re getting downvoted for pointing out that this technology, at optimal efficiency on Earth, generates about 1/100,000 the power of a solar panel. “Not very useful” is an understatement (it’s currently fucking useless). Even worse: the title saying “at night” implies a terrestrial usage and misdirects from this technology’s only potential useful application in the future once and if it becomes much better – namely on deep-space missions.

This research is interesting. I hope it yields something useful. Your comment is still 100% correct for the foreseeable future.

Edit: I was conflating the optimal efficiency of 1 W/m² and the actual efficiency of 1/100,000 the solar panel. Sorry for introducing that confusion.

As a voter and a taxpayer, I’m waiting on some important concessions before I can support this. Were Trump, for example, hoisted in front of the arch by a crane and dropped from the top into an inflatable kiddie pool filled with cottage cheese, this could become an important and beautiful landmark for D.C.

Talking about a man serially raping trafficked children as part of an international pedophile cabal, but saying the full word “fuck” is a bridge too far.

Someone call Burt Macklin; he can sort this out.

I’m sorry, did you have any more empty, performative platitudes you wanted to make yourself feel better by pretending you believed in, or are we still stuck in denial over the first one – the one where your deep care for remembering history ends somewhere before reading a couple paragraphs on Wikipedia?

You want to explain the math of how 1600 evictions can come from those 225 people?

Hahahaha. I knew you were going to ask this after I wrote it, and now I’m so glad I didn’t clarify*, because it demonstrates you don’t actually give enough of a shit to learn about this subject that you’re vapidly pretending to champion.

225 people lived in Seneca Village. Seneca Village, obviously, was not the only site seized for the park. The other evictions came from the places you didn’t bother to read about, you smarmy fucking oaf.

* This wasn’t baiting a trap. I just didn’t think until after writing it that anyone would be this profoundly stupid. Whoops.

Like I said: it’s relative. It’s clearly awful and racially motivated. But to treat it as such a notably dark past that it’s elevated to something worth studying in high school or even an undergrad gen-ed course alongside the rest of US history is absurd. You would have to know astonishingly little about US history (and/or learning) to think this somehow slots into a general curriculum about it.

I feel vindicated by the fact that places like Lemmy and Reddit are bubbles of people who I often agree with broadly on social and economic issues but who are often majorly disconnected from obvious reality when it comes to smaller pet issues.

I’m sorry that Seneca Village and the other eminent domain seizures for Central Park being bad but a footnote within a footnote in the course of US history is racist to you.

In particular because the point they are making is about the notariety and popularity of central park having such a dark past.

“such a dark past” is a pretty wild exaggeration of a total of about 1600 evictions for its construction. Central Park’s early history is shocking to nobody who has, as in the post, a high school or undergraduate-level understanding of US history. It’s dark-ish, but dark enough to stand out from the US’ past otherwise? Not even close. Central Park isn’t such a huge topic that you’d expect, in a high school or undergraduate-level gen-ed course, to learn what constitutes a paragraph in its fairly extensive Wikipedia article.

TL:DR: The point is that history can remain buried no matter how popular what buried it becomes. You would think more people would notice what’s underneath.

Anyone can. It’s right there. It’s mentioned in the second paragraph of the lead of the Wikipedia article. Anyone even slightly interested in Central Park’s history will find this. Not teaching this in an undergruate-level gen-ed isn’t buried history; it just means it’s not significant enough for the general public to care.

Insulting their knowledge doesn’t do much to make them want to know more.

Anyone who would expect this to be part of the curriculum of the courses the OP is describing is completely delusional. I don’t really care what pointing that out makes them want to do or not.

Dude, what the fuck?? I’ve been waiting my whole life to see if Republican tax cuts will benefit average, working-class people, and you just go and fucking ruin it for me. Thanks.

And that I never heard a peep of this in any high school or college history class?

I mean… Unless you were taking some sort of graduate-level course focusing on events like this, why would you? It’s a really interesting story, but it was a village of 225 people in a city of about one million that lasted 30 years, and its existence had minimal impact on history going forward. Seizures of predominantly black neighborhoods for public works projects are a dime a dozen in US history, and there are a million other topics to choose from like the Tulsa race massacre if you want noteworthy material about black oppression in the US for a high school or undergraduate level course. At best this would be an incidental two-sentence mention as a piece of trivia from a particularly knowledgeable teacher.

“Local person discovers undergraduate gen-ed courses not designed to teach you literally everything about a subject. More at 11.”

China has executed 11 members of the notorious Ming family criminal gang, who ran mafia-like scam centers in Myanmar and killed workers who tried to escape, Chinese state media reported on Thursday.

The Ming family was one of the so-called four families of northern Myanmar — crime syndicates accused of running hundreds of compounds dealing in internet fraud, prostitution and drug production, and whose members held prominent positions in the local government and militia aligned with Myanmar’s ruling junta.

Still 100% against state-sanctioned murder and would’ve preferred life in prison, but I can’t shed any tears. Apparently Wikipedia has a whole article on scam centers in Myanmar for further reading.

If you listen to the song

An understandable but unfortunately dubious assumption to grant Trump’s base.

so many of the tax cuts that we’re talking about

Damn, it feels like things are pretty dire for him even among his stupid fuck base when he’s going back to just straight-up bribing them with money (of course they’re losing money anyway because tax money pays for itself multiple times over and because his tariffs are directly fucking them over far worse than any breaks he could offer).

No problem at all! As with any Wikipedia page, you’re welcome to contribute if you know any good ones that aren’t on there yet.

I had missed this piece of internet history.

You might catch a few more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unusual_articles#Computing

A… Sal-ad?

More established Human Rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have refrained from reporting total death counts amid the uncertainty caused by the internet blackout.

That’s fine, but they have been abundantly clear that there are ongoing country-wide massacres. HRW ten days ago, for example:

In the capital, Tehran, videos show a heavily militarized response to the protests as they grew. Human Rights Watch verified videos that began to circulate on January 11 of body bags and bodies piled up in and around the Forensic Diagnostic and Laboratory Center in Kahrizak, south of the capital. The bodies were placed there for families to identify their loved ones. Human Rights Watch counted at least 400 bodies visible in several videos from that site alone. This number is an undercount, as bodies were piled on top of each other, making counting difficult.

Witnesses also said that many bodies were at Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery Complex, 600 meters from the Kahrizak morgue. One person who went to identify the body of a loved one on January 10 said: “When we got close to the [large] halls, we saw bodies piled on top of bodies. They were in body bags, and some had tags with identification details. From the size of the halls, I could estimate that between 1,500 to 2,000 bodies were held there.” The witness said that more bodies were arriving by refrigerated trucks in the late afternoon when they were leaving the cemetery.

I think based on what you wrote that you do actually care about Iran’s civilians and denounce their massacre by Khamenei’s regime but don’t want fascists to use it as a pretext for invasion, so I assume you can, in good faith, acknowledge that this BBC News article isn’t just “manufacturing consent” and that civilians really are being murdered by the thousands by an authoritarian, theocratic regime.