Prior to D-Day, The Allies had inflatable tanks and trucks to disguise where the real buildup was. Pretty classical tactic.

I hope they continue to resist and eventually cause a larger change for the better across the region.

Except that’s not what’s happening if you read the article, on either count.

Women aren’t resisting childbirth as an act of rebellion or as an exercise of their rights, there’s just too many competing pressures in their lives to table in having kids. Coupled with declining rates of attachment and a distraction-based economy, this isn’t a ‘win’ for anyone.

And population decline is a crisis we don’t know how to deal with. Old people have little economic output, but use up a lot of resources. It means the kids who are still born end up carrying a huge burden paying for and caring for older generations, they end up tax serfs in an aged care-based economy, and if older generations aren’t cared for you end up with human atrocities on a massive scale.

…

Most of these comments are problematic. You don’t have to have children, but for most people it has been a pretty consistent and natural inclination. Now a whole generation are convincing themselves they don’t want children when they really just can’t, and rather than holding those responsible to account and improving all our circumstances, they’re treating it as some personal victory.

You can either try to do things the right way and cure multiple social ills, or you can do it the wrong way and end up with different rules for different adults all in an attempt to prohibition your way out of one issue.

NZ already did this and it is the most cowardly way to avoid political blowback.

There’s plenty of other options for minimising smoking. A more altruistic way is by lifting people out of poverty and tackling social disintegration, since smokers are overwhelmingly poor and disaffected.

Maybe I’m just weird but I think the tech focus is better.

Like that’s where all this started. Kevin Rose wanted a better version of Slashdot, a tech news aggregator, so he created Digg.

And Digg was about tech news for several years before going to a general format, at which point it became trash.

And then Digg’s redesign killed the site and everyone flocked to a Digg clone called reddit, even though reddit was a clone of post-shittification Digg, not pre-shittification Digg.

Being tech-focussed really does help. I’d sooner deal with Well Actually neckbeards than the average Facebook user, even if I’m not just interested in tech news.

Forums worked really elegantly when you had an active userbase of maybe a couple of dozen people a day.

Megaforums… not so much.

Sentencing has never made much sense. Depends upon jurisdiction, how many charges prosecutors can tack on, how many you end up going to trial over, how many you get convicted over, and who is responsible for sentencing (in some places the jury sentence, in some the trial judge, in others sentencing is a separate proceeding with a separate judge).

One of the big factors here is that Masterson and his lawyers still deny everything. He didn’t cut a deal, hasn’t shown remorse since he hasn’t admitted to any wrong-doing, and the judge chose to sentence consecutively. First trial was a mistrial, second trial got 2/3 convictions, and apparently they intend to appeal. So depending upon appeal, he is currently facing somewhere between being acquitted on appeal to facing life in prison. In a lot of cases like this, some sort of deal is cut on lesser charges or lesser sentencing in exchange for admitting guilt and not dragging this on through appeal, hence typically shorter sentences. Masterson/his lawyers are instead rolling d20s and the current outcome is a 1.

Oh, there’s your mistake. If you close one window at a time, Firefox thinks you no longer want that window/pinned tabs, and only restores the last window still open when restarting. Close Firefox with Ctrl+Shift+Q or go to the hamburger menu and exit.

You can also middle-click the bookmark folder itself.

Or you can open a second window, open all your work sites, then pin the tabs. If you have at least one pinned tab in the first window as well, even if that pinned tab is just about:blank, both windows will re-open when reopening firefox.

At some point during his attempted coup, he realised it wasn’t going to work

When was that, exactly? Putin fled, reserve forces were standing by and not fighting Wagner, and he was a day out from an undefended Moscow. Worst case scenario was a protracted civil war, but he still would’ve lived longer than this.

Honestly, none of this makes sense. The fact that he aborted in the first place makes the idea that he was conspiring with Putin the whole time to flush out disloyal elements within the Russian armed forces seem credible… but then why kill him after? I’m not ruling out the possibility that either this was a genuine accident, or it was another false flag and he and his second in command just faked their own deaths.

A lot of bullshit work is administrative, jobs that exist to meet regulatory requirements (compliance jobs).

Or contract requirements (eg. sometimes one company will be contracted by another company to produce X amount of Y, then the other company will go bust and have no real need of Y, but the first company still needs to produce a minimum amount of Y for several more years to avoid being in breach of the other company’s creditors and get sued, or a specialised worker will be given a 4-year contract on a project that gets cancelled, and it’s cheaper to pay him to do nothing than it is to pay him out of his contract early).

Or as a result of a freak accident or screw-up that the company over-corrected on, at which point you’re basically being paid out of the marketing budget to perform security- or QA-theatre, or being paid by another company or govt department to confirm that the security/QA-theatre is taking place whilst taking really long lunches.

A lot of the time a business or govt department will be too organisationally complex for anyone to figure out where the bullshit jobs are. You could have 5 departments under you, all of which justify their existence with a bunch of dense jargon, and any one of them could be operationally useless. And if enough time passes without you figuring it out, the personal cost to your career in just playing along will be less than if you admit that you had your bosses pay 12 people for 5 years to push and rubber-stamp papers that could’ve just been handled by two other departments knowing how to email each other.

It’s not an issue of if there’s any patriarchy, but that Universal and Mattel obviously limited how much the film makers could critique capitalism, corporatism, and this general issue of forced competitiveness (of which patriarchy is a symptom - make 10 people fight over 5 sticks, act surprised when whichever people end up grabbing the sticks first use them to leverage an advantage and beat down the others, and it eventually turns into things like patriarchy and white supremacy and class systems).

So instead the film has to pretend that patriarchy is the core issue, despite undermining that notion itself multiple times (eg. multiple powerless male characters in both worlds, Ken being unable to get a job, most of Gloria’s grievances about being a woman being grievances many men share or basic human insecurities, etc.) The film even tries to lampshade some of its own shortcomings (“thanks, white saviour Barbie” and the line about Margot Robbie being the wrong casting choice).

Thematically, the film is a hot mess. It degenerates into bullshit twitter mottos and catchphrases from about 10 years ago and dance numbers instead of plot resolution.

If you’re using this, of all movies, to “test” your boyfriends and partners - well a) testing your partners is not a great sign in itself, but also b) you may be an idiot.

Don’t accuse me of being obtuse and conflating different situations when you just attacked a massive strawman. I’m not talking about rumours, more like someone showing up to a party at your place, acting weird from the moment she showed up, locking herself in the toilet, self-harming, then wasting weeks of your life and doing a number on your sanity after going to the police, claiming she was raped. This isn’t a hypothetical.

Compared to actual real sexual assault, which IS a huge problem

You repeat some variation of this about 3 times in your reply. This is called relative privation. Two things can be problems at the same time, and it doesn’t need to be a competition over which one we’re allowed to care about.

The issue of how to handle sexual assault accusations is not complicated. I told you, we handle them all the time in the medical field. You default to protecting the accuser, you do a thorough investigation, if the investigation turns up no evidence, you move on.

Speaking of conflation… most people don’t have the luxury of a professional environment with oversight and procedures for handling these situations. You live in a fantasy land if you think this is how actual human relationships play out, or if this is how they’re investigated.

This is way too close to “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide” logic.

What exactly are you doing out there in the world that this is a major concern in your life?

Making terrible choices in friends, for one. Never been accused of SA, thank christ, but figured out too late that many people live in their own reality, and rewrite history once the friendship ends. Have also known people who have been in that situation, and even if no charges end up being pressed, it’s still a gut-wrenching situation to be in.

The issue of how to handle SA accusations is such a nightmare that it’s practically inevitable that we have both innocent people convicted, and guilty people acquitted at the same time. Most of the time we don’t have the kind of oversight and institutional procedure you would enjoy if accused.