I find that I want some politics, and the politics that leaks into News and elsewhere is just about right. I un-subbed from anything specifically with the word politics in it and I mostly avoid .ml, and generally I find it very pleasant around here.

I have mine, and frankly I still use it to read about college football and Star Wars and check AskHistorians and post about keyboards. For shitposting and actually engaging with humans – yes, many of whom are my political speed or even further left – I really prefer it here. I “left” during the Mod Rebellion and APIpocalypse when it kind of became clear things were not going to be getting better. If it dies, it dies. We got beans over here.

You know what? Go for it. Only existing brands get adapted these days and this is a good one. The book is different from the movie and both are very wink-and-nod about the creative pursuits. Maybe it will be good. Maybe it will suck. More even than other “franchises,” a crappy musical would take nothing away from a good book and a great movie.

There’s constant running commentary and speculation, and biographical segments, and sometimes a little drama when surprising things happen, or expected things don’t, and a large group of people simply care enough that they want to know as soon as a pick happens, though how organic the growth of that group has been is certainly open for debate.

So it’s basically a combination of everything that everyone else has said.

1. NFL is by far the most popular sport in the country, but it also only has 17 regular season games (versus 82ish for NHL and NBA, 40ish for MLS, and 162 for MLB), and the entire season is spread over only 6-7 months of the calendar year, versus 8-10 for the others. There is an appetite for any content at all that materially affects the most watched sport.
2. College Football itself is probably the fourth most popular sports “league” in the country, though its organization and economics are WAY different (for now) than the normal pro leagues’. There’s huge overlap in general of course, but the Draft brings all of the fans together as CFB fans see where the top players will move.
3. Going back to number 1, the NFL and media companies, being what they are, noticed the gap in the sporting calendar (after March Madness, before NBA and NHL playoffs, very early in the MLB season, MLS well… (LOL, I love MLS and it’s a miracle it’s stable but it’s still not an important “TV sport” in this country). They also noticed that a certain segment of die-hards have been watching the draft for 30 years, and they saw an opportunity to tap that dormant interest for months of “segments” and a big day of ratings and revenue, so of course they did.
4. More recently, seeing that their hype efforts were working, they’ve moved it out of an auditorium near League HQ and made it a travelling road show, goosing local attention and furthering the image that it’s an event.

As to why all that worked, I like the posts that talk about the optimism and renewal that the draft represents. The NFL is unique in how it handles player development, in that it mostly doesn’t because it has an independently-popular lower league that will do it for free. Since that lower league is effectively the sole source of players, and since the NFL is an American-style sporting cartel, the Draft becomes the single biggest infusion of talent that a team will see in a given year, some of it ready to contribute on the field right away, and the teams that need the talent the most usually have the best picks and therefore a real chance to improve quickly, though the same bad management that gets teams in a bad place will often squander that chance.

For those who follow European football (soccer, not the niche gridiron leagues over there), imagine a single day (okay, three days now, but Rounds 2-7 are still for the nerds) that combines the anxiety of a promotion playoff final (though with deferred results) with the excitement of the summer transfer window (let’s consider NFL free agency the equivalent of the winter window).

FreeCAD still crashes for me a lot, across versions and distros and different PCs. I just don’t know what the deal is; maybe bad luck.

Then, its kernel, being the only truly viable open source one, is understandable but also has some limitations commercial tools don’t, and I’m just talking about super basic stuff like giving up on a fillet or chamfer as soon as two vertices touch.

The workflow is much improved, as are the heuristics for user intention (yes, yes, the “crutches”) and to mitigate toponaming, but I still get frustrated trying to use it for my stupid keyboard and other 3D printing projects. I have Alibre Design on my Windows partition, and with the improvements in Linux gaming (seriously OP, it’s WAY better these days), CAD is the main reason I even bothered to keep my old SSD with Windows.

There are probably things I do at work in MS Office that Libre would have a hard time with, but frankly I just don’t care. :-)

I mean, we don’t really notice the BMW drivers who are acting sensibly, and it’s probably the vast majority. But that being said, outside Germany they attract a certain enthusiast demographic that will include a statistically relevant minority who think every trip outside the neighborhood is Gran Turismo.

I don’t drive a BMW, so yes, I do use my blinker.

He’s not wrong exactly, but to a certain extent the market has spoken. A critical mass of people would prefer to watch quiet dramas in their own time and on the setup they control. The takeover by HD and the proliferation of bigger screens and soundbars or easy home theater solutions has created a “middle space” where the average viewer has something that, while not a proper cinema, is miles ahead of the 480i standard definition nonsense we had at home in the 90s and earlier. Then, at the other end, those same trends have allowed some percentage of connoisseurs to invest their resources into home theaters with curtains and posters and tiered seating and the works. Any form of home viewing, of course, avoids the scheduling and interpersonal downsides of going out to see a movie.

So, these types of films are getting squeezed at both ends. Most people will just catch them on their 50" Roku 4K from Walmart and be happy with that. Others who appreciate getting to 95% of the “cinema experience” will watch on their fancy projector and surround sound system. The only people left are the ones who value the communal experience and/or that last bit of quality presentation. If that’s not enough to support wide distribution of “adult drama,” then I just don’t know what to tell the auteurs. For all the same reasons we don’t bother with many lowest-common-denominator revenge dramas on the live stage, we’re not really going to see a ton of prestige character pieces scheduled into the limited slots at the multiplex.

Because I think it’s pretty much self-explanatory that separation on purely ethnicity/looks is not constructive where people are artificially treated as if they were different even though they’re not. I think the damage clearly outweighs here.

Justifying racism by saying ‘this is what we always did and it worked like that’ is not the right way forward imo as we can’t be stuck in the past and make the same mistakes that could be successfully improved.

What I’m trying to get at is that while appearance is not any kind of enlightened reason for distinct communities to have arisen, through accidents of history and genetics they did, and they are still relevant and appreciated by the people who are part of them. The color terminology is shorthand that acknowledges history. It’s not “justifying racism” to accept that in many places your ethnic background, especially if visible, means that certain experiences will have been more or less common for you. You can engage in this, even light heartedly, in good faith and as a way to understand your neighbors better, and indeed to think of them as your friends and neighbors instead of “Other.” People who are trying to do right by their fellow Americans are not using it to “separate,” but acknowledging that separation gave rise to proud, distinct communities and there’s no value in snuffing that out. The dialogue can be a way to unite us.

I believe we can agree that using visible “racial” markers to treat someone as less valuable than someone else is disturbing and evil, and still sadly common. I’m just saying that it’s not the mere use of the terms, or creating media that acknowledges them that results in the continuation of racism. Hell, in some ways, refusing to acknowledge differences gives a person with bad intent the license to settle on a single definition of what it means to be a “proper” American and to decide that anyone who doesn’t act the right way is less valuable: “I didn’t refuse to hire him because he’s black, but because he dresses and speaks differently. All he has to do is be exactly like me and I’d be more than happy to hire him!” (coughJDVancecoughcough)

So, good for you, but the particular dynamics of being a colonial country that had a massive portion of its economy based on race-based slavery has resulted in an approach to diversity that has much deeper roots and has been wrestling with hard issues for much longer than Germany has, and Germany’s own record with dealing with identifiable minorities in the last hundred years has, shall we say, not always been great.

Many European countries are only now hitting levels of diversity America had fifty years ago, and America has been made of statistically significant communities with distinctive origins for hundreds of years, and this in a colonizing country where there is no historically continuous monoculture. Historically, people tend to become dicks to the “Other” among them when faced with hardship, and much of American history reflects that sort of thing, but also its aftermath and attempts to heal.

Diverse and defiantly distinctive communities formed and persisted because that was how people got by and found support and could make their way, admittedly often because opportunities to assimilate, into whatever soup of dimly remembered pan-European customs that passes for a privileged culture here, were intentionally blocked. Yet even if the reasons for them are shameful, they are real and important, and the American dialogue on race simply cannot be color-blind even when well-meaning. Instead, it has to be a dance, where people of goodwill celebrate both differences and similarities and do not set groups above one another but also do not pretend they don’t exist.

I wish more Americans would understand that our approach rarely translates well, and for fuck’s sake I wish we had fewer people who were stuck in the bad old days where reconciliation and healing were very much not priorities. That said, I also wish that people from countries with a very different cultural and historical experience would not assume that their countries have shit figured out, when a lot of it simply boils down to “we don’t have many people with darker skin shades here.”

And even then, everything screamed “quirky project with Terry Gilliam vibes.” I want to see it, but it didn’t look like the sort of thing whose charms were dependent on a huge screen and a roomful of strangers. I had no idea its budget was well over halfway to a Marvel movie.

Aerocart from Worx looks a little gimmicky, but might be closer to your needs.

If budget is no object, then maybe a Polymule at USD1000+.

Inbetween, there’s something like a “Foldit Cart”.

Try searches for folding wheelbarrow, folding garden cart, or folding “vermont” cart. Your options get better if you can live without it being collapsible.

Everybody here is kinda right, but there are other factors to consider, and the net result is that it’s usually not a case worth bringing.

The “Impossibility” defense says that in most cases, the “factual” impossibility of committing the crime is not a defense, but taking an action that is not a crime is a defense, and if raised must be proved by the prosecution. Even with “Factual,” the line gets muddy (the article cites a person whose appeal won after they were convicted of poaching after shooting a stuffed deer). Many jurisdictions have a “reasonable person” standard for that as well, where if the act is the sort of thing that might normally be expected to result in a crime (the most infamous case is two US military personnel who thought they were raping a passed out woman, but really she had died from a heart attack) then you get no benefit, but if no reasonable person would believe that their action would do anything, then it’s more likely to succeed. To answer one of your questions, being told the button sets off a bomb would be more problematic for our hypothetical asshole than being told it “just kills” somebody that would be a bigger problem than a Death Note notebook, but it’s not a simple yes/no.

So anyway, this then raises some questions. Was this button setup convincing? Who did the convincing? Why did they do so? Other defenses might arise out of these conditions: e.g. they were told that pushing the button would save a bunch of other people, trolley-problem style, or it was the police egging them on and telling them they needed to for XYZ good reason. Many of them will turn on the defendant’s thoughts, so in any jurisdiction where they are not obligated to testify (e.g. the United States), our very interesting defendant simply doesn’t, and their attorney argues that there’s reasonable doubt they thought the button would actually do anything.

Add on top of this prosecutorial discretion. A prosecutor knows all of this, and knows this is a loser of a case, so apart from truly bonkers hypothetical, they will not bring it.

TL;DR: By the letter of the law, very probably yes, but no one will ever get convicted for it.

https://lemmy.world/post/26172293

I’m a little confused about what states in US are. Are they more like their own countries united in alliance, or are they districts of one country?

They’re closer to districts, but with more constitutionally described rights. Definitely much more independent than French provinces, and even more than German states or UK constituent countries (devolution is at Parliament’s discretion, for instance), but much, much less than EU countries.

I would just say that the key part to include is that the North knew slavery needed to die on the vine and was uninterested in helping the South preserve it, specifically by opposing the addition of new slave states, or at least abandoning the notion that the two should be intentionally kept in balance.

So nominally, yeah, few with any influence were proposing emancipation, and to be clear almost every white person in the country was super racist by modern standards, but slavery was doomed over the medium- to long-term. The South could see that the writing was on the wall, so they decided it was time to shoot their shot to preserve slavery, in a form particularly at odds with the world around it by the way, for as long as possible, and secession was the only viable path for them. No other issue of the day would have driven any significant region of the country to secede, though ironically if it had, no other issue would have given the opponents the moral high-ground like slavery did.

Many times you miss them worse than a person.

I know they’re “just” pets, but I can get that. You’re their whole life, they don’t really comprehend life and death the way people do, and if their simple, uncomplicated love (maybe) sets a ceiling on how much they give back to your wellbeing, it also sets a much higher floor.

That sucks so much. I’m sorry. I always say that as hard as it is, the only alternative to losing them is never having them, which is of course completely unacceptable. Grieve, heal, and when you can stand it, give another that same good life you gave your dumbbell.

That tension continues in the USA between recognizing and celebrating cultural differences, and becoming a melting pot of many cultures becoming one.

This is the crux. It’s a uniquely American take on how you deal with a country that has seen dozens of waves of immigration (starting with the illegal immigration of colonization) from many different places over a fairly short timeframe. American culture is kind of like a fork, with a unified base that has integrated but very distinct tines (bear with me… combining the “melting pot” and “salad bowl” tropes is HARD!). At their best, memes and jokes like that can be an invitation to genuine dialogue. At their worst… well… not that. A lot depends on who is putting them out and with what agenda in mind.

Statistically, most European countries seem to be estimated at somewhere between 80%-90% “white,” likely to mean “of exclusively European extraction beyond any sort of family memory,” and I wager the vast majority of those people are from the core borders or frontiers that might well have shifted in the last few centuries. America hasn’t had that sort of percentage for over 40 years, and even then the white population was more “assorted crackers.” Even back into that era, most areas will have had at least two and likely three to five statistically significant populations that would have been visually and culturally distinct (not that this in ANY way implies that these groups were treated equally by the power structures… OMG far, far, FAR from it). These people don’t have to give up their distinctiveness to remain American, and when considered in good faith, particularly by those who mostly live in the base of the fork, the sorts of things you’re describing can be more celebratory than divisive.

I’m not going to suggest Americans are particularly good at multiculturalism (another understatement), but we’ve been at it a long time and specific practices and trends have grown up around it. The balancing act of racial and ethnic awareness without descending into judgment is probably one of the more complicated aspects of navigating American culture, regardless of whether you were born to it or looking on from the outside. So much so, in fact, that certain small-minded people think we should just snap the tines off the fork and pretend the nub was always a spoon.