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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2025

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  • I worked with a dude when I was in college that used to buy broken TVs on eBay and swap out the guts, return them, and then sell the TVs to people on eBay.

    He was banned from a couple Walmarts around town because they caught on to what he was doing, but couldn’t actually prove he was doing fraud because we would also remove and re-solder the internal serial numbers back on the returned tv.






  • It essentially has the same issue. How many scenarios can we think of that need something that can crawl into rubble or explore irregular caves, but without the ability to climb? It’s what happens when a design’s aesthetic is developed before its function.

    When aesthetics is the selling point of an engineering project then the aesthetics is its purpose. In this case it’s to advertise a university’s research department.


  • Right, but my point is that you are still being forced. The legal definition of force isn’t someone successfully gets you to do the thing they wanted to, it’s being coerced via the threat of violence or imprisonment.

    Even if you decide to frag your commander, your life is still being endangered. Also, what you are advocating is a lot easier to say than do. Lower enlisted conscripts during unpopular wars develop a pretty strong bond because there is a lack of choice. No one wants to be there and no one really wants to die, or see their buddies get meaninglessly killed.

    Militaries who regularly employ conscripted forces know how to control and manipulate there conscripts into doing their jobs, even when they really don’t want to. If you want some pretty horrific accounts of this you can read about Russian conscription during the days of the Romanov empire.


  • Tbh they probably did, there’s likely more profit in it as a luxury sex toy than in prosthetics or manufacturing.

    I work in prosthetics and have seen a couple of tentacle-like terminal end devices made over the years, but they all fail to truly be useful for anything.

    They fall into the category of being not efficient enough for specific or universal uses. For something like manufacturing they aren’t as efficient as building a specific tool for a specific purpose, and for something like a prosthetic they aren’t useful enough to overcome the fact that most things we interact with everyday are made to work with something in the shape of a hand.

    So an expensive space dildo is likely the most profitable option if they can bring it to market at an achievable price. But honestly, most of these things are mainly created as an eye grabbing marketing scheme for some universities research department.


  • I mean, conscription is basically forcing people to go to war through the threat of violence. There are plenty of modern examples of people either being forced to go to war or to be imprisoned or killed.

    I get the general idea that you still ultimately have a choice to make, but a choice between serving or being imprisoned or worse still implies coercion.


  • Eh, I think there’s a decent semantic dispute for it. It’s of course dependent on your definition of deity and is mostly an exercise of pedantry. However, with the size of the universe I think there’s a pretty decent chance that there exists an intellectual being that could be interpreted as being god-like to the human perspective.

    Now I’m not making claims that this proposed being has ever had anything to do with humans, nor are they responsible for any universal creation. Just that the universe is big enough for the existence of something significantly more advanced than humans. That being said, the size of the universe that allows for the possibility of this proposal also makes it possible existence mostly pedantic.



  • The brain damage hasn’t helped, but Fetterman has always been a conservative cosplaying as a working class union guy. His father is the CEO of an insurance agency, a big Republican donor, and he bankrolled Fettermans political career.

    If you actually look into his history in government his behavior has been very consistent throughout his career. Pretty much anyone who works with him will always report that he’s an erasable contrarian and is very lazy. Even as Lt gov he barely showed up to preside over the state Senate which was mandatory, and his official schedule was empty 1/3 of the time. Even when he did decide to work, he averaged a 4-5 hour day.



  • Yes? I’m even friends with several queer people…shocking as that may be.

    I even know a few conservative leaning gay dudes, our gay district has a gaybar specifically for cowboys. Even they don’t hate or discriminate against flamboyant gay men. They might not seek their company or want anything to do with that particular scene, but they are still neighborly.


  • disclaimed explicitly that I don’t believe that speakers who use the phrase “toxic masculinity” believe that masculinity per se is toxic

    And did I accuse you of doing so?

    while I was writing, somebody else left a comment that does indeed interpret it that way.

    Yes, lemmy has a pretty established history of harboring a lot of misogynistic users which do not reflect the thoughts of everyday normal people.

    I don’t think we should be moderating our own behavior to satisfy people acting in bad faith or to the temper of bigots.


  • Imo an absolute meritocracy would first require a society of absolute equity. Otherwise how would you know if someone is actually more inherently better at something or if they just had more opportunity?

    I think meritocracies are a nice idea, but they’ve mostly been supported by societal elites throughout history because they know it’s easy to score when you’re born on third base.