What does vote splitting have to do with a Democratic primary?

Not the mayor I want, but then again I didn’t particularly want Cuomo either. I wish there had been a viable centrist candidate who hadn’t resigned in shame from his last position.

I wish I could still buy plain old corded blinds. I managed to find someone selling the precisely correct size for my apartment on Amazon despite the rule against it but now I’m staying in a house with windows of different sizes and no window coverings at all, and I’m misdirecting my spite towards my neighbors by forcing them to see me rather than buying cordless blinds.

Despite being a software developer, I don’t like “smart home” stuff. I recently spent several hundred dollars getting a couple of three-way light switches wired up (I wanted to be able to control the light from multiple locations) and people told me to get the much cheaper and more flexible smart bulbs and wireless switches, but for some reason I can’t put into words I didn’t want that.

(I suppose this is the same urge that pushes me to buy a car with a manual transmission, which in 2025 is severely limiting my options.)

I thought I could see piles of debris at the bottoms of some slopes in the after pictures which weren’t there in the before pictures, but now that I’m looking at them again, I’m no longer sure that what I’m seeing isn’t just a difference in the shadows. (Presumably the pictures were taken at different times of the day.) I’m going to edit my original statement.

No. First, even enriched uranium is not particularly radioactive without human intervention (with a half-life of 704 million years). Second, the uranium stockpile may be buried under a mountain of rubble, rather than dispersed by the explosion. Third, who knows if the Iranian government is telling the truth; they have good reason to claim that their stockpile is intact even if it isn’t.

The landslides at Fordow look extensive. The whole mountain must have shaken.

Edit: Maybe what I’m seeing is just shadows rather than new debris at the bottoms of some slopes.

Here’s an incident that is only tangentially related to what we’re talking about, but it’s one that I found memorable. My grandmother was reading a tabloid newspaper (which she tends to believe) and it apparently had an article about UFOs. She turned to me and told me that, according to the newspaper, space aliens were real and visiting Earth. Then she went about her ordinary business - the thing about the aliens was simply an interesting bit of trivia for her.

I think her reaction was not in fact particularly unusual, but I found it baffling. The arrival of space aliens would be perhaps the most important thing that has ever happened to humanity. The entire future of the species would hang in the balance, and everything would hinge on what the aliens want. I know my grandmother very well but I still don’t really understand how she thinks about things like this. The best I can come up with is that she believes in many fantastical things and therefore just one more fantastical thing changes little for her.

This isn’t a direct response to what you’re describing but I think it’s relevant as an illustration of one way how the fantastical can be less important than the mundane for people.

The idea that Trump can start wars as he sees fit is a frightening one, but I’m not sure that in practice Congress is capable of making these decisions (especially with regard to unconventional military actions as opposed to traditional wars). It is simply too dysfunctional an institution, although I suppose institutional paralysis would lead to the outcome that isolationists and pacifists want.

I think people’s behavior is determined much more by social conventions and the expectations of their community (in addition to pragmatic self-interest) than it is by logical reasoning. I’ll risk being the preachy vegetarian by discussing people’s attitudes towards eating meat. Most people sincerely believe that cruelty to animals is wrong, and also that factory farming (if not all killing) is cruel. Yet they eat meat. I even know some people who started eating meat again after being ethical vegetarians. Did they change their minds about whether or not harming animals is bad? No. If pressed, they feel guilty but they don’t like to talk about it. The reason they’re eating meat is because it’s convenient and almost everyone expects them to, not because they reasoned from first principles. Likewise with religion - if no one else is giving everything away to the poor and everyone will think you’re crazy if you do rather than praising you, you’re not going to give everything away to the poor even if it would make sense to do so given what you believe.

Edit: Kidney donation is another example. I met a woman once who donated a kidney to a friend of her mother’s. This person wasn’t someone particularly dear to her, but she found out that he needed a kidney to live and she gave him hers. I think that what she did is commendable, but I still have both my kidneys. This is despite the fact that I sincerely believe that if, for example, I saw a drowning child then I would risk my life to save him. People would think I was a hero if I saved the child, or that I was a coward if I didn’t try. Meanwhile almost everyone I know would think I went crazy if I donated a kidney to a stranger. My relatives would be extremely worried, and they would try to talk me out of it. I’m not going to do something difficult, painful, and (to an extent) dangerous when everyone I know would disapprove, even if in principle I think risking my life to save another’s is a good thing to do.

I’m upset by many things going on in the world but I’m not overwhelmed because there are no relevant decisions for me to make. Look at it this way: what’s the difference between reading a book that says Genghis Khan killed a hundred more people than you thought he did centuries ago and reading a newspaper that says a hundred people died in some catastrophe yesterday? In both cases, you’ve learned that total strangers died in the past, there was nothing you could have done, and there will be no direct effect on your own life. It’s natural to be more upset by the more recent deaths (and I admit that I would be) but I think it isn’t logical.

The exception to that is AI. I think I do need to change my own life in order to increase my chance of thriving in an AI-dominated future, at least because if some jobs will still exist then I’ll need to be able to do one of them.

(I suppose “Do I flee the country?” is another decision I technically need to consider, but the answer is “No unless things get dramatically worse.” Thus there isn’t much to think about on a daily basis.)

The intent is presumably to force Iran to accept that it cannot be safe, and that the best it can do is to appease its enemies. That is, as a matter of fact, currently true if the USA decides to see things through. It’s a situation that many countries have been forced to accept over the course of history (and one that Iran has been eager to impose on is neighbors).

I know that there are religious scientists and I think humans often compartmentalize beliefs in such a way that their belief about the supernatural doesn’t affect their assessment of real-world situations. I’ll even go further and say that often it seems like their belief affects their behavior much less than it logically ought to, with some (but not all) people who apparently sincerely believe in an all-seeing God and an afterlife still acting just like atheists in relevant situations. In this context, the fanatics are sometimes technically the more rational ones - I disagree with their premises, but their actions make sense if those premises are considered true.

I’m an atheist. I dated a woman once who believed in spirits. I think she experienced night terrors among other things and interpreted them as supernatural phenomena. It didn’t cause problems then but I was a lot younger and I think now I’m less tolerant of that sort of thing. But who knows - I was crazy about her so maybe if I meet a woman I’m crazy about like that again then I’ll tolerate anything.

More recently I’ve dated people who believe in a vague sort of life after death but never someone who practiced any religion. I think I would immediately rule out practicing religious people if I were going through a list (as when dating online) but if I met someone in person, really liked her, and then found out she was religious then I’m not sure what I would do. It would definitely be off-putting.

The problem for me isn’t the lifestyle differences but rather my impression that religious people are missing the point about the basic nature of existence, when it really should be obvious. It makes me feel like I’m patronizing them, because to be frank I don’t tend to think of them as my intellectual equals. (And I know that makes me sound like a pompous jerk.)

I completely quit reddit in protest after using it for over ten years when it threatened to replace the moderators of a small subreddit I participated in after that subreddit shut down during the API protests. I don’t actually care about the API myself (I never used anything other than old reddit) but I thought that reddit had no moral (as opposed to merely legal) right to take over something the mods had built and it merely hosted.

Lemmy is worse, but at least I’m following my principles.

I don’t think that Iran is going to get much useful sympathy from any country not already on its side (and of those, Russia has other priorities). Iran’s ambitions have put it at odds with both Western countries and the Arab world and international law (even if it is on Iran’s side - I don’t know) is never going to lead countries to act against the dictates of realpolitik.

I also don’t think that failing to destroy these facilities necessarily makes a nuclear-armed Iran inevitable, given that Israel and the USA apparently have total air dominance. The infrastructure needed to deploy nuclear ICBMs can’t all be kept deep underground and Iran’s dependence on oil exports makes its economy particularly vulnerable to strategic bombing. I just don’t trust Trump to see things through if his initial attempts fail - he’s too impulsive. (And I’m not sure the moral calculus remains the same either - it’s one thing to blow up a few underground weapons labs and quite another to engage in a strategic bombing campaign against the entire country.)

I hope the bunker-buster bombs worked. Whether the costs of war are worth paying in order to destroy Iran’s nuclear program is debatable, but they’re definitely paid in vain if the program survives.

I wonder to what extent this is actually popular. I have a stereotype in mind of small but vehement and politically active groups getting laws like this passed while the majority of voters is opposed but not opposed enough to vote for the other party, but maybe I’m biased because I find the plastic bag ban where I live (not Oregon) so annoying. But not so annoying that I’d vote for a Republican because of it.

In this thread: Americans supporting “Death to America!”

Nah if I’m going to shill for any Manhattan grocery store, it will be Fairway. It’s also really expensive but it feels like being in the sort of store you’d go to if you were rich, not like being ripped off. Their cheese counter has prices per 1/4 pound for some of the cheeses but then if you get some $15 per 1/4 pound cheese it will taste so good that you’ll think it was worth it. I haven’t been there in years but I still long for that cheese.

I don’t think that’s actually an unusual conversation for people who live in Manhattan to have. The comments about relative prices are accurate in my experience - I live on the same block as a Gristides and I still never shop there because of how expensive it is, even compared to Whole Foods. I get most of my groceries in Brooklyn on the weekends.

I also know a woman with a whole stack of different credit cards, so she always has the one that gives her the most rewards for whatever specific thing she’s buying. I’m sure she has one for grocery shopping.