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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I obviously do not support this application of martial law. I pointed at a mask mandate because it fits your dictatorship vision.

    I also didn’t say a thing about kidnapping. Telling people to “get off a plane” without a justification is not kidnapping. If you say “get off this plane, we think it has a bomb on it” things wouldn’t fly any better with people freaking over and having panic attacks. You can do the explaining once people are out of the plane.


  • So, you can’t accept the idea that in very specific circumstances it can be a good thing for cops to tell you to do something without having to reach for a court order? Like an emergency evacuation order that needs to be secret during that very same hour for whatever good reason or the checkpointing of people in a region where you know that a major prison break just happened?

    Not talking about the random pig just thinking “hmm, I’m the boss now” out of nowhere; I’m talking about someone like the head of the police forces giving an order indiscriminately that is limited to a temporal scope.

    Even things like “masks are mandatory” can be seen as a “muh freedoms” violation.

    If you take things to such extremes, can we have the freedom not to have such freedom? Apparently is what the entire world wants except for a few thousand internet folks






  • As for the “no system is foolproof”, you’re thinking of implementations, not algorithms. An algorithm can indeed be something-proof. Most “known” algorithms are built on top of very strong mathematical foundations stating what is possible, what is not and what is a maybe.

    As for the ads thing, Mozilla is not making a dime off this. It is not monetizable. They’re basically expecting that by giving advertisers a fairly “benign” way to do their shenanigans they will stop doing things the way they currently do (with per-individual tracking).

    The absolutists might say that there’s no such thing as benign ads, however truth is that the market forces behind ads are big enough that you’d get website-integrity-bullshit rather ad-free web. Having tracking less ads is better than having a “this website only works in chrome” or “only without extensions” internet.

    Is there any other possibility? Maybe. Is is reasonable to think that the moment tracking starts getting blocked em masse, we risk a web-integrity-bullshit +wherever-said-tracking-can-exist-only internet? I think so.


  • Nope. At least in Lisbon (which is probably just the same as Barcelona) the vast majority of them go straight at the tourist traps. They barely get any contact with the culture beyond having some foreigner guide pretend he knows about the city point at things while driving their rickshaw in the most annoying possible way. At the end of the day they end up eating whatever sounds foreign while listening to foreign music. This is an actual common complaint people have in Lisbon, that it is not Lisbon, it has been pretending it is Disneyland for the last 10-15 years.

    There are places where people do that kind of tourism you’re describing. Barcelona, Lisbon and a few more popular places, for the vast majority of tourists, is not.

    As for the “support” argument, they mostly support low-wage low-qualification boss-owns-50-other-places businesses while, collaterally, raising the expenses of every other business, prompting those to just close the doors and move elsewhere. If you are qualified in basically anything, the job market in Lisbon is a mess. Plenty of people do lie about their qualifications to state them as lower than they are, just in order to get these crap jobs. The purchasing power fell, locals are actually much poorer since the mass tourism wave that started when the world rebound from 2008. The median salary in Lisbon is like 1000€ while a rent for a cube starts at like 800-1200€.

    As for the “yell at the government”, I don’t know about the situation in Barcelona, but in Portugal, the far-right just received 20% of the votes because they are the only ones addressing those problems (in a very “close the doors” kind of way). Some municipalities straight up started not giving a damn at as they cash in more from the tourists than from the local’s taxes. Oeiras and Cascais, two kind of famous tourist destinations next to Lisbon straight up are renaming official stuff to English in order to appease their real clients (eg. Not the people who live there).



  • These last year’s of fighting were not exclusively done by volunteers and patriots at all.

    Source: Gave a place to stay to a men (28yo) dodging the draft, weeks after the war started. He told me that his friends were either hiding in some grandpa house, pretending that they never knew about any draft invite, or straight up ran to some other country (some of them bribing border guards in the process).

    These situations happened in 2022, not now. You can probably imagine that this is far from “with volunteers”. A lot of these were caught (or didn’t hide in the first place) and were sent to some army outpost.


  • When the likely outcome is death, most people don’t want to fight. If people were just allowed to flee to some other country, not only the bully country gets a free and repeatable pass but the neighbouring countries get some immigration crisis which lead to not-so-fun rhetorics.

    The Finns were some of the most vigorous defenders in history, but if they just had the option of moving en mass to Sweden, consequence-free, they probably would. If that was to be the case every decade or so, today’s Russia would be bigger than the USSR ever was and without any republic whatsoever, only Russians given that everyone else fled. They have quite the history of chomping territory; that’s how they got this big to start with.

    You probably understand that this wouldn’t fly. That the other countries wouldn’t allow it to happen anyway. But at the end of the day, you need boots on the ground to do anything about it.


  • Everyone considers stealing wrong. Everyone condemns big fat pigs robbing millions from the financial system wrong. If I had to place a bet, most people would of they had the chance. The fact people are hypocritical doesn’t mean it is not condemnable. DiCaprio is a piece of shit in a lot of people’s mind, just not in the judicial system.

    No shit that a lot of middle-aged or maybe elderly man would enjoy 16 year old teasing them. Not so much for woman but if I had to bet it would happen as well. Our sex drive plays a lot here. Back in the we’re animals in nature thingy, putting dicks into young women was almost always a “good thing”; propagating genes and stuff. Just so happens that we’re trying not to behave like wild beasts anymore.

    The brain would ideally be fully matured before one is to take life-long decisions, however 25 years is an awful lot of time. My armchair sociologist says that people would not tolerate that for the same reason people do not tolerate expecting for their kids to be 25 before allowing them to cross the road by themselves. Maturity is not a linear thing. At the age of 5 you’ll try to kill yourself every now and then. At the age of 10 you barely do that. 18 is an arbitrary line, yes, because it is believed that most people at that age are able to figure life long decisions well-enough. People still get some sparks of development after 18, but it is nowhere compared to the 5-10 or the 10-15.

    You state that age differences at the time were far more common. Well, at the time most marriages were arranged and considered plenty of things above the wellbeing of the brides.

    In any case, we’re working around my key argument. We’re all silly animals, but god and it’s prophets are supposed to be perfect. You can point a finger at them for that. Yes, fuck Francis. That guy is a piece of shit as well and points fairly well at the bullshit that Christianity is. This is not a anti-muslim rant; it is a “can we condemn condemnable people that were supposed to know what they were doing as they were ‘perfect’?”


  • That’s not the case in my western country but sure, hit that scarecrow. I personally know underage people dating 25-ish people.

    What is frowned upon is people in completely different levels of maturity creating a tremendous imbalance, and usually abuse. DiCaprio dating teens is not a “we stand on an equal footing and love each other” kind of thing, is a “I’m famous and will use this fact to mess with teenagers”.

    An elderly hardly has a healthy relationship with a teenager, and this is particularly true for arranged marriages.

    This western civilization thing of your already had that in the past. We stopped doing that rather recently as we figured it creates more trouble than not. Let’s not pretend that “western” is some sort of axiom that just appeared and not the product of the evolution of some society. Just like eastern societies have such evolutions in some aspects. For example some eastern civilisations figured that clean spaces are better and so they try real hard to try to keep them that way. Of course you’re free to argue that this cleanliness is not needed so it is a purely subjective thing of these societies and not necessarily better, but sociologists night disagree.

    As for “ok if the victim preforms the deed”, that’s irrelevant. The same criteria applies. Promoting healthier relationships promotes a healthier society. If some 14/yo teenager is obsessed with dating way older men for whatever reason, chances are people are going to judge it, legal or not, no matter the society.


  • I didn’t even specify any religion. I just said that god, any god, by definition, can’t evolve.

    This ain’t Hercules adventures where gods are just sky humans with perks. Mainstream gods (&co) are all perfect in their “mysterious ways”.

    As such, if a prophet was into pedophilia, then either pedophilia is right (which I personally find odd… but them I’m merely human…) or that prophet wasn’t exactly the most exemplary lad.

    Whatever the case, people’s lives are worth of dignity, be it Palestinians, Israelis, South Africans or Santa. That’s not what I was arguing against at all. We can defend people while, at the same time, pointing the finger out at some bullshit they do.

    The west is also full of bullshit. So what? We can also point the finger at that. Be my guest. I never said that we were perfect.



  • I don’t think you’re envisioning physics in many of these situations. Might not be the case in Barcelona which is pretty big and growable but let me give you another example to point out why that generalization doesn’t stick. I’m from nearby Sesimbra, a 5k pop village in a very very cool-looking place.

    If I had to bet, Sesimbra receives like 50k tourists a month, many of which want to stay in hotels and tents and illegal caravans. If one expands Sesimbra, the beauty of the place gets destroyed for everyone. If one does not, the fisherman (yes, it is a fishing village) are now competing with 50k other fellas for land, in a village that can’t sustain any other industry.

    Even if you tax the hell of tourists and only a fifth keeps going, that is already too many. It literally is destroying both the nature and the livelihood of people that were there for centuries.

    I get the idea that people want to see fancy places and we don’t have that many Sesimbras in the world, but this massification is basically forbidding people from living anywhere that happens to be pretty and has a good weather. The richer tourists stay in the hotels (which lay on top of bulldozed homes) and the locals are now 20km away because physics couldn’t care less. 50k ain’t gonna stay in that tiny valley, people do not fit.

    We have huge chunks of the coastal dunes destroyed (and those take a long time to recover) because of such misuse and overuse. Everyone wants to go to the beach and everyone wants to have resorts or whatever, and yet the places and the populations are taking very hard beatings. No amount of policy making solves some of those situations given that you can’t just have quotas of people allowed to visit a city within the EU. The entire region of Algarve is a disaster.

    And yes, there are airports with tourist taxes, but Portugal doesn’t have all that many airports. These villages (Sesimbra, Sintra, Ericeira…) are serviced by the same airport as Lisbon. Can’t hit tourists with a tax without hitting businesses and others.


  • They partially solve the fuel and the bad air problems. In exchange they damage roads way more (I recall reading that the damage is proportional to the vehicle weight to the fourth power, probably with some more nuance) and that also creates substantially more rubber micro particle pollution. They also happen to be more dangerous in the event of a crash. Plus the additional challenges with grid load, which some people dismiss with silly ideas like having said cars act like load balancers (that would be a mess to scale).

    In most cases, EVs are not a solution to mobility, they are a solution to save the car industry from real solutions to climate change, namely spamming trams, trains and buses (in sparse locations) all over the place.



  • Has it occurred you that they do not want it at all? Tourism money is not a blessing. It results in terrible jobs that pay miserably and prevents better jobs from appearing as the living costs skyrocket.

    Tourist season begins and boom, surge of 110% minimum-wage jobs. 6 months later, everyone is fired and invited to live 6 more months off the sun. People are pretty fed up with this new form of bellow-minimum-wage slavery you can’t possibly imagine.

    Source: Engineer who lives in Lisbon and does not need to submit to it but still needs to pay 150% minimum wage for rent. There isn’t a single person besides bribed politicians and tourism-related business owners who wants this.