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GraniteM

@ GraniteM @lemmy.world

Posts
10
Comments
802
Joined
3 yr. ago

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  • "What does this 400-room hotel need to employ a full-time plumber for? The pipes are all fine, and no one ever complains about a clogged toilet. Fire that lazy bum!"

  • You Can’t Have Both Democracy and Billionaires

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  • Take Back Your Government is a nonfiction book about how and why to get involved in politics, primarily at a volunteer level. Lots of it is a historical artifact about how political campaigns worked in the 1940s, but it's also got some great glimpses into Heinlein's ideas about governance and one's individual responsibility to get informed and involved.

    Some of my favorite bits:

    But why be partisan? Why not vote independently, after an earnest scrutiny of the candidates and issues, for the welfare of the people as a whole? It sounds good and it would be very nice if it would work. It would also be nice if pi were exactly 3.000 instead of a bothersome 3.14159 plus.

    There are two reasons, one moral and one practical. The practical reason is this: You simply cannot be effective in politics unless you join in the process of compromise and conciliation whereby free men merge little groups into big groups until they accomplish a government. If you are not partisan you are on your own, everybody is out of step but Johnny, and the chances that you can have any effect on how this country is run are 140,000,000 to one against you.

    ...and...

    We need never be afraid of the vote of informed Americans. It is only the ignorant voter we have to fear, ignorant politically, no matter how fine his house or how expensive his schooling. Such people have never experienced democracy; they have merely enjoyed its benefits. It is hard to explain what democracy is; it is necessary to participate in it to understand it.

    The former Berlin businessman I referred to earlier told me that he blamed his own group, people with the time and the money and the opportunity to know better, for what happened to Germany. "We ignored Hitler," he said. "We considered him an unimportant fellow, not quite a gentleman, not of our own class. We considered it just a little bit vulgar to bother with him, to bother with politics at all."

    They thought of the government as "They." The only possible route to a clear conscience in politics is to accept political responsibility, either as an active member of the party in power or as an equally active member of the loyal opposition.

    ...and...

    If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.

  • Farmers and Firemen get a pass

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  • Yes...

    ...but also...

  • You Can’t Have Both Democracy and Billionaires

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  • Of what use, then, are the American Communists?

    They serve one function extremely useful to you and to the country, so useful that, if there were no Communists, we would almost be forced to create some. They are a reliable litmus paper for detecting real sources of danger to the Republic.

    Communism is so repugnant to almost all Americans, when they are getting along even tolerably well, that one may predict with certainty that any social field or group in which the Communists make real strides in gaining members or acceptance of their doctrines, any such spot is in such bad shape from real and not imaginary social ills that the rest of us should take emergency, drastic action to investigate and correct the trouble.

    Unfortunately we are more prone to ignore the sick spot thus disclosed and content ourselves with calling out more cops.

    --Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government

  • What are some actors that can only play themselves?

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  • I'm not sure if it's himself but John Spencer had an oddly specific career type cast as "guy who is smarter than the people around him and is totally exasperated with having to deal with their nonsense."

    From WarGames to The Rock to The West Wing, he's that guy. So consistent.

  • When you know you're not getting your security deposit back, it becomes more of a budget. [Feral Mills]

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  • Local Brand Realizes Customers Hate Its AI Ads, Switches to Charming Homemade Ones Instead

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  • There's like... one percent of one percent of advertising that has ever been created that actually had some kind of artistic or entertainment merit. Those insane Spongmonkies ads for Quiznos. The H&M ad Wes Anderson did. It's so vanishingly rare as to not meaningfully count, but it does happen once in a blue moon.

  • teleporter

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  • Yes, they confirmed the objective existence of the soul within the context of their fictional universe, alongside faster than light travel, time travel, accessible parallel universes, stable wormholes, hand-held weapons that can vaporize a human being, and artificial general intelligence.

    On the scale of science fiction hardness, Star Trek is somewhere between warm jello and cotton candy.

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  • 1: Closing Time, by Semisonic, but that's because I put it on when I'm trying to hustle people out of the store at the end of a day

    2: Batman Theme, by Neal Hefti

    3: Evil Plot to Blow Up Batman, by Neal Hefti, but those are because my daughter kept insisting she wanted to listen to the 1960s Batman soundtrack on the way to school.

    Numbers 4-6 are from the Frozen Soundtrack for the same reason, then back to 1960s Batman for 7-9.

    10: The Batman Theme, by the Ventures. Kid loves Batman.

    Then there's more Batman, more Frozen, and a song from The Little Mermaid.The first song that I consistently choose to listen to for myself and that hasn't been artificially inflated is #15.

    Victim of Love, by Erasure.

  • teleporter

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  • In the TNG episode Lonely Among Us, while under the influence of an alien entity, Picard disintegrates himself into a nebula. The crew spend hours trying to get him back and are about to give up, when Troi senses Picard's disembodied presence nearby, and they are able to reconstitute his body from the transporter buffer, reuniting it with his mental energy.

    So Star Trek has effectively confirmed the scientific existence of the soul, and the fact that it exists independently of the body, and that the soul can continue to exist without the body, and that the transporter can transport the soul without destroying it. So, no, the transporter is not a suicide machine.

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  • Take this over to Church of Thighentology.

  • How many farts a day is normal? Scientists just calculated what's normal

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  • One, long fart, you say?

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  • Little bit of bedbug in there, too.

  • Mamdani: Democratic Party has ‘lost its focus on working people’

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  • I'd say that's the point of having a functional democracy: you respond to the needs of the people with a series of bloodless revolutions in the form of elections so as to make bloody revolutions unnecessary. Why should there be cities in flames and blood in the streets when one can have a series of votes instead?

    This is predicated on the the concept of a functional democracy, of course, whereas ours has become less and less functionally representative every year since 1929, and then got a bullet to the brain from Citizens United.

  • Riker the Meats

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  • Cars are like horses: people will soon realise EVs are just better, claims VW boss

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  • Hell yeah, electric horses!

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  • Six fish enter! One fish leaves!

  • I am extremely fatigued with the constant negativity

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  • I taught myself a few knots! Took a few tries, but now I can tie a monkey's fist without screwing it up too badly. Gives me something to do with my hands for a while, and I can give them away as gifts.

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  • Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.