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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Specifically the US is already spending more federal tax dollars on healthcare, per capita, than the UK is spending on the NHS.

    Now the NHS is underfunded but imagine what the US could afford in terms of healthcare quality and availability if you add what Americans are currently paying to their insurances on top of that.

    And the inefficiencies aren’t just capitalist grift, btw: It’s also that the US system, systemically, does not do prevention. Lots of ER visits could be avoided if people wouldn’t have to fear bankruptcy when they go to a regular check-up, but noone gets turned down at the ER and noone can afford the bills so hospitals get stuck with the bills and the government has to bail them out. That’s where a huge chunk of that federal money is flowing, next to medicare and medicaid, which both cost way more than they should because aforementioned grift, and lobbyist-written laws enabling that grift.


  • If you had a look at the actual statistics, with measures such as “be on hormones for at least X months before competing” in place: Middling athletes stay middling, shoddy stay shoddy, stellar ones stay stellar. If Michael Phelps transitioned and then competed and won it wouldn’t be because of being born as a man, but because he’s a genetic freak. Ideal limb structure, something about his lactose processing, you name it, he’s been born with tons of advantages.

    Which brings me to another point: No, the competitions have never been fair. Grit and determination is necessary, but definitely not sufficient, to win the Olympics. Athletes transitioning to get an edge? I believe it when transphobes demonstrate it, under doctor’s supervision, on themselves. More likely they’d off themselves due to dysphoria before they could even dream of competing.



  • Mostly among nobility, given that it was quite similar in different places (e.g. Rome (cum manu) vs. the Germanic tribes (Muntehe)) it’s probably something that got imported by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. It never was the sole form of marriage, and much less common to unheard of among people with less political power to inherit.

    That form getting outlawed was past enlightenment (16th and 17th century), at least in Germany the right of a woman to annul a forced marriage was considered as established in the 18th century… before that it was probably hit and miss, depending on suzerain, etc. Love marriage becoming the ideal was only in the 19th. That’s not to say that people didn’t marry for love earlier, but that was the point where economical considerations were put second place at best. Also couples of course have eloped since time immemorial. Also nobles. Say, Mary Tudor.

    And then we have to factor inheritance practices into it – again, in Germany (a, by and large, stem family culture) single heirs were the norm (until that was outlawed you can give a single kid at most 50% of everything nowadays), with the property transfer generally being done while the parents were still alive: Transfer of the estate to a freshly married couple (one of them your kid) in exchange for support in old age, archives are full of transfer contracts like that. If you wanted to marry someone your parents couldn’t stand it was very possible to hear “then your younger sibling is going to inherit”. The non-inheriting kids would set off elsewhere, get a stipend to learn a trade, become clergy, or be employed by the inheriting sibling.



  • in that we treat children’s ability to make informed decisions differently than that of adults’.

    14yolds can make informed decisions the question is whether they bother to do so, not whether they have the capacity. The main difference in Germany is a) specialised judges and b) sentences and sentencing institutions which capitalise on the fact that youth are still very malleable. While ordinary prison guards are social workers and adults can be absolutely bone-headed and set in their ways, correctional youth institutions have an army of pedagogues and psychologists running circles around the kids, forming them.



  • Generally, you don’t get charged as an adult until you’re 18 in America, so, not applicable.

    Being charged as a minor is still getting charged. The offences you stand trial for are the same, it’s the sentencing that differs. So if it was illegal to have sex with a 14yold, and then two 14yolds were having sex, we’d have to put them both on trial for sexual abuse of the other because they’re both criminally mature. Under 14yolds cannot be tried.

    so I can’t really understand how or why you would have a law saying 14 years is old enough for sex, but 18 for porn, but 21 for prostitution, as a premise.

    Because having sex and earning money with sex are two very different kinds of things. Kids are also old enough to buy shovels and dig holes doesn’t mean we let them work in the mines. They can have and earn money (within reasonable parameters, think doing paper rounds or working a trade in the context of learning a trade) and spend it, they cannot take on debt or future obligations (like a mobile contract which you can’t cancel on short notice and such).

    Oh, and maybe this is worth pointing out in contrast to the US: We actually have sex ed and none of that abstinence only BS which obviously doesn’t work, look at your teen pregnancy rates.


  • Why shouldn’t it be 14. With 14 you’re old enough to stand trial so you’re old enough to decide who you want to fuck. There’s staggered protections, though:

    • No exploitation of lack of sense of sexual self-determination of under 16yolds if the perpetrator is over 21. Over 16 that sense is presumed to be present, and under 21yolds aren’t themselves considered mature enough to know what they’re doing. Also from 18-21 either juvenile or adult criminal law may apply, depends on the defendant.
    • No sex against money or money-valued things (prostitution, sugar daddying) until 18, also no sex with persons in a position of authority, trust, care, etc (teacher, boss, whatnot). Also, no porn.
    • No recruitment into prostitution under 21years old (side note that’s where a good chunk of the “human trafficking” statistic in Germany comes from. I’m not saying the law is bad all I’m saying we shouldn’t confuse chaining women to radiators with driving through the Romanian countryside asking gals whether they want to make lots of money).

    Technically 13/14 relationships are illegal, but courts apply Radbruch’s formula to throw those cases out.



  • Earthworks are expensive, doubly so if you need specialised techs because fibre isn’t easy to install much less splice. If you get fibre to within 200-500m of the property G.Fast will deliver 100Mbit to 1Gbit, which is way faster than most people are willing to pay for. And that’s old tech in fact most plans for FTTH are actually FTTF, that is, fibre only reaches the property border, then you get a copper cable from there using XG-FAST, a single-user DSL installation. Expect something on the order of 8Gbit/s. Which is an amount of speed most people’s PCs can’t even deal with, 1Gbit NICs are still the norm with 2.5G making inroads. Gigabit ethernet has been sufficient for the vast, vast, majority of people for a good 20 years now.

    Things might be a bit different in the US because suburbia and those ludicrously sparse neighbourhoods, yep going directly to fibre at least to the property border probably makes sense there. But in the city? Provide fibre to a block, the rest of the infrastructure can be reused. It’s not cheap to run fibre through apartment building hallways, either, and no running Ethernet on those copper lines is a much worse idea, ethernet can’t deal gracefully with interference, crosstalk, and otherwise shoddy copper.


  • It’s also not hard to use that fibre connection to the neighbourhood to provide DSL. That’s precisely what it’s made for: Use that copper last mile and have whatever on the upstream side. And there’s plenty of DSL hardware that doubles as POTS and/or ISDN hardware, you can upgrade the whole neighbourhood to “DSL available” by installing such a thing, connecting all the lines to it, and then remotely activating DSL when people sign up.

    Over here they’re actually moving away from that, opting for voip instead and using DSL over the whole frequency spectrum.


  • I mean… back in the days I would never have bought a uATX board. You need expansion slots, after all, video, sound, TV, network, at least.

    Nowadays? Exactly one PCIe slot occupied by the graphics card. Soundcards are pointless nowadays if your onboard doesn’t suffice for what you want to do you’d get an external audio interface, have it away from all that EM interference in the case, TV we’ve got the internet, NIC is onboard and as I won’t downgrade my network to wifi that’s not needed, either.

    As far as I’m concerned pretty much all of my boards were an upgrade while also simultaneously becoming more and more budget.


  • Depends on the desktop. I have a NanoPC T4, originally as a set top box (that’s what the RK3399 was designed for, has a beast of a VPU) now on light server and wlan AP duty, and it’s plenty fast enough for a browser and office. Provided you give it an SSD, that is.

    Speaking of Desktop though the graphics driver situation is atrocious. There’s been movement since I last had a monitor hooked up to it but let’s just say the linux blob that came with it could do gles2, while the android driver does vulkan. Presumably because ARM wants Rockchip to pay per fucking feature per OS for Mali drivers.

    Oh the VPU that I mentioned? As said, a beast, decodes 4k h264 at 60Hz, very good driver support, well-documented instruction set, mpv supports it out of the box, but because the Mali drivers are shit you only get an overlay, no window system integration because it can’t paint to gles2 textures. Throwback to the 90s.

    Sidenote some madlads got a dedicated GPU running on the thing. M.2 to PCIe adapter, and presumably a lot of duct tape code.



  • there are radical-ecologists that

    …are way too small in number and connections and frankly energy to pull off a covert stunt like that. This isn’t like getting a bunch of people to live in treetops to make it complicated for the forest to give way to a chemical plant.

    Sure there’s folks with ideas like that but as all other urban guerillas it’s doomed to fail. Embarrassingly so. The type of people willing to do these kinds of things aren’t the kind of people who’d agree with anyone on anything much less trust another affinity group to not be moles. The higher the stakes you insist on the more isolated you are the less you can coordinate.

    If this was a chain of attacks over a longer time-span, sure, then one group could have inspired another, but everything coordinated? Forget it.


  • It may have been some sort of “style” but it was what they were putting on the spit to cut from and being sold as “döner” on the menu.

    Then you should have contacted the authorities. Also shops using cheap meat don’t do their own skewers they buy them frozen – you can also get good meat in frozen form, but if a shop makes their own skewer they’re not going to use shoddy ingredients that makes no economical sense at all.

    Actually the pizza definitions do specify the thickness of the crust

    Sensibly so, there’s pizza styles with much thicker crusts than Neapolitana (also Italian ones). Not sure that’s necessary for Döner simply because noone is cutting the meat off in slabs. 2mm minimum btw sounds rather thick. 5mm are definitely too thick. Heck that’s an acceptable lower range for Wienerschnitzel. The maximum makes sense, a minimum not really.

    And, as said: If they want to register Bursa Döner to be like that, a specific type of meat without spices and cut in rather thick slices, they’re free to (though regulating the length of the blade is still BS). But why shouldn’t there be other Döner beside that.


  • Meat in bread indeed is not the German part, for a German Döner veggies and sauce aren’t optional, even when served on a plate. Default is Tsatsiki – not even Cacik, but the Greek stuff, without mint, dill, or extra water. Cucumber, tomato, onions, and some sort of cabbage as veggies, as well as the option of with Scharf, implemented via (usually pickled) Jalapenos and/or Sambal Oelek. There’s various things to the whole thing you see in neither German or Turkish cuisine, it is true fusion food, wouldn’t be possible without the different cuisines meeting.

    As for the word, no, this is like the Italians trying to regulate what “Pizza” means instead of, rightly, regulating what “Pizza Neapolitana” means. If Swedes want to put pineapple in their Döner then Germans are going to join in with Turks calling it a crime against food but we’re also not going to stop them.

    I’ve heard all kinds of crazy stuff from outside Germany, like using ketchup or mayonnaise, can’t even decide which is worse they’re both atrocious choices. There’s exactly one valid reason why you would use a sauce that’s not yoghurt-based, and that’s because you’re making a vegan variant – which would then imitate a yoghurt-based sauce (Vegan is not at all common but veggie options aren’t rare, usually replacing meat with falafel otherwise the same concept).


  • Then you saw something, but definitely not Döner.

    I’ll grant that it’s easier to hide shoddy meat if use lots of spices and sell it mixed with veggies compared to serving it on a plate with rice but that doesn’t mean that you can sell just anything as Döner in Germany. The same overall dish concept with stuff shaved from a ground meat skewer isn’t nearly as nice, but it’s still better than McDonalds so it has its place on the market… as “Ground meat skewer pocket Döner-style”, not “Döner”. And the Turkish initiative would change nothing about that.

    Side note there’s a lot of things to look out for when it comes to the quality of a German Döner, how the meat is cut from the skewer is not one of them. It literally makes no difference, yet the initiative wants to regulate the bloody length of the bloody blade. It’s pointlessly over-restrictive. Pizza Neapolitana also regulates a lot of things but not the size of the pizza shovel – as long as it fits into the oven and it’s a comfortable size for the cook to handle, who cares? It also doesn’t try to define “Pizza”, only “Pizza Neapolitana”, and if the initiative was restricting itself to the term “Bursa Döner” or something noone would mind.