I don’t know what “other countries” you’re talking about, but where I’m from, a “can opener” looks like this:

(I’ve been using one just like this for my entire adult life, and guess what - it’s ok!)

If we’re also talking about vehicles… I’m about average height (~180 cm) but have long-ish legs, and this means that I simply don’t fit well into the driver’s seat of most cars. Even with the steering wheel adjusted all the way up, seat slid all the way back and reclined all the way forward, my legs are hitting the steering wheel and yet I can barely reach it with my hands. Because of this, I sometimes have to take my shoes off while driving.

Also, almost every car has some annoying things like your oil plug; simply because a modern combustion engine is really quite complicated and there’s not enough space under the hood to give every component a convenient place. E.g. my Delica has the starter located below the engine and quite far back, so it’s mostly covered by the engine protection plate. Good luck banging on that starter relay if it sticks in the off position and refuses to start, while you’re stuck in the mud! However I do agree that making periodic maintenance painful, like in your case, is way worse.

I was also surprised about this, but I took this quote directly from the judgement in question. As I think about it, it starts to make more sense - literally, defamation is dis (break into pieces/remove/…) + famo (fame/reputation). The word itself only conveys that someone’s reputation was injured, not that it was injured unjustly. IIUC the words for “unjust defamation” are specifically libel and slander, under common law. I think it’s similar to how there’s “homicide” (the act of one person killing another) which can be legal (e.g. self-defense) or criminal (e.g. murder). At least that’s my understanding of it.

I think the headline is incorrect - it didn’t win the lawsuit, it just got past the preliminary hearing and to substantive arguments (https://caseboard.io/cases/75bb8071-86c7-4032-bd34-e9d66eed1249). AFAIU now both parties will argue whether the contents of the report are true.

I don’t think it does necessarily,

Meanings will be considered defamatory at common law if they “substantially affect in an adverse manner the attitude of other people towards a Claimant, or have a tendency to do so”

This definition doesn’t consider the truth of the statement or even whether it is provable, merely whether it affects opinion.

AFAIU this ruling just means that the lawsuit can carry forward to substantive arguments.

I’ve found the entire text of the judgement here: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/KB/2024/3276.html

It’s also full of legalese, but as far as I understand the court did not rule on the verity of the statements, only on whether they are defamatory:

14. Meanings will be considered defamatory at common law if they “substantially affect in an adverse manner the attitude of other people towards a Claimant, or have a tendency to do so”

…

Conclusion:

…

54. The meanings of both publications are of fact and both are defamatory at common law with a Chase level 2 meaning.

This just means that a lawsuit can move on to factual arguments (i.e. arguments about the truth of those statements). Whoever is more convincing to the judge will win. So IIUC at least, the headline of this post is incorrect.

Alec from Technology Connections is known for his extensive rants about household appliances: https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections

As for me, I’m just trying to avoid things in general, and things I don’t enjoy in particular. Perhaps the only things that I find annoying at my home are:

• An awful flow-through gas water heater, which requires me to wait for like a minute before water gets up to temperature every time I need hot water (I’d go with an electric one myself, but unfortunately I’m a renter for now). It’s also a poor design because it’s going to fuck over humanity in a couple decades via climate change.
• Packaging on almost all processed food. I don’t need everything I buy to be in a plastic bag. It’s an incredibly poor design because it is almost always non-recyleable, either because it has a thin foil layer or it’s a mix of plastics or both, filling the landfills forever and contaminating everything with microplastics.
• Poor window frame design, combined with inevitable building settling, has resulted in a cracked window twice within the last year.

I have many more gripes about things, some of the most prominent:

• Most modern smartphones just suck. Gimme back the headphone jack, an SD card slot, and a back that I can open with my fingernails! (thankfully my current phone has all of those despite being only a couple years old and very cheap)
• Generally everything that has a battery which I can’t replace
• Bluetooth headphones without a headphone jack or at least audio-over-USB are an awful design, it would cost the manufacturer like a dollar do add that functionality that can come in really handy and yet they don’t
• Fuck clothes without pockets!
• Cheap plastic crap from wish.com or similar that’s designed to fail after one use, it just shouldn’t exist. I hope CPC bans this shit soon. (although I find it fun to pull out broken christmas lights from recycling, fix them and then get free christmas lights for every New Year’s)
• “Teflon” or similar frying pans. Just get a cast iron one. Lasts forever, doesn’t poison you, also allegedly enriches your food with iron

Behold… The REPUBLICAN party!

(also, RIP traffic in NYC, I hope this pushes them over the edge to just ban most private traffic in the city and become the New Amsterdam again)

Non vegans at least have the excuse of being deeply indoctrinated, and having 90+ percent of people reenforcing and defending their behaviour. The ultra rich dont.

In a way, they have been indoctrinated by capitalism, and are reinforcing that indoctrination by being the capitalists. I can totally believe that most rich people consider themselves “good people” because they have “succeeded” in the capitalist system.

Keeping people in a cage is crueler and riskier than just killing them.

That’s debatable by itself. But I’m not talking about keeping people in a cage. I’m talking about trying to forcefully re-educate them and re-integrate them into the society. If they refuse or fail then that’s on them. Even keeping someone in (a humane) prison for life is still less cruel then murdering them IMHO. This is demonstrated by the fact that most death row inmates fight their conviction up until the last moment, even though their living conditions there are awful. People who volunteer to be killed usually have severe mental issues, thus it’s closer to suicide then an informed decision.

I don’t think you quite grasp just how far gone the rich are.

As I’ve said, I’ve met and talked with one of them. They’re not all innately awful evil people (I don’t think there are any people who are born evil), merely shaped to be such by their situation. And therefore, a lot of them could be turned into productive members of society with enough re-education, therapy, and honest work.

It’s the fact that Mercurial tags the commit with the name of the branch that it was committed to which makes it much easier to determine whether a commit is included in your current branch or not.

Isn’t this trivial in Git too? git branch --contains COMMIT ?

It’s absolutely not 0, people constantly try non violent means of renegotiating social relations and get nowhere, in fact they usually get executed for the trouble.

Imprisonment and confiscations is definitionally violent; I’m not advocating for a non-violent solution to a problem which is perpetuated by violence.

Remember that I’m not talking about peaceful protests. I’m talking about isolating the parasites, trying to turn them into humans and giving them a second chance if we’re reasonably certain they’re not a threat anymore.

Revolutions have left people alive and they consistently side with counterrevolutionary forces and violently crush anyone attempting to improve equality.

Prisons are places where people are placed to stop them from causing further harm. Hard to help reactionary forces when you’re isolated from society.

The hope is that during that isolation it’s possible to change their ways.

As far as I can tell, this has never been tried by anyone.

I mean french revolution says hello? The worst that can happen is they scuttle off, rouse reactionary forces, and violently oppress billions again. Which they have consistently done no matter how attractive the proposed alternatives have been.

The french revolution was orchestrated by the bourgeoisie. The then-billionaires never “scuttled off”, they were literally half the Assembly. And that revolution also executed most of the old elites, the old order never really came back but was replaced with an imperialist order practically brought about by the Assembly/Convention themselves, so I’m not sure what point you’re making here.

Also people who aren’t vegan and have encountered the idea also suck, so that isn’t exactly making your point.

This is like a good 80% of the population nowadays. Do we execute all of them? No, we try to make them understand the consequences of their lifestyle, and teach them empathy for all living things. That’s my point.

Nobody has ever demonstrated an effective treatment for such a disordered mind.

How many times have we tried? It’s 0. AES countries throw them in (somewhat) brutal prisons or execute them, and capitalist countries with rehab-oriented prisons don’t consider parasitism a crime (which of course it is).

The same has been said many times about murderers and rapists in the past (and, by some people, in the present too) - and yet look at rates of recidivism in Scandinavia. 80% or more of violent criminals become productive members of society after being released.

Are parasites worse? Sometimes. I’ve had the displeasure of talking to a person worth ~$1B (it was Evgeniy Kaspersky for reference). They just didn’t want to think about all the suffering they are causing, instead saying shit like “I worked hard for this, if other people worked as hard they’d be as rich”. Just like most people don’t want to think where their chicken nuggets come from and how they are produced. I don’t think they lack empathy, they’re just trying their best to avoid feeling it towards people they’re exploiting.

AES countries need to push the envelope of humanity, not be stuck in brutal 17th century ways. Try to teach everyone empathy and understanding, give everyone a second chance, the worst that could happen with a parasite is that they try this shit again after being released and go back to prison, with their wealth confiscated for public good once again.

Yeah sure, Scandinavian countries are capitalist and thus billionaires are treated as demigods. We still observe that their prison system has better outcomes for everyone involved (convicts & society) compared to US/Chinese system of “prisons as punishment only” and learn from it.

That’s kinda irrelevant to murdering someone. But yeah, if you make your prisons places that fix people rather than places for punishment (provide prisoners the ability to learn actually useful skills and put them to use, and offer therapy) I think that even some of the worst parasites, murderers, etc can eventually become useful members of society (see the Scandinavian prison model for how this can be applied quite successfully).

That’s a bit better, I guess? But then China still executes the most people in the world every year, most of them not even billionaires. How many of them are innocent working-class people framed for something they didn’t do? (Hint: historically that percentage is alarmingly high if you look at other countries). Fuck that shit, countries should abolish executions after their socialist revolution succeeds.

Counterpoint: if you deem killing hundreds to thousands of others by spreadsheet to make your line go up, you have to be made an example of.

Sure. Confiscate everything they have, confiscate everything their family has, put them in prison. There is little difference in deterrence between that and the death penalty.

I don’t care if Eichmann could have been rehabilitated or if Netanyahu can, they’re not worth the manpower required to get them there.

Whether you care or not is irrelevant when we’re talking about a human life.

Crimes of necessity are one thing, death or cruel punishment won’t do a single bit. Crimes of greed? Those fucks only understand deterrence by threat of violence, because all they think of is themselves.

Sure. Imprisonment is definitionally violence.

If the Sackler family had been executed for their crimes I bet you’d see far fewer claims denied and insulin wouldn’t be worth an arm and a leg.

Or, uh, if this shit was properly regulated in the first place there wouldn’t be as many parasites getting wealthy on it, and there would be no price gouging. Look at the rest of the “developed” world, insulin is basically free there, and 0 executions were needed to get there (unless we’re counting the threat of proletariat revolution, but then the US also had that). Those who would still abuse the system could be imprisoned to stop them from doing so.

It’s self defence, you’re talking about people that have demonstrated a complete lack of empathy and a complete lack of wanting to use their resources to rectify that or limit the harms they can do.

It’s definitionally not self-defense to kill someone who’s already in handcuffs. I don’t care if they are straight up evil, no living being deserves to be murdered once they present no actual danger.

Yep, NixOS as a base + some Flatpak store for installing apps. In fact, use impermanence to just drop all OS state apart from logs, network settings and flatpaks. That way, “turn it off and then on again” will almost always work to fix the OS.

Seconded, it somehow manages to lag on my overclocked 5950X w/ 64GB of RAM. (this may be related to the Dark Mode extension or some shit, however it’s still absolutely inexcusable)

Nobody deserves the death penalty. It’s just cruelty with no benefit for the society. Studies show, time after time, that it has little to no deterrent effect. Its only purposes are either narrow-minded vengeance or preventing a person from being freed once the current government fails.

That said, I’m all for confiscating all wealth from anyone worth over a billion dollars and placing them under arrest until they can effectively demonstrate they are no longer a parasite on the society.