I miss the KDE 3.x crystal theme

I see an ostrich

Oh fuck! Buy travel insurance…

Then they were pulled on board, the survivors thought they’d died and landed in hell

A malicious gene drive. Basically, use molecular tools to ensure that a gene is always passed down from a parent to its progeny, regardless of the other parent’s genetic makeup.

Many choices available: propagate resistance to a pesticide for mosquitos, guarantee Huntington’s disease in a family, or crash a population of beneficial species by reducing fertility, to name a few.

Australia: carrying out elections.

Voting is compulsory and you will be fined if you don’t vote without an acceptable reason.

But because voting is compulsory, it’s extremely easy and accessible. Waiting in line for more than 15 minutes is a long wait. Even in the suburbs you’re not usually more than a five minute drive from a polling place.

If you think you’ll have trouble getting to a polling place on election day (a Saturday), you can request a postal ballot or vote early at a different polling place.

We have an independent electoral commission federally and in each state/territory to organise elections (depending on which level of government you’re voting for). They also handle district boundaries to remove gerrymandering.

All ballots are marked and counted by hand. The counting process is open and transparent: any candidate can send people to inspect the counting process and ensure there are no irregularities.

This sounds like a Carmen Sandiego heist

Russian windows really need fixing up

Did you ever contrast it with Brave New World? In many ways the latter is more disturbing since the masses are kept busy with frivolity to question their world.

Their rationale was, get this, “people don’t know who their councillors are”

Like holy shit nobody ever knows who their local MLCs or senators are, but are we scrapping hare clarke? No.

It’s a sleazy tactic to increase the impact of major parties.

For a sec I thought this was a chrorpleth of how much people were paid to make choropleths

They really like being in opposition, the Vic coalition

🙈

I think this is a really interesting question. To me, if I hear a claim, I might say I accept it as knowledge or believe it as a worldview.

For example, I get irked by people asking if I “believe” in climate change. To me, it’s not a matter of belief: there is a body of knowledge being scrutinised by extraordinarily smart and talented people. I accept the existence of and need to mitigate climate change.

On the other hand, do I believe we’re not alone in the universe? I can’t rely on knowledge, it’s a lot of intuition.

I wish that naked TLDs were a thing. Like https://com/ or https://london/

I’m just a casual observer, but do white cats get visible scratches more easily? And are they easier fix up?

Some car models look fantastic in white, sort of going for that mid-2000s futurism feel.

I used to love forums back in the day, but I must say I’ve really gotten over the format of the medium. It promotes email-like long form responses with space used up with avatar images, handles and signature blocks. Nested replies become a nightmare steer several layer’s and you’re cooked on mobile.

Would love a Lemmy-like plugin to parse vBulletin forums. Endless scroll for topics, minimal non-content fluff, easy and quick replies. (The irony of this reply length isn’t lost on me. Most of my replies are short, promise!)

Thanks for the suggestion I’ll follow it up!

Thank you for reminding me of this one! I keep forgetting to try it out

Isn’t it fortunate that we have robust user-centred privacy frameworks to protect people from corporate overreach. 🙃