Nah, I know how to really piss 'em off. The definition of ‘white’ has always been cultural, not genetic. Look at how the Irish or Italians weren’t considered ‘white’ for many generations. So I propose we modify the definition of ‘white’ to deliberately exclude people with strong Southern heritage. Maybe we can justify it with racist psuedoscience. “No one whose ancestors who have lived in such a hot and humid area for so long can really be white.” If you have ancestors who have lived in the American South for more than three generations, you are now a person of color by default, regardless of your skin color. You no longer get to live in the ‘white’ club. If the Irish can be excluded from being white, so can the Southerners. Only people whose ancestors fought on the right side of the Civil War will get to call themselves white from here on out. We’ll even add a question to the Census that asks how long long your ancestors have lived below the Mason-Dixon line. Anyone who says three or more generations will automatically be classified as non-white, regardless of what they list their stated race as. We’ll take the thing from them that they value above everything else, their very whiteness.

Burn the witch!

Professional hitmen don’t actually exist. It’s a ‘business’ that you can’t possibly advertise for and has no way for the customer to assess the quality of the provider in advance. Sometimes killings do happen in exchange for money, but they don’t involve someone that is a professional killer that works with the public as their primary source of income. It just doesn’t exist. But there are some cases where killing does happen for money.

Sometimes two people will conspire to kill another for profit. Maybe one spouse hates another spouse. They ask a close friend or relative to kill their spouse, and they offer a portion of proceeds from life insurance as a payment for their risk and trouble. Or they’re cheating on their spouse with someone else, stand to inherit all their spouses assets upon their demise, and promise to marry the person they’re cheating with, thus sharing all the assets with them. In this case, it’s not a stranger being hired; the killer has known the person ‘hiring’ them for decades.

Some killings-for-hire are gang related. A gang wants someone killed. They don’t hire a random person to do it. They get one of their own members, who they’ve already known for many years and is a full member of the gang. In compensation for the huge risk the person is taking on to perform the deed, they offer a large sum of cash. Again, an unvetted stranger is not being hired. This person has likely already committed numerous crimes on the gang’s behalf in the past. When you’ve already committed enough crimes on a gang’s behalf to get you years in prison, a murder isn’t such a stretch.

Some killings-for-hire are done at the behest of nation-states. Spycraft. The KGB or CIA hire someone in a foreign country who is already sympathetic to them to kill someone the intelligence agency wants taken out. The intelligence agency doesn’t just select anyone, they go through a long vetting process just like they would any other intelligence asset. In fact, the potential assassin has likely already provided good intelligence and assistance to them for years, already risked extensive jail time or worse. If you’re a US military member that’s been providing intelligence to the KGB for a decade and have already participated in sabotage efforts, you’re already looking at treason charges if you’re caught. Offing someone for the KGB isn’t such an escalation. And when a nation-state hires someone to perform a killing, they also offer the person a plausible way out. The CIA can hire someone to kill someone for them in a foreign country and hand that person a US passport along with a few million safely in a US bank account in their name. Hell, they can make sure the assassin’s family has been given US citizenship and is already in the US before the deed is done. The CIA assassin can perform the killing, and as long as they can get to US or friendly territory before the foreign cops catch up with them, they’ll be completely free and clear. And regardless, their family will already be set for life in the US.

These are the kinds of scenarios where killings actually do occur in exchange for money. No one hires someone to kill another that they haven’t heavily vetted. If a random civilian is going to hire someone else to kill someone, they won’t hire a professional assassin. They’ll hire their brother or their lover. Otherwise contract killings only are done by organizations like gangs or national intelligence agencies, and they only hire people to do so that they’ve worked with for years and who has already committed numerous less severe crimes for them in the past.

In short, there really is no such thing as a professional assassin that serves the general public. Maybe if you are the spouse of a high-level violent gang member, you might be able to convince them to use the gang’s resources to pay one of their trusted members to kill someone in exchange for cash. But if you’re just a random average person? Forget it. There simply are not professional contract killers hiding in the shadows that a random civilian can hire if they have the cash. Anyone claiming to be that is simply a cop. Any person who DID try to start a career like this would be caught very quickly and have a very, very short career.

Are you high?

It’s really rich. The same party that six months ago was apoplectic because a handful of Jewish students were blocked by protesters from using one of many doors at a few buildings when they attempted to march through barricades, decrying it as Hitler returned? That same party is now trying to start a pogrom against Haitian immigrants in Ohio.

At first I read this as “the next generation of buffets.” I was getting excited that someone had figured out how to make a buffet that isn’t a food safety nightmare, then I read the rest of the sentence and was disappointed…

We’re bringin’ back capes and cloaks.

To prevent the obvious reference, the trend will be called, “‘No capes’ only applies to superheroes.”

You may find this SFIA video interesting.

Exactly. Maybe Steven Hawking is just really bad at throwing parties!

An example of the law in Texas:

https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/FA/htm/FA.65.htm

There is no tuition at public schools. (K-12, ages 5-18 approximately.) There are private schools that some choose to enroll their kids in; often these are religious in nature. And these private schools do charge tuition. But children of a certain age are legally required to attend school of some form:

https://legal-info.lawyers.com/research/education-law/chart-age-requirements-for-compulsory-education-in-all-50-states.html

Most states do allow home schooling with various degrees of requirements therein. But yes, school attendance is required. If a 14 year old is just wandering down the sidewalk at a time they should be in school, they absolutely can be stopped by the police.

Shit. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get that surgery? When I got it, insurance didn’t cover it. I had to fly to Thailand to afford it. Even with going overseas it was still about $18k USD including flights and everything. And that was in 2013 dollars. I worked my ass off to afford that. And that’s to say nothing of the endless psych evals, therapist letters, and myriad other hoops you have to jump through. It is NOT something you can just stumble into, even if you had an unlimited budget behind you.

And I’ll tell you, I was pretty young looking for my age. A bit into transition I was once walking down the street in the middle of the day on a weekday, and I literally had a cop stop me, thinking I was a high school student playing hookie from school. Meanwhile I was 24, having recently finished a masters degree.

My point is…if you could just walk into a high school and get surgery covered like that, and done no questions asked? I would have legitimately become one of those weirdos who fakes being a teenager and enrolls in a high school in their twenties. I probably could have pulled it off. I would have claimed to be a homeless kid, enrolled in a local high school, got the surgery, and then disappeared again. Compared to what I did go through to get it, that would be child’s play.

Of course, idiots like Trump don’t even realize how involved that surgery is. This is not some outpatient procedure you do in the morning and are up on your feet in the afternoon. Plan a month off of work. That’s what it realistically involves. Then imagine paying for it and finding a way to arrange such an extended absence from the very job that allows you to afford it, all while also paying your regular bills and keeping a roof over your head.

For those who need it, gender reassignment surgery is literally life-saving. I can say that from personal experience. But to see ignorant fools like Trump make light of a thing that you had to work so hard to get?..I do not have the words to express it.

What is likely the cause of this is one thing that people miss about solar panels. Their efficiency is a function of temperature. In the summer, you get more sunlight, but the panels themselves are hotter and thus lose efficiency. In the winter there is less light, but the panels make the most of every photon.

Insurance companies need to face financial penalties for having these ghost networks. You should legally be able to demand, and sue for, $50 for every fake listing you find in your insurance’s company’s network. This is the 21st century. It should be possible for insurance companies to instantly know whether providers are still accepting new patients. Insurance companies could have a platform where providers can instantly indicate that they’re no longer accepting new patients. And insurance companies could add penalties to their contracts with providers. If the providers don’t update their status as soon as they are no longer accepting new patients, then the providers themselves will have to pay some sort of penalty.

Sundom in Horizon

I mean, I’m not expecting anyone to actually start rebuilding temples to Helios any time soon. But if you want to, I’m not going to stop you. Live your dreams!

@1984@lemmy.today: It’s true today that you can easily drive your entire home on solar power, but only if you live in a sunny country.

The truth of that statement is entirely a function of the price of solar panels. Again, if they are cheap enough, even on a cloudy winter day, you can power a city with them. My point is that solar is becoming so stupidly cheap that “spam solar panels” is becoming a viable option for our power production needs. Unless you live in such a high latitude that you’re near the Arctic circle, you will be able to power things off solar. Solar panels will produce power literally in the middle of a snow storm. It may only be 10% or their peak output. But if you have enough of the damn things, it doesn’t matter. And solar is getting cheap enough that this is a viable path forward. And that’s before we even talk about other energy storage methods like green hydrogen production or long distance power transport.

Dedicate the $1 million to funding zoning reform efforts in your city to allow for the construction of more housing and reduce the cost of housing for everyone.

We are currently undergoing the greatest transformation in energy infrastructure since the start of the industrial revolution. Solar power and batteries are not only growing, but absolutely exploding.

Solar has become so cheap so fast that it’s going to fundamentally change the very way we use power and energy as a civilization. Seriously, look at new power generation by source. It’s almost all solar and wind, with a bit of nuclear and natural gas as a rounding error. And really, new power generation is majority solar.

The key thing is that solar is a technology that can be mass produced in absurd quantities. And the more we produce, the cheaper we can produce it. It appears now that solar is this epochal leviathan, a glacier sweeping across the energy landscape that will grind everything else to powder before it.

We have a very clear path to a grid that is almost entirely solar and wind. There’s nothing wrong with nuclear, but it cannot even begin to compete economically against the tsunami that is the solar revolution. Hell, I expect the grid to be almost entirely solar in the future.

Obviously the Sun doesn’t shine all the time, but panels have gotten so cheap, so fast, that a lot of these problems are just being carried away by the solar tsunami. For swings over the course of a day, batteries are getting so stupid cheap that we’re going to have no problem making enough power during the day to meet our needs at night. But the bigger concern was always seasonal variation. How can we possibly store enough energy to last through a winter? In years prior, this was seen as the Achilles’ heel of a largely solar grid. To store that much energy in batteries would seem completely impossible.

But it seems the seasonal problem is going to solve itself. You see, if solar power gets cheap enough, you can start doing really wild things with it. Even on a snowy day in winter, solar panels still generate some electricity. They may only generate 10-20% of what they do on a clear summer day, but they still generate power. And if solar is cheap enough, you can simply size your system so stupidly large that you can meet even your winter’s need without any seasonal energy storage. If you spam enough solar panels, you can meet your needs in the winter and then have dirt cheap, essentially free power the rest of the year. And it really looks like this is where we’re headed.

I foresee that many of our most energy-intensive industries will adopt a seasonal or semi-seasonal schedule to take advantage of the dirt cheap power in the warmer months of the year. We have a crop growing season, why not an aluminum smelting season or an AI-model training season? Or that free summertime power could be used to desalinate vast quantities of seawater affordably. Or, such a low-cost energy source is exactly what we need to make bulk atmospheric carbon removal a real possibility.

We used to live in tune with the cycle of the seasons. We lived according to the cycle of the Sun. So important was the Sun to our ancestors that we named our greatest deities after it. Amun. Aten. Ra. Huītzilōpōchtli. Ba’al. Aryaman. Mithra. Apollo. Helios. Sol Invictus. These were but a handful of the thousand names we gave to the mighty Sun upon which we so depended. We rose to its light and slept in its absence. We worked when it shone brightest and in the winter, invented elaborate holidays and rituals to encourage its return. We built our entire calendars and organized our entire civilizations around its cycles.

With the Industrial Revolution, we abandoned this close relationship with the Sun. We learned to draw upon bottled remnants of old rotted sunlight, and for a time learned to live apart from the mighty Sun. And those energies in fossil fuels improved our lives so greatly; they raised us up from the mud. We improved our standard of living so much, that we would rather burn the world to ashes than give up the lifestyle we have grown accustomed to. And so, the great challenge of our age is to find a way to keep our lives and comforts going, without destroying the Earth in the process. Millions of people have dedicated their lives to this one central challenge of our age. All our efforts. All our sciences. All of our industry. Our brightest minds and every tool of finance and government at our disposal. All of it searching, seeking, trying to desperately to find a way out of this horrible trap that we have built for ourselves.

And now, after all this yearning. After all this wondering. After all this wandering. The solution was in front of us this entire time. A ray of Sunlight has been cast down into the cave that we are so lost in. And it is leading us back to the light. We will cast off these shackles and leave the fossil fuels in the dust where we found them. We will once organize our entire civilization around the infinite bounty that the Sun freely gives in such abundance. And we will continue to enjoy the fruits that science has given us, but in a way that not only does not damage the Earth, but allows it to heal. That is the future ahead of us. That is the light in the darkness. As our ancestors did from time immemorial, we will once again live in the endless generosity of the star that birthed us. And we will rejoice. And we will sing.

Sol Invictus. We are coming home.

This video explains it.

I assume you’re some sort of serial killer. 😁

Same. I used reddit since 2008. I’ve had accounts with multiple posts to /bestof, with over 100k karma get banned. The things I’ve been banned for have always been trivial “zero tolerance policy” violations that remind me of the zero tolerance, zero thought policies you used to (still do?) see in American high schools. At least when I was in school, my school had a zero-tolerance policy for violence. A bully could attack a victim and both of them would be suspended for fighting. The administrators didn’t want to bother figuring out who was at fault, so they just punished victim and perpetrator equally.

On different accounts, I was banned from some of the largest subreddits that I had years of history of posting very high quality and well-regarded comments in. The biggest account I ever had was under the username “isleepinahammock.” You can still find links to now-deleted bestof posts through google. The things I’ve been banned from the big subreddits for include:

1. On January 6th, as the capital was actively being breached, wondering aloud why this invasion wasn’t being responded to with soldiers and automatic weapons. (Historically how such mobs trying to overthrow governments are always dealt with. Later we learned that the reason those soldiers weren’t present was because Trump deliberately left the place unguarded.)

2. As SCOTUS was considering its ruling on presidential immunity, stating that if SCOTUS rules the president has complete immunity and effectively be a dictator, Biden should simply drone strike Supreme Court justices until the ruling is reversed. (Later news articles and opinion pieces proposing this exact kind of thing were openly promoted to the top of r/politics.)

3. Flippantly telling an overt bigot, commenting in one of the LGBT subreddits, to “go die in a fire.”

4. Making pro-Palestinian comments in r/worldnews.

Never did I ever threaten anyone. Never did I propose vigilante justice on anyone. Any mentions of violence were either obviously flippant remarks or suggestions of lawful and just use of government authority. But these comments violated the zero tolerance, zero thought policies of the major subreddits. I received bogus site site suspensions for these, which I ignored with alt accounts. Eventually I received a total IP ban for ban evasion.

I realize that reddit likes to claim to have a neutral hand. They say that moderators should be able to operate their subs as they please. But these major community subs aren’t some niche community. If you want to create r/rightwingworldnews, go ahead, but the main worldnews section for the biggest discussion site on the net should not be run by a bunch of radical Israeli supremacists. r/politics, the main political discussion forum, should not apply a harsher standard to their commenters than they do the standards they apply to the very stories they feature. And there should be a meaningful appeals process to actually get access restored to individual subreddits and the site as a whole.

If they actually cared about quality content, they would do this. But this takes care and thought. And if all you’re trying to do is juice ad revenue, your number one priority is to make the site as clean and sanitary as possible. If all you care about is maxing ad revenue, then having a zero-tolerance, zero-thought policy of “any mention of an act of violence in any context = ban,” makes sense. Even though in some cases, such a nation’s capital literally being stormed by an invading rebel army, violence IS the correct response.

I don’t know if you saw images of what the capital looked like a few weeks after January 6th on Biden’s actual inauguration day, but the capital was a damn fortress. If those fuckers had tried to storm the capital again on that day, it would have been a blood bath. And you know what? I would absolutely support the military opening up machine guns on any violent mob trying to overthrow our democracy. The moment you choose violence, you deserve to be responded to in turn with violence. You do that? Well you’ve made your choice. I have no sympathy for you. And zero-tolerance, zero-thought moderation policies prevent us from talking about these harsh realities. Sometimes violence IS the answer. Sometimes democracy DOES need to be defended with force. But we cannot discuss these harsh realities on the main political page of the biggest discussion site on the net, just to keep the place clean for advertisers.

Oh, and one more reason I was once banned from r/politics? Someone posted a doomer comment saying something to the effect of, “how can we possibly deal with MAGA terrorists? What if they lose the next election and just start an open rebellion? It’s hopeless! We might as well give up now.” I responded with the obvious and correct statement. Something to the effect of, “what do we do if armed revolutionaries enter open rebellion against the government? We shoot them. We send in the military and we shoot them. That is what you are SUPPOSED to do to people who take up arms against a just and legitimately elected government. It’s that whole ‘enemies foreign and domestic’ thing that soldiers swear to enforce.” I was literally banned for suggesting the very thing every US soldier swears an oath to do if necessary.