Fubarberry

https://www.al.com/news/huntsville/2022/07/no-homicide-case-went-unsolved-in-huntsville-in-2021.html

Here’s an article on it, it was actually in 2021 (where the rest of the data was from 2023) so the 100% rate probably isn’t the case anymore. Basically they attribute it to having a really low base crime rate compared to other cities, saying that it frees them up to give a lot of attention and resources to each one.

I suspect that’s just because of Birmingham, and possibly Mobile. They have pretty bad crime rates, and Birmingham is the state’s main “blue city”, at least based on how counties voted in the 2024 election.

Birmingham had a violent crime rate of 1440 per 100k, making it one the worst cities in the nation for violent crime.

Mobile had a crime rate of 825 per 100k. Mobile’s county was slightly red in the 2023 election.

Meanwhile Huntsville (who was slightly red in that same election) had a violent crime rate of 133 per 100k, and has been proudly claiming a 100% arrest and conviction rate for homicide cases. So to answer @[email protected]’s question, I guess Huntsville is an example of a successful “red” city (although it may be less successful in coming years due to Trump’s NASA cuts).

Rural Alabama (excluding counties that were classified as metropolitan) had a violent crime rate of 248 per 100k, making it less safe than Huntsville but far better than the state average of 494 per 100k.

I’m not going to actually claim that the crime rate is just from politics, Huntsville has a big aerospace industry and it’s probably more of an education/class thing than anything else. But regardless those are the violent crime rate numbers for 2023, so feel free to draw your own conclusions.

Generally the same culture, but skewed towards more tech savvy types and online-centric culture groups. It’s a lot smaller than reddit, which helps a lot with the quality of interactions, but I think if it grew enough it would end up very close to reddit culture.

Ars Technica is generally excellent in my experience, one of the better tech news websites.

Or new incognito window.

You won’t see much about protests until we’re closer to the next election.

I’ve tried a bunch of apps, and Thunder is my favorite. I believe it’s available for both iOS and Android.

I was a big fan of relay for Reddit, and thunder is the closest I’ve found.

I know a lot of subreddits like that have rules that you have to be part of the profession to post. Reason being that they don’t want amateurs/etc to fill up the community with posts asking for advice, but instead want it to be a place for people in the profession to be able to talk to other professionals.

I can fully understand that approach, and how following that rule would directly lead to posts like this getting locked. At the same time, this is an interesting post and seems like it would have interesting discussion.

So basically this post probably breaks the written rules of the community, but is the kind of content that they wanted the rules to encourage. If it was my community I’d let the post stay (maybe with a mod comment on why it was allowed to stay up), but it’s always risky to enforce the written rules inconsistently. I’ve seen a lot of communities get upset about inconsistent mods.

Honestly, it sounds like you’ve been spending too much time in some online communities that are doom posting about everything. Do things suck right now? Yes, but they’ve literally sucked for as long as human society has existed. Things can always be better, or always be worse. However you can’t just sit around passively waiting for the times to change, or your life will suck.

The single biggest factor in whether your life is good or not is you and your actions. Don’t let things outside of your control convince you to give up. Do the best with what you have, and I promise you that you can find fulfillment and happiness in the life available to you.

You can probably just use any of the big chat programs, and just start out by telling it you want it to converse with you like it’s just another person.

Gemini has that “live” feature where you can talk out loud and it sounds like you’re talking to a real person. Combining that with pre-prompting for casual conversation is fairly convincing.

It’s not like the current group of users is perfect either. There’s a lot of circlejerk opinions going around, and I’ve seen being get majorly downvoted for posting factual info that went against the “hivemind” opinion.

I think some people sabotage relationships for the same reason they throw video games. They have fears/suspicions that it’s going to not work out, and rather than be a victim they want to have some control over the outcome. A loss or failed relationship doesn’t hurt as bad if they caused it to end the way it did.

However in your case, it sounds more like a fear of something different. It’s a lot easier to keep things like they are, when a relationship gets too serious or life impacting it can be easy to be scared of the change, and instead subconsciously decide you want to keep things like they are.

It takes a lot less money and knowledge to tear things down than it does to build them up. Especially if the members are willing to die for the cause.

That was a good investigation and explanation about a weird number of up votes. Thanks for explaining it.

I’ve been reading some litrpg-genre books, and a lot of the better books in that genre are extremely enjoyable despite obvious literary flaws.

Some top recommendations are He Who Fights with Monsters and Defiance of the Fall.

Right, but any kind of “you can’t wear a mask in public” law is easily evaded if there’s a legal exception for wearing one for health reasons.

From reading the article, I get the impression that this bill is mostly about them wanting to be able to arrest protesters who wear masks to hide their identity.

Which is still really shitty, to be clear.

Yeah, my wife wanted to watch it together and we got burned out on the repeated catastrophes. At some point they move onto dramatic plot disasters that include a bunch of the hospital staff, to make it more exciting. The show went on for a ton of seasons after we dropped it, so presumably they found some way to make it even more dramatic than a disaster that kills a 3rd of the hospital every season finale.

Watching the show on netflix was also bad for emotional whiplash. They would build all season up to two doctors confessing their love in the season finale, and then immediately in the next episode (new season) they would be broken up again. I suspect it felt more natural with the delay between seasons in-between episodes, but watching them back to back like that felt jarring.

I feel like that’s less of a democracy issue, and more of an issue that people with power will use that power for their own benefit.

Pretty rough, from what I understand:

• Promised jobs in Germany
• sent to Bangkok instead
• Taken to Belarus
• Taken across border into Russia, kept at camps.

Once in Russia, they were told to join the Russian Army. To motivate them, they were:

• Offered Russian work visas, brides, and passports
• Denied food and water when they refused.
• Burned with heated wood and matchsticks, cut with knives, and other torture methods
• Threated with knives and guns
• Finally arrested for illegally entering the Russia.

I’ve heard other reports of people from India getting forced into fighting for Russia after fraudulent job offers, so it seems like this is becoming fairly widespread.