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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I’m fine with that. I’m not saying we should be able to “aquire” magic. I’m saying we’re somehow incapable of even acknowledging its existence. If muggles can’t perceive magic then what’s the point of keeping it a secret.

    Obviously that’s not true because not only could Dursleys see magic but it was used on them, thus magic is observable and muggles would be trying to harness it because they wouldn’t know they can’t.

    So it also somewhat makes sense why they’d have a secret society. But to keep it a secret you need know what the muggles are up to so they wouldn’t discover your secret. You need something like an intelligence agency to keep track of muggles and intervene if they get close to the secret.

    But you don’t know how the muggle world works, so you don’t know what the muggles are doing which means you can’t intervene if they start to discover magic. If you can’t prevent them from discovering magic why haven’t they discovered magic?


  • While I think that can be explained away with the idea that the magic is so OP they don’t actually need to know science. To use the Rowlings own tidbit as an example, why bother with toilets when you can simply magic away your shit.

    And that also leads to what IMO is the biggest plot point nobody really thinks about. That there’s a secret society of magic users who almost exclusively use magic, and the “muggle” society has no idea of its existence.

    Think about all the things we’ve discovered. Electromagnetism is pretty much magic, we figured that out. Atoms are pretty much magic, not only did we figure out atoms we figured out what atoms consist of. Einstein predicted black holes, something so out there that even Einstein doubted his prediction, we later discovered and modeled it. We can literally come up with absolutely insane ideas and then come up with ways to prove or disprove those ideas. There’s no chance we wouldn’t figure out the existence of magic and a secret society if we saw glimpses of something that makes us go “hmm, that’s interesting”.

    You could argue that they use magic to hide magic from us, but they’d have to know about what we are doing to make sure we don’t accidentally stumble into discovering magic. But Arthur Weasley makes it pretty clear wizards don’t understand how our world works. They don’t know what we’re doing so their secret society is literally at the mercy of us not just noticing it.

    So the secret of society pretty much exists on the premise that we’re too stupid to figure out Magic, but smart enough to create the society we have.


  • I feel like this is a misrepresentation of Marxs work either by misunderstanding his work or by not being familiar with his works. And not every Marxists waits for a revolution, it’s mostly orthodox Marxists (or Marxist-leninists) who are hoping for a revolution. Revisionist Marxists, such a democratic socialists, don’t necessarily believe in a revolution or even outright reject a revolution.

    Being a Marxist doesn’t mean you need to agree with everything Marx wrote. I don’t agree with his revolutionary ideas, but I think his criticism of capitalism is accurate because I’ve yet to see any compelling counterarguments to his fundamental points. Me not agreeing with his inevitable revolution doesn’t mean I’m not a Marxist, it means I’m not an orthodox Marxist.




  • Don’t put that much importance on dates. You’ll stress yourself out and if your date gets even a whiff of you making it into a big deal it’s going to put stress on them as well. I dated for years before meeting my significant other. Some were good, most were meh and some were bad. Almost all the bad dates were either me or the other person taking the date too seriously and not really opening up to participate.

    I used to set up dates in restaurants/museums/parks etc. I wanted to visit. First of all it gave me some idea of who I’m meeting because I would discuss with them what places on my list would also interest them. And it also doubled as a way to get something out of the date if it was a bust, at the very least I would be able to enjoy the atmosphere.


  • We could split the difference and users could get auto-notified if their vote was viewed and by whom. That way it’s a two-way street. The mod/admin can see your votes, the users know that their vote was accessed by that mod.

    It would be pointless to do. Anyone can view your votes without notifying you. Just set up your own instance, download the data (that you need to do anyway because of how activitypub works) and then just open up the database with a different software to access the data. No notification can be sent because the application doesn’t know the data was accessed.

    Second choice would be that all users are anonymized by a hash so that bad vote actors can be removed via their hash being associated with malicious or other bad acting, but to discover who individuals are the admin would have to do the legwork of follonf multiple posts/ comments to associate the hash.

    This opens a door to vote manipulation. If you can’t verify users someone can send random hashes.

    Otherwise hide the votes if trust of anonymity is paramount.

    The votes still exist in the activitypub. They’re already publicly available, the question is how accessible they should be because right now if you want to track downvotes you need to put in some effort. Upvotes you can already easily check from any mbin instance



  • I guess I should’ve specified. I don’t think it’s rent-able. It’s more than a 100 year old house in the middle of nowhere with more than 100 year old plumbing (hint, no plumbing), no internet outside of mobile network which is also very flaky since there aren’t many cell towers nearby, water comes from a nearby well which limits the amount of water you can use because it’s not a deep well and the list goes on. It’s not a modern house that’s going to just sit empty, it’s a relic from a different era where the main value the house has is of sentimental value. If it was to get sold the next “owner” would most likely tear down the house and turn the entire plot of land into agricultural land.

    If it was a decent apartment somewhere where people would actually want to live I’d absolutely “rent” it out. Not take any profits from it, put a bit to the side in case something breaks and if they leave without breaking anything they get their money back.





  • I don’t consider it unethical. For example if my father dies and I inherit his house where I grew up, he grew up, his father grew up and his grandfather built. That house has a lot of sentimental value in it. I have settled down very far from there. What am I supposed to do? Throw away the family legacy or uproot my entire life?

    I think as long as I don’t rent it out it’s acceptable to own it. It’s just extra cost for me to keep something of sentimental value in the family. I’d even be okay with paying extra tax on it considering I think every house you own that you don’t live in should be taxed extra.


  • Yeah, it’s not about monetization. I think for content creators the biggest limiting factor is the user base. If you make a video but nobody sees it then what’s the point of making a video? You want people watching your creations and the more users a site has the more likely you’re going to have people watching your video. So a real suggestion would be something like video visibility which is kind of a hit or miss on Youtube since the magical Youtube algorithm pretty much throws only clickbait.