The way this is treated reminds me of the South Park episode.

“Why? What happened?”
“………Oh yeah. Some kid shot up the school.”
“Wha? Who did that?…Was it you?”
“No.”
“Oh. Then what’s this about a Math quiz?”

I’ve wanted to write a story about lawyers and prosecutorial discretion - I think a lot of it can be explored through fiction, to say nothing of the real world’s crazy case history.

Much as literalists may like the idea that “The law is the law”, and that it will always be enforced, it’s made up of humans who carry it out, and it’s by design that they each have their emotional flaws. The law as a machine would lose sight of its purpose as a means to improve society.

There’s another side to prosecutorial discretion where exclusion of consequences can provide favoritism to bad people, though, and that’s what gives me pause - but I don’t know how easy it would be for the law alone to remedy that, even by ending discretion.

This isn’t the best approach necessarily, but it’s a feel-good thing: If they’re intercepting me as I go to a store, I refuse to give money, but offer to buy them something to eat inside (or whatever else they need). I hold to those promises and they’re generally grateful.

I also sometimes give money if someone isn’t actively accosting about it. It’s down to what I can afford, too.

A great one from Another Crab’s Treasure:

“I’m not-…!! I…I am getting angry, aren’t I? I think, maybe, I’ve been angry the whole time. Ever since I left the tide pool. I never wanted to be. Everyone else seems angry all the time. I didn’t want to be like that. But I can’t help it! Not when people like you always get everything you want, and other people get hurt for it! It’s not fair! And I’m really strong now, strong enough to stop you from making things worse!..I think I get what Chitan meant now. If I’m gonna be angry, I might as well use it for something good! So that maybe, one day, other people won’t have to fight like me! And what better way to start than to beat up a SELFISH…GREEDY…MUSSEL SHUCKER LIKE YOU!!”

My recommendation is, don’t go with any of the distros you haven’t heard of before.

At some point, you will need to google “<distroname> how do I…” many many times. It is much better if you have something popular and common to do that in.

I have tried to approach this off the basic principle of “Oh, it’s basically Fedora!” on a few distributions but it doesn’t work as reliably as you’d like.

Final Fantasy XIV story.

Ugh it’s an MMO. I’m going to guess anyone who’s slogged through that much content will praise the story.

I don’t necessarily think everyone would find it worth it getting through the less enjoyable content, especially if you’re not taking breaks, but getting up to the two star expansions, Shadowbringers and Endwalker, yes, those expansion endings have been some of my favorite memories in the entire RPG space. The music alone forms such perfectly defined leitmotifs for its best moments. I still wouldn’t blame anyone for walling it off in their mind given the time and financial commitment, but after years of hype, it did match it.

What’s a little sad is I’ve tried the demos for XV and XVI and just still feel thoroughly uninspired by them.

The Persona series has even brought up the idea you’d praise coffee more for its mature flavor than just to wake up. In some places, they drink it at any time of day.

The world and the internet are so low on trust, I kind of wish there was some entity we trusted.

Some website where you could upload a photo, and people would actually know for sure that all the site is going to do is compare the photo to an ID, verify you’re over a certain age, and send a simple boolean “Yes” to the website that wanted to know if you were over-age. Or, to somehow know that your account is human and not a duplicate.

We could do a lot with that, but as it stands, no person or entity can ever really be trusted with that kind of data; I think most wouldn’t even trust the same governments that issue those IDs.

The Escape Key closes most popups, dialogs, modals. It’s also non-destructive, so it won’t close a program; any “save changes” dialog will be cancelled.

What really sucks is how many times this conversation has started, only for the trans person to (very logically and understandably) react internally with “Ohhh boy, here we go, another one of these backwards bigots. I’m just going to yell to make myself feel better.”

Then the ignorant individual feels attacked, gets defensive, and feels satisfied in their belief that trans people are hysterical or something.

I don’t even blame anyone so much for that. Being patient with every single transphobe just in case they’re a reasonable person takes far more energy than I have.

I guess I’m glad Twitch took a side on that?

After Bezos went full nazi on the Washington Post, I have expected the worst of everything Amazon.

50501 refers to “Fifty States, Fifty Protests, One Movement” (originally “One Day”). While some states have more presence than others, it has 50 chapters for the 50 states.

I don’t think there’s as much presence on Lemmy, but lots of media gets posted to Reddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/50501/.

Their website also links to social media accounts covering more of it: https://www.fiftyfifty.one/

To be very clear here, my outrage is not at being pranked with a rick roll. I’d be fine with decent politicians doing that on most days. It’s specifically with reversed courses on transparency regarding circumstantial evidence that the president was involved in sexual assault.

Obama gave out his birth certificate. Bernie Sanders shows his tax returns. The Republican Party is a team of liars that shares nothing.

The painful part is he didn’t even say anything like “I regret voting for you!” It was more like “I am strongly considering reducing the level of my support for you!”

Not that Don needs his support anymore. I almost feel like one of the biggest messages to keep pushing is: “Don doesn’t care about you.” As far as I can find, he hasn’t even put out any comments on the pardoned Jan 6 rioter that was killed in a traffic stop.

More recently I’ve felt like there’s issues with being completely disconnected from any sort of critical mass. If I wanted to join a protest in my local city, I have doubts any of the fringe social networks could organize that. I can do my part to try to get more people on there.

It’s part of why I joined BlueSky over X. It’s more popular, and issues be what they are, that counts for a lot.

Okay, totally off topic…what is it with this annoying trend of censoring a company/name with an asterisk when it’s a subject of ire? It just bugs me - and not in a way that focuses my anger to Microsoft.

I’m reminded of a joke from Burn Notice where Michael has kept a folder of critically important blackmail files in his mother’s oven for several seasons. He just casually points out she never actually cooks anything herself.

No matter what you think of Ubisoft, this guy was the best part of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, had some very good lines.

The issue that caused this topic to arise wasn’t of other people having opinions we didn’t like. It wasn’t even a case of arguing in bad faith, eg deflecting truth, or disguising real intentions by making arguments the owner doesn’t believe for some other purpose (those are also bad, but generally don’t get such a response).

The issue was specific moderator/instance-ownership censorship. People’s posts were being removed without warning when they were making respectful, good-faith arguments - that disagreed with the politics of lemmy.ml. Worse, they were attempting to be stealthy about this removal so that no one victimized by this censorship was aware of it.

For reference, I’m gonna be a Biden voter. If someone posted “Biden is a piece of trash old man” then I’d disagree with them, but they’d have every right to put that opinion up.

Most people would be fine with this in the case of a home user duplicating one or two copies for his kids to watch and as backups. But we have seen whenever a rule permits something, someone will work out the MAXIMUM way in which they can abuse it for profit. Give them an inch, and they take a mile.

Ideally, we could have laws that are really finely built to be specific to that first scenario. But I honestly don’t know how you write those.