Wow, man, you sound so angry! I can feel the anger from here! It’s coming off you like… like… like the slow and steady, groovy sound of a reggae tune!

Some of the south has public areas that aren’t available to the north, like beaches.

But, I think it’s a bad combination of multiple factors. Cities designed after cars became popular, vs. European cities where they tried to adapt cars to existing roads (while often keeping public squares etc.) Cities designed by European immigrants who came from warmer climates, and didn’t plan for winter spaces. Cities designed by people who worship capitalism, vs. cities designed around a balance between capitalism and socialism.

So much of that is about public transit.

When everyone travels by car, there’s not much space for walking around or standing around. Places where people walk around or stand around become places for buskers, artists, small vendors, etc. That turns that space from just a place you pass by into a destination itself.

The other half of the problem is winter. Most of Europe is fairly warm compared to most of the Americas. It’s only really the nordic countries where the daily average high is below freezing. In more than half of the US it’s below freezing for months on end. That means that public outdoor spaces are not really all that usable for just hanging out in the winter.

Part of the problem is cultural. Many of the colder places in Europe do outdoor Christmas markets. Those aren’t exactly consumption-free places, but you can walk around and browse without paying. The US doesn’t even do that, making the cold months a wasteland outdoors.

I don’t know if there’s anywhere in the world that does extensive consumption-free public spaces for use in winter. But, that’s what would really be needed in the northern US and Canada.

You think the sufragette movement was free from violence?

You think gay rights were achieved without violence?

Read a book!

Riots are grenades. You don’t get to precisely target what gets broken and what doesn’t.

Whitewashing is precisely why his music is seen as stoner-feel-good-vibes and not the fiery protest music it was.

Well, I’d say that has more to do with music sensibility. His music used slow tempo, heavy and steady beats, was bass-driven, and melodic vocals. That isn’t angry music for a western audience. Going back centuries, angry western music is fast paced, unsteady rhythms, big changes in volume, discordant sounds and lots of high frequencies.

It’s not whitewashing. It would be very hard to make an angry protest song set to a waltz beat too. The medium is the message, and the medium of steady droning beats is calmness not anger.

Because it would be nice to have a card number that looked plausible that could be used in movies. Imagine if every phone number in a movie had to be (555) 555-5555. It would break your suspension of disbelief.

Too bad the Visa and Mastercard ones are so obviously fake.

You’re right that Bluesky isn’t federated, but it most definitely is centralized.

It doesn’t seem to be the case, but it would be interesting if there were CC numbers that were meant to be used in movies, similar to how 555-XXXX phone numbers are never real.

Languages are interesting. Why is something being “cool” a good thing? Why has that particular term survived so long?

I summarized everything using ChatGPT

So, anything below may or may not be true.

While it’s often maintained that the word doozy derives from the “Duesenberg” in the name of the famed Duesenberg Motor Company, this is impossible on chronological grounds. Doozy was first recorded (in the form dozy) in eastern Ohio in 1916, four years before the Duesenberg Motor Company began to manufacture passenger cars; the related adjective doozy, meaning “stylish” or “splendid,” is attested considerably earlier, in 1903. So where did doozy come from? Etymologists believe that it’s an altered form of the word daisy, which was used especially in the late 1800s as a slang term for someone or something considered the best.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doozy

Both the “space” and “travel” parts of “space travel” are disputable there. It’s not even “space tourism”. I’ll maybe give you “high altitude tourism”. Space tourism, to me, implies spending an extended period in space, not a minute or two. That’s barely enough time for a satisfying wank.

Needs one that’s like #4 from January to September, labelled: “Fuck Github and anything else owned my Microsoft”.

That’s pretty brave of you. It’s a lot of work to fight people’s assumptions, and I’m sure it results in harassment.

But, you’re right that things will never change if women don’t do that. It’s a chicken and egg thing. Nobody wants to be the first to do it, because whoever’s first gets harassed the most. But, if enough people do it, it won’t be abnormal anymore.

Good luck, and thanks for trying to make women on the internet more normal.

It’s a different model.

Mastodon, like Twitter, is a person-centered setup. You can use hashtags, but most people don’t. You follow people not communities. As a result it’s basically microblogs, where most people are just posting into the void. Celebrities are followed more, so they get more replies, so there are more conversations. But, fundamentally it’s not really inviting interactions.

Lemmy, like Reddit, is a topic-centered setup. It has a bunch of communities and people post something because they think it might be interesting for people who are also interested in that community. Every post is basically an invitation to have a discussion about something.

I think the friction to posting something on Lemmy is slightly higher, but when you do, it’s more likely to generate comments.

Similarly a “good post”, one that gets lots of comments, would be any post that gets more than 13 comments.

By my count, this comment will take your post from one with 12 comments to one with 13 comments, therefore I’m conferring on you the title of “good post”. Congratulations!!

However, I’m assuming that you’re including your own comments in the comment tally. If you’re not, then your 2 comments so far to this post don’t count, and you’ll only be at 11, and therefore “not good”.

If you are counting your own comments on your own post, can you juice the numbers by adding lots of comments? In other words, can you make a post good by interacting with the people who are interacting with the post? Like some kind of um… conversation? Sounds like cheating to me.

I’m saying it is necessary to achieve the aims of the GPL.

Until copyright no longer exists and everything is in the public domain, as I said.

How are you going to enforce the GPL in a world where copyright doesn’t exist?

I’m a Beastie Boys fan, but I don’t think most of their stuff stands the test of time. Other than Paul’s Boutique and Sabotage, they weren’t really groundbreaking most of the time. They were fun, and had some good tunes, but I wouldn’t list them as one of the groundbreaking acts that changed music.