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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 15th, 2024

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  • So it’s basically a combination of everything that everyone else has said.

    1. NFL is by far the most popular sport in the country, but it also only has 17 regular season games (versus 82ish for NHL and NBA, 40ish for MLS, and 162 for MLB), and the entire season is spread over only 6-7 months of the calendar year, versus 8-10 for the others. There is an appetite for any content at all that materially affects the most watched sport.
    2. College Football itself is probably the fourth most popular sports “league” in the country, though its organization and economics are WAY different (for now) than the normal pro leagues’. There’s huge overlap in general of course, but the Draft brings all of the fans together as CFB fans see where the top players will move.
    3. Going back to number 1, the NFL and media companies, being what they are, noticed the gap in the sporting calendar (after March Madness, before NBA and NHL playoffs, very early in the MLB season, MLS well… (LOL, I love MLS and it’s a miracle it’s stable but it’s still not an important “TV sport” in this country). They also noticed that a certain segment of die-hards have been watching the draft for 30 years, and they saw an opportunity to tap that dormant interest for months of “segments” and a big day of ratings and revenue, so of course they did.
    4. More recently, seeing that their hype efforts were working, they’ve moved it out of an auditorium near League HQ and made it a travelling road show, goosing local attention and furthering the image that it’s an event.

    As to why all that worked, I like the posts that talk about the optimism and renewal that the draft represents. The NFL is unique in how it handles player development, in that it mostly doesn’t because it has an independently-popular lower league that will do it for free. Since that lower league is effectively the sole source of players, and since the NFL is an American-style sporting cartel, the Draft becomes the single biggest infusion of talent that a team will see in a given year, some of it ready to contribute on the field right away, and the teams that need the talent the most usually have the best picks and therefore a real chance to improve quickly, though the same bad management that gets teams in a bad place will often squander that chance.

    For those who follow European football (soccer, not the niche gridiron leagues over there), imagine a single day (okay, three days now, but Rounds 2-7 are still for the nerds) that combines the anxiety of a promotion playoff final (though with deferred results) with the excitement of the summer transfer window (let’s consider NFL free agency the equivalent of the winter window).





  • FreeCAD still crashes for me a lot, across versions and distros and different PCs. I just don’t know what the deal is; maybe bad luck.

    Then, its kernel, being the only truly viable open source one, is understandable but also has some limitations commercial tools don’t, and I’m just talking about super basic stuff like giving up on a fillet or chamfer as soon as two vertices touch.

    The workflow is much improved, as are the heuristics for user intention (yes, yes, the “crutches”) and to mitigate toponaming, but I still get frustrated trying to use it for my stupid keyboard and other 3D printing projects. I have Alibre Design on my Windows partition, and with the improvements in Linux gaming (seriously OP, it’s WAY better these days), CAD is the main reason I even bothered to keep my old SSD with Windows.

    There are probably things I do at work in MS Office that Libre would have a hard time with, but frankly I just don’t care. :-)










  • Because I think it’s pretty much self-explanatory that separation on purely ethnicity/looks is not constructive where people are artificially treated as if they were different even though they’re not. I think the damage clearly outweighs here.

    Justifying racism by saying ‘this is what we always did and it worked like that’ is not the right way forward imo as we can’t be stuck in the past and make the same mistakes that could be successfully improved.

    What I’m trying to get at is that while appearance is not any kind of enlightened reason for distinct communities to have arisen, through accidents of history and genetics they did, and they are still relevant and appreciated by the people who are part of them. The color terminology is shorthand that acknowledges history. It’s not “justifying racism” to accept that in many places your ethnic background, especially if visible, means that certain experiences will have been more or less common for you. You can engage in this, even light heartedly, in good faith and as a way to understand your neighbors better, and indeed to think of them as your friends and neighbors instead of “Other.” People who are trying to do right by their fellow Americans are not using it to “separate,” but acknowledging that separation gave rise to proud, distinct communities and there’s no value in snuffing that out. The dialogue can be a way to unite us.

    I believe we can agree that using visible “racial” markers to treat someone as less valuable than someone else is disturbing and evil, and still sadly common. I’m just saying that it’s not the mere use of the terms, or creating media that acknowledges them that results in the continuation of racism. Hell, in some ways, refusing to acknowledge differences gives a person with bad intent the license to settle on a single definition of what it means to be a “proper” American and to decide that anyone who doesn’t act the right way is less valuable: “I didn’t refuse to hire him because he’s black, but because he dresses and speaks differently. All he has to do is be exactly like me and I’d be more than happy to hire him!” (coughJDVancecoughcough)



  • So, good for you, but the particular dynamics of being a colonial country that had a massive portion of its economy based on race-based slavery has resulted in an approach to diversity that has much deeper roots and has been wrestling with hard issues for much longer than Germany has, and Germany’s own record with dealing with identifiable minorities in the last hundred years has, shall we say, not always been great.

    Many European countries are only now hitting levels of diversity America had fifty years ago, and America has been made of statistically significant communities with distinctive origins for hundreds of years, and this in a colonizing country where there is no historically continuous monoculture. Historically, people tend to become dicks to the “Other” among them when faced with hardship, and much of American history reflects that sort of thing, but also its aftermath and attempts to heal.

    Diverse and defiantly distinctive communities formed and persisted because that was how people got by and found support and could make their way, admittedly often because opportunities to assimilate, into whatever soup of dimly remembered pan-European customs that passes for a privileged culture here, were intentionally blocked. Yet even if the reasons for them are shameful, they are real and important, and the American dialogue on race simply cannot be color-blind even when well-meaning. Instead, it has to be a dance, where people of goodwill celebrate both differences and similarities and do not set groups above one another but also do not pretend they don’t exist.

    I wish more Americans would understand that our approach rarely translates well, and for fuck’s sake I wish we had fewer people who were stuck in the bad old days where reconciliation and healing were very much not priorities. That said, I also wish that people from countries with a very different cultural and historical experience would not assume that their countries have shit figured out, when a lot of it simply boils down to “we don’t have many people with darker skin shades here.”



  • Everybody here is kinda right, but there are other factors to consider, and the net result is that it’s usually not a case worth bringing.

    The “Impossibility” defense says that in most cases, the “factual” impossibility of committing the crime is not a defense, but taking an action that is not a crime is a defense, and if raised must be proved by the prosecution. Even with “Factual,” the line gets muddy (the article cites a person whose appeal won after they were convicted of poaching after shooting a stuffed deer). Many jurisdictions have a “reasonable person” standard for that as well, where if the act is the sort of thing that might normally be expected to result in a crime (the most infamous case is two US military personnel who thought they were raping a passed out woman, but really she had died from a heart attack) then you get no benefit, but if no reasonable person would believe that their action would do anything, then it’s more likely to succeed. To answer one of your questions, being told the button sets off a bomb would be more problematic for our hypothetical asshole than being told it “just kills” somebody that would be a bigger problem than a Death Note notebook, but it’s not a simple yes/no.

    So anyway, this then raises some questions. Was this button setup convincing? Who did the convincing? Why did they do so? Other defenses might arise out of these conditions: e.g. they were told that pushing the button would save a bunch of other people, trolley-problem style, or it was the police egging them on and telling them they needed to for XYZ good reason. Many of them will turn on the defendant’s thoughts, so in any jurisdiction where they are not obligated to testify (e.g. the United States), our very interesting defendant simply doesn’t, and their attorney argues that there’s reasonable doubt they thought the button would actually do anything.

    Add on top of this prosecutorial discretion. A prosecutor knows all of this, and knows this is a loser of a case, so apart from truly bonkers hypothetical, they will not bring it.

    TL;DR: By the letter of the law, very probably yes, but no one will ever get convicted for it.



  • I would just say that the key part to include is that the North knew slavery needed to die on the vine and was uninterested in helping the South preserve it, specifically by opposing the addition of new slave states, or at least abandoning the notion that the two should be intentionally kept in balance.

    So nominally, yeah, few with any influence were proposing emancipation, and to be clear almost every white person in the country was super racist by modern standards, but slavery was doomed over the medium- to long-term. The South could see that the writing was on the wall, so they decided it was time to shoot their shot to preserve slavery, in a form particularly at odds with the world around it by the way, for as long as possible, and secession was the only viable path for them. No other issue of the day would have driven any significant region of the country to secede, though ironically if it had, no other issue would have given the opponents the moral high-ground like slavery did.