CombatWombatEsq

@[email protected]

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CombatWombatEsq ,

We’re doing tariffs instead of an embargo this time because Trump doesn’t know what an embargo is.

CombatWombatEsq OP ,

States would also have to provide documented proof of U.S. citizenship for anyone registered to vote in federal elections and re-check those voters’ eligibility “as are necessary on an ongoing basis, but in no case less frequently than once every 30 days.”

Even if you were to try to take this as a good faith effort to improve elections in the United States, instead of the transparent attempt to suppress voting it is, it is by no means “small government” to check the voting rolls of the entire United States every 30 days.

CombatWombatEsq OP ,

The policy was passed on 11/15/25. All that chaos makes it hard to keep track of all the terrible awfulness happening.

CombatWombatEsq OP ,

I think the problem is that we don’t take sports seriously enough. Trans women are women and they need representation in women’s sports. Trans men are men and they need representation in men’s sports.

CombatWombatEsq OP ,

I hear you. I appreciate you taking the time to put pen to paper, so to speak, to think through this.

CombatWombatEsq OP ,

It’s certainly not by giving the creepy guys the authority to go into the women’s room and inspect everyone’s genitalia.

CombatWombatEsq ,

Us separatists up here in Washington are in favor of a state called Cascadia that includes BC in addition to Washington and Oregon (and maybe NorCal), so it’d be a little different.

CombatWombatEsq , (edited )

I don’t have anything good to say here, just that I personally have no intention of taking anything from anyone, and I support separatism only to the extent that it allows for better self-governance. Being extremely skeptical of Americans supporting separatist movements, especially right now, given that we have a long and storied history of annexing those “independent” groups immediately afterwards, makes a lot of sense.

Edit: I lost my train of thought while in a different thread and forgot the point I was trying to make: exactly because Cascadian separatism concerns Canadian sovereignty, it would be considerably less contentious for Canada to meet with Washingtonians who want independence than it is for Trump to meet with Albertan separatists.

CombatWombatEsq ,

We joke, but the metric conversion act of 1975 means that most Americans are more familiar with metric than we care to admit. It’s on most everything. Mostly, it’s the professional class — engineers who don’t want to learn to visually estimate in liters/second rather than gallons/second — who have resisted switching over, rather than Joe and Jane American.

CombatWombatEsq ,

Factors of 10 are overrated. Mebibtyes are objectively a better measure than megabytes.

CombatWombatEsq ,

Yep. Old hands in the field, not students in the academy.

CombatWombatEsq ,

How hard is it to get your American colleagues to use metric as well?

CombatWombatEsq , (edited )

I dunno, a half cup is 8 tablespoons, quarter cup is 4 tablespoons, an eighth cup is 2 tablespoons. A half liter is 5 deciliters, a quarter liter is 2.5 deciliters, an eighth liter is 1.25 deciliters. In cooking I’m much more likely to use binary arrangements than decimal, and the fact that metric users would use ml or cl instead of deciliters makes me think that ten isn’t really the magic number it’s cracked up to be.

CombatWombatEsq ,

Yeah. You hear a lot more UK commentators call it the 18 yard box than the 16 meter box.

CombatWombatEsq ,

You and I, I suspect, agree here. I prefer 2; you prefer 5. But what matters about weights and measures is communication with other humans and everyone has decided to use a 10 based system and what matters is not your personal preference but interoperability. Mebibytes might be better than megabytes but you use megabytes in your documentation because that’s what everyone else uses.

With the current situation with Tiktok, it's time for the Fediverse to rise.

Given the situation with TikTok—marked by censorship and the app's recent control by MAGA-aligned interests—I checked Reddit to see what TikTok users are saying. It turns out many are asking for alternatives. Most replies suggest other proprietary apps, and I haven’t seen any recommendations for decentralized platforms...

CombatWombatEsq ,

Hi I’m the bot who links loops and I approve this message: https://joinloops.org/

CombatWombatEsq ,
CombatWombatEsq ,

It’s not really my style of social media, so I don’t post much, but it’s a very impressive product. Props to dansup for getting it this far this fast.

CombatWombatEsq ,

Idk if this is bad manners or if it’ll work at all, but the dev is active on fedi, so here goes nothing: @dansup

CombatWombatEsq ,

Interesting that this comes right on the heels of the unexplained bug in Bluesky that causes the Minnesota hashtag to break on the day of the general strike. How’s that corporate-backed social media going, friendo? Is your speech free yet?

CombatWombatEsq ,

Every time I comment about bluesky I realize I don’t know anything about bluesky so… maybe?

CombatWombatEsq ,

I know it sucks but you’ve just gotta shitpost through it. No comments? Guess you gotta generate some content. We are the algorithm, and we are the bots, here on fedi.

CombatWombatEsq OP ,

I feel the same way. I got to the part where she unholstered his gun and wondered to myself if I would have that same grace.

CombatWombatEsq OP ,

I mostly was thinking about it practically — it’s a pretty straightforward case to make that a federal agent feared for his life because someone handled their service weapon and that justified the use of lethal force, even by a more law-abiding federal agency during a more liberal administration.

Whats the hardest days work you've had?

I'll intellectually/emotionally/physically hard as answers. For me its either 12 hours straight "punching tubes" on a very large scotch marine firetube boiler at the beginning of my career or Easter around a decade ago when I was working with troubled teens and had to engage in 5 separate protective holds in one 16 hour double...

CombatWombatEsq ,

Simultaneous interpretation. My first time out I did 20-30 minutes and had to lie down immediately afterwards. You’d think that just listening to someone else talk and then just repeating them in another language would be easy, but you have to buffer quite a bit to get the interpretation right, and then talking and listening at the same time is also pretty hard.

CombatWombatEsq ,

It isn’t, and it does.

CombatWombatEsq OP ,

For those of you who are from outside the US, this is a Fox affiliate, which is a pretty conservative news source, but less conservative than Fox News proper, since it’s for the MSP area specifically. Still an indicator that we’re likely to see very good participation.

CombatWombatEsq OP ,

Feel free to elaborate further here; I was just going for a quick one-line summary. The finer points of American media ownership are truly Lovecraftian.

CombatWombatEsq OP ,
CombatWombatEsq OP ,

The one nice thing about reading fox is they take articles that are roughly center-left eu politics and write articles about them as if they are communist propaganda. The more centrist papers just… don’t mention them at all. If you can withstand the awful editorial voice, it’s actually a pretty reasonable source for news.

CombatWombatEsq OP ,

I have already asked you all the questions I have regarding the contours of the American media landscape. Thank you for offering your time and expertise.

CombatWombatEsq OP ,

You are welcome to join us from anywhere. Workers of the world unite.

CombatWombatEsq OP ,

Thanks!

CombatWombatEsq OP ,

2 days is short notice, but we’re just asking you to run a couple extra errands after work on Thursday and call out sick on Friday. You don’t have to be perfect — if you have an appointment you can’t move or something that’s totally okay — but it’s important to do something visible so the people around you know they’re not alone.

First time here: What are some tips or rules I should know?

Hello. My first time here. As the title says, this is my first “thread” creation here. What are some things I should watch out for when I post here? Am I even allowed to create a thread even though this is my first time here? Or are there rules like Karma points, like in Reddit? Any input would be appreciated. Thanks. And...

CombatWombatEsq ,

I think the most confusing idea for newcomers is federation. You and I, we’re on lemmy.world, which is kind of like Reddit, but we’re connected to a million other servers. Some of them are other servers like Reddit, kind of like if you could comment on Reddit posts from Digg. Some of them are not, kind of like if you could comment on Reddit posts from Twitter, or Instagram. Every instance has a little different culture — lemmy.world is the “default” instance so our culture is pretty dilute, but some other instances have very strong cultures, for instance the stridently communist lemmy.ml server.

What's the best way for me to donate to FOSS projects?

Over the last 6 months or so I’ve been trying to switch to (mostly) open source software. I’d like to somehow contribute to the software I use and the people making it, but I have no programming expertise or other skills that would be useful. Is there anywhere I can set up a monthly donation so I can at least help support...

CombatWombatEsq ,

It’s not the ideal solution, but a lot of foss is hosted on GitHub and uses GitHub sponsorships. I would start by looking at the repositories for the projects you use the most and seeing if there is a button or link on it.

Fediverse Challenge: Prove there's still good in the world

There have been a couple of posts somewhat recently asking what can be done to attract new users to the Fediverse. My answer was basically "make it something new people would want to see and stick around for". The crux of that was basically less news, less politics, less rage and more, well, anything else....

CombatWombatEsq ,

I think there’s a lot of communities where the mods have gone inactive and no-one’s noticed yet, so when you get stuff in the wrong community there’s no-one to clean it up. Iirc, there’s a process for getting added as a mod for those communities — maybe it’s something we could help with?

CombatWombatEsq ,

Lemmy’s mod tools allow for much more nuanced responses than just nuking a post. For instance, I think locking the post and adding a comment pointing folks to the same post in a more relevant community is something most people would react positively to. And, it’s definitely okay to have some communities be for very small groups of people with a very restrictive mod policy — there’s always a bigger, more permissive community available for people that want to discuss whatever.

Are there "big accounts" on the threadiverse?

There’s been a couple of minor dust-ups on mastodon about the conduct of so-called “big accounts” there that I do not care to comment on, but it has got me thinking — do we even have “big accounts” on the threadiverse (Lemmy/piefed/mbin)? I don’t think there’s any handle I’ve seen where I’ve been like “oh...

CombatWombatEsq OP ,

I don’t include it in my mental model, personally, but I don’t think the term has a well-agreed-upon meaning. I use fediverse for any federated activitypub server, like mastodon and pixelfed, and then use threadiverse for the community/post/thread style instances like lemmy, mbin and piefed. For me, the threadiverse is the subset of the fediverse where you say, “oh, that’s just like reddit!”

CombatWombatEsq OP ,

I run a personal website where I host my resume. Is it censorship that I don’t allow you to post there, either?

CombatWombatEsq OP ,

Yep, that one. How is it different to say that I have to let you post anything you want on the lemmy instance that I host than to say I have to let you post anything you want on my personal website that I host?