You’re being disingenuous.

During the Iraq war/invasion of Afghanistan the american military was being treated as “defenders” of our nation. Public schools frame unjustified wars as justified to this day. I personally was taught that dropping nuclear bombs on Japanese cities was morally justified, and I didn’t learn until I was an adult that the Japanese air force/navy was obliterated at this point and the nukes were completely unnecessary.

What I’m saying is, pretending that being 18 means the average person suddenly views military personnel as murderers is completely loony toons. That’s not how this works.

Ah yes, all those 18 year old kids who bought into propaganda produced by a massive state run machine totally deserve it. Especially the ones from poor families in economically depressed areas that thought they could pay for college by enlisting.

When I left my tiny home town to go to the mall in the nearby economically depressed city (Flint MI), they had army recruiters just posted up outside. Trying to catch suckers in the wake of 9/11.

That town still doesn’t have clean water.

People don’t just decide they want to go kill brown people. You have to propagandize them, tell them they’ll be heroes. Tell them they’ll be rewarded. Force them to grow up in conditions that leave them with few choices.

Fight against wars for oil. Fight against american imperialism. The vets themselves are almost entirely working class. Choose better targets for your vitrol.

But he also said he wanted cuts, and that Musk would remain a power center: “If they can cut, it’s better. And if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting.”

Its not time for celebration. This is just to take heat off Elon. Now the media will be able to spread the blame around or excuse it. “People inside the department know how best to make cuts. Everything is normal”.

For what it’s worth, they have their domain back. It seems from a skim from the front page they’re just deciding how to refederate (allow list or block list, basically they are trying to decide if they will automatically federate with new instances).

At the time of writing this comment the votes are close and allow list is winning (many commenters don’t want to federate with new instances unless they are approved).

I think that you should keep posting with your signature if it makes you happy. I have some sincere doubts it will force a corporation to exclude your content from any aggregated data, though, nor do I think anyone is giving up their rights by not properly licensing their comments here. Copyright is automatic in the USA. The problem isn’t the licensing, its the fact that no court is properly enforcing these rights. And, too few governments have data privacy laws on the books.

I’m not interested in relitigating those points though, I’m sure you’ve heard them. I guess I’m just typing that up so you know where I’m coming from.

I do think your signature is valuable when it makes people consider who owns their data, and why the CC license is important.

Personally I think you should put an explanation in your bio. I think your message will be served better if you can point to a pre-written explanation (or even an old style FAQ). But, I don’t think you’re obligated to do so. Its all gravy. People are going to fight you regardless.

Did you see that post from that guy mad about a period character on slashdot? Lmao

Hm, interesting. So this guy was posting all weird on slashdot, and you remember decades later? And you carried that with you, and it inspired you to type this comment. That’s a lot of commitment on your part for a stray period.

That’s pretty funny. Thank you for sharing.

Yes, thanks for catching my errors.

I wrote my comment too hastily, you are correct. My comment has been edited, probably while you were typing yours.

I miss the old web, where if someone wanted to RP as a alien or a cat or something in all their forum posts, we just kind of rolled with it. The internet was strange and diverse.

So many people are dog piling this guy because, in essence, he isn’t conforming. He’s including a little forum signature on his lemmy posts in 2025.

Just ignore it and keep scrolling.

I agree, but not in a “this guy is an idiot” kind of way, but in a “do whatever you want and keep the internet diverse and strange” kind of way. Let the guy have his small protest. Folks need to stop dog piling him. It shows up in many of the threads he’s in, and judgments about his little signature dominate over anything he actually had to say.

Ah yep, I wrote my reply too hastily. It is fixed (Edit: I also missed where it specified b is an integer).

(edit: I typed this up not as a response to OP, but for anyone who was curious about this but didn’t remember or never learned enough math to solve this for themselves. It had errors but I fixed them (I think, I just woke up and I’m tired of re-reading this comment). Sharing is imperative, and not everyone has had the chance to develop an appreciation for math).

Here I come to explain the joke.

The question asks for what values of b produce no real solutions.

Quadratics (this is the type of equation this is) have two, one or no real real roots. (If we set x to some arbitrary number and the equation is equal to zero, we say x is a root of the equation. A real number is anything we traditionally call a number, like 2, 1/4, -248957.666667 and pi).

So we need to find where it has only one real solution. Quadratics of the form (x-k)^2 = 0 have only one real solution, that solution is k.

So, since 169 = 13^2 we can easily find the b that produces this (this part isn’t necessary as part of the solution, I include it in case it helps someone understand):

-1(x-13)^2 = 0
-1(x^2 -26x + 169) = 0
-x^2 +26x - 169 = 0

If we apply the quadratic formula, we can find what values of b produce imaginary roots. I’m not going to type the whole thing out, we just need to know what is happening under the “square root” part of the quadratic formula, the radicand:

sqrt(b^2 - 4 * -1 * 169) 
sqrt(b^2 - 676)

sqrt(676) is 26, by the way. So any value between 0 and 26 (or 0 and -26) will produce a negative value inside the radicand. We can’t take a square root of a negative number (unless you don’t mind that your solution has complex numbers), so any -26 < b < 26 will give us an equation without real solutions.

Therefore, the least value of b is a value of b greater than -26, but less than 0. Since the question specifies it is an integer, that number is -25.

Its standard practice for math equations involving spectral densities and Fourier transforms to use the testicles character for the independent variable.

Fourier analysis involves measuring the sampled strength of the signal at different points in time. Its also related to ARIMA models. Essentially, you’re inspecting how cyclical some data is, and the testies are points in time.

By the way, there is an error in this meme, see the comment left by jjagaimo

R

We can reject the null hypothesis that you are not a nerd at significance $\alpha < 0.001$.

oh wait, shit let me run that again, my data frame is full of NA somehow, again.

Not just that, I like how they went with “radical change” instead of “wanton destruction” or “unlawful government restructuring”.

These salary numbers are SO OLD. GS5 is like, 40k minimum?

The GS payscale is public data. GS is adjusted every year and each position is adjusted for the cost of living for the area. Each GS rank has “steps” which, most people start at step 1 and get raises based on yearly reviews

Here is the public listing for 2024: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/2024/general-schedule

(Efit: this still isn’t much money to become a traitor to your fellow man)

Thank you for the thorough reply!

I’m not a website administrator so I’m out of the loop. Other ways to manage bots? Like what?

I didn’t mean to imply it only came from trash food, I only intended to show one/two examples where associated cancer risk [edit: could be] correlated and not causal.

I am not saying microplastics are neutral. I am saying that the title of this article is clickbatey.

please read the article before panicking, this shit is mega complicated:

Brains of people with dementia had up to 10 times more MNPs than other brains but that doesn’t mean MNPs had caused dementia. The elevated rate was likely a result of damage to the blood-brain barrier from the neurodegenerative disease, the authors said.

The study didn’t find more plastic in the brains of older people with more lifetime exposure, suggesting the brain can clear itself of MNPs, Campen said.

however:

Previous studies have found microplastics associated with certain cancers, cardiovascular disease and harm to human reproductive, digestive and respiratory health.

although, if you’re ingesting a lot of microplastics, maybe you are also ingesting a lot of other pollutants (or maybe you’re just eating a ton of processed food, and this trash food has more microplastics in it), and the microplastics are correlated in this way.

This is the message of the enemy. I am not sure what there is to be done, but to say this:

There’s nothing that can be done.

is to give up. The only thing that we ordinary people can know is that the democratic party is unable/unwilling to form an effective resistance right now.