skullgiver

I do like the concept of a "politics-free" sporting event, but then those events need to actually be free of politics. That makes things like partially unrecognised countries (Palestine, Taiwan, South Ossetia, Sealand) very difficult, though, so you'd end up with tons of micronations and disputed areas in the line-up, which immediately becomes politics again.

However, I don't think the IOC is as neutral as they claim. Belarus being excluded for "invading during the Olympic ceasefire" or whatever they claimed was just a political move.

If you're trying to be free of politics, you'll have to stay free of politics every time. It's all or nothing.

In that regard, I sort of respect the IOC for disciplining athletes that refused to compete with Israeli/Russian athletes. I can't fault the athletes themselves, but at least the organisation seems to stick to its guns most of the time.

Honestly, I think I'd prefer it if there were no flags involved at all.

I agree with the sentiment. Israel should not be permitted to be part of the Olympics, their athletes should only be allowed to compete under the neutral flag, like the ~~Russian and~~ Belarussian athletes. Or, alternatively, if the IOC decides to go "no politics at the Olympics", ~~Russia and~~ Belarus should be permitted to compete again.

But going the extra mile to throw in a cartoonish evil smile and adding a random "USA" emblem? That's kind of cringe. It's detrimental to the message it's trying to convey, unless I misunderstood the message, in which case it's just dumb.

Edit: forgot that Russia also got banned for a doping scandal. That's separate from the war, of course.

It kind of depends on how much of your body is densely packed fat or muscle, but in a still pool I've never managed to float in a way that didn't at least let me float with my mouth above the water.

I wouldn't recommend anyone to go into the deep end of a pool without at least basic swimming skills, but if you can manage to remain calm, you can keep yourself from drowning pretty well, at least until help arrives.

If you can swim and want to try this out, please try not to look like a drowning person, or you'll end up being dragged out of the water by a lifeguard (or at least get called out). The human body has an instinctive drowning response that doesn't look at all like drowning people in the movies, and keeping your head just above the water can easily make you look like a drowning victim if you've got your arms side to side.

While it seems rather obvious that inhaling carcinogenic fumes is bad for your health, I've never really found a study that shows harm by second hand smoke as serious as the harm of smoking itself, to be honest. I don't think the damage second hand smoking does to the general population's health is quite as bad as direct smoking is.

Second hand smoking is bad, but it's orders of magnitude less dangerous than sucking the carcinogens straight out of a burning cigarette according to the papers I've scanned through. It'll increase the healthcare cost a few percent, but it's not as significant across the entire population as you'd think looking at the individual risks.

If we can end smoking, we'll end secondhand smoking for free. Plus, places and people just smell nicer in general.

Check the modlog on the instance you were banned from. If it's a temporary ban, it'll also show you how long the ban is in effect.

Unfortunately, Lemmy lacks a good UI for showing you this information. Then again, it's unfinished software, so who knows, maybe it'll be better in the next release!

Looks like someone didn't set up their MIME types right. I get it, though, email is a terrible protocol to work with if you're trying to do anymore more complicated than sending a plaintext message.

At least they didn't hit you with one of those winmail.dat files!

You need execute permissions on a directory to browse its contents. 664 on /var/cache/bind, /var/lib/bind, and /var/log/bind may cause issues. You may want to try 764 or 774 instead.

I don't know much about bind, though.

Using modern technology, you can write a C Windows application that runs on Wine that runs on Linux that runs on QEMU running on WASM inside a web browser running on macOS that runs on a virtual machine controlled by a Linux hypervisor. Even the individual instructions sent to the CPU are decoded by a layer of software that rewrites and reorders them inside the CPU. The CPU that may very well contain a smaller Pentium CPU running Minix to maintain operation of the rest of the CPU.

Software lunacy has made low/high-level programming languages obsolete. Everything can be distilled into Javascript runtimes, nothing is a real programming language anymore.

Tobacco execs generally don't like the 400% tax.

I know the tobacco industry has pushed the "smokers make the government money" narrative for decades, but since a few years it's actually true. Mostly because the healthcare system is collapsing under high demand and retiring boomers and gen X will leave the country with a disproportionate amount of people needing care versus people working to provide/pay for care. Important surgeries can already take years to be scheduled and that's only going to get worse the coming years.

This isn't the "thank the tax payer for paying for themselves", it's yet another symptom of decades of terrible decisions and putting off necessary reforms to deal with the demographic changes.

Also, in general, "at least they don't cost us money" isn't a good defence in general for maintaining a system getting people addicted to huffing cancerous fumes. Even if taxes brought in double the money it costs to care for a cancered up smoker, we should still strive for a smoke-free society. That includes huffing other cancerous fumes, such as vapes and weed smoke.

Thanks to taxes (81½% of the price is tax on average), smokers are currently making my government a profit, including all the cancer care. Old people need a lot of healthcare, so people dying of cancer saves a lot of healthcare cost in the long term.

People need help getting off their addiction to give them a better life. Money isn't really an issue. Turns out raising taxes for addicts, you can make a lot of money as a government!

I'm 100% for abolishing smoking. I particularly like the cut-off point approach, just stop people who turn 18 after a certain point from buying tabacco. This will slowly weed out the smoking habit, and in a couple of decades smoking will be seen as something old people and maybe foreigners do.

Powershell may have a stupid syntax, but it's actually pretty good if you look beyond that. Piping objects between scriptlets is so much better than the awk/grep workflows on Linux.

I tried to use it as a base scripting language for a while but I just can't get over the super verbose command line. Probably great for scripts, but not great in an interactive terminal.

Powershell does this on Windows. May also work on Linux?

I think there's a zsh script that does this as well but I can't remember the name of it.