Here in Germany it has been revealed that the church set up a whole network shuffling around offenders (or sending them away to south america) and muddling traces. It’s even been shown that the former pope knew about such cases. It’s systemic.

Basically it’s a combination of supposed moral authority, intransparency, and mutual cover ups. People are willing to look the other way a lot when they perceive of someone as having a higher mission or great social standing. That includes law enforcement. Think of Donald Trump who’s a fraudster-racist-rapist-insurrectionist and yet the MAGA crowd loves him. Maybe celibacy plays into it as well, sexual urges don’t stop just because you don a robe.

Younger people are less and less religious with each generation. So at least from that angle the problem might eventually go away.

My guess is that his team set it up this way as aid to focus on economic issues instead of personal attacks and self aggrandization. But Trump’s gonna Trump and he said as much in the Interview 🫠.

Saudi Arabi is hostile to Iran (as is Israel) too.

The wheel (for transportation) is really a concomitant of stable roads existing. Really wheels only work on flat, paved surfaces. The “invention” of the wheel isn’t the stroke of genius that pop culture likes to portray it as. It’s just something that follows from having the right environment. The Romans for instance built and maintained widespread road networks throughout Europe to quickly move troops to the front lines. It turns out that those roads also were a tremendous boon for traders and travellers using carts.

Comic’s still funny though.

I often use this over KDE’s inbuilt screenshot tool because this one has a quick way to crop a screenshot

It’s leaves from a climbing plant like ivy, as for the torso I see it as fur or hide of animal like a leopard.

Nice, the 3 panels work in pretty much any order (some are better).

It’s a good overview. As a bonus I would love to see the number of people affected (in absolute numbers and share of global population) in each category for each point in time.

It’s true but for the broader picture one should add that many people don’t bother to vote if their state is predicted to be a landslide victory for either candidate.

Too many games I’ve seen conflate being evil with being a jerk. Few games let you play the ‘long game’ where you are specifically nice and cooperative to deceive and manipulate. I think this partly due to decisions being made modular and point to point. Your overall morality then is calculated as some form of average of all the decisions you made. Mass effect series comes to mind.

But if you want to play as a scheming villain the opposite should be the case: you set your primary long term goal (eg taking over a country or institution) and then your actions are chosen in the vein of that goal. And those actions might in isolation actually be seen as beneficial or benign. But you ultimately do them to gain trust or deceive.

It’s appealing but I wish the black font for mountain names had an outline or something to make it more readable.

Ime it’s not only the quality/style of music but being compressed and transmitted over phone line (which is optimized for human voice) and also often being way too loud (sudden shock plus clipped dynamic range).

Law terminology specifically can seem pretty archaic because there’s a high need for terms to be stable over time. In other fields and everyday speech terms can change over time. There’s contracts signed decades or even centuries ago that are still binding today. So it’s practical in a sense if the words within and those used to discuss legal dealings don’t change over time.

Eternity on Android passes with flying colors.

Off topic but:

[…] said Matthew Hindman, a professor at George Washington University who studies digital emails.

How do you study analog emails then? Print them out?

I’m the opposite of this picture. It’s like I have to relearn the game each time and fluid play takes a long time to return.

Funnily enough my muscle memory persists to some degree though. So for instance if a particularly tough enemy is charging me I might push a specific key without actually knowing what it does. Afterwards I have to reason and rediscover what I was trying to accomplish and bind that action to the key I pressed.

In my experience the big problem is not people self ascribing personality types but type casting others. When you expect others to have certain traits you also treat them accordingly.

I can’t believe she has trouble speaking in front of crowds, she’s a lion after all.

Then again horoscopes aren’t unified or anything and you can just cherry pick from different sources and cultures to believe anything.

Is that what the Steam Deck uses? It’s pretty useful.

I’d much rather look a simple sorted table or a bar chart.

For me the country outlines don’t add anything of value and they aren’t too scale either with arbitrary rotations mixed in. Spending is on a strictly one dimensional scale yet the graphic implies some concentric (2-dimensional) pattern.