Again, not what they were talking about.

Fly a plane. Get in the sights of a Messerschmitt 262 Schwalbe.

Don’t understand potential energy, you’re in a tight spot.

You do you lol

Chill out dude, they’re talking about a road atlas here, not aviation or long distance trucking or whatever.

This is like getting angry about not calling them switchboard operators when they’re talking about the telephone book.

Why would you smear Charlie like this? He died protecting our 2nd amendment rights, a noble sacrifice just like he said we need, and by showing any empathy, you’re doing a lot of damage.

We do, but it’s really scaled back compared to what we used to have. There are so many scars of abandoned rail lines all over major cities where they were torn out and replaced with road infrastructure. So many central train stations that are shadows of their former selves.

The unicorn also has forward-facing eyes like the horses in Skyrim, implying that the unicorn is a predator.

I think those are lines with standard passenger train service on them, though I can’t remember the reasoning for that. Might have been the states there refused to cooperate with the company or it could just be a terrain issue with the rail grade being too steep or winding for high-speed rail.

In short, the US has absolutely zero high-speed rail infrastructure - and barely any rail infrastructure at all compared to what it used to have and the size of the country.

This was one of many proposed high-speed rail networks from (I think) the late 2000s/early 2010s, but the fledgling train companies were largely strangled or bought up and closed by freight rail, car, and fossil fuel companies, so nothing ever happened.

TERF Island is not a safe place for trans people. Better than the US? Probably. I imagine you’re less likely to get hate crimed, at least. But they’ve been the biggest driver of the anti-trans misinformation machine that’s plagued medicine and culture for 20 years now. Trans medical care is incredibly difficult to get there and the government has been trying to get rid of it entirely for at least a decade now. Many of the politicians are funded by right-wing extremist Christian fundamentalist groups from the US.

They’re not far behind the US and Canada in the fall to fascism. It’s just a less hateful and more Big Brother flavor for the most part.

even windows added support a year ago or so supposedly

You answered your own question. I spent years playing the game of “This image is a JPEG. Will the website force me to save it in a format that can’t be opened by the basic Windows photo viewer, or will it actually be a JPEG when I download it?”

You’d be surprised how often it would turn out to be the former rather than the latter.

I appreciate the recommendation, but that was just a jab at how the comparison in the meme really doesn’t work because trying to describe the Fediverse as a house results in a non-Euclidian house right out of a horror movie or something.

When I joined Lemmy, the map of the entrances was in a GitHub repository, and you had to pass a vibe check at whatever door you chose. The first door I chose suddenly disappeared a month later and I had to find a different door and wear a different hat when I come in.

The rooms you can see changes depending on which door you walk in through. The door I use now doesn’t like wallpaper and so none of the rooms appear to have any. There’s also a distinct lack of all the leg lamps that I hear people who come in through other doors complaining about. I’ve found a handful of rooms dedicated to different kinds of leg lamps, but only if I track them down and map them so I can find those rooms again later. And many of the rooms only have one or two pieces of furniture in them as well.

The first time I find a room that’s a quarter of an inch bigger than the dimensions of the house would allow, I’m selling this house of leaves-ass place and never looking back.

Jim Jones, of the Jonestown Massacre. The cult leader who we got the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” from (though they actually were too poor to get Kool-Aid and they laced Flavor-Aid, the off brand version, with cyanide instead). When he started out, he was actually a very influential Civil Rights activist who is responsible for the policies that would later become the foundation of the civil rights laws in his home city. But he later became a crazy cult leader and by the time of the cult’s mass suicide, he ranted like Trump does today.

As for how anybody could believe that Trump’s a good businessman, many people only know him as that guy from The Apprentice, not the businessman who has bankrupted multiple casinos, an airline company (and beauty pageant for young girls who he flew around the country with in his private plane - just him, the girls, and a man by the name of Epstein), and who couldn’t even sell steaks to Americans.

Public transit in the US was purposefully gutted to force the adoption of cars, with many transit lines being replaced by highways or car centric infrastructure.

The Boston metro (more of a light rail), referred to as the T, is rated as the 3rd best public transit system in the US, despite the frequent fires and breakdowns caused by a lack of maintenance on vehicles that haven’t been replaced since the 70s or 80s due to being majorly underfunded. 100 years ago, the T was twice the size it is today, and a connection of one of the lines in Boston proper is now done by shuttle bus.

The number one and two spots in quality public transit are held by the bus lines in Seattle and Washington D.C., respectively. Public train lines effectively don’t exist as there are no government owned tracks in the country. Amtrak, the public train line, has to run on freight rail under contract with the various companies that own the rails along the way and is never on schedule because they have to stop and let freight go by due to said contracts. All the companies that were started to bring high-speed rail to the US were bought up by car companies or the fossil fuel industry and immediately shut down. The cities of Boston and NYC at one point had planned to build a direct high-speed rail connection between the two cities that would have dramatically cut down travel time compared to any other form of transit, but that never went anywhere.

My hometown has a few bus lines with maybe ten stops each and no connecting stops between them, and a single coach line that’s a direct stop at Logan Airport, which is probably 2 hours away depending on the traffic (probably an hour and change if you were to drive yourself instead). If you want to get anywhere else, your options are taxi services, rideshare, or driving.

Public transportation is so bad in the US that cars are culturally seen as a major sign of independence and the ability to choose for oneself. Getting your driver’s license is seen as a major growth point because it’s often the first time that people have the ability to go wherever they want without getting a ride from their parents.

People are more likely to be interested in who you are as a person than your country’s politics.

The current political state of the US is just the icing on the shit cake. When I was a kid traveling abroad with my parents 30 years ago, Americans were considered fat, ignorant, and egotistical. That they expected the rest of the world to speak English, accept USD everywhere, and give them special treatment. That they were loud, obnoxious, ignorant, and rude.

2016 Trump ran on the idea of being the good businessman who was going to clean up the swamp and get this company’s country’s act together. Just like any other CEO selling to investors. I have friends who, halfway into his campaign, were like, “I kinda like this Trump guy, he tells it like it is,” and by the time of the election they had completely 180’d on him because of the details of what he was promising.

One of these friends is super into cults and true crime, and he says that listening to Trump is eerie because he sounds exactly like Jim Jones. Then, and now. Back then he sounded like Jim Jones in his prime (and read Hitler’s speeches as bedtime stories according to an ex-wife, which would explain why all his campaign promises match up with Hitler’s). Today, he sounds like Jim Jones making his death speeches while you can hear them forcing the cultists to drink the Flavor-Aid and gasping, choking, and dying in the background of the recordings.

The people who liked Trump the first time and didn’t change their minds then were never going to change their minds the second time. They’ve already bought into the cult. And that’s what Trump is - a cult leader. He promises them a solution to their misery by giving them an obvious target to take their aggression out on, and people eat it up because they want a simple solution that absolves them of any blame.

How do I put this, your belief of what Lemmy and a forum are intended for are…misguided? Not quite the word I’m looking for, but close.

A forum is a 3rd space, like a bar, a restaurant, a community garden, a local store that runs tabletop games, or even a park. A gathering space for people to intermingle. But that doesn’t mean that a forum has to allow everything. 3rd spaces still have rules to be followed. When you enter Blahaj, you agree to abide by the house rules. And some of those rules are there specifically to stop sealioning behavior, which trans people are subjected to endlessly everywhere else on the web and looks exactly like this:

Inherently transphobic? You’re just assuming and extrapolating

Don’t assume it’s malicious, they might just not know. Aren’t we here to discuss? Being wrong doesn’t mean I should be banned, but I should be corrected. Closing debates when I’m respectful isn’t useful to anyone

I just like to question things, not take and accept them just because the person is concerned by the topic, especially if they have a sensibility or opinion on the subject

There are places where those kinds of questions and debates are okay (as long as they’re sincere and not malicious), but Blahaj is designed to be a space where trans people can get together and not be bombarded by those sorts of questions endlessly.

So Warl0k3 had a pretty good conversation on the matter, but as the original asker I just wanted to add something.

In this regard, Blahaj is no more authoritarian than a lesbian bar. That’s the analogy I use to describe how Blahaj is run - it’s like a gay/lesbian bar. It’s not a place meant to be an open floor of debate or something, it’s a place for trans people made by trans people. Blahaj is supposed to be a place where people can get away from the “just asking questions” or having to defend their existence constantly like everywhere else on the internet and real life. And just like a lesbian bar, if you bother the clientele or staff, you can and will be thrown out.

Got any examples? Blahaj was founded on the principle of protecting trans people, and I have yet to see anything here that people are claiming as mods abusing their power that didn’t turn out to be people getting upset about being banned for being transphobic.

There’s definitely some tankies here, but the biggest complaint I have about Blahaj is that you can’t see downvotes so the most controversial posts can look like the most agreed on takes.

Athletes just run. That’s not work.

Musicians just strum some chords on a guitar. That’s not work.

News reporters just yap on a screen all day. They don’t even do any video editing so they work even less. Same with actors and comedians.

Programmers and game designers just click buttons on a keyboard all day. Not work.

Factory workers just pull levers and move stuff around. Not work.

Mechanics just screw some stuff in here and there. Not work.

Da Vinci just scribbled on a ceiling all day. Not work.

It’s amazing how easy it is to dismiss a whole profession when you misrepresent what they actually do.

His literal last words before being shot were answering the question of if he knew how many shootings there have been in the past 10 years (after blaming them on trans people one question before) with, “With or without gang violence?” Not even a second later he had a fountain of blood spurting from his neck.