The division of political ideologies into left and right derives from the French Parliament which had the monarchists on the right and the liberals on the left.

The names yes, but the basic conflict is much older, Europe itself had the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict.

The best photo smartphone of 2024 comes with Android

Yeah bro, this isn’t the 90s. You don’t need to insert stacks of DOS floppys.

Padoru Bocchi

Have they considered spending less on war and more on education / R&D?

I understand that politics in the US is very polarised, but surely most voters don’t blindly support every single thing their party says? There have to be thousands of possible combinations of opinions in a country.

The friend fell off.

Different social animals have different social structures. Wolves generally live in family units, led by the parents. Wasps and gorillas have complicated group politics, with alliances, betrayals and backroom deals. Some primitive ants have a ‘might is right’ system, with the strongest becoming the queen and fighting off challengers. Most ants have a highly democratic system, with decisions made using chemical ‘votes’ (cast by the workers; drones and queens don’t have a say).

Bangladesh is a very populous country that lies almost entirely at sea level, and the Ganga and Brahmaputra flood at least once a year. The problem isn’t not being able to swim in calm water. The best swimmer in the world would still die if he got caught in one of those currents.

Two points:

1. Top-level sports isn’t fair. Most famous athletes are outliers in terms of height, weight, muscle mass, etc. Some, like Phelps, have genetic or developmental differences that give them a pretty significant advantage.

2. I must admit that the legal definition of ‘transwoman’ varies from country to country. In India, where I live, a person can legally change their gender without any medical intervention, and such people might have a physical advantage over cis-women. But in the vast majority of countries, they have to take hormones and / or do surgical procedures that reshape their body to be more ‘feminine’. Once they do that, they have no significant advantage over cis-women.

At the application level? Yes. At the OS / package level? It’s still a work in progress. And you need the latter to use the former.

Fair, but it means devs will write software that can one day run on open hardware.

Ah yes, the French Revolution …

THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror … A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

• Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/989759-there-were-two-reigns-of-terror-if-we-would-but

It’s memes all the way down.

Why they putting ideas in people’s heads?

If you want power over another country, attacking them is a very inefficient path. You will take losses, and you won’t be able to take their resources intact. The easier and cheaper method is to just bribe their leaders into selling you whatever you want.

The US starts wars even when it doesn’t need to, because there are a handful of companies that stand to make a lot of money selling weapons. No other country has such a large and influential military lobby, so other countries tend not to start wars for private profit.

The admins seem to not crack down on misogyny, transphobia and so on. If they’re doing it on principle - refusing to censor and letting the bigots make fools of themselves in public - then I guess I can respect that. But on the other hand, sometimes silence can be seen as approval.

I wonder if it will be somewhat better here.

If you host your own instance, you have complete control over what gets posted. If not, you have to follow your instance’s rules.

one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called “The Principles of Communism” which I thought was very odd for a site to do.

That’s just basic bot detection, like a captcha. Karl Marx’s works are out of copyright, and Lemmy’s lead developer is a communist, hence the choice.

it’s part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.

In general, instances don’t expect you to agree with their mods on politics or religion, but the content hosted on that instance would be somewhat biased towards the mods’ tastes. So you go from lemmygrad (far-left) to lemmy.ml (centre-left) to lemm.ee (centrist) to shitjustworks (centre-right) to lemmy.world (right-wing). Personally I’d avoid the first and last, but it’s up to each person to decide what’s right for them.

The smallest Indian city that (almost) all Indians would know would be the hill resort of Shimla (pop 170,000). However, this is because a place is expected to have a population of about 100,000 to be declared a ‘city’, so for example New Delhi is only a town.

So witches are fish?

You need to think long term, man. What if those children grow up to become nuclear scientists?

/s, because someone actually arguing this is just a matter of time.