For starters, there’s the ballroom of the Washington Hilton, located less than 2 miles from the White House, where the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is held every year and has a seating capacity of more than twice what this one is planned to have.

It’s really not like DC is hurting for hotels, ballrooms, convention centers and other suitable places to host large events.

As for why have it on the south lawn when those sorts of facilities are available? I ask myself a similar question whenever I get a wedding invite and the venue is outdoors, but people choose and even prefer to have these sorts of formal events outside sometimes, so this is cutting into available space to host those sorts of events, because it’s a lot harder to find a large private outdoor space in DC that can be easily secured than it is to find a suitable indoor space.

I think (and hope) people are downvoting you just because of the content of the article and not really paying attention to where it was posted.

It’s maybe not the absolute best fit for this community, I’m not sure that it’s quite crazy enough to be an onion article, although in all honesty that line has become so blurry with how crazy the real world is these days that I can’t even say for certain whether the authors intended for this to be a genuine defense of this ridiculous project or some incredible tongue-in-cheek mockery of it.

And to be clear, this project and any defense of it is insane, I get what you were going for sharing it here (or at least I hope I do)

I would hope that like damn-near every other electronic device, it would include at least a thermal cutoff to kill the power before it got hot enough to start a fire.

Seriously, they’re in pretty much everything, any sort of tool or appliance with a motor probably has one, of course anything that generates heat like a hair dryer or space heater, I’ve seen them in lamps, they’re everywhere. They’re also a pretty common point of failure, so if you’re a little handy with a soldering iron, for any random device that suddenly stops working, there’s a pretty good chance that the culprit is a brown thermal fuse and can be repaired for just a few cents and a few minutes of mumbling curses to yourself while you try to get the damn thing open.

I think the bigger issue with this is probably people with mobility issues, who I imagine are a pretty big part of the target market for a bed like this, if they have trouble getting out of bed to adjust the heat or whatever, a bed like this is probably pretty attractive. But if they get stuck in bed with the heat stuck on high, that could be a pretty big medical problem.

I have a friend who is unapologetically a weirdo (really that describes most of my friends and myself I suppose, but this story is about one of them in particular)

We’re at a bar for his birthday. This place was formerly a real dump of a dive/biker bar but has cleaned itself up a bit. Still kind of a dive, but it’s a nice dive. It’s located practically right on the border of a really shitty town and one that’s generally pretty nice, so it gets an interesting selection of patrons there.

He’s a regular there, he actually lived in a small motel attached to the bar for a bit while his house needed some major repairs.

Again, he’s a bit of a weirdo, it’s his birthday, he’s been drinking, and he wants to listen to some Disney song (I’m pretty sure it was “part of your world” from the little mermaid) so he goes and queues it up on the jukebox

And the song never plays

So he does it again. And again it never plays.

Eventually he figures out that the bartender (what was new and didn’t really recognize him as a regular) was skipping it when it came up.

We ask her to just let it play for him for his birthday, she refused

So he queues it up about 10 times in a row, she can’t skip them all fast enough, it finally starts playing, she’s getting mad at us,some asshole dudebros in the bar are getting annoyed that this song is now playing twice, and we’re all politely yet firmly asked to leave.

So we fuck off to another bar owned by the same person, we’re welcomed in, they let us play the damn song, they mention to to the owner who apparently told the bartender who was giving us issues to chill and there hasn’t been any issue since.

V for Vendetta

Things got changed a bit for the movie if you’re only familiar with that

The man is Adam Susan (renamed Adam Sutler in the movie, played by John Hurt) the leader of the ruling Norsefire party, he falls in love with the “Fate” supercomputer that runs the government surveillance system

This feels like a wonderful gift, this video needs to be projected behind every speaker at the next round of protests, with an accompanying message flashing at the bottom saying “Trump posted this himself” à la South Park’s “this what scientologists actually believe”

It’s him literally labeling himself as a king, complete with a crown

Shitting all over America.

What possible angle could you look at this from and say "yes, that is a mature, mentally stable person who should be in charge of anything?

And since most of the media is kind of dropping the ball on this, we need to be sharing this around as something like “Trump posts AI-slop video of himself as a king shitting on America” instead of the bullshit headlines I’m seeing about it.

Playing devil’s advocate, if I somehow didn’t know robotaxis and other autonomous vehicles were a thing, I might think it was a car used for Google Street view or some sort of GIS mapping

Or if I were a paranoid cop I might think they have a bomb strapped to their roof, or cell phone jammers or some other crazy conspiracy bullshit.

I’m no expert on animal color vision, but different animals absolutely see color differently, some have markedly worse color vision than humans, others are even better

And of course we can’t really know for certain how different animals perceive color since we can’t actually see the world through their eyes as it gets processed through their brain, though we can make some pretty educated guesses.

AFAIK, most mammals except for some primates (like humans) and a few other exceptions, have dichromatic vision (have only 2 kinds of cone cells in their eyes instead of 3 like we do) so there’s gonna be some “gaps” in their color vision, and one of the common configurations is similar to red-green colorblindness in humans and would make orange look very similar or indistinguishable from green but the specifics do vary from one species to another.

Other types of animals like many fish, birds, and reptiles actually have 4 types of cones and so can see parts of the spectrum we can’t (though it doesn’t necessarily mean they can or can’t see the same colors we do and then some, where we have receptors for red, blue, and green light, they might have for example, red, blue, blue-green, and green, giving them essentially the same range of color vision we do but with extra sensitivity to the blue/green part of the spectrum)

And then of course you have animals like mantis shrimp with 12 or 16 types of receptors.

When I took my state’s required hunter safety course, one of the instructors was an older dude with grey hair and a ponytail who wouldn’t look out of place at a Dead & Company concert.

To point out the importance of wearing an orange hat during small game seasons, and also to “be sure of your target and what lies beyond it” he pointed out how much that grey hair and ponytail would look a lot like a squirrel if you only caught a glimpse of it through some brush.

Not saying that’s exactly what happened here, the kid doesn’t look like he was the grey ponytail type, but the article shook loose that memory in my head.

EDIT: not that I’m ungrateful, but somehow this is now my highest rated comment on Lemmy, and I’m just curious why this one in particular resonated to well.

I think I see a bit of steam escaping from the pan, so I think they tried to weigh it after cooking

Which makes sense, there’s going to be some weight change after you cook it because of evaporation and such… hence the steam

Before cooking you couldn’t really call it Jollof Rice, it would just be a big pot of the raw ingredients for Jollof Rice

And they know the weight of the ingredients going in already, they’re quoted in the article, so that’s just simple addition to figure out.

Yeah, don’t get me wrong I enjoyed his lectures, it’s just very much not going to be everyone’s cup of tea and certainly not something that would have translated well to a movie

I’m personally very much a fan of both the comic and the movie

The overall plots are largely the same, the comic of course has a little more space to flesh things out.

Which does actually work against it at times, there’s a point where V just kind of goes off on a lecture about anarchy for a couple pages, which is interesting but maybe not the most exciting comic book reading you’ll ever do, and certainly wouldn’t have translated particularly well to the screen, so overall I don’t mind most of the changes they made of

Both the comic and movie are very much a product of their times and places. The comic is very much a reaction to Thatcherism in the UK, the movie more to post-911 Bush-era America.

The movie probably resonates more with me personally, but I’m also a product of that time and place. The comic strikes me as a little more timeless.

Even more appropriately, it’s V for Vendetta

Spoilers, I guess, for a 40 year old comic (the plot in the movie is a bit different)

I know that when police in my area need to destroy evidence that’s no longer needed (and can’t just be disposed of in normal waste streams, or sold or what have you) they normally take it to a local garbage incineration plant.

There was also a steel mill in the area at one point and their furnace was occasionally been put to use for similar purposes (tangential - there was at least one instance I’ve heard of where the US mint used that furnace to dispose of a batch of coins they were testing a new alloy or process or something on)

How “no install” does it need to be? Because in one sense, duct-taping a flashlight to the ceiling could technically be considered an install if we really want to split hairs.

I’m assuming the main thing is you don’t want to be running wires and cutting holes in the ceiling.

If screwing something into the ceiling isn’t too tall of an ask, a plug-in chandelier/pendant lamp might be a good option, but finding an attractive way to route the wires may prove tricky.

Some command hooks and string lights may do the trick

You could also try some rope rights along the perimeter of your ceiling held on with command strips/double stick tape

A tall floor lamp could sort fill the role of a ceiling light, at an old apartment I had a lamp that was basically an enormous version of the Pixar lamp that filled that role pretty well.

You might be able to find some sort of battery/rechargeable/maybe even solar powered light fixture that you can mount to your ceiling to get around needing to run a power cord to it, but I have a feeling you’ll find the light output and battery life of most options disappointing.

Not what you’re asking for, but just a final thought- my childhood home had almost no overhead lighting, there was a light fixture or two in the kitchen, a couple bare bulbs in the basement, and a wall fixture in the bathroom. Everywhere else we just had floor, table, and desk lamps and never really had a problem with it. I feel like that’s still a perfectly serviceable solution, especially with the modern option of having smart bulbs and/or outlets to control those lights.

When I first joined Reddit, maybe around 2009-ish, give or take a couple years, I remember there being a pretty sizeable libertarian/Ron Paul crowd there.

That’s not to say they were like the modern maga/alt-right lunatics,I think the reddit-libertarians of that era probably would have hated maga bullshit

But there’s a definite path from that to the crazy shit we have now.

And there was always some crazy people there, one of the first subreddits I remember checking out was /r/conspiracy, I’m an enjoyer of a good conspiracy theory, I don’t believe them except for a few relatively mainstream ones, after all, who doesn’t have a favorite theory about the Kennedy assassination? But I noped out of there really quickly because holy shit those people actually believed the shit they were talking about.

And with all of the corporate bullshit they’ve had over the last few years driving away people who haven’t been brainwashed, I’m not surprised that the users who are left are completely insane.