European guy, weird by default.

You dislike what I say, great. Makes the world a more interesting of a place. But try to disagree with me beyond a downvote. Argue your point. Let’s see if we can reach a consensus between our positions.

  • 22 Posts
  • 765 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 19th, 2023

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  • In my country, jury duty can be refused and is deemed as a role, not an obligation. It is an honor, as it is very rare to have such added role in court; takes very complex and often serious crimes. People called for it often accept but I have heard of situations where people object from personal or moral values.

    And, again, in my country, voting is not an obligation, nor legal, nor moral. It is a right and the duty to vote is considered a matter of respect towards the right that was acquired through a revolution and the individual right to be part of the political destiny of the nation, no matter how small.

    Maybe I’m splitting hairs, here, but I don’t care.

    A duty arises from a personal sense of necessity to do something. Call moral obligation if it is easier for you. Being moral relative… Obligation is determined, enforced and enforceable by law.



  • You be the judge of it:

    • punched through a tempered, textured, 3mm thick glass, leading to several cuts on a hand and wrist
    • kicked a glass panel on a door and got a nasty cust on my toe
    • several instances of cutting myself on different types of thorny bushes
    • perforation with glasses rim on my eyebrow
    • severe cut on my other eyebrow, another on the bridge of my nose
    • broken arm, twice
    • fall from a 1st floor balcony, landing on a bush, after breaking a cabinet with my back and legs, until finally reaching the ground
    • hundreds, if not thousands, of small scrapes and bruises
    • bitten by dogs, leading to deep gouges, on my calves
    • severe tear on the back of my left hand, with a broken bone, not exposed, leading to surgery
    • many, many, many sprained ankles and wrists
    • three pulled teeth plus all the bleeding from losing my baby teeth
    • minor burns on hands and fingers, from cooking
    • several nasty cuts from kitchen knives and a perforation by a lobster spike, which led to a severe infection, with a piece of lobster shell stuck underneath a finger nail
    • a few near choking to death episodes
    • two electrocussion incidents (230V), for mere seconds


  • I’m going to risk there is none.

    Many hand to hand combat weapons were bespoke to the user.

    Using an example I’m fairly familiar with:

    In Portugal, we have a martial art called jogo do pau. It uses a simple wooden staff. Today’s schools insist the staff has a standard lenght, width and shape.

    An old school practitioner I had the pleasure to meet taught me the staff was always made to fit the wielder, not the opposite.

    As a general guide line, it should have the lenght of the distance from the wielder’s armpit to the ground but there would be people that prefered longer or shorter staffs. Some people would prefer thinner staffs, nearly cylindrical in shape, others would prefers heavier, thicker, almost eliptical in profile. The amount of customisation and variation capable of being put into the weapon itself was so diverse, it made each staff unique.

    I’d risk this same logic would apply to more classic weapons, like the flails you ask about.


  • I’m not against supporting a software in a recurring form but the web browser is essentially the lock and key of accessing the entirery of what exists outside your machine.

    That would garner an immense power to whichever entity developing one. Remember Microsoft and the IE case.

    Firefox is not perfect and apparently on a downwards spiral but what made it stand out was because it wanted to be free and for all. Chrome is far from being a good thing.


  • The Mafia and most, if not all organized crime syndicates, started as a way for people to defend themselves from abusive governments, officials, etc. Mafia thrives by getting along with people, not openly prey on them.

    Syndicates also tend to be patriotic, in the sense that they are defending or at least looking to preserve their interests where they are rooted.

    Mafia tends to arbour great disdain for police and similar forces. They can be useful if bribeable or somehow coherced to look the other way but they are still police. The enemy.

    I’ll give you an extreme example.

    In Brasil, the Comando Vermelho is one of the largest, if not te largest, criminal organization on the country. They are well known for their extremely violent and cruel methods. Yet they are the biggest employers in the areas they control. They build schools, pay people for their work (mostly unrelated to criminal activities), distribute food, run clinics. They act as de facto police, courts and punishers, to keep peace. They nearly replace the state because the state nearly abandoned the poorest of poor, amongst who they set grounds, in the favelas.

    I can’t imagine the resistance they would pose to an invading force.

    And, I can’t confirm this, but I have a memory of reading somewhere that during WW2, the Mafia helped the Allies infiltrate areas.















  • Hello from Portugal!

    We also suffer from combination of rain and waste waters here. And most cities just wave it off, even when solving the problem could be done with very little inconvenience.

    But I digress.

    What type of installation are you more familiar with?

    Most instalations around here are two stage processes, fully biological. Exceptions with terciary processing are very few and with fourth stage processing I have heard about a single one, that once supplied water to a brewery for a proof-of-concept experiment with crafting beer with processed waste water.

    I respect your remark. The solar panels are not technically a part of the process but we can agree the use of otherwise vacant space is smart.