I like listening to historical podcasts, and my favorites are "The History of Rome" (which has finished) and its followup "The History of Byzantium" and "Hardcore History" . I've heard good things about "Revolutions" by the creator of "The History of Rome" but I haven't checked it out yet.
Also I've been enjoying "Fall of Civilizations" a lot, but so far have only listened to a few of the episodes.
I've listened to all of these podcasts besides Hardcore history, and I can highly recommend all of them. It's hard to pick a favourite but it might be Revolutions, which I found the most eye-opening, especially season 3 on the french revolution. I'm currently working my way through Wittenberg to Westphalia, the Wars of the Reformation, which is meant to be on the 30 years way, but takes a very deep dive into the life, economy, history and culture of the middle ages and early modern period.
Given that we presume someone dies either way it becomes murder or manslaughter – it’s kinda hard to be involved in someone dying without those charges being discussed – but that gets very much into the weeds of jurisdiction specific laws and I’m not super familiar with them.
What is very interesting to think about is tort law, the general case history of negligence and liability when one person harms another but it isn’t explicitly illegal. Basically the injured person or family sues someone for doing something they shouldn’t have, and it gets into really interesting weird cases like could they have reasonably foreseen the injury etc. Here’s a summary of some major tort precedents going back many years: findlaw.com/…/5-classic-torts-cases-made-simple-f…
My favorite is Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. (1928) where a Rube Goldberg style chain of events caused Mrs. Palsgraf to be injured and it was ruled that the rail employee could not have reasonably foreseen all of that, so they weren’t liable. If anything (in my opinion) the men who brought fireworks in an unlabeled container onto a train and then ran to catch it were the ones behaving negligently (i.e., the originators of the foreseeably dangerous situation.)
This is a long way of saying, if you do nothing then you’re an innocent bystander to a tragedy. But if you take an action that reasonably (in this case certainly) causes injury, you’re responsible for that. You might say you’d rather have one man’s death on your conscience than a dozen, but that’s for you to meditate on in jail.
The real problem with the Trolley Problem is that it presupposes only two outcomes. In real life we don’t know what the possibilities will be and many actions are available to many people. First and foremost whoever tied the people to the tracks needs to be found and tried. Second, the trolley driver and whoever created, installed, or maintained the brakes needs to be interrogated. (Trolleys don’t generally drive very fast and they almost always have low bumpers to prevent things from falling underneath.) Finally, a number of other things had to go wrong or fail to go right in order to get into the situation: the tied people have to remain there for awhile unnoticed or unhelped by anyone until it’s too late, the trolley has to not notice things and be traveling too fast to slow down by other means, and every human between the people and trolley has to essentially freeze and fail to do extreme things like cut the power or derail the trolley or yell at someone for help. There are almost always third fourth and fifth options besides a singular person happening to stand by a singular track switch that points to certain death either way.
If it was me, I would yell for help and get myself and one other to man the switch and untie the single prisoner simultaneously. Even if we somehow fail, that action is more natural and moral and understandable to a jury than freezing up and choosing only the second worst option.
Ultimately it boils down to the jury, the judge’s instructions, and the specific wording of the law.
If we take Washington DC as an example, the lowest illegal killing law is involuntary misdemeanor manslaughter, like if you do something illegal and someone dies even if you didn’t intend it. It requires:
Defendant caused the death of the victim;
Defendant did so while committing or attempting to commit an underlying misdemeanor; and
Defendant committed or attempted to commit the underlying misdemeanor in a manner that created a reasonably foreseeable risk of appreciable physical injury.
So then you get into whether touching the rail switch was a misdemeanor or not (what are the laws on touching railroad stuff) and who in this unlikely chain “caused” the death. Once again we get into “foreseeable” despite the problem assuming that one person’s death is guaranteed, which isn’t actually how reality works.
Ironically, placing objects upon a railway with intent to cause harm OR doing something that “displaces or injures anything” related to the railroad resulting in death, is murder in the first degree in DC. So if throwing a switch counts as displacing a rail-related thing, which it probably does, the D.A. could try and get you for the worst form of murder they have. After all, in the real world you have no idea how trolleys and rail switches work. The problem supposes that you have perfect knowledge and awareness of many things, with the huge omissions of not noticing until it’s too late and only having one possible action to take. I might add that trolleys often don’t have switches laying around (they tend to take fixed paths) and when they do they’re not immediately accessible: they’re usually actuated by a separate tool or electric signal that the public doesn’t have. If we’re talking about a full sized railway then those levers are big and hanging around, but it’s illegal to trespass onto the rails and switching yards are placed far from the public. But anyway all of this depends largely on how the D.A. is feeling, which is bad news because most D.A.s are elected officials who politically campaign on seeming tough. So do people see you as a sympathetic everyman, or a contemptible fuckup, and how’s the D.A.'s career going? code.dccouncil.gov/us/dc/council/code/…/22-2102
If you can afford a decent lawyer, though, they’ll definitely request a trial by jury and play up the fact that you were doing your best to save as many people as you could in an awful situation set in motion by some other psychopath. Make sure to look mournful yet sympathetic to the jury. If you’re a white conservative Christian man with young kids in America, even better.
Even though this account is new because it was created a few days ago with the server I've set up (lemmy.cat), I've been on Lemmy for a while and have contributed to its development (documentation and translation).
I'd love to be able to help moderate one of the most important communities, not only in terms of the number of people, but also in terms of what it represents.
Sorting by top day helps. I have actually been sorting by new as well. Not as busy here as it is on Reddit, plus generally high quality so new stuff is pretty good.
Honestly being hyper and energetic all the time. Maybe it’s not necessarily childish but people are always surprised to learn I’m in my thirties because I don’t look/act like a lifeless zombie.
Honestly is not a big deal. Some specific instance might start behaving like aholes because of corporate greed or anything else.
All they can do is take their specific communities down. The affected communities can always move to other instance (that is easier than changing to a different system all together).
Changing platforms will always be harder than just switch instance because you instance changed the rules on you.
I get that genetically msg is not a problem for a huge amount of the population, but what about someone like me that genuinely has msg reactions that require me to do a time out at restaurants because of body shock loading?
It's no different from Asians that don't process alcohol so well. Some want a time out because genetically they're in a group that might not like alcohol.
There's a lot of Asian pride in telling me it's not msg, and doing studies to prove it's not msg. (Asian pride as described by Asian pride experts of that ethnicity).
However, the horrible fact remains that for some people MSG is proving to be the cause of reactions. The usual source is restaurants using MSG, but just to clarify the matter we find out the hard way when friends get too happy with MSG.
As much as I want to believe in rigorous science I still have to tell you that you're not considering the actual sufferers. It's a reaction akin to getting punched, and I definitely know about it.
It wounds the pride of the occasional restaurant that doesn't really want people to walk out because of a medical problem. I'm sorry about that. I'll look into possible solutions. It's my fault for really enjoying Asia and Asian food.
Again, all of that is really testable. You can even blind test yourself at home.
Any salted meats will naturally form MSG when the glutamic acid binds to sodium. Pretty much all processed foods contain msg even if it was not an additive because it naturally forms on the foods themselves when free glutamate binds to salts. If you had any form of Japanese food cooked with kombu or seaweed, it also had high msg content.
None of this is even unique to Asian foods. Most cheeses are extremely high in msg, especially aged cheeses like Parmesan. Pretty much all savory foods contain some glutamate and glutamic acids.
I would like to see things related to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, DC, or films in general. I would also like a news community, although there might already be one.
Are you still looking? What would you like to know - the technical details, or what each instance feels like, or just a general "i don't care how it works, I just want to jump into the conversation"?
I am looking for something that goes into technical details from a developer's perspective. How does the ActivityPub protocol structured, how one app receives data from another (e. g. Lemmy to Mastodon), how does an admin de-federates another instance etc.
I work in tech, but sometimes tech is added to things needlessly. I just want my washing machine to be a washing machine. I’m tired of being the product.
Silicon valley’s “disruptors” are usually full of shit. The vast majority of the time: it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Don’t tell me what to do with my land if you’re not willing to pay my taxes (or if you don’t have good ecological reasons). I’ll paint my shudders whatever color I want to.
Bring back the damn knobs, buttons, and switches in my car. I don’t need more touchscreens.
On the other hand…
I recognize that the way I feel and some of the opinions I have are based on a context I grew up with that may no longer exist - or at least it may not exist in the form it once did. I recognize how I see things may die with me and my peers, and that’s ok. It’s a sad truth, but truth, nonetheless.
Nah. This is a fresh start. It's been less than a week and theres already so much more content. It'll grow soon enough. Especially with spez fucking around over there. We want og content here, not all the shit reposts that already plague reddit
asklemmy
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.