dogorman

I read both; the 'rant' is better and argues its point more persuasively. I think you didn't read the 'rant' in full.

The BP and Exxon pages are like night and day. If you don't see a fundamental difference between the two, you have your head buried firmly in the sand.

The decision to only have three sentences about it. The decision to hide those three sentences under the "History" heading so there is no hint of it in the table of contents. The decision to not even have a "Controversies" section to the page. The decision to not have any photographs of the aftermath. Don't be so credulous. Wikipedians have been caught selling their PR services numerous times before, and doubtlessly get away with it even more often than that.

Contrast this with what BP's page looks like and it's obvious Exxon payed top dollar while BP's PR team cheaped out (gave up?). BP's page has a paragraph dedicated to the Deepwater spill in the introduction section, has a "Violations and accidents" section in the table of contents, and has "Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill" in the table of contents as well. And that section? It has a dozen or so paragraphs, not just three lame sentences. The page has several photographs of the aftermath. BP's page looks like an authentic wikipedia page, while Exxon's page was obviously bought and paid for by Exxon's PR. Exxon's page should look like BP's, but doesn't.

And since you mention the article dedicated to the spill, lets compare those too. The Deep Water Horizon page is 4 times as long. The Deep Water Horizon page gets prominent links from BP's main page, at the top of the section titled "Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill"

> Main article: Deepwater Horizon oil spill

> See also: Deepwater Horizon explosion, Deepwater Horizon litigation, and Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Trust

BP's page also has an infobox all about the spill: "This article is part of a series about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill"

Exxon's page? The link for the spill's dedicated page is hidden as the 4th link in one of the three sentences that page has about the spill:

> On March 24, 1989, in what is regarded as one of the worst oil spills in American history,[9] a tanker owned by Exxon, the Exxon Valdez, crashed into Bligh Reef, [[Exxon Valdez oil spill|spilling]] its cargo of over ten million gallons of crude oil into the Prince William Sound in Alaska

What an absolute fucking joke. I can't believe you defend this.

Cast Harrison Ford as the wrongfully accused husband. Have him escape after his bus to the prison crashes, then have Tommy Lee Jones as a US Marshal chase Ford down while Ford is trying to prove his innocence.

Might just make for a blockbuster movie.

From what I understand, ".22 LR" is nominally .22 inches, actually is .223 inches, and is labeled as 5.6x15mmR in Europe while actually being something like 5.66mm (the 'x15' is the length of the case in millimeters, and the R means rimmed.) They are called different things and both are not quite their nominal sizes, but I think they're interchangeable in practice.

10 paragraphs? That's your standard? What a joke! The Exxon Valdez only gets three sentences on Exxon's wikipedia page. It costs peanuts to bribe a wikipedian editor to manage your corporation's reputation and suppress controversies on wikipedia. This is standard practice. How anybody thinks a corporation's wikipedia page is neutral territory is beyond me.

American public schools have been using metric for decades. Science classes in American public schools use metric exclusively since the 80s at least. When you meet an American who makes a big deal out of not knowing what a meter is, 9 times out of 10 they're putting on a performative patriotic display mean to get a rise out of you. That, or they're quite elderly.

Incidentally, .22 LR is nominally but not actually 0.22 inches in diameter. It's very slightly bigger than that. In the domain of ammunition, there is often a mismatch between actual diameter and nominal diameter.

Yes, police are pretty good at solving "the spouse did it" crimes, the most obvious sort. When the victims were chosen randomly, the clearance rate becomes abysmal. They're also bad at solving crimes when the victims come from the marginalized fringes of society. Jack the Ripper is a famous unsolved case of a serial killer who targeted prostitutes more than a century ago. Modern examples include the Long Island killer, the Eastbound Strangler, and plenty more.

When the existence of such a serial killer is recognized, it tends to make the news at least regionally. Sometimes they become internationally famous for many years. But to my point, the public hearing about it is not contingent on the culprit being caught. If anything, the ones who are caught fast and easy tend to make the least amount of news. You can 'juice' unsolved crimes for stories a century after the fact, but stories that follow the "husband did it and we caught him" format tend to disappear from the news after the culprit has been sentenced.

> building structures to enforce their own morality

You mean, applications that people voluntarily choose to use? You still haven't pointed out any authoritarianism from Atmana.

> The best crimes do not look like crimes.

Sure, but there is really no shortage of known unsolved crimes.

> The police does not put out press releases repeatedly with 'we got no leads'.

They do, in all the cases I listed they've asked the public for help for years. Certainly they don't do that for crimes they don't know occurred, but there is no shortage of known crimes that are very publicly unsolved.

For that matter, there are also a whole lot of missing person bulletins soliciting information from the public. Many of them might be murder victims, but it isn't known whether they are really alive or dead, let alone murdered. The public is nonetheless asked for information.

Selection bias is a cheap canned answer, but it doesn't make any sense here. Sensational unsolved crimes make the news. The public hearing about crimes isn't conditional on those crimes being solves. Arguably some of the most enduringly notorious crimes are the ones that go unsolved.

The Zodiac Killer; never been caught. "D.B. Cooper", never caught. The presumed murder of Jimmy Hoffa, unsolved.

> Not claiming this at all, didn’t mention alcohol.

Wait, so you claim it of people who want to quit unspecified "hard drugs", but not alcohol specifically? Attendance to alcoholics anonymous is voluntary (usually, though sometimes a court compels it.) Use of this application is also voluntary. So what's the fundamental difference here?

> groups (esp religious ‘addiction’ services) _organizing_

If this is really key to what you're getting at, then it makes no sense for you to exclude Alcoholics Anonymous from your ire since that is an organized group that is religion-adjacent if not outright religious.

> I’m sorry for not assuming good faith here.

You're not sorry.

I suppose you'll also claim you've never met a "vegetarian" who thinks "fish don't count."

Might there be merit to a semi-tethered approach? Enough onboard batteries to last a minute or two when you walk to another room, where you promptly plug in again?

Maybe so, though this too seems like a strange belief, and touches on the reason I find surprise at such things odd: it's been known for years that fetuses at late stages have cycles of REM sleep and apparent wakefulness.

I've found that "fetuses aren't alive" is a common talking point espoused by people who aren't comfortable sitting in a moral gray area and want an simple excuse to resolve their cognitive dissonance. It's common enough that I can't help but wonder if that is the reason people are so resistant to the idea that fetuses might dream. It seems remarkably similar to "farm animals can't feel pain". A transparent fib people tell themselves to feel better about their positions. Incidentally, I eat meat and I am pro-choice.

I guess the suggestion that fetuses might dream probably seems outlandish if, for some reason, you were already committed to the idea that fetuses are "not alive."

The article you link seems to talk in circles and dwell on the question of whether covid-19 came from that lab, but I don't see where it explains what definition of 'gain-of-function' Fauci is operating under, if not,

> gain-of-function — a type of research the U.S. government generally defined in 2014 as aiming to “increase the ability of infectious agents to cause disease by enhancing its pathogenicity or by increasing its transmissibility.”

What does Fauci claim the meaning of gain-of-function is, which excludes "take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans"?

Let's not forget a certain government lab originating pathogen that made quite a stir at around the same time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks

I don't think you'd be so obtuse to respond with a 'just get a better job' comment if you understood that expression, so for future reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake

> and (I'm not sure why) 24/7 security staff

Are you trying to make some sort of point with a show of feigned ignorance, or do you really not get it? Security is the second rung on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, one of the most basic needs.

You may as well write "and (I'm not sure why) water". Baffling. Any human being should be able to understand this need without having it explained to them.

I think you've missed my point,

> Glocks are still not unpredictable by my metric. [...] it’s not going to go bang without a trigger press. It’s a very predictable firearm in that way.

I agree with this completely. Glocks are predictable. Where we part ways is that I don't believe predictability is the metric that should be optimized for. People not getting shot is the important metric; predictability is only important insofar as it relates to that. But as demonstrated by glocks, predictability is not the end-all-be-all when it comes to people not accidentally shooting themselves.

As for soldiers in WWII, they also had piss-poor to non-existent trigger discipline. A 1911 is a safer gun than a glock due to the manual safety, but still won't protect you from handling it in unsafe ways. Glocks have that same problem, but worse because they lack manual safeties which function as one last line of defense when you fuck up everything else.

> The moment curation becomes creation is when there's a choice, a decision, to show this but not that.

What does curation mean to you, specifically?

(transitive) To apply selectivity and taste to, as a collection of fashion items or web pages.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/curate

If there is no selection, no choice or decision of what to show, then in what sense is there any curation? Selection is the essence of curation.

> (accidental trigger press or not is still investigated)

It seems like a moot distinction to me. Take Glock for example; they make a big deal about their guns having "three automatic independently-operating mechanical safeties." But the fact of the matter is a glock has no traditional fire/safe toggle safety. ALL the safety of a glock is based on the premise that the trigger will not be unintentionally pulled when a round is in the chamber. The obvious consequence of this is people getting shot by completely accidental trigger pulls. Whether you drop the gun and it goes off or the trigger snags on your clothing and the gun goes off, a gunshot accident is still a gunshot accident, and both are consequences of the gun's design.

Don't sign these sort of moronic agreements if you aren't willing to keep them. Instead, go to a secular school that doesn't make such demands. If more people chose not to give these schools their tuition money, they will be pressured to reform.

You may as well go to their church then complain when they shun you. It's self-inflicted. Don't go to their dumb church and don't go to their dumb school either.

The X-15 was a rocket.

From what I understand, present day historians are sitting on a huge pile of cuneiform tablets that have yet to be transcribed or translated because there is much more material than there is interest/manpower.

Of course, to your point, they do keep it around. They don't just throw it in the trash.

> Except no one wants to take the risk that the small fire becomes a huge one

Generally controlled burns are scheduled during wetter seasons for this reason. But the difficulty of getting the general public to understand this and go along with it is probably hard to understate.

Read the literature from your nearest HR department and there is a good chance you'll see this term being used in earnest.