Frosted Flake posted:

The Catholic Church rose to prominence by taking the place of the shrinking Roman state in aid to orphans, widows, poverty and disaster relief. It was the largest driver of Christianization, creating a Maoist dual power within Roman society.

Biplane posted:

Libraries round these parts have heavily restricted access to ebooks, if at all, to protect small businesses like major international publishing houses. I was able to search my local library online to see if they had a physical copy at least (they did not)

Halisnacks posted:

If librairies hadn’t already been invented, there is no way they could have been created for the first time now.

3D Megadoodoo posted:

Yeah according to the church, attendance minus Yule and poo poo like that is less than 1%. Lmao just convert them into Hesburgers already.

Shame Boy posted:

It's the Pinellas Plant in St. Petersburg, Florida. Wikipedia doesn't even give it the dignity of its own article, it's just mentioned in the notes on an article about the current thing on the property: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young-Rainey_Star_Center

I'd just "update it" as suggested but there actually aren't many good sources online to reference, what I've been able to figure out has been from reading through the enormous docket of the EPA cleanup, because they had to interview people and figure out what processes were being used so they knew how to clean the fuckin' thing up. The only other mention I've found that gets what they did there correct is in this self-published book about nuclear weapons I bought a little while ago (mostly because it was 2000 pages long and contained eye-watering amounts of detail about every declassified aspect of every nuclear weapon America has ever done). Even in that book he only mentions it offhand while talking about the development of the stuff they made there and doesn't go into any more detail, though at least he provides a picture of the actual devices that I've found real helpful. Neither of those are really great wikipedia sources.

The one non-environmental-cleanup-related wikipedia cite goes to the current website of the property, here: http://www.young-raineystarcenter.org/about-us/ which doesn't really say anything other than "it made nuclear weapons components". The WSJ link is just an aggregation of superfund data, and it's also... kinda wrong? Like here:

https://www.wsj.com/graphics/waste-lands/site/364-pinellas-plant-general-electric-co/

So "radioisotope-powered" would imply something like an RTG used on spacecraft, but that's not what they did there. From deep in the EPA interviews and from the one book that mentions it, the thing they did was build the electronic neutron initiators, which are basically tiny fusion reactors that generate a burst of neutrons right as the primary reaches critical mass, to ensure it fires at exactly the point when its most dense. In fact, they built every single neutron initiator used in every single American nuclear weapon manufactured over the course of 50 loving years, right up to the 90's.

My ultimate goal would be to write, at the very least some kinda article, maybe even a little book about the place, and then maybe that can be cited on wikipedia. It's very weird to me that the factory in charge of making the tiny fusion reactor that blows up nuclear bombs is so hard to find any information about, and today the most visible thing at the site is... the DMV.

Frosted Flake posted:

It was mostly this. There are some books on the "politics" of sacrifice. In Greece, for example, sacrificing livestock was essentially throwing a BBQ for the working class and could build support for members of the ruling class in return. The coalition that opposed Pericles were popular because of their observance of sacrifice. Yes, piety, sure, but also they were the ones working class shlubs associated with pit beef, and got their votes in return.

Shame Boy posted:

Eh plenty of stuff sure but like, the Saturn V really didn't have much military potential or even transferrable technologies. I know we like being cynical as all hell (and for good reason) but c'mon we walked on the loving moon and even in the deepest of cold war rah rah bullshit tensions the plaque we left still says "from the planet earth" and not "from America" and idk, that's something at least

Next one we leave is gonna be an ad for FritoLay, isn't it

Shame Boy posted:

Milo and POTUS posted:

I told my friend about the jenny trick to get points or rewards at places and he called me a thief lmao

i am harry posted:

I like when I say I don’t have my card and the lady at the register uses hers. she must have so many free gas points

BonHair posted:

At the self checkout, the teenagers are always super tired and just click okay as fast as possible. Self Scan has automated random checks, and they also don't give a poo poo, so at best they catch if you accidentally scanned something without bagging it. I'm pretty sure I've accidentally shoplifted because something didn't scan at some point.

I guess in corporate, this means that there should be checks on the teenagers to make sure they aren't phoning it in. Luckily, so far Danish corporate has decided that it's not worth the hassle.

To be fair... posted:

self checkouts are peak neoliberalism

Dog Case posted:

Our Walmart has the blue light it's on the sign for the parking spot in front (it used to be the closest handicap spot) reserved for the cops

When I worked at home depot everybody hated using self checkout because everything is big and heavy and sucks to scan. They expected the self checkout cashier to help everybody and basically check them out like a regular register, except there were four checkouts and only one attendant so you'd just end up with them helping one customer while the other three were waiting getting mad and waiting for help when they had a problem

Also rats made a nest in one of the machines and ate all the wires and pissed all over everything so that was pretty great

Biplane posted:

The State Vs. Donkey Kong

Shame Boy posted:

Also got to point out all the mistakes people made when programming receipt printers because I wrote the entire receipt printer interface, and there's a lot and once you start noticing them you can't loving stop. Nobody knows how to properly center anything!!!!!

Pepe Silvia Browne posted:

buying out all of Burger King's hamburgers and selling them for $.50 less than whatever the current Wendy's surge price is just before the speakerbox at wendy's

Shame Boy posted:

I just knew there'd be hustlegrinders in the replies and yep

https://twitter.com/NicktheBuilder_/status/1764764239569232298

Arivia posted:

no that guy just liked em young (and enslaveable)

cash crab posted:

hey i have a question wrt grocery stores. there is a cop at the entrance of my grocery store at all times. i feel like the stupid answer as to why this is because of large thefts but I worked in a grocery store and we got robbed all the time, and i don’t see why the presence of a gun would make that situation better since the guys holding us up usually had guns too.

why is the cop there then? is it to scare people? i was waiting for a woman to get out of the way so i could put my cart back and said cop was getting an apb about a mostly naked guy with two guns nearby and i feel like maybe he should be taking care of that rather than patrolling the grocery store.

Arivia posted:

that's paid for. that's higher-class. graffiti is the youth doing things without permission!!!!

Regarde Aduck posted:

if people don't destroy these things then everyone deserves this poo poo world

spechtie posted:

I understand that, I just dont think the US is special when it comes to the danger of protesting

https://va.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_sb9upliboY1s1ddrj_720.mp4

DJJIB-DJDCT posted:

This came up in the Ukraine thread, but the one time Germans actually protested against the Holocaust, the Rosenstrasse protest, the protestors won, no violence was used against them, and memos show the Nazi party was immediately concerned and responsive to public protest against one of their policies.

Contemporary Liberalism, is literally more heavy handed and less responsive than Naziism.

jetz0r posted:

Remember when all the leaders of the Ferguson BLM protests committed suicide?

And how a bunch of leaders of the 2020 George Floyd protests also decided to shoot themselves in their burning car, or lynch themselves?

Anyways, you see that new show on Netflix?

Orange Devil posted:

The first wave RAF ofcourse did somehow manage to abuse all that freedom in prison to coordinate a collective suicide by shooting themselves in the base of the neck at an angle that is physiologically very unlikely...

Coolness Averted posted:

Not including photos to dox myself, but my company is celebrating a big anniversary. They put out an email about the merch store full of 'limited time swag' available on the company intranet. So I take a look at the anniversary stuff and they actually expect staff to pay for it.

They've done a bunch of weird stuff like IT requests also go through a 'store' interface and PPE comes from a vending machine -neither of which require employees to actually pay for anything, it's just the framework. So I assumed that's what the anniversary merch store was, but nope they legit seem to think employees wanna spend 40 bucks on a hoody with the company's logo or 30 for a high end lunch box.

MLKQUOTEMACHINE posted:

poo poo like this reminds me of that quote from the Iranian cleric about how Americans have no real heroes, only brands and their mascots.

tokin opposition posted:

Lol how are we supposed to do that? The boomers are all senior management now, then the sellout Xers under that.

Paladinus posted:

3D Megadoodoo posted:

One time I was reading a novel (based on real events I think) written by a communist, describing young German boys fighting in the resistance against the Nazi regime, and the people sitting opposite me kept giving me looks. I surreptitiosly checked if my pants were split at the crotch, and tried to peep my reflection in the window to see if I had maybe toothpaste all over my chin or something.

When I got to my stop and put the book in my bag, I realized the cover image was basically just a big-rear end Nazi emblem (when viewed from any distance).

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:

"It's Not What You Think" by Rudolf Shimmler

Biplane posted:

Halo: the fall of Reach

Facebook Aunt posted:

Their test costs $2500 per embryo. They aren't actually doing anything to improve the embryo, you just pay them to test all your embryos and they'll tell you which ones are losers. So people who were already doing massively expensive IVF can make it even more expensive to make sure the implant the best ones. If, like her, you produced 16 apparently viable embryos this would cost $40,000 to help pick out the best one.

How is this supposed to improve the birth rate exactly?

3D Megadoodoo posted:

Zündschnüre by Franz Josef Degenhardt

Dr. Killjoy posted:

I think she did worse in polling afterwards

if you’ve ever worked customer service the phrase “Are you calling me a liar?” or variations of such signals that you are dealing with some of the worst individuals you can encounter

Shame Boy posted:

Yeah well how am I supposed to make well-informed executive decisions if I have to think huh??

Facebook Aunt posted:

Quiet quitting is like that, but without even telling managers that you're doing it because you've lost hope that better things are possible.