I’m not sure if anyone involved actually admitted their wrongs, it sounds like Ashton is sorry people felt bad not that he did it

I absolutely hate this situation and I was going to write a whole thing about how we wouldn’t do the same thing if an upstanding husband and father was convicted of murder, except oh yes people literally actually do do the same thing. You’ll literally have letters written like “he made a mistake but he has kids at home please go easy on him” as if actual murder isn’t a pretty big disqualifier.

I guess we humans have a blind spot to the most common sins versus the mythical perfect criminal who spits on babies and hails satan…

Lots of roofs in Asia are blue and I have no idea why lol

That photo is from a film about neanderthals. The phrase “unga bunga” has its earliest known usage in a Bugs Bunny short mocking Aborigines, but it’s a generic enough phrase that I’m not sure you can write off the entire phrase as racist against Aborigines: any nonsense word could be used in its place and I’m not sure anyone creating or sharing the meme has actually watched that Bugs Bunny clip from 1950. It’s just a nonsense phrase used to indicate low intelligence or nonsense. Given that the photo is of a neanderthal, I think anyone seeing the meme will understand that it’s supposed to mean “a caveman would be confused by this” and not about any particular group of modern or indigenous humans. Most usages of the meme imply that the poster themselves is the confused one, so I don’t think a racist would find it very funny to post something like that.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/confused-unga-bunga

Given that the words “unga” and “bunga” have existed in print since at least 1700 AD, I’m not sure we can point to that one Bugs cartoon as the definitive and only definition of that particular nonsense phrase. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=unga%2C+bunga&year_start=1500&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

Apparently it’s not super great? I haven’t noticed https://lemmy.ca/post/3532299

Some airlines don’t have seat assignment until you print your boarding pass

Japanese do this too especially in pottery, it seems like a very old form of artisanry

Also a linguist would of course dedicate a chapter to the pure joy of rhymes, verses, and words that feel fun to say

No, Linux and Mac can open ZIP as easily as anything besides TGZ.

Yes this is a good point, you don’t want i.e. tiny capillaries in areas with low circulation to be heating up before you notice other places.

If you can’t feel your hand heating up if you hold it near the oven and sensors or thermometer strips don’t register any temperature increase outside the oven when it’s on then nothing substantial is escaping. The amount of 2.4ghz energy required for indoor communication is on the order of tenths or hundredths of a watt, whereas the amount of energy required to cook food is on the order of 1000 watts. So you’re talking about a 10,000-100,000-fold difference in magnitude.

For non-ionizing EM radiation like radio waves and normal light (as opposed to ionizing radiation that can cause cancer by knocking bits off your DNA like UV rays and X rays) the danger is in, essentially, cooking your flesh. For radio professionals determining if a microwave antenna or cell phone is safe for your body, we calculate watts per square centimeter, in other words how much electrical energy is delivered to your skin’s surface. When a radio professional messes up and gets exposed to dangerous levels of energy, they experience it as feeling very warm or burning, and may suffer symptoms similar to a sunburn or, worst case, like putting a body part in a microwave oven.

Also because of how rays of energy work mathematically against surfaces, every foot you stand away will exponentially decrease the amount of energy you’d possibly receive: standing 6 feet away will give you 2.8% the dose versus standing 1 foot away. So even if you have a dangerously defective oven, just don’t hang out with your face pressed to the glass and you’ll have much bigger things to worry about in life.

TLDR: there’s no voodoo scariness behind microwaves, just try to make sure they’re not warming you up and cooking you, especially for extended periods of time. You’d probably notice if they were.

The main hazard of putting an electronic device in a microwave is that it heats up and catches fire or ruins your food.

General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil, and Phillips Petroleum were convicted of an actual conspiracy related to the monopolization of transit systems, which replaced beloved streetcar (rail) systems with rubber-tired oil-burning buses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy

And many plantations converted to prisons that are still in operation to this day.

And many states can’t reduce their prison populations because then they’d lose free labor.

And some states use prison labor to staff the governor’s mansion with butlers.

The captain and inventor is betting his life and reputation on it!

I’m happy to help, I’ve been a reddit and FB mod for years and am doing my best to be active here.

I agree it’d be heartless to prosecute or sue a switch-thrower who was acting in good faith, but the family of someone killed often don’t have a ton of sympathy.

http://www.cprinstructor.com/DC-GS.htm

Using DC as an example, I don’t think that tampering with railroad equipment counts as “in good faith, rendering emergency medical care or assistance at the scene of an accident or other emergency” and it only covers against civil damages: basically it reduces private claims of negligence or liability when you did your best to stabilize an injured person. It gets into shaky ground when the person is not yet injured, and they become injured because of your actions. It also doesn’t prevent the government from trying you for manslaughter.

It’s definitely a messed up situation though, ideally we’d have further laws reducing the bystander effect and encouraging people to do whatever’s possible to help. Often we see that people already do, though, and fortunately(?) the situations are often far less clear cut and diabolical than the Trolley Problem.

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: https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/greedy-associates/5-classic-torts-cases-made-simple-for-1ls/

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.

https://www.findlaw.com/state/dc-law/district-of-columbia-involuntary-manslaughter-laws.html

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? https://code.dccouncil.gov/us/dc/council/code/sections/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.