Weakness, definitely. The range of “permitted” ideas is way too narrow.
I tend to agree with most common political stances on Lemmy, but still I feel I’m self-censoring occasionally.

Many instances intentionally want an echo chamber. Posts and comments are often deleted even if they’re not abusive, if they are ideologically opposed.

When the driver is drunk. Inevitably after a party someone will offer to drive me at least part way to home. I try to resist but when I’m also drunk saying no is hard.

This is car ownership, not car use. While there is some correlation (if you have a car you’re more likely to use it) I think it reflects purchasing power rather than preferred transportation choice.

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No one knows. I really want to know, but the current understanding takes us back only to the big bang. Not why it happened or why anything exists at all.

The Anthropic Principle is at work here. If nothing existed we wouldn’t be here to ask why it exists.

Stupid non-american question: Is any of these Kansas?

It’s a common pub quiz factoid that Kansas City is not in Kansas

Regarding 1 - data is hard to find, apparently electric busses are 50-100% more expensive, but with lower operating costs. How much is uncertain. (requires digging into agency reports in languages I don’t understand)

The good thing is that you don’t have to throw good busses away in order to switch. Busses have a relatively short lifespan, about 15 years. They naturally come up for replacement anyway, and then you can buy electric ones instead.

There’s even more to the story, every step even more absurd than the other:

US woman caught with golden gun in luggage at Sydney airport jailed for a year
US woman backflips in court, pleads guilty to smuggling 24-carat gold gun into Sydney

A review of Goodson’s phone revealed she had searched online “can I have a gun in my suitcase?” and set a calendar entry with a note reminding her to “put gun in suitcase”.

“What about the gun in your bag?” she was asked by a customs officer. Goodson replied: “Oh yeah, I forgot about that.”

“I am scared of shooting it… I would probably just pistol whip until I got training again,” she said.

The court also heard that she previously owned two other guns while living in the States, but she had accidentally given them away. "Those guns I ended up giving away, because I accidentally left them in a donation box."

Nothing will ever change if only rotten people go into the system. Of course, there’s a high chance he will become corrupt himself, but it’s a necessary risk.
You can’t hope for some higher power to come down and fix things. Nobody is going to magically dismantle the police and form a new one. The best you can do is make the police as diverse as possible, especially in the personality profile of it members.

Definitely something was wrong there. Aztecs became a thing about 800 years ago.

Whoever discovered cheese:

• Damn, my milk spoiled
• I’ll leave it out a bit longer maybe it fixes itself
• It’s better now!

In an impressive backfire, the Greek subborness inspired North Macedonians to start claiming actual Greek heritage. Like building statuses of Alexander the Great and similar.
Prior to that they were proudly Slavic, (North) Macedonian identity wasn’t anything more than belonging to a geographic region.

I don’t know how it could get any worse than now. Basically we’re all in echo chambers whichever platform you use. Including Lemmy.

Agreement with “consensus” of whatever bucket you’re placed into is rewarded, and disagreement is punished. Even if only by upvote/downvote. Switching platforms won’t change much.

US in the 1970/80s were very deluded by thinking that “whoever we support == good guys”, no matter what they do. Huge foreign policy fail, and the reason they lost many potential allies.
And the reason Henry Kissinger had a website celebrating his death.