Mniot

Based on the article, it seems like cult-follower behavior. Not everyone is susceptible to cults (I think it's a combo of individual brain and life-circumstances), but I wouldn't say, "eh, it's not the cult's fault that these delusional people killed themselves!"

lol is it even worth tracking what's tariffed today?

I don't disagree with you, but I don't put a lot of value in that judgement. Like, if I was the VP of Denying Claims at UnitedHealthcare, I guess I would avoid being in a room with him and a gun just to be safe? I donno...

When I see people saying he's definitely innocent, I mostly read that as a reaction against the media which portrays all suspects as 100% guilty. And that's a pretty fucked-up thing, right? Like, suppose there's a real trial and we all get to see that the evidence against Manione is garbage and that he's clearly innocent and he gets correctly exonerated. Even still, he'll spend the rest of his life as "Luigi, that dude who killed the CEO!" because that's what people saw on TV long before his trial.

I think Mojo's comment is meant sarcastically. I.e. UCH does murder sick people.

But to your question: the presumption of innocence. You've got the burden-of-proof backwards; it's not "prove he didn't commit murder" but rather "prove he did". What I've seen is: some blurry pictures of a white man with brown hair in NYC, security footage of a white man with brown hair doing the killing, and the police say that they found a confession-manifesto and a ghost-gun on Mangione when they arrested him.

As a white man with brown hair who doesn't trust the police, I feel concerned about this standard of evidence!

The physical evidence would seem pretty strong but: a manifesto is something you mail, not carry around with you waiting to be arrested. And a ghost-gun is something you throw away immediately, not hang on to across state lines.

My main point here isn't that it's a slam-dunk "no possible way he could have done it". But that it's just not a ton of evidence. And the pressure to get a conviction and execute someone is incredibly strong. I'd say there's decent evidence that the NYC cops are corrupt and setting up an innocent man to make themselves look good. If we're going to jump to a verdict before the trial, what made you pick the one you picked?

In my own experience, these are two different people.

One who hasn't thought about the actual evidence or legal burden. They just saw on the news that the suspect is definitely guilty and their reaction is: "yeah, guilty of killing someone who deserved to die. Rock on murderer-dude."

The other person is thinking about the law and the evidence presented so far and finds it pretty thin. They might or might not feel like healthcare CEOs should be executed, but I have not heard this type of person lauding Mangione for the killing because they are skeptical that he had anything to do with it.

It may be that your friends are less internally-consistent.

For more interesting writing about the historical Sparta, check out the history blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry:

• https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/
• https://acoup.blog/2019/08/23/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-ii-spartan-equality/
• https://acoup.blog/2019/08/29/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-iii-spartan-women/
• https://acoup.blog/2019/09/05/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-iv-spartan-wealth/
• https://acoup.blog/2019/09/12/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-v-spartan-government/
• https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vi-spartan-battle/
• https://acoup.blog/2019/09/27/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vii-spartan-ends/
• https://acoup.blog/2022/08/19/collections-this-isnt-sparta-retrospective/

Though, do be careful because there are abusive same-sex relationships and sometimes it's even harder to get away because the people around you are telling you "but women can't be abusers!"

Goats sure are neat

To someone watching network traffic, a VPN connection looks like two machines exchanging encrypted packets. You can't see the actual data inside the packet, but you can see all the metadata (who it's addressed to, how big it is, whether its TCP or UDP, when it's sent). From the metadata, you can make guesses about the content and VPN would be pretty easy to guess.

When sending a packet over the Internet, there's two parts of the address: the IP address and the port. The IP address is a specific Internet location, blocks of IP addresses are owned by groups (who owns what is public info) and there are many services that do geo-ip mappings. So if you're connecting to an IP address that belongs to a known VPN provider, that's easy.

The second part of the address is the port-number. Servers choose port-numbers to listen to and the common convention is to use well-known ports. So, for example, HTTPS traffic is on port 443. If you see a computer making a lot of requests to port 443, even though the traffic is encrypted we can guess that they're browsing the web. Wikipedia has a list (which is incomplete because new software can be written at any time and make up a new port that it prefers) and you can see lots of VPN software on there. If you're connecting to a port that's known to be used by VPN software, we can guess that you're using VPN software.

Once you're running VPN software on an unknown machine and have configured it to use a non-standard port, it's a bit harder to tell what's happening, but it's still possible to make a pretty confident guess. Some VPN setups use "split-tunnel" where some traffic goes over VPN and some over the public Internet. (This is most common in corporate use where private company traffic goes in the tunnel, but browsing Lemmy would go over public.) Sometimes, DNS doesn't go through the VPN which is a big give-away: you looked up "foo.com" and sent traffic to 172.67.137.159. Then you looked up "bar.org" and sent traffic to the same 172.67.137.159. Odds are that thing is a VPN (or other proxy).

Finally, you can just look at more complex patterns in the traffic. If you're interested, you could install Wireshark or just run tcpdump and watch your own network traffic. Basic web-browsing is very visible: you send a small request ("HTTP GET /index.html") and you get a much bigger response back. Then you send a flurry of smaller requests for all the page elements and get a bunch of bigger responses. Then there's a huuuuge pause. Different protocols will have different shapes (a MOBA game would probably show more even traffic back-and-forth).

You wouldn't be able to be absolutely confident with this, but over enough time and people you can get very close. Or you can just be a bit aggressive and incorrectly mark things as VPNs.

Responsibility lies with "The Democrats" (some sort of far away secret group that I can't influence) and not with any American. If those Democrats can't give me my perfect candidate, then I'll just give up and let the fascists win. Also, I can't figure out why they won't do this--my ideal liberal candidate would appeal to the majority of Americans!

It's a bad headline: seems easy to believe that there's just a lot more journalists around today than there were in the world wars.

Much better would be to highlight from the body of the article that the death toll is also more than have been killed in the invasion of Ukraine. That one's modern, well-covered by media, Russia has repeatedly targeted civilians, and Russia's been attacking for longer. So to have still killed more journalists makes it clear that it's deliberate.

I wonder if the sleep-change fucks up our brains and that's why more people aren't upset about it.

Until this comment, I'd completely forgotten about how the most recent time-change messed up me and the puppy I've been training, because of course she needs to pee as soon as she wakes up at 6am every day...