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Joined 5 days ago
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Cake day: May 11th, 2026

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  • If you haven’t seen It the largest steam train in the world was restored by union pacific, #4014 big boy. It’s basically two heavy freight locos welded together into one machine over a hundred feet long. Lots of great videos of it online including a great video where it helps out a stalled mainline freight train running actual customer UP freight.




  • Athenian democracies solve a lot of our current issues. It’s a bit like jury duty. You put your own name down and can be picked for roles in government.

    France did that after the yellow vest protests. They randomly picked 100 citizens to lead a citizens Senate to propose solutions, and Macron promised to implement their suggestions (he lied. Only partial implementation happened)

    One of the emergent properties to picking 100 random citizens is you get close to a random sample of society. Rich and poor, left and right all with different perspectives and life experiences. They all have to argue their perspective and back it up with evidence for it to function properly.

    They also can’t be bought out the same way as entrenched parties. The candidates are random. Nobody knows until the results are announced.

    It also results in a much stronger sense of civic duty for the average citizen when you participate in the civic process regularly like this.

    This video does a far better job than I can making the case for them









  • It somehow reminds me of a rant I heard from a Microsoft office instructor. They would teach office products and basically every class would go “yeah if you crop an image in word the cropped portions are still viewable, so if you rely on that for redaction you’re not actually redacting anything unless you do X to permanently remove cropped parts of an image”

    Without fail at least 3 people would get an “oh fuck” look on their face and urgently leave the room.