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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • It depends a bit on what you mean by “stealing”

    If you were to break into the coke vault, hack into their computers, threaten or blackmail a coke executive, etc. in order to obtain it, those would all be illegal acts on their own.

    But if you reverse-engineered the recipe yourself, or just happened to come across it in some legal fashion you could do pretty much whatever you want with it- publish the recipe, make your own cola and sell it (can’t call it “coca-cola” or “Coke” though because of trademarks and such,) try to sell the recipe to one of Coke’s competitors, etc.

    Anyone with the recipe is going to have a hell of a time trying to do anything with it though because one of the ingredients is allegedly still coca leaf extract and coke is pretty much the only entity that is allowed to do anything with the stuff.





  • So here’s a little brief history of the falklands that I’ve posted before that people seem to usually enjoy. I’m no historian or anything of the sort, so take my thoughts on this for what it’s worth (and I am certainly biased being an American, don’t exactly get a whole lot of Argentinian history books to study, and most of the Spanish I know is food-related, so if someone wants to enlighten me more on the Argentinian side of things, I welcome the education.) I’m aiming as much to keep this fun and light-hearted as I am for historical accuracy.

    In general my understanding is that the British were the first people to land there, didn’t really do much with it at that time, and pretty much just said “finders keepers” then left.

    Maybe worth noting, there were no indigenous inhabitants there, so that’s probably about as ethical as colonization can get.

    Then France showed up and set up shop since the British weren’t doing anything with it. Britain came back and also set up shop, and it’s not totally clear if either of them even knew the other was there. France eventually decided to fuck off, and let Spain have their bit of the Falklands.

    Spain and Britain coexisted for a while, had some scuffles, but more or less worked things out. Eventually Britain pulled out to focus on other things but still considered their “finders keepers” claim to be valid.

    Spain eventually pulled out as well, so for a little while no one was really doing much of anything with it officially.

    Argentina (technically Buenos Aires at the time if we want to split hairs, I’m going to just use Argentina and Britain to keep the sides easy to follow) comes along, and decides it’s theirs, since they split off from Spain they figure they get the falklands as part of the package since Spain was claiming ownership at the time, although Brittain was still holding to their “finders keeps” claim, Spain and later Argentina basically just countered with “losers weepers” and this is basically the root of the whole conflict.

    Put a little more professionally, basically Britain’s claim is they were there first and that claim has always been valid whether they were doing anything with the Islands or not. Argentina’s claim is that Brittain pulled out they left the islands up for grabs, and since Spain was the last country trying to do anything with them, it belongs to them since they’re laying claim to Spain’s former holdings in the region.

    Argentina gave some German dude permission to set up a colony for them there to fish and hunt feral cows. Eventually he gets into a fight with an American navy captain over fishing and hunting rights, Captain America kicks their ass a bit and declares the colonial government disolved, and pretty much continues on his merry way. Argentina tries to get things there started back up again but never quite gets their shit back together in the Falklands. A little while later the Brits come back around, still claiming finders keepers, and take charge of everything again, and this time the colonies stick and continue to grow. Argentina spends the next hundred years or so muttering “this is bullshit” to themselves.

    Around the 1960s, Britain starts talking about decolonizing, it was kind of all the rage among the European colonial powers at the time, and Argentina gets excited thinking they’re going to finally get the Falklands. Britain even quietly floats the idea of giving them the islands, figuring the Islanders would just kind of accept that decision if it was made, and running these islands from halfway around the world was getting kind of expensive. Turns out though that pretty much everyone on the Falklands is pretty damn happy to be British subjects (sort of a novel experience for Britain, historically not many British colonies have been happy to be British colonies, hell, half of Brittain proper sometimes isn’t too happy to be part of Britain) and don’t really want to be part of Argentina, which made things a bit complicated, and Britain needed some time to figure things out.

    Argentina gets kind of impatient with all of this, and eventually decided “fuck it, we’ll just take them ourselves.” Britain cannot abide Argentina’s inability to wait patiently in the queue and was starting to really wrap their heads around the idea that the Falklands would rather stay part of Britain, and so we get the Falklands war.

    Britain wins, Argentina goes back to muttering to themselves, and that pretty much brings us up to the present day.


  • The price point is way off, but strangely enough I’ve personally been champing at the bit for something with pretty much exactly those specs,just at about half the price.

    Currently, I daily drive an SUV and do get good use out of it. I have to commute in the snow (essential employee,) I have outdoorsy hobbies that require hauling people and camping gear around, I tow some small trailers, I use it pretty frequently to move furniture, pick up lumber and other bulky stuff from the hardware store, etc. and while I don’t go off-roading in the sense that I don’t purposely go looking for rocks to climb and mud to drive through for fun, I do sometimes drive onto a beach to fish or drive onto fields for various reasons, and find myself on some really shitty dirt roads where some ground clearance and 4wd are necessary. I’m doing those things usually a few times a month.

    But most of my daily driving adds up to 20 miles a day or less, on paved roads, rarely going over 45mph. I also have a wonky schedule where I rarely have to work more than 3 days in a row, and it’s usually just me and occasionally my wife or my dog (rarely both at the same time)

    I can’t quite afford 2 cars, but something like this at the right price point would probably tip the scales in my favor. I could daily drive the small cheap electric car and save my SUV (or maybe a small truck) for my days off when I’m doing stuff that it’s needed for while the small car charges.


  • I’d probably push it back to a little over 100 years to include WWI, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the British Mandate for Palestine, since that all set the stage for Israel being founded pretty directly, and there had already been a pretty substantial movement for Jews to immigrate to the region by about the '30s (known as the “Fifth Aliyah”) so a bit outside of your 80 year range.

    But of course, none of these events happen in a vacuum, if you want to get really nitpicky, you can start talking about the events that led to world war 1, trace them way back, through the crusades, the birth of Muhammad, Christianity, the Roman empire, all the way back to the bronze age, and maybe even further if you were able to somehow find decent historical records going that far back.

    Trying to point to one single event as the one that kicked off a certain conflict is tough, because there was always something that led up to that event too, and when you try to unravel it, before too long you might come to a very Douglass Adams-y conclusion that it all started when our first ape ancestors decided to come down from the trees, only for someone else to say that the trees had been a mistake in the first place and that we never should have left the oceans.


  • I think you’re misreading the comment of the person you’re replying to here, it’s worded a little wonky and I don’t know if you picked up on a bit of a sarcastic tone there, I think you also may not be reading far enough into the history to really have a handle on the situation but frankly neither of you are doing a great job of explaining your positions so it’s a little hard to say what point either of you are trying to make

    Tl;dr of modern Afghan history:

    Around the 80s, Russia invaded Afghanistan and installed a socialist government

    The US backs Islamic militants, essentially the Taliban or the groups that eventually morph into them, to oust the Russian backed government,

    The Taliban also likes to style themselves as the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan

    Some power struggles ensue, by the 90s sometime the Taliban is in charge of the country

    9/11 happens, US invades, tries to set up their own government, pulls out, Taliban quickly takes back over


  • The impression I’ve always gotten (and I’m sure no political guru or social scientist or anything of the sort) isn’t so much that the country overall prefers the Taliban as much as most of them just don’t really give a rat’s ass about the country as a whole or who’s claiming to be in charge of it at any given time, they don’t have a strong sense of national identity, they care for more about their tribe or village than anything going on outside of it. American, Russian, Taliban, doesn’t really matter too much to them, when the guys with better guns roll into town, you pay them lip service until they go away then continue right on doing things more or less the same way you have for the last 2000 years.

    It does happen that the Taliban probably aligns with their traditional values more closely than the other people who have tried ruling it as a unified country over the years, but day-to-day, they’re still probably mostly only going to the Taliban when they need something from them and deferring to village elders or local warlords or whoever for everything else.

    There’s variation I’m sure, those in cities probably have a stronger sense of what a country is and what it has to offer in the modern world than those in rural areas, but it’s a largely rural country, almost 75% of them are living in rural areas and some of them are super rural where some of them have probably never even seen a city.







  • I’m not sure why, but a lot of people seem to have a really hard time looking up information about stuff from the Bible. I remember probably about a year ago not too long after I first joined Lemmy commenting on a thread from some guy whose sister fell into some fundamentalist Christian flat earther bullshit and he was trying to figure out where she got her info from and said that he couldn’t find anything about “the firmament”

    It’s on like the first page of the Bible. And just googling “firmament” will get you plenty of good sources about the firmament and what it’s supposed to be.


  • I’m not too sure where I first picked up the idea, for some reason I think it may have been one of the videos on the Useful Charts YouTube channel, but in general it all kind of fits together to me, and I of course kind of put my own little bit of spin into it myself. Unfortunately I don’t have exact sources to cite directly to where I first heard this theory put together.

    For starters you can go to the Bible itself with Mathew 27:16-17

    16 At that time they had a well-known prisoner whose name was Jesus Barabbas. 17 So when the crowd had gathered, Pilate asked them, “Which one do you want me to release to you: Jesus Barabbas, or Jesus who is called the Messiah?”

    I misspoke in my earlier comment, and I edited it accordingly, the language would have been Aramaic, which is what most scholars agree is the language Jesus mostly spoke, although it is a pretty closely related language to Hebrew. I speak neither Hebrew nor Aramaic so I kind of just have to take it on faith that some of the people I’ve seen discussing this online have some idea what they’re talking about. You can kind of piece it together from some common bits of Hebrew “bar mitzvah” literally translates to something like “son of the commandments” and I believe in modern Hebrew, the word for father in “av” with “aba” being commonly used in some places/cultures.

    There’s also some that would say it comes from “bar rabban” (may be misspelling that) meaning “son of the teacher” instead of father, which you can compare to “Rabbi”

    This comes from an era when people didn’t really have official last names, depending on who you asked, Jesus could have been known by quite a few different names, Jesus the carpenter, Jesus son of Joseph/mary, the son of God, the teacher, the guy from Nazareth, the religious weirdo, the insurrectionist, of the house of David, etc.

    I believe in modern Hebrew “ben” is more often used as the “son of” prefix. And those sort of patronymic names are pretty common in semitic languages, in Arabic you’ve probably heard a few people with “bin” in their name. It’s basically the same idea as Irish/Scottish names that begin with mc/Mac/O’, or names that end in “son”

    As for Barabbas having been involved in an insurrection, going back to the bible we have Mark 15:7

    A man called Barabbas was in prison with the insurrectionists who had committed murder in the uprising.

    Israel experienced more than a few different Jewish uprisings/revolts/riots/insurrections/whatever name you wanted to call it. They weren’t exactly happy to be under Roman rule, and there were always a bunch of different political or religious movements trying to do something about it and usually not having much success. It’s not unlikely that Jesus is sort of a composite of several different folks making trouble for the Romans.

    I’m no scholar, my knowledge on this doesn’t really go a whole lot deeper than what I’ve said here, and I can’t say how widespread this particular little conspiracy theory is in academic circles, I won’t say that I’m totally sold on it myself, I’m very open to someone else saying differently, but it’s something to consider, and it looks like a hell of a coincidence to just be a coincidence to me


  • One of the interesting things that sticks out to me personally that lends credence to the idea that the Bible is just kind of a bunch of half-remembered stories all mashed together is Barabbas- the guy that Pontius Pilate supposedly pardoned instead of Jesus.

    In some versions, Barabbas is given the first name “Jesus”

    And “Barabbas” could potentially come from “bar abba” in Hebrew Aramaic (although Hebrew “ben av” or “ben aba” is not far off) meaning “son of the father”

    He was imprisoned and sentenced to execution due to taking part in an insurrection against the Roman empire.

    The two characters- “Jesus, son of the father, and sentenced to death for sedition” and “Jesus, son of God, sentenced to die for claiming to be king of the Jews” sound a hell of a lot like they’re referring to the same dude to me.

    That’s either one of the biggest coincidences in all of history, or someone heard two different versions of the same story and mashed them together.

    Or maybe it’s just sort of a 1st century version of the saying that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom-fighter.”