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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: May 29th, 2024

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  • Those aren’t purely atechnological solutions though (except in the loosest sense of the word, where any non-hunter-gatherer behavior a human engages in is a technology), as they involve changing the way people live.

    The electric car is a mostly drop-in replacement that fits in fine with the existing car centric suburban development model. The transit, cycling, and pedestrian oriented city involves changing how people think about their lives (many people in the US ask how it’s even possible to get groceries without a car) and even changing some of the ways we structure our society (the expectation that the cost of housing will increase forever, or even the expectation that housing should be treated as a commodity to invest in at all, as well as many other things to do with the intersection of finance and landuse).

    To give another example inventing new chemical processes to try to make plastic recycling work is a technological solution to the problem of petroleum use and plastic waste. Reducing or eliminating the use of single-use plastics where practicable is a non-technological solution, because it doesn’t involve any new technologies.

    In principle I’m not opposed to new technologies and “technological solutions”. However you can see from the above examples that very often the non-technological solution works better. Technological solutions are also very often a poison pill (plastic recycling was made to save the plastic industry, not the planet).

    In practice I think we need to use both types of solutions (for example, massively reduce our plastic use, but also use bio-plastics anywhere we can’t). But people have a strong reaction to the idea of so-called technological solutions because of the chilling effect they have on policy changes. We saw this with the loop and hyperloop. Rather than rethinking the policies that lead to the dearth of High-Speed rail in the US and investing in a technology that already existed a bunch of states decided to wait for the latest whizz-bang gadget to come out. And it turns out this was exactly the plan. The hyperloop was never supposed to work, it was just supposed to discourage investment in rail projects.



  • The problem with that style of blocking is that it goes both ways.

    Someone can post ignorant shite and block anyone who would give them pushback, then when other people look at the comments they think “wow I guess everyone here just agrees with this”.

    I guess I’ve always viewed making a post as standing on a street corner and shouting, not meeting on the side of a street with a group of your friends.

    I guess it depends on if you view “subreddits” as communities, that is groups of people that you choose to associate with if you post there, or if you view them as topics that you want your post tagged as. A lot of social media sites take the latter approach, but reddit used to take the former, as did old style forums. It might just be from me spending more time on those kinds of platforms, but I do think the “community” approach is better.


  • If you want to dual boot I suggest getting a second hard drive (a little SSD maybe) and installing Linux on that. Then you can select what OS to boot through the BIOS

    It’ll be way easier and less risky than trying to install Linux alongside windows on the same hard drive, and it’ll also stop windows from screwing with the bootloader when it updates.






  • For another comparison do a Google image search of “Arnold in his prime”. Now imagine seeing a dude who looks like that and being told “be careful, that guy has no concept of human laws or morality, he won’t go out of his way to kill you but if he did it wouldn’t bother him one bit. Also he doesn’t speak English.”.

    I think most would be pretty unlikely to just walk up and run their fingers through that dude’s hair. But Arnold in his prime only weighed 240 lbs. An adult male bison can weigh anywhere from 1000 to 2200 lbs.



  • You can improve strength by improving your disciplines, but IIRC the shape of your body is permanently stuck the way it “normally” is at the time of your embrace (so any really recent injuries are healed, but years old scars and suchlike that you gained as a mortal are retained).

    Vampires are creatures of stasis after all.




  • Man I am so tired of the endless parade of articles with the premise “How could conservatives possibly think this?? Surely if we just take the time to carefully understand their reasoning we can blah blah blah…”

    Here I’ll answer the the “why” right now:
    A) Most US conservatives live in suburbs and rural areas and generally hate and fear inner cities and the people who live there. They also generally hate and fear environmentalism. They also greatly resent the idea that the USA isn’t the best country on earth at literally everything. They’re also violently homophobic and have such deeply toxic ideas of masculinity that they consider it to be weak and “gay” to drive a smaller vehicle.

    So when an urbanism advocate says they want people to give up their lifted truck to live in a city and ride a bicycle so the US can be more like Europe and East Asia to help the environment how in the world do you expect them to react in any other way?

    B) This is a population that’s addicted to hate, fear and opposition like a drug, and conservative politicians and news orgs are the dealers. They need to periodically find something new to tantrum about. If there is no reason to hate something then a reason will be created. This was the case with LED lightbulbs, with COVID, with Romneycare, and so on and on and on. The 15 minute city conspiracy theories are not some sort of new unprecedented pattern of behavior.



  • drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoScience Memes@mander.xyzHero
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    1 month ago

    In my personal experience I’ve had to go out of my way to find every quality product I’ve ever purchased, from dishwasher detergent to heat pumps, and none of them were the ones with the highest advertising budgets. You’re right that we all have limited time and can’t possibly evaluate every single thing that exists, but hype men don’t help with that. The professional liars and manipulators that work in advertising only add to the noise and make it take longer to arrive at a conclusion. For example the fact that there are the 12 different brands of space heaters that come in different sizes and shapes and at different price points despite all performing the exact same way. It’s like that with literally everything, from bar soap, to maple syrup, to sunscreen.

    I think this way because I am autistic. I honestly cannot imagine feeling the need for hype men. The phrase “you need hype men” sounds to me like “you need your abuser, you cannot live without them”.

    Something like 35% of autistic people attempt suicide because of what the original post describes (and not just in science, but in every aspect of the world). And yeah, I think if I had to work for someone like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk I would as well.


  • drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoScience Memes@mander.xyzHero
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    1 month ago

    “Asshole” is the word for a guy who likes to cut people off in traffic. I think there’s probably a more appropriate word for someone who emotionally manipulates you over the course of years so you’re continually a nervous wreck and can be destroyed any time it’s convenient for him. Seriously if you haven’t watched the interview I linked at least look at the first couple of minutes.

    And at the end of the day, who did this behavior actually benefit? Steve helped make Apple a lot of money, sure, but where did most of that money go? It didn’t go to the employees he abused, that’s for sure. But maybe Apple products ended up benefitting society as a whole, and without Steve we wouldn’t have had that? Well you already said that more often than not Apple’s success didn’t have anything to do with technical superiority.

    The fact that people like this (Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc) often head successful companies isn’t an example of how beneficial they are, it’s an example of how broken our system is.