CarbonIceDragon

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

realistically, living in space doesnt mean making mars habitable, it means getting good enough at life support and indoor farming and building bigger structures in space to just live inside artificial habitats, be that on mars or some other planet, or in space itself, forever. Its not a solution to climate change or such though, even if simply because being able to do it at scale means that the climate changing is no longer an existential threat anyway.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

Maybe we should banish him to the desert instead after leveling his home and selling it to property developers, see how he feels about the concept then.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

Monosodium glutamate. Makes things taste more savory. Also causes furries to make in-jokes about family unfriendly topics.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

I just add a bit of bottled mustard, about half a teaspoon to a box of mac I find to be good, too much more and you start to taste the mustard distinctly.

Adding a bunch of black pepper to it also does good things in my opinion

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

When I worked at a grocery store (a bit over a year ago) we had a sign posted near the registers, though in a place it was easy to not notice, stating something similar, though it might have been a state law (MA) rather than anything federal.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

I could have used this when I was a kid playing games and would go “sorry, my cpu is bad” whenever I had lag issues even though the cpu was actually okay and it was really because of playing on a laptop with integrated graphics and a spotty internet connection, because at the time I thought CPU was just a short way of saying ComPUter…

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

I mean, hypothetically couldn’t they mix some proprietary chemical formula into the ink and incorporates some device that analyses the ink chemistry and doesn’t print if that proprietary mixture is not present?

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

I think think for awhile as a very young kid I thought the former (by the time I learned about hard drives I knew what a monitor and computer were), but in my defense, my first exposure to computers and what my family had at that age was one of those old imac computers that really did have the screen and the computer in the same device.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

Almost none do, the gila monster is one of the few venomous species. It isn’t usually a fatal venom to my understanding, though as this proves it can be and it’s still said to be highly unpleasant in any case. It’s also not a terribly common lizard to see as a pet either, like you can probably find one if you go looking for it, but if you just want a pet lizard, there are a lot better suited species that will be most of what is sold, so I’d bet this guy intentionally wanted to get these ones and knew what they were, and was being reckless with them, rather than just didn’t know they were dangerous or something.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

Something to consider here is that selective breeding of dogs is very often not done to the dog’s benefit, and indeed in some breeds makes them less healthy. It’s done for the benefit of their owners, either to do some job or for aesthetics, in a way that would be considered absolutely abhorrent if done to people (indeed, a lot of people think that in dogs it can go too far, especially where breeds with health problems are concerned). Eugenics is at least conceived by its proponents as being for the good of the species in a way that dog breeding is not, it’s just that the easiest way to do that is to control who has children, which isn’t generally considered acceptable for people, and the easiest ways to prevent someone you don’t want to have children from doing so are to kill or forcibly sterilize them, which is even worse. Additionally, it’s tricky to know what traits even are detrimental or beneficial to the species, and the personal biases of whoever is in charge come into play (for instance, a lot of historical examples of eugenics being pushed have been by people who were, well, extremely racist and therefore selecting for things like skin color, which if successful would simply lower genetic diversity, which is counterproductive)

Now, as far as comparing humans to dog breeds (as in, why people find it okay to say “x breed of dog tends to be more aggressive”, but not “x group of people are more aggressive”), it should be considered that humans already have a rather low genetic diversity, as far as species go. If were we like dogs, we would probably all be the same “breed”, so to speak, even people from different ethnic backgrounds (sure, we can tell ourselves apart due to not looking exactly the same, but even two dogs of the same breed don’t look exactly alike, and we’re very attuned to seeing small differences in humans that we might not see in other animals). I’d bet it would probably be possible to eventually selectively breed a bunch of humans to have noticably and consistently different traits beyond just skin and hair color (which while visibly distinct from the outside, don’t really represent very much change), but intentionally engaging in breeding humans like dogs like this would be considered, well, a horrible thing to do, and in any case, isn’t what we currently have nowadays.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

Jeans are comfy, and I hate the sensation of too much air on my bare legs. And no, the blankets aren’t enough, it needs to be pants, and almost all my pants are jeans.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

I do wonder how this kind of thing will mesh with sites that arent for porn but do allow posting of it. Like reddit or for that manner any lemmy instance federated with one of the instances with nsfw subs

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

That should mean they don’t go bankrupt though. If their service is vital, people will pay for it even if the prices rise. It would mean an increase in prices for goods admittedly as the stores try to recoup the increased logistics costs, but intuitively I’d imagine the financial impact on the end customer wouldn’t be as much because they’re paying for the road upkeep either way, just via higher taxes in the current state and via increased prices in the new one.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

That depends on if the tax is sufficient to cover the societal costs of driving that mile or not. Not every use of electricity degrades public infrastructure to the same extent, so if the maintenance burden an EV adds is more than what the electricity tax brings in, then additional taxes to make up the difference would make sense.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

I mean the supply and demand for the trucking companies. Shipping is a vital service, if it had high taxes, it would have to dramatically increase prices for their shipping service, but they shouldn’t go out of business because everyone else would still pay those dramatically high prices, because they’d have to

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

In the sense of this particular period of instability being the intentional design of the US, not as far as I’m aware. In the sense of the historical context behind why Haiti has basically always been extremely poor even compared to it’s neighbors being largely though not entirely a result of the actions of the US, the history is rather horrifying.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

Control? No

Influence? Certainly, basically any major power has the capacity to do that to some extent and the US has been a great power for over a century at this point. It doesn’t even need to be “the globe” in this case anyway though, Haiti isn’t all that far away relatively speaking, and the US has a history of meddling with smaller countries in Central America and the Caribbean going back to not too long after the founding of the country.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

I never said nobody else was, just that Haiti in particular has a history that has seen the US act to hinder it’s development on a number of occasions. The same for that matter can be said of France in this case. My point was not that Haiti’s situation is the exclusive fault of the United States, but rather that the US does at least have some responsibility for how it has turned out.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

Where did i suggest that none of this contributes? A thing can have more than one contributing cause.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

The US literally took over the country’s central bank, occupied the country for a period of over a decade, and forced it to pay a huge percentage of it’s national income for that period to US banks to repay a debt that it never fairly acquired in the first place (admittedly, one that the US had basically taken over from France, which had forced it on Haiti in the first place, which is one of the reasons I also named France as a contributor in one of these replies). The country was prevented from using this revenue to invest in itself for a significant chunk of time, and that kind of investment has compounding effects that would have made the country at least somewhat better off had it not been basically robbed of it’s income at gunpoint. As things like organized crime thrive under an environment of poverty and desperation, it isn’t that unreasonable to think that the gangs would be less severe a problem had this development been allowed to occur.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

I did not say all, I said largely, and the reason for that is that the US has intervened more with Haiti in particular than it did in most countries, and in a way that stripped it of much of it’s wealth and ability to develop itself for a significant period of time. I was not making some generic “America bad” comment here, I was trying to point out that Haiti in particular has a long and particularly negative history with the United States.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

If you don’t want your posts/content to appear on other websites from the one you posted it on, why would you use a federated platform in the first place? Isn’t the entire point of these kinds of platforms that this kind of content is shared between sites?

And on a mostly unrelated side note, that bit about people trying to force the website to display CP to get the owner in legal trouble is exactly the reason why strict liability crimes that don’t care about intent are a bad idea

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

This is pretty much just a technical before they were called technicals, no? preexisting vehicle, bolt some machineguns and metal plates on to make a fighting vehicle in times of desperation

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

I do think theyre making perfect be the enemy of, well not exactly good, but in this case the better option, but Im not so sure theyre foreign ops. If you were running a campaign like that, wouldnt you want to concentrate your messaging on the places where the greatest number of people would be to see it, or at least a lot of people? Lemmy is certainly not immune to influence campaigns, Id bet it might even be more vulnerable than most given the lack of central control that might try to inhibit one, but its also currently incredibly small and obscure as far as social networks go. Would it really be considered worth the resources, to such a campaign, in its current state?

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

The thing is: the US is not a well-functioning democracy. It currently tries to be to some extent, but it’s system especially at the national level is set up in a way that heavily biases power towards wealthy interests and rural states, both of which tend to favor conservative politics, and which mathematically garuntees only two parties can be viable at a time, with third parties merely providing a negative effect on whatever major party is closer to them. In a well designed democratic system, there’d be a much greater variety of political groups to support such that one that actually reasonably approximates a given person’s views may exist, and voting for those groups would have practical consequence. But, we don’t have that. Voting isn’t completely inconsequential, hence one should still do it, but in our current state it’s not enough to fix things by itself. But again, since it still does something even if not enough, it makes sense to try to get as much utility as possible out of it. At the moment, the only candidates that have any chance whatsoever of winning are a neoliberal and a fascist. Now, you can argue that the popularity of the fascist is a result of the failures of neoliberal policies and so voting for the candidate supporting those policies won’t stop the popularity of the fascist ones, and that could be true- but the fascist is just going to bring about the fascist policies even faster. “The candidate that can fix things” isn’t on the ballot of either major party right now, and the system mathematically garuntees that third parties are counterproductive at this level, so voting for meaningful change isn’t an option here.

I’m not saying one should give up pushing for meaningful change. I’m saying that at the moment, getting that change is going to require more than just voting, at least at the national level and especially in the presidential election. I do not plan on voting for Biden in the coming general election because I am under some illusion that he’s going to fix things. I plan on voting for him to stall for time. It isn’t exiting, it’s downright depressing, but on balance, it’s still more moral in my view to take that option than the fascistic one, or to do nothing at all.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

Is it a bad thing to industrially farm the permit crabs?

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

Embraer? For the smaller types of airliners at least

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

To be fair, the recent bunch of failed or partially successful landers have mostly been countries that haven’t landed on the moon before, or private companies that haven’t done it themselves and have an incentive to save money during the design process, or Russia, which has been letting their space program decay for some time now.

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

I don’t think the primary concern with things like this is the porn companies having access to that information (though it is of course a concern, especially given that no organization is immune to hacking), but rather that the government would have access to people’s porn consumption habits, which presents both the same hacking risks but also the risk that some future government that decided to go after, say, LGBT people would have information that could potentially be used to identify those people at scale. Plus the risk that some unscrupulous member of government could use the information to blackmail critics or political rivals.

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

what the hell does decline have to do with the morals of it? In any case, while there are certainly misused funds, the truth of the matter is that it is vitally important to keep society functioning, and that doing this requires a lot of money. If not taxes, where else do you propose this funding come?

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

hypothetically, what stops a spam group from creating their own instance to register accounts on, or several such? It’d get defederated quickly once the attack got going, sure, but it would take time for this to get done, and in the meantime the spam gets in

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

Yeah, just stay out in the open away from places a snake might hide so that you don’t accidentally scare one, and the Mambas should be fine.

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

I’m not sure to what degree that this restriction is practically possible with the way the internet works though. You can probably make it work on big websites dedicated to that content, sure (there’s admittedly still the issue of using VPNs to appear to be from a location without such rules, but given that these kinds of laws seem to be slowly becoming more common, maybe that won’t be an issue forever), but children are curious about things kept off limits, and includes teenagers who may seek that content actively. As such, if there’s a reasonably easy way to find that content, they’ll find it, so simply gating big websites isn’t enough. In theory, laws about the matter probably apply to more than just those sites, but consider: small websites based in other countries might just not care about foreign laws, any web service that allows user generated content (which is a lot of them) can potentially be used to share pornographic content, and some such web services are set up in a way that moderation sufficient to actually stop this is not realistic (say, discord servers secretly set up for sharing it, or fediverse instances too small to be notified by regulators, or based in another country, or with inactive moderation that doesn’t notice what is being shared). As such, I don’t think it’s really realistic, short of a type of authoritarian control on any site that allows any kind of user uploaded content that would cause way more harm than what it tries to solve, to actually be able to stop minors from being able to access porn if they really want to. As such, I’d think that a better way of addressing concerns like them getting the wrong ideas about how sex works, or having unrealistic standards of appearance or such, is better sex-ed. When they grow up they’ll be able to access this stuff anyway, so if one is worried about it giving incorrect ideas, it makes more sense to tell them that they’re incorrect, and why, and what the reality of the matter is, rather than try a futile attempt to childproof the internet.

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

I mean, surely the solution to that would be to use curated/vetted training data? Or at the very least, data from before LLMs became commonplace?

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

I mean, isn’t that basically what a townhouse is?

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

Honestly, it might not be that bad

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

I doubt that the gene would be successful in the wild, given it would make it harder for the deer to hide from predators.

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

Ever had glofish? They look much brighter under a blacklight, but they’re still noticably colorful even under natural sunlight, in a way that the unmodified zebra danios (the original fish) are not

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

Rich people would probably set something up so that their future incarnation inherits their wealth, since it’s statistically likely that they’d be reincarnated as someone poorer. I could also imagine a much stronger push to bring the birthrate up even at the cost of using unethical means to force it, because if the population decreases, there wouldn’t be enough children born for an increasingly large percentage to reincarnate into

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

It’s possible they could, but it’s risky to count on, the history of countries where very different groups who hate eachother have been forced into one country, generally in post colonial states, is full of examples of the situation devolving into civil war and genocide. The two state solution is by no means ideal, but at least in the short term, I think it would stand a better chance of stopping at least the worst of the violence so that things can calm down in the region.

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

Unless it’s within two hours in either direction of the cats feeding time, in which case “I wuv u, have u noticed ur poor kitty is starving and the food bowl is empty? Here let me get all up in your face in case you’ve forgotten about me…”

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

This begs the question of how the French talk about vore

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

oh is that what these are? I saw something like this on a train station in Boston the other day, assumed it was some new kind of QR code or something

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

Only once they’ve taken over. But once there’s more than the unavoidable fringe of them around and they start having a real shot at power, you have a problem, even if they can’t yet stop people from criticizing them

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

I mean, how many people bought them even there? Isnt there like, one model that anyone has even tried to sell to the public, just from toyota stubbornly insisting that EVs wont work despite all the working EVs that already exist?

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

Tbh if I see black come up 32 times in a row I’m probably betting on black just because I’m gonna start getting suspicious this wheel has actually been biased towards black somehow and isn’t as random as it’s supposed to be. Is there such a thing as an inverse gamblers fallacy?

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

Yeah, I thought the implication was that in the lore of whatever pretend reality the game takes place in, the penalty for losing the game is getting executed by hanging