There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Jtotheb ,

And both of which impact its users’ lives, thus why the users feel they should have a say in what’s done with the space, even if they aren’t the owners of the space

Jtotheb ,

I don’t particularly agree with the concept of the privately owned park and feel that it has ruined the social lives of Americans, since they’re no longer allowed to “loiter” (exist) anywhere outside of work and home. And also, yes, I think you should have to maintain the property you’ve taken away from the surrounding community or else give it back. I don’t think the comparison to the Web necessarily holds up, but I do think that people’s contributions to a website remain theirs even if you pay a lawyer to write down that it’s not. The concept of complete forfeiture of any claim to your work because-I-said-so is very made up. Your hard work is not.

Jtotheb ,

I was just talking about YouTube last night! It’s easy to forget the mind bending amount of data uploaded and stored every single day. It is impossible to draw a comparison to anything that has ever come before. And it will all have to go away at some point, as far as I’m concerned. It’s untenable to keep more than a tiny fraction of it. There is so much interesting stuff… and the site has existed for the blink of an eye. Nobody can consume a meaningful amount of the information stored on it, nobody could possibly categorize and manage a system of valuation and sortation. Barring a radical reorganization of economic system and values, any sort of proposed YouTube Archival Project never makes a dent. And files are only getting bigger… crazy to think that my kids will likely never get through the amount of photos and videos of my childhood that exist, yet I currently possess all of the photographic proof of my mom’s parents’ existence in the back of a small drawer.

Jtotheb ,

They thought the review process was more arduous than looking at some newly discovered scientific fact that no one had ever known before and saying “yeah that seems self-evident.”

If you feel like that’s reductive, now you know why I felt like responding

Jtotheb ,

Reminded me of his story All Summer in a Day, actually.

Jtotheb ,

Sorry in advance! The morality of meat really interests me.

It seems almost guaranteed that we will look back on factory farming in this fashion. The current system requires significant help from the legal system (banning documentation of the animals’ conditions, excessively prosecuting people who break the rules, looking the other way when farms hire people who will lose their jobs if they rock the boat) just to keep going.

Whether or not meat consumption in general meets the same societal fate seems less certain to me. We don’t view any other animals killing their prey as immoral, and before the industrial agricultural takeover lots of folks lived on farms and raised livestock for slaughter and treated them far better. Groups that lives successfully and sustainably off the land, like the Polynesians who settled Hawaii, raised livestock and fished a renewable amount. That’s been going on for ages and ages. Is it the act of killing a conscious animal we’ll have issue with? Will that sentiment focus on the smart animals like pigs and cows, and leave chickens and fish as acceptable? Will it rule out all animals even though some of them are so dumb that their form of consciousness is unrelatable? What about insect biomass based food? Will it spread to certain plants or fungi as we learn more about their forms of awareness and how they experience the world? Plants sharing knowledge through pheromones and root systems seems quite similar to the level of communication ants and other colony insects have. Where is the line going to be drawn?

From a knowledge standpoint, I simply don’t know enough about nutrition to understand whether or not humans can be ‘maximally healthy’ on a vegetarian or vegan or pescatarian or w/e diet. If we can, sweet! If not, what’s the next move? Lab grown meat seems like it’s just around the corner but then when you listen to a podcast on where they’re at you realize they can’t mimic any of the complex structures that give meat texture; they’re sometimes only 20, 30% meat with the rest being additives; they suck an undetermined but certainly super high amount of energy from the grid just to perform these relatively rudimentary feats. It does make me wonder if having some cows that wander around eating grass and killing one or two of the herd periodically is really worse from a moral standpoint than covering entire ecosystems in solar panels to run the scaled up meat labs. Not to mention how either option seems like there’s no way it can scale to how many people are living on the planet right now!

I certainly don’t envy the next generations. Which is a weird feeling. I don’t think we’re supposed to feel bad for our descendants. I hope they figure out the things that stumped us.

My family is mostly veggie, still eat dairy and some meat on the weekends. No pork because I’m trying to keep pushing the line further towards a place I feel better about. Pigs are just too dang smart for the hellish conditions they’re raised in on U.S. farms. Drawing that line felt hard, pepperoni might be my favorite use case for meat. But I think my kids will grow up just a little further toward the point of outrage we need to be at to save these animals from the madhouse created to feed us.

Jtotheb ,

Thanks for the recommendation.

Jtotheb ,

Except then it blocks the cookie that remembers your cookie preferences, and your entire time online is spent closing pop ups. Welcome to the future of convenience!

Jtotheb ,

Thank you for the recommendation, I’ll see if that does it

Jtotheb ,

Sounds like a good point, but claiming that “Words are the least secure way to generate a password 84 characters long” would be pointless.

Jtotheb ,

Nature wants you to live to 50. Anything less than that is brought to you by Blackwater

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returns to Australia a free man after US legal battle ends (apnews.com)

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returned to his homeland Australia aboard a charter jet on Wednesday, hours after pleading guilty to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with Justice Department prosecutors that concludes a drawn-out legal saga....

Jtotheb ,

So, to clarify, since zero deaths are listed there—we don’t have a source for that claim?

Jtotheb ,

In the spirit of offering feedback I disagree, pop-ups are terrible design, super abrasive and make the experience worse no matter when they show up

Jtotheb ,

As opposed to the main company, which cares so much that they don’t bother taking your call directly

Jtotheb ,

You are very nearly correct in your guarantee., Per ProPublica’s reporting it has been found in basically everyone’s blood except some very isolated groups in rural China

Jtotheb ,

Sorry, but two disagreements—good food is trivial to find when you travel in Italy lol and American bread is bad without question

Jtotheb ,

The whole wide world of authors who have written about the difficulties of this new technological age and you choose the one who had to pretend her work was unpopular

Jtotheb ,

Sure was nice of the state to require your 2001 online casino to list in writing the odds of winning and enforce payment. But sure, they did you a favor and the state is bad, people are solo acts and you should be free to prey on the less powerful

Jtotheb ,

Sorry, I’ll extrapolate more precisely.

Casinos spend unfathomable resources on learning exactly how to wedge their ads deep into your mind and get you hooked on their satisfying little dopamine loops, but it’s your personal failure if you, an ordinary person who is statistically speaking living paycheck to paycheck raising a kid with no savings, succumb to them. And your responsibility to fix it.

Correct?

Jtotheb ,

I thought I wanted a dumber phone. Not a flip phone necessarily, but not a pocket supercomputer. I looked at the majority of options out there and concluded that (ignoring the ones that are basically just running Android) they’re all missing a feature or two I really like, like the Light Phone looks great but I listen to audiobooks on Libby all the time. So then I just decided to delete a bunch of stuff from my iPhone, and then I didn’t get around to that so I still just have the same phone. 🤦‍♀️

Jtotheb ,

Does the US benefit from stopping them?

Jtotheb ,

They used to be the poorest age group in the United States. Senior discounts made a lot more sense when something like 30% of seniors lived in poverty in [1960? 70? Can’t recall]

Jtotheb ,

You’re replying to people who can’t believe the injustice of these laws by explaining that the laws are legal. No consensus will be reached; these are two completely different perspectives. Personally, I think laws, being a made up construct, should generally promote positive behavior like stopping genocide, so I easily side with the protesters and commenters here expressing indignation alongside them.

The legality argument also ignores the police tradition of breaking the law while shutting down protests just because they can get away with it.

Almost every problem in the world would be dealt with meaningfully if we outlawed billionaires.

Everytime I look at small problems or big global problems, if you follow the money trail, it all leads to some billionaire who is either working towards increasing their wealth or protecting their wealth from decreasing....

Jtotheb , (edited )

I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew, so I’ll just address the ‘jobs no longer existing’ thing—you seem wholly unaware that people enjoy being chefs, waiters, pizza dough tossers, all sorts of food service roles. Helping feed people is much more directly meaningful than most jobs in the developed world. Unlikely that this is the job sector that disappears, and not say the world of finance

Jtotheb ,

Ah, well whether or not fast food joints continue to exist is interesting to ponder, ideally you’re never in such a hurry that you want to go to a burger joint where you’re being slowly poisoned by 15 year olds reheating decidedly unhealthy meals, but given how many people try starting restaurants and just how intrinsically tied to existence the food industry is, I imagine in an ideal world plenty of people who are stuck in the fast food sector would leave but plenty more who’ve never explored their passions would be drawn to food in a different form

Jtotheb ,

By that token Israel should have lost its nukes after funding Hamas. Far too irrational for nuke privileges

Jtotheb ,

I fail to see the difference. Israel’s policy has been to help Hamas and hurt the Palestinian Authority. They have successfully blockaded incoming aid in recent months yet for years money and weapons flowed freely to Hamas in Gaza. All to divide Gaza and the West Bank and avoid statehood, while stating as much. Must Netanyahu hand deliver the bills, or may we take him at his word?

Jtotheb ,

None of the niche communities I am interested in exist on lemmy. Maybe they will eventually, maybe they won’t. It’s more or less useless beyond doom scrolling. I miss reddit because I miss having all of my useful forums in one place with a better thread format, and I didn’t need to remember a bunch of accounts to participate in something like /r/tipofmytongue or /r/bikewrench periodically. Lemmy is just a political news space with memes and that’s not going to attract everyone.

Jtotheb , (edited )

Oh, I should clarify. They exist, but nobody uses them. So they’re useless, like asking a ‘genuine’ question and then disagreeing with answers you don’t like.

You may have legitimately misunderstood that I meant better format than normal forums. I’m using lemmy, I know it’s the same layout as reddit

Jtotheb ,

Like trying to get MLK Jr. to kill himself, or you thinking more like the ‘inventing terrorists so they can arrest them’ angle

Jtotheb ,

I tend to disagree with your opinion here. There is a level of objectivity within the realm of taste. I will continue to warn people not to eat pea gravel even if it has a great mouthfeel, for instance.

The plot is less complex than it appears at face value, because at face value most people are lacking the dialogue that despite Nolan’s protestations has a lot of valuable information within it. Is it great art because he makes you suffer for it? Is The Prestige worse because it’s enjoyable to rewatch?

Jtotheb ,

Benefits may be progressive but the funding is regressive. Actually enduring the prerequisite significantly harder life? Also regressive.

Lifting the cap would increase funding.

It is welfare regardless, but lifting the cap and then paying the extra revenue out to people who don’t need it would not do much, so good call there.

We are perfectly capable of taking care of one another, so technical explanations of why people actually have to suffer because yacht construction stimulates GDP are inherently suspect.

Jtotheb ,

Well, maybe the first generation or two wouldn’t suck if they had consulted people who use wheelchairs and know how they should be designed. Too bad they thought the same way you do and said ‘why bother’!

Jtotheb ,

Yes, everyone but you is uneducated on the risks of being around people who set themselves on fire and then shoot other people.

Jtotheb ,

To be clear, just because the LSD experiments happened does not make them reasonable. It sounds like you’re justifying future terrible mistakes based on past terrible mistakes that you learn about in a fairly neutral and sanitized way in school.

Jtotheb ,

Against, in my opinion, because you hold women back even if it is unwittingly.

But they’re also far from unreachable. Ignorance has a solution.

Jtotheb ,

MLK Jr., famous for talking about how much he loves white moderates right

Jtotheb ,

Good to see the true feelings of this community reflected in such quick fashion. ‘That one quote’ is a pretty lengthy diatribe, and it’s far from his only time. But the sick comeback makes white moderates feel better about themselves

Jtotheb , (edited )

If Stephen King wants to share his accumulated wisdom for free with millions of readers, hopeful artists, random people on the street who’ve never heard of him, what is the best way to reach them? Start a blog that will never show up in any search results behind the pages of machine-generated SEO junk about how they have answers for “Stephen King blog”, right? Because then he had zero impact but retains the moral high ground.

Jtotheb ,

Without citing specific examples, it sounds like you just don’t like affirmative action programs, which is an opinion I’d be embarrassed to say out loud. When one group of people has all the money and all the connections, it’s not fair to say “just treat everyone equally!” because it maintains the unequal status quo—poorer minority groups continue getting into schools at lower rates since they live in poorer neighborhoods with poorer schools and poorer access to the funds needed for higher education, women continue getting passed up for management positions, leading to more male dominated companies hiring more men for more management positions, et cetera

Jtotheb ,

Well unfortunately, the overlap is close enough to a circle that it makes plenty of sense, especially since the issue is not purely economic, but social, as you accidentally point out by using the phrase socioeconomic. Obama has wealth that is unfathomable to the everyday person, as does Clinton—both deal with a society that belittles them because of who they are in a way that white men don’t face, rich or poor.

Surely you’ve noticed that Obama is the only black president so far, despite black people making up 10 to 20% of the population over the last few centuries.

You are also aware that Clinton would have been the first female U.S. President. She won the popular vote by a significant margin, which is a great sign for public opinion on women, but the reality is still that women, who are more than half the country, are not more than half in charge of it.

The fact these two got as far as they did is in no small part thanks to the concept of affirmative action, where we try to right past wrongs and level the playing field. Encourage women to go into nontraditional fields, encourage black students to apply for Ivy League schools and ensure there are spots for them—these things only “hurt” white men because resources are so artificially limited already, disproportionately held by the tiny percentage of [rich white men] who control the US’s giant conglomerates and obedient politicians, and regular old white men aren’t used to feeling the squeeze.

Did Obama pull the ladder up behind him somewhat by applying the same neoliberal bullshit that has destroyed the concept of compassionate social safety nets in favor of a more competitive marketplace? Can you be mad at him? Yeah. That’s beside the point. White people have been allowed to fuck over other white people for ages.

Jtotheb ,

To your last point, yes, affirmative action is the term the U.S. has decided on for programs such as that one. There may be newer phrases in use, I don’t know for certain.

I would agree on the ‘lazy’ argument. It certainly feels like we could do better. But that always seems to be true!

I have on a personal level had to learn to avoid letting perfection get in the way of improvement. Whether that is broadly applicable to policy is debatable—I would welcome much more radical change, but I also feel as though radical action in one direction spurs more radical opposition. For instance, Biden tried to forgive $430 billion in student debt in the U.S. and it was in the news, argued over, eventually stopped due to some absurd court cases—yet he and his administration have successfully gotten about $132 billion forgiven in other avenues, step by step, with much less fanfare and thus (in my mind) much less opposition as well.

In regards to the German Green Party, and to for the moment ignore the question of additional genders, I thought that there were currently two co-leaders, one man one woman? If that is not the case, and even if it is, I assume the argument would be along the lines of ‘women have been underrepresented for so long that it is reasonable to give them a stretch of overrepresentation in order to bring a semblance of balance around.’ Or ‘other parties are mostly led by men so we will be led by women for some semblance of balance.’ Neither concept seems crazy to me.

And on the question of alternative gender presentations I think the issue is one of how to enact the greatest good for the largest number of people. The rights and representation of trans, non-binary, etc. peoples matter very much to me, knowing several such people personally! But collectively they do at the moment make up a small portion of the population. I think they should be encouraged to do whatever it is they want with their lives. If that is to pursue office with the Green Party, so be it. Such a thing seems like it may take a change in language to ‘allow’. But it does not mean the rules are bad conceptually or that they need to be thrown out—more inclusive language seems like a small change that does not require a change in the direction of progress.

That’s the ‘affirmative’ side of affirmative action—taking an action like encouraging trans people to run for office. Temporarily banning men from holding office wouldn’t really fall under the umbrella in spirit I suppose, but isn’t the outcome the same, and thus whether or not you take offense at the concept a personal choice, or at least worthy of a philosophical debate?

Visiting again the concept of laziness: just appointing women to leadership positions does not make everything fair. For instance, the disabled may suffer more social exclusion under female leadership, because women tend to see disabled children in terms of the additional child raising work they represent (of course, mostly men’s fault for pigeonholing women as homemakers). But this is a reason to improve the course we are on. It is okay to critique, to point out the ways that things are not going the right way. For instance, feel free to complain about how the focus on social justice overshadows the larger issues of economic injustice that hold everybody down! Feel free to point out groups that are being forgotten. Individuals who benefit from affirmative action and then turn around and preach self sufficiency. Personally, I think men’s mental health will need to be a bigger focus! It’s clearly an issue, and since they’re still mostly in charge it’ll probably benefit us all if they get some help. Whatever your critique, it should be in the spirit of fostering a world where your genitals or skin color or the neighborhood you’re born in does not determine your life’s course.

But it should not critique the concept. We should not reverse course and say “we were wrong, put men back in charge of everything and don’t let brown people live here.” And that is what I think being against affirmative action means. It means “no thanks, I am okay with the deal as it stands.” The deal as it stands, where in the United States you can accurately predict someone’s income just by knowing what ZIP code they were born in; where despite Hillary Clinton’s career women are underrepresented lucrative fields like the sciences because they’re still expected to put their future on hold to raise a couple’s children; where despite Barack Obama’s success black men are more than four times as likely to have felony convictions than white, taking the community’s right to vote away. That means, whether the person saying it is part of the in-group or a well-off member of a minority group, that they have enough, and aren’t interested in helping others get enough. I’d be embarrassed to say something like that.

Sorry I rambled on so much, I am “stealing time” at my job and lost my train of thought a few times as I left and revisited this comment. :)

Jtotheb ,

You’ve never heard of someone buying music on iTunes?

Jtotheb ,

From the abstract: “We interpret these observations by introducing the hypothesis that photons in the visible spectrum can cleave water clusters off surfaces due to large electrical field gradients and quadrupole force on molecular clusters.”

The commenter’s interpretation of the summary was pretty close to the language Chen used.

To be clear, this article is written by an English native speaker who is summarizing a study written in English primarily by a man who’s been at U.S. universities for three decades. Unless you meant it was a bad summary, which I don’t think it was, but that’s opinion.

Jtotheb , (edited )

You replied to a fairly accurate summary of the postulated explanation of an observed phenomena by saying it’s literally impossible. Either the study is faking its* data, or the study has real data but you don’t like the way definitions are playing out here. You’re arguing for both, because it’s really important that this study is wrong, because you don’t like it. But it can’t be both. Let’s assume PNAS didn’t publish a completely fraudulent study about a made-up phenomenon.

The thermal heat that is being transferred is what causes evaporation. That’s the historical understanding. Yes? Energy in, energy out. 1:1 ratio, everything is conserved. But it’s evaporating twice as fast as that measured heat transfer explains. 1=2? That’s not right. Saying “it’s just more heat that you can’t measure” doesn’t make any sense, because you’re claiming that 1.0004 = 2. It’s a new process. Yeah, something happened on a molecular level and there was probably heat transfer. But on a completely different scale than the known process of evaporation through actual ‘macro’ heat transfer. So it’s not the fucking same.

Again, the green thing. If evaporation is caused only by previously understood processes of heat transfer—more energy is more heat transfer is more evaporation—then why does a less energetic green light produce more evaporation than a more energetic blue or violent light?

“The researchers tried to duplicate the observed evaporation rate with the same setup but using electricity to heat the material, and no light. Even though the thermal input was the same as in the other test, the amount of water that evaporated never exceeded the thermal limit. However, it did so when the simulated sunlight was on, confirming that light was the cause of the extra evaporation.”

Sorry to steal so much of your time, but if you’re not fucking what’s so damn important

Jtotheb ,

Okay, this study has absolutely fascinated me. Tried to find the full study but failed, but Gang Chen (MIT professor, primary author) has a 40 minute symposium about it. Piped bot incoming, hopefully: m.youtube.com/watch?v=B1PbNTYU0GQ

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines