I hear you. Didn’t mean for that to come across as an attack on you.

Lemmy is such a fickle place. Just a few days ago people were clamoring for Democrats to make a purely performative abortion vote that would be doomed to fail, merely because it would send an important signal to voters. Now people are skeptical that performative signal votes are sincere because they won’t go anywhere. Not saying you, specifically, but the whiplash is really frustrating.

Second, sure, it’s a low risk bill because they know it won’t go anywhere, but damn isn’t it good news that somebody is putting their money where their mouth is? Maybe we just need to primary in more Dems who will sign on and help push it through?

https://rankthevote.us/raskin-beyer-welch-bill-would-bring-ranked-choice-voting-to-congressional-elections/

The recent NCAA conference kerfuffle proves money was only part of the problem, though. While there certainly have been declines in state support and endowment revenue, they’ve also spent decades prioritizing things like sports, facilities, and coaches over research and academic programs. And we can’t even justify it by claiming that Universities need to prioritize revenue-generating entities to support non-revenue generating entities, because sports lose a stupid amount of money each year. They’ve lost track of what Universities are supposed to be doing, which is education, and they’re doing it in a way that keeps them trapped in a financial doom loop.

Yep. Page 30 in the referenced study.

Yes, but the lede is why. They don’t really get to anything resembling a resolution until something like 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through the article. Even now I’m still unsure whether the 500k excess deaths were rabies infections or due to tainted water. They never got around to providing much clarity on that front. The paper only goes so far as to say a) more rabies vaccines were sold, b) people saw more dogs, c) fecal counts in water went up, and d) DO in water went down. But that comes with two huge caveats:

1. Feral dog data were collected after the ban and “do not allow us to reject that feral dog populations were already higher in the high-vulture suitability districts even before the collapse of vulture populations.”

2. Fecal coliform also has human origins. And the uptick in fecal counts (along with the decline in DO) was in areas where more people live.

Correlation between excess human deaths and vulture decline wasn’t actually teased out into any kind of causation, and the best they could do was link death upticks with spatially isolated poisoning nodes. Urban areas had a more pronounced effect, but urban areas have a lot of other factors that can cause death, and none of those factors were controlled for, or really even mentioned in section 6.2 or the conclusion. Overall the paper is crappy because the study is quite poor, so I guess the author did the best they could with a study that tried to do far too much with far too little data.

Blech. The opening to the article isn’t any better, and they clearly buried the lede to keep you scrolling. Here’s the gist:

1. Vultures eat cattle carcasses.

2. Anti-inflammatory cattle medicine Diclofenac is toxic to birds.

3. Price of Diclofenac falls in 1994, becomes widely used.

4. 95% of vultures in India die over 1990s and 2000s.

5. Diclofenac banned in 2006.

6. Rotting livestock carcasses, no longer picked to the bones by vultures, polluted waterways and fed an increase in feral dogs and rabies.

7. Districts with no vultures saw uptick in human deaths. Districts with vultures saw no uptick. About 500,000 excess deaths across India.

What a fucking terrible article.

Lol, yep. Oh you spray lots of stuff that’s designed to kill bugs? I think it might be killing lots of bugs!

Fascinating, as I had no idea it could start to happen this quickly. This really helps explain how regional dialects like the Carolina Brogue emerged in isolated parts of the country/world.

1. It was never dominant the way Google is.

2. That was in the early days of the internet, when things changed on a fundamental level quite frequently. I’m very specifically making a point about today, not 1995.

Yeah the niches have been filled. Facebook is the personal profile networking thing, Instagram is the photo thing, X-Twitter is the “shout your inner monologue” thing, Reddit the anonymous networking thing, TikTok the short vid thing, Tinder the sex thing. Alternatives to the dominant platforms just won’t catch on because no new gadget is more valuable than a critical mass. We’re in the late stage of social media Phase I, and it’ll take something fundamentally (not cosmetically) different to shake us out of Phase I and kick off Phase II.

Boil it down even further than OP and everything, ultimately, is just binary impulses between differently oriented clusters of atoms.

Time and time again I find myself coming back to a deterministic interpretation of the physical world. We’re now at the point where a simple scrape-predict-regurgitate AI language model (ChatGPT) can convincingly imitate the communication pattern of a human being with good factual recall but low social acumen, almost like what we generally associate with the autism spectrum. It’s harder and harder to argue that we aren’t just walking flesh bags with simple electrical impulses that carry us from decision to decision based on a finite dataset. It’s amazingly complex and sometimes can seem unpredictable, but it’s still finite. Were we ever able to build a sufficiently complex computer, I believe it could predict every decision we ever make with remarkable accuracy. The concept of “free will”, at least to me, seems a comfortable agreed-upon illusion that keeps us from killing and eating one another.

Fair. My apologies.

I light some fires but also have some thoughts. Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExplosionsAndFire/

Broseph, you’re not gonna get any kind of traffic bump by directing people from here back to Reddit. The only reason we’re all here is because we abandoned that shithole.

Can I get that process started? Where do I put the url in directly to subscribe from kbin if/when the 404 error is corrected?

Why doesn’t flyfishing@lemmy.world show up when I log into kbin.social and try to subscribe from that instance?

I started it here: https://lemmy.world/c/flyfishing