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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Is there any evidence that living legumes make the nitrogen they fix available to other plants nearby? I thought they locked it up in root nodules and it only becomes bioavailable if you chop and drop the legumes so that the nodules break down and release nitrogen into the surrounding soil. Otherwise the legumes are just going to use the nitrogen for their own growth.




  • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlAlso "parasite".
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    5 days ago

    There are millions of people in the U.S. whose wealth comes from the increase in the property value of their family home. This is unearned wealth.

    Of course, you’ll have a hard time convincing most people of that last bit. Which is why billionaires are the more popular enemy rather than the middle class.














  • It’s really simple: Microsoft is a business solutions company. Microsoft helps your boss spy on you at work. Your boss is their customer, not you.

    Apple is a consumer products company. You are their customer. They market their products on privacy and security. Betraying that marketing message by spying on users is shooting themselves in the foot, so they’re incentivized not to do that.

    Neither company is trustworthy. Economic incentives are the trustworthy concept here. Barring screwups, we can trust both companies to do what is profitable to them. Microsoft profits by spying on users, Apple does not (not right now anyway).


  • There’s a big issue with using weight classes in team sports: player weights vary dramatically. Take the NFL for example. Setting aside the enormous differences in weight between linemen (offensive and defensive) and all other position players, there are also huge weight differences within a given position. For example, quarterback Jared Lorenzen was 6’4” and weighed 275 lbs whereas Russell Wilson is 5’11” and weighs 211 lbs. That’s a huge weight difference!

    You can find similar weight differences across players in other leagues (NHL, NBA, and MLB). Weights don’t really correlate with overall skill level though they do somewhat correlate with position and skill set (and height of course).

    How would you classify by weight in team sports? You might think to do it by position but none of the leagues require a player to remain at a single position for their career. Players can and do switch positions, and many even do so multiple times during a game. Sports like NBA basketball don’t even have any particular rules about what a player at any given position is allowed/not allowed to do, so the positions on team rosters are more like a suggestion than a requirement.


  • Dark Matter isn’t a theory. It’s a feature of some theories to account for otherwise unexplained phenomena (galactic rotation curves, microlensing, the structure of the CMB) but no one knows what Dark Matter actually consists of. It’s basically a placeholder which is compelling for some reasons (theories without Dark Matter tend to explain some but not all of the above phenomena) but not compelling for others (unable to determine what the stuff is made of).

    The aether came about by an argument from ignorance rather than the observations. Until the discovery of the wave-like nature of light it was believed that all waves travel in some medium, like the waves on water. Then it was assumed there must be some medium for light as well. But this was an invalid assumption without any evidence to back it up.


  • I mean the Gimp in particular. My point is that if we could suddenly wish the Gimp into non-existence (a counterfactual) then we could get a do-over. But because the Gimp actually exists it occupies a niche that could go to something better. Instead of banding together to create a better tool, people just grumble a bit and then use the Gimp (or hand over their wallet to Adobe).