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Cake day: July 28th, 2023

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  • If everybody acts collectively in their own interest, we all win.

    I mean this is only really true so long as everyone is allowed to vote, which is inevitably never the case. We always have certain subsects of the population which aren’t really given access to democracy. It’s very easy to, even in a “total democracy”, still have a ton of xenophobia and imperialism, because obviously, people who aren’t citizens can’t vote. That’s a very large top-down example, right, but this creation of subsects happens at every level. Famous more american examples are gerrymandering and the electoral college.


  • The goal wasn’t to cover every single wall, just to poison the discourse.

    They’ve successfully done that anyways even if all their bots get called out, because then they will have successfully gotten everyone to think everyone else is a bot, and that the solution and way to figure out if they’re bots is to basically just post spam at them. Luckily, people on the internet have been doing this for the past 20 years anyways, so it probably doesn’t matter and they’ve really done nothing.


  • daltotron@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldBlursed Bot
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    2 months ago

    I dunno, I’ve definitely seen enough people immediately default to, oh you’re a paid russian troll, chinese troll, in almost any political argument as a sort of easy thought terminating cliche, just as people will do so by calling anyone they disagree with fascists or SJWs or whatever the new terminology of the last 5 years is. Wokies, maybe, I dunno. This is just a slightly more conspiratorial extension of that, I think. It’s not so much that everyone will be convinced that everyone else is a bot, it’s that there will probably be more than a select few people that start to believe dead internet theory style shit, or start to punch at ghosts that don’t exist. I don’t know if those people would’ve just like, naturally existed otherwise, either, like if they would’ve naturally been paranoid schizos, I think probably they wouldn’t have and our actions do indeed have an affect.

    But then this conversation is littered with “I thinks”, so it’s all just sort of, tautologies and feelings, so who really knows. I just don’t think it’s probably good for people to basically engage in mass amounts of what is basically spam, and then have that be acceptable just because it’s “funny”.



  • I was being hyperbolic, but, a famous part of the prohibition was the organized crime which was both kind of naturally occurring at the time and was created specifically to traffic booze. Illegal material can’t be protected by legal means, obviously, and so in order to trade it, you basically have to create your own police force, your own privatized military. a gang, a mob. That’s how we got nascar and shit, the rumrunners. If you made porn illegal, I’d imagine it would just be added as kind of another form of valuable property which would be traded around by gangs which would see increased power and are kind of inherently anti-institutional. So, turning to black market cartels is a form of resisting policing, it’s a form of anti-institutional action, I’d say, as it gives more economic power to anti-institutional organizations.

    I’d also say, you know, I mean, the hippies did go to wall street in 2008, so that’s something. We had the big liberal feminist pussy hat shit sometime after that, which I’m not as familiar with. More recently we had BLM which was possibly the highest level of street marching we’ve seen basically ever, and then we’ve seen like two riots to try and overturn elections, one of which was successful. We’ve seen more recent campus protests which are still constantly ongoing despite a lack of media attention. I don’t think it’s as absurd as you think, that something kind of stupid like porn getting banned might be the tipping point, especially considering the pretty steady upward trend that we’ve seen with political action concerning other somewhat disconnected issues.




  • daltotron@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzRuby turds
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    3 months ago

    That’s not really being rich, though. The guys on that list could theoretically buy whatever countries they wanted, hell, they could buy multiple, hell, they could just buy owning stock in every country by way of bribery. If you’re the leader of a single country, it’s as though your money is all invested for you already in that single country. You’re mostly locked down to wherever you are. But the Walton family, owning Walmart, last time I checked the third largest economy in the world, they can extract that money and pivot wherever they want, with basically no borders or limits.







  • Most greens are very wierd. They claim to be against malnutrition and vitamin deficiency, but when it comes to solutions, they are against them(see golden rice). They are also mostly vegans, but when it comes to insulin, they would rather kill lots of pigs instead of scary-scary GMO yeast. Or when it comes to energy production, they rather would choose one with guaranteed dangers(coal has very nasty byproducts of burning) instead of potential.

    I think this is probably because they represent a more dangerous and legitimate opposition to the powers that be, and, as a result, tend to be one of the most astroturfed groups on the planet. Couple that with a kind of extremism, where they will oppose golden rice or GMO yeast on the basis of evergreening IP laws (a fair complaint, imo), and then you can kind of see why they keep opposing things that are presented as solutions and keep getting hit with the terminally annoying “well, why don’t you have any solutions, then?” style of criticism.


  • then you’re just a bot.

    I mean to be fair you do make it pretty easy to discredit your entire argument, when you’re just gonna say that anyone calling you out on this very obviously stupid idea is a bot. Like that’s the same thing again.

    Maybe I’m a victim of Poe’s law, but I’ve seen “launch nuclear waste into space” get way more repute than it deserves as an idea from people who have no clue about the actual issues with, even just normal aspects to do with energy generation. It’s a shorthand signal that lets me know that someone’s had all their thinking on it done for them by shitty pop science and shitty science journalism. It’s like if someone believes in antivax, or something. I’m probably not going to really think they’re a credible source, after that. This is also bad if the shit they’re saying is itself lacking in external sources which I can rely on outside of them.

    I’m also flexing my brain right now because none of the shit you said at all really backs up the idea the nuclear energy is the future. Like, if you think it’s inevitable that more plants collapse and it’s inevitable that nuclear power plants get destroyed by missiles in times of war (also a great idea, on par with disposing of it in space, let me irradiate the exact area I’m trying to capture for miles and miles around), then you wouldn’t want nuclear power. If you believe in that and then you also believe in the overblown problem of nuclear waste, then there’s not really a point, there’s no point at which the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

    The reason people aren’t going to accept nuclear if they believe it has cons is because like half of those cons are, albeit overblown, catastrophic for life on the planet, and the other half are failures to conceptualize based on economic boogeymen, just the same as with solar power. Political will problems, rather than problems with physical reality or core technologies. But still, problems that conflict with the existence of the idea itself.

    You’re not going to convince people to go in on nuclear power, your stated idea, if you only point out it’s flaws, and then also post ridiculous shit.


  • This, this should be common sense, and I don’t understand why it’s not.

    Okay, so, say I need some energy that’s pretty dense in terms of the space that it takes up, say I need a large amount of constant energy draw, and say that I need a form of energy that’s going to be pretty stable and not prone to variation in weather events. I.e. I seek to power a city. This isn’t even really a far-fetched hypothetical, this is a pretty common situation. What energy source seems like the best for that? Basically, we’re looking at hydropower, which generally has long term environmental problems itself, and is contextually dependant, or nuclear.

    Solar also makes sense, wind energy also makes sense, for certain use cases. Say I have a very spread out population or I have a place where space is really not at a premium, as is the case with much of america, and america’s startling lack of population density, that might be the case. But then, I kind of worry that said lack of population density in general is kind of it’s own ongoing environmental crisis, and makes things much, much harder than they’d otherwise need to be.

    I think the best metaphor for nuclear that I have is the shinkansen. I dunno what solar would be, in this metaphor, maybe bicycles or something. So, the shinkansen, when it was constructed, costed almost double it’s expected cost and took longer then anyone thought it would and everybody fucking hated it, on paper. In practice, everybody loves that shit now, it goes super fast, and even though it should be incredibly dangerous because the trains are super light and have super powerful motors and no crash safety to speak of, they’re pretty well-protected because the safety standards are well in place. It’s something that’s gone from being a kind of, theoretical idiot solution, to being something that actually worked out very well in practice.

    If you were to propose a high speed rail corridor in the US, you would probably get the same problems brought up, as you might if you were to plan a nuclear site. Oh, NIMBYs are never gonna let you, it’s too expensive, we lack the generational knowledge to build it, and we can patch everything up with this smaller solution in e-bikes and micromobility anyways. Then people don’t pay attention to that singular, big encompassing solution, and the micromobility gets privatized to shit and ends up as a bunch of shitty electric rental scooters dumped in rivers and a bunch of rideshare apps that destroy taxi business. These issues which we bring up strike me as purely being political issues, rather than real problems. So, we lack generational knowledge, why not import some chinese guys to build some reactors, since they can do it so fast? Or, if we’re not willing to deal with them, south korean?

    I’m not saying we can’t also do solar and renewables as well, sure, those also have political issues that we would need to deal with, and I am perfectly willing to deal with them as they come up and as it makes sense. If you actually want a sober analysis, though, we’re going to need to look at all the different use cases and then come up with whichever one actually makes sense, instead of making some blanket statement and then kind of, poo-pooing on everything else as though we can just come up with some kind of one size fits all solution, which is what I view as really being the thing which got us into this mess. Oooh, oil is so energy dense, oooh, plastic is so highly performing and so cheap and we don’t even have to set up any recycling or buyback schemes, oooh, let’s become the richest nation on the planet by controlling the purchasing of oil. We got lulled into a one size fits all solution that looked good at the time and was in hindsight was a large part in perhaps a civilization ending and ecologically costly mistake.


  • And I say just launch the waste into space

    This immediately discards like, everything you’ve said up until now, though. It matters if it explodes on the way up challenger style and irradiates half of the continent with a massive dirty bomb of nuclear waste. It’s way more cost effective, efficient, and safer to just put it somewhere behind a big concrete block and then pay some guy to watch it 24/7, and make sure the big concrete block doesn’t crack open or suffer from water infiltration or whatever.


  • Here, I have a couple examples to kind of, illustrate why, despite the common sentiment, antinatalism, and malthusianism, inherently, like, just straight up, don’t make any sense. This is all based on back of the napkin math that I did a while ago, and I don’t want to redo the numbers, so take it with a grain of salt maybe, but, yeah.

    Okay, so, not really taking into account consumption or supply chain, which are major factors, you could fit the entire population of earth in one city the size of about one and a quarter rhode islands, if you had the population density of kowloon. Now, kowloon has retroactively been shat on as having a low quality standard of living, which is partially true, there were leaks everywhere, it was run by the mob, yadda yadda, but there’s nothing inherently problematic with that level of density, there. You could easily expand that to, say, two rhode islands, or three, right, and that would cover an insanely small portion of the earth’s surface while also being more than enough for everyone to live.

    On the other hand, if you divided up the earth based on only habitable zones and arable land, you’d get about 2.5 acres per person, which I think also accounts for the elderly and children. To me, that sounds like probably 2.5x more than I would ever need in a lifetime, especially once we kind of tally up all the savings that we can get at scale, at mass production, and then maybe take costs for transportation.

    We also, never, never ever take into account the amount of land management which was being done by the various natives of all their lands before colonialism kind of came in and fucked everything up. We have this conception of nature as being some kind of like, inherent good entity that humans can only ever destroy with their presence. A kind of untouched garden of eden that we should basically never touch. As being like, inherently sacred, or having some inherent value, even, to the point where we anthropomorphize it. “Mother nature”. We have this view of humans as also being completely separate from nature, as being an aberration, rather than being a part of it. I think these are both mistakes. We have to view humans as being a part of nature, and we have to start viewing nature as existing everywhere, rather than just being something that you minorly interface with when you go for a hike. Our built environment is part of nature, our decision to plant exclusively male trees that will give off a shit ton of pollen which covers all the windows and makes everything super shitty all spring so we don’t have fruit, that’s a part of nature. So are the raccoons and possums and stray cats and dogs and pigeons and weeds and other things which we see as being invasive but also simultaneously as having no real habitat anymore.

    The real solution, I think, is only going to come about when humans collectively start to conceptualize and take accountability for what they go around and do, rather than just sort of, pawning off all responsibility for everything, and cooking up some apocalyptic reality where it’d just be better off if we didn’t exist at all. The genie is out of the bottle. Even to conceptualize of us as being “the problem”, as though there is a singular kind of problem, is a kind of anthropocentrism, and a kind of anthropomorphizing of nature.

    I also assume I don’t need to really discuss how like, the idea that we’re currently doing everything in the most efficient way, is a little bit overconfident, and takes everything at a kind of, unchanging face value. As though we exist in the long arc of history with a kind of inevitability, rather than a random happenstance.