We could do it.
That graph with all the lines taking all of a sudden a massive spike downwards, including China’s which right before D-day was climbing steadily upwards, looks like pure absurdist comedy, sure.
But we could do it. There’s still time.
Yeah. If there’s an explicit list, then it’s easy to extrapolate, too, if some source comes in that’s not on the list. I’m sure there will be little disagreements about particular sources, but it’s easier if there’s a clear guideline to follow.
It might be a good idea to make explicit rulings on some of the borderline sources.
If it were me, I would ban ScienceAlert, for example. “A Physicist Reveals Why You Should Run in The Rain” or “NASA Reveals Spooky Eyes in Space, And They’re Staring Straight at You.” They have a lot of good articles, too, but some of it is clearly just stuff for clicks. Psypost is also a little dubious. Maybe if it’s something a scientist in that field would ever read and take seriously, including reliable journalism sources that are talking about science, then it’s good, but if it would be viewed as pop-science clickbait, then we need to talk about it.
These are just ideas. I’m just saying that clarifying by name some of the things near the border, maybe after checking with the community, might be good.
I clicked through to the Nature article, and it sounds like about half the plastic gets used for making energy and exhaled as carbon dioxide, with the other half getting pooped out as microplastics. I’d call that progress. It’s not the end goal, but it’s a good tool with some potential, is I think what they are saying.
I’m confident that it will happen, these things just take time. There’s enough energy floating around bound up in plastic polymers, and the chemistry is simple enough, that something will learn to make use of it. 100 years is just way too short in evolutionary time for it to happen on a large scale.
Life is incredibly resilient. It’s been through way worse than us and it’s done fine.
The right conditions for any single species to keep existing in a safe and comfortable place, like the friendly green-blue paradise we were born on, are heartbreakingly fragile.
Not true.
We found that mealworms on the polystyrene-bran diet survived at higher rates than those fed on polystyrene alone.
While the polystyrene-only diet did support the mealworms’ survival, they didn’t have enough nutrition to make them efficient in breaking down polystyrene.
Many of the ones fed only polystyrene for a month did survive, they just fared poorly as with any organism that’s eating only one substance for an entire month. But they did live, which is pretty impressive.
They have gut bacteria that can break down polystyrene for nutrition. They just can’t eat only polystyrene and nothing else and thrive. It’s mostly an area of research because they want to use the bacteria in processing waste, not that the mealworms are going to be the answer as-is.
Mastodon is your coworker who’s honestly well-meaning and kind, but seems to have fits of upset for seemingly no reason at all and random beefs and drama with people that arise from nothing at all. She’s not very good at her job, but she can get it done, and she seems like a sincerely good person, which is enough that people like her.
Misskey is the employee who’s incredibly efficient, but has her own system that no one else can make sense of or follow. You have to just let her do things the way she wants to do them, but it all works. She does not hang around with anyone, just comes in and does her thing.
Bluesky is the guy who is always talking buddy-buddy while either wasting time or asking people for things, blows coke in the bathroom, is constantly hyping himself up. He seems to be very qualified, but it’s hard to tell how much of that is an act, and he’s also clearly a huge piece of shit. For some reason he is wildly popular with everyone.
You didn’t ask, but Bonfire is the IT guy who seems to live in his windowless office, wears T-shirts to work, speaks to no one, and is personally responsible for about 40% of the company’s products and services. Most people have no idea who he is.
In many ways, the Democratic leadership responsible for Donald Trump’s return to power. Let’s explore why.
Fixed the headline.
I mostly agree with the article itself. I would just urge anyone who wants to read the headline and absorb only the general sense-picture “Democrats = bad” to read the whole thing.
Assigning some blame to corporate-friendly Democrats who turned their backs on most of the people on the ground fighting for real change, and failed to do much of anything successful when the wolves arrived at the door for real in 2016, is completely fair.
Now that the shit-storm has arrived for real, though, I think that deciding you want to make anyone who’s a Democrat into your enemy, and so reduce your coalition size from 70 million people to maybe 1-2 million if that, sounds like suicide. We will either hang together or we will surely hang separately. Nobody you’re talking to, or going to be in a position to be talking to anytime during the coming storm, had anything to do with failing to prosecute Trump effectively or betraying Bernie Sanders. They worked with what was in front of them, same as you.
Read the article. I’m usually in defense of Democrats, but I fully admit that I think it’s a mostly fair assessment of how we got here and what we do from here.
If someone didn’t say thing A, but you’re pretending they did so you can make a big fuss about how they’re wrong about thing A when they actually said thing B, please don’t do that.
In fact, in general, it’s not good to try to “win” the conversation. If you said your thing, and they said their thing, and you all had your chance to understand it and make any counter arguments and ask questions, then the mission is accomplished. Not everyone has to see things the same way, just understand each other.
There are people who went through the holocaust who compared Trump in 2016 to Hitler. They, if anyone, understand the gravity of the comparison, and made it a little bit carefully. But they said that the way he speaks, the way everyone who is his enemy is an animal who must be destroyed, is very similar.
Well… if it makes you feel better, they’ll get punished, too. I think most of those people are unknowingly living within a very cushy society which has been set up and maintained for them, which is nearing its end, to be replaced by one much more difficult and dangerous.
They’re victims too. They had so much propaganda, and so much bad education, and so many legitimate grievances about a government that since the 1990s at least has mostly forgotten about them.
I try to be kind in my thinking. They might attack and someone might have to defend against them. They might get attacked by the same system they supported in the beginning. A lot of them are going to get hurt, some of them very badly. None of that is good, even a little bit. Some of it “has to happen” and some will just happen because it happens. But I don’t hold any of it against them nearly as much as I do against the people at the top that engineered this whole thing on purpose, with full awareness.
I’m pretty sure that if they are doing that on Lemmy, it’s not without a human in the loop. I’ve been doing some experimentation with it, and I don’t think it’s a fully automated response.
I have some thoughts on it, along with a whole series of unfounded Fediverse conspiracy theories. I don’t think they are doing fully automated bot responses. They might have LLMs helping to craft long, hostile messages that always carry the right framings and narratives at scale, but there wouldn’t really be a way to detect that as far as I can see, so I’m not sure how much it bears thinking about. I do think systematically hijacking posts and making sure the comments look “right” is part of their system.
Take a look at this:
If they are outside the US, actively in contest with it in some kind of zero-sum game, then I don’t have too much to say that’s upset with them.
If they are outside the US and angry about its imperialism, I think they have yet to learn that the US doesn’t have a monopoly on it, and some of the other brands are somehow even worse. But the temporary or permanent collapse of the US might still be a good thing for them, depending.
If they are in the US, and edgelording, then fuck ‘em. I don’t exactly wish on them what’s in store, but there is a certain grim anticipation, I guess, of the day they start to learn about the reality of what they’ve been talking about.
You know what else is weird? I don’t go to the big communities on Lemmy.world because they are stupid. I looked at !microblogmemes@lemmy.world today, and holy fuck is it weird.
Look at the comments in that one about Hasan Piker. Try sorting by “old.” I came very early, with skepticism and horror and my little .gif, and I got about 1/3 downvotes and 2/3 upvotes. That seems fair. My meme wasn’t even necessarily a fair thing to say, because I’m not even sure that it’s warranted when directed at the OP. But the reaction shows a healthy split of opinion. There were some people arguing. Some people think the Democrats are awful, some think it’s a horror that Trump won and it’s the fault of the people that didn’t vote. Normal stuff.
Then flip it back to “hot.” It leads off with a slick recitation of all the standard talking points about how it’s all the fault of the Democrats for various reasons, and some bad things about them a lot of which aren’t true. Right away that comment got 37 upvotes, and 1 downvote.
It’s weird. If you look at the default sort of the comments, there’s this whole alternate reality created, that wasn’t the consensus of all the early commenters. You’d get the idea that everyone thinks the Democrats are just bad and useless, and we’re all in agreement about that.
And, probably, that’s how the comments will stay, for posterity.
It’s weird. It’s not what I’m used to, from the smaller communities, even the ones that have a big population of anti-electoralists, or whatever, that I am arguing with.
The tide is sure as fuck going to be shifted. They got that part right.
If you want a preview about how any of these dummies that are actually in the US are going to behave, look for the reaction of the civilian Germans after World War 2. For the most part, it was, “This is awful and unfair, I can’t believe they would be so mean to us, when we didn’t even do anything.”
A tool for wiping free RAM space offers several benefits, particularly for enhancing security, system stability, and performance
What?
285,428 idiots so far have voted for Jill Stein.
They are outnumbered 1.8-to-1 by votes for RFK, Jr. or Chase Oliver. My level of hope that the foolish people on the left will be outnumbered by foolish people on the right is: IT’S NOT FUN ANYMORE
I think I will stop the updates, I’m getting scared now.
Well, we need to do both.
We need to act now, like the graph with a sudden unprecedented downturn, and also to prepare for things to get worse than we’ve ever seen them get.
I don’t think we’ll do those things. But we could. It’s the current political and business leaders who aren’t willing to. Think about how everything changed during Covid. A lot of people even at the current level of realization would be willing to make serious changes if it put us off the doom-course.
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”