I am going to try this, but I’d really like to know why it works. Someone else suggested cold water on the knife. Do the irritant molecules from the onion react with the water on your hands/wrists/knife before getting up in your eyes?

Externalized costs to subsidize profits for fossil fuel companies?! In my grocery cart?!

I am especially sensitive to this. I’ve found that using a very, very sharp knife can help, but some onions are especially strong. At that point I’m breaking out the swimming goggles.

It’s actually remarkably difficult to get officially excommunicated from the Catholic Church. You have to track down where you were originally baptized, and if they don’t have your records because of churches closing or because it was just too long ago, you won’t get a response from your local church.

The standard response is that once you are baptized, it cannot be undone. You can “self-excommunicate” but you can’t get a certificate saying that you’re no longer a member. I think it’s easier to get kicked out by the Mormons or Adventists, but the Catholics are weirdly clingy.

I have a 3p app that still seems to be working. I don’t log in, so I only read occasionally, but I have to say that the number of upvotes seem much higher than when I was using the site. I was a very active user who quit during the exodus (when Apollo went dark), but I don’t remember the number of upvotes being regularly in the thousands to tens of thousands.

It makes me wonder whether they’re artificially boosting traffic ahead of the IPO, to be honest. I mean, if they are, it probably would have leaked by now - but it still feels like it doesn’t line up with the third party traffic reports.

In any case, I think that going public is just going to increase the pressure for monetization, and Spez has already said how much he admires what Elon did with Twitter, so I think we know where it’s heading. It’s really just waiting for a replacement. Whether lemmy can be it or not is yet to be determined, but the enshittification has started and the migration will come as soon as someone drops a couple of billion building a service and app that’s a real substitute for the casual users.

Okay, I’m not a believer of free will, and so I’m not in favor of a justice system that’s used to punish rather than rehabilitate.

However, given the current system, it seems odd to me that they give credit (if we can call it that) for pretrial detention based on detaining the person attempting to flee. It recalls Jean Valjean, who got a tremendous amount of extra time in prison for his attempt to escape.

On the other hand, I believe that Germany has a legal policy to not consider attempting to escape from prison a crime, because wanting freedom is a very natural state of mind and shouldn’t be criminalized. I am, not surprisingly, more in favor of Germany’s philosophy on this.

But its examples like this that make me appreciate Robert Sapolsky’s position that it’s really challenging sometimes to have to keep your scientifically derived ethical position in mind when faced with a crime that really gets to you.

I understand what you’re saying, but it’s not a new idea. What you’re proposing is (as far as I can see) the Platonic philosopher-king. They would rule fairly and wisely - since they agree with me and I am fair and wise.

But let’s make sure we are being fair here. It’s not “democracy” that allowed for an armed insurrection against the government. Armed insurrections against governments occur in totalitarian regimes all the time. I can recommend a 400 page biography of Che if you want a reference. British democracy allowed the IRA. Iranian dictatorship allowed for the Islamic revolution. There are multiple civil wars going on right now around the world under multiple systems of government.

I absolutely don’t believe that all people have equally valid opinions. I don’t even believe that people have free will. I agree with Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky that everything people do is predetermined. I’ve gotten very deep into that in other conversations on here so I don’t want to repeat all of that, but I can say that democracy allows for more dynamic adaptation. My position on free will makes these discussions more nuanced - human behavior is determined but not predictable - so I prefer to think of it in terms of information flows.

So let me do my thing as a theoretical biologist. Do ants have democracy? I’d argue that they do, in a very real sense. Emergent behaviors - where each ant’s activity influences others’ activities - is a coordinating action. The queen ant isn’t the brain of the colony. She’s the reproductive organ. The brain of the colony is the ants themselves, the ants whose genetically driven programs respond to their environment and peers in a way that is responsive.

It comes down to information flows.

The reason people are terrified of an authoritarian regime isn’t because a dictator Republican is going to force lower taxes on people. It’s because of the state and private violence. I may have hated Reagan and W because of their policies, but neither of them would have tried to overthrow the government of the US and replace it with a dictatorship. If either of them lost their election, they would have conceded. Neither of them promised while running for office that they would enact a dictatorship.

The problem with your question is that you’re assuming that what we have an issue with are republican policies. It’s true, we do. That’s not the biggest problem with Trump, though, and the linked article makes that quite clear.

To be honest, I wish Obama had been more successful in passing a national healthcare program. I hated that he had campaigned for Lieberman (because the default position is to support the incumbent) rather than his from-the-left challenger in the primaries, and that L went on to tank the public option. But I wish that Obama had used every ounce of political power to ram it through, or had thrown L to the dogs and went all in on getting a more liberal senate. I don’t wish Obama had dictatorial power.

I don’t even particularly favor having an executive branch that’s separate from the legislature. I think that parliamentary democracy is a better approach (although it has its issues too).

Shark, as long as we are on land. I’d just outrun him then call coup by hitting him with a stick while he’s gasping for air. I guess at that point I could take on a blue whale, but that would just make me feel like a dick. I’ll stick with the shark. Any shark, any time, 1.5 miles inland.

Thanks!

I have always loved the OED. As a kid I used to sit in the library and just read it. It was always a dream of mine to buy my own copy and just have it the way people used to have encyclopedias.

That’s exactly my perspective.

I came of age with the birth of the web. I was using systems like Usenet, gopher, wais, and that sort of thing. I was very much into the whole cypherpunk, “information wants to be free” philosophy that thought that the more information people had, the more they could talk to each other, the better the world would be.

Boy, was I wrong.

But you can’t put the genie back into the bottle. So now, in addition to having NPR online, we have kids eating tide pods and getting recruited into fascist ideologies. And of course it’s not just kids. It’s tough to see how the anti-vax movement or QAnon could have grown without the internet (which obviously has search engines as a major driver of traffic).

I think you’re better off teaching critical thinking, and even demonstrating the failings of ChatGPT by showing them how bad it is at answering questions. There’s plenty of resources you can find that should give you a starting point. Ironically, you can find them using a search engine.

That was amazing! I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve seen this.

“Every customer should be greeted when they walk into the store.”

The singular “they” is traditional in English - it is very much proper English and has been around (iirc) since the 17th century. It’s only a big deal now because conservatives want to make gender a factor in elections.

You gave no competing hypothesis. I offered several.

This is a hot take.

Here’s the problem with your hypothesis:

You’re mixing together people who don’t vote with people publicly advocating not voting. That’s completely unsupported. Let’s see some stats on why people don’t vote. Is it because they don’t have time because they’re working, because they’re uncomfortable with the process, because they’re being lazy? On the other hand, what are the predictors of voting? We know age is a factor, so that would encourage us to think about the time availability question.

The second part is that the disengagement approach you’re advocating has driven the Democratic Party to the right. The Third Way movement came entirely from seeing Reagan’s engagement numbers. Not voting casts a zero information signal. First, the numbers only move mildly from year to year, and even when they do it tends to come down to the charisma of the candidate, not the policy positions.

A surprising number of Americans want universal healthcare, support LGBT rights and are against racism, yet vote for Donald Trump or DeSantis because they can get the crowds riled up in the way that policy wonks just don’t.

I mean, when the republicans did that huge study that found that economic and demographic changes in the US meant they needed to adopt more progressive policies (eg not being openly racist) if they wanted to have a future, the gop said “screw that, we will just depress the vote.”

So, no, your policy is not evidence-based, and it’s unreasonable. It forces the country to the right. If that’s what you want, go for it.

He absolutely did not invent CA. His book was published well after it had become an established modeling technique. Conway’s game of life was published in 1970. Complexity theory modeling had moved well past CA by the time Wolfram’s book came out, to the point that most of us didn’t know why he bothered writing it, much less thought it would revolutionize science.

This is the rpg where you join the “not a fraternity” in college and then go on to become a political or business leader of the United States, right?

One of the most frustrating things about academic Marxism is that it hypothesizes that “capitalists” (whom they bung together with remarkable aplomb) do things like figure in the reproduction cost of labor. They don’t. They’re focused on the next quarter and maybe the next year. Maybe even the next five years. But no one ranging from Elon Musk to (not sure who his opposite would be so I’m kinda taking a stab here) Warren Buffett is thinking in terms of generational replacement. First, they’re not going to live that long. Neither are their shareholders. Plus capital is mobile - it’ll just go someplace else.

This is a headline precisely because it’s a man bites dog story. If your company gives you paid parental leave it’s either because it’s legally required or for retention. It’s not in the hope that the little toy will become a software engineer at the company in 25 years.

Evolutionary biologist here.

I know this is a recurring meme, and it does have a basis in truth. However, in my opinion, it vastly overemphasizes a single aspect of early humans at the expense of other and more important distinct human qualities (and I’m using this term to also refer to our closely related species and ancestors).

First, the real distinction is sociality. Humans are the most cooperative species of hominid. As someone once said, you will never see two chimpanzees carrying a log together. This translates into being able to coordinate efficient hunting practices in a variety of ecosystems.

Second, and very related, is social learning. Other species can also exhibit social learning, but never to the degree humans do. Most species figure out things in evolutionary time - what counts as food, what counts as danger, the best way to do X, etc. Humans do it daily and pass it on to each other. We learn to kill prey by setting fires in grasslands. We develop tools and teach each other how to make and use them. These are all interlocking effects. The bigger our brains get, the more helpless our babies are, so the more we need societies, which creates increasingly complex social dynamics, which rewards more complex brains, and so on.

In short, it’s intelligence and social learning replacing learning in evolutionary time that made humans successful, possibly to the point of self destruction.