• 1 Post
  • 60 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 19th, 2023

help-circle








  • It’s important to remember that not every litre of water is the same as every other liter of water.

    It’s really important to watch water use if you’re using groundwater in Texas or California, but water is a renewable resource in many places and it isn’t a problem to use water as long as it’s properly managed. For example if you remove water from a river, purify it, use it for something benign like cooling making sure not to add anything to it, process it so you’re not impacting the ecosystem, then return it to the same river, then you’ve used water, but you didn’t really consume anything.

    On the other hand, if you polute that water, or you damage local ecosystems, or if you’re pulling water out of non-renewable sources, that’s a problem. Environmentalism must be local, there are few universal answers.



  • I think the concept of an ideal may be flawed. What is ideal changes based on what the current situation is.

    That goes for the ideal human body as well as the ideal human philosophy. We need to evolve constantly to fit with our current situation.

    People get fat because famines killed people a lot. People have sickle cell anemia because sickle cell traits protect against malaria which killed people a lot. A lot of cancers are caused by mechanisms that protect against things that kill people a lot. Different personality traits that look suboptimal exist because those strategies were successful over time. Yeah these traits look bad when that situation doesn’t exist, but they’re much more likely to help in the aggregate than to hurt particularly with stuff like cancers which tend to kick in after an individual has reproduced so don’t have as much of an evolutionary impact.

    A lot of the same goes for philosophies – people tend to follow what works, and what works at one time doesn’t work all the time – ask gen z as they’re given advice by boomers.

    All this is one good reason to be wary of genetic engineering. We’ll get rid of all the “bad traits” and be wiped out because some of them were there for good reasons we don’t understand.








  • It would really depend on the diagnosis of a clinician, anything is definitely just conjecture.

    Bipolar is often more like periods of high energy and periods of low energy as I understand it.

    The swings between ideation and demonization is a trait of borderline personality disorder, however, and one that I have experienced first-hand with an ex. The way I’ve had it explained to me is that where sociopathy is an inability to regulate your behavior, BPD is an inability to regulate your emotions.



  • The logo change has brought out a new wave of articles and tweets about it, and people go “oh no that’s right I’m on twitter! Well THIS is the final straw! Thank goodness there were all these hate articles and tweets that reminded me I was supposed to be angry!”

    Also, many of the people who “jump ship” are right back on Twitter within a week. mastodon.social has an entire graveyard of celebrity accounts that haven’t been posted to in months because the outraged celebrities just went back to twitter.

    I’m happy for Mastodon (I run a fediverse instance and the more users there are the more chances of interesting people and the like), and some of those people do realize they like the vibe more and stay, and a lot of those bumps are significant for the platform. The thing is, we’re talking a few hundred thousand, maybe a million accounts of 200 million daily active users on twitter.


  • The evidence really doesn’t bear that out. Twitter has lost some people, but there are plenty of people still on there. What I keep on seeing is people saying that they’re leaving twitter, they might even deactivate their accounts, and then they’re back on it a little while later. It reminds me of when kathy griffin used her dead mothers account to bypass her twitter ban. They’re just addicted.

    Incidentally, griffin created a mastodon account and hasn’t posted in months, and I strongly suspect her (locked down) Twitter is active.