Reddit can be a useful knowledge base, but there are certain subject areas where the consensus voice will confidently, clearly, emphatically state something that is simply wrong.
My current irritation is r/sailing, which has a large number of people who have clearly never sailed beyond the yacht club bar, or maybe a small lake, and have precisely zero clue about the interplay between wind and current (because they never experience the latter), spouting off bullshit with authority.
And there’s no point arguing with them, but my god, the extent to which they are smug about being wrong is irritating as fuck.
@saramg @thelocalecho @ajlanes Abseiling 120' down a waterfall into a river in flash flood, then walking out past the "route closed" signs was a memorable one.
@ajlanes @thelocalecho @saramg I figure it was fair you did the running, after all, I'd done the abseil into a flooded river with the possibility of having to climb back up a very slippery waterfall.
@ajlanes @thelocalecho @zoe Crib Goch wasn't near-death either, but I still felt profoundly unwise wandering along a steep spine of wet, slick rock in dense fog over a 500m drop to either side.
Those are very tasty. Enough that I’ll choose them over many other non-gf M&S sandwiches. (ISTR @zoe being surprised at this - “you didn’t have to buy GF sandwiches just because you were going to eat them at me”)
The barely concealed glee from climate doomers with their crescendo of “look at the graphs! We’re all going to die, and it was totally your fault for putting an aluminium bun case in the black bin that one time” is, I have to be honest, kinda getting me down.
@Sarah Brown I think we must allow us to be humans and make those occational mistakes. What is important is the direction, not the bumps on the road. I recycle a lot, but there are days when I am less thorough. I don't drive an electric car because.. well money but also because I have no place to charge one. Instead I've chosen one as small and light as I can live with. It's not perfect but it's what I can currently do.
@Maria Karlsen Lots of us do what we can do. The reality is though that none of it makes any difference. Our actions on an individual level are irrelevant. It would be like trying to build a 747 by individuals making paper aeroplanes.
The people who can fix this are governments and massive industries, and they don’t want to.
There is literally no point in the constant moralising and insinuation that we’re all fucked because we didn’t believe in fairies, er I mean recycling, hard enough.
It’s just terrifying people for the sake of terrifying people.
@shimriez I used to feel the same way, and still largely do. The actions and choices of individuals can not meaningfully shift the impact on the climate. I also don't believe in any sort of shaming. It's just a terrible motivator. You don't want people to feel like "climate" is about finger wagging tree huggers who feel superior to you because they recycle.
But I also think that individual action matters, because in a more sustainable future our lives will look differently, we might as well get a head start. And it normalizes caring about these things, and helps to start conversations on the topic. I think it can help create broader public support for tough climate action, which will help politicians to take their responsibility.
So yeah I guess I largely agree, doomerism and shaming are counterproductive. That's not how you mobilize people.
There is also the social value of the alternatives: biking or taking public transportation enables a different relationship to the world.
When I bike, I notice things that I don't see when I drive or take the bus, while taking transit allows me to be in a space with other people--it takes me out of my personal bubble and forces engagement with the world.
Personally, I feel that the shift to individual EVs misses on the opportunity to restructure our world.
@Sarah Brown While I agree that it's the governments and industries that are the biggest polluters and have the most power to change things - if they want to. I still think that what many millions of people do or don't do also matters. If nothing else to keep hope up and despair down.
@Maria Karlsen When I say none of it makes any difference, I'm specifically talking about the effect individual actions have on climate change. To a first approximation, this is zero, and has little scope for it to be any other number.
I agree that we can very definitely make a difference in how people feel, and this is the source of my complaint: the constant stream of "we are all going to die, because we are filthy eco-sinners" articles just make people feel like shit.
It's basically doom and gloom protestantism, but with the climate playing the role of their god.
!Friendica Support I accidentally removed a thread locally. The thread is ongoing on the original server and I'm quite keen to get it back. Is it possible to do this? If I paste any of the URLs from the posts into the search box, I just get an error page.
Ah, alas I was hoping we might run into each other again, but I can#t blame you for going to Portugal. If I thought I had a snowball's chance of finding an academic position, I'd follow.
To be honest it's such a simple marque it does not surprise me that it's already in use. I would have expected some social media business to have used it by now. Trying to find even complex names that are unique is very challenging.
It's almost like Twitter was actually a valuable brand . . .
I have a theory that Musk is actually bipolar to some degree, at least prone to mania. He seems to go from simply being a jerk (not a bipolar or autistic trait, just who he is) but not crazy, to doing utterly bizarre things for a period of time, then calm down a bit. Certainly a fascination with a letter and tearing through a business over it without regard to the consequences seems like that. If so, presumably he only manages to do it without intervention because these aren't listed companies, since surely others would get wise to what was happening,
Hi from bsky. You need an invitation to get here. The website link is published through telepathy. We have twelve active users and a nightly circular firing squad. You can’t link to posts anywhere, but you can verify yourself by visiting your favourite domain registrar with your compsci degree.
Today we will be talking about why fediverse is so hard to use and why it will never be popular with its fifteen million users.
Bluesky is developing a very weird dynamic. In the day it fills up with shitposts and then I got to bed and wake up, and the bodies of the circular firing squad crew are all over the place. It’s like two entirely different social media sites and which you get depends on your time zone.
It's a deep rot. Heck, if the centre ground ish politicians in Europe had *any* sense of self preservation, let alone decency, measures like votes for all residents would be much, much higher up the political agenda. But the average European social democrat, centrist-liberal, or christian democrat politician still consider giving us votes more off the table, more beyond the pale, than letting actual fascists into government.
This entry was edited (Saturday, July 22, 2023, 9:11 AM)
so-called left wing parties: we're uhhhh anti Brussels? we want affordability? hold corporations """accountable""" in some vague undefined way? anyway sorry can't talk about immigration, nationalisation or climate collapse because guess what, greedflation's happening so it's time for more austerity
The LGBTQ+ charity also appears to have softened its stance on the issue of single-sex spaces, as Mr Anderson said he supports exemptions that can be used to exclude transgender people from women's prisons and toilets.
I never got why it's ok to refuse someone to use a toilet based on their gender. It should be about being polite and leaving the space safe and clean for the next person, instead of all this gender stuff. Where did the idea for gender based toilet access come from anyway? Isn't it just daft and ignorable?
Forty years in the tory party. I suspect someone has rattled one of his skeletons. He was interviewed by Nick Robinson in February. thepinknews.com/2023/02/13/lgb…
IIRC I think that was when Ben Summerskill was CE. They were as transphobic AF. Summerskill weirdly was opposed to marriage equality for LG people too 🤪
I had a horrible feeling that Nancy Kelley's resignation was to do with backsliding on trans rights.
Anderson was involved with the Tory government until recently.
I think it took a very heavy toll on her. I have a great deal of respect for Ruth, and I think her force of will was maybe more important than any of us (her included) realised.
How is it that people like this look at how right wingers act and treat them and think they’re willing to be compassionate, empathetic or decent human beings? The right thinks queer people have no place in society. Nothing that you do is going to change that. This stance is suicidally stupid.
@ajlanes @Cassandra There are a load of golf courses in Tucson too - though I believe they're required to water them with some variety of waste water at least.
@jugglerchris @Cassandra US suburbia is mad. It’s practically designed to make people live so far from each other and anything else that they can only be dependent on cars.
So the background here is that I referred to TERFs as pests that are particularly recalcitrant, like pubic lice or bedbugs.
And various people liked the post, including some who are members or a UK political party.
And some pubic louse with nothing better to do is complaining about them because they liked my post.
And said pubic louse got told to go piss into the wind by the complaints process.
So instead of taking the hint that everyone hates them and all their bullshit works, they set out to prove me right by just being UTTERLY FUCKING UNABLE TO JUST PISS OFF AND LEAVE PEOPLE IN PEACE.
I’m sure the irony of this situation is lost on them. Silly fucker.
She must really hate it that I resigned from said party and then emigrated to get away from the likes of her and their bullshit, and as a result there is nothing they can do to get at me other than bother my friends.
I mean, I am annoyed on behalf of my friends, but I also appear to have triple residency now: Portugal, the UK, and rent-free in their heads.
What is the deal with Kettle Chips? They act like they’re a premium brand, but they’re actually very bad crisps with a relentlessly disappointing taste.
It’s the way they try to make out that they’re lovingly hand made by artisans dropping slices of potato one by one into a cauldron with a skimmer which gets me. When they say ‘hand made’, the hand will press the button which lowers a basket of 20kg of potato into a vat for a precisely timed period.
Sarah Ditum and Louise Mensch turned up in Bluesky, made one introduction post each, and then there is just page after page after page, full of replies telling them to fuck off.
And it's utterly glorious to behold. Gives me a bit of hope for humanity.
Oh, this is funky! Reading a book with the multi focal contact lenses in. If I close one eye, the page has blurred and sharp bits in a chessboard type pattern. If I open both, the whole thing is sharp.
@Rachel Lawson Yeah. It’s different to glasses where you can look around to change which bit you get. With contacts, they move with your eye, so, looking around makes no difference. You get distance vision in some bits and close vision in others. After a while, the brain sorts this out.
Oh I see, so the lens varies in a pattern over its surface and just relies on binocular vision and your brain to sort it all out? That’s absurdly clever (and suggests these contacts wouldn’t work for me). I think when I first saw you describe this I assumed the chessboard was an artefact of your brain rather than of the lens. (Like the weird kaleidoscope patterns you get when you rub your eyes too hard.)
I mean, Hanlon's Razor is a thing, but someone who was actually setting out to destroy Twitter would likely be behaving indistinguishably from Space Karen right now. Just saying.
@kianryan I suppose therein lies a problem. While I don’t agree with much of anything Twitter does these days, I can kinda understand the idea that businesses using the platform to offer customer support while not paying does seem like a thing that should have been monetized. There are so many services out there monetizing that exact functionality elsewhere on the web.
@kianryan "As per Musk, the apparent big catch is that verified users only make money off of other verified users, creating what amounts to the combination of an MLM and conspiratorial echo chamber."
@cykonot @kianryan that’s kinda the point I guess. The business should be expecting to bear the cost of that interaction. The fact Twitter didn’t seek to monetize B2C interactions is part of why they’re where they are right now. They never grew the platform into a true business tool and got bought out by a Aparteid Clyde
people can compensate for a fair amount of retinal damage without being aware of it. E.g. I seem to have a fairly large blank spot in the right visual field of my right eye & I cannot make myself consciously aware of it. I only know it's there because of stuff suddenly becoming visible (like moving cars <AHEM/>) that I ought damn well have seen.
Expect the orca people will be along to explain about how he was a billionaire and deserved it any moment now.
Seriously, I think the main thing determining whether dolphins (including orcas) attack humans is whether they think they can get away with it. Nasty little twats, they are. asahi.com/ajw/articles/1495829…
Weather's been bloody awful though so I haven't been able to try them out on the bike, which is why I bought them. Need to see the road *and* my GPS device.
@Jason Bennett-Brown So I'm short sighted but also old as fuck. I need correction for driving, but with distance correction I can't read. My uncorrected reading vision is perfect.
As a result, I mostly don't wear the contacts at all.
But these, I think I will wear. I can see what I'm typing just fine.. I can see the horizon. It's like being 20 again!
I have varifocal glasses but the temptation to take them off when reading text is too strong. I guess multifocal contacts remove that temptation at least.
@Sarah Brown Multifocal (glasses) make a huge difference. I started needing reading glasses, but eventually had to take them on and off so often that my eyes couldn't catch up. I can still drive safely without them, but barely read a book. Now with these, I'm wearing them all the time. It took a while (a month or so) to get used to but I wouldn't want to be without them.
@Maria Karlsen so I was mostly just using distance glasses to drive, and nothing to read. It-s easy to take driving glasses off, and I don't mind the world being blurred.
But obviously that's harder to do with contacts. These, however, seem like a much better solution.
@Tobias I had to visit an optician (not sure if that's the right term in English) for mine. That included getting my eyes checked to get the right strength and also to make sure there wasn't any medical condition causing my problems.
Seminal "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria" crap study, largely determined to be bullshit but often used as justification to abuse trans kids withdrawn on account of how it's nonsense: medscape.com/s/viewarticle/992…
convenient how the headline omits the fact that it's being withdrawn for violating standards of informed consent. Or that those were far from the only criticisms. No, it's all just "backlash."🙄
Shoutout to places which have 1 “free from” sandwich in their entire range, and it’s lactose free vegan salad on gluten free bread because that ticks all the “food intolerance” boxes in one go.
And by “shoutout”, I mean “fuck you”.
You wonder why nobody is buying your dismal sadness cardboard. It’s because gluten intolerant people like chicken as well (for example)
Being a vegetarian who's gluten and lactose intolerant, I can't believe they've actually made a sandwich I can eat! (Provided there's no vinegar-based dressing on the salad... nor tomatoes, nor onion... the list goes on)
@Kate Watson The shop worker was like, "that's the only one we have"
Probably wondering why they never sell any of them.
"Oh, we barely stock gluten free sandwiches because we tried sticking three pairs of cardboard with some dismal lettuce between them on a shelf and nobody bought them, so we assumed there's no demand"
@Alfred Chow - Maker of Things Although I tend to steer clear of stalls because, IME, they typically take no precautions against cross contamination. Learned that the hard way.
Looking like Bluesky is basically over. Jack Dorsey will not budge from the ideological position that content moderation is something that can be done as an afterthought with regexps.
It maybe worked well enough to keep the site viable as long as the number of bad actors was tiny. It clearly doesn’t work any more.
KatLS
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown
in reply to KatLS • •Eve (?), she/her (?), secret spooky romulan (?)
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown likes this.
Alexandra Lanes
in reply to Sarah Brown • •like this
Sarah Brown likes this.
Alexandra Lanes
Unknown parent • •: j@fabrica:~/src;
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Oooh, if you’re fully saturated, does that mean we can add seed particles to initiate crystal precipitation?
Who doesn’t love some fresh brain crystals?