twig @ twig @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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2 yr. ago

I'm really not "arguing against agriculture," I'm pointing out that there are other modes of subsistence that humans still practice, and that that's perfectly valid. There are legitimate reasons why a culture would collectively reject agriculture.

But in point of fact, agriculture is not actually more efficient or reliable. Agriculture does allow for centralized city states in a way that foraging/hunting/fishing usually doesn't, with a notable exception of many indigenous groups on the western coast of turtle island.

A study positing that in fact, agriculturalists are not more productive and in fact are more prone to famine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917328/

But the main point I was trying to make is that different expressions of human culture still exist, and not all cultures have followed along the trajectory of the dominant culture. People tend to view colonialism, expansion and everything that means as inevitable, and I think that's a pretty big problem.

This is called "enumerating badness" and the findings here are both probably not that meaningful and based on a lot of assumptions.

I am curious to see what data is being transmitted, but not a lot is actually revealed by this

I get what you're saying, kind of...

But also, most modern earbuds usually sound quite good. Quality in general has become such a bizarre moving target, but here's my take: We've become so used to constant improvement at the expense of satisfaction. I can barely notice the difference between 1080p and 4k. In my mind they're both "good quality" and therefore I'm satisfied. Same goes for audio quality. I've used a few pairs of earbuds and they have sounded "good."

As a culture, we need to stop with throwing away of perfectly good devices, because it's extremely harmful to the planet's occupants.

This is some pretty weird and lowkey racist exposition on humanity.

Humankind isn't a single unified thing. Individual cultures have their own modes of subsistence and transportation that are unique to specific cultural needs.

It's not that it took 1 million years to "figure out" farming. It's that 1 specific culture of modern humans (biologically, humans as we conceive of ourselves today have existed for about 200,000 years, with close relatives existing for in the ballpark of 1M years) started practicing a specific mode of subsistence around 23,000 years ago. Specific groups of indigenous cultures remaining today still don't practice agriculture, because it's not actually advantageous in many ways -- stored foods are less nutritious, agriculture requires a fairly sedentary existence, it takes a shit load of time to cultivate and grow food (especially when compared to foraging and hunting), which leads to less leisure time.

Also where did you come up with the number 12,000 for "figuring out" the combustion engine? Genuinely curious. Like were we "working on it" for 12k years? I don't get it. But this isn't exactly a net positive and has come with some pretty disastrous consequences. I say this because you're proposing a linear path for "humanity" forward, when the reality is that humans are many things, and progress viewed in this way has a tendency toward racism or at least ethnocentrism.

But also yeah, the point of this meme is "artists are valuable."

You can also sideload epubs, borrow books from libraries on Overdrive and read articles online, etc. It's way easier on the eyes than screens that rely on refresh rates (which also make them better to use before sleep), they have long battery life. And it's a lot lighter than carrying books around.

They have a lot of advantages over other platforms for reading.

Human beings need to be compensated at a level that allows them to continue existing. These businesses fundamentally don't need to exist and their owners will not receive my sympathy.

If you can't afford to pay your employees living wages, you can't afford to have a business.

Also... even barring hanging out with literal nazis, if your whole fucking thing is trying to deny human rights to vulnerable segments of the population, you're a piece of shit, even if you are actually "pretty liberal" otherwise.

I'm so sick of hearing about this irrelevant piece of shit and everyone who makes excuses for her.

I've played a lot of different games in recent years. I'll be honest and say that I'm pretty easy to please. Also I'd say that for the times I was disappointed, it was usually by an AAA title. So much of the time they're just so boring, the files are massive, and the stories are whatever.

Some of the best gameplay I've experienced is in indie games with hand-drawn 2D or pixel graphics. So much more energy is put into games being enjoyable and interesting in these games.

It's so obvious that many of the features of larger releases are put in by non-gamers. Why do I need a 10 minute "quest" of getting drunk in a saloon with an NPC in RDR2?

There are some great AAA titles, ones that put less energy into marketing and more into polished gameplay. But I think if you want to have reliable fun, retro and indie games are the best. And the barrier for entry is a lot more manageable.

You wouldn't think it, but tree planter. A pretty quintessentially Canadian job. It's piece rate, usually between 15-50c per tree. I got to the point later in my career where I was regularly making $800+ per day, with a few days over $1500. It requires planting a helluva lot of trees though.

Not a year-round occupation, but it's possible to make a decent annual income by doing this seasonally.

So the industry that I was in for a long time was production based, meaning your income is reflected by your physical performance. It was extremely demanding and also quite high paying.

So, I got stupidly good at this job. And I rarely took on additional responsibilities, because that would actually mean more stress and less money. In this industry, there were two reasons to go into management: you either had trouble coping with the physical strain that came with this insane work, or because you wanted to hold power over others. But it wasn't a pay bump and it was more work/responsibility. Consequently the people who took this on were rarely the people who should have and the industry on the whole suffers accordingly.

I have said it before and I'll say it again: this issue exists to stir up controversy. Very few people can ever be professional athletes, but lots of people suffer as a result of the hostility generated by this debate.

Also, very few people talk about trans men in sport. There's no real justification for excluding trans men from sport other than fragile egos of male athletes being scared of being outperformed by an afab athlete.

Also also, if we're making the argument that people with higher exposure to testosterone for a short duration in their life have increased athletic performance (which to be clear is kind of true but not actually relevant for all trans women), then I have to remind you that anabolic steroids can benefit athletes for up to a decade, which is exactly much fucking longer than these drugs remain detectable in an athlete's system.

Also also also, professional sport is stupid and doesn't deserve this much attention. It certainly shouldn't be allowed to stir up this much hate toward regular ass trans folks just wanting to live their damn lives, but it does have that effect.

Communism is an economic system, democracy is a political system. There are examples of democratic socialism and of capitalist dictatorships. Also, the word here is in fact socialism and not communism.

Signal releases their own self-updating apk on their site, and this release doesn't use Google services for push notifications. There are legitimate reasons why publishers sometimes avoid f-droid.

Also there's Molly, which is a signal fork that allows database encryption; or Session, which doesn't require a phone number for account registration and is decentralized. Both of these forks have repos that you can add to f-droid.

I do understand the hesitance to use a platform that has its infrastructure in the US, but I will say that international compliance with the US is a problem even if the infrastructure is located elsewhere. Session is a really promising option, since it's decentralized, and I'd love to see more people using it.

I have no problem with creating drm-free copies of ebooks, and absolutely hard no on stealing from libraries.

But I wasn't even saying that. I'm just saying borrow and read the books as per the usual method from libraries. Libraries are awesome and there to be used. I love that public and private funding still gets directed toward the free sharing of media in libraries, reducing (not erasing) the actual need for piracy through their existence, especially for books.

Now what I'm betting is that this is for an overpriced textbook, in which case by all means create copies and sideload them onto an ereader that allows this.

Getting an e-reader that allows for sideloading is probably the easiest and cheapest workaround for this problem. You can often get them used for quite cheap. It doesn't give the physical copy, but is more than likely a better reading experience than trying to print out volumes yourself.

Then you can also "borrow" digital books from libraries, among other things.

Or, for that matter, you could just go to a library in person.

For some reason it's a really contentious topic.

I support trans rights. I also acknowledge that this specific issue materially affects almost no one, and yet it's one of the flashpoints of some of the most rabid transphobia. And I also acknowledge that given the current regressive laws that are taking effect, it would be infinitely more constructive to focus on... I don't know, access to healthcare or anti-bullying policy.

Basically no one gets to be a professional athlete. Leagues have not grown in proportion to the population, and even before that, the dream of being a professional athlete was very unrealistic. Professional sports are inherently classist in that you must have consistent access to equipment, facilities, and a bonkers amount of time to devote to a (for almost everyone who tries) fruitless pursuit.

Nothing is better because of professional sport and basically no one gets to do it anyways. It seems like a deliberately divisive issue that is basically meaningless.

On the other hand, this specific reaction seems maybe like people are mad that college is stupidly unaffordable and athletics are a way to access college. Seems like post secondary education reform might be the better solution but wtf do I know.

Conveniently people never talk about Bhagat Singh when they talk about Gandhi.

This just means the next wave of influencers are going to appear to be "regular people." There's no such thing as neutrality or authenticity on communications platforms that exist to sell advertising space.