deltamental
@deltamental@lemmy.world
- Comment on I love lamp. 6 days ago:
If the angle between your direction of travel and the sun or the moon remains constant, you will be traveling in an almost perfectly straight line. If the angle between your direction of travel and a street lamp remains constant, you will travel in a spiral.
Lamps confuse moths, because they rely on the sun and moon for navigation. It would be like if you repainted road lines to send cars on head-on collision courses, or made all four directions of a traffic light green at the same time at a blind intersection.
Humans experience a similar phenomenon too. We rely on the force of gravity acting on our vestibular sense (in the inner ear) to detect which way is up. If you spin a around a bunch really fast, it disturbs your vestibular sense and you will not be able to stand up straight and will keep falling down. It doesn’t matter that your eyes are working fine: the vestibular sense is so tightly ingrained in our sense of “up” that 20:20 vision and a clear mind cannot compensate for its absence.
It’s important to understand this, because it helps people understand it has nothing to do with moths being mindlessly attracted to light. It is because humans have introduced unnatural sources of light which are extremely disorienting to moths because of the way they experience and sense the world. We should be compassionate towards moths and try to reduce light pollution so they can guide themselves by the moon, just as our ancestors guided themselves by the stars.
- Comment on Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you 3 months ago:
Yes, we can cover the resulting tax shortfall by increasing the tax on single mothers, first-generation low-income homebuyers, and renters.
Look at the result of California’s tax policy (which was designed with aims similar to yours): an entire generation of young people will never be able to afford a home in the place they grew up in, while millionaire retirees get a huge tax break while making thousands renting out spare rooms in their massive houses on AirBnB.
These kinds of special tax carve outssound nice in theory, because it seems like you are just “not taking money from old and disabled people”, but that tax burden falls on everyone else, as does the massive distortion of the market. You are in fact taking more money from other people, who may be hurting even more.
And don’t tell me, “We’ll fund it by a tax on the rich”. If that’s your proposal, get that tax on the rich passed, and dole out the proceeds to elderly at risk of homelessness. Have it officially be budgeted, so that we can decide if keeping an elderly person in their $2.1m 5 bedroom home is worth cuts elsewhere. As of now, such policies are mostly robbing middle class young people blind.
- Comment on A new study found adaptive traffic signals powered by big data reduced peak-hour travel times by 11% in China’s 100 most congested cities – saving 31.73 million tonnes of CO₂ annually. 3 months ago:
Yes, and such intelligent systems can also optimize for pedestrian traffic, reducing the time waiting for a walk light, monitor bike lane usage, track dangerous intersections, improve emergency response times, prioritize buses and trams, etc. It’s good for people to be gathering this data and trying to make things better.
- Comment on Honey 8 months ago: