antlion
@antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Child care costs more than a mortgage payment or rent almost everywhere in the U.S.: ‘There is no escaping it’ 1 day ago:
California has required child:staff ratios for childcare. Under 1 year is 3:1, age 1-2 is 4:1, age 3 is 7:1, and ages 4-5 is 8:1.
Our childcare center is non-profit. It’s about $1800/month for infants and $1300/month for 3-4 year olds. They cover all the food and diapers, and they do the laundry (sheets). The teachers are paid poorly. The government pays nothing. Anyway I agree with you, for infants it makes sense for the cost to be about the same as renting a small place.
- Comment on Hearing is be-leafing: Students invent quieter leaf blower 1 day ago:
Interesting, my rake makes some sounds when I use it. It’s pretty loud on hard surfaces.
- Comment on Does it seem odd to track my lifespan? 5 days ago:
If you use the actuary life tables for your expected lifespan, you can have a true mid-life crisis when you turn 39 or 41 depending if your male or female.
Or if you’re the age of one of the presidential candidates you’ll know what it feels like to have under 10 years of life expectancy remaining.
Anyway, I do think it’s weird. You have plenty of time to waste at your age. It would be a misuse of your youth to try and allocate your time wisely.
- Comment on Neuralink's first in-human brain implant has experienced a problem, company says 1 week ago:
My takeaway from that article is mostly that primate research is a big emotional topic for some people, and maybe tech writers shouldn’t write about medical research. Do you think it would be so interesting if it was done on mice? The primate research center in Davis has been there since 1962, and it’s always been controversial. Do you think they’ve just been twiddling their thumbs for 55 years waiting for Neuralink to come along? No, that shit is routine for them. They keep doing it because primate research is still an important step before human trials.
There is no need to ethically green light a medical procedure that is voluntary, of sound mind, and of one’s own will. It’s not your body. It’s not your life. People implant beads and magnets into their bodies and tattoo their faces. People hang themselves from meat hooks for fun. People get circumcised, and pierced. It’s all none of your business.
- Comment on Neuralink's first in-human brain implant has experienced a problem, company says 1 week ago:
I don’t think it’s obvious at all. This is a sample size of one, and it is still working after 3 months.
Globally, a staggering 310 million major surgeries are performed each year; around 40 to 50 million in USA and 20 million in Europe. It is estimated that 1–4% of these patients will die, up to 15% will have serious postoperative morbidity, and 5–15% will be readmitted within 30 days. An annual global mortality of around 8 million patients places major surgery comparable with the leading causes of death from cardiovascular disease and stroke, cancer and injury. If surgical complications were classified as a pandemic, like HIV/AIDS or coronavirus (COVID-19), developed countries would work together and devise an immediate action plan and allocate resources to address it.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7388795/
Implants are rejected by the immune system. Stents fail. Hip and joint replacements fail. Does that mean we shouldn’t do them?
- Comment on Neuralink's first in-human brain implant has experienced a problem, company says 1 week ago:
Are you suggesting that the FDA gave Neuralink special treatment in the approval process? Or are you suggesting that the government should specifically shut down anything Musk tries to do, like SpaceX?
- Comment on Neuralink's first in-human brain implant has experienced a problem, company says 1 week ago:
Nobody is making you get a brain chip. Noland did the research, talked about it with his family, and wanted to proceed in spite of the fully disclosed risks. Bodily autonomy is a fundamental human right - if you want to do something or have something done to your body it’s not the governments place to stop you. Safeguards are necessary, and they do exist. You don’t need laws to make sure everybody has the same risk tolerance as you. I can’t fully imagine what it would be like to have no use of my body and no hope of recovery. But I wouldn’t want people like you or me who aren’t in my shoes deciding what I can and can’t do. Honestly if he wanted to have a lethal injection, I believe he should be allowed to make that decision, but he can’t. I’m happy he was able to make some kind of decision, and regain some autonomy, if only temporarily, and not just be a vegetable head in a bed for the rest of his life.
- Comment on Neuralink's first in-human brain implant has experienced a problem, company says 1 week ago:
No use of your body is a pretty desperate situation. Before the procedure he had to yell for his parents that he wanted to use the computer, they’d come sit him upright and put a joystick in his mouth, leaving him unable to speak. And he was often very uncomfortable in that position, so he couldn’t do it long. Now, he can use the computer fully laying down, without anyone’s help. The next logical step would be to have some robotic helper arms.
Anyway he can’t shoot himself. He can’t hold a gun or anything else. There’s little reason for this to be about Musk at all other than money. This is the culmination of decades of research from many medical professionals. It’s about a lot more than one person.
- Comment on How come liberals dont hate conservatives the way conservatives hate liberals 1 week ago:
I hate racists and bigots, but there’s not much to be done about it. Stress and anger will take years off your own life - don’t let them harm you. On the other hand if you can troll them a bit, you may be sending some of them to an early grave, just with words. It’s not hard to do they’re triggered by anything gay, reparations, dominant women, intelligence and education, health foods, immigrants, solar power, and so on. So you don’t really have to send them any hate, you just need to be an example of the world you want to live in and they’ll rage about it.
- Comment on [Serious] Why do so many people seem to hate veganism? 1 week ago:
There is no life without death. In order to feed vegans, countless insects must die. In order for agriculture to exist in any form, we must wage war against nature (and win). For example, coconut oil is a terrible vegan product. If vegans are complacent about killing insects and ravaging natural habitats, why not kill and eat crustaceans and mollusks - they’re not all that different in terms of neurons. We can keep stepping up the level of consciousness - fish, etc… when does it become unacceptable?
The next question I would ask, is whether death is always equal to suffering. Death can be painless. Some vegans don’t eat honey because many honey bees are treated horribly. What if they’re not? Also, if you feel that way as a vegan, you shouldn’t eat anything pollinated by bees (try not to starve). Some animals have good lives and painless deaths. If there’s no financially viable market for animal products of happy animals (by vegan boycotting), we’ll be left with only industrial animal agriculture. Do you think a deer would rather be ripped apart by a puma, hit by a car, shot by a bullet, or become elderly and senile - abandoned by the herd to die alone in a field, picked apart by buzzards. Nature is brutal as fuck. Death by human is not the worst outcome for many animals.
The final thing I’d assert is that animal agriculture has an important role in the overall food system. Pigs, cows, and chickens are fed a lot of agricultural byproducts, like spent brewing grains or corn stalks, and their manure is used as non-petroleum fertilizer. Many animals are raised on land that is too hilly and rocky to farm any other way. Our industrial food system is like a artificial ecosystem of its own. Each piece of the industrial food web has a role, and you can’t simply remove all the animals - you’d be overwhelmed with green waste, reliant on petroleum fertilizer, and many would go hungry.
Ethical veganism is idiotic because it places human morality onto nature. It’s a child-like misunderstanding of the real world. The reality is that for you to be fed, the natural world will suffer. Don’t draw a line in the sand and think you’re living a better life. You’re an ostrich with your head buried in sand.
Freeganism on the other hand, is something we could use a lot more of (25-50% more). The only thing worse than raping and killing animals to feed ourselves, is that there’s so much abundance that we throw a lot of it in the trash. Freegans understand the real crime against nature is food waste.
- Comment on [Serious] Why do so many people seem to hate veganism? 1 week ago:
Everyone, the answer to the thread is right here.
- Comment on Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production 1 week ago:
Salt is sodium chloride. Sodium is a metal, and it is right below Lithium on the periodic table (behaves and reacts similarly).
- Comment on Gas stoves increase nitrogen dioxide exposure above WHO standards – study 1 week ago:
You can use a camp stove for 1 week per year. That’s 2% of the annual pollution in your lungs from cooking on it year round.
- Comment on A Difficult Game About Climbing is a difficult game about climbing 2 weeks ago:
If his legs are just gonna flail, should have just made him a double amputee.
- Comment on Which is the best Lemmy app for mobile? 2 weeks ago:
I just switched from Memmy to Mlem
- Comment on ByteDance won't sell TikTok, would rather pull it from the US 2 weeks ago:
I see, well Lemmy is a bunch of Reddit refugees for the most part. Probably happy to see social media corps dying no matter how?
- Comment on ByteDance won't sell TikTok, would rather pull it from the US 2 weeks ago:
Not sure if you’ve been paying attention but citizens have no say over stuff like this. 99% of the politicians in office were placed there by rich people - they have the only true votes. The bill included money to Ukraine (great), and Israel (WTF), and Taiwan, and TikTok. It shouldn’t be legal to package all that stuff together, but it’s pretty standard. Anyway not sure who you’re talking to - there are like a few hundred politicians who supported this bill, most of them probably for other reasons, and none of them are on Lemmy.
- Comment on Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked to hundreds of crashes, dozens of deaths 3 weeks ago:
These are spanning from the earliest adopters, up until August of last year. Plenty of idiots using a cruise control system and trusting their lives to beta software. Not the same as the current FSD software.
Your own car insurance isn’t based on your driving skill when you had your learners permit. When Tesla takes on the liability and insurance for CyberCab, you’ll know it’s much safer than human drivers.
- Comment on California Replaces Gas Plant with Giant, Billion-Dollar Grid Battery 4 weeks ago:
Totally, it’s actually not that many vehicles! And it implies a value of thousands of dollars per EV in its lifetime grid balancing.
- Comment on California Replaces Gas Plant with Giant, Billion-Dollar Grid Battery 4 weeks ago:
It’s actually pretty incredible. About 8 years ago SMUD cancelled their Iowa Hill pumped storage project. The stats are pretty comparable to this one, except for physical size! About $1B, 400 MW, 4,800 MWh of storage, by pumping 6400 acre feet of water 1200 feet uphill (7.9 million cubic meters of water 365 meters uphill).
- Comment on California Replaces Gas Plant with Giant, Billion-Dollar Grid Battery 4 weeks ago:
Wow that’s as much battery as 33,500 Model Ys.
- Comment on Later generations will have less attachment to how things were when they grew up because everything changes a lot faster. 4 weeks ago:
Teflon/nonstick and the many ways it’s marketed leads to semi-disposable cookware. A couple of all-clad stainless pots, a Dutch oven, a couple cast iron skillets, and 3 good knives can all be purchased brand new and will last a lifetime. There are more insanely cheap options, and due to wage stagnation that’s all people can afford. Adjusted for inflation, the bomber appliances from the 50’s and 60’s are basically still available at those prices and quality, but people will buy ones that cost 1/4 the price because nobody makes that kind of money anymore.
- Comment on Millennials and Gen Z's trendy new splurge: groceries 5 weeks ago:
Not a joke. Regulators have slowly reduced showers to a trickle. Pulling out the flow regulation device is a splurge worth doing.
- Comment on How climate change could affect the microbes that ferment grapes and give wine its specific flavors 5 weeks ago:
Is there a big market for naturally/spontaneously fermented wine in New Zealand? In California it’s a very small percentage of wine. Most grapes are treated with sulphur and commercial yeast is used. So all those wines are not going to be any different from a microbe perspective.
- Comment on We should count in base four 1 month ago:
Should be single syllables to speak. Nil, bit, pair, few.
15 is a few few. 12 is few nil.
But for more than 2 digits, I think we need something better than just spewing digits. I would propose a vowel suffix for the higher digits. Y, O, and A. So 63 becomes few-y few few, and 64 is Bit-Y or “bitty”. Don’t need to say the nils after. 65 is Bitty bit. 255 is FewO FewY few few, followed by 256 which is Bitta.
- Comment on New Law Allowing Religion into Science Classrooms Is Dangerous for Everyone 1 month ago:
Well John Denver did say W. Virginia is “almost heaven”. Seems they’re taking steps to get a little closer.
- Comment on Best printer 2024: a humorous critique of the Google search engine and printer enshittification 1 month ago:
Yeah, but the ink is very inexpensive.
- Comment on Best printer 2024: a humorous critique of the Google search engine and printer enshittification 1 month ago:
I actually think the Google LLM produced a really good summary of trade-offs. I didn’t choose a laser printer because it’s more expensive and larger and I don’t print very often. I got the Canon TS702, which has AirPrint and cheap knock-off ink available on Amazon. The older Verge article mentioned seeing Brother printers in the background of video calls. You won’t see a printer in my background, it fits in a cabinet. Why would I want a huge appliance that I use once or twice a month sitting on a table top in the background of my video calls?
If you can find an inkjet that removes the ink-racket of the business model, it’s a really good value. The company making the printer maybe even loses money on it. That’s a win in my book.
- Comment on Using AI to spot edible mushrooms could kill you | AI tools are good for some things, but don’t trust your health to apps that make frequent mistakes 1 month ago:
I read it, just don’t agree on the generalization. I think it’s more that there’s a cultural phobia of fungi, and not really that they’re harder to ID safely than plants.
- Comment on Using AI to spot edible mushrooms could kill you | AI tools are good for some things, but don’t trust your health to apps that make frequent mistakes 1 month ago:
Death camas and wild onion are not easy to tell apart. Chanterelles and morels can be identified safely and easily by beginners by looking at a few key features. Neither should use an app to ID.