rational_lib

@rational_lib@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon Boycot March 7-14th | No Purchases. Its time to disrupt the system.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s very hard to avoid buying stuff on Amazon even if we hate them. This provides a bit of extra motivation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨smort⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The average person (and to be fair, most psychologists) thinks of intelligence as the innate, fundamental characteristic of a person to think across all cognitive areas. However, this concept is not easily falsifiable and therefore arguably exists outside the realm of science.

  For example, say I wanted to come up with a concept called “sportsness” which is the ability to be good at sports. I could test a bunch of people in a battery of sports-related tasks, and I’d probably get a nice bell curve where some people have high sportsness across all tasks and others have low sportsness across all tasks.

  But does that prove the existence of sportsness? Or did I just measure a spurious correlation caused by the fact that some people are just more likely to be playing sports than others, or that some body types may lead to being better at sports related tasks, or some combination thereof? Of course most would say the latter, but then maybe some would defend the concept of sportsness by saying sportsness is just an emergent property of those things or something like that. But then is sportsness useful at all? You get the idea.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does this pic show that Elon Musk doesnt know SQL?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To me I’m not really sure what his reply even means. I think it’s some attempt at a joke, but I figure the joke can be broken down into two potential jokes that fail for different, embarrassing reasons:

  Interpretation 1: The government is so advanced it doesn’t use SQL - This interpretation is unlikely given that Elon is trying to portray the government as in need of reform. But it would make more sense if coming from a NoSQL type who thinks SQL needs to be removed from everywhere. NoSQL Guy is someone many software devs are familiar with who takes the sometimes-good idea of avoiding SQL and takes it way too far. Elon being NoSQL Guy would be dumb, but not as dumb as the more likely interpretation #2.

  Interpretation 2: The government is so backward it doesn’t use SQL - I think this is the more likely interpretation as it would be consistent with Elon’s ideology, but it really falls flat because SQL is far from being cutting-edge. There has kind of been a trend of moving away from SQL (with considerable controversy) over the last 10 years or so and it’s really surprising that Elon seems completely unaware of that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨hexbear.net comically loses its domain name⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are definitely far left groups, primarily in Europe, that ally with Russia. All groups on the fringes have proven useful for spreading pro-Russian propaganda. In the US, Trump’s pro-Russian sympathies and general stupifaction of the GOP has led to the GOP becoming an ally to the Kremlin. But prior to that, both parties were anti-Russia with Republicans being moreso.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yeah, let's stop with this "don't judge people for their poiltics" bullshit⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The most successful tactic of the right has been judging the left for their politics - “woke” etc. The left needs to be similarly unabashed.

  But it needs to be more fun and less serious than this post. Why is there no “screaming maga” meme? Surely there’s plenty of those images, and more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We're in the endgame now⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you were to try to drive someone else’s car, that would be illegal
  If you were to try to get money from a bank account that’s not yours, that’s also illegal
  Vice Presidents aren’t allowed to fuck couches.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anonymous: Trump is making America weaker and we’ll exploit it - News Cafe⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s gonna be a big ask. Republicans don’t even get the blame for the things they do themselves. Oligarch propaganda is everywhere and pernicious, look at how the average working class American has accepted the notion that low level bureaucrats are the reason they’re poor.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why was Hitler so mean and hateful toward one group or another? I find it hard to believe he woke up one day and said you and you suck but these people over here are good. Taking it so far as killing?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Gustav Bauer had no religious affiliation and in any case he did not sign the Treaty of Versailles. It was signed for Germany by Matthias Erzberger, who was also not Jewish. But, those sorts of facts tended to make little difference to the German far right of that time which basically branded everyone they didn’t like as Jews.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why was Hitler so mean and hateful toward one group or another? I find it hard to believe he woke up one day and said you and you suck but these people over here are good. Taking it so far as killing?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s probably as many theories as there are people.

  My own is that cognitive dissonance is a powerful force, especially for a narcissist. Hitler spent 4 of the best years of his life is the pure misery of the trenches of WWI, and even worse - running between the trenches to deliver messages. He was gassed so badly it put him in the hospital for the final month of the war. Hitler was probably also deluded about Germany’s failing position in the war, probably kept in the dark by German propaganda and made quite gullible by his fierce patriotism. So when Germany surrendered, that must have actually both shocking and enraging for him. And we know that because he frequently attacked the treaty of Versailles, even before he was known to be anti-semetic.

  The “stab in the back” myth is the idea that Germany’s surrender was corruptly carried out by politicians, and due to common antisemitism across Germany and Europe generally it soon focused on Jews. In reality there was virtually no Jewish people significantly involved with the surrender and events leading up to it, but that didn’t matter because as is often the case today, emotional truth is more important than reality. Given that Hitler couldn’t possibly bring himself to believe that he incurred tremendous pain and suffering by voluntarily and stupidly buying into an imperialistic war that was doomed to failure from the start, the stab in the back myth would’ve been extremely appealing to him. He wanted to believe it, so he did.

  So when he happened to be assigned to monitor the DAP - the predecessor to the Nazi Party - he was ready to wholeheartedly accept their antisemitic ideas. Even though he seemed to get along with Jewish officers during the war, by a year after the war he was already talking about “removing” the Jews.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Californians Say X Blocked Them From Viewing Amber Alert About Missing 14-Year-Old⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This has been annoying me as well, so many city services got used to just using twitter and then Elon took over and now you just can’t find out about things unless you have an X account. Shortly after the change to X I drove hours to use a hiking trail that was closed - I checked the conditions, but the top post was “trail is open, come on in!” because it had been changed to show the top post of all time instead of the newest post.

  There should be some non-profit funded by cities that’s basically just a webpage where cities can post important info, or maybe they can have their own mastodon node.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Uber Eats undercover: Delivering your food for $1.74 an hour⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Many of the food couriers I worked alongside were young international students struggling to earn an income while they make their way through school. Others were refugees or undocumented workers, navigating precarious lives.

  I honestly wonder if pretty much all of the surge in illegal immigration over the last 5 or 6 years comes down to Uber Eats.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My favorite⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Olive Garden is Nickelback for pasta restaurants.

  Never Again

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨bird flu⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Isn’t that how these diseases are generated in the first place?

  No, livestock diseases were a problem long before vaccination. In fact it’s been hypothesized that the reason Europeans killed off Native Americans with disease instead of the other way around is that European livestock spread so much disease that it meant Europeans carried and were immune to a wide variety of diseases.

  As for why livestock diseases are so common, it’s probably due to the obvious - the cramped conditions, often in close contact with other animals. Think of the classic Chinese wet market with animals from many different places stacked in cages on top of each other with fluids flying all over. That’s the real bio weapons lab.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s because there’s no opposing corporate interest to building nuclear weapons. The way the world works is: profitable shit happens, no matter what the hippies think about it. See: every other environmental issue.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Comcast, Disney, and IBM Are Among Advertisers Returning to X After Ad Freeze⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Doesn’t matter. They’re not doing it to get people to see their ads, they’re doing it to bribe Elon since he has actual political power now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Habits of Insects⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The world just keeps getting more and more efficient at being dumb. Let’s just count all the appallingly stupid things crammed into this small meme with 2 million views:

  1. "Insurrection Barbie"
  2. Celebrating the defunding of useful scientific research by a new government efficiency agency
  3. This new agency is named after a cryptocurrency
  4. The cryptocurrency in question was created as a joke to satirize cryptocurrencies, but became a top prominent cryptocurrency itself.
  5. The “Department of Government Efficiency Agency” has 2 heads, both of whom have other primary jobs and were chosen in return for political support.
  6. There is also already an existing government agency that does the exact same thing, called the “Government Accountability Office”. But most people seem to be unaware of it, likely because it’s not named after a cryptocurrency/dog meme.
  7. This whole scheme was the idea of the richest person in the world.

  Idiocracy didn’t happen because of unnatural selection, it happened because social media unlocked a runaway chain reaction of stupidity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Terrified friends burn to death trapped in Tesla as doors won't open after crash⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is not utopia