CarbonIceDragon
@CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
- Comment on What do we know so far about the mysterious crash of the helicopter carrying Iran's president? 13 hours ago:
Why would Russia want to mess with Iran though? They’ve been one of the few countries overtly supplying Russia with weapons.
- Comment on How ‘Zionist’ became a slur on the US left 1 week ago:
I wasn’t so much talking about what should be addressed, but rather what can be addressed. You can, of course, try to break the cycle of poverty that the descendants of slaves face even today, by things like education scholarships or monetary reparations. But, we’d want to do this regardless of the source of that poverty being slavery, Id imagine, nobody deserves to be born into poverty after all. The relevance of slavery to the discussion there is primarily just as an explanation for why that poverty is so concentrated in African American communities, because if in some alternative universe in which civil war era slavery had never happened but somehow that poverty still existed, we’d still need to do something about it. What you can’t do though is bring relief to the slaves themselves (at least those of that era, modern slaves of course can be, but that’s still within living memory), or punish the people that enslaved them. Not because of any kind of moral argument, but just because those people are dead. Sure, I guess one could argue that this effectively locks in injustice that has occurred long enough ago, but well, that’s just part of the nastiness of things like colonialism, the impact it has on a people is something that simply cannot be truly undone.
- Comment on How ‘Zionist’ became a slur on the US left 1 week ago:
It was quite deliberate on my part. You can partly undo things done to or by living people, not even close to all the way obviously, but you can return things taken, from those that have stolen them, and reasonably minimize collateral effects from that, because any uninvolved descendants of the guilty party either don’t yet exist, or can reasonably be assumed to have available whatever resources the perpetrating group had beforehand. When the original victims and perpetrators are dead, though, things become more ethically murky, because you can end up in a situation where it isn’t clear who specifically to return stolen properties to, those properties may no longer exist or no longer be useful in the way they once were, the people in possession of them now may both not be involved in the original atrocity and be dependent on them/have nowhere else to go, and the two groups may have had time for mixing to occur or new identities unique to the region to form. That isn’t to say that there’s nothing to be done about addressing historical atrocities of course, one can still try to offset the impact on the victims descendants, but that doesn’t really undo any of the impact on the victims themselves or punish anyone involved, because you can’t at that point, justice is time sensitive, it just helps a whole new set of people with negative circumstances that they were born into as a result of the atrocity.
- Comment on How ‘Zionist’ became a slur on the US left 1 week ago:
Hamas is a different matter though, the post was talking about Zionism and the actions of Isreal more broadly. Hamas is a terrorist organization, sure, and a pretty intolerant one, but it exists largely as a response to those actions. The Palestinians were having their land taken before Hamas and are even in areas not controlled by Hamas, so Hamas isn’t the main problem so much as an excuse for Isreal to do what they have been doing for a long time to a faster or slower degree. Now, if Palestinian statehood and sovereignty were achieved, then sure, Hamas is not the kind of organization that one would want ruling the place, any more than the Taliban for example have been good for Afghanistan. But, one would have to deal with the situation that is pressing people in Gaza to join that kind organization first to truly solve that, because just blowing them up indiscriminately will just drive desperate and angry people into the same kind of group again. And at the moment, the thing pressuring people to join up with Hamas, is the conditions that Isreal has placed them under. Treat any group badly enough, and some of them will do horrible things in the name of resisting you.
- Comment on How ‘Zionist’ became a slur on the US left 1 week ago:
The settlers that currently take land from Palestinians on the west bank, those specific people, not some group centuries ago that those people might share some part of their identity with, were not there before the specific currently living people that they are taking that land from. People living now matter more than some vague historical claims. If the area had been invaded by Islam and the land taken from Isreal within living memory, then sure, it would be just that it be returned to those it was taken from, but taking the land from people who have been there generations to give to people that have not been there for that time and had established lives elsewhere, results in people being uprooted and forced from their homes needlessly. Any history along the lines of what religion was where first is irrelevant to that fact.
- Comment on lil robot 2 weeks ago:
Cassini
- Comment on lil robot 2 weeks ago:
Hey, it’s not Mar’s fault that Saturn destroyed it’s robot by burning it with it’s atmosphere…
- Comment on Fact checked 2 weeks ago:
Israel is not Judaism and criticism of it is not criticism of Jewish people as a whole. To hold otherwise is to hold an entire people responsible for the actions of a few (those in the Israeli government), that those people often have no or only limited influence over, which would be an inherently bigoted position to take because it robs those people of their agency. If anything, the Israeli government itself is being antisemitic in a sense by pushing such a narrative in order to use Jewish people as a whole as shield against criticism of their actions.
- Comment on histories mysteries 2 weeks ago:
Last time one of these threads popped up, I saw someone suggest that it might have been a holder for some of those bottles with pointed bottoms the Romans had, don’t remember the name. I’m not sure if this is a hypothesis with any level of acceptance, but it feels like it could be plausible just from looking at the thing, having different sized holes would allow different sizes of bottle to fit, and you’d want feet for each possible side that it could be resting on, which would explain the prongs.
- Comment on Ever notice mammals never seem to come in green? 3 weeks ago:
I’m guessing you misread the title as animals instead of mammals, and then didn’t read the actual post text
- Comment on Physics 3 weeks ago:
Isn’t a lot of engineering basically applied physics though anyway? Just reversed, such that rather than studying or predicting how a physical system should behave, you’re trying to take what has been learned over time and use it to work backwards to create a system that exhibits desired behavior
- Comment on Physics 3 weeks ago:
I didnt really pivot to anything, I was very unsure what I wanted to do at that point, and being quite bad at learning virtually, which of course most everything had temporarily pivoted to at that time, I took an opportunity to move in with a family member in a different state that I liked better. Ive not gone back to school since as Ive been worried about spending a lot of time and effort and money on something that I cant see through to completion again or wont like using. Ive ended up working a low volume manufacturing type job at a company that makes measuring equipment (microscopes and spectroscopy devices and such like that), which Ive found tolerable enough as the work has some amount of variation, isn’t too physically or socially demanding, and at least has some scientific relevance (it doesn’t involve doing any science, but scientists cant do their work without the right equipment, so making some of that equipment still feels helpful in some small way). Ive thought about going back at some point if I can come up with something Im sure I’ll prefer doing, but so far have not and have no immediate plans.
- Comment on Physics 3 weeks ago:
If theres anything that I took away from my 3 years of trying to get a physics degree before burning out on it around covid hit, its that like half of physics seems to be just figuring out what approximations you can safely make to turn something infeasibly complicated into something that can actually be worked out
- Comment on Palestinian Relief Bundle includes indie classics (and hundreds more) for just $8 4 weeks ago:
From the sound of it, they are selling games, and then donating the money to a nonprofit that is supposed to help Gaza
- Comment on Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew 4 weeks ago:
Pumpkins I’m curious about. All I can even think of to do with a pumpkin is pie, though I’m sure there’s probably more traditionally done with them
- Comment on pluto 5 weeks ago:
Me, who misread the caption at first, who knows Plato is a philosopher
- Comment on space 5 weeks ago:
A time machine would necessarily need to have some way of defining what reference frame one is stationary in space relative towards, because there is no universal frame that everything moves relative too. This suggests that a time machine ought to let you move through space as well as time
- Comment on don't tell iceland 5 weeks ago:
If whales are smart enough to debate that, they probably have cultural memory of almost getting whaled to extinction. Which would make them like us less, but on the other hand, might make them afraid to get us too upset at them
- Comment on get infamous, yeah! 1 month ago:
At least theres no “dck” this time
- Comment on Greatest train robbery ever 1 month ago:
I mean, until the next train comes that is
- Comment on Dynamic pricing is coming to grocery stores 1 month ago:
When I worked at a grocery store (a bit over a year ago) we had a sign posted near the registers, though in a place it was easy to not notice, stating something similar, though it might have been a state law (MA) rather than anything federal.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
If anything, the book of Mormon would be fan-fiction in this series, or maybe one of those cases where the author’s son or whatever writes an awkward sequel that isn’t as popular as the originals and steps all over the canon.
- Comment on You weirdos 2 months ago:
Jeans are comfy, and I hate the sensation of too much air on my bare legs. And no, the blankets aren’t enough, it needs to be pants, and almost all my pants are jeans.
- Comment on A 7,000-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That’s Bad News for All of Us. 2 months ago:
I mean the supply and demand for the trucking companies. Shipping is a vital service, if it had high taxes, it would have to dramatically increase prices for their shipping service, but they shouldn’t go out of business because everyone else would still pay those dramatically high prices, because they’d have to
- Comment on A 7,000-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That’s Bad News for All of Us. 2 months ago:
That depends on if the tax is sufficient to cover the societal costs of driving that mile or not. Not every use of electricity degrades public infrastructure to the same extent, so if the maintenance burden an EV adds is more than what the electricity tax brings in, then additional taxes to make up the difference would make sense.
- Comment on A 7,000-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That’s Bad News for All of Us. 2 months ago:
That should mean they don’t go bankrupt though. If their service is vital, people will pay for it even if the prices rise. It would mean an increase in prices for goods admittedly as the stores try to recoup the increased logistics costs, but intuitively I’d imagine the financial impact on the end customer wouldn’t be as much because they’re paying for the road upkeep either way, just via higher taxes in the current state and via increased prices in the new one.
- Comment on Get the ketchup. 2 months ago:
Honestly, it might not be that bad
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Ever had glofish? They look much brighter under a blacklight, but they’re still noticably colorful even under natural sunlight
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
I doubt that the gene would be successful in the wild, given it would make it harder for the deer to hide from predators.
- Comment on Altered Carbon 2 months ago:
Rich people would probably set something up so that their future incarnation inherits their wealth, since it’s statistically likely that they’d be reincarnated as someone poorer. I could also imagine a much stronger push to bring the birthrate up even at the cost of using unethical means to force it, because if the population decreases, there wouldn’t be enough children born for an increasingly large percentage to reincarnate into