AbouBenAdhem
@AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
- Comment on Anyone else feel that the beautiful always win no matter how evil they are? 7 hours ago:
Beauty is subjective—maybe we just find success attractive after the fact?
- Comment on The rich oppose clean energy because it is renewable. If clean energy became non renewable, or fossil fuels became renewable, they would no longer oppose a transition to clean energy technology 17 hours ago:
It’s simpler than that: the rich support the industries that enabled them to get rich, whatever they are; and when a new industry finally does supplants them, a new group will get rich and fight to preserve the new status quo. That’s the cost of privatized infrastructure.
- Comment on What if the Epstein files are the distraction? 4 days ago:
I don’t think Trump himself is doing it—but I think the people around him see it as a bonus that the Epstein scandal will likely eventually bring him down, because it will release the political pressure while leaving the rest them and his policies intact.
- Comment on Am I financially enabling child labor in 3rd world countries by buying second hand fast fashion? 5 days ago:
It depends on what you would have bought otherwise—you presumably buy a limited amount of clothing, so what purchase is it replacing?
- Comment on Before social media/internet/cell phones/landlines/payphones; how would 2 friends living across the same city arrange in person meetings and stay in touch? 6 days ago:
Sending letters via post to friends in the same city wasn’t uncommon—but beyond that, you could leave messages at common locations. Like if you both go to the same shop once a week, you could leave messages for each other with the shopkeeper.
- Comment on Why there is no clock that displays time 4:20:69 ? 6 days ago:
They’ve made prototypes, but it never made it into production because the workers keep taking smoke breaks.
- Comment on How does capitalism differ from crony capitalism? 1 week ago:
What you’re describing isn’t capitalism per se, but a free market. They tend to be correlated, but you can have either one without the other. Capitalism strictly speaking is about private ownership of production—when private investors control industry and reap all the profits after wages and taxes.
Crony capitalism is when investors influence the state to reduce wages and taxes, and to manipulate the market at the expense of rival investors.
- Comment on Is anyone else having a hard time sympathizing with Americans? 1 week ago:
It’s fair to judge people for the collective actions of a group they’ve voluntarily joined—a political party, a military, an occupation, etc.
But when you look at the behavior of a country (or any other group that people belong to by birth), you’re seeing what any other group of humans would do when raised in similar circumstances. You can judge their institutions and their leadership, but when you judge them as people you’re judging all of humanity.
- Comment on The lyrics to "if you're happy and you know it" imply you can be happy and not know it 1 week ago:
What difference would you expect if the “and you know it” clause were omitted?
Suppose there are indeed some people who would clap if the clause were omitted, but refrain when it’s included. The implication would be that these people are happy and don’t know it—and yet they clap anyway.
If they didn’t clap, adding the clause would have no effect and its inclusion would have no motivation.
- Comment on If the color of the Sun was orange, wouldn't the clouds and everything white also be orange? My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the "real" Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED. 1 week ago:
30 years ago?
So right about the time The Truman Show came out?
- Comment on If the color of the Sun was orange, wouldn't the clouds and everything white also be orange? My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the "real" Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED. 1 week ago:
Other comments are correctly stating that the sun is white, but appears yellow/orange due to the blue light being scattered—but that doesn’t fully address the issue, because objects seen under a white light with an orange filter in front would still have an orange cast.
The difference with the sun is that the scattered blue light is still reaching objects via the light from the rest of the sky—it’s the orange light from the sun combining with the blue light from the sky that makes things appear white.
- Comment on The lyrics to "if you're happy and you know it" imply you can be happy and not know it 1 week ago:
It also implies that you might clap anyway if the song didn’t clarify.
- Comment on If I'm struggling with depression, I get ostracized as a "loser" that haven't accomplished anything but if I die in a tragic accident tonight, I'm a "young man with a bright future ahead" 1 week ago:
While people are alive, their accomplishments are always being compared to expectations; but if they die before accomplishing anything, the expectations are all that’s left.
- Comment on The Lord of the Rings spinoff the world needs right now isn’t Rings of Power or the Hunt for Gollum—it’s a film-length version of the Scouring of the Shire. 1 week ago:
There would be continuity issues with Jackson”s adaptation, too—in the films, Saruman and Wormtongue die at Isengard (in the extended edition), Galadriel says Frodo’s dystopian vision of the Shire is what will happen “if he fails”, Rosie Cotton is a barmaid instead of a fellow member of Sam’s agrarian resistance cell, etc.
- Comment on The Lord of the Rings spinoff the world needs right now isn’t Rings of Power or the Hunt for Gollum—it’s a film-length version of the Scouring of the Shire. 1 week ago:
In the books, Saruman and Wormtongue escape from Isengard and set up shop in the Shire while the hobbits are still busy wrapping things up in Gondor and Rivendell. They turn the Shire into an industrial dystopia, destroying the environment and corrupting the local hobbits with promises of power before betraying them. When Frodo & co. return, they organize an underground resistance movement that leads to a revolution.
- Submitted 1 week ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 22 comments
- Comment on Scientists Discovered the Tunnels of a Possibly Unknown Ancient Lifeform 1 week ago:
Mysterious micro-burrows in desert marble and limestone were probably made by microbes that lived millions of years ago.
“Millions of years ago”—that narrows it down to 99.95% of the history of life on earth.
- Comment on "Echo Chambers" are massive unbroken spaces with no internal differentiation or divisions, not highly sorted, disconnected masses of variously interconnected smaller chambers 2 weeks ago:
I think it depends on the type of sound: a canyon echoes shouts, while a cathedral echoes sermons. But a canyon won’t echo regular speaking voices like a cathedral does, and I think that’s what the metaphor is drawing on: the cathedral is an echo chamber relative to an open public square.
- Comment on Stone tablet found with carved symbols that do not match any known language 2 weeks ago:
“Generally, the Bashplemi inscription does not repeat any script known to us; however, most of the symbols used therein resemble ones found in the scripts of the Middle East, as well as those of geographically remote countries such as India, Egypt and West Iberia,” wrote Shengelia.
So it resembles practically everything except Chinese?
- Comment on Most mouse pointers designs assume right-handed users 2 weeks ago:
I’m left-handed, but I’ve always used a mouse with my right hand… and now I’m wondering if I was unconsciously influenced by the orientation of the pointer.
- Comment on We always seen/heard/read about dumb criminals. Has the opposite ever been true a smart criminal? Not including that white collar crap? 2 weeks ago:
Getting people to dismiss their crimes as “white collar crap” is the primary trick of smart criminals.
- Comment on YSK that taking advice from youtubers and podcasters is a terrible idea. Only take advice from research universities 2 weeks ago:
Research isn’t advice, either—it can provide the data to make an informed decision, but you still need to figure out what information is relevant to your particular case.
In particular, you shouldn’t read a random study or research paper and take it as an actionable recommendation—you need to be familiar with other similar studies, and how they fit into the current state of the rest of their field.
- Comment on LLMs are already doing fascists a favor by ensuring that anything that is reasonably eloquently formulated on social media is automatically suspected of having been written by LLMs. 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think the quality that gives prose an AI smell is eloquence per se, so much as the use of common tropes and rhetorical formulae. The kind of rhetoric AI is best at is the kind that relies on appeal to a shared tradition of discourse more than on novel arguments or reason—and I think that type of rhetoric is more common on the right than the left.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Except that we’ve criminalized the wrong one.
- Comment on Flowers nut on unsuspecting bees 3 weeks ago:
Who are we to say what bees suspect?
- Comment on Is geolibertarianism left wing or right wing? 3 weeks ago:
Most of the underlying concepts are left wing, but the people using the label aren’t.
- Comment on Is geolibertarianism left wing or right wing? 3 weeks ago:
It’s basically a version of Georgism, rebranded to avoid Georgism’s left-wing association.
- Comment on What are your technology mispredictions? 3 weeks ago:
In the late nineties, I thought the availability of online knowledge would make universities obsolete.
- Comment on People who care deeply about important events they have no impact on are abnormal, most people just go about their day without giving a shit. 3 weeks ago:
People care about events that make a compelling story. Whether or not they have an impact is secondary.
- Comment on Choosing to not to help your friends dying child doesn't make you an asshole 3 weeks ago:
You’re right, that doesn’t make you an asshole.
Being an asshole is the cause, not the effect.