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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I agree, though I am super disdainful of any argument that is sort of reskinning “other people are really stupid”.

    On the other hand, participation in a congressional primary is pretty low and should weed out the casuals. Nobody who is going to the polls without much info is probably going to show up for these right?

    Further, when you have “safe” districts for your party, you sort of invite people from the entire political spectrum to participate in your primary. The parts of the American electorate that WANT muscular support for Israeli military operations are on the right. If those folks skip this primary, they have no influence over their representative at all. Activating conservative voters is probably easier than changing minds.




  • Sellers raise their prices because they have buyers ready to pay that higher price.

    Say your have the best restaurant in town and you have a line down the street and everyday you sell out of food before lunch. If you raise your prices the line will get shorter as some of your more price sensitive customers decide to go elsewhere. Keep raising them and your shop will be empty as nobody wants your food at those prices. The “right price” is where you get the most money you can for the work that you do in a day. Right?

    You should be looking at your wages exactly the same. Ask for 10k per hour and you’re going to be jobless. As for 5 per hour and you’re gonna have lots of offers but not make enough money. Try to find the “right” wage. This is why wages have been going up faster than inflation pretty much every quarter since some time in 2022.

    And no, we shouldn’t punish you or our hypothetical restaurant owner for setting your prices properly.

    Also, taxes don’t remove money from the economy so it would be neutral from an inflation standpoint. But that’s a much longer story.


  • A pretty good number of these are just pointing out differences between colloquial language and specific language.

    Botanical language is useful for botanists to communicate with each other but I’m not putting tomatoes in the fruit salad. Thinking of tomatoes as veggies in your kitchen isn’t some MYTH! Calling a tall plant a tree is useful for you and I to communicate. That does not mean we are deceived or attempting to undermine the work of our botany friends.


  • Pohl@lemmy.worldtoCool Guides@lemmy.caA cool guide of commonly believed myths
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    5 months ago

    The sugar one drives me nuts. Like yeah sugar doesn’t cause DSM-5 “hyperactivity”. Like of course not! It does give a little energy boost. And the rugrats will use the highly available energy and become a hilarious unmanageable dufus for a half hour or so.

    If you actually thought that candy was going to give your child a diagnosable psychiatric condition… you’re a huge fucking idiot. If you haven’t ever noticed that giving a kid a bag of sour patch kids gets them riled up, you haven’t spent much time with kids.


  • This comes from a memory of a digression during a lecture in an ecology class I was in 20yrs ago… so you know, grain of salt.

    From this particular professors point of view. Symbiotic was the term to describe mutualism until recently. And then. A few papers started using symbiosis as an umbrella term for all relationships with sub-terms to describe the “benefits math”. This, to him, was annoying pedantry. But eventually all the textbooks adopted the new hierarchy of terms and the world moved on.

    If you took a biology class with a text published pre-2000s, it’s very possible that your book described symbiosis as a mutually beneficial relationship between species.

    Long story short: the language is fluid and ever changing, even in science fields.




  • Pohl@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldAre We in an AI Bubble?
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    5 months ago

    Nvidia is making a thing and selling it. No matter what happens with AI tech, they are going to keep their winnings.

    Everybody else… well they borrowed/raised and spent a FORTUNE on R&D, chips, and electricity to make a product that has no realized commercial value (yet?). They are either going to figure out where the money comes from soon or the bills gonna come due. The next 12 months are going to be popcorn worthy if you like watching the tech industry.



  • I mean it’s only 30ish seconds so it’s not a lot of investment, BUT, it really is just noise, you can barely pick out the trombone until the last 3seconds.

    It is grating and unapproachable, but the rest of the album feels like it could have had half a dozen radio hits in an alternate version of the early 90s.

    Edit: just re-read my comment and noticed the ambiguity in my closing sentence. Sigh… sloppy writing. Anyway I was playing with the fact that phish fans are known to be a little bit evangelical (not unlike trek fans tbh). And if one tells you not to listen to a song you should listen to THEM, and avoid the song.


  • Jonathan Frakes fun fact:

    He has a gold record for an album he appeared on as a trombone player. Apparently the band phish saw an unusual mailbox when they were driving up to meet a record company guy and the guy from the label told them that his neighbor with the strange mailbox was in fact Lt Riker. Knowing he played trombone from the show they asked to be introduced and invited him to join them in the studio on a record they were working on (Hoist). Well as Jonathan tells it he got to the studio and pretty quickly realized that the charts for the part were probably beyond his ability, but he bravely recorded a few attempts and everyone was very nice about. The band did not use the his takes for the intended track but they did cut them up and make a track out of them called “Riker’s mailbox”. When the record went gold the band made sure that a gold record plaque was also sent to Jonathan.

    Story pieced together from interviews with Jonathan and Trey, heard on a podcast at some point but I would have a hell of a time sourcing it further. The song, which also feature bela fleck on banjo, is pretty much just noise and not worth the effort to chase down. If a phish fan tells you NOT to listen to a phish song you should listen!




  • People’s take on this stuff always seems so naive to me. All war ever can be viewed as an attempt to arrest the leader of another group for “crimes”. When you get arrested… that means you lost the war. Winning a war means you didn’t get arrested.

    The ICC is such a silly stupid waste of human attention. It’s like an idea that children came up with after watching Star Trek. It has no utility whatsoever for our species. We fight, we have winners and losers. If you start a fight with somebody stronger than you, you are gonna have a bad time. If you start a fight with someone weaker than you, others will think you are dishonorable. That doesn’t mean you get arrested.


  • Pohl@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzFear
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    6 months ago

    The average lifespan for wild passerine birds is probably a lot longer than 3 yrs.

    In general, birds live a weirdly long time. Banding studies show us song birds that have lived up to 15yrs or so. Assuming they make it to adulthood, a cardinal can probably expect to live 6-8 yrs but that is a wild guess since it’s almost impossible for us to really measure that.

    Anyway, that’s enough zoology time, back to the memes!



  • “Privacy” means two different things depending on the audience. For me privacy means that my information is not being used to advance some organizations commercial interest. For others it means that my information will never be shared with a government.

    Don’t advertise to me

    Or

    Don’t narc on me

    I guess I don’t really expect a company to resist pressure from government agencies on my behalf. Especially if I have been using their service to commit crimes in my country. If you are doing things your government would prefer you didn’t, hire a good lawyer and consult with them about what should be sent via email (spoiler, it’s nothing). The mafia doesn’t send emails, or put anything in writing, if you do crimes, you shouldn’t either.