I wasn’t advancing a position that cooperation did not exist in nature (that would be absurd). Multicellular life is essentially defined by cooperation. No, I was arguing against the meme’s implication that greed is unnatural or even unique to humans.

As for a counterpoint to Kropotkin, I would advance game theory, which shows that greed and selfishness are successful strategies in otherwise cooperative environments (Free rider problem). In nature (and in human society) we find free riders everywhere we look.

Really the best thing home gardeners can do is grow their own fresh herbs. Fresh herbs in the store are not economical and are often nearly spoiled by the time you bring them home anyway.

This is mostly a thing for people who get really into home cooking though. Most people just use dried herbs.

This one’s silly. Lots of animals display greed. They gather way more food than they need for the winter. They steal each other’s food. They engage in surplus killing. Greed is everywhere. Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw.

Yeah I get that the centre of the distribution is on the bullseye, it just doesn’t fit with the ordinary meaning of the word “accurate.”

It also falls apart with a small sample size. If I fire only a single shot and hit the bullseye, that doesn’t tell you anything. However, in everyday speech most people would describe that as an accurate shot.

Home gardening (in aggregate) is way worse than farming in terms of fertilizer use, fossil fuels burned, and any other efficiency, economic, and environmental measures you may want to improve on.

Sure, there are a tiny percentage of home gardeners who are masters of no-till growing, cover cropping, and all that. The other 99.9% are driving their pickup trucks to Home Depot to buy plastic bags of topsoil and jugs of synthetic fertilizer. The issue with widespread deployment of community gardening (at a level that significantly replaces farmed food) is that regular people don’t have either the time or the knowledge to do it.

I think everyone vastly underestimates how much knowledge farmers actually have and think they just clumsily dump vast amounts of fertilizer on their fields like maniacs. In reality, farmers are experts at using the least amount of fertilizer possible for their fields because if they don’t they LOSE MONEY on the crop.

Maybe a nice bell but that site design is like nails on a chalkboard to me. Could they have a normal photo of the bell? Drives me crazy when sites do this. I know it’s not specific to this company either, I’ve seen tons of other companies that do this.

The high accuracy, low precision regime seems so strange to me! I think not many would call that situation “high accuracy” with most of the shots missing the bullseye!

Plus it seems like if you just keep increasing accuracy, you necessarily force all the shots to converge on the bullseye, don’t you? Then you get precision “for free” which is strange!

The AAA game industry wants to leverage FOMO to keep you engaged, keep you buying the newest game, forgetting about your backlog.

If they had their way, older games would no longer be playable, just to force people to keep buying new games.

Haskell keeps track of your types automatically. You can ask it “what is the type of this expression” and it will infer it for you. Haskell is of course fully static typed (types erased at compile time).

That’s really unstable to me. Grows like a weed, needs constant pruning.

Stable is something like a succulent or a slow-growing epiphyte. Barely needs water or really any attention at all. Grows extremely slowly and can survive long droughts.

I looked it up. 2022 IIHS crash tests showed the Tesla model 3 as being much safer in front impacts.

Modern cars may make the engine fall in a crash, but it’s still better not to have that mass there in the first place. Having said that, the safety advantages of a frunk may be reduced if you have a bunch of heavy cargo in there.

Putting part of the battery in the front, in the crash zone, is going to reduce safety, not improve it.

One of the main things that improved EV safety over ICE cars is the frunk itself. By removing that massive engine from the front and replacing it with a crumple zone, the car becomes much safer in front impacts.

Speak for yourself! Last time I went for a walk to get a snack at the local shop, I got scooped up by a giant shark and carried back to the water!

But how does that work in terms of manufacturing in a global economy? Or are you calling for a return to villages with cottage industries?

The mechanism of markets is that the price of goods follows the law of supply and demand. Prices are a universal signal to producers that they should produce more/less of a good.

Without currency you need a mechanism to replace this. Given your previous posts in favour of anarchism, I’m guessing you don’t favour central planning. So what mechanism for determining how much and of what kinds of goods should be produced, do you prefer?

Seeing what’s happening in Ukraine and in Iran and neighbouring gulf countries feels like early stage Terminator to me. Same goes for all the Sam Altman slop. The goal of AI is to replace us. Right now it might not do a very good job at most things we can do, but I don’t think it’s too far from replacing almost everything we do on the battlefield.

Sure, though you don’t need a state of the art PC to play 90% of the games ever made. These days I play a lot of my games on an old 3DS (hacked to the gills)!

I also have a huge steam library of games, many of which I bought for next to nothing in huge bundles during past sales. Many of them I still haven’t played! They would run fine on a 10 year old PC though.

To dismantle power you must have power: the power to dismantle. Then afterwards do you dismantle your own power?

Love how she’s looking at you like “hey, we’re not done here!” She likes getting the summer coat cleanup!

Gaming is cheaper than ever. Just don’t buy new games. I haven’t bought a new AAA game in decades. There are thousands and thousands of games you can play for free or nearly free.

It’s like music. You can listen to lifetimes worth of music for free or nearly free. The only expensive thing is going to some fancy concert and giving a ton of money to Ticketmaster.