chonglibloodsport
@chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
- Comment on 1 week ago:
I have that book. It has an absolute ton of practice problems. They were not very helpful for my electricity & magnetism final!
- Comment on Record breaker Starmer is the 'most unpopular PM since polling began' 1 week ago:
The rich aren’t paying the inheritance tax because they don’t own farming capital, just a homestead on cheap land. This is an inefficient tax if it’s meant to target the rich. It’s catching family farmers (working class people) in the crossfire and driving the process of farm consolidation (corporations that own many farms and don’t pay inheritance taxes because corporations never die).
- Comment on Record breaker Starmer is the 'most unpopular PM since polling began' 1 week ago:
Because farming is notoriously capital-intensive (the equipment costs millions of dollars) and low margin (the supplies you put into each year’s crop cost a fortune as well). This means a farmer has very little liquidity because most of their wealth is tied up on equipment and seeds and fertilizers and everything else. On top of that, there’s a huge element of climate and weather risk where an entire year’s profits can be wiped out by a few days (or sometimes a single day) of bad weather at the wrong time. Many farmers go out of business after one bad crop causes a huge loss and they can no longer afford to buy more seeds or they miss a payment on their tractor or their mortgage or whatever.
Compare with something like the restaurant business where the equipment is vastly cheaper (hundred dollar frying pan vs million dollar harvester) and so are the supplies (hundreds of dollars worth of food vs tens of thousands worth of seeds and chemicals). Restaurants are also much shorter in turnaround, as you’re generally aiming to sell out all your food the same day it arrives, whereas a farmer is waiting for their crop to grow all summer long.
And it’s really not wealth hoarding. The capital equipment (tractors, harvesters etc) costs a ton of money but depreciates in value rapidly over time and costs huge amounts in maintenance as well. Furthermore, the maintenance element for equipment can add another risk factor to your crops, as an equipment failure at the wrong time can result in a total crop loss if you’re not able to get it fixed right away.
That harvester can be sitting in the shed all year in perfectly working condition and then break down 2 minutes into harvesting this year’s crop. Unfortunately, all the other farmers are harvesting at the same time and so the harvester mechanics are overloaded with work and can’t get to yours in time to save the crop. Too bad!
Anyway, the other reason farming is different than other businesses is because farming produces the food supply that feeds everyone. Governments are acutely aware of the importance of food security and so they provide subsidies and other support programs for farmers. However, these programs can often be a double edged sword because they make it even harder or more capital intensive to get into the business (for example, by requiring new farmers to purchase quota to be allowed access to the market).
Lastly, I should point out that none of these issues matter if you’re just a rich person who wants to retire to the countryside. You can buy agricultural land cheap (far cheaper than land in the city) and you don’t need to buy any fancy equipment or quota, you just move into the farmhouse. When you pass on your inheritance to your children, the lack of capital equipment means they pay a lot less in taxes than a farmer would.
- Comment on Record breaker Starmer is the 'most unpopular PM since polling began' 1 week ago:
Inheritance taxes for real farmers (as opposed to people who just buy farmland to live in the country) are much higher because they include capital expenditures. Modern tractors, harvesters, ploughs, seed drills, sprayers, barns, equipment sheds, silos, fences, irrigation systems… all of this can add up to millions of pounds. Having to suddenly pay a large inheritance tax for a cash-strapped (high leverage) working farmer because their parent died could absolutely force the sale of everything.
- Comment on Record breaker Starmer is the 'most unpopular PM since polling began' 1 week ago:
Providing for one’s own children, passing on family traditions and ways of working, preserving the spaces where childhood memories are created; these are among the most fundamental of human desires. Take those away and your society gives way to nihilism. You make an enemy of every parent in the country.
On the other hand, a strong society understands this at a cultural level and the preservation of family traditions is deeply rooted in the society. This is where you get family farms, family restaurants, family workshops and small businesses that last for hundreds of years and produce some of the best products life has to offer. Japan, France, Italy, and Spain are some examples of countries where this is the case.
As for arbitrary restrictions on corporations: ad-hoc solutions like that rarely work. People find ways of circumventing and undermining such efforts. Instead of one corporation, people will have hundreds, each with its 10 hectares of land.
The more regulations you create, the more you reward people with the money to hire accountants and lawyers to navigate them. On the other hand, traditional farmers and other small family businesses will simply give up trying to navigate the red tape and bail out.
- Comment on Record breaker Starmer is the 'most unpopular PM since polling began' 1 week ago:
If the inheritance taxes are the reason his parents had to sell then it stands to reason that the people who introduced the inheritance taxes in parliament are to blame, no?
- Comment on Record breaker Starmer is the 'most unpopular PM since polling began' 1 week ago:
No, I’m pro-actual-farmer keeping their family farm in the family. People dodging taxes need to be taxed but catching real farmers in the crossfire is not good. It’s very bad.
- Comment on Record breaker Starmer is the 'most unpopular PM since polling began' 1 week ago:
Right, because if (guy I don’t like) supports something, I’m obliged to hate it and fight against it!
This really tells me all I need to know about your politics. You’re not interested in making life better for anyone. You’re filled with bitterness and resentment and you just want to watch the world burn.
- Comment on Record breaker Starmer is the 'most unpopular PM since polling began' 1 week ago:
So you support the consolidation of small family farms into large corporate farming operations. Interesting take.
- Comment on Record breaker Starmer is the 'most unpopular PM since polling began' 1 week ago:
I’m not even British (I’m Canadian) and I don’t like him. Why’d he go after family farmers with aggressive inheritance taxes? That seems like a political dead end. Absolute foolishness.
Farmers usually have a lot of money invested in capital equipment but their lifestyles are anything but lavish. They live a working class life but get taxed (on inheritance) like millionaires, preventing them from handing down the family farm through generations (and allowing wealthy corporate farming operations to consolidate them).
- Comment on Should Neutron Stars be Added to the Periodic Table? 1 week ago:
Neutron stars do contain protons and electrons. It’s a misconception that they’re 100% pure neutrons.
A well-known type of neutron star is a pulsar. These rotating objects have extremely powerful magnetic fields which can only be produced by the movement of electric charges. If they were purely made of neutrons there could be no electric charges to move, and thus no magnetic fields.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Here’s the key thing to realize with deck builders: every card you take reduces the number of times you’ll see every other card in your deck by a small amount. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of “this looks useful, I’ll take it” over and over again.
The best decks in Slay the Spire have 5 or fewer cards and they go infinite in on turn 1. Of course in most runs you don’t have the opportunity to create a deck like that. Instead, you want to think about what the core of your deck is right now. Think “if I could remove as many cards as I want right now, what sort of broken thing could I do with the rest?” If your deck can’t do anything broken even after all those removals, then see if adding a card would change that.
If your deck can do something broken after removing all those other cards, and none of the reward cards on offer would change that, why take them?
There are many opportunities to remove cards throughout a run. Take them as much as you can. Try to get rid of as many filler cards as possible. Strikes and defends, for example, have no business being in your deck at the end of the game.
Ironclad, being the first character you can play in StS, is meant to teach you this concept (he also teaches you other concepts, such as health being a resource). He has a number of cards that exhaust other cards and he can frequently build into a deck that’s capable of exhausting down to a winning core. Try playing an exhaust based ironclad and see what you can do with an eye towards creating a broken core.
- Comment on Some crimes are unforgivable 1 week ago:
That’s all this is. That’s all Lemmy is. Just throwing shit out there. None of it matters.
- Comment on Some crimes are unforgivable 1 week ago:
Far more people have seen Michelangelo’s art in person than have Banksy’s and this will always be the case. Michelangelo’s art will remain relevant a hundred thousand years from now, whereas Banksy’s is tied to current events. It’s not even close!
- Comment on Some crimes are unforgivable 1 week ago:
My premise wasn’t that “all art today is about elitism”, it was about the art world. One of Banksy’s works actually went up in value after it was shredded!
Who gives a shit about “Catholic cuntiness”? I was talking about Michelangelo whose patron was the pope but who had no love for the pope himself (and may not have liked the church either). Michelangelo the artist made his work for billions to love and enjoy for all time. Banksy’s shredded painting is funny as a middle finger to the rich guy who bought it but it backfired when the painting went up in value after that.
- Comment on Some crimes are unforgivable 1 week ago:
None of what you said is convincing whatsoever because you cherry picked your examples. How about you try steelmanning Duchamp’s Fountain, Serrano’s Piss Christ, Newman’s Onement VI, or Cattelan’s Comedian? These are all pieces which set the art world on fire with reverence just as they provoked bafflement, bemusement, or exasperation from the public.
You’re also wrong about the Sistine Chapel frescoes. That was the purpose their patron Pope Julius II hoped to achieve. It was defied by Michelangelo (who didn’t like the pope at all), particularly with the anatomical imagery hidden within The Birth of Adam which seems to suggest that God emerged from the human mind. Now his subtle irony may have been lost on almost everyone from his time but it’s not hard to imagine that he hid this Easter egg for future educated citizens to find.
- Comment on Some crimes are unforgivable 1 week ago:
I think Bob Ross is a perfect illustration of the big divorce between the art world and the public that happened during the 20th century.
Regular people love Bob Ross because he created paintings that make people feel good. You can find these types of paintings at affordable art markets all over the place as well as on jigsaw puzzles.
The art world decided to turn its nose up at this kind of popular art and pivot toward controversial, shocking, and lazy (looking) art intended to provoke all kinds of responses (many negative). This continues to drive a perception in the public of an artist community that is increasingly elitist and out of touch.
People forget that it wasn’t always this way. Look at masterpieces like the Sistine Chapel frescoes which were intended to inspire awe and reverence in the public, not scorn. Yes, Michelangelo’s technique and artistry was far in excess of Bob Ross’s, but his art was made to be loved by everyone, not just his wealthy patrons. In that respect, Bob Ross is more like Michelangelo than modern artists.
- Comment on Covers the bases 1 week ago:
Impressing girls may be the reason why guys join a gym but impressing their gym buddies is why they stay.
- Comment on Everyone thinks the Deus Ex remaster looks awful and they're right: 'They really turned those 1999 graphics into 2003 graphics' 1 week ago:
I played some of Human Revolution but I didn’t like the grind-factor (nor did I like the weird forced boss fights).
The original Deus Ex was so beautiful for the way you gained exploration and progress experience for finding secrets and accomplishing goals. Replacing that with a more “RPG-like” system that rewards hacking every single computer and doing non-lethal takedowns on every single enemy totally ruined it for me.
- Comment on Everyone thinks the Deus Ex remaster looks awful and they're right: 'They really turned those 1999 graphics into 2003 graphics' 1 week ago:
Oh you don’t need quick reactions for Deus Ex. It can be played in a very slow and methodical way. It’s just that you need precision to get the most out of the sniper scopes (which can be used on multiple weapons).
- Comment on Everyone thinks the Deus Ex remaster looks awful and they're right: 'They really turned those 1999 graphics into 2003 graphics' 1 week ago:
The original game has plenty of characters who are true believers in the government lie: the UNATCO soldiers, the mech agents, and even multiple civilians who either work for or support the government.
The main resistance force, the NSF (Northwest Sessionist Forces), is pretty controversial among the public. People seem to be split between viewing them as terrorists or heroes. Not unlike the way people view antifa in real life!
- Comment on Everyone thinks the Deus Ex remaster looks awful and they're right: 'They really turned those 1999 graphics into 2003 graphics' 1 week ago:
The original Deus Ex is perfectly playable today as long as you follow a guide to get it patched up and configured for a modern system. Plus it runs at a rock steady frame rate on any PC today, whereas it didn’t at the time of release (it was very laggy, buggy, and crashed a lot).
The game is definitely meant for mouse and keyboard though. You need some very high precision aiming and a steady hand to cope with the scope wobble (unless you train to master level).
- Comment on Everyone thinks the Deus Ex remaster looks awful and they're right: 'They really turned those 1999 graphics into 2003 graphics' 2 weeks ago:
I’m honestly quite tired of remasters. Why can’t we see some new original games?
The original Deus Ex is this bizarre mixture of jank, camp, and sheer brilliance. So much of what made the game amazing was unintentional and contingent with the era. A remaster is never going to be able to recapture that lightning in a bottle. It’s always going to be soulless.
- Comment on Anon doesn't understand streamer fans 2 weeks ago:
Sexual attraction and frustration, sure. Also loneliness, loss of community, loss of purpose, loss of meaning.
Maybe not every guy who watches her is like that, but some definitely are. I would especially be concerned for those who watch her consistently and donate large amounts of money to her. But I feel the same way about anyone who watches a lot of streamers and donates a lot of money (relative to their own income of course).
Parasocial relationships are a deeply concerning development.
- Comment on Plants looking at people looking at people looking at fungi 2 weeks ago:
I can see we’re just talking past each other at this point.
Scientists work with different definitions of words in different contexts all the time. You seem unable to grasp that. I don’t know what else to say to you. You keep wanting to apply the specific to the general and conflate the two. If I didn’t know any better I would conclude that you’re arguing in bad faith.
- Comment on Plants looking at people looking at people looking at fungi 2 weeks ago:
First of all, it’s not my approach, it’s the standard one among biologists. From Wikipedia:
Sex is the biological trait that determines whether a sexually reproducing organism produces male or female gametes.[1][2][3][4][5] During sexual reproduction, a male and a female gamete fuse to form a zygote, which develops into an offspring that inherits traits from each parent. By convention, organisms that produce smaller, more mobile gametes (spermatozoa, sperm) are called male, while organisms that produce larger, non-mobile gametes (ova, often called egg cells) are called female.[6] An organism that produces both types of gamete is a hermaphrodite.[3][7]
Biology deals with all living things, not just humans, and the word sex has been defined to be useful for understanding sexual reproduction (reproduction by the fusion of gametes) across many different species in their myriad forms. This is its purpose.
All sexually reproducing species undergo a life cycle and may not be fertile at every stage. Post menopausal women and prepubescent children are just 2 examples of non-fertile stages of the human lifecycle. Annual plants after dropping their fruits or seeds are another.
The specific details of how sex is expressed in humans (secondary sex characteristics, life cycle, etc) are important if you’re studying sex in humans but they aren’t part of the biological definition of sex because they don’t apply to other species.
- Comment on Plants looking at people looking at people looking at fungi 2 weeks ago:
Biologically speaking, sex is just a trait, like eye colour or hair colour. Some people have blue eyes, some people have brown eyes, some people are born without eyes at all. Is it meaningful to ask whether a person born without eyes is blue-eyed or brown-eyed? No. The trait doesn’t define the entire being.
Categories are social constructs, not biologically determined at all. People place organisms within categories according to traits they’ve decided on. People also change their minds about categories all the time, especially in socially and politically charged contexts.
What I’ve told you about the biological trait of sex is what biologists use to categorize organisms based on their mechanisms of reproduction. Biologists are scientists trying to understand life in its many variations. Having categories that are as broad and stable as possible is desirable for scientists because it avoids having to go back and rewrite all the catalogues. It also lets us ask more general questions and look for patterns across myriad unrelated organisms.
- Comment on Plants looking at people looking at people looking at fungi 2 weeks ago:
If they don’t produce gametes then they don’t have a sex; they’re sterile. If they produce both types of gametes then they have both sexes, making them a hermaphrodite.
- Comment on Plants looking at people looking at people looking at fungi 2 weeks ago:
Well in the case of the plant, most plants have both male and female parts. Asking “which sex is this plant?” is a meaningless question, even if one of those parts is absent or improperly formed.
- Comment on Plants looking at people looking at people looking at fungi 2 weeks ago:
I’m talking about a working definition for biologists in a research setting, not for colloquial use. We’re in the science memes community. The original meme in question is about mycologists and botanists, both working scientists in biology.
What a doctor sees when a human baby is born has nothing to do with plants or fungi. And if you’re studying plants (for example) and happen to produce one that can’t produce gametes of its own (such as a seedless watermelon) you just refer to that as sterile offspring. It doesn’t factor into your working definition of sex, it’s just one of many variations that happen to (in this case adversely) affect reproduction.