gandalf_der_12te
@gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on I Quit 1 day ago:
ability and willingness
- Comment on I Quit 1 day ago:
Very interesting. I imagine an even simpler explanation for why poorer kids do less well in school:
You simply can’t focus on abstract thoughts if you’re lacking basic ingredients in your life.
It’s something like the pyramid of needs:
When you’re hungry in school because you didn’t have proper breakfast because your parents had too little time to prepare one or were unable to actually buy proper-quality ingredients, your brain simply can’t focus on geography of the other end of the world or god forbid, calculus.
I guess that if schoolkids were given free meals before school and during midday break, their performance in school-related activity would improve by at least 50% in poorer regions.
- Comment on As Big Tech Oligarchs Wage War on Workers, Sanders Warns AI Could Kill Nearly 100 Million US Jobs 2 days ago:
It’s also good to understand that it’s not only the quantity of jobs that will be shifted downwards but also the pay level as people are shifted towards lower-paying jobs.
- Comment on do you remember a time when societies were so polarized and shifted so much to the right like today? How long did it last? 2 days ago:
Whatever ideology a group is pushing has little to do with having the moral high ground and will typically result in their own benefit.
what little you can do to improve the quality of politics is to educate the people so they can analyze and decide whether the policies are meaningful for common good or not.
- Comment on do you remember a time when societies were so polarized and shifted so much to the right like today? How long did it last? 2 days ago:
treat it as a spectrum
a spectrum is typically 1-dimensional as well, though; at least the spectrums i think of
- Comment on do you remember a time when societies were so polarized and shifted so much to the right like today? How long did it last? 2 days ago:
People that feel disenfranchised will vote for change regardless of the change proposed.
hahah yeah unfortunately that’s accurate :D
- Comment on do you remember a time when societies were so polarized and shifted so much to the right like today? How long did it last? 2 days ago:
Something common I see in all these parties is strong disaffection with the current state of their countries and a longing to an idealized past they promise to bring back, to make countries great again…
The past cannot come back, neither will it come back just because some people want it to. It’s completely futile, but people are not rational about this, they’re completely emotional and tribal.
Yes, societies are going through the five stages of grief:
- denial (that there are problems)
- anger (vote for a strongman) <-- you are here
- bargaining (maybe we can partially go back to the past)
- depression (this sucks, nothing can be done about it)
- acceptance (well, let’s look forward and make the best out of it)
- Comment on Does anyone know? 2 days ago:
We’re entering irrational times, ones that you can only navigate with your heart.
- Comment on 4 days ago:
i don’t get it
- Comment on 4 days ago:
Actually it makes sense to calculate “analytically” as long as possible and only after that doesn’t help anymore, go to “numerical” calculations.
- Comment on Why can't we have a static vintage web? 5 days ago:
thanks, that makes sense. i gotta bookmark that comment.
- Comment on Why can't we have a static vintage web? 5 days ago:
I honestly tend to think that instead of using search engines where you already have to know what you’re looking for, it might be better to use something like lemmy where you can advertise what you made with a post in a related community.
- Comment on Why can't we have a static vintage web? 5 days ago:
lemmy isn’t a static vintage web, and that’s a good thing, i guess.
- Comment on Unified Theory of American Reality 5 days ago:
I mean i just want to note for a second that the aging retardant properties of humanity are one of the great miracles that puts us above other species.
Most other mammal species, including dogs, cats, camels, zebras, horses, cattle, sheep, whatever farm animal/pet you can think of typically lives no longer than 20 years, while for humans it’s routinely 80 years, about 4x as long.
That, it turns out, is one of humanity’s great strengths. We age significantly slower, and that includes a significantly longer childhood. Most feral animals grow up and reach puberty within 1-3 years, while for humans it takes at least 12 years (even longer if you wait to be socially accepted as an “adult”). This gives us more time to play, figure things out, learn, and develop. It is for this reason that we’re able to pull off more amazing things than other species, because our long lifes warrant that getting a long, proper education is worth it. Because if we only lived for 20 years, it would hardly be worth it to study till you’re 25 years old.
So, aging slower, and staying childish for longer, is actually one of humanity’s great strengths. It is unfortunate, i believe, that we’re trying to remove that human specialty in these days and trying to make people grow up faster.
- Comment on Unified Theory of American Reality 5 days ago:
This reads a lot to me like Sokrates’ speech that the children are all spoiled today. I.e. it has always been that way but people continuously assume that they have it especially bad in that regard.
- Comment on Cause and Effect 5 days ago:
self-chosen
- Comment on Cause and Effect 5 days ago:
We need to split the US up into two parts so we can do A/B testing.
As others have said, the problem of vaccines isn’t that they don’t work. The problem of vaccines is that they work too well. They have completely eliminated the diseases that motivated their development, so people can’t imagine a world where these vaccines don’t exist anymore.
We need to split the US up into two parts. One gets vaccines, the other one does not. Wait 30 years. Then the people will see the effects and then the people will understand why we should have vaccines. If the people don’t see the alternative scenario, they can’t see the difference that vaccines make. We need to make these differences more visual, by making practical experiments.
- Comment on 6 days ago:
I’ve read the giving tree recently and i must say, it kinda makes me angry, but not so much because of its sad story, but because i think that that is not a good way of life. you can’t give away your life, i think, and you shouldn’t look at yourself like a candle that is pre-destined to burn down through its course.
i believe that to truly live well, one must always live as if one had a very long life and must be sustainable in any action. this includes not giving away parts of your life that don’t regrow. that is why the giving tree made me so angry.
- Comment on What's your test for people? 1 week ago:
My dad gets legitimately angry when I do this
I think it has to do with “putting the waiters out of their job”. Like, when you do a part of the job for them consistently, the restaurant manager will eventually notice that and realize they can do with a little bit less staff. So they hire fewer waiters, which means potential waiters face a tougher job market.
- Comment on What's your test for people? 1 week ago:
My test for people is dressing plainly, by which i mean, not excessively well. I wear simple and plain clothing and have a plain appearance.
In my opinion, jewelry and cosmetics and all that are all very problematic. The whole feminism movement is largely about the fact that women don’t want to be objectified, but then they objectify themselves, i argue. By wearing makeup, you’re making yourself a “pretty thing”, one whose superficial appearance is judged, which is arguably more problematic than helpful. Like, if you’re a woman and talking to a man and you’re overly pretty, you subconsciously think that they only talk to you because you look pretty, and that makes you suspicious of them and a little bit angry, which hinders the discussion and makes honest exchange of opinions a bit more difficult. If you dress plainly, don’t wear makeup, earrings or any of that, then you can’t think that they’re only interested in your superficial appearance that they’re interested in, so that means they talk to you because of your personality, which i think puts you in a better mood and makes the talking more worth-while. It leads to higher-quality exchanges.
- Comment on Anon makes games 1 week ago:
xD it’s to confuse the romans, in case they invade again
- Comment on Anon plays GTA V 1 week ago:
uhm do you have a source of that because i’ve seen various evidence to the contrary.
- Comment on Anon plays GTA V 1 week ago:
It’s worth noticing that this is apparently the traditional far-eastern way of life; at least it was explained to me that this “realization” is a major part in traditional japanese meditation techniques.
It’s also noteworthy that japanese people typically refer to themselves by their name, i.e. I would say “gandalf ate noodles yesterday” instead of “I ate noodles yesterday”. I believe this stems from the idea that you look at yourself from the outside, just like you would look at anybody else. This is also the root cause for why there’s traditionally such a strong “group think” in far-eastern countries. Because they differentiate way less between themselves and others.
- Comment on Anon makes games 1 week ago:
the gold market wasn’t “manipulated”, that was just a lie that Nixon came up with to justify ending the dollar-gold exchange system.
actually the US government just wanted to have complete control over the dollar, including the ability to print more dollars if needed. if the dollar is bound to gold, that’s impossible because you can’t just print gold. by declaring an emergency (“to protect the dollars against the speculators”) they had enough reason in the eyes of the population to make the dollar a pure fiat currency.
- Comment on Anon makes games 1 week ago:
And to follow up on my own comment, imagine this:
- Extracting water from the martian landscape would literally be seen as “printing money”, and it gives people a strong incentive to extract as much water from the landscape as is reasonably doable, thus giving society a steady source of water, which drives society forward.
- Maybe, 1 martian dollar ($1) would represent 1 ton of water, and 1 cent would represent 1 kg of water, which means 1000 cents = 1 dollar.
- So you might have paper money representing 5c (almost a gallon) or 50c (let’s call it a barrel) for everyday use, so when you go to a market to buy some food, you might pay for it either by paper money or by literally handing over water bottles.
- The paper money would have to be handed out by banks that store the water or at least are able to hand it out if somebody wants to redeem their paper money.
- Comment on Anon makes games 1 week ago:
I’d be glad if anybody actually paid attention to my mod pack xD
so i’m fine with this :D - Comment on Anon makes games 1 week ago:
You’ll need some kind of representational currency
yep that’s exactly what i think would make sense in the real world. basically a paper currency backed by real water. one dollar represents 1 kg of water.
it’s like the gold standard, just not backed by gold but by water.
- Comment on Anon makes games 1 week ago:
it only seems to work for rotating black holes though?
- Comment on Anon makes games 1 week ago:
is there a physics limit to the density of energy
the physics limit to the density of energy is literally a black hole. it compresses the maximum amount of mass (energy) into a space. but that’s technologically useless since you can’t extract the energy out of it on-demand.
The densest ways of storing energy that are technologically useful are:
- batteries (Na-Ion batteries: 0.2 kWh/kg)
- oil/carbon-based fuels (bread: 5 kWh/kg)
- uranium (pure uranium: 24 * 10^6 kWh/kg)
There’s also speculative technologies like antimatter (24 * 10^9 kWh/kg) which aren’t available today.
- Comment on Anon makes games 1 week ago:
I’m making a mars-themed luanti modpack (it’s FOSS and available here btw), and i intend to use water as the currency, if i ever get to trading.
Water is a scarce and useful resource on Mars. That’s all it takes to make a meaningful currency out of it.
