Carrolade

@Carrolade@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some good places/activities where a middle-aged man can new make friends?⁩ ⁨⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  If you want to start an irl group, yeah. If you’re joining an existing group, no though. Fully online is obviously the easiest place to find groups looking for players, but you can also head down to your local gaming store. I’ve seen bulletin boards before with flyers looking for players, but can probably just ask the people working there if they know of any.

  Could also check online forums for your local community, maybe even make a post asking if any gaming groups have openings for irl players.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some good places/activities where a middle-aged man can new make friends?⁩ ⁨⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Dungeons & Dragons is one, for the sufficiently geeky.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would AI replacing humans in every workplace eventually make it easier for an advanced civilization from outer space to colonize us?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure. It’s certainly not impossible, just unlikely when we consider all the possibilities.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would AI replacing humans in every workplace eventually make it easier for an advanced civilization from outer space to colonize us?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Just adds an extra, unnecessary step. It’d be like if you had billions of grocery stores to choose from and went to the one crawling with ants.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MEN.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The idea of imbibing potions whose recipes predate our awareness of things like radium or mercury toxicity somewhat disturbs me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would AI replacing humans in every workplace eventually make it easier for an advanced civilization from outer space to colonize us?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Probably not.

  I also don’t see why any spacefaring civilization would have any interest in colonizing inhabited planets. It would just be more hassle for the same resources you could get on lots and lots of planets. If they have the technology for interstellar flight, they can probably extract whatever they want from wherever they want. Regarding living space, you wouldn’t even need planets, there are far more efficient structures you could devise when you don’t have to limit yourself to only what nature has provided.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨glupi jebeni bot⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It makes more sense with restaurant reviews. The business environment is so intensely competitive that any restaurant actually deserving of 1-2 stars would be much more likely to eventually go out of business.

  So, over a long enough period of time, you’d wind up with mostly 3-5 star places, with some exceptions existing for restaurants that can survive without the benefit of repeat customers. (tourist trap places, places operated as some kind of money laundering operation, etc)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inspired by a friends current vacation⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I like to set my tent up in the lowest elevation spot I can find too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed. I understand people’s desire to look at the fact that both women lost, but we should also remember the fact that they both failed to unify their own coalition. This is a pretty big deal, if you can’t even unify your own coalition, your prospects are pretty damn challenging.

  That charisma element is very valuable for that, as is tossing your own faction members enough policy bones to satisfy them even if you’re not fully pleasing them. Clinton and Harris both failed to do this, and took their coalitions a little bit too much for granted. Harris came close with the Walz pick, but Gaza weighed very heavily on her with progressives. She needed to do more to distance herself from Biden to thoroughly win them over.

  Ultimately, I think our problem stemmed from them not understanding the appeal of the far right. This caused them to underestimate the strength of their opponent and fail to run as dynamically and aggressively as necessary. They played it too safe. With Harris in particular, I wanted to see the prosecutor prosecute the case against Trump, with the voters as the jury. Instead her stump speeches and interviews remained frustratingly soft. Hilary did this too.

  We the people can look at Trump as some big joke, and make fun of him and his supporters as much as we want. But the opposition candidate has to take him deathly seriously, and give him the gravity he is due as a potentially fascist leader of the worlds most powerful military. That is no laughing matter.

  This sort of speech by AOC is what we needed more of, and even it is a little bit soft: youtu.be/OO7SE4Zpd9s

  Bernie could have done it too, I think. He did come fairly close in the primary, even though he was fighting upstream against lingering negative sentiment about “socialists” in middle America. I think the country has changed enough in the past 10 years, partly due to his trailblazing, that that’s no longer as much as an albatross as it once was though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the evolutionary benefit of loving a pet so much you melt into a puddle when they are around?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Certainly. But we still cannot say that should mean every beneficial mutation for their lives was likely to be adopted. Like I said earlier, the majority of possibly good things are left on the table, even when drawbacks are not considered.

  Including drawbacks muddies it up even further, we can look at how cardiovascular shock occurs and how the particular traits that create it were a bit of a double edged sword.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the evolutionary benefit of loving a pet so much you melt into a puddle when they are around?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  But what is the likelihood of this autonomous stress relieving function arising, how many mutations would be required to implement such a thing? Would it have any significant drawbacks or side effects in other aspects of our biology?

  You can’t look only at the propagation side of things.

  Another thing, stress isn’t event based per se. It’s more of a floating value that always exists to a certain degree and provides both positive and negative effects at different levels and in different situations. The negative health impacts come in when it remains high for a long period of time. So what we’d really want to look at is something like the frequency of headpats given to your dog or something, and the effects of this compared to other potential stress relieving activities like meditation.

  Lastly, I would check your data on pet availability, I think it’d be far, far higher than 10%.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the evolutionary benefit of loving a pet so much you melt into a puddle when they are around?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Negative health outcomes are an evolutionary pressure.

  Also, evolution does not work from a plan, we do not spontaneously generate all the things that would benefit us over a long enough timeframe. Instead, random things happen and certain ones propagate while others don’t. Because it is not a conscious force operating from any sort of plan, and instead works via random mutation and propagation of beneficial traits, it leaves a whole bunch of potentially beneficial things unadopted.

  Otherwise all life would just move towards some sort of optimal form, maybe crabs, instead of evolving greater and greater diversity that can better handle changing environments.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the evolutionary benefit of loving a pet so much you melt into a puddle when they are around?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  One I can think of would be stress relief. Stress contributes to a lot of negative health outcomes, and cuddling with a pet can help mitigate some of that stress. Wouldn’t surprise me if amount of stress also has a more general effect on overall decisionmaking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Firefighter With O.C.D. and the Vaccine He Believed Would Kill Him⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel like the worst thing about severe OCD would be, not just the disruption that comes from all severe mental disorders, but the banality of it.

  Like this guy said, he wasted his life … by cleaning stuff. It’s basically Sisyphean, being condemned to spend your life in labor that you cannot actually ever finish, benefit from or retire from. To me that’s in its own tier along with things like severe agoraphobia. You’re basically healthy, except for this one paralyzing fear that makes you just watch other people and long for something you can’t have. But you appear healthy to everyone else, you’re not hallucinating or spouting the craziest shit, but inside you may as well be.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did the western world just suddenly go back to pretending wrestling is "real" for some reason?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that’s kinda silly. I can see an argument that WWE wrestlers are athletes, no problems there. But they don’t actually perform in any sort of athletic competition, which makes thinking of it as a “sport” a little weird. If WWE is a sport, then so is ballet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How majestic⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Those are clearly whiskers. gtfo.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Baldurs Gate 3's voice acting so great that it ruined other games for me?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed. Great voice acting is one thing. Quality voicing a cast that gigantic is another. I first noticed with that frog in the hag’s area. You don’t even get it if you don’t cast speak with animals and talk to this random frog hopping around, but if you bother to, you get this short, amazingly acted dialogue.

  The attention to detail is just off the charts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is this possibly a jealousy thing?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Bullies get positive feelings for themselves by making others suffer. Who they target with this isn’t too different from how a predator selects prey–choose the vulnerable.

  Your sister, for one reason or another, is vulnerable, meaning the bully is less likely to suffer any consequences for picking on her than if they picked on someone else. That “someone else” could have more friends willing to stick up for them and fight back, they could have a really sharp wit and be able to verbally humiliate the bully if they wanted, they could be huge and practice MMA, being able to physically knock all her teeth out with one swing, they could be a teacher’s favorite and able to go to an authority figure to get backup and inflict consequences that way. All sorts of possibilities.

  But one way or another, your sister has been selected due to having fewer plausible defenses than any of the potential alternatives.

  Best way to resolve that is to bolster her defenses in some way or another, so the bully picks a different, more vulnerable target. Making the bully actually stop bullying everyone isn’t very likely, though. As someone else pointed out, the bully is most likely suffering a lot themselves, and participating in bullying is how they themselves are surviving their own difficult circumstances. The easiest fix would probably be the “sharp wit” route, as verbally tearing into someone in a humorous way is a learnable skill. Otherwise a physical intimidation route, where your sister or another makes them afraid for their teeth remaining in their mouth if the bullying continues.

  To answer your direct question, yes, jealously could be a part of it. There isn’t much use in wondering about it, though, there’s no real solutions to be found down this line of thinking, that I’m aware of.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How would world politics be like if the top 100 countries (in terms of military strength) all had their own nuclear arsenals?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I think people need to recognize that this arms Kuwait, Tunisia, Lithuania, Oman, Netherlands, Chad, Yemen, Bulgaria, Tajikistan, Rwanda and Cameroon all with nuclear weapons. (Ranks 91-100 if we just go by number of military personnel, active and reserve, an imperfect but very convenient way to measure.)

  If I’m not mistaken, two of those countries are currently involved in conflict. (Yemeni Civil War and Rwanda involved in Congo)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Opinion | It Isn’t Just Trump. America’s Whole Reputation Is Shot.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  These are not mutually exclusive preferences, they can easily coexist in a single person. I think you’re both correct, basically.

  We could even examine if simplicity vs complexity have any coding as “hard” or “soft”, if we wished. Say, a piece of equipment breaks, do I bust out technical sheets, troubleshoot what went wrong and replace a broken component, or do I whack the whole thing with a wrench? I would argue that the simpler option of intentionally failing to understand and whacking it with a wrench codes as “harder” than the alternative, due to stubbornness and unwillingness to learn/change being a component of our cultural understanding of “hard” in America.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sun God⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My fav is just that the sun is, all by itself, 99% of the total mass of our solar system. Most of the rest of that 1% is Jupiter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For a conservative that’s amazing, I’d be kinda proud of him. I’d comply with his request, assuming he wants you to see a couple other doctors and not attend some conversion camp or something. I’d just frame that as getting a second/third opinion, basically, which is always a good idea anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Memory Wiped⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  … really? Even we learn a fair bit about the British Empire, though I suppose Anglo-American history is somewhat intertwined, so it makes sense. We covered Magna Carta, 100 Years War, Henry VIII, then some British Empire. And the World Wars of course.

  We don’t really go over the Commonwealth nations that much, but we definitely touch on Britain quite a lot. Though we did cover Indian Independence a little bit, Gandhi and all that, if memory serves.

  Glazing over the largest empire ever created on our planet seems a little odd to me though, especially when its your own. That’d be like Greek kids not covering Alexander.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Memory Wiped⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, it is very much an ongoing battle, that’s for sure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Memory Wiped⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You also said it was a Hollywood production.

  I’m neutral on your overall argument, I think it’s a little frivolous. I don’t know of any way to accurately guage how effective CCP methods are, and I have no personal experience with living in China, so a comparison is impossible for me to make. Your opinion is noted, but it’s just a random opinion to me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Memory Wiped⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, we are talking about education. You can receive education in all of these things in more advanced studies, it is available and anyone can choose it. This is because the information is not suppressed.

  I’m unfamiliar with this PR campaign you’re discussing. Is this the film you’re talking about?

  en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_for_Haditha

  If so, it’s British and you seem to have your facts incorrect. Though I do agree the DoD engages in domestic propaganda and is overly aggressive with classifying information, no question about that. This does not prevent any American from receiving an education that includes what is known of the real events, however.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Memory Wiped⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  North Dakota makes sense, that’s a fairly conservative region if I’m not mistaken. I’m from a more purple region.

  I don’t expect everything to be covered in junior high or high school, there isn’t enough time in a general US history or world history class to focus on most details. They’re not US imperialism classes, they’re generalist with a lot of material worthy of time and attention. This is what more advanced studies are for.

  This is entirely different from actively suppressing information. The information is available, even if teaching it to all teenagers is not mandatory. One thing is active suppression, another is prioritization of limited time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Memory Wiped⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I learned about around half of that in junior high and high school. Where did you study? That has a lot to do with it, our education system is controlled at the local level by individual school boards.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Memory Wiped⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  We also had discussions on war crimes, though that wasn’t until high school.

  This was before 9/11, so the War on Terror had not happened yet. It was mainly focused on Vietnam. We did learn about some of the covert stuff, but most of it was not covered.

  I agree none of it is part of mainstream US discourse, but neither is the vast majority of the things covered in history class. This reflects American anti-intellectualism overall imo.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Memory Wiped⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It is kinda weird. We don’t have any problems talking about our historical atrocities, unless your community is really, really conservative. I first learned about the Trail of Tears in elementary school, we even took a field trip to a historical location on it. That’s some heavy shit for a little kid. We didn’t go into all the gory details, but the wide scale of the suffering and betrayal we committed was covered.

  Even into current events, American bombs falling on Gaza was a big deal.