rational_lib
@rational_lib@lemmy.world
- Comment on What Did William Burrito Mean by This? 1 day ago:
Getting sick of all this observational humor.
- Comment on How does this pic show that Elon Musk doesnt know SQL? 5 days ago:
To me I’m not really sure what his reply even means. I think it’s some attempt at a joke, but I figure the joke can be broken down into two potential jokes that fail for different, embarrassing reasons:
Interpretation 1: The government is so advanced it doesn’t use SQL - This interpretation is unlikely given that Elon is trying to portray the government as in need of reform. But it would make more sense if coming from a NoSQL type who thinks SQL needs to be removed from everywhere. NoSQL Guy is someone many software devs are familiar with who takes the sometimes-good idea of avoiding SQL and takes it way too far. Elon being NoSQL Guy would be dumb, but not as dumb as the more likely interpretation #2.
Interpretation 2: The government is so backward it doesn’t use SQL - I think this is the more likely interpretation as it would be consistent with Elon’s ideology, but it really falls flat because SQL is far from being cutting-edge. There has kind of been a trend of moving away from SQL (with considerable controversy) over the last 10 years or so and it’s really surprising that Elon seems completely unaware of that.
- Comment on Yeah, let's stop with this "don't judge people for their poiltics" bullshit 1 week ago:
The most successful tactic of the right has been judging the left for their politics - “woke” etc. The left needs to be similarly unabashed.
But it needs to be more fun and less serious than this post. Why is there no “screaming maga” meme? Surely there’s plenty of those images, and more.
- Comment on We're in the endgame now 1 week ago:
If you were to try to drive someone else’s car, that would be illegal
If you were to try to get money from a bank account that’s not yours, that’s also illegal
Vice Presidents aren’t allowed to fuck couches. - Comment on Why was Hitler so mean and hateful toward one group or another? I find it hard to believe he woke up one day and said you and you suck but these people over here are good. Taking it so far as killing? 1 week ago:
Gustav Bauer had no religious affiliation and in any case he did not sign the Treaty of Versailles. It was signed for Germany by Matthias Erzberger, who was also not Jewish. But, those sorts of facts tended to make little difference to the German far right of that time which basically branded everyone they didn’t like as Jews.
- Comment on Why was Hitler so mean and hateful toward one group or another? I find it hard to believe he woke up one day and said you and you suck but these people over here are good. Taking it so far as killing? 1 week ago:
There’s probably as many theories as there are people.
My own is that cognitive dissonance is a powerful force, especially for a narcissist. Hitler spent 4 of the best years of his life is the pure misery of the trenches of WWI, and even worse - running between the trenches to deliver messages. He was gassed so badly it put him in the hospital for the final month of the war. Hitler was probably also deluded about Germany’s failing position in the war, probably kept in the dark by German propaganda and made quite gullible by his fierce patriotism. So when Germany surrendered, that must have actually both shocking and enraging for him. And we know that because he frequently attacked the treaty of Versailles, even before he was known to be anti-semetic.
The “stab in the back” myth is the idea that Germany’s surrender was corruptly carried out by politicians, and due to common antisemitism across Germany and Europe generally it soon focused on Jews. In reality there was virtually no Jewish people significantly involved with the surrender and events leading up to it, but that didn’t matter because as is often the case today, emotional truth is more important than reality. Given that Hitler couldn’t possibly bring himself to believe that he incurred tremendous pain and suffering by voluntarily and stupidly buying into an imperialistic war that was doomed to failure from the start, the stab in the back myth would’ve been extremely appealing to him. He wanted to believe it, so he did.
So when he happened to be assigned to monitor the DAP - the predecessor to the Nazi Party - he was ready to wholeheartedly accept their antisemitic ideas. Even though he seemed to get along with Jewish officers during the war, by a year after the war he was already talking about “removing” the Jews.
- Comment on Is anyone planning on doing anything about trump creating a concentration camp at guantanamo bay? 3 weeks ago:
I already did, it didn’t work.
- Comment on Amazon Artificially Discounting Items $0.01 Below the Free Shipping Limit 3 weeks ago:
Retail capitalists are fine, but Amazon, Walmart, and Target all did the maga loyalty thing after Trump’s win. I don’t need to buy from someone who shares my politics or even doesn’t disagree with me, I just need them to not be outright oligarchs using my money to support dictators.
- Comment on Amazon Artificially Discounting Items $0.01 Below the Free Shipping Limit 3 weeks ago:
What’s the alternative? The other places I can order a big box of cheap stuff from (Walmart, Target) are run by even worse people and have even worse service.
I once ordered porcelain plates from target and they arrived with no packaging. I don’t mean insufficient packaging, I mean four plates just thrown in a giant box with absolutely nothing else. Somehow 3 were not broken.
- Comment on Anon questions North Korea 4 weeks ago:
Correct, sorted by arable land %, NK is actually pretty high on the list. The land is arable, but the dictator is unbearable.
- Comment on A totally normal figure of cancer signaling pathways 5 weeks ago:
“I have lung cancer? How bad is it?”
“Well let’s just say it’s…non-small lung cancer.” - Comment on Anon goes on a first date 5 weeks ago:
If you’re not a normie, don’t match with hardcore normies. Usually it’s pretty easy to tell.
- Comment on Behold, the peak of Twitter (formerly renamed to X) 5 weeks ago:
Really it’s the celebrities more than others. What’s really inexcusable is that so many Democratic politicians still have accounts - AOC, Bernie, the whole gang is still there.
- Comment on My favorite 1 month ago:
Olive Garden is Nickelback for pasta restaurants.
Never Again
- Comment on bird flu 1 month ago:
Isn’t that how these diseases are generated in the first place?
No, livestock diseases were a problem long before vaccination. In fact it’s been hypothesized that the reason Europeans killed off Native Americans with disease instead of the other way around is that European livestock spread so much disease that it meant Europeans carried and were immune to a wide variety of diseases.
As for why livestock diseases are so common, it’s probably due to the obvious - the cramped conditions, often in close contact with other animals. Think of the classic Chinese wet market with animals from many different places stacked in cages on top of each other with fluids flying all over. That’s the real bio weapons lab.
- Comment on If investing in the S&P 500 is such a surefire way to make money, then why isn't everyone doing it? 1 month ago:
A large number of us CAN be millionaires.
It’s actually technically correct that we all can be millionaires, at least on a household basis. The mean household wealth in the US was $1.06 million as of 2022, by now it’s undoubtedly higher. So with a full redistribution of wealth every household would have over $1 million.
In reality though the median household wealth is just under $200k as of 2022, and doesn’t rise as consistently so who knows where it is now.
- Comment on If investing in the S&P 500 is such a surefire way to make money, then why isn't everyone doing it? 1 month ago:
In my experience:
- A lot of people do this with 401ks and such because many times there aren’t many other options.
- People I know who are serious investors with a lot of money tend to not invest much in the S&P 500 because they think of themselves as superior investors, but I don’t know of anyone for whom this is actually true based on past performance.
- I invest some 20% of my money in the S&P 500, which is probably not as much as I should. It’s some combination of the above hubris, which is natural, wanting to be diversified, and enjoying gambling on individual stocks.
- Comment on "Images of 'Saint Luigi Mangione, The patron saint of health care justice' have been making rounds on social media" 1 month ago:
Not quite, in America we always think of the sacrificed as belonging to the other tribe.
- Comment on Happy birthday, peon 2 months ago:
And the shoes (which are abnormally large) don’t look like any work boots I’ve ever seen, resembling trail running shoes but bigger. The laces seem to be oddly non-existent and instead the straps for lacing them appear to connect with each other.
AI can get reflections right, just when it doesn’t it can be very creepy.
- Comment on Iraq War was preceded by the largest worldwide non-violent protests in history and the war happened anyway. 2 months ago:
It was also preceded by a violent act of terrorism that made people support whatever the president wanted to do in the middle east.
- Comment on Charities of Employees from "non-profit" I was going to donate too 2 months ago:
If paying a CEO $200k more makes the charity $2 million more, it’s a no-brainer. Billionaires love to give to animal-related causes, so that’s easily plausible.
In reality of course, predicting the amounts of money a CEO will bring in, so it becomes a nepo-baby-fest like everything else. People with rich connections are in high demand at pretty much every entity that has a need to raise money, so they cost a lot.
Then of course you have the problem that in the wider scope, this reality creates an arms-race between charities for fundraising potential that diverts from the causes themselves. The only real solution to that problem is to punish charities that pay their officers too much by not giving them money.
- Comment on You don't need to answer this 2 months ago:
I think the message is that there’s a thin line between the hero and the villain. The villain feels the same anger and desire for justice we all do. Just add a bit of delusion, and you can turn Gandhi into Hitler, or Batman into the Joker.
- Comment on Carcinisation? 2 months ago:
There’s two kinds of ground transportation: off-roading, and should be a train.
- Comment on Causes of Death in London (1623) 2 months ago:
“And in other news, the death figures were released today. Once again, the leading cause of death is: being a baby. Over the last year, 2,268 infants died naturally of babyness.”
- Comment on Wait, my body's own heat is enough? Always has been. 2 months ago:
Just embrace the cold and build up your brown fat which burns calories to keep you warm so you can eat pizza all day and stay skinny*.
- Not really but sorta
- Comment on The Prisoner's Trolley Problemma 2 months ago:
Yell to the guy on the other side that I’m going to pull the lever, so he’d better not.
Then let it go because that both maximizes global utility and poses the lowest risk of the worst case scenario.
- Comment on I am a very liberal person and I have very liberal children, except for one. I'm pretty sure my Gen Z son has been taken in by fascist doctrine. What can I get him for Christmas? 2 months ago:
I’d be curious about what makes him different from the others. There’s been some research regarding fluid intelligence* vs. crystalized intelligence, where liberals tend to be more on the fluid side. It kind of makes sense because rather than trying to figure out what they can’t understand off the bat, conservatives tend to rage against it.
As far as gifts, I dunno. Maybe a puzzle game? I don’t know what’s big in the puzzle game world now, if anything. The idea is make your son more comfortable with the idea of tackling novel problems instead of trying to cram them into an existing framework.
*it’s called “intelligence” but I tend to think of it more like a thinking strategy. Fluid intelligence being “can I think of a way to solve this?” while crystallized intelligence is “what strategy that I’m familiar with already can solve this?”
- Comment on Why does it seem most people, mainly conservatives, against Trans people? Unless I am wrong I never heard of one shooting up a school church or whatever. The ones I have met have been pretty cool. 2 months ago:
They’re a convenient political target because it makes insecure men not want to be associated with them. Believe it or not, a similar thing happened last time Republicans won the popular vote in 2004 - back then the issue was gay marriage. Bush went hard on opposing that and it helped him win.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 2 months ago:
It’s because there’s no opposing corporate interest to building nuclear weapons. The way the world works is: profitable shit happens, no matter what the hippies think about it. See: every other environmental issue.
- Comment on Habits of Insects 2 months ago:
The world just keeps getting more and more efficient at being dumb. Let’s just count all the appallingly stupid things crammed into this small meme with 2 million views:
- "Insurrection Barbie"
- Celebrating the defunding of useful scientific research by a new government efficiency agency
- This new agency is named after a cryptocurrency
- The cryptocurrency in question was created as a joke to satirize cryptocurrencies, but became a top prominent cryptocurrency itself.
- The “Department of Government Efficiency Agency” has 2 heads, both of whom have other primary jobs and were chosen in return for political support.
- There is also already an existing government agency that does the exact same thing, called the “Government Accountability Office”. But most people seem to be unaware of it, likely because it’s not named after a cryptocurrency/dog meme.
- This whole scheme was the idea of the richest person in the world.
Idiocracy didn’t happen because of unnatural selection, it happened because social media unlocked a runaway chain reaction of stupidity.