Signtist
@Signtist@bookwyr.me
Formerly /u/Signtist@lemm.ee
- Comment on take their money and arrest those responsible 1 day ago:
Honestly, I believe the main roadblock is the idea that change will need to happen at all. The sad truth is that most people are fine with contributing to climate change so long as they can keep doing what they’re accustomed to doing.
The only way I can see for meaningful climate action to happen is to get people on board with regulation polluters while allowing them to be ignorant to the fact that lifestyle changes will have to follow, and then when they’re forced to adapt, they will. People are much better at changing when they can’t afford not to than when they have the option to just keep on doing what they always have.
People are also a lot more likely to make sacrifices to keep up momentum after a win like regulating polluters; few people are going to change first when they can see a company like Shell - polluting more every day than they have in their entire lives - going unchecked. A change has to happen to give them hope that the climate can even be saved before they try to make changes themselves to save it.
- Comment on PSBLACKOUT (boycott of PlayStation) 3 days ago:
I won’t be turning mine on, but that’s only because I recently hacked my GameCube, so I’ll be playing that until I decide to go back.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
You’re both right. He had good intentions, but good intentions implemented in bad ways can be - and often are - just as harmful as bad intentions. If you want to be beneficial for society, you can’t just hope for the best: you need to actively assess whether your actions are helping, and course correct if they aren’t. It’s a tiresome, often thankless job, but it’s required to do actual good.
- Comment on Me too! Or not? Whichever! 4 days ago:
Never assume anyone understands anything - if there’s something important people need to know, shout it from the rooftops until everyone in the world can recite it in their sleep, and even then don’t assume they’ve truly understood it.
There’s no such thing as beating a dead horse on important topics. Not to mention that the thing that’s getting beaten is the “I’m on the list lol!” crap - there’s been far too little discussion about the censorship issue itself.
- Comment on Me too! Or not? Whichever! 4 days ago:
The issue isn’t who or what was on the list, the issue is that the list was hidden. One of the biggest issues with Reddit is that they can censor people they disagree with even against the will of the users. Tesseract was doing exactly that on a platform specifically designed to prevent it.
Sure, different instances can have their own block lists, and users need to find one that works for them, but those are all clearly listed. This one was hidden, causing people who thought they were getting all the information available to them on this platform to instead be getting a tailored list of only what information was deemed acceptable by some person they don’t even know. It’s a major problem.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
This is it. For profit companies exit to make a profit, not a product. Any time you ask “why did they do this thing that makes the product worse?” remember that the product doesn’t matter to them, only the money it makes. If a change makes more money, they’ll do it.
Some might think a worse product means worse sales and less profit, but they’d be wrong. Enough people buy products regardless of their qualify that it’s often more profitable to simply make the product as cheap as possible while maintaining just barely enough of the most basic functionality to meet the definition of what they’re trying to sell.
- Comment on "Censorship" ☠️ 2 weeks ago:
The linked study doesn’t feature any children being harmed, and there are plenty of ways to safely study the dark sides of the human psyche indirectly. Psychology research is often done in this way, as even acceptable behavior is difficult to study directly, since people often act differently when they know they’re being examined.
- Comment on Portlandia was spot on 2 weeks ago:
What I remember most from 1998 were commercials for flavored sugar water where kids turned into metallic early-CGI goop and rocketed through the air toward a woman carrying a tray of pouches so they could get there faster to consume.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, I didn’t understand people who ask “Why do this thing that makes money if it inconveniences the customer?” as if the customer ever mattered to them in the first place. The only reason they ever catered to us is because we used to simply collectively not buy things from companies that didn’t. As soon as they convinced us to spend indiscriminately, any reason to give us anything we want over something more profitable went out the window.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Sure, and a lion being alive results in a “massive loss of life” as well, so long as you consider a single animal’s influence to be “massive,” but that doesn’t mean we kill them. People don’t want to kill things because they don’t want to do it themselves, not because they specifically want to limit total deaths. Not saying it’s better, but it’s still an option, and it’s still better to let the people who don’t want to kill them neuter them instead, rather than not helping at all.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Sure, and plenty of people do, but the people who don’t want to kill them can neuter them - there’s no drawback to gain their help when the alternative is that they simply wouldn’t help. So I’m still confused about why this post is implying that a person who neutered one is somehow making a big mistake.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Because a lot of people consider killing an animal to be unethical.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Well, the reason some people don’t kill them is because they consider it unethical to purposefully stop a life, but besides the 5-15 year offset for lifespan, it’ll still be effective in stopping the problem. The issue with invasive species is that they breed quickly and outcompete the native species due to that factor, but that wouldn’t happen if they prevented the invasive species from breeding. Killing them all or neutering them all barely makes a difference; given a few years, they both result in none remaining.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Sure, but then it dies without having children, stopping the resource consumption. It might be delayed, but it’s still a halting force. I’m also confused as to what the issue is - do they have some way of bypassing being neutered?
- Comment on Skyleeeerrr 2 weeks ago:
Ultimately, people care much more about what affects their own life than what affects others’. A murderer might be doing objectively worse things, but to someone not affected by those killings, someone who is annoying them will occupy a greater space in their brain, and get a bigger reaction.
- Comment on OHGODOHGODOHGODOHGODOH 2 weeks ago:
Just run the disposal for a while then use a straw.
- Comment on Microsoft Teams status 2 weeks ago:
Caffeine’s great. I use it to keep my computer on if I’m out doing errands so I can check my emails and whatnot with a remote desktop through my phone.
- Comment on Why is so difficult to organize a strike 3 weeks ago:
Ah, gotcha. Still, looks like a fun read - I’ll check it out. Thanks for taking the time to explain it!
- Comment on Why is so difficult to organize a strike 3 weeks ago:
So it’s just theoretical mathematics based on a given amount of assumed possible choices? Is there even a way to truly apply it to a real-world scenario as complicated as large-group human behavior?
- Comment on Can anyone confirm accuracy? 3 weeks ago:
It gets the point across well enough, but there are some issues if you get deeper with it.
First, the colors would swap back and forth much more often, blurring together into a single color at this scale, much like how small alternating black and white dots can be used to make us see a gray color. We can get around that issue by assuming that they’re just organized into groups by parent of origin, rather than being actual representation of the exact DNA order, though.
Next, the proportion of colors is off, especially in the last generation. You’ll get different amounts of DNA from one progenitor to another, but it’s always pretty close to an equal split halved by generation, so the first 2 bears in the 3rd generation would be much closer to the proportions seen in the 3rd than they really are, and the bears in the 4th generation would all be 1/2 orange, 1/4 green, and 1/8 each of red and yellow.
Finally, the first 2 bears of the 3rd generation seem to have been given the “missing” DNA from their red/yellow parent, with one having mostly red and a little yellow, and the other having mostly yellow with a little red. While this is technically possible, it’s no more likely than any other of the near-infinite variations 2 separate siblings could have instead. Someone using this as a way to understand inheritance may get the incorrect notion that one sibling inherits what DNA the previous sibling didn’t, when it’s instead completely random each time.
Ultimately, this is a good way to introduce the concept of genetics and inheritance to someone who may be having trouble picturing it in their mind, but more information would need to be provided for them to truly understand it.
- Comment on Why is so difficult to organize a strike 3 weeks ago:
I honestly know nothing about game theory, so I don’t doubt that there are aspects that account for irrational behavior like meaningless self sabotage, but I don’t recall the prisoner’s dilemma having allowing one of the prisoners to specifically choose to be imprisoned for the maximum sentence in exchange for the other prisoner to also be imprisoned that same amount. Is there a version that has that option, or something similar? Every version I’ve seen assumes they would never do something so completely against their own self-interest.
One of the most common reasons for people not coming together I’ve seen is the classic “Sure, this makes it harder for everyone, but we can weather it so long as we know it’s harder for those damn (insert innocent group here)!” which of course only makes things unnecessarily harder for both groups, and only benefits their shared enemies. If that’s not something that game theory would cover, then I don’t know how well it would be able to be applied to our inability to organize effective resistance to an oppressive government.
If it is something that’s covered, I’d love an example! I could use a bit of hope that we’ll rise up eventually.
- Comment on Anon ruins christmas 3 weeks ago:
Sounds like Atheism, like all belief systems, empowered an asshole with self-righteous validation. Even if you bet on the right horse, it doesn’t mean everything you do is automatically justified; empathy is a higher order law.
- Comment on Good for him. 4 weeks ago:
Flat earth isn’t the scam itself, it’s the hook. There are a million ways to get people into the conspiracy theory sphere, but once they’re hooked on one thing, they’re primed to believe everything else. It took less than a year from my mom to go from watching videos “asking questions” about science to spending a bunch of money on everything from silver supplements and ivermectin to 5g blockers and resonance machines.
The point of flat earth and related conspiracies is that they prey on people’s misunderstanding of science and mathematics (why Earth round if look flat?) to sow doubt in the collective understanding of reality as a whole. Once that happens, you can tell them anything isn’t what it seems and they’ll believe you, and sell them anything to fix it, and they’ll pay you.
- Comment on Anon is a nostalgic gamer 4 weeks ago:
DK64. I see so much hate for it now, with people saying there are way too many collectibles, but those people fail to realize that back then most kids only had a few games that they just had to play over and over again if they wanted to play video games at all. To have a game that always had a new thing to collect even when you went to the same level for the 1000th time was a godsend.
- Comment on Don't have kids 4 weeks ago:
Eh, it only touches the gasketing, but it would probably still get some on the inner part of it you’d need to clean with a pipe cleaner or something, yeah.
- Comment on Don't have kids 4 weeks ago:
Eh, assuming you’re not allergic, just roll down the windows and drive it to a car wash. 15 minute $15 fix, just remember to roll the windows back up before it starts.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, my wife will often respond with “I know you think I’m beautiful” which I think means the same thing. But that’s kinda the point - beauty isn’t objective. If someone can see you’re beautiful, that means you’re beautiful, because we’re the ones who made up the concept, so we get to decide what meets the cutoff. Now, yes, that means you can decide that you don’t meet the cutoff, but why do that?
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
I almost got her with something similar a couple days ago, but she caught on.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
10 years ago I told my girlfriend I’d get her to admit she’s beautiful one day. She’s my wife now, and I still haven’t managed it. I’m glad she’s going to therapy now to try to get a better self image, but I’d have kept trying for the rest of my life regardless.
- Comment on Anon's lil bro goes through his first break up 4 weeks ago:
Responsive doesn’t mean agreeable. But ultimately, if you’re part of a group where most of the members want to hate a certain other group for something they can’t change, and your disagreement isn’t likely to change the dynamics of that group to make them stop being hateful, then as I said earlier, it’s a sign you should leave that group.