SwingingTheLamp
@SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip
- Comment on havent had it since friday🫠 12 hours ago:
- Comment on havent had it since friday🫠 14 hours ago:
Since Friday, you say? Got you beat, it’s only been since Sunday.
(A Sunday in 2016.)
- Comment on Honk 1 day ago:
Most animals are full of microplastics these days, but I’m thinking that almost none have any number of letters in them. (Unless maybe cow magnets have a model number stamped on them?)
- Comment on Benefits are limnited, but I guess there's no end to the liminal space photographs you can take 2 days ago:
True, but to be clear:
Limnology : oceanography :: Freshwater biologist : marine biologist
- Comment on Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts? 5 days ago:
Does the book posit new laws of physics, or even call into question the current set? That’s what Gallileo did, but the promotional copy for the book doesn’t suggest that it does.
- Comment on a little palate cleanser from my other posts🫶 5 days ago:
Note to self: Send unsolicited duck pix…
- Comment on Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts? 6 days ago:
If a book claims something that’s fundamentally impossible by the laws of physics, I don’t need to read it to dismiss it.
- Comment on Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts? 6 days ago:
With all due respect, you’ve latched onto 1. my introductory literary device for framing the argument, and 2. where I dismiss the book based on my argument, but missed my argument, which I would succinctly state as: By definition, we don’t know anything about the supernatural, but we know the natural world extremely well, and we can explain the way that it behaves fully and completely without supernatural influence. Not only do we lack evidence of the supernatural, the evidence that we do have rules it out.
- Comment on Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts? 6 days ago:
That’s essentially a "god of the gaps" argument, i.e. if we cannot demonstrate it scientifically, therefore it must be God, or ghosts, or the Great Bacterial Collective Intelligence. But, in any case, turn that question around: do we have good reason to scientifically exclude the possibility of ghosts? And the answer there is a very strong ‘yes’.
Ryan North has a lot of Dinosaur Comics exploring concepts around ghosts, but the one that sticks in my mind is the one in which T-Rex muses about finding out what makes a poltergeist angry, triggering its ire constantly, and connecting the object(s) it manipulates to a generator in order to get infinite free energy.
Because, the physical world that we know and inhabit works on energy. For a ghost to interact with our world, it would simply have to inject energy into it. Sound, light, heat, et cetera, it’s energy. There’s no way around it. And we have laws of physics, like conservation of energy, which we very, very, very thoroughly tested at the scale, energy level, and relativistic velocities (that is, our human environment) at which ghosts would interact. In our natural world, we’d have to see macroscopic effects without causes, and energy entering or leaving the system. We’d be able to measure it, but we have not. E = mv2, and the two sides of the equation balance, always.
More prosaically, another Dinosaur Comics strip posits that ghosts must be blind because they’re invisible. Invisibility means that all light passes through them, but if it doesn’t strike whatever ghosts use for photoreceptors, they’d by needs be blind. If their eyes did intercept light so that they were able to see, then if a ghost was watching you in a bright room, you’d at least see the faint shadows of its retinas. (Creepy!) In short, we don’t have to make any claims about the supernatural to say that if ghosts, or other supernatural phenomenon, interact with our natural world, we’d have to be able to see and measure the effect beyond subjective reports. However, we don’t, and there really just aren’t any gaps in the physics for ghosts to reside in.
As for the book, well, we all live inside these meat-based processors that are not exactly reliable in interpreting sensory input, or making narrative sense of it, and are well-known to just fabricate experiences and memories out of the ether when the sensory input is absent, scrambled, or just not interesting enough. It seems to me that the strongest likelihood is that brains did what brains habitually do (i.e. come up with fantastical stories), and that our theory of physics is pretty decent, since it has enabled us to create all sorts of technology.
- Comment on Don't we all hate this 1 week ago:
The meme is fine, it’s the comments. If a business is following the law, the business must pass along the full amount of donated money, and does not get a tax deduction. I tried to look up some numbers, and found that many companies do not even report the amounts they collect, so they’re not doing it for media coverage. Agree with me or not, those are the facts.
- Comment on Don't we all hate this 1 week ago:
Oh, for Pete’s sake! If you don’t want to donate, don’t donate, but at least get the facts, please. There’s plenty of stuff in the world to get angry about right now that’s real. In reality:
- The store has to book your donation as “unearned revenue,” that is, money it collected, but is not theirs. Charitable donations collected through the registers do not count as the store’s income. Giving the lump sum to the charity does not count as a store expense. The store is merely a custodian of the money until transferring it to the charity.
- YOU get the tax deduction, not the store. If you itemize your tax deductions (and do not take the standard deduction), you can submit the register receipt as proof of a donation, and get the tax benefit.
- The media coverage of these donations for PR benefit is basically nil. Off the top of your head, name the last 3 feel-good stories about grocery store charity donations that you saw in the news. (Can you name even one? I can’t.)
- Stores often do add some of their own money to the donation, but charitable donations are an “above the line” adjustment to income, not a “below the line” refundable credit. That is, the value of the write-off is the amount of tax the store avoided, which is always less then the amount of money it gave.
Last time I was at a grocery, and the payment terminal asked my to round up, I did. I see it as a win-win-win. I win because I can feel good about donating, even if it was only 14 cents. The store wins by some of my good feelings transferring to it; as well, the people who run the store are human, and also want to feel good about themselves by helping a charity. The charity itself wins by getting a couple thousand dollars that it wouldn’t have received otherwise. Despite my best intentions, I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to donate to that organization, and absolutely would not have bothered to give a tiny amount like 14 cents. But every little bit helps, and a few cents each from hundreds people adds up. I see this as a frictionless way to do some good.
Source: Used to work at a family-owned grocery store.
- Comment on meanwhile on instagram 1 week ago:
No, for pushing the COVID-19 vaccine. As I keep telling people, it was the “plandemic” that made him get the jab which is what made his neck just do that. The liberals pinned it on a nice boy from a MAGA family to protect Big Pharma.
- Comment on I don't know the reason why. 1 week ago:
Was this a regional thing? In my memory, they were all dyed green.
- Comment on Our kryptonite 1 week ago:
Life pro tip: While humans are indeed vulnerable to gamma rays from uranium, it’s usually all around more expedient to just hit ‘em with it. And for that, many rocks will do, even just plain old feldspar.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Oy vey, I’ve experienced this for the past 30 years, in which time no Democrat has ever been able to give me a positive reason to vote for their candidate. Rather, only browbeating about how I’m to blame for Republicans winning, like I owed them my vote.
Even though I’d never voted for a Democrat for President. Well, until Biden, and then as a sort of Hail Mary last attempt to forestall the fascist takeover that’d been openly brewing for at least those 30 years. And what’d I get for voting for the Democrat? Sweet fuck-all, that’s what! The signs were there that Biden was not the man to meet the moment, and several op-eds I read even before the 2020 election warned that his win might be a Pyrric victory. (Nor to diss the man; he’d have made a great Republican President in the 1950’s.) And then he did nothing about the COUP ATTEMPT for 2 1/2 years. I voted in-person absentee, and [REDACTED] filed a lawsuit to throw out my vote, not absentee ballots in all of Wisconsin, mind, but my county specifically, and Biden did nothing.
Then, after I voted for Harris, and she lost, it came out in a few quiet news articles that her campaign knew that her support of the Gaza genocide would cost her some votes. To re-state that: Killing civilians in Palestine was more important to the Harris campaign than allegedly saving the U.S. Ho-lee fuck!
So that’s it, I’m done. If the United States can’t come up with even one major political party that opposes literal genocide, is it worth saving? (And no, I don’t buy that line about protecting other marginalized groups. Once a party has decided that it’s okay to throw people under the bus, it’s only a matter of whom, which they proved almost immediately by speculating that maybe they should’ve ditched trans people.)
Hmm, yeah, I’m triggered. Nice to have a rant now and again.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Not a very useful heuristic to identify bots and paid shills, given that there’s always an election in the future, eh?
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
This line is extra hilarious after the election is over, and they’re still here.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
An incomplete image, since all of those other groups are just slightly further down the track on the D side.
- Comment on Too young to understand what this is? 2 weeks ago:
Pfft! It’s 2026 now… the stereo in my car holds 6 CDs.
- Comment on You want a easy way to convert Fahrenheit to Centigrade? Subtract 30 and divide by 2 2 weeks ago:
This is a shitpost? Seems like a LPT as a useful, quick approximation, since the real formula is “subtract 32, divide by 9/5”. 30≈32, and 2≈9/5, as long as you’re figuring out what to wear for the day, not working in a chemistry lab. (Don’t burn your meth, fer gawdsakes!)
For 32°F, the approximation is 1°C, and even where the scales align at -40°, it works out to -35°C.
- Comment on Tune a fish 2 weeks ago:
But a water heater is going to produce hot water, right? That’s what it does. It’s redundant to call it a hot water heater, unless you have multiple water heaters for different temperatures, then you’d need to specify, like the lukewarm water heater. I’ll note that we don’t call them hot food heaters, warm space heaters, or warm floor heaters, because we know that’s going to be the result.
- Comment on Tune a fish 2 weeks ago:
Okay, so can I ask about the “hot water heater” then? Do some people have a tepid water heater in their homes? 🤨
- Comment on Follow me for more shitty diet tips 2 weeks ago:
A nutritionist and a personal chef? I don’t have that kind of money.
- Comment on Can't believe it's been renamed for a year now! 2 weeks ago:
About 30 years ago, a local company paid for the naming rights of the county arena and event center. The amount was so absurdly low that I found it insulting. I decided that it didn’t pay me to call it that, but I’m open to offers. In any case, everybody knows what I mean when I say “Coliseum and Expo Center.”
So for years now, I’ve been thinking that we need to create a web site or app that we can use to reach consensus on what places should be called. None of this corporate name claptrap. If we the citizens pay for a pro sports stadium with our taxes, then we can call it what want! If enough people decide on a place’s name, that’s common usage, and that simply becomes what it’s called.
- Comment on Wtf 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on A Statement From The White House 3 weeks ago:
BTW, this is one of those Mandela Effect things. The actual brand name is singular: Depend®
- Comment on OK, it looks nice, but you get an award for it? 3 weeks ago:
If you do it well enough.
- Comment on I detect no errors of logic here 3 weeks ago:
That’s exactly what I mean. They know they’re into the most depraved shit, and they like it because it’s a way to break taboos and demonstrate their power. (Power is the real paraphilia.) I feel like it’s literally incomprehensible to them that somebody with the connections and influence to do it (e.g. Hunter Biden), too, just… wouldn’t. Because of course everybody wants to! So if Biden wasn’t in Epstein’s orbit, it must have driven them mad wondering what he was doing that was so much better (by their taboo-breaking standards) than what they were doing.
- Comment on I detect no errors of logic here 3 weeks ago:
It all makes sense to me now: The Grand Old Pedophiles were obsessed with Hunter Biden because, if he wasn’t in the Epstein files, he must’ve been into some real shit, right? Their minds just can’t process the idea that a powerful man would be satisfied with vanilla stuff like sex with consenting adults.
- Comment on Before you get vaccinated, consider this 3 weeks ago:
It wasn’t the vaccine, that was just a cursed year. Everybody born in 1798 has died, too.
