thebestaquaman

@thebestaquaman@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Team Car!⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  If I’m on a bike, notice a car coming up behind me, and don’t think it’s safe for them to pass, I will put myself in the middle of the road to block them.

  If they try some stupid and dangerous passing, I’m the one getting pulped. Putting yourself in the middle of the road is a very effective way of communicating “don’t even try to squeeze past me, there’s not enough space.” The most dangerous situations I’ve been in on a bike have been due to cars trying to squeeze past me when there isn’t enough space, it’s terrifying.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Team Car!⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I definitely agree with the sentiment, my top priority is to not get run over. I still walk confidently onto the crosswalk without pausing, while keeping a close eye on the approaching car so that I can get out of the way if they don’t stop.

  My experience is that if you hesitate, way too many drivers will just floor it in front of you, while if you give the impression that they’ll hit you if they don’t stop, they’ll hit the breaks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Team Car!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  The kamikaze cyclists give all of us a really bad time. I’m honestly surprised at how some people behave in traffic, knowing that they’re an unprotected meat bag moving at speeds far higher than what the human body is built for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Team Car!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I bike or walk pretty much everywhere I go, so my take on roads and traffic is that they’re usually far too car-centric (Norway). Even when I drive, I’m so used to thinking like a cyclist that I become very aware of how poorly roads are often designed around biking.

  With that said… The amount of cyclists with an apparent death wish is just staggering. Just two days ago I passed a cyclist in an 80 km/h zone. No issue there. Just around the next turn, I caught up to a second cyclist that I couldn’t immediately pass due to oncoming traffic. I’m behind this second cyclist, going downhill at maybe 50 km/h, with oncoming traffic on a relatively narrow road, when I notice that the first cyclist has caught up to us. Instead of placing himself behind me, he decided it was a brilliant idea to squeeze himself into the ≈ 1.5 m gap between me (a 6m long, 2-ton car going at 50 km/h) and the guard rail. At this point, I’m just sitting here terrified that I’ll end up accidentally squeezing him into the guard rail and killing him if I happen to move a couple centimeters too close to the edge of the road. I’m seriously afraid of breaking to let him in front of me, because I’m afraid he could hit my side-view mirror if I break unexpectedly (for him). There’s oncoming traffic, so I can’t move over to give him more space.

  To be honest, even when I’m biking myself I far too often find other cyclists to be absolute assholes with no respect for traffic rules. Of course, this doesn’t apply to everyone (by a long shot), but man those people cause the rest of us a lot of stress by being a danger to themselves and others.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hundreds of years ago trying to spice things up⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll betcha that one Greek dude was just the first to write it down. The trees and mountains know what kind of depraved shit our ancient ancestors were doing when everybody was living semi-naked in caves without showers to wash away the pheromones…

  ^doest’t^ ^sound^ ^too^ ^bad^

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Going Back ↪️🏨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve done this a lot, so I’m speaking from experience. It probably depends on where you’re travelling to though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Going Back ↪️🏨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re a low-maintenance kind of pet that just wants a pull-out sofa to sleep on, a shower, and possibly a kettle+microwave to make coffee+bad food for a day or two, you can find Airbnbs at ¼ the price of a hotel.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to move a sofa⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think we agree on the broad aspect here, but are disagreeing on minutiae: When I say it’s “not inherently built into the system”, what I mean is that if it was, my situation would be impossible to achieve within the system, not that the system doesn’t discourage it.

  The system most definitely heavily encourages exploitation, but it’s still possible to build a company within the current system that doesn’t rely on exploitation. That’s basically what I mean by “not inherent in the system”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ciao⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  But not if they have deodorant in them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to move a sofa⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  While what you’re saying is typically true, it’s not inherently built into the system. I work in a company owned by two friends. They own the company because they took out loans with their houses as security in order to finance the lease of an office space, buying work stations, and hiring themselves and me. I work on the same stuff as them, for the same hours, and make the same salary as them.

  If the company goes to shit, they have craploads of debt, while I don’t. We have a contract ensuring that I get a fair share of whatever comes in, including options to buy myself into the company at the same rate as what they initially invested once I can afford it. Nobody here is making excess money of others work. I have no reason to believe I’m being scammed.

  Again, what you’re saying is true in 99+ % of cases, but it doesn’t have to be that way. There’s nothing preventing a company from deciding that profits are split evenly among all employees (with the owners also acting as employees).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to move a sofa⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree with pretty much everything you’re saying here, I still want to comment on

  Middle class does not exist

  I do think it’s a reasonable term to separate those that actually make a decent salary, are self-employed, own their own company (at which they work) together with others, etc. from the more clearly exploited workers that have far too few rights and are not compensated fairly.

  I have no problem with selling my labour for money as long as I’m fairly compensated for it. Historically, the working class has not been.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If only someone would invent one⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I use a buff to keep warm in winter, couldn’t imagine wearing one in summer!

  a backwards hat to protect from the sun realistically offers dubious protection unless you are always walking directly away from the sun.

  I typically flip it depending on sun direction. I’ve found the neck to be most critical though, I don’t seem to burn as easily on the sides/front.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If only someone would invent one⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I was out hiking a couple years ago when I suddenly realised that I had become the guy with shades and a backwards cap. It’s practical: I want to prevent a sunburn in my neck (the backwards cap) and also not have the sun in my eyes (shades). I spent some time coming to terms with it, but now that’s how I’m regularly equipped in harsh sun in the mountains. It’s simply the optimal solution to sun protection while hiking (I’ve tried wide-brimmed hats, but they get caught in the wind too easily in my experience).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to move a sofa⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Anyone who makes their living by working, either for salary or hourly rate, is working class. Let’s just be on the same page about that.

  Aha! That’s where you got me! I was thinking “working class” in the more classical sense, referring to typical lower-paying jobs. I work for a living, but I’m definitely closer to what is typically considered “middle-class” in the sense that I make enough money that I feel well-off, but not enough that I could buy a new sofa just because moving the old one is too much hassle.

  Obligatory “Fuck the wealth-class”. “Passive income through ownership” is a convoluted way of saying “parasitic”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to move a sofa⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t see what about this that makes it a “working-class” thing? I thought it was common practice to help each other out in exchange for pizzas and beer in any part of society where people have friends? I see it primarily as an excuse to hang out while doing something together.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to move a sofa⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Societies that run on neighbours, friends, acquaintances, and that guy over there helping each other out in exchange for sharing pizza and beer afterwards are wholesome societies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A small moment in gaming history⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In October 2020, a paleontology conference’s virtual meeting platform blocked various words including “bone” (…)

  There’s a lot of gems here

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon's jobs⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Wait… sorry? In what world is 180k USD/year “working class”? I make the equivalent of like 70k/year before my nordic-country taxes take their share. That puts me decently well off here, at least above “working class” wage. I was in the US a couple years back, and prices were lower than they are here.

  Like, at 70k/yr (before Nordic taxes), I felt like I was pretty well off in the US. Definitely not lower-end at least. How on earth does that translate to 180k/yr being “working class”?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Ultimate Robot Knockout Legend (URKL) is a professional, freestyle combat sports league for full-sized humanoid robots. This is real.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh absolutely! It’s cool as hell! I think it could be even cooler if they put a camera in the robots head so that the controller could get the right point of view, that would probably make it more easy to be accurate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Ultimate Robot Knockout Legend (URKL) is a professional, freestyle combat sports league for full-sized humanoid robots. This is real.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It doesn’t look like they’re autonomous to me, it looks like they have a pre-programmed set of movements (like the kick-variants we’re seeing, and the “get up” motion), and being controlled by someone outside the ring. That also fits with the way they’re missing: it’s hard to get proper alignment when you’re looking from the side, and the pattern for how they’re missing looks a lot to me like how you often miss if you try to line up e.g. a remote controlled toy car on an opening to drive through when you’re sitting off to the side.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is an imposter⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s because an “IT engineer” is like an “engineer in chemistry”. You have so many sub-disciplines that a given engineer can’t be expected to know everything. Nobody is surprised if an organic chemist doesn’t know much about heat exchanger optimisation, or a chemical process engineer is confused by organic synthesis.

  In the same way, I’ve met devops guys that know surprisingly (to me) little about the intricacies of hand writing multi-threaded high performance calculation code. In the other hand, they’re wizards at stuff like load balancing and optimising how we use sub-processes for I/O, CPU-bound or memory bound tasks. You would think the two are very similar, but even then it quickly becomes clear that people really become specialists in their field.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I stick my head out a car window or a gust of wind hits my face it's like my throat closes and I can't breathe. How come motorcycle riders without helmets don't seem to have this problem?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Same thing (wind in face) applies to people skydiving though. Some skydivers use full helmets, but a lot don’t, and they’re typically falling at 100+ km/h. I think the “lose your breath from strong wind”-response is just an initial response that disappears once your body adjusts after a couple seconds. I went skydiving once (tandem), and can’t remember getting the same feeling as I do if I stick my head out of a moving car.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do people come up with ts⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  “200 KMH in the wrong lane”

  I’m honestly pretty impressed by some of the obscure/absurd stuff some of these artists come up with. This one is strangely specific, yet slightly absurd. What makes you conceive of calling an album that?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨time to eat⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I see you haven’t experienced “doing something with tunnel vision for 16 hours before realising that you’re shaking because you forgot to eat and that your last meal was dinner yesterday around 26 hours ago”. I don’t think you need the beetus to experience that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Need to yak? Skip emetics, hear about what the world's Most Moral Army's up to⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I also believe there are other ways for the government to fund itself.

  The government doesn’t just need to fund itself, it needs the resources to provide collective goods like a social safety net (unemployment, health care, legal assistance, and other fundamental rights). No matter how you twist it, those resources have to eventually come from the population. We can call that resource acquisition “taxing the population”, disregarding the details of how it’s done. In that case, taxes are an absolutely fundamental part of implementing a social contract that involves the collective helping each other provide collective goods. If you remove taxation (in this expanded sense) completely, you are no longer capable of sustaining a government of any kind: You’re left with a collection of individuals with no common programs. Note: I’m saying here that any common program implies that people are providing resources to the collective, which is a de facto form of taxation in the expanded sense.

  Would you expect me to fight a European army if I was in the US and they were invading to stop US war crimes?

  Disclaimer: The following retort is conceptual, not tied to your concrete example. If russia, or israel, or china, etc… invaded your country to displace your people, steal your homes and resources, and kill those in the way, do you believe that your government has any obligation to protect you? If so, who should risk their life to enact that protection? Who should decide whether to resist or not in the first place?

  The point of these questions is that if we believe that we have a right to protection, we are implying that someone has an obligation to protect. Furthermore, that someone’s obligation to protect is tied to your right to protection, not their personal opinion on who they want to fight. Basically, stating that you would only conditionally fight to protect your country against an invading force is incompatible with believing you have the right to protection from any invading force. If it comes down to opinion, there’s nothing in the way of everyone else stepping aside when your house is the one being bombed, because they personally feel that particular bombing is justified. If that can happen, you effectively have no right to protection.

  Furthermore, unless someone is obliged to protect, nobody can have a right to protection. These are two sides of the same coin. What I advocate for is that everyone in a society should have equal rights to protection, and that we should collectively share the attached obligation to protect.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Need to yak? Skip emetics, hear about what the world's Most Moral Army's up to⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  In the context of Modern US the majority of people pay the taxes and the minority of people who have the majority of wealth do not. Do you think the Social contract is already broken?

  Oh, absolutely YES. The social contract in the US is broken to the point where I don’t know if it can be repaired.

  Do you actually believe any modern war was actually for its stated purpose?

  That depends: I think Ukraine defending itself from a russian invasion is legitimate. I also think there are other wars where there is some party legitimately defending themselves against aggression. This question seems loaded in the sense that it appears to me like you’re asking if I think a war of aggression is defensible. On general grounds, I would immediately say no.

  Do you think it is wrong sending young men to die in the Middle East for oil profits?

  Obviously, YES. I honestly have no idea what would make you think that I would answer otherwise.

  It seems, based on your questions, like you think I’m some US imperialist. I couldn’t be much further from it.

  Having answered your questions, I would very much like to see your answers to mine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Need to yak? Skip emetics, hear about what the world's Most Moral Army's up to⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks! We definitely have major issues with the increasing wealth gap, I can only hope we’re able to deal with it sooner rather than later.

  vote for policies to address this wealth gap before it is too late

  I’m doing my part! (Ref. comment below that wondered if I was a Starship Troopers citizen)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Need to yak? Skip emetics, hear about what the world's Most Moral Army's up to⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m trying to be very explicit on two things: 1) My country also has plenty of issues that need work, but I think the overall system/philosophy behind how it currently works is worth defending. 2) I acknowledge that many countries don’t provide the social safety and protection for its citizens that warrants the contributions I’m talking about.

  I thought “I got mine” would mean that I was content with my own situation and therefore neglected the plight of others. That’s not at all what I’m doing or attempting to convey.

  Since you ask, I’m from Norway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Need to yak? Skip emetics, hear about what the world's Most Moral Army's up to⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks! I’m honestly surprised by how controversial it was to state that we should all have the same rights, and the same obligation to defend/uphold those rights for each other.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Need to yak? Skip emetics, hear about what the world's Most Moral Army's up to⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  How so? Do you not think that the right of social benefits should be coupled with the obligation to pay taxes if you’re capable? Do you actually believe that, if a neighbouring country invaded, you have some kind of right to hide in the basement while someone else mans the AA protecting your house?

  If the answer to either is “no”, then you probably agree with me.