thebestaquaman
@thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
- Comment on Is it sexist to say "I've never worn a wet dress before" 3 days ago:
In general, I don’t think it’s right to lie down flat whenever someone accuses you of saying something wrong, just because they think it was wrong.
It should be pretty fair to respond with a simple “why is that sexist? I think wet clothes are uncomfortable, so I assumed others did as well.”
- Comment on Do movie actors or actress keep the skills they learned? Like no one would screw with Keanu after seeing all the John Wick films? And if they did would they just be fucked from the start? 4 days ago:
Define “good”. I would say that any professional with dozens of hours of training, that could comfortably overcome any average person is “good”. Those are the people I trained with, and my impression is that Keanu is better than most of them.
- Comment on Do movie actors or actress keep the skills they learned? Like no one would screw with Keanu after seeing all the John Wick films? And if they did would they just be fucked from the start? 4 days ago:
IIRC, Keanu did some extensive firearms training in connection with John Wick. I’ve seen some footage of him on a training set with mobile targets, and would estimate that he’s better at handling a wide variety of firearms than a fair portion of military personnel are before the first time they see combat. This estimate is based on my own military training on similar courses.
I know the movies are choreographed, but I definitely wouldn’t give someone without extensive training good odds against him, based on footage I’ve seen from his training.
- Comment on It’s the little things 5 days ago:
If we want to go to extremes, zero surface tension means no nucleation barrier for critical bubbles. In practice, this implies that liquid water is unstable, and will spontaneously vaporise at all conditions.
So yeah, all life ends pretty quickly.
- Comment on It’s the little things 6 days ago:
It relies on differences in surface tension. If a liquid has a lower surface tension (energy) towards one surface than another, you get the typical capillary effect. In the case of water, the water-air energy is lower than the water-<whatever your capillary is made of> energy, so you get a capillary effect.
If water had exactly zero surface tension against every interface,
- it would not exhibit any capillary action
- life on earth would cease to exist quite quickly
- your socks would remain dry
- Comment on Why doesn't the Trump administration simply edit the Epstein files and release them? 1 week ago:
If you make any edits that contradict the physical evidence, you’ve outed yourself.
We’re talking about people that contradict both themselves and physical reality on a daily basis without their supporters batting an eye.
- Comment on Why doesn't the Trump administration simply edit the Epstein files and release them? 1 week ago:
Export to jpeg. Compress.
Can decent edits still be reliably detected?
- Comment on How come nobody does anything about North Korea? 1 week ago:
Great, it seems like we agree on the major points here! I’m not denying any of the major issues of the Afghan war, nor any of the glaring problems with how the whole “nation building” attempt went about. I’m very well aware of the history of the Afghan war, and have seen several of the documentaries you refer to that point out that it was largely known that the Afghan army would likely desert once the coalition left.
I’m not saying we don’t care.
That is quite literally what you said in your first comment, and is literally the only thing I’ve disagreed with you on so far (“the world simply doesn’t care”).
Many individual people did earnestly care, and tried their best.
This is literally the point I’ve been trying to make, but it seems like you keep misinterpreting me as saying the whole invasion was a misunderstood humanitarian operation. I’m not saying that.
- Comment on How come nobody does anything about North Korea? 1 week ago:
I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say here?
My point is that, while flimsy and flawed, there was in fact an education system and a humanitarian system in place that was propped up by coalition forces. This system did fall apart, leaving no system at all when the forces left. And yes, a bunch of Afghanis have every right to feel betrayed. I never said otherwise.
It’s not like Afghanistan is the only place where schools, hospitals and infrastructure has been financed by western countries. By and large, we spend a lot of money on these things because a significant portion of the population sees it as the right thing to do. Because we care, and want to help people.
What became very clear in Afghanistan was that you can’t force a population to be a liberal democracy. They have to be willing to fight for it themselves. The Afghan army (on paper) had several hundred thousand men, loads of heavy equipment, and several years to train and prepare for coalition forces leaving. There was a government structure in place. These things instantly folded when the coalition left because, clearly, enough people preferred Taliban to what the outsiders had forced upon them.
I guess I’m saying it’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. If you stay, you’re an oppressive occupier. If you leave, you’re a traitor that permits a humanitarian crisis to occur.
The OP here asked “why doesn’t anybody do anything about NK”, and my answer is that we (seem to) have learned that you can’t force democracy and human rights on a country. Chalking it up to “we don’t care” is reductionist.
- Comment on As expected every page in the book is blank 1 week ago:
I’ve always carried my balls in one big unisack that holds them all. However, I do think the idea of splitting my eggs between different baskets sounds interesting.
- Comment on As expected every page in the book is blank 1 week ago:
ball sacks
You guys have several?
- Comment on How come nobody does anything about North Korea? 1 week ago:
It didn’t go to shit when we left, it was shit from the beginning.
It seems like you didn’t observe the thousands of people swarming the airport in Kabul trying to get out with the last planes. It also seems like you haven’t picked up on the people crying about how people are being brutally punished for getting an education or listening to music now.
I’m not denying that shit was really bad while coalition forces were there, but acting like it didn’t get worse for a lot of people when the left is just closing your eyes.
Regardless, it’s ludicrous to claim that western countries “aren’t doing anything because they don’t care”. It’s not like we’ve spent truckloads of money and thousands of lives over 20 years of trying to get a functioning system in place while preventing a humanitarian crisis because we “didn’t care”. People saw it as immoral to just turn our backs on Afghanistan and let them solve their own problems. The result was largely that we learned that you can’t force democracy and human rights onto someone else, as proven by the almost complete absence of people willing to fight for just that once the coalition left.
- Comment on How come nobody does anything about North Korea? 1 week ago:
“The west” isn’t really a cohesive unit regarding Israel/Iran. You have some western countries supporting a genocide and committing blatant violations of international law, while others condemn them for it and try to pressure them to stop.
Sadly, one rogue state can cause a lot of damage, and countries typically have a very high bar for using military force against their closest allies in defence of a third party.
- Comment on How come nobody does anything about North Korea? 1 week ago:
It’s not that people “don’t care”. We’ve tried intervening with force in e.g. Afghanistan, where the oppressive regime was forcibly removed, and military power was used to ensure that elections were held and the results were respected.
We have observed, several times, that everything goes to shit when we leave. Not only that, but people generally don’t seem like it when outsiders take over and tell them how to run their country, who should be allowed an education, and that <insert group> cannot be oppressed. So a side effect of the armed intervention is that a lot more people hate you now.
Western countries “aren’t doing anything” because we’ve both learned from experience that military intervention doesn’t really work, and been repeatedly told by the rest of the world to mind our own business.
- Comment on Financially rewarding and you will always have a job 1 week ago:
We have a “complicated” relationship to the EU. There was a vote in the '90s where we decided not to join, and now we’re connected through the EEA (which another comment treats in detail). Today, the EU debate is rising again, largely because of the war in Ukraine. However, it seems like public opinion is still marginally opposed to membership due to our somewhat special situation regarding oil, hydropower, and (lack of) agricultural land.
- Comment on Financially rewarding and you will always have a job 1 week ago:
What do you mean by “little other support”? I don’t get any other “support” from my job as a phd than my salary?
- Comment on Financially rewarding and you will always have a job 1 week ago:
Norway here: This is kind of how it works, but not quite.
While studying, you get a student loan. 40 % of that loan is automatically “forgiven” (turned into a stipend) as you complete your courses. In order to remain eligible for the loan, you need to maintain a certain progression in your studies, and there’s also a limit to how many years you can receive the stipend for (I think it’s eight years now). As long as you’re studying, the loan doesn’t accrue interest, and you don’t need to make down payments.
Throughout five years, I received very roughly 200k NOK (≈20k USD) in stipend, and 300k NOK in loans.
Also, a PhD is treated as an ordinary job here. I’m paid about 600k NOK (≈60k USD) per year, which is a bit less than my peers from engineering studies in industry jobs (the get around 700-800), but it’s by no means a bad pay. I’ve been able to afford a small apartment together with my SO on that pay. Hearing about places where people have to take up loans in order to finance taking a phd makes my head spin.
- Comment on "You can't hook copper into fiber that way, you just can't do it." 1 week ago:
A cue to whether someone is educated is how hard they try to fight experts in a field they know nothing about.
People with expertise in one field tend to respect those with expertise in another.
- Comment on What if the moon turned into a black hole? | xkcd's What If? 1 week ago:
Fair enough, I’m just one of the people that massively prefers reading to videos, so I thought I would link the OP instead of asking you for it :)
- Comment on What if the moon turned into a black hole? | xkcd's What If? 1 week ago:
The comic, for people that prefer reading over watching YouTube videos.
- Comment on If I found voter irregularities in my home district do I have to hire a lawyer to prove it.? Or just let it go and the Florida Orange win? 2 weeks ago:
You can pay someone to vote a specific way, but with the current system, there doesn’t exist a way for you to verify that they actually voted how you told them to.
- Comment on If I found voter irregularities in my home district do I have to hire a lawyer to prove it.? Or just let it go and the Florida Orange win? 2 weeks ago:
The problem with any kind of system like this is that if you can verify your own vote, then someone else could always force you to show them that verification.
- Comment on Breaking: Netflix has made another minor change for their subscribers. 2 weeks ago:
I’m not an expert by any means here, but my impression is that it at some point comes down to a tradeoff between security/anonymity and having a fast enough connection. TOR slows you down much more than an ordinary VPN is what I’ve heard.
- Comment on Call Before You Dig 2 weeks ago:
That’s because they’re full of shit. If you have the equipment to properly treat water, it will be drinkable pretty much no matter what it’s been through.
Obviously, you shouldn’t be drinking unsterilised water that’s full of shit.
- Comment on Fart kontrol 2 weeks ago:
English has a lot of influence from both Germanic and Latin, to the point where I don’t think it’s reasonable to classify it as a strictly “Germanic” language.
There are plenty of English words that can be traced to old Norse (i.e. Norwegian Viking occupiers, raiders, and/or traders).
- Comment on shrooms 2 weeks ago:
Cause this is the internet, where you can say whatever you want and nothing is real.
- Comment on Bernie Sanders says that if AI makes us so productive, we should get a 4-day work week 3 weeks ago:
Would not having 30 dresses make you unhappier, if you have time to spend doing things you enjoy instead of consumption being the only thing you have to show for all the time you spend at work?
It feels like you’re attributing to me an opinion that a decrease in the availability of goods and services would be a universally bad thing. I never said that.
For my own part, I don’t own much excess stuff. I use whatever clothes I buy until they’re worn out, and the only furniture I own is a couch, a bed, a kitchen table and two chairs. However, I do enjoy climbing, hiking, and skiing, all of which require a bit of equipment to do. Lower productivity would likely imply that those things become less available/more expensive.
As for food: Saying that it “has the amazing ability to just grow without much human intervention” just makes you seem unaware of the fact that loads of people would literally starve if it weren’t for modern farming equipment, synthetic fertiliser, preservation methods, and transportation. For people to rely on “a small garden for some of their food” is not a practice that works at scale with the population density in the world today. There’s a reason the population on earth was relatively stable until the industrial revolution, and has grown exponentially since: Modern technology makes it possible for us to feed very many more people with a lot less land and resources.
IT services: Yes, I’m on a platform run by volunteers. I’m on it using hardware that was built by workers, with materials developed, extracted and refined by workers, on electricity produced and distributed by workers, over an internet that is possible because of workers. All these workers are reliant on their own corporate IT systems in order to be as efficient as they are today. You can’t just extract the last link in a huge web of dependencies, and act like it could work on its own.
Anyway, all these things are side-notes. My primary point (which I still believe stands) is that we cannot expect to reduce productivity across the board (i.e. everyone works significantly less), and expect that there will not be a price to pay. Whether that price is worth paying is an open discussion, which I haven’t really decided what I think about myself.
- Comment on Bernie Sanders says that if AI makes us so productive, we should get a 4-day work week 3 weeks ago:
You seem to agree with my last point, which was that
the distribution of wealth in society, and how it’s shifted the past 20-50 years is more concerning
That is: The major problem we have today is that the increase in production we’ve seen the past 20-50 years has primarily benefited the wealthy. This needs to change. Once we have decent wealth distribution, we can make an informed decision on whether we want to reduce our total productivity in order to have more free time.
- Comment on Chickenslap 3 weeks ago:
Also completely neglecting that not all the energy in a slap will be transferred to thermal energy in the chicken.
- Comment on Bernie Sanders says that if AI makes us so productive, we should get a 4-day work week 3 weeks ago:
when the 5 day a week, 40 hour work week began there was a specific level of productivity. As technology increased the output increased.
Exactly, so following this argument, we can choose between living at our current (increased) productivity level (40 hour weeks), or trading off the technological advancements for more spare time at the cost of going back to the productivity level we had previously.
I won’t argue for which of these two is “correct”, I think the tradeoff between free time vs. more access to goods and services is considered very differently by different people. However, I do think that a major problem we’re facing today is that the increased productivity we’ve had the past 50 years due to technological advances has benefited the wealthy far too much, at the expense of everyone else.
I think it’s more fruitful to first try to take care of the wealth distribution, such that we can actually see the quality of life our current productivity level can give everyone. Then we can make an informed choice regarding whether we want to reduce the productivity in exchange for more free time.