merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Teddybears - Punkrocker 3 hours ago:
The funniest thing is that the superhero they have a problem with is Superman.
If it were Batman, that would be different. Batman isn’t a pure-hearted hero, he’s a more complex character. If it had been someone in the X-Men, or pretty much any Avenger other than Captain America, there would be room for a discussion.
But, Superman is such a good, kind-hearted hero that it’s basically impossible to be a good person and be anti-Superman.
- Comment on Teddybears - Punkrocker 3 hours ago:
I thought the movie was awful, but the message was good. The plot was just bad. The characters were so unrealistic that it was distracting. Like, the people Luthor had in his command centre. These ordinary people were eager to kill, or at least badly injure Superman? That detail needed an explanation. It wouldn’t have needed one if they hadn’t focused so much on those characters, but for some reason they were made an important part of the story.
The only really great scene in the movie was when Lois Lane grilled Superman on his intervention in the war. It was good to see a good-hearted man who was confident he had done the right thing stumble when asked hard questions.
- Comment on Electricity Consumption 3 hours ago:
It would be interesting (if the data was available) to see the energy consumption in Europe at that time: windmills, horses drawing carts, cooking fires, etc.
- Comment on Expand North! So much room up there. 10 hours ago:
Give it a rest dude, go touch some grass.
- Comment on Anon goes home 1 week ago:
Also, some things haven’t changed, but should have.
Yeah, the kitchen smells the same, mom’s laugh is the same, dad’s still using the same chipped mug.
But, dad’s prejudices haven’t changed, they’ve only calcified a bit more. Mom’s learned helplessness has only gotten worse. The old disagreements never got resolved, they just got shelved, ready to be taken down again when the time comes.
Plus, the parents think that you, their kid, hasn’t changed. They still see you as helpless and in need of their guidance, even when they’re having increasing difficulty navigating the world because things are changing too quickly for them to handle. Hence the old meme of “take your resume, walk right into that office, and demand a job!”
I get the appeal of nostalgia, and it’s sometimes fun to pretend that things haven’t changed, but it’s better to realize that time keeps marching forward and try to adapt to the new situation.
- Comment on Expand North! So much room up there. 1 week ago:
Give it a rest dude, go touch some grass.
- Comment on Expand North! So much room up there. 1 week ago:
Snow plows for roads exist and often just run and run and run to keep roads open.
Which is very expensive, but necessary because of the shitty climate. What’s your point?
- Comment on Expand North! So much room up there. 1 week ago:
Give it a rest dude, go touch some grass.
- Comment on Bill and Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge after 15 years: Only 9 of the 256 billionaires actually followed through on giving away half their wealth 1 week ago:
Now imagine if there was some way a government could take a percentage of that and put it towards improving society as a whole.
Yes, some form of “giving pledge” where the amount was standardized and there was no option to back out. Radical thinking here.
- Comment on Expand North! So much room up there. 1 week ago:
Ooh, wheat! Great. What about fruits? They’re important for a balanced diet.
It turns out that Canada imports 50% of its vegetables and 75% of its fruit.
But do go on, tell me how Canada’s climate isn’t limiting in what it can produce domestically.
- Comment on Expand North! So much room up there. 1 week ago:
The video says that there were more than 500,000 bike share trips in Toronto in the winter months. Let’s be conservative and say that “the winter months” are just December, January and February. The reality is that there’s ice on the ground until May pretty often, but let’s just pretend it’s 500,000 trips in 3 months to make the numbers seem as big as possible.
Is that big? Not really, 500,000 trips in 3 months is 167,000 trips per month. Meanwhile in the summer it’s 1 million trips per month. So, cycling drops by a factor of at least 6 in the winter. That’s massive.
And yes, I’ve watched that Not Just Bikes video. It makes the point that in order for people to bike in the winter, you need massive infrastructure that Canada refuses to spend on. The city in question in the video, Oulu, makes it a priority to clear the bike routes within 3 hours of a 2 cm snowfall. Theoretically could that be done in every rich city in the world? Sure. Is it realistic it will ever happen anywhere in Canada? Doubtful.
I stand by what I said, “winter is a major factor”. Do you have any idea how much it would cost to commit to clearing all the bike routes within 3 hours of a 2 cm snowfall? You could argue that the cost is worth it, and that the cost is smaller than doing similar things for cars, but it remains a major factor.
Besides, it wouldn’t even make sense to have snow clearing like Oulu unless they first built a dedicated bike network for the city. There’s no point in just clearing the “bike lanes” which are just a tiny strip of pavement next to the gutter.
Canadian cities aren’t doing enough to build mass transit and bike lanes. But, even if they did, the weather sucks in the winter. And Oulu, is colder than Toronto. But it’s slightly warmer than Ottawa and Montreal, and significantly warmer than Winnipeg, Edmonton and Calgary. So, even if you replicated all the bike lanes from Oulu, committed to clearing the snow as quickly as they do in Oulu and made cars and fuel as expensive as they are in Europe, Canada would probably have nowhere near the number of winter bikers as Oulu per capita. Canada is much colder, cities are designed around cars, and people have “car brain”.
- Comment on Expand North! So much room up there. 1 week ago:
Canada should really just wait until the US collapses and then move south into the wreckage.
The Nordic countries don’t understand bad climate. Maybe they want to continue existing as they are, but Canadians will want to move south as soon as the US destroys itself.
Measure Oslo Stockholm Helsinki Ottawa Coldest Mean Daily Minimum -4.7 -3.2 -6.3 -14 Coldest Mean Minimum -15.9 -13.7 -20.6 -27 Coldest Record Low -26.0 -28.2 -35 -38.9 Hottest Mean Maximum 29.6 30.6 27.9 32 Hottest Record High 34.6 35.4 33.2 37.8 Ottawa is significantly colder than those country’s capitals during the winter, and significantly hotter in the summer. It might be unpleasant at times to live in those European climates, but it’s truly miserable to live in Ottawa for much of the year.
People in the Nordic countries might want to stay there because it’s the only place where their language is spoken, or because there are thousands of years of tradition in living there. Meanwhile, Canada as a country is barely 150 years old, and speaks the same language (with roughly the same accent) as the neighbour to the south.
There’s a lot in common in terms of culture too. Sure, Canada plays a bit more hockey than the southerners, but they have the NHL too. The other sports are largely shared: Toronto has NBA and MLB teams. Unlike Europe where “futbol” is big, it’s pretty small in the English-speaking part of North America, but to the extent it exists, Canada is part of the same system, with teams in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. The only split is that Canada plays a superior version of gridiron football with far inferior players, and the US has a mass market hugely popular version of gridiron football with worse rules but much better players.
Canadians watch the same TV shows and movies, and listen to the same music. Many of the stars of stage and screen in the US are actually Canadian, and many shows that are set in the US and air on US TV are actually filmed in Canada.
So really, there isn’t a lot that Canada has in common with the Nordic countries. I like the idea of working more with the EU and less with the US, but culturally Canadians are part of the English-speaking North American culture… except when it comes to politics, guns, and healthcare.
I just hope the US hurries its collapse up so that the remnants of the fractured states can petition to join Canada and the border can be shifted down. Then Canadians can move to a more hospitable climate without having to abandon the parts of their culture that matter.
- Comment on Expand North! So much room up there. 1 week ago:
I agree that Canadian cities aren’t doing enough to build mass transit. But, I still think winter has a lot to do with that.
Mass transit means waiting outside for a bus or tram, and waiting outside when it’s either +35 or -30 sucks. Many people will prefer cars for that reason. It isn’t the only factor, but it is definitely a factor.
As for bike lanes, winter is a major factor. It’s certainly possible to bike in the winter, I’ve done it for many years, but it isn’t easy. In Canada as it exists now, biking in winter means biking in traffic most of the time. Bike lanes exist, but often in winter they just shove the snow to the side of the road and block the bike lanes. I don’t know of anywhere in Canada where they clear bike lanes as a priority. That could be done. It is done in some places in Finland, for example. But, there’s a catch 22. It’s not worth it to clear the bike lanes because there aren’t enough winter bikers; there aren’t enough winter bikers because it’s dangerous and unpleasant to bike during winter because they don’t clear the bike lanes.
- Comment on Expand North! So much room up there. 1 week ago:
If anything, this proves how much Canadians don’t want to be Americans.
Canadian weather is shitty, you can’t grow crops for most of the year. During the fraction of the year where the climate is suitable for growing crops, the variety of things that grow is small compared to what’s possible in the US. And, as bad as winter can be, summer’s no good either. You don’t want to be outside in the winter because it’s -30, and you don’t want to be outside in the summer because it’s +35. The cost of living in Canada is high because you need to heat your home in the winter and cool it in the summer. Almost everybody drives a car because of that “being outside sucks” thing, but cars are expensive to own and operate in Canada. There’s the cost of winter tires, more expensive winter fuels, antifreeze in the windshield washer, plus the constant freeze/thaw cycle wrecks the road surfaces, which results in potholes, which results in more wear and tear on cars. In addition, to make driving safe they drop a lot of salt and sand, which just rusts your car. Because the country is a thin strip, everything is far away, and everything communications-related is expensive. And, a low population relative to the US means that a lot of companies just don’t offer services in Canada because it isn’t worth it to comply with Canadian laws just to get the same number of customers you could get from a single American state. I could keep going on and on.
Yet, despite all that, Canadians huddle up as close as possible to the border for warmth, but refuse to go any further south because that would mean entering the US. As bad as Canada’s climate is, putting up with that is an easy decision to make when the alternative is 'Murica.
- Comment on Damm WaterCatholics 1 week ago:
Look out! Here come’s an “s”!
- Comment on So glad I suck dick 1 week ago:
But, isn’t it wonderful that we can have a fediverse where there can be annoying instances like those ones, but if you don’t like it you can just move or block?
The fediverse is chaotic but I sure prefer chaos to having one corporate overlord with one point of view, and one goal, which is getting ads in front of as many eyeballs as possible.
- Comment on So glad I suck dick 1 week ago:
The correct answer is: “Those seem to be Disney characters, and Disney is a horrible company, so none of the above.”
- Comment on Water Snek 2 weeks ago:
Here’s another question: how far did she swim?
Do you count the distance her body travelled relative to the land? Or do you only count the distance she travelled relative to the water, and it was the water that was moving.
If you count the distance relative to the land, she’ll have been measured to have travelled much farther and with a much faster average speed.
- Comment on Thinheritance 2 weeks ago:
Thanks, I didn’t know how bad it was either until I saw that.
- Comment on Thinheritance 2 weeks ago:
Furniture used to be a thing you saved for and bought once, for life.
And if you were poor you got used furniture. Still much more expensive than Ikea furniture, but your “new” furniture would have scratches and dings from the previous owner. If you were really poor you got used furniture that had been damaged in a fire.
Now, you can get something that’s built from cheap parts and doesn’t last that long, but you can get it brand new.
There was only a few choices in the refrigerator space. People talked, compared notes, knew what brand ranked where in quality.
These days people talk even more, compare even more notes, there’s pages and pages of information about the quality of things available on the Internet. The problem is that it’s much less authentic.
In Ye Olde days, the people you talked to about a new fridge would be friends, cow-orkers, acquaintances from church, the guy in your bowling league, etc. These people didn’t have any reason to lie to you, so you’d mostly get honest feedback. These days there’s way more “information” available online about everything you might want to buy, including thousands of amateur reviews, and dozens of professional reviews. The problem is that the reviews are all from strangers, many of whom are probably shills for the company trying to sell something. The professional review sites frequently care much more about getting traffic than they do about factually reviewing things.
And then there’s Google. In the ancient past it used to use a system called Page Rank (named after Larry Page, not webpages) that was, for a time, a foolproof way to get high quality results. But, for a long time Google fought a war against Search Engine Optimization operators who wanted their sites to rank highly despite being of dubious quality. Eventually Google realized that rather than fighting SEO, they could actually make more money by letting the SEO spammers win, because the SEO spammers just wanted to show ads, and Google had a monopoly on website ads, and a monopoly on search, so what were its users going to do – switch to an alternative?
There’s a very good summary of the enshittification of product reviews here:
- Comment on change_org 2 weeks ago:
AFAIK, Israel is actually extremely prosperous these days, and the money received by the west is just “nice to have” free money these days.
- Comment on change_org 2 weeks ago:
Russia’s war on Ukraine shows you can’t stop a war in another country even with massive sanctions.
And, various empires’ adventures in Afghanistan show that even sending in troops to stop the “bad guys” will probably not work.
Sometimes people can make a change. The Apartheid governments of South Africa collapsed largely due to boycotts and people pressure. But, that only really works when the targeted country wants to be part of the community of nations, and its people don’t want to be seen as criminals by the rest of the world. IMO, that situation is rare. Most of the time the rest of the world can’t do much of anything when it comes to civil wars and border conflicts.
- Comment on robot slurs 3 weeks ago:
- Gasbags: Even when doing nothing else, humans are constantly sucking in and pushing out air.
- Slow rotting meat: As opposed to steaks which rot in a day, humans take a few decades to rot, but to a robot which might live for millennia, it’s about the same
- Wet Brains: Unlike a robot, our brains are wet, mushy things.
- Sleepers: How weird must it be to see a lifeform that spends 1/3 of its short existence unconscious.
But, I can also imagine words of admiration from robots for things humans can do that they can’t, for example:
- self-fixers: When a robot part breaks it needs to be repaired. With a lot of injuries, humans just have to wait and the body repairs itself. That would seem pretty magical.
- puzzlers: Humans are capable of lateral thinking in a way robots aren’t. Humans can use analogies to things they do understand, and can reason about things in the physical world.
- stinkers: Could be an insult because of humans pooping, pissing, sweating, etc. But it could also be a play on “instinct”, somehow magically making a good guess about what to do in a new situation that’s outside their “programming”.
- leaders: Robots are good at responding to inputs, but they don’t actually have any motivation themselves. If eventually there’s a robot that’s capable of thinking and wondering, it might wonder what it’s like to do something, not because someone asked, but because you wanted to do it.
- Comment on robot slurs 3 weeks ago:
Most mechanical equipment doesn’t work well unless it is well oiled, so a properly maintained robot would be oily too. Computers aren’t too oily, but they don’t have very many moving parts anymore. But, a robot would have plenty.
- Comment on I just shitpost🙃 3 weeks ago:
I’ll bear with you, but I don’t want to get naked with you.
- Comment on I just shitpost🙃 3 weeks ago:
If you just wanted to follow a topic, you could follow Wikipedia RSS feeds.
If you’re reading and responding to comments, you’re engaging in social media.
- Comment on I 🖤 LaTeX 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, but I prefer to pronounce latex properly, just like the rubber.
- Comment on I 🖤 LaTeX 3 weeks ago:
Except that it’s spelled “Latex” with all letters from the English alphabet and there is already an existing word with that spelling, therefore it is pronounced the same way as that word. You don’t pronounce “Laser” as “Lah Seer” even though the “A” comes from “Amplification” and the “E” from “Emission”. Once it became a word, it was pronounced using standard English pronunciation rules.
Latex, like the rubber stuff.
- Comment on You don’t see articles like this about moms with three two jobs who still manage to take care of their kids. 3 weeks ago:
Hour to hour and day to day that’s probably true. But, nVidia is actually an example of a company where their leadership made some smart decisions decades ago by understanding their market extremely well and correctly predicting what was going to be happening in the industry 5-10 years down the line. For example, he went all in on CUDA almost a decade before the AI went mainstream, and because of that decision, nVidia is the biggest company in the world today.
I would bet that if a major decision came up and you had to decide whether or not to go all in on X, you couldn’t actually do his job.
- Comment on You don’t see articles like this about moms with three two jobs who still manage to take care of their kids. 3 weeks ago:
It’s also proof that there wouldn’t be major negatives from a wealth tax. These guys love working, it’s not about the money, they all say it. So, let them keep working, but give their earnings to people who need it.