JoBo
@JoBo@feddit.uk
- Comment on Community 7 months ago:
The fact of higher protein content appears to be true (without going back to find and critique all the original studies). Explanations are much harder to ‘prove’ for questions like this.
We can’t do experiments on the evolution of tears, so all we can do is come up with plausible theories and look at how they fit with the body of evidence. With enough evidence, from enough different angles, we might one day be able to say which proposed explanations fit the facts (and which don’t). It’s how we (eventually) proved smoking was killing people (another question we cannot do experiments on human beings to prove one way or the other) but not all questions are as important as smoking was and there isn’t necessarily a neat, single factor explanation to find even if someone was willing to fund all the necessary research.
Not my area but, for example, I recently saw a study claim that sniffing women’s tears makes men less aggressive. That’s an angle that might help build some support for, or knock down, the theory that emotional tears are useful for social communication (ie help get women killed slightly less often). Did those studies use sad stories or onions? Did any study compare sad stories to onions? If we’re seeing hints of differences between sad stories and onions, that would tend to support the social communication element of the explanation. Unless we think there’s a difference between sad tears and frightened tears, which there probably is, so we should check that too. And the rest of the literature on tears, if it’s considered important enough to get the theory right. And we need to remember that sticky tears are not the same thing as smelly tears, so can we do experiments where non-emotional tears are made sticky, and non-sticky tears made to smell frightened?
Etc etc.
Explaining things we observe but cannot directly experiment on is a process, a process which typically takes many years and dozens of research groups. And a lot of funding. And decades of exhausting battles, if there is a lot riding on the answer (as it did with Big Tobacco vs Public Health).
- Comment on How come liberals dont hate conservatives the way conservatives hate liberals 7 months ago:
You think there’s going to be civil war and also, you want to maximise the numbers fighting for the fascists. Cool, cool.
- Comment on How come liberals dont hate conservatives the way conservatives hate liberals 7 months ago:
Because handing election victories to fascists is a really, really bad idea.
- Comment on Astounding absurdity 7 months ago:
I mean, yeah. All of this. Absurd.
But, FWIW, offloading cheap tat onto charity shops is not going to work well. It costs them money to put it on a shelf and it probably takes up more space than it is worth. Plus, they very likely can’t sell electrical equipment that has had its cord chopped up and repaired, or at least not without spending more on having it tested than they could sell it for anyway.
Next time, find a friend with small feet who would like to take it off your hands.
- Comment on How come liberals dont hate conservatives the way conservatives hate liberals 7 months ago:
Because there is no mirror image.
@pjwestin@lemmy.world has given you a good description of fascist methods. They’re not available to the opponents of fascism because they are not fascists.
Fascism appeals to the worst parts of our nature. It gives permission to those feeling fear, humiliation or shame to lash out in anger and destroy the people that make them feel that way.
You can’t deploy the same tactics to make those people want to be on your side instead. If you try to shame them, they will just hate harder.
You should, of course, expose and ridicule the grifters who lead fascist movements and punching fascists is encouraged. But you need to distinguish between authoritarian leaders and the people they seek to lead.
You should not pander to the billionaire-funded leaderships (take note NYT), but you must not sneer at the people they are trying to lead (take note centrist Dems).
- Comment on Hardcore 7 months ago:
DOIs are forever. It’s why they exist.
- Comment on [Serious] Do you know of any processed snack foods with some vitamins? 7 months ago:
Advising a parent to torture a child over food is piss poor advice to start with but when the parent has identified possible autism, you realise you know less than nothing and shut the fuck up.
- Comment on [Serious] Do you know of any processed snack foods with some vitamins? 7 months ago:
So the fuck what?
- Comment on [Serious] Do you know of any processed snack foods with some vitamins? 7 months ago:
What did you think this bit meant?
(He’s likely on the spectrum.)
- Comment on [BBC News] Claims that smart motorways tech leaves drivers at risk 7 months ago:
National Highways says the radar detects 89% of stopped vehicles - but that means one in 10 are not spotted.
At least 79 people have been killed on smart motorways since they were introduced in 2010. In the past five years, seven coroners have called for them to be made safer.
National Highways’ latest figures suggest that if you break down on a smart motorway without a hard shoulder you are three times more likely to be killed or seriously injured than on one with a hard shoulder.
No brainer. But then they quote this prick without directly challenging the contradiction:
The agency’s operational control director Andrew Page-Dove says action was being taken to “close the gap between how drivers feel and what the safety statistics show”.
The ‘gap’ seems to be a result of drivers having a much more accurate perception than the people paid to defend them.
National Highways says reinstating the hard shoulder would increase congestion and that there are well-rehearsed contingency plans to deal with power outages.
Just add more lanes. That’ll work. It’s never worked but obviously it’ll work. Fuckwits.
- Comment on Alan Bates considers private prosecutions of Post Office bosses 8 months ago:
All barristers are only as good as the evidence given to them
That’s not entirely true. The Secret Barrister made a good point on the site I won’t visit to grab the link: people always ask how you can defend someone you know is guilty; they never ask how you can prosecute someone who you know is innocent.
We have an adversarial system, not an inquisatorial one. Barristers are paid to present one case or the other, not decide what is true for themselves.
There are barristers and judges who may well be sanctioned, professionally if not also criminally, for their part in this scandal. Richard Morgan is one that sticks in my mind. He relied on an entirely circular argument (Lee Castleton signed off the accounts therefore the reliability of Horizon is irrelevant, even though it produced the accounts that Castleton had to sign if he wanted to continue trading). If you read/watch his appearance at the inquiry, it appears to literally dawn on him during the questioning. He was professionally negligent and he should not be allowed to get away with it.
- Comment on Alan Bates considers private prosecutions of Post Office bosses 8 months ago:
The CPS, and equivalents in Scotland, brought around a third of the wrongful prosecutions.
The barristers the CPS employs to bring prosecutions are the same barristers used by the Post Office, using the same courts and the same judges.
This scandal just shines a light on how impossible the criminal justice system is for ordinary people with more limited means. Bates vs PO only happened because they managed to find 555 claimants (500 being the minimum their funders needed to risk it).
There was a case settled in 2003 because the court appointed a single independent expert to act for both sides and he pointed out all the holes in the Post Office case. That should have been the end of it. But they made her sign a confidentiality agreement, slandered him, and carried on prosecuting.
I told Post Office the truth about Horizon in 2003, IT expert says
- Comment on How is the hydrogen made? 8 months ago:
Batteries are too heavy for many applications (including, arguably, cars).
That doesn’t make hydrogen the only solution but it is at least a currently available solution. I posted a link about why the Orkneys (population 23k) are producing hydrogen and switching much of their transport to it: they have so much wind the UK (population 70m) national grid can’t take all the power they generate from it.
- Comment on How is the hydrogen made? 8 months ago:
Yes. I’m not watching a video but it is a serious problem, especially as hydrogen degrades metals and finds its way out anyway. The private sector cannot be trusted to self-regulate nor the government to meaningfully regulate.
Trying very hard not to succumb to nihilism here …
- Comment on How is the hydrogen made? 8 months ago:
That is true of all colours of hydrogen other than green (and possibly natural stores of ‘fossil’ hydrogen if they can be extracted without leakage).
Green hydrogen is better thought of as a battery than a fuel. It’s a good way to store the excess from renewables and may be the only way to solve problems like air travel.
How hydrogen is transforming these tiny Scottish islands
That’s not to say it’s perfect. Hydrogen in the atmosphere slows down the decomposition of methane so leaks must be kept well below 5% or the climate benefits are lost. We don’t have a good way to measure leaks. It’s also quite inefficient because a lot of energy is needed to compress it for portable uses.
And, of course, the biggest problem is that Big Carbon will never stop pushing for dirtier hydrogens to be included in the mix, if green hydrogen paves the way.
- Comment on [BBC Sounds] Helen Lewis has left the chat 8 months ago:
She has used her considerable platform to make trans lives worse in many ways, not just with regard to sport.
Because she is a transphobinc piece of shit, you see.
- Comment on [BBC Sounds] Helen Lewis has left the chat 8 months ago:
As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s about who you want to benefit from your clicks. Pirate her books and articles if you want to know what she has to say (but honestly, it’s not much so probs don’t bother).
- Comment on [BBC Sounds] Helen Lewis has left the chat 8 months ago:
She’s very similar to JK Rowling, even if Jordan Peterson is as far as she’s got in her adventures with the far right so far.
You have an incorrect mental timeline on sports inclusion. Some sporting bodies have recently begun to introduce bans under pressure from conservative politicians desperate to distract the people they are pickpocketing. The stronger trend is for inclusion, because two years on gender-affirming care eliminates all the advantages a trans woman might have apart from extra height for those who went through a male puberty because they weren’t lucky enough to get puberty blockers early enough.
Laurel Hubbard: First transgender athlete to compete at Olympics
The 43-year-old became eligible to compete at the Olympics when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 2015 changed its rules allowing transgender athletes to compete as a woman if their testosterone levels are below a certain threshold.
(Feel free to look up Hubbard’s performances before and after transition.)
One of the big tells with Lewis is her scare-mongering about trans women in women’s prisons. It has long been the case in the UK that women who are considered too violent to be housed in a women’s prison have been sent to men’s prisons. This applies to all women, cis and trans, and obviously includes trans women who have committed violent crimes against other women. People like Lewis seize on very rare instances where errors have been made to cause alarm and distress. Of course, they ignore the fates of trans women who have mistakenly been housed in men’s prisons without any of the protective segregation cis women in men’s prisons receive.
Also it was weird of you to bring up her race in the original comment - her being a white woman is orthogonal to the criticism you are making of her.
No idea why you think race and class are not relevant in a comment about her abuse of intersectionality. If you don’t understand, dictionaires exist.
- Comment on [BBC Sounds] Helen Lewis has left the chat 8 months ago:
I didn’t say they were. But people should be aware of who they are giving their clicks to.
- Comment on [BBC Sounds] Helen Lewis has left the chat 8 months ago:
And?
- Comment on [BBC Sounds] Helen Lewis has left the chat 8 months ago:
She’s a transphobic piece of shit who abuses the concept of intersectionality to claim eternal victimhood for middle-class white women. Empty-brained narcissist.
- Comment on [CW: Slurs/pejoratives, morality] When is it considered immoral if someone is saying something that they know is pejorative and they are not intending it as disparaging towards the original group? 8 months ago:
Yes. I never said any different. It was adopted as a descriptor by gay men, not bigots trying to denigrate them.
- Comment on [CW: Slurs/pejoratives, morality] When is it considered immoral if someone is saying something that they know is pejorative and they are not intending it as disparaging towards the original group? 8 months ago:
These two examples are quite different, I think.
Gay was not originally a slur, AFAIK. It was adopted as a less clinical descriptor by gay people themselves (again, AFAIK). There have been concerted efforts to make it into a slur and it is often used in a derogatory fashion, but it does not have a pre-history of being used as a slur.
Queer is the opposite. It was used as a slur and it is a rare example of successful reclamation of a word. A slogan in the 1980s on Gay Pride protests was “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re fabulous, get used to it”. At the time, queer was very much a slur so the chant had a bite that you wouldn’t hear in it today.
- Comment on Warning after people fined because they used Royal Mail stamps 8 months ago:
who the fuck keeps receipts for stamps?
They’re charging (fining) the recipients £5 to collect the post so the people they’re robbing couldn’t possibly have the relevant receipt anyway.
They better have some very good evidence that the problem is not with their stamps given the decades-long saga with the Post Office (which started years before Royal Mail was sold off as a separate entity).
- Comment on Minimum wage is UK’s ‘most successful economic policy in a generation’ 8 months ago:
Yes, that and increasing conditionality of benefits (which were originally designed to place a floor under which no employer could sink).
Minimum wage is a neoliberal policy, necessitated by the fact that capital would happily starve its own workforce to death and only then wonder why they could not find any more workers to exploit.
The Scandinavian countries are, I think, the only wealthy countries left with no minimum wage. Because sectoral bargaining still works there (hence Musk’s travails in Sweden).
I haven’t read this report but any research like this needs to also look at the proportion of the workforce who are at or close to the minimum wage, which has steadily increased since 1999. It has undoubtedly improved things for the most easily exploited workers but it has also meant that wages in general have pancaked downwards. Overall inequality has increased even as minimum wage improved things for the very lowest paid. This headline is reporting the good news while ignoring the bad.
- Comment on Public satisfaction with NHS falls to lowest level on record 8 months ago:
Maybe we need to look at what France and Germany are doing with their system and copy them.
They’re funding theirs.
The Tories (and Labour) are trying to privatise ours. Which obviously won’t make it any cheaper because idle shareholders will be siphoning off a hefty chunk into the tax havens that neither the Tories nor Labour will shut down. In the meantime, they’re pulling the same trick they did with British Rail: underfund it until it’s easy to kill off and sell cheap to their rich backers so they can charge us more for less.
- Comment on We're sorry. 8 months ago:
The publishers do not write any part of the paper.
- Comment on We're sorry. 8 months ago:
They do not include the peer reviewers in their list of people who missed it. Which means that either the peer reviewers did pick it up and for some reason it didn’t get addressed (unlikely) or this was a straight up pay-to-play and whoever runs that particular bit of the racket for Elsevier fucked up.
- Comment on Channel 4 presenter among more than 250 UK stars victimised by deepfake porn 8 months ago:
Send me a picture of your face, your location, and your employer, and I’ll see if I can help you find out exactly how ‘cool’ it is.
- Comment on degree in bamf 8 months ago:
Because the 'splaining phenomenon is about perceived but unearned superiority which leads the 'splainer to 'splain to someone who knows a great deal more than they do and, crucially, someone who the 'splainer ought to realise knows more than they do but doesn’t because of the illusion created by the society they live in.
I’d have added “(born) middle-class” because that’s an important part of it too.