That’s objectively bullshit.

The only other option is trump. Are you trying to get people to vote for trump? If so, why?

I don’t disagree. But we’re living in interesting times.

I don’t like most of the people on the ticket I’ll be given in November, but you know what’s objectively worse? Actual fascism. Fascism always ends in genocide, and these white Christian nationalists aren’t even trying to hide it, going mask-off even before they have the power to back it up.

When fascists can be this bold and still keep their seats of power, that’s quite worrying.

As I saw someone say earlier, we’re in democracy triage.

I’d vote for Biden’s corpse before trump or not voting. We must wrest all power from the fascists before we can squabble about who’s more left.

I hope people stop believing the bullshit that’s trying to get progressives to not vote or to vote for 3rd parties. Progressives absolutely can win democrat tickets, and that’s exactly why there’s so much propaganda trying to convince people otherwise. Progressives have a lot of political power right now, and the whole system can swing left if people don’t just give up. Progressives giving up is the only play the right has.

Can’t.

I’ve had literally insane run-ins with the US healthcare system, and have a bad enough health issue that I’ve been absolutely ruined by it: physically, mentally, financially, and socially. I do mean utterly – that was not hyperbole.

I have nothing else to add right now, because I have medically-induced PTSD and can’t even think about anything medical without having a panic attack now.

Just wanted to chime in with how bad it can get, and I know my situation isn’t as bad as it can be. It ruined everything for me and destroyed my family, but I never had to care for a dying child. There are no forbidden depths.

Well that seems to have backfired.

Excuse me, I seem to have facepalmed my eyeballs into the next room. Fuck.

Yeah, but some new tech won’t work at all if you don’t.

Plenty of people aren’t aware of that, and when you’re buying shit, it often obfuscates that fact.

Most people will buy shit having no idea the thing will require you to connect it to your wifi.

e: television is only one of the things. It’s getting harder to name things that don’t require this.

Five people here think Nazi business is fine. Yikes.

e: wait, 6.

e2: hey guys! Lemmy doesn’t have vote fuzzing yet! (just noticing. there’s no conspiracy here … or is there?)

I like 14-4317 TCX. 😎👌

Yeah, the fossil record and dna analysis is such a gradient, any lines we draw are arbitrary. To be fair, those lines were always for our own convenience, in much the same way it’s useful for print designers to specify Pantone 032, but if most people look at the full colour chart they couldn’t even tell you where ‘red’ becomes ‘orange’.

It’s definitely rabbits (or turtles) all the way down.

We’re prokaryotes, and vertebrates, and mammals, and from there some people get bent. Are we apes? Genus homo? Where must we draw the line to ensure we’re not actually animals like other living things and were divinely inspired special creations?

I like simplicity. Life is a beautiful prismatic projection and it doesn’t matter that much what our Pantone swatch turns out to be.

(Sorry, /mini rant)

Not-quite-a-chicken laid an egg containing a definitely-chicken. Actual chicken egg was first.

Slightly larger file size, which mattered in like 2002, but it’s only a few mb, which doesn’t matter at all now.

e: if you’re a professional photographer and saving stupidly high resolution images by the thousands, you’ll want to use jpg, but in that case, you’ll understand why.

It made Fox News in 2015.

A biology paper that same year.

Religious people seem to care.

More religious people care.

Biologists have been talking about it.

BBC Science covered it.

I didn’t pull this out of my arse.

And re: that citation you asked for:

God created mature birds with the ability to reproduce. So the bird was first, ready to lay eggs.

—Answers In Genesis

You’re right, I shouldn’t have said ‘never’. It was a paradox in ancient history, but at least in my lifetime, I’ve read it as basically solved. That may be a relatively recent stance (since 100-200 years ago), but it doesn’t seem useful to continue presenting it as a paradox at this point.

Jpg for photos, png for everything else.

It’s an easy rule of thumb, it hurts that 20 years of repeating it seems to have had zero effect.

Maybe this helps: Jpg fucks up your image, and png doesn’t.

Or: jpg is lossy, png is lossless.

Or: It’s better to save photos as png than cartoons as jpg.

Seriously, I hope some of this breaks through because deep fried images are so fucking unnecessary.

The chicken vs egg question has never been about chronology or science.

It’s been about religion vs science.

Science says the egg came first: a chicken laid an egg that was nearly imperceptibly not a chicken, so the egg was a new thing. Then it hatched and one of its descendants laid an egg that was almost imperceptibly not a not-a-chicken. Repeat ad nauseum. That’s how evolution works, with the egg coming first.

Religion says a god poofed a chicken into existence., and then forever it just lays chicken eggs. The eggs will forever be a chicken.

That’s the chicken vs egg thing. It’s not a puzzle at all, it’s just science vs religion.

On a drive when I was ten, I asked my dad why the tall, skeletal towers had blinking lights. He said so planes wouldn’t crash into them. So I asked what the towers were for, and he said to hold up the lights.

That fucked with me for like ten more years.

The second half of this experiment is far less wholesome:

To verify their findings, these scientists reran the experiment by cutting off ants’ legs at the knees. Those ants consistently undershot their targets, showing definitively that ants do actually count their steps.

So yay, verified results via torture!

This is awesome and all, but it doesn’t really tell us anything about Plato’s life, death, or anything else except what people in Herculaneum maybe thought about him, which should be taken with an erupting mountain of salt.

Keep in mind there was half a century between these stories and Plato’s life, and Plato didn’t even live on this island. Taking these stories at face value is like believing the stories of King Arthur today – the stories of Paul Bunyan in the US are far more credible, being far more recent and having happened in a time and place in which such stories were more reliably documented. We’ve mostly decided Paul Bunyan wasn’t ten stories tall and didn’t have a giant neon blue ox, though some theme rides still want to claim so. We’re talking about fables written 500 years after the fact here.

This is a wonderful find, but its veracity wrt Plato’s actual burial place is highly suspect.

You’re right, and I don’t disagree with you at all. Yes, we’ve had an emotional need for stories – more for connection with one another than for individual understanding, which cultural stories provide.

I’m saying there’s a difference between cultural stories and organised religion. The former is benign and can translate our questions into a semblance of meaning, and the latter which becomes dictatorial dogma that amplifies the worst of us, turning our basest instincts into abhorrent action.

I don’t think we disagree that much, you and I. I used to think organised religion wasn’t something I could get behind, but I thought to each their own.

The more I learned about it and the more I saw the bad influence it did to people I loved, the more I realised it’s nothing but a terrible influence in the world, holding us back as a people, and causing needless suffering and death.

I’m a user experience designer. My favourite story is from aviation engineering. I don’t remember the year or all the details, but the US Navy had put stupid amounts of money and time into engineering a new fighter jet. It was worked out on paper and built to exact specifications. Then, during the first human test of it, the pilot ejected on the tarmac before it took off. The plane crashed, obviously, but the pilot couldn’t explain what happened (apparently he had a concussion from his unscheduled landing).

The plane was built again, and shortly after takeoff, the pilot again ejected without explanation.

What the fuck was going on?

In the retelling I heard, someone finally noticed the design of the cockpit was to blame. In trying to cram all the standard controls plus new ones into the smallest amount of space, the designers had moved the eject lever right next to the lever to adjust the seat position – they’d coloured the eject lever red, but the pilot couldn’t see that since it was below and slightly to the right of his ass, and both levers were the same size and shape. Nobody noticed this was a problem until at least two pilots accidentally ejected on takeoff.

This might be apocryphal, I don’t know, but I learnt it as an example of how things might look good on paper, but you can’t really know until a user fucks everything up.