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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2026

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  • My understanding is the best answer is ‘all of the above.’ Nuclear is big and expensive, and just as expensive to expand, and has ongoing input costs like skilled staff, water, fuel, etc. but produces very steady, controllable power, and can do so for decades in a well designed and maintained system. Solar and wind, on the other hand, are very easily scaled down to smaller budgets, but generate intermittent power. It can be very useful to have the nuclear as a backup for moments of high demand and low solar/wind output, but very efficient to mostly use renewables because they don’t have much of an ongoing input cost.



  • There is always something profoundly silly about people saying ‘my time is too valuable to…’ when the time amounts are basically negligible, you probably sell your time for wages at a low rate anyway, and you are making your own life more onerous for the betterment of a company’s profit margin and the detriment of the people who rely on those jobs. Suffice to say, if your time is not too valuable to go to the store yourself, and not too valuable to waste on Lemmy, your time is not too valuable to wait a few moments in line. You’re just being pretentious about how important you are as an excuse for your impatience.


  • Pangolin, maybe? It’s probably as close as one could get to a pet draco vulgaris.

    Capybara are actually supposed to be already pretty cool. Some selective breeding might make them even cooler.

    Sloth could be interesting.

    There are some aquaria that would be unrealistic to own now but if there were no limits it’d be interesting to have some of the deep sea creatures.

    But also, really, if money, time, etc. were no issue, I’d probably take over an entire american state to build an enormous shelter/kennel/animal hospital/rescue centre for the lost, abandoned, unhoused, or otherwise uncared for pets of the world.






  • The right/left divide has a lot of definitions but the one it feels right to apply here is the oldest one. Right wants to maintain and reinforce existent hierachies. Left wants to change them. Now, notice that there is an extremely well defined goal for the right, to maintain and reinforce the thing we all can see right in front if us. The left on the other hand, doesn’t have a defined, unified goal state. Someone can be ‘left’ and want to bring down their current government in favour of an entirely different, maybe even more powerful and centralised state, or they can be ‘left’ and want to eliminate the idea of any person or group having authority over any other person or group. To use more modern examples, ‘tankies’ and ‘anarcho-primitivists’ are both ‘leftist’ insofar as they both agree the systems of places in the global ‘west’ should end, despite how little they agree on what should happen after.


  • There’s a term I’m drawing a blank on just now that refers to one’s tendency/ability to think of things as separable. It’s something like high vs. low segmentation/delineation/compartmentalisation/discretion individuals. For some people, different aspects of a person/concept/etc. can be more readily separated in their consideration. For others, the associations are too strong to be ignored.

    Some people have low (word I am having trouble remembering). These are people who cannot or have difficulty in separating different elements of consideration. These are people who say the only way to understand, say, The Lord of the Rings is to understand Tolkien, or that one cannot separate the mysogyny of Tomas from the music of Nightwish. They are also the kind of person who, if they met Ted Bundy in the office, would then have great difficulty reconciling that friendly experience with new information saying he was a murderer.

    Some people are high (word). They split concepts frequently and easily. These are people who can look at things which are connected by being parts of the same whole but consider each part separately, like say, looking at the beliefs of Ted Kaczynski and saying he was right about this one technology but wrong about bombing as the optimal solution, or that it’s wrong to murder but eating the dead is fine. These are also the kind of people who are more capable of meeting someone, being their friend for years, trusting them, but still having the cognitive distance to see the evidence in front of them and realise their friend is abusing his daughter, even if that doesn’t comport with how they have previously seen that friend.

    Each way of thinking is as alien to the opposing end of the spectrum as introverts vs extroverts or the religious vs materialists.




  • Dan Olson made one of his fun documentaries about this exact subject. If you have the time, watch it.

    If you want my cheap boil-down of the idea:

    NFTs are representations of ownership of a digital asset stored on a blockchain. However, as with any digital thing, the represented object can usually just be duplicated, making ownership essentially lacking in the aspect of ‘control’ one usually associates with other forms of ownership, and as with many fad purchases, the value of such things was massively distorted. There was and probably still is no legal structure for that ‘ownership,’ so it’s a bit like ‘owning’ your Lemmy account. As long as you have the password and no one else does, you can control it, if anyone gets the credentials, they can take control and there is little to no legal recourse. So, if you can’t stop other people using duplicates and you can have it taken as easily as any other account, it’s hard to really call it ownership. It’s just a mark in a ledger that says your account is associated with some entry, which is also what registering a title/deed does but with the legal force of the government reinforcing it.





  • meaning of life

    Nope. No meaning. Any meaning you see is as real as the ‘person’ you talk to when you ‘talk to’ chatgpt.

    overcome

    Nope. No over to come. Just arbitrarily chosen metrics for ‘success.’

    Evolutionary path

    Nope. No path. Omnidirectional expansion against inescapable entropy. Random as far as you are concerned.