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Cake day: January 1st, 2026

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  • Yeah, it takes impressive dumbassery to pretend to know whenever a mobile device is recording when we have them everywhere. Dumber still to convince yourself that ain’t relevant to the same principle that no privacy is reasonably expected in public and whatever bullshit they’re fearmongering is already effective reality that they’re conveniently overlooking in defiance of basic sense. Sometimes a comment claiming another is a dumb take is self-indulgence poorly attempting to evade critical examination of their own dumb as fuck take like right there.






  • lmmarsano@group.lttoScience Memes@mander.xyzReal talk
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    25 days ago

    Specifically billionaires/unchecked capitalists

    The easy scapegoat oversimplifies the problem, which goes beyond & predates capitalism. Though exterminating all of humanity is one way to achieve sustainability, it doesn’t necessarily require it. So far, however, humanity has reached living standards beyond subsistence only by consuming resources at unsustainable levels faster than the planet can replenish, and that has been true regardless of economic system. Even when living at subsistence levels, humanity has likely caused mass extinction events.

    From a comment to a similar post

    People here tend to fixate on their pet theories that scapegoat capitalism for everything including that humanity’s drain on ecological resources exceeds Earth’s rate of regeneration without acknowledging that their alternatives don’t address the problem, either.

    Although governments are far more able than individuals and firms acting singly to take action to protect the environment, they often fail to do so. The centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe, where governments controlled production, had a particularly poor record on pollution control. Per capita mortality from air pollution in Eastern Europe (outside the EU) and China remains high relative to the EU and North America.

    In particular, the Soviet economy—with constitutional guarantees to continuously improve living standards & steadily grow productive forces—caused disproportionately worse ecological damage than the US’s. All economic systems have the same capacity to degrade the environment & deplete stocks of natural resources. Without adequate policies to protect the environment, improving & maintaining living standards with the continuous economic growth necessary to do that threatens the environment.

    Moreover, human activity before capitalism has led to extinctions of megafauna, plants, & animals dependent on those plants. The quaternary megafauna extinction was likely driven by overhunting by humans. Those extinctions & increased fires coinciding with the arrival of humanity to Australia transformed the ecosystem from mixed rainforest to drier landscapes. Aboriginal landscape burning

    may have caused the extinction of some fire-sensitive species of plants and animals dependent upon infrequently burnt habitats

    More recently, they killed off the elephant bird likely due to major environmental alterations & overconsumption of their eggs.

    Until humanity starts living sustainably, they are the problem.



  • I think Adam Smith would have a lot to say about this. Specifically, he would probably point out that the slave states really had an awfully small economy compared to the free states, and that most of the wealth generation which occurred in the US occurred due to productivity gains driven by technological innovations which were most aggressively exploited in the north. In the long run, few people could claim to have really benefitted noticeably from american slavery - it was just a shitty thing to do for no reason.

    Some historians appear to agree with additional support. During the 18th century, the slave economy was significant in the expansion of industry & commerce, but its value declined & was no longer needed by the 19th century. Slave-intensive sugar production that dominated the 18th century became less important in the 19th century as shipment of cotton products to international markets grew in significance. Unlike sugar, cotton had less need for slaves, and early cotton growers used slaves primarily because they were already slave-owners.

    Insurgent scholars known as New Historians of Capitalism argue that slavery, specifically slave-grown cotton, was critical for the rise of the U.S. economy in the 19th century. In contrast, I argued that although industrial capitalism needed cheap cotton, cheap cotton did not need slavery. Unlike sugar, cotton required no large investments of fixed capital and could be cultivated efficiently at any scale, in locations that would have been settled by free farmers in the absence of slavery. Early mainland cotton growers deployed slave labour not because of its productivity or aptness for the new crop, but because they were already slave owners, searching for profitable alternatives to tobacco, indigo, and other declining crops. Slavery was, in effect, a ‘pre-existing condition’ for the 19th-century American South.

    Slavery restrained economic development of the south, causing it to underperform economically: while it unevenly concentrated the lesser wealth produced there, the lesser wealth produced there benefitted the rest of the economy less than it could have. Free states didn’t benefit from the less wealth concentrated elsewhere.

    To be sure, U.S. cotton did indeed rise ‘on the backs of slaves’, and no cliometric counterfactual can gainsay this brute fact of history. But it is doubtful that this brutal system served the long-run interests of textile producers in Lancashire and New England, as many of them recognized at the time. As argued here, the slave South underperformed as a world cotton supplier, for three distinct though related reasons: in 1807 the region closed the African slave trade, yet failed to recruit free migrants, making labour supply inelastic; slave owners neglected transportation infrastructure, leaving large sections of potential cotton land on the margins of commercial agriculture; and because of the fixed-cost character of slavery, even large plantations aimed at self-sufficiency in foodstuffs, limiting the region’s overall degree of market specialization. The best evidence that slavery was not essential for cotton supply is demonstrated by what happened when slavery ended. After war and emancipation, merchants and railroads flooded into the southeast, enticing previously isolated farm areas into the cotton economy. Production in plantation areas gradually recovered, but the biggest source of new cotton came from white farmers in the Piedmont. When the dust settled in the 1880s, India, Egypt, and slave-using Brazil had retreated from world markets, and the price of cotton in Liverpool returned to its antebellum level. See Figure 2.









  • What part of science is guilt by association fallacy? Rash judgement is at odds with science. Did you know criminals can associate with noncriminals?

    To flip this around, ostracizing others “out of safety” for associating with ex-convicts (who had been processed & released to society) is morally compromised & dishonest, ie, immoral. Talking to someone who did something wrong doesn’t imply you did something wrong. Neither does taking their money. Indulging fallacies is not a hallmark of scientific thought & is more consistent with the repressive, medieval thought scientists fought very hard to overcome.

    Sages of major religions famously associated with undesirables: outcasts, untouchables, murderers, dangerous felons, etc. By the “logic” of that announcement, communities should have banned Buddha & Jesus (also mentioned in the Epstein files). Those that didn’t were “deplorable” for “not taking firm action to protect” members “in light of” blanket “allegations” that fail to specifically accuse them. If they were sanctimonious enough, they too could have done “more”.

    Post needs text alternative for image of text.

    Images of text break much that text alternatives do not. Losses due to image of text lacking alternative such as link:

    • usability
      • we can’t quote the text without pointless bullshit like retyping it or OCR
      • text search is unavailable
      • the system can’t
        • reflow text to varied screen sizes
        • vary presentation (size, contrast)
        • vary modality (audio, braille)
    • accessibility
      • lacks semantic structure (tags for titles, heading levels, sections, paragraphs, lists, emphasis, code, links, accessibility features, etc)
      • some users can’t read the image due to lack of alt text (markdown image description)
      • users can’t adapt the text for dyslexia or vision impairments
      • systems can’t read the text to them or send it to braille devices
    • web connectivity
      • we have to do failure-prone bullshit to find the original source
      • we can’t explore wider context of the original message
    • authenticity: we don’t know the image hasn’t been tampered
    • searchability: the “text” isn’t indexable by search engine in a meaningful way
    • fault tolerance: no text fallback if
      • image breaks
      • image host is geoblocked due to insane regulations.

    Contrary to age & humble appearance, text is an advanced technology that provides all these capabilities absent from images.