I advocate for logical and consistent viewpoints on controversial topics. If you’re looking at my profile, I’ve probably made you mad by doing so.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I see what you mean, but energy isn’t currently free, and as we built more headroom, crypto and AI have simply eaten up that headroom. Don’t take my word for it, simply look at the statistics on how much more energy we are using than 10 years ago, and then look at corporate energy usage now on those two things. Renewables haven’t kept up because large corporations keep eating more and more. In fact, governments have had to **de-**decomission a few coal plants because the energy usage was so high. Here’s an article on one of them that is supporting a massive crypto farm.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m absolutely 100% glad that the energy is not all coming from coal plants anymore, but also it isn’t like none of it is.

    And no energy is emission free. You still have to pay the environmental cost to create and maintain the equipment gathering the energy in the first place.

    In short, renewables are great. Corporate overusage of energy is not, especially for incredibly selfish gain like crypto and “AI”. I’m not going to cheer for the shares at corporations to be higher simply because we have renewables offsetting a tiny bit of the massive power they suck up.




  • That paper is not really a source, it’s a literature review. That’s not inherently bad, but essentially all it does is pull things in from other (if you check, quite outdated by nearly 60 years, which is a lot, ESPECIALLY for biology) articles and say “… and therefore this other thing may be true.” It’s essentially philosophizing.

    The paper neither invalidate nor proves anything, it simply makes a loose connection to a strange claim.

    The author is correct that we do have characteristics of herbivores. However that is not something anyone was questioning; that’s literally one of the requirements for being an omnivore. We also have characteristics of carnivores. And even obligate carnivores will often have some characteristics of herbivores due to evolutionary holdovers.

    The paper is, essentially, saying nothing of value.



  • Human teeth also have sharp peaks and deeper valleys within them which is the case for the overwhelming majority of omnivorous creatures. Most obligate herbivores have flatter teeth or will regrow them unless they have teeth explicitly for a particular use case.

    Source: You can check out scads of scientific resources on herbivores versus omnivore versus carnivore teeth. I assume you know how a search engine works, but here’s a solid article on differences.

    Also my sister has been one of the veterinary bigwigs at several zoos through her lifetime and we’ve had multiple discussions on it.






  • Ace T'Ken@lemmy.catoPatient Gamers@sh.itjust.worksAbout to try the Outer Worlds
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    2 months ago

    Played the OG version with all the DLC and not the Spacer’s Choice version, so take my comments with that in mind:

    PROS:

    • The music was completely appropriate and fit the world. It was nothing I’d listen to independently though.
    • It ran very well the entire time I played it. Very little in the way of hitching, and very quick load times.
    • Achievements!
    • From beginning to end I was having a darn good time. It’s a “smooth” game experience that I stayed up way too late a few nights in a row to get through because I couldn’t wait to see what came next.
    • Many ways to solve issues; you didn’t feel forced to end nearly anything in a certain way. The only exception was one main DLC quest I couldn’t finish the way I wanted due to the level cap being too low and not having enough points.
    • Zero bugs experienced.
    • Plenty to explore and loads of side stories to discover. Some stories weren’t wonderfully told and were hard to track, but many more than that were awesome.

    NEUTRAL:

    • It felt like it ended too soon. A game like this with two expansions should have offered more. That’s both a good thing and a bad thing in that it didn’t overstay its welcome either.

    CONS:

    • Some of the achievements are deeply annoying to the point that I gave up on completing the set. You’d have to waste dozens of hours to grind all of them and play in some pretty odd ways that wouldn’t match normal gameplay.
    • There are no romance options for the player, and only thing even remotely like it in game is a gay asexual romance quest for a side character. You get some G-rated come-ons thrown your way, but nothing can come of it. It’s extremely puzzling in it’s puritanicality in both how the colony operates, and how everything is treated. Not that this has to be a porn game or anything, mind you, but some options to do SOMETHING romance-related (or characters that operate like they have genitals) like Mass Effect or Fallout would be nice. Heck, there aren’t even any kids in the world to show that someone had bred ever.
    • Some of the environments and buildings are not terribly visibly distinct and it hurt pathfinding. It would tell me to go somewhere specific and I wasn’t sure what it was referring to, and this was after playing for hours. This has something to do with the “corporate jargon” style language they use as well. It fits stylistically, but can be confusing.
    • The sidekicks stories felt exceptionally rushed and some of the outcomes were a little nonsensical.
    • I beat the game and both DLCs close to 100% in under 37 hours.
    • The level cap even with the DLCs is set to 36 which I hit about halfway through the game, and I felt like it needed far more. It really made that feeling of progression you love in these games stop dead. There was nothing to find for new item upgrades or interesting loot past that point. This was my largest gripe with the game by far as it disincentivized exploration because there was nothing to gain by doing so at that stage. UPDATE: The new version of the game supposedly upgrades the level cap to something a little less horrible. I wish this were available during my playthrough as the game isn’t worth going through a second time. If you’re interested, I HIGHLY recommend waiting for the newer edition.

    DID YOU FINISH THE GAME?: Yup! And the DLC. Though if you’re playing now, just get the new edition since it fixes the XP progression block that I mention above.

    CONCLUSION: While it won’t stick with me for years, it was great while it lasted and I would 100% play more in the series. If you enjoy story and exploration, play this. The only things stopping it from being Fallout-level good was the awful level cap and the lack of content.



  • But come now, certainly you must recognize that that’s not even close to causation. Just because it’s done often doesn’t even come close to meaning that there’s any proof that it functions as you state.

    If I carry a “rock of tiger repellent” and tell you that I’ve never been attacked by a tiger, therefore it must work, it’s the same logic.

    Countries that do not (or rarely) have highway blockades have more civil rights or had them earlier than the US did. They also have stronger protections and aren’t helping bomb Gaza. Using the logic stated by you, that may actually mean that highway protests make things worse.

    Again, just because it agrees with you politically, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. There’s no study or data indicating that it functions, and scads of loose polls and information saying it doesn’t (which are only slightly better than no evidence at all). I’d encourage an actual study, but judging by every thread I’ve ever seen on the issue, the only people claiming to be even minutely swayed by these demonstrations were people already on the side of the protesters.


  • In this one instance they might do that. In the area where I live where it was done, there was no space for the emergency vehicles to go in the other direction. Just because there are ways they could do it in this one case doesn’t make it universal.

    Also, are you able to provide the polling you referenced showing that highway blockades change minds? I was unable to find anything other than web and call-in polls, both of which overwhelmingly showed the exact opposite (but those are hardly scientific so I wouldn’t trust them).

    Also, I’m not the one downvoting you. I do not do that.


  • … which just means you have to get creative.

    Freeway blocking is not creative, doesn’t get people present on your side (quite literally the opposite), presents safety risks, may delay emergency vehicles, wastes natural resources, and doesn’t change minds of readers. Same with the stupid “throw soup / oil at a piece of art” shit I saw repeatedly. A throw-away headline seems to be the goal, but it accomplishes next to nothing.

    Target. Those. In. Power. Make life fucking hard for them.

    This thread (not you explicitly) reeks of this attitude I see frequently on Lemmy of “It’s a deeply stupid and astoundingly flawed thing to do, but I’ll defend it to the death because it agrees with my politics!”



  • But there definitely are though. Why wouldn’t you, say, protest the factories where these things are made? Not just hold up some signs outside, but blockade those businesses in.

    Maybe find out who their major shareholders are and publicly shame them. Dig up dirt on them. Do anything you can to stop them.

    Maybe find the neighbourhoods that those shareholders live in and blockade those.

    Protest at the schools that their children go to letting them know their parents are murdering people overseas.

    It took me like 3 minutes to think of those and those are far more effective than what is going on in this news story. Are protesters in America really that short-sighted but they can’t think of anything better than annoying other normal people and making enemies?

    This is like protesting the food in a prison cafeteria by beating the shit out of your cellmate, and then calling him complicit because he ate food yesterday.

    They’re not targeting the right people, they’re simply turning normal people off of their message.