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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • IMO, it is a distinction that is worthwhile.

    What distinction, pointing out that the existing astronomical and mineralogical structures will withstand even our worst impulses? Or changing “Saving the planet” to “slowing our inevitable dissolution due to corrupt thinking and possibly saving some ducks, too”?

    The distinction is already very well known - as we can see, people drive for hundreds of miles so they can hop out and tell us the actual physical structure of Earth will remain, most likely. It’s the insistence on focusing on that distinction which slows our ability to talk about the core causes for this climate disaster. And it sounds a lot like the previous 100 years of:

    • there’s plenty of nature
    • we can’t live like savages, we must pollute to make money
    • what if we add lead to it and spray it all over everything and everyone? No knocks! Profit!
    • What the heck is an ozone layer
    • oh you’re a tree hugger huh
    • there’s no proof its caused by humans
    • there are always periods of heating and cooling
    • this is a Chinese hoax
    • well you drink water so you’re part of the problem
    • i’ll never give up eating meat, what are you, gay?
    • It’s too expensive to not destroy the environment
    • oil prices are the key to liberty and freedom
    • the future of clean energy is a nightmare because we’ll have to enslave humanity to extract rare minerals from protected wildlife areas to build large batteries
    • it’s fine, the earth will survive. Sure we’ll die and everything we commonly consider animal life will be killed but - ya gotta go sometime


  • God.fucking.dammit.

    When these two debates were announced, I knew it was going to be fucked up, but NO. Oooh he’s got to debate! He’ll show everyone how bad trump is! He needs to do it to help the undecideds!

    Fucking insane gibberish of a person who learned NOTHING from 2016. We got away with it in 2020 on the sheer novelty of an adult, a representative of government, telling trump to shut the fuck up. Now that was good tv. But it was a one-off.

    And now look at this shit. These fuckheads who can’t wait to elect trump are all up in here going “ooooh noooo Biden’s so bad he’s making us have trump be elected!1!!”

    Goddammit. The fucking “Operation gENoSiDE jOe” wasn’t gaining enough traction so THANK FUCK a bunch of Harvard MBA fuckups roundly decided Joe should stand on stage with a demented socopathic rapist who is functionally incapable of telling the truth and, y’know, give folks in the rural areas a little of the ol’, y’know, compare and contrast! What a goddamned brilliant idea. Hey! Let’s do it twice! Yeah! We are soooo smrt.

    Son of a fucking bitch, now we have to watch this garbage-truck-off-a-cliff-in-slow-motion for probably the next three months while all the Li’l Che Guevaras pile in every thread like clowns in a decrepit, backfiring bus, farting and defecating the same pointless key phrases over and over.

    DNC, you fucked up again because you refuse to understand how media works. Trumps out here kicking in windows and laughing and you guys are faxing press releases to republiQan-run news organizations and hoping their spin isn’t terrible. Christ in a bucket.






  • Optional@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzExplain that, science nerds!
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    2 hours ago

    . . . the planet and life itself will survive . . .

    How are you defining “life itself”?

    . . . and probably even be better off without humans.

    I’d say that goes without saying.

    Humans are causing the next extinction event and afterwards life will just start fresh again.

    Start “fresh”? Like with single-celled organisms? Maybe a billion years later we’ll be back eating sandwiches? Okay, so what process created sustainable environments again? Humans left some sort-of-permanent damage. Nuclear waste, PFAS, etc. Sure a good ol’ pole shift and a few asteroid impacts and we’re back in business.

    So no, saving the planet is not the goal. Saving humanity and most of all other current life is. And if that’s what you want to accomplish then that’s what you should talk about, specifically.

    God this is fucking exhausting. The prevention of unmitigated and prolonged suffering by all sentient life is the goal, YES. Kudos to the possibly viable future space rock and the wisdom to acknowledge our utter inability to protect one single planet from ourselves is laughably inadequate and - CLEARLY - irrelevant.






  • Because the threat is not a nuclear winter. It’s the disruption of all environmental systems that regulate the planet that is the threat in question. Which, in turn, disrupts the food chain, which starves whatever requires that food, which is for all intents and purposes, all life.

    I don’t understand how this is such a conversation with so many people here.



  • From your link:

    In practice, the sample size used in a study is usually determined based on the cost, time, or convenience of collecting the data, and the need for it to offer sufficient statistical power.

    You see how the elements listed there (cost, time, convenience, and ‘sufficient statistical power’) are more qualitative measurements and not known constants? (I mean, whenever it starts with, “In practice . . .” you know it means “in a perfect system devoid of unknowns”, or in other words “ideally but you’ll see it doesn’t work exactly like that” )

    What is the sufficient statistical power for sampling Europe? 0.002%? Two thousandths of a single percent? That greenlights your findings? Okay. I disagree. Polling companies don’t disagree because in this case, as you noted, 20k is an amazing sample size. The cost and time for that - not to mention the convenience! - alone is amazing . . for an opinion poll. No doubt they’re proud, that’s a fine achievement for an opinion poll. Now: did they measure what they set out to measure? I doubt it, but since the methodology given is the single word “online”, I remain skeptical.

    And saying “but there’s math in it!” is exactly why I’m skeptical. That effectively means nothing, and it’s used to validate whatever conclusions were presented. “We ran the numbers, and . . ” can mean very specific things, and in some contexts it is good enough to move on to the conclusions. Polls trade on that, but they don’t deserve to.



  • Depends on if you work outside for a living or live near a coastline or a forested area. It won’t be like a Star Trek: The Original Series where everyone’s in a big room and a red glow starts pulsating and we all groan and crumple to the floor. No, it won’t be like that.

    It’ll be like heat exhaustion exacerbated a hitherto unknown heart condition that deaded you. Or a Cat 6 hurricane rolled a tree over you. Or failing crops mean you couldn’t fight off COVID-26 or whatever.

    No, we’re not going to all die at once, as such. Depending on your timeframe for “at once”.