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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • I disagree. Just following your source to its conclusion, I think it’s safe to say OA (organic agriculture) is better all around:

    7.1 Pros • Lower emissions of CO 2 , N 2 O, and CH4 • Enhanced soil and water quality • Lower energy use per land area • Higher energy efficiency per land area 7.2 Cons • Lower soil profile SOC stocks [i.e. how much carbon is in the soil] • Lower crop yields • Higher land requirement • Lower energy production per land area

    Your conclusion that we’d have to clear more land for agriculture use if we all switched to OA seems flawed; e.g. here in Germany we use about 60% of agricultural land to raise livestock feed like corn etc (https://www.landwirtschaft.de/tier-und-pflanze/pflanze/was-waechst-auf-deutschlands-feldern). Seems to me like eating less meat and growing idk lentils or beans would not immediately lead to food insecurity.

    This is also what the FAO says: yes, OA leads to yield reduction when compared to conventional methods, but not to food scarcity and instead to healthier ecosystems (https://www.fao.org/organicag/oa-faq/oa-faq6/en/).

    (sry gotta go, more.later)




  • Wikipedia in Video Form is a great line! I feel much the same way, but I think that’s not the entire picture. Wikipedia is a lot of declarative knowledge (i.e. what things are and Al’s maybe why they are), but YouTube is a lot of procedural knowledge for me. That is how to X. My GF and I finally found an apartment. I don’t know how to replace broken light switches, but in five minutes YouTube taught me how.

    I didn’t know how to replace a faucet - now I do. I did not know how to insert a metal screw fitting into the furniture I was constructing - now I do. I wanted to measure our energy consumption, figuring there had to be a way to it it smart/connected and Open Source. YT content creators showed me how.

    The list goes oooonnnnnn


  • You are in the wrong side of this.Theres a German doc shedding some light on this issue:

    https://youtu.be/vogs4NzqI3Q (money quote around 7:07), basically “half the perpetrators of child sexual abuse do not feel an attraction to kids. On the other hand, half the people who do feel attracted to kids do not become perpetrators.”

    Basically, half the people abusing kids don’t do so because they’re attracted to kids but presumably because they’re easier victims whereas half the people getting attracted to life feel disgusted by themselves.

    It’s, for all that we know, as congenital as being straight or queer. Now, with queer and straight preference, you don’t necessarily run into consent problems. Imagine you notice yourself being attracted to, idk, 15-year-olds. You’re otherwise a reasonably well adjusted human being. That’s gotta be devastating. You can’t help it, you were born this way. There’s no redemption arc here, the only thing you can do is just never ever give in to this feeling.




  • so much this!

    I used to recoil at the thought of “networking” for similar reasons as OOP. I’d rather make smalltalk at a conference for exactly as long as it takesb to find someone to go ditch the entire thing with. I don’t wanna talk shop for the sake of talking shop or “networking”, I wanna go for a beer and talk about fully automated luxury gay space communism 🚀

    However, now that I’m professionally doing something that I’m interested in, things have changed a bit. I actually enjoy the challenges at my job and actively seek out people that (hopefully) know more about the pitfalls than me. I want to learn from other people! Hopefully I can pay it forward sometime.

    But now, all of a sudden, I’m networking. I know what Rebekah does over at Engineering and I know what Claude is trying to accomplish over at $competitor. They in turn know what’s in my roadmap and where I might need support. They also know how I work.

    And now, every now and then I get a LinkedIn message alerting me to a professional learning opportunity or a job opportunity. Likewise, I keep Rebecah and Claude in the loop about things that might be interesting to them.










  • Very much this. I was an exchange student in the US in 2005 and my US history teacher (yes, their history classes are commonly split between us and “rest of the world”) exclusively worked with excerpts from Zinn.

    I understood once I leafed through the official textbook. It was about as bad as you can imagine.

    So yes, Zinn is far from “objective” or “neutral”. It’s a deliberate choice because

    a) it’s supposed to counterbalance the terribly whitewashed school books and b) there’s a case to be made that no text, not even scientific ones, is ever truly objective or neutral because reality is a construct.

    The latter is a more philosophical debate, but nonetheless an important one. Since there is no single objective truth, you’ll usually dare better by considering varying interpretations of “truth” before making your mind up.

    In other words: you’ll never get the full picture, but if you assemble enough puzzle pieces you increase your chances of understanding the bigger picture, and, more importantly, you’ll gain a sense for when somebody is just off their rocker.