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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Not as great as it seems. The thing is, everyone’s retirement is tied to real-estate. The numbers my vary country by country, but nearly all pension funds and mutual funds have significant exposure to real-estate that is just ignoring the issue that those properties may become uninsurable. That’s before what happens due to the economic disruption of all those cities slowly, then at an increased velocity, relocating.

    It’s not going to be pretty.


  • So yes, I realize this a joke map (honestly, a giant, probably mostly freshwater sea, in the US would be a blessing). But what you’re describing is the main issue with climate change.

    It’s not going to be “the day after tomorrow”. It will be coastal cities… which are… like nearly ALL of them… losing all their economic value. In the US when having this conversation I say “what do you do when any building in Manhattan is uninsurable? What do you do when it’s sure to have severe damage?”.

    For most people there are plenty of places to go, but the “going” is going to be very, very ugly.






  • batmaniam@lemmy.worldtoNews@lemmy.world[META] MBFC bot
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    1 month ago

    2nd. It’s just not necessary. Frankly what’s more off putting is the outright bizarre insistence on the mods part and outright denial of feedback. If the bot comes back I’m blocking the community, there are other streams for news.

    Edit: didn’t realize the “new and improved” bot is back. Good luck yall.





  • If it’s determined there’s liability, maybe. I don’t know about jail but a victims family absolutely could sue in civil court in the US.

    I don’t know about specifics but there are absolutely cases and laws around determining when and if a storage company in this case should have known. Also for things like kids breaking into your derelict building and hurting themselves and a million other things.

    Don’t ask me to get into whether the laws around establishing liability are correct or ethical, I barley know any details in my own country let alone others (and what international treaties apply). But you asked a question and the answer is: it depends but, yes, sometimes.



  • I guess what it comes down to is there a plenty of things, big and small, that I don’t have an issue with as an American but I know matter to the other person. Usually it’s small stuff (how people comport themselves in relation to work, the line between direct and rude, etc) , but when it comes to things where people died, I think it’s best to defer to the people involved.

    Maybe that’s a trap of my upbringing as well but I don’t see that as American lens, I see that as recognizing there are a lot of lenses.

    And again, the original joke is decent, its a role reversal and punches up not down, but I wouldn’t want an American paper making jokes about Finnish biathalon Olympians spanking the Russians.

    Any joke with cultural baggage carries the risk you miss context. Again, I don’t think that’s just true for Americans.




  • how much you can build without a complete understanding

    We’ve never actually never had one. I’d have to check the timelines but Tesla was almost certainly working on a functional, but inaccurate atomic model (Bohr). Medicine is actually a great example of all this. We are so used to just kind of knowing “there’s a bad bug or bad gene that’s making me sick”. Like you may not know the details, but you’ve got some loose concept a bunch of cells in your body are pissed off. For the vast, vasssssssst history of medicine, it was all empirical, and the thing is, it kind of worked… sometimes.

    My favorite example of “knowing without fully understanding” is Mendel and his peas. If you do a 4x4 punnet square (that gene cross thing), and look at the frequency of co-inheritance, you can track how far genes are from on another (because the further they are, the more likely there will be a swap during the shuffle). Thing is… because DNA is an integer thing (no such thing as ‘half a base pair’) it works DOWN TO THE SINGLE BASE PAIR. Mendel was accurately counting the number of freaking base pairs separating genes without knowing what a base pair, or indeed even really a molecule, was.

    Tesla would have lived to see some absolutely nutty stuff in physics. Boltzman, Einstein with relativity, it must have seemed like pure madness at the time.

    So yeah, we discover new and interesting stuff all the time. I personally think that some of the weird quantum stuff is going seem as rote in the future as germs do to us now. As in, the same way any lay-person shoved into a time machine would at least be able to give the basics to a medieval European, someone from the future would be like “well I don’t remember much about quantum tunneling, but…”.

    And that’s all before getting into some of the bizarre things going on in math itself. Be careful if you look into that stuff though, it’s easy to fall into the “Terrance Howard” style rabbit hole. Suffice to say there is some really interesting and unexpected implications we’re discovering, but if you don’t have a solid grasp of theory, it is easy to be led astray but sources that want to gloss over details to talk about a conclusion that isn’t actually supported. It’s like if you tried to explain time dilation to an ancient Greek, and they excitedly hopped on their fastest chariot thinking they could “fast forward” to the future, because time moves “more slowly” for you when you’re going faster, right?




  • I have a story to share that this crowd will appreciate.

    I got into TNG with my Dad. We’d watch it on broadcast when I was young whatever day of the week it was that is on.

    Thing is, the afterschool daycare I was at, the last 45mins or whatever, as kids were trickling out, they’d sit us down to watch something while they closed up shop, vacuuming, wiping the kid grime off stuff etc. Frequently what they put on was reading rainbow.

    So being young, I’d ask my Dad about Geordi’s visor and his eyes. He would patiently explain that Geordi was blind but could see with the visor. Somewhere in there was the episode where his visor breaks and he and the Romulan bond. So far so good, I’m with you.

    But what I could NOT square, and didn’t have the means to articulate, was that just earlier that day Geordi was reading me godamn books. WITHOUT HIS VISOR.

    … and then there we got to the godamn crossover episode of reading rainbow.