• 2 Posts
  • 95 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 19th, 2023

help-circle







  • You’re not wrong, but my point is that we’re dealing with laws of math here. You can’t just go “Just accept less profit” when the majority don’t make enough profit to survive. That money has to come from somewhere.

    My mom ran a couple restaurants at different times in her life. She’s a high school drop-out who has never had a great job so it isn’t like she’s some high class capitalist. Both restaurants failed within a year or two, and she came out each time quite a bit worse than she went in. The company in charge of the building locked the doors and kept all her stuff in lieu of rent. It’s pretty brutal. She lost all the money she put into it well beyond any money she might have made on the business itself, and she went into debt each time as a result of the failing business as well.









  • I think it depends a lot on the federated service.

    For mastodon, you follow individual users, so if there’s a million users or ten million or a hundred million, their instances will only be contacting other intances they’re federating with so it’s quite scalable.

    For Lemmy, you follow communities, so every server pulls all the posts and comments the common community. This means that for an instance like lemmy.world hosting lots of different big communities, every new server hammers the one central instance.

    A strategy for improving the situation I think would be to spread the load. Instead of everyone piling into megacommunities, if people spread out into smaller more tight knit communities over many different instances. Of course, this isn’t really compatible with the purpose of having communities like that.

    It does seem to suggest that ActivityPub isn’t necessarily the most appropriate protocol for this purpose, even though it’s what was used because it’s the de facto standard on the fediverse.



  • It’s important to remember that not every litre of water is the same as every other liter of water.

    It’s really important to watch water use if you’re using groundwater in Texas or California, but water is a renewable resource in many places and it isn’t a problem to use water as long as it’s properly managed. For example if you remove water from a river, purify it, use it for something benign like cooling making sure not to add anything to it, process it so you’re not impacting the ecosystem, then return it to the same river, then you’ve used water, but you didn’t really consume anything.

    On the other hand, if you polute that water, or you damage local ecosystems, or if you’re pulling water out of non-renewable sources, that’s a problem. Environmentalism must be local, there are few universal answers.



  • I think the concept of an ideal may be flawed. What is ideal changes based on what the current situation is.

    That goes for the ideal human body as well as the ideal human philosophy. We need to evolve constantly to fit with our current situation.

    People get fat because famines killed people a lot. People have sickle cell anemia because sickle cell traits protect against malaria which killed people a lot. A lot of cancers are caused by mechanisms that protect against things that kill people a lot. Different personality traits that look suboptimal exist because those strategies were successful over time. Yeah these traits look bad when that situation doesn’t exist, but they’re much more likely to help in the aggregate than to hurt particularly with stuff like cancers which tend to kick in after an individual has reproduced so don’t have as much of an evolutionary impact.

    A lot of the same goes for philosophies – people tend to follow what works, and what works at one time doesn’t work all the time – ask gen z as they’re given advice by boomers.

    All this is one good reason to be wary of genetic engineering. We’ll get rid of all the “bad traits” and be wiped out because some of them were there for good reasons we don’t understand.