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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I don’t intend to imply that groundwater extraction should cease, only that this effect desperately needs to be studied further. Perhaps we can develop a way to safely replace or counterbalance the mass of the groundwater we take out. Perhaps we wont need to, and natural processes that take longer than human timescales will have negative feedback mechanisms that will gradually counteract the effect. We need more precise data than an 2 decades model can provide if we want to be able to project how this will continue. Of course we also don’t want Antarctica at the equator in X thousand years. We should understand what’s happening better before we define and label this as a problem problem develop and propose solutions. But the known unknown, the potential for extreme axial drift leading to mass exctinction via a “global roll,” is just waiting to be investigated.


  • I’m currently loving a bunch of games in the factory building genre so can I offer you some Dyson Sphere Program in these trying times?

    Imagine factorio but you’re in a mecha suit building factories spanning multiple planets eventually multiple stars, to build exponentially more complex resources until you’re able to shoot swarms of dyson reflectors and eventually build a rigid sphere in orbit.

    Still in Alpha after several years, but exquisitely polished, runs fine on legacy machines, excellent responsive dev team, combat is being added soon.


  • As someone with both a college level understanding of German and an understanding of law, it’s basically a law creating a special type of lawsuit similar but different from a US class action, that Germany passed into law after the 2015 Volkswagen scandal. It tries to incentivize businesses protecting consumers through actual safeguards by punishing companies when they lack them, rather than a class action that arguably has the effect of pressuring companies to be even more misleading or confusing to deliberately avoid liability. How it does this? Probably gonna have to tap in a legal scholar for that one.


  • Reasonable people can have disagreements about trans rights.

    For instance, the complexities of solving trans issues in sports, does the age of HRT matter for gendered leagues and title IX? Rule changes occur in sports leagues every year, how will acknowledging trans people change the ways we revise rules for safety, competition, entertainment, and sportsmanship? Should certain sports start to franchise into coed/nonbinary leagues?

    For instance the best approach for teach children acceptance and tolerance towards peers who may come to identify with a different gender thsn assigned. There can be conservative and liberal approaches to teaching tolerance.

    For instance the difference between the Human Rights campaign that wants LGBTQ civil rights to mimic POC civil rights (the capitalist conservative path, btw) versus groups that advocate liberation politics and taking civil rights in a more left wing direction.

    Those are political disagreements. QAnon-fake-news trans lobby conspiracy is not a political disagreement - it’s just trolling.


  • We are all happy to engage with competing worldviews

    What you call “far right” and “extremist” is actually normal, conservative, and Christian. What you call “hateful” is actually just truth telling.

    This isn’t a competing worldview, or rather, it’s a competing worldview in the same way that phrenology and alchemy are competing ways to view anatomy and chemistry. Like, it’s possible to genuinely believe in these things if your conditions of childhood existence are so constrained, isolated, or manipulated that you are happier living life in your own personal ‘Truman show.’ But the rest of us don’t have an obligation to play along with your fantasy.

    Most of us here on the internet have at some point met someone we’ve had a reasonable political disagreement with but could walk away understanding each other better due to those disagreements. Most of us would even say thise diagreements have gone in both political directions. The same cannot honestly be said for folks with your version of a ‘world view.’ It’s like a method actor but worse because it lacks any goal, it’s like a person suffering mental but worse because the cause (Patriarchal models of religion) is external, intentional, and had been prosthlytizing delusion as a worldview for millenia.


  • Because the facts are the facts. The Attny General of the Biden Administration could have conceded the case and the water rights at any point Biden wanted. Biden chose to do the same thing Trump, Obama, and Bush did. The same thing every US president has always done when the indigenous folks rouse some rabble about the promises we made to them.

    The treaties aren’t some secret, they were written down and you can read them for yourself. The people signing it agreed on the words to communicate their intentions. Make your own opinion and decide whether Bidens administration fought this over the genuine intentions of the promises made in the treaty, or over the modern interests of current and future non-indigenous voters. Think for yourself, form your own opinion rather than wringing your hands over the optics of the headline.


  • If this was a meeting on gender equality rather than female empowerment your reaction would make more sense. The two concepts are similar but different and apply to different social contexts.

    Equality is a political goal, empowerment is the actions we collectively take today regardless of our patchwork of political realities. Do we need men to be the leaders of female empowerment in places where women do not yet feel even close to equal to men? Maybe this would make sense in some places, counties where women leaders are ubiquitous like New Zealand and Finland (they arent really ubuquitous , merely moreso than the rest of the world). But that’s really up to the women to decide who empowers them when they feel disenfranchised by their country’s establishment.

    So do you think Japanese women feel inspired and empowered by this guy? Or is it better interpretiert as tonedeaf homework put forth by someone who didnt understand the assignment?


  • The observed drift since humans have been able to make these observations is that our natural tilt fluctuates 2⁰ over 40,000 or so years. Which comes out to about 576 inches a year (I didnt do the maths, im basing this off the speed that the polar circle is currently drifting, not sure if thats the best way to approximate earths tilt vs. orbital plane). So comparing that to 31 inches of drift per year due to water, this seems to account for roughly 5% of the observed axial drift of the earth.

    It’s dawning on me that our most current astronomical measurements and this study are drawing on the same time period of observations, and that most of the water humans have moved around on earth likely occurred before and/or after the decades this model accounts for. So yeah, it’s troubling.


  • Mostly because Skyrim was still delivering a novel gaming experience of being able to explore for 100s to 1000s of hours without repetition. Despite the bugs it was first to market in an era where WoW and multiplayer was the premiere gaming experience. By the time Cyberpunk hit shelves the format was old news in the sense that we already had “open world explore this map for your entire jaded teenage years” maps for genres from viking to western to future dystopia.

    Aside: There is a reason HBO could only reboot Westworld in 2016 and the concept was already stale again by 2018, it would have been unthinkably dumb to try it in, say, 2006.

    Maybe without Fallout 4, Half-life 2±, Bioshock 3, and so on, the future dystopia thirst would have won out, but when you put all these options on the same steam library which one do people want to spend their time in?