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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • Even before renewables/green energy, we’ve had problems with surplus power in the grid. It’s actually one of the biggest issues for infrastructure to solve in moving away from fossil fuels. We simply don’t have the storage capacity, and nobody has any real plan or path toward a solution as of yet, as far as I know.

    For probably a century or so now, power companies have been paying manufacturing industries to run their heaviest equipment with nothing in them just to bleed extra power out of the grids during lows in demand because power stations can’t change their outputs fast enough, especially things like nuclear energy. Even stuff like coal or natural gas plants have a spool up or down time that can’t keep pace with the changes in demand.







  • Republicans don’t believe that FtM people exist. In their minds, they’re just delusional women who wish they were men, but it makes perfect sense to them that women wish they were men. It would be weirder to them to hear that not all women wish they were men. It’s completely part of the sexism and patriarchy.

    The reason that they’re so obsessed with trans women by comparison is that it goes against their entire worldview. A man who wants to be a woman? Why would anyone ever want to be a woman?! There’s also the bigotry and everything else, of course, but the fact that it defies what they see as the natural order or hierarchy of the sexes drives them crazy.



  • Anti-vaxxer insurrectionists protesting COVID regulations and “personal freedom” by attempting to shut down the government? Yeah, we had that. It’s called Jan 6th. We’ve also had our own series of MAGA convoys over the years. We call them Y’All Qaeda. I don’t know why this is your golden idol of what protesting should be.

    And you should give a shit that I’m a minority who has watched Canada be roughly 5 to 10 years behind the US in their own war on science and education since 2001. Trump may be the signpost that actually turns the Canadian slide into MAGA conservatism around, there was some evidence of them backtracking on those stances during his last term, but only time will tell.



  • I’m a trans woman in the US, a group who the government had already been stealing official documents from since before Trump was even officially in office and who states have been banning from public life, creating lists of, and trying to deny medical care to for years. We’ve been saying for a decade that conservatives would love nothing more than to round us all up and put us in camps. Guess what conservatives have expressed their desire to do?

    Come at me again and tell me I’m not doing anything about my government when you don’t know the first thing about me.

    You sir, are a fucking moron and transphobic to boot. Go be racist somewhere else.



  • You mean that one time a bunch of Canadians drove in a line?

    Compared to that time a protest was staged across an area the size of Europe? From small towns with a few dozen people to capital cities? And then again? And again?

    These were all literally a quick Google search away. And you know what? Almost all of them are from last year, from a couple of cities out of those national protests, because our media is captured and it’s very difficult to find photos of the people scaring off ICE attempting to snatch people in broad daylight or the masses of abandoned cars in Chicago - some of them still running - from all the ICE raids. Or the community watch groups that have sprouted up to track where ICE agents are in the city. I couldn’t find a single picture of the protests from Boston then where there were more protesters in the city than the total population of the city. Most of what I saw was pro-ICE propaganda from news outlets about immigrants in NYC “cheering for ICE after capture of violent gang members” and other nonsense.




  • The one thing I will say is that there does seem to be a generalized dislike for AI that has all the investors and upper management types nervous. Even by their own studies do people generally either not care about AI in their products or actively dislike it/find it intrusive. There was a study by a phone company from this past summer or fall that concluded that 80% of their users had no interest in AI or found that it actively made their experience worse, and there have been plenty of pretty damning reports about how useful it’s been in various industries (just look at Microslop). That is not conducive to convincing investors to fund your product and does not show a viable path to making a profit in the future.

    We’ve seen similar things happening recently with car manufacturers walking back on their big touchscreens (with some help from regulation in civilized places that care about things like “pedestrian fatalities” - like Europe) due to consumer sentiment. They tried for nearly a decade to push bigger and bigger screens into cars and remove physical buttons, and now they’re moving in the other direction. Completely anecdotal evidence, but the last time I went to buy a car I told the salesman at the dealership that I wasn’t interested in cars newer than a certain year because that was when they increased the size of the screen and put them in a more obnoxious spot on the dashboard, and he said that he heard similar sentiments from practically everybody who came in looking to buy a car - everybody hated the bigger screens.


  • If you think about it, it is very wasteful for you to have that chocolate bar in your food pantry. So many wasted calories as most bodies can only burn a fraction of them before converting the rest into fat. Same can be said for pasta and many other foods. We even spend a full third of our lives asleep, consuming even less calories! Incredibly inefficient!

    Maybe the solution is aerosolized calories that can be sprayed via plane over vast regions of the country instead of food so that calories are owned by the people on a local, regional, or national level?


  • It’s a real catch-22. The ability to spin up new servers leads to plenty run by your run-of-the-mill person with some knowledge about hosting. The downside is that it’s inherently unstable due to relying on your run-of-the-mill person with some knowledge about hosting to maintain a social media server, and it’s always easier to destroy than it is to create.

    Each time a server goes down, there’s some percentage of users and communities that won’t return due to the effort of relocating and starting all over. Why go through the effort of finding a new server, especially one run the way you want, and start over when the same thing could happen within a month. It’s like when a Discord server disappears, but your account gets deleted every time as well.


  • They have metal internal components just like almost every 3d printed gun does. There are some things that you just need metal for, like springs. The vast majority of 3d printed guns are actually guns purchased from a gun store and then modified with the equivalent of handmade after-market parts.

    In order to be undetectable by metal detectors, you would have to keep the amount of metal in them to about that of a pair of glasses. So basically a firing pin and that’s about it. I think a break action firing chamber would probably set it off like a big belt buckle would, and no recoil or magazine springs mean that it would have to be a single shot weapon with a manual reload - some kind of break action. And no barrel liner or a metal barrel at all, nor metal bullet casings. A shotgun shell might be able to make it through because of their mostly plastic shell with a copper back about the size of a quarter, but that’s gonna be about it.

    It’s really not the issue that politicians and the media make it out to be. It’s just fear mongering.