I would like to subscribe to strange space facts. Even though I’ll never get to experience them, it feels cozy somehow just knowing about them.

What would ‘nothing’ (like in those voids) feel like, I wonder?

Manowar had that one song titled ‘Pleasure slave’, if memory serves. No idea if it was a serious song or not. Those were some weird times for music.

you’re fighting a losing battle. ‘having kids is a good thing’ is the only piece of propaganda that is distributed to probably every human. and probably the oldest one, too. it’s also a base instinct, sort of hard to override by reasoning, as anyone who’s ever been horny or hungry can probably attest. this is probably the best example on here related to the posted question.

for what it’s worth, I do think you are correct

I mean, all life on Earth is basically carbon based and that’s how oil formed in the first place, organic matter burried deep and left there for a very long time. We’d just have to find a way to put organic matter in the places we extract oil from now.

Living things already pull carbon out of the atmosphere (via plants, for instance - plants pull carbon from the air and nitrogen from the soil, and along with water build up all manner of sugars and proteins. animals then eat those and they become the building blocks for the animal’s body). They also put some back as byproducts of metabolism - CO2 for higher organisms, methane for some bacteria. Living things just go through a cycle and none of the carbon remains locked away, as it was in the case of oil deposits. All that oil was at some point huge hunks of living, breathing, eating, multiplying beings. So we wouldn’t actually need to form it into a solid rock before disposing of it.

I don’t know, maybe we can just dig an extremely deep pit and shove all our organic waste down there. Or make some very sturdy concrete tombs (similar to nuclear waste, minus the lead) and just seal it all away, but it’d have to be completely sealed so as not to seep into the environment around it. Or deep enough so that it won’t contaminate groundwater if it does.

because saying you’d need to build a power plant for every 72 homes would not make the technology very attractive

it certainly has some ‘war is peace, freedom is slavery’ (and all that) vibes

quoth Rage Against The Machine:

‘fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’

Ah, you are a person of culture(s) as well, I see

Any sort of EU federal state I would agree is nigh impossible - as it stands currently there is some lack of overlap on freedom of movement without border checks (the Schengen area) and currency adoption (all members except Denmark are obligated to adopt the Euro at some point in time, but Sweden at least doesn’t seem to have any real intention of doing so) within EU member states.

On top of that, ‘muh freedumb, they want to take away our right to self-govern’ is used as a very efficient talking point for nationalist parties in all EU member states to shift public opinion against the EU (some possibly due to propaganda, others due to homegrown ideology). Any decision of importance within the EU has to be unanimous, so pretty sure there will be at least one state vetoing any motion to become a federal state.

Maybe once world peace is achieved, there can be an EU federal state, though even then I’d be skeptical.

For any brexit reversal, I understand the main issue would be that as a founding member, the UK had some perks (opt out of Schengen and the Euro) that would no longer be on the table for a new arrival. And there’s the matter of breach of trust for already leaving once and causing major headaches.

Sounds to me like an advancement on what Black & White started many years ago. Or what Spore should have been like at the end stage.

Huh, I always thought pineapples and tomatoes were canned in non-aluminium tins that also have a coating on the inside to prevent corrosion. Them tins don’t really feel as soft as a beer or soda can.

Thank you. Your service is well appreciated!

Your philosophical dilemma is valid, but I would point out that pointing fingers is the best choice we have in this matter. Say, indeed, the ones fucking shit up do have intellectual disabilities, they still continue doing it. Reprimanding them for it is perhaps society’s way of trying to get them to stop. Sort of like in the case of a child I guess - children being considered in this argument as having not enough understanding of the consequences of their actions. Equate, if you will, ‘goddamn it Billy, stop running in the street’ to ‘goddamnit grandma, stop voting for idiots’.

The problem then is that Billy may listen, but grandma is set in her ways and has the notion that age brings wisdom regardless, so she’s less inclined to listen to what the equivalent of Billy for her has to say.

I see no alternatives for this (that is to say, an attempt to correct erroneous behaviour) in the context of the aspirations of modern society.

As a thought experiment, in the most extreme case, what would we do? Test everyone for lead and remove, for example, the right to vote across a certain threshold? That doesn’t take into account the baseline intellectual ability of individual (which can vary across a population) and the degree to which said discovered lead levels would affect them. It’s entirely possible that a lead-laden ‘smart’ brain still has more capability than a pure but idiotic one. Not sure how we’d ever assess that. Not to mention the system would be exploited as soon as possible to channel power.

We could of course, stop pointing fingers and forgive them, for they know not what they do, and it’d probably have about the same effect.

It can also lead to priapism if you somehow (through great pain, I’d imagine) manage to retract it and the tight part becomes stuck during an erection. If not treated in time the lack of circulation leads to necrosis.

It’s easier to tell people to just use a rubber when on antibiotics rathern than explain to them that it’s only for some unpronounceable substances for most of the population and have them memorize a list of substances for which it’s safe to go on as usual - azithromycin is safe, amoxicillin is not. They may sound fairly similar to a layman.

It’s because some substances (in this case, antibiotics) mess with the units in your body that process them and prepare them for excretion. They may inhibit or induce them, but these units process a whole load of other stuff. Including birth control, which can lead to less activity from the birth control pills because they’re inactivated quicker (in case of induction) or the biotransformation to the active form is slower (in case of inhibition, for prodrugs that are inactive as is, but have active metabolites, no idea if this is the case for birth control though).

A similar thing happens with alcohol, for example, which is why you should always be honest with exactly how much alcohol you drink or what other drugs you take when talking to an anaesthesiologist, or any doctor prescribing you any sort of medicine, lest you risk ineffective anaesthesia or treatment (the first one is worse imo).

Would be nice if they expanded it to all digital goods - to include music, for instance, and things like youtube videos (technically not films or series, as I’m sure somebody at google will point out).

It’s almost as if the ones that singled her out have no knowledge of history and the concept of martyrdom.

So they’re either stupid or actually agree with her ideas but still have to do their jobs, but in the worst way.

now now, no need to be dismissive of other age groups in this matter. I’m sure there’s plenty of non-teenager people that think the same way too. on the internet, nobody knows you’re a 74 yr old extremist

I mean you’re not wrong. But here we are. If you’ve ever tried to convince anyone of… well anything that conflicts with their views, you’re probably well aware that there’s no changing peoples’ minds.

So I guess my honest question is… what now?

I’d say all these articles about social media saying it’s broken are just about maintaining the illusion of something better. As long as they can keep it up, people are going to think “it’s bad but it shouldn’t be!” and just keep coming back hoping it improves. And that can keep social media alive with everything it can do for everybody using it as an income stream.

It has never informed users and a pet peeve of mine is governments using fucking twitter to communicate. And businesses too lazy to create their own webpages (or pay somebody to do it for them) and pay for some hosting (deductible as a business expense, by the way) so they use fecebook instead.

Also, as somebody mentioned in a different comment, it is actually the town square, as it always was (I believe their comment evoked witch trials as an example).