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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • scratchee@feddit.uktoComic Strips@lemmy.worldNice Guy
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    2 months ago

    The problem is you need to depict their actions as evil and monstrous, or fascism might appear to be a reasonable solution. Isolating the evil of fascism from the ordinary people pushing for it is subtle and complicated. Especially when some fascists really do cross the line into evil behaviour.

    Basically humans are often bad at sharing subtle messages widely. Regardless of how much nuance you add to begin with, the message will always devolve for most people into either “hitler evil” or “hitler wasn’t that bad, he was nice to animals”, so given the options, most people prefer to lean into the evil side and avoid normalising fascism, with the inevitable consequence that it appears you have to start wearing skulls and torturing people in order to be a fascist and people forget that for the vast majority of everyday fascists it was “just politics” right up until they lost the war and had to start rethinking things.

    I offer no solutions, but I don’t think you can blame just the bourgeoisie, but rather the human condition in general, us vs them, and the difficulty in sharing detailed concepts to a wide audience. There will always be “bad guys” who are so bad that we can’t possibly become them. I do think we’ve gotten better at telling stories with complex evil, but the flip side is that seems to just reduce people’s resolve to act. Almost like the 2 options built into our brains are “us vs them, kill the evils ones” and “meh, corruption is inevitable, just ignore it”.


  • scratchee@feddit.uktoComic Strips@lemmy.worldBeing a teacher
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    4 months ago

    My dad and his brother didn’t get diagnosed until adulthood.

    My dad after he wore a horrific shirt at uni, and my uncle after he passed almost all the tests to be a airforce pilot.

    Turns out they don’t have colourblind mode for military jets, and colourblindness can be surprisingly well hidden, the brain does everything it can to hide the flaw, you really have to break assumptions to make it glitch out and guess wrong.





  • Well that sucks. My favourite moment in a hidden role game was when a player won by misreading their card and convincing both of us that we were allies at the start. They ended up the only evil player for most of the game and then in the last round after we’d worked together to systematically kill everyone else (all weirdly innocents, we were both feeling guilty by this point), when they finally realised they knew there was no evil player they checked and… killed me. Total madness and a glorious victory for them. How can you be mad at that?!


  • Whilst I agree that universal consuming nanobots are a bit far fetched, I’m not sure I’m sold on the replication problem.

    Life has replication errors on purpose because we’re dependent on it for mid to long term survival.

    It’s easy to write program code with arbitrarily high error protection. You could make a program that will produce 1 unhandled error for every 100000 consumed universes, and it wouldn’t be particularly hard, you just need enough spare space.

    Mutation and cancer are potential problems for technology, but they’re decidedly solvable problems.

    Life only makes it hard because life is chaotic and complex, there’s not an error correcting code ratio we can bump from 5 to 20 and call it a day.







  • I agree with you and Alexa, but you can always say “five past six” to avoid the [zer]o if it’s bothering you.

    I remember on a German exchange at school the German student could not handle “oh” sounds in phone numbers at all. So it might be tricky for non native speakers (though I think they made more of a fuss from anger at how stupid English is than out of genuine confusion…)




  • Yup, it’s hard to predict what the mix will look like, but 100% solar would be a very costly solution for sure.

    I used to be very pro nuclear, and I still think it could have been a big piece of the puzzle, but I do worry we’ve missed the boat, it could’ve been the first wave of decarbonisation 20 (or more) years ago, I’m not sure how well it can compete growing from almost nothing now with the renewables eating all the easy money. nuclear plants need to run 100% to be successful, and renewables have dropped a bomb on the concept of baseline demand. Maybe as we kill gas we’ll have to start giving massive bonuses to on demand power that isn’t pumping co2, but the absolute lid on that market is the price of storage, which is high enough now, but will drop, it’s unclear how long the gap for nuclear will exist there.

    Certainly willing to be wrong though, there’s lots of unknowns with nuclear, quite possibly it could be multiple times cheaper if only we’d invest into it properly.



  • I’m certainly not arguing nuclear is a panacea that everyone in all the governments have somehow missed (even ignoring the risks mentioned its only a potential fit for a small subset of the grid these days, there’s no way building a 100% nuclear grid would make sense today).

    The point I’m making is that currently there are energy production needs we effectively can’t fulfil with renewables because the costs would be impractical (eg the last 10% of usage on dark windless nights at the wrong time of year). Some cases do fit nuclear better currently (not all, nuclear usually wants constant usage, can’t help with surges).

    Nobody really cares about that though for 2 reasons: 1. There’s plenty of opportunities that renewables still can fill and 2. The cost of storage is projected to drop a lot over time, which should fill in the gaps and squeeze out many of the last opportunities for nuclear.

    Quite possibly by the end the remaining slice where nuclear could fit will be so thin it can’t actually sustain an industry (and given the industry has been half dead for decades, it’d take a big win to justify reviving it), so yeah, at the moment it looks like lots of risks and questionable rewards. Nonetheless the current prices aren’t really the problem, it’s just that things are risky, and projected to get worse over time, so why invest?

    Ironically it’s not that different to the fossil fuel industry, just with a lot less existing infrastructure.