Here’s another good one: The city of Long Beach, California spends close to that much every year to do the same thing to protect mansions built on a sand bar (the Long Beach Peninsula) that are about 50 feet from the water line on a good day. They just keep constantly moving sand from one end of the beach to the other end a couple miles away. That’s city money. The article below has some details, but only refers to the city saving $100k to $300k a year by bringing the work in house. The figure I’ve heard is more like $500k a year. I imagine it’s actually higher than that, even. They have dedicated big earth movers, a built facility to store and maintain them, employees dedicated to it, etc. Do the math. This is probably happening all over the country and all over the world.

https://www.presstelegram.com/2022/12/19/long-beach-moves-its-own-beach-sand-to-protect-peninsula/

Ah, interesting, I didn’t realize that this stuff had been around so long!

I’m sorry to hear that. I recognize that any general statements meant for a “majority” audience can appear to be insensitive to those outside that “majority”. That was not my intention and I regret that it appeared to be so.

I didn’t say it was a rule or commandment. The point is that natural food ingredients > processed, mystery ingredients for health (as a general rule, not always).

Also, an extreme low carb diet is not necessary to avoid diabetes, for most people.

The point is that natural food ingredients > processed, mystery ingredients for health (as a general rule).

I didn’t say it was a rule or commandment. The point is that natural food ingredients > processed, mystery ingredients for health (as a general rule, not always).

Seaweed is looking super sus atm

Not seaweed in general, but “Processed eucheuma seaweed (thickener) (stabiliser) (gelling agent) emulsifier”

Pretty much, perhaps with the exception of bacon fat. And I say this as someone who is mostly vegan. The point is that natural food ingredients > processed, mystery ingredients for health (as a general rule).

Point taken, but the thing about adages is that they are generally truthful, simple guidelines, not 100% fail-proof rules. The point is that we should eat real, natural foods, not ultra-processed “products”.

I’m sorry to hear of what happened to your family members though, that’s truly regrettable! Sorry for your loss.

Processed eucheuma seaweed (thickener) (stabiliser) (gelling agent) emulsifier

Note it doesn’t just say seaweed in general, but “Processed eucheuma seaweed (thickener) (stabiliser) (gelling agent) emulsifier”

Again, the old adages to eat real foods, and only ingredients that your grandmother would have cooked with, ring true.

I just searched amazon.com for metric tape measure right now and the entire first page of results were actual metric tape measures? The Milwaukee ones seem to be cheaper on ebay.

This is the first I’ve heard of “a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues” and “Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute”.

Can you give a summary or examples? I’m not trying to argue, but would just like to know more. I don’t follow Lemmy development more closely than reading the dev summaries they post, so wasn’t aware of any of this.

Upvoted for the news that these treatments are speeding towards approval. However, the point that no one knows how these new treatments work seems silly, given my understanding that no one seems to know exactly how antidepressants in general work either (or at least they didn’t until recently?), even ones that have been used for decades, like Prozac.

Here’s a quote from an article from 2021: I’ve been making references on this blog for years about how we don’t even know how antidepressants work

They were big through investors throwing money at a money sink for years. Youtube was losing tens to hundreds of millions of dollars a year for a long time, before it finally became profitable.

A new competitor wouldn’t get such favorable support from investors.

If you’d be open to try Linux again if it were less likely to break than your past experience, look into the recent trend of what they commonly call “immutable” distributions. This should give you the ability to always switch back to a working OS if anything goes wrong (which should be much less likely in the first place). It’s similar in concept to Android or Chrome OS, from what I understand. I’m watching this space very closely because I’m concerned about experiencing the same thing as you if I switch to Linux, and not having the ability to fix the system myself.

You’re probably right, but I just wonder where all this AI panic is coming from. There was a story on the Washington Post a few weeks back saying that millions are being invested into university groups that are studying the risks of AI. It just seems that something is afoot that doesn’t look like just a natural reaction or overreaction. Perhaps this story itself explains it: the Big Tech companies trying to tamp down competition from startups.

AI, climate change, and nuclear weapons proliferation

One of those is not like the others. Nuclear weapons can wipe out humanity at any minute right now. Climate change has been starting the job of wiping out humanity for a while now. When and how is AI going to wipe out humanity?

This is not a criticism directed at you, by the way. It’s just a frustration that I keep hearing about AI being a threat to humanity and it just sounds like a far-fetched idea. It almost seems like it’s being used as a way to distract away from much more critically pressing issues like the myriad of environmental issues that we are already deep into, not just climate change. I wonder who would want to distract from those? Oil companies would definitely be number 1 in the list of suspects.

I feel it’s time for people that care to start moving on the the acceptance phase of our future.

I’ve recently started to feel this way as well. One need not look any further than this thread itself to see that we’re fucked. The discussion here is a perfect example of how we seem to be frozen in some sort of complex “prisoner’s dilemma” between the public, the media, the politicians, the industry, etc. All this finger-pointing going around, when the reality is that most people AND (especially) most companies in the entire developed/industrialized world shares a large part of the blame for this, and because of the mentality (human nature) and manipulations (capitalist nature) at play, nothing will be done in time before our species starts to be completely decimated.

I’ve been recommending this article to people who seem to share this realization, because it not only describes what we’re thinking, but it also provides some resources to help us process this.

Edit: At the same time, I still would like to fight like hell to change our course. But I just don’t want to fight alone, and I fear that that’s what it would mostly feel like. Alone, or very, very few people by my side.

In the old days, a friend of mine would carry some paper(?) stickers(?) (labels?) that said something like “I park like an asshole” and superglue it to one of the windows of someone parked like this.

If you wanted to be nicer, you could get some proper pre-printed stickers (most online print/sticker shops should have them) and place them. Wouldn’t cause any damage but would maybe make them think about it a little bit.

I also saw a post recently where someone replaced all the tire valve caps with bright orange or pink little dick shaped caps. This would cause more inconvenience and embarrassment, but not be damaging or dangerous.