• 9 Posts
  • 107 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: May 17th, 2024

help-circle








  • Life evolves in a certain environment, and usually anything that changes that environment will be bad. And some organisms adapt to that bad, and some don’t.

    An example of this is stuff like highly processed foods, coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, women in the workforce, and effects of fetal health. I am in favor of women’s rights, but female stress and alcohol use and cigarette usage have all been found to affect prenatal health, and women in the workforce during pregnancy may be correlated with higher female stress. (I am in favor of women in science and working, that is not an anti-woman comment.)

    So the human body is always signaling to other cells and neighboring cells and if there’s plastic blocking the signaling, it’s going to effect how cells grow and die and likely their epigenetic expression. The question is how much? If the microplastics are damaging cells, and they likely do but knowledge to be sure, then there’s resulting healing processes that may increase inflammation, and inflammation has wide-ranging effects on organic systems.

    I can’t fathom that these microplastic don’t impact prenatal health. Babies in utero are more impacted by smaller things because it changes the growth patterns.

    It also seems very likely to me that having things like this, which could alter epigenetics and brain structure growth, would possibly result in more varied phenotypes (ie, more autism, more transgender people, etc) and more miscarriages. I say this as someone who is pro-LGBT, but a lot of these microplastics act as endocrine disruptors.

    When you see Elon Musk doing so much Ketamine that he’s starting to, according to some, lose it, and he’s possibly using Ketamine for depression, it is likely because of how environmentally fucked the planet is. His whole angle is to get the fuck off this planet and try again somewhere else and it may or may not work.

    This planet is environmentally fucked, and environmental problems show the core problem with Democracy: when you have scientific idiots choosing which psychopath to govern, it doesn’t usually result in ecological harmony. Then all the communist governments are just trying to compete with the capitalist governments, fatally chugging along. The Scandanavian countries, with their death metal and embrace of nihilism, are filled with people who accept that we may all be doomed, although some of them are trying. Then you have pockets of liberals all over who are keyboard warriors while the real activists are few and far between. And it may not even matter if there is activism. It’s almost certainly too late and we’re all going to die. Try to look surprised when it happens.

    It’s likely the microplastics are making human stupidity increase, thereby leading people to ignore environmental logic, thereby leading to more microplastics, thereby increasing human stupidity, etc.


  • If you give your ID to a 3rd party company in the US, it’s impossible to know if they will delete you ID or whether you’ll be added secretly to a facial recognition system.

    The US is allowed to issue secret orders to companies demanding they do things in the interest of “security.” They can also issue gag orders forcing companies to not talk about the secret orders. Therefore, any US company may be secretly forced to violate it’s supposed terms. A company that collects biometric information seems like it would be especially likely to be targeted.

    Facebook, Instagram, and other social media such as Linked In are likely the largest source of law enforcement information being fed to facial recognition systems. Given the dystopian “ideals” of some politicians, I consider it a risk and wouldn’t do it. Your country may not be sharing that information with the US already.

    Additionally, some of these companies have become the main way people get employed, rent things, or buy things. Because these companies serve a public function but are officially private, they can de-platform people for any reason, with no meaningful appeal, creating havoc and misery for an affected person. If you have been flagged to be banned, by giving them your ID, you will let them ban you based on a government document forever. Their system may have flagged you for verification, but it could have also flagged you to be banned forever based on TOS violations.

    If you abandon your account, you can always create a new account, then later claim a hacker got you or your forgot your email password. If you provide an ID, you may be linking a government record to biometric information to something they can ban.

    A company may also be claiming that they get rid of an ID but still keep a hash of some combination of biometric information.

    In theory, anyone in Facebook in California should be able to submit a CCPA request to delete all information, including ban information, and then go on Facebook again, even after a lifetime ban. Anyone in the EU should be able to do this too through GDPR. But this doesn’t happen, because Facebook lies and is also just a rebranding of Lifelog.


  • I think this sounds nice, but often even with close people this doesn’t work well and a depressed person risks damaging the relationship. A spouse or best friend will sometimes deal with it for a year. They often won’t deal with it for yearS. I have a hard time envisioning you’ve been extraordinarily depressed before, even if you’ve been technically depressed and took Proaz for a month, and I doubt anything like that has even happened.



  • This is the view of someone who is slightly bummed out and not horribly depressed.

    Some people have children murdered in war, damaged body parts, or people they love dead. Others have tried to date over and over, exercise and eat healthy, and are single virgins at 30 because no one finds them romantically attractive. Other people have extreme financial hardships while dealing with chronic incurable medical conditions like Huntington’s.

    Don’t take this the wrong way, but for the people whose children were murdered in war, eating veggies may not improve things much.

    The desire to thrive at any cost usually only exists when problems are theoretically fixable. You can’t bring back dead children, someone who has lost a body part and has chronic phantom pain isn’t going to become a neuroscientist and solve that problem while in chronic pain.

    I feel like platitudes like that “Just overcome it bro. Exercise and veggies and grit” don’t help the majority of people with severe emotional problems. Once again, these ideas seem like ideas that help you, the reader of that post, feel better about depression existing rather than do anything for people who are depressed.

    But I feel like you are in good company because it feels like 90 percent of mental health posts and slogans are really “Your depression is inconvenient for me and society and your possible suicide down the line may upset me. We support you! Call this number so we can lock you up and drug you, then bill you $30,000 and force you to work even harder while drugged up so we feel less annoyed about your ennui and sorrow.”

    Like I get that your transitory sadness has been something you overcome with tech bro grit, but tech bro grit doesn’t overcome most reasons for severe depression that results not in brief suicide ideation but like getting to the stage of “What method will work best for me?” when people start buying tools to help them die or coming up with timelines and rewriting wills and debating whether to try to make it seem accidental so as to not harm loved ones.

    I am glad you have grit and this works for you. Keep pushing. I just don’t like the messaging in society that feels like this needs to be a solvable problem because others are annoyed or saddened by it.


  • This isn’t realistic.

    I’ve dealt with depression before.

    People will say they want to support you and want to know what’s going on. If you describe a problem, the person listening almost always offers a solution. If you start to explain why their solution won’t work, they almost instantly get super annoyed and may suddenly become unavailable the next time you call.

    People want to think of themselves as the type of person who would be supportive of a depressed person, but most “supportive” people who feel this way still adhere to normal social mores and expectations and get pissed or annoyed when a depressed person doesn’t follow them. It’s also super hard for a depressed person to simultaneously discus their depression and adhere to unwritten social niceties.

    If I as a depressed person keep my feelings to myself, if I get better I still may have friends and if I die at least some people may show up to my funeral. If I lean on non-depressed people for support, they will expect normal social responses that adhere to unwritten codes and will get annoyed, the result being for me at best fewer friends and at worst a cremation with no one who cares about the ashes.

    Honestly fuck that tweet or whatever. Shit like that is bout making society feel better with corporatesque platitudes like “Mental Health Awareness is Important! See something say something!” or whatever empty cheerleading slogan exists to encourage the workers while the most poor of all rot on the street (unless they fall asleep, causing them to be arrested, whenceupon they are fed in jail). Most people do not give a fuck, that’s why a homeless subpopulation exists, fuck this planet and fuck empty tweets like this.





  • The idea that intelligence has no impact on computer skills and the ability to quickly learn computer skills is magical thinking. Intelligence differences are real and the solution is to make easy explanation to help people learn. I am not among the most intelligent people on Lemmy, the intelligence of the average Lemmy person probably at least an IQ above 115. It’s not about elitism, it’s about accessibility. I have terrible coordination. If someone tries to teach me advanced tennis, it would be bad, but if someone recognizes my coordination limits and is like, the goal is to just hit the ball once, then perhaps I have fun with tennis.



  • New users get overwhelmed with decision fatigue, especially when they have average intelligence.

    When selecting a federation, new users should be told:

    “Because Lemmy isn’t run by a large corporation, lots of small volunteers run Lemmy and run different copies of Lemmy at the same time. These different copies are called instances. You can choose 1 or just click the large red button and we’ll randomly select one of the most popular instances for you. If you aren’t sure what to choose, just press the button!”


  • I remember being curious about the fediverse and when I first looked and saw “instances” I got decision fatigue.

    I didn’t know if an instance would limit me from interacting with others, could randomly disappear (ie hexbear domain), or if some instances would be a bad fit. I also didn’t know of it was unchangeable. Decision fatigue set in and I was less excited, but still registered.

    To overcome that, there should be a “randomly choose for me” button with notes next to it that say you can change later, it won’t impact things, and you can interact with any instance. For random selection, just make it the top 3 most popular instances. Use a fun icon to indicate random change so the on boarding user has to think less.

    Instances seem very confusing to an average user, as does federation. There could be an explanation like "Instead of 1 big company controlling everything, there are many copies of Lemmy that are in different places run by volunteers. These “instances” or copies are all Lemmy and can interact with each other, but having many copies means there isn’t ever 1 big company who can set all the rules and suddenly change thing in a bad way. " and then the random selection button which almost everyone would choose.

    The average user dosn’t want to RTFM and also has an IQ of around 100 which is really low. The average reading ability of someone in the USA is like 6th grade level or something atrocious. You can’t overestimate average intelligence in an in boarding process.


  • He may have made a calculation about this not based on money and can’t disclose it without altering the calculation.

    Example:

    Scenario 1: Tell Trump to fuck off for treatment of transgender people. Result: Trump using monopoly power to break up Facebook, truth social increases in power, no way to monitor hate groups effectively

    Scenario 2: Pretend to agree with Trump and move hard right, monitor hate groups, come back slowly center in subtle ways, no rise in Truth Social users, ability to shape acceptance over time

    Even with fuck you money, saying fuck you makes scenario 2 possible. Say what you want avout Zuckerberg, but he’s no idiot. If I as an indifferent person can do a simple decision tree example in 3 seconds in my head, imagine how much he analyzed such a big decision.

    My point is Facebook sucks because they make it almost impossible for users to use Facebook without submitting to surveillance capitalism and ban people without giving them recourse in a mean shitty way. He must be aware of that and for allowing that, he sucks. And as a US company that is likely in bed with surveillance capitalism and the intelligence community, their “private” ways of verifying individuals is unlikely to be private, and they offer no alternative. So he sucks for that, but I’m not sure he specifically sucks for this reason. He’s even heavily implying strategic thinking is requiring him to do things he otherwise wouldn’t and can’t discuss it without altering the outcome.

    Whether the end never justifies the means (same “we won’t vote for Kamala because of Gaza stance” mindset) is better ethically even if impractical is another debate.