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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
centrally-unplanned
centrally-unplanned

The funniest thing about Germany's anti-nuclear stance is that most of it stems from Chernobyl; there were these big scares and concerns fallout and radiation drifting through winds and rain into Germany. The local disaster is obviously bad, of course, but coal is a way more reliable local disaster, it was the "globality" of nuclear accidents that motivated the anti-nuclear stance, otherwise you can just have no one live nearby.

I'm not going to get into whether or not those fears were justified or how those concerns rank in comparison to the global consequences of global warming - I don't think they are but its not my point. My point is you are concerned about the global-scale impacts of nuclear accidents, and you live here:

image

A few years outdated of course, given how Germany has shut theirs down...but almost no one else has. Germany is flanked on all sides by nuclear power plants! France has way way more than Germany ever had, Russia is still going strong, Chernobyl itself produced power until 2013 until foreign pressure intervened For Germany, shutting down their own nuclear power plants barely addresses the actual 'problem' they are faced with, they are not safer at all from "nuclear rain", like really! They shut down 3 plants this year, France has 58 running.

Which maybe would be like "yeah okay but we are sending a message" if this was a harmless decision, but global warming is right there, Russian gas dependence is running roughshod over your energy policy, this is not the time for symbolic gestures. Even by the metrics of Germany's own anti-nuclear policy advocates, this move is an extremely minor win for them, their concerns aren't local. And man what a price they (and the rest of us) are paying for it.

the-grey-tribe

Skip Google for Research

s-n-arly

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

cromulentenough
anomalocariscanadensis

I'm starting a new movement in literary criticism called "Undeath of the Author". basically we consider the author to be alive enough that their intention is the only source of meaning in the text, but dead enough that any interpretation of the text is valid. consequently, if you can read a particular meaning into a text, the author put that meaning there entirely on purpose, regardless of any claims to the contrary.

FAQ:

  • This is already a common mode of reading things online, you're not starting it.
  • Every literary movement draws on existing practices which it formalizes, expands, and explores. I'm the first one to endorse this approach openly and give it a catchy name. That counts as me starting it. Besides, most people who follow the basic principles of Undeath of the Author wouldn't admit to it.
  • This is a piss-poor approach to understanding anything.
  • Nowhere in the above statement, nor in any of my other writings, do I endorse pissing on the poor.
  • Are any of these FAQ entries questions?
  • Only this one.
  • Actually, Barthes's point in La mort de l'auteur is a lot more interesting and subtle than the received concept of "Death of the Author", having as much to do with the authorial voice within the text and the cultural archetype of The Author as with the "proper" way to interpret texts. The received concept instead derives mostly from the New Criticism, and -
  • Yes.
cromulentenough
toastyglow

Hades Animation | Glitter and Gold

There comes a time with any project where you have to be like “do I actually want to make an entire music video, or do I just wish an entire music video existed”, and sometimes you realize it’s the latter and it’s best to simply cut the project short.  Anyway here’s this.

Fandom: Hades
Song: Glitter & Gold by Barnes Courtney
Programs Used: Clip Studio Paint (Animation), iMovie (Combining w/ SFX)

cromulentenough
algorithmist

sorry I make this post frequently but apple really doesn't get enough hate

birdblogwhichisforbirds

so if you don't like them it's fine. I know a lot of people who are really mean to picky eaters about their preferences, and it doesn't actually help.

However, some people only think they hate apples because they've only tried the horrible mealy Red "Delicious" variety. If that's the case, you might be surprised by how much you enjoy a tastier variety. Honeycrisp and Cosmic crisp are some of the most popular apples and they are really good.

https://applerankings.com/ is a great, and wittily written, trove of apple reviews and information and will help you find nice apples. It is focused on apples available in the US, and idk where you are. I really miss discovery apples, which don't seem to be a thing this side of the Atlantic.

They can be a little pricey though. Obviously I don't know your personal situation, but if that's an issue, there might be local programs that can help. I don't know where you live, but here in Seattle there's a program called Fresh Bucks that gives people $40/month to spend on fruit and vegetables at local farmers markets. There might be something like that near you. Or, if you just really wanna try a really nice apple and it's not accessible to you, dm me and I can PayPal you something. I just want everyone to have the chance to have a nice apple from time to time.

Anyway, like I said, if you just truly don't like any apples, you are 100% valid and you shouldn't force yourself to eat something you don't like. Body autonomy includes not having to eat foods you hate. But I'd hate for you to go through life not knowing how much you could enjoy a high-quality apple, just because you've only experienced the worst apples.

birdblogwhichisforbirds

oh snap I just realized op meant the phone company

centrally-unplanned

rocky-3 asked:

I agree with you about the issues with Right-Communism / Vanguardism / Democratic-Centralism. What about Left-Communism or Anarchism? And Im not one of the people who say 'true communism/anarchism' has never been achieved so here's some examples that I think achieved it.

Paris Commune (of course)

Anarchist Spain

The Ukrainian Free Territory/Makhnovshchina

Revolutionary Russia (specifically the various worker's soviets) from the Dual Power situation to the Russian Civil War.

Possibly Yugoslavia, but only in the economic sense and I havent researched it that much.

centrally-unplanned answered:

Its definitely a less dangerous path, but there is a reason Right-Communism is the cause that was able to build actual states while Left-Communism essentially never did. Without strong state elements they were simply too weak to actually destroy the existing state apparatuses they were opposing or compel resources from them population and territory they were governing. All of the examples (lets set aside Yugoslavia) you are citing too are “wartime states” to use the word state loosely - they emerged in response to crises, but failed to survive those crises.

They failed for various reasons - the Paris Commune was a classic “capital riot” built out of a city filled with artists and ideologues, while the masses just…weren’t that interested in utopianism. Anarchist Spain…wasn’t really anarchist, a wartime movement that exerted heavy control over its population - done in a decentralized way, sure, but trade unions were confiscating property, taxing resources, and as the war progressed the ‘confederal’ militias were folded into the regular army due to their ineffectiveness. Revolutionary Russian Blacks and Greens and SR factions all just failed to mobilize resources in any real way to fight the Bolsheviks or the Whites, crops of ex-soldiers depleting their stolen stocks of weapons from battle to battle till they fizzled out. Left-Communism had no real theory of politics - they expected the masses of people to just get on board with their entire vision and sacrifice for them without compulsory methods or large bureaucratic apparatuses and they just aren’t going to do that. Its why they only emerged into power in moments of crisis - piggybacking off the armies actual states built with defected soldiers and stolen kit - and withered away through the combination of the median person’s apathy for permanent revolution and the vast resources movements like the Bolsheviks who understood what building a state actually entailed threw at them.

Still I respect the idea that “maybe this could work if others didn’t invade you”, that’s life but also I get feeling like its a dream thwarted. Yugoslavia is interesting because most Left-Communism movements had no way to seize power, but it existed for almost 50 years. I don’t think Yugoslavia is Left-Communism, it was a authoritarian dictatorship with a cult of personality under Tito. But I definitely agree it was not Stalinist, it organized its economy and its governance structure in a way more decentralized way - in particular its industries were actually run by the workers, they were the managers, as opposed to in the USSR where the party ruled. And it just…didn’t work? The companies would constantly underinvest, underhire (doing so diluted your own salary), coordinating between companies was endless meetings and hassle. The devolved political system worked for a bit when everyone involved had fought together against the nazis and that bond created unity, but as time passed local authorities chipped away at the power of the state pursuing their own self interest. Starting in the 1960’s Yugoslavia actually opened its borders to Europe, allowing its residents to work abroad as guest workers, and they did in droves, over a million people did so during the 1970’s and they used those funds - plus Adriatic Coast tourism revenue - to paper over their economic woes. And by the 80’s Tito was dead and no one cared about the system anymore and when it fell apart none of the Left Communism ideals the entire country had been bombarded with their whole lives resonated with the median person at all, it fell to nationalism and the worst civil war Europe had seen in 50 years.

Yugoslavia wasn’t awful, it actually had a decent track record, definitely the best of the Soviet states while it was around. But it shows the limits of Left Communism - once you remove the “verve” of revolution and crisis that brings people together to sacrifice for the revolution, the steady state that remains turns out to need incentives, state control, law and order, managers, bureaucrats. No one wants the Free Commune society, its just a ton of work for less payoff than what Social Democracy in Europe is getting you.

(I also recommend the history of the Kibbutz communes in Israel for a similar trajectory - starting off as the best of the commune ideals in the 60’s, eventually forced to evolve into variant companies with incentives, ownership shares, etc. Which isn’t bad, there are still real benefits! Its just what the future of this kind of left strain of thought looks like, it won’t look like the CNT-FAI)

wirehead-wannabe

Another April Fool’s Confession

wirehead-wannabe

Content warnings: torture, genocide, murder, rape, institutionalization, vivicoaction

For the longest time, I thought that I was the only one to have ever crossed the boundaries of the multiverse. Over the past few April Fool’s Days, I learned I was wrong. For whatever reason, I seem to have stumbled into a social group with a high number of individuals who come from worlds very much like our own, but with a few fundamental social differences. Perhaps this phenomenon is more common than we realize, and it’s just more openly acknowledged among the people I’ve met.

Many of the reports from other multiverse-hoppers such as myself identify a point of divergence between our timelines. If I had known that I was about to be thrust into such a radically different world, I might have studied up on history so that I would be better able to pin down that exact point. Based on my somewhat vague recollection, my timeline’s reactions to the horrors of the World Wars, the Holocaust, and the widespread involuntary commitment of the physically and mentally disabled was different from yours. What most made us sick to our stomachs and fearful of our own species was not the widespread taking of lives, but rather what so many people were forced to endure with no idea when they would finally be allowed to die.

As horrifying as we found it, the people of my universe acknowledged as you do that war involved killing, and that war wasn’t going away any time soon. Like you, we also wanted to declare certain actions beyond the pale even in wartime, so that at least a fraction the amount of human suffering could be prevented. We decreed as you did that such atrocities as murdering civilians, impersonating medics, and using prisoners of war for medical experiments should be treated as crimes against humanity, no matter by who or against whom they were committed. We seem to have had approximately the same degree of success in enforcing our rules as you.

Unlike you, we included in our Geneva Conventions an absolute prohibition against keeping a human being alive against their will. We called this “vivicoaction”, a word that as far as I can tell does not exist in this timeline. There’s not even a single google result for it! I still can’t fully wrap my mind around how you managed to go without a world for the most horrific inhumanity. Imagine what it would be like to find an entire planet of humans with no word for rape. How could such an obvious evil be so ignored that it didn’t even appear in the dictionary?

I first started to realize that something was off when I went to see a counselor at my alma mater. I had been to therapists before, and by then was used to being asked to read a statement of my rights as a patient. Prior to that day, every such statement had included my absolute, inalienable right to a painless death in a reasonable amount of time. What counted as “reasonable” was, of course, somewhat contentious, in the same way that both our universes seem to be unable to form a precise standard for what counts as a “speedy trial”. Regardless, very few people from my world disagreed about an individual’s right to suicide, any more than most people from your world would ever seriously advocate lynching. In the middle of the worst bout of depression of my life, I hadn’t ever expected the additional blow of seeing my college therapist’s office threaten me with a war crime.

Your world doesn’t just look the other way at vivicoaction. It LEGALLY MANDATES that it be carried out by those who have sworn an oath to do no harm. It treats as deviants those who would refuse to hand over their closest and most vulnerable friends to have their rights and dignity stripped away. Even terminally ill patients in unbearable pain are handcuffed to the bed if they attempt to end their suffering. Hardly anyone gets to even have the comfort of dying painlessly while surrounded by their loved ones. Instead, you simply through your elderly and infirm into prisons where no one has to see their misery.

I don’t know how to communicate to the people of this world that such things are morally wrong. How would you persuade someone who, for example, believed that it was a moral imperative for parents to place their children in solitary confinement? I see moral panics about people killing themselves impulsively, but how are they supposed to talk it over if anyone they open up to will treat them worse than war criminals? I wish I could pull out some hard evidence, but that evidence doesn’t even seem to exist in this world, since as far as I can tell there is not any single developed country on your version of Earth that can serve as a case study.

My life is better now than it was in college, but I still don’t know what I’ll do if things ever get intolerably, indefinitely bad. There’s no one with authority that I can turn to for protection. No foreign country I can flee to for asylum. No sympathetic media outlets who will take my side. Even if things go smoothly for me all the way through retirement, I don’t know what I’ll do when I’m too slow to run, too weak to fight off the doctors and police, and too senile to plan an escape. I want to go home.

death cw rape cw
serinemolecule
serinemolecule

Most discourse about self-driving cars and nuclear power:

“We need to be more careful about saving millions of lives! A few dozen people might die in the process!”

Honestly, I’m nonzero sympathetic to the viewpoint that technology can make things worse, and we should be cautious about it. You want to argue that social media and clickbait have made our lives worse? That’s a defensible position.

But that caution seems incredibly misplaced when the technology is specifically designed to fix one of the major causes of death in the status quo.

serinemolecule

I feel like the main problem here is that people just entirely forget that, like, new tech should be compared to the status quo, not to perfection.

Imagine Toyota came out with a new car, which was half the price of existing cars, and also was twice as safe, and put out half as much pollution. It would be amazing!

Now imagine they didn’t call it a car, they called it a kuruma or something. Everyone would hate it! “Dozens of people are dying in kurumas!” “Kurumas are taking up lanes that could have been used by cars!” The media would report on “The Kuruma Menace”. Some poor people who couldn’t afford cars would buy kurumas, and everyone would complain about the increased traffic/pollution caused by them.

This is how I feel about people’s reactions to basically every transit innovation ever. Scooters, Uber, self-driving cars, Lime, etc. People always hate them even if they’re a strict improvement over cars. Because instead of comparing them to cars, they compare them to what if people stayed home and did nothing.

And, like, maybe that holds water if you’re the kind of person who think everyone should stay home and do nothing. But most of the critics are people who drive cars! I could talk about how not being stuck at home is a human need, that people are willing to pollute and risk their lives for, but I don’t need to, because these people already know that, that’s why they have cars!


Drilling down into specifics: A lot of the criticism of Uber comes because it’s taking people away from public transit as well as from cars. And yes, cars are in fact less safe, more polluting, cause worse traffic, etc, compared to public transit.

But, like, notice basically everyone I know who complains about Uber owns a car.

People who don’t own cars tend to like Uber. It gets them home when buses aren’t running; when they’re in a rush, it gets them in town in half an hour rather than three hours by bus; it lets them go places while being blind; or while in suburbs underserved by transit. It gets them to hospitals when they’re too sick to bike, for 1/50th of the cost of an ambulance. It lets children go places when their parents don’t feel like driving.

But the car owners? They’ll tell you all about how Uber is ruining their city, because it allows poor people and disabled people the convenience of a car every once in a while, and the convenience of a car just happens to come with tradeoffs.

srysnoopdoggbutilovethesehoes

i’d love to hear how your logic ties into nuclear energy

serinemolecule

#im with you all the way on the other stuff even though id add in some points #but with nuclear energy im just not so sure #if the tech is as i recall - and this may not be so - the by products of that stuff are extremely deleterious to our environment #in which case perfection should be aimed for

Like the others, nuclear energy is one of those things where it always gets compared to “not using energy”, rather than to coal.

And as long as a single coal plant exists, the question isn’t “is nuclear power better than nothing?” but “is nuclear power better than coal?” – i.e. “should we replace this coal plant with a nuclear plant?”

Because you don’t need to get bogged down in the tradeoffs of “are deaths and environmental effects worth having electric power?” when we as a society have already said ‘yes’ to the same question regarding coal. If you disagree with those tradeoffs, you should be lobbying for dismantling coal, or at least for replacing it with nuclear as we move towards

Estimates for coal deaths range in the millions of deaths per year. Nuclear is responsible for, like, on average, one death per year? Most meltdowns result in zero deaths. Literal meltdowns!

(Nuclear is even safer than solar and wind – if you’re wondering how, people sometimes die falling off roofs while installing solar panels. Nuclear power hysteria kills more people than nuclear power itself does – more people died in the Fukushima evacuation than would have died if they just ignored it!)

Sure, nuclear energy has byproducts which are not great. But the question isn’t “are the byproducts better than nothing” but “are the byproducts as bad as millions of deaths every year?”

Which, even if you didn’t know anything about them, it’s probably less bad than millions of deaths per year, considering there are relatively few things in the world quite that bad, and we’d probably hear about them if they were. [1]

Casual research (skimming the Wikipedia article) confirms this: nuclear waste is being dealt with. There’s room for improvement, but considering there hasn’t been a single death involved, it’s clearly significantly less bad as millions of deaths per year.

It’s not like nuclear waste is magic. We have a pretty good understanding of it: It emits radiation which lessens over long periods of time, and we know how to block radiation, how far away from it is safe, etc etc.


[1] Fun fact: gasoline is one of the few worse things; electric cars are less bad per-mile than gas cars even if the electricity is generated from coal.

postnuclearwar

I know this has some good points, but please for the love of god do not try and convince people that nuclear energy is good. Nuclear waste is a huge issue actually and the u.s. technically still has no plan in place for it. Also meltdowns can have serious, long ranging and long term effects on people’s health.

Deaths caused from solar or wind are due to improper implementation, not something that the energy in of itself causes. Interactions with coal and muclear energy in of themself cause damage to the environment and to living things.

serinemolecule

Do you notice that this is the exact thing I was talking about, though? I could talk about how you’re wrong about how big of a problem nuclear waste and meltdowns are, but I shouldn’t even need to, because they’re nothing compared to the widespread environmental destruction and death caused by coal power.

Deaths caused from solar or wind are due to improper implementation, not something that the energy in of itself causes.

Deaths aren’t less bad when they’re accidental… The deceased’s family isn’t going to feel any better if you tell them it was preventable.

The only way this matters if we’re talking about what we should do in the future, when these deaths can be entirely prevented. At that point, yeah, I agree, we should stop using nuclear power, and switch to, like, Dyson spheres or something. But that’s not relevant to what we should be doing now.

shieldfoss

Also, if accidental deaths don’t count, Nuclear has zero deaths.

nicdevera

I have similar feelings for vaping/e-cigs. Studies show e-cigs can be bad! But there’s no way to jigger the numbers to make it anywhere near as bad as real cigarettes. This is clearly better.

another-normal-anomaly

“meltdowns can have serious, long ranging and long term effects on people’s health“ so can crossing the street. More importantly, so do coal plants, and a lot more so. The question is not “does this thing have any risks”, the question is “which of these things has fewer risks”.

kolleh

The reason people are inherently wary of nuclear waste repositories isn’t just because of hysteria, it’s because of uncertainty that can’t be fully eliminated. Ramana does a good job of summarizing it here.

Here are some of the most relevant bits:

There “are a variety of factors that make it difficult to predict repository behavior over geologic time, including climate, saturated zone behavior, volcanism, unsaturated zone behavior… the environmental and chemical conditions of the repository environment as it evolves over time, especially the chemistry of the water that will exist in the repository.”

Adding to this technical complexity is uncertainty about how human populations will behave tens or hundreds of thousands of years from now. How are we to know, for example, that in the 29th century, people might not be mining in the vicinity of the repository to obtain some mineral that has become widely used at that time? Efforts to try and communicate about the dangers of buried radioactive waste through millennia border on science fiction, and believing that the proposed design elements would deter human intrusion thousands if not tens of thousands of years into the future strains one’s credulity.

The second factor that undermines claims about safety are failures of different kinds: design failure, human failure, or institutional failure. Even the limited experience with existing repositories provides ample examples of failure. […] If such failures have occurred just 15 years after the facility started receiving wastes, how is one to trust that other failures would not occur during the many decades it would take to construct and load large quantities of highly radioactive waste into a geological repository, let alone over the millennia that the waste will remain hazardous?

TL;DR:

1) We can’t actually guarantee the safety of repositories due to factors like volcanism, changing climate, and the chemistry of repository water.

2) We don’t actually have an effective way of communicating danger to humans 10,000 years in the future. (That’s how we end up with weirdness like the blue Yucca cacti, which for all we know will actually encourage people to go check it out.)

3) Humans aren’t perfect, which means even if we could guarantee perfect technological safety, we’re the weak link that could screw things up.

In addition, the question isn’t whether nuclear power is better than coal, it’s whether nuclear power is better than a direct transition to renewable energy.

another-normal-anomaly

And I’m saying that there’s degrees of uncertainty between “guaranteed safe” and “so dangerous it’s not worth doing.” There is a range of levels of risk such that the benefit outweighs the risk, and that range includes values other than zero.

official-kircheis

“ In addition, the question isn’t whether nuclear power is better than coal, “

@kolleh why didn’t you tell that to Germany and Japan before they replaced nuclear power with coal power, leading to far more premature deaths than the Fukushima meltdown

eruhamster

It blows my mind someone would even try arguing switching to nuclear power would only ‘kill a dozen people’ like with self-driving cars. The reason people are terrified of nuclear power is because, even if it’s safe and efficient, if it goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. Wrong for generations and enough to fuck up the entire world in one blow. 

The reason we learned about Chernobyl is because the wind dragged the huge amounts of radioactivity across Europe and other countries picked up on it. Across countries. Fish are being caught close to Fukushima that still have radioactivity levels above the legal limit to sell, and those things are just hanging around in our waters. There were fish caught near Canada who had radioactive elements only found in Fukushima; the radioactivity carried across oceans and countries in both these cases. 

That’s why people are terrified of nuclear power, because even if it only goes wrong .0001% of the time, it goes REALLY wrong. 

serinemolecule

Man, I actually originally just wanted to vagueblog about self-driving cars (the Uber thing was in the news again recently), but here I am, knee deep in nuclear power discourse.

So, a worst-case scenario for a nuclear disaster might be something like the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. 28 deaths, and an additional 15 indirect deaths from the fallout.

If that’s not sufficiently worst-case for you, how about this? The nukes dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed a lot of people. Combined, 200,000 deaths is an upper-end estimate, including all the indirect deaths.

No matter how bad a nuclear accident would be, you can’t imagine it’d be worse than the one time humans intentionally used nuclear physics to kill as many people as possible, right?

How much is 200,000 deaths? It’s so many deaths that it’s multiple weeks of coal power worth of deaths.

There have been 883 months since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Let me drive that point home. If, instead of using coal power, we had magically converted it all into nuclear power, had just as many nuclear accidents per-kilowatt as now, and also literally nuked another two cities a month, we would still have had fewer deaths.

Yes, you’re right, “some people will have health problems” is a serious issue. It’s just, have you forgotten that the issue it’s up against is “millions of deaths per year worth of health problems”? It’s not like dying from coal is a “clean” death, or in any way better.

The worst doomsday scenario anyone has managed to provide is a series of improbable coincidences – what if we have some sort of apocalypse? And in the apocalypse, all scientific knowledge has been lost? And some people stumble across some nuclear waste and don’t know it’s bad?

Well, then, in this incredibly unlikely scenario, some people would die before they figured it out, and it would be tragic. But it still wouldn’t be as tragic as two nukes per month guaranteed.

And if radioactive waste is seriously more of a problem to you than multiple atomic bombs of deaths every month, well, for one thing, you don’t understand radiation very well, but for another, I have some news about coal