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Cake day: April 4th, 2025

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  • Yes but you, like everyone I seem to talk to these days, is under the false impression that Trump isn’t a complete idiot who literally thinks tariffs are the solution to all problems. It’s more comforting to think there’s some massive conspiracy by Russia or that it’s a ploy to make money off the stock market, but I truly believe that Trump actually thinks tariffs will magically fix the economy and his reactions to the backlash are legitimate shock that so many people and the markets don’t agree. Yes Russia does stand to gain from this, but they don’t need to pull the strings when the guy in charge is innovating economic policy so stupid that a smart person would have trouble even imagining it.

    Trump decisions make more sense when you realize he is actually stupid as fuck and there’s no hidden chess moves or anyone pulling the strings from the shadows. There is nobody at the wheel who is actually competent even if they’re evil. This is all just the whims of a complete moron who is probably also going a bit senile as well.



  • It completely baffles me that there are apparently a decent number of people who voted for this jackass who are somehow surprised he’s doing everything he said he spent months telling everyone he was going to do. Dumb fucks deserve all the pain and heartache they’re going to get. I never really understood what people get out of apocalyptic religious stories where the wicked are punished with divine torment for defying God but now that I am faced with so many people who, despite having access to all of the information required to make a better decision, willingly chose to do the wrong thing because of their willful ignorance and greed, I understand these texts so much better. It is maddening to have a way of morality and justice that you believe in and see people who you feel should do better completely disregard all you believe in. It’s no wonder people wrote stories about how there is a day of reckoning coming, where the first shall be last and the last shall be first, the wicked will be punished for knowingly defying the rules, and the good will be rewarded for staying the course. I don’t wish eternal damnation on those who voted for Trump and I don’t think there’s a God who would even do that to them but I don’t feel bad for them at all and I refuse to listen to them cry about losing their jobs or not being able to afford groceries if those things result directly from their decisions. Their Day of Judgement is coming, and it’s entirely self created. Fitting for a group of people who worship a man as a god- their god king is the source of their judgement.



  • It probably wouldn’t work though. Say you wash your hands. Okay that helps some against certain diseases but not against respiratory disease, many types of foodborne illness, the plague, etc. You’d still get all of those just as easily as everyone else without also having a backdrop of the germ theory of disease to explain other ways to prevent disease and antibiotics to cure bacterial infections.

    This is the state of biology in the middle ages. This is a medieval Scottish bestiary, a book of animals, which contains many interesting facts about animals such as beavers biting their testicles off to throw away pursuers, several animals spontaneously generating from nothing, and many animals that don’t exist (my favorite is the Bonnacon, a bull that spews firey shit as a defense mechanism). Medieval scholars also didn’t accept experimentation as a valid means of gaining knowledge - they were stuck on Plato’s ideas about matter being flawed and untrustworthy and true knowledge only being able to come from Reason (and in the case of the medieval era, Divine revelation). Obviously you could show them bacteria (if you could somehow fashion a powerful enough microscope with medieval tech, which is not a trivial task) and they’d have to believe in it but how would you get them to believe that those little guys cause disease when that took us a couple hundred years in actual history?



  • I would die quickly because I don’t have any wilderness survival skills and the land I live in (USA) was inhabited by hunter gatherer tribes whose language is completely unrelated to anything I know and whose customs are completely unknown to me as well. But beyond that, even if I got teleported to England where I at least know a similar enough language to where I could figure out middle English decently quickly, I think people seriously overestimate how useful just having modern knowledge is.

    For example, say you want to build a gun. Do you know how to forge a gun barrel with medieval steel and make gunpowder out of bat shit and sulfur? Because I sure as hell don’t. I could probably make gunpowder but how the hell would you get the money to pay someone to make a gun barrel for you? And further, even if you had the skills yourself, basically nobody today deals with raw materials as inconsistent as what they were working with back then and therefore don’t have practice working with them. Even if you introduced something like germ theory to them why would anyone believe you? You’d probably get just as sick as everyone else even with following modern sanitation standards for yourself because nobody else would be. Same with math. Want to speedrun introducing calculus to the world? Good luck trying to prove it to medieval mathematicians without having deep knowledge of euclidean constructive proofs and philosophy to even allow for something like an infinitesimal to exist. There’s very little one person can realistically do to change the world on their own.



  • It greatly simplifies life from a legal standpoint. It’s basically like creating a tiny corporation of two people that can act as a single legal entity. If you’re married it simplifies buying a house together, inheritance, medical decisions, etc. As others have pointed out, these are important especially when your partner’s family don’t approve of you or the relationship especially for LGBT people.

    I am going to break the mold though and say the actual ceremony is important too. Declaring your intention to stay together for life in front of your friends and family changes things. It adds a level of security and finality to the relationship- you have to put your money where your mouth is on the relationship. Although people frequently do it, I don’t know how someone can go through the wedding process without reflecting on how big of a deal it is to stand up in front of so many of your friends and family and declare your intention to stay together forever, even without the religious ritual aspect of it. I wouldn’t want to have kids with someone without having this commitment, for example. Ultimately even though marriage is a social construct, I think it’s still a useful one even in a world where women are no longer considered property of men.




  • I’m a chemical engineer at a plastics company. When I’m in the office I’m looking at data and making decisions based on that, like whether to stop or increase production rates, whether to shut something down for maintenance, or finding what piece of equipment is broken and causing a problem. I also design improvements to the process like finding better ways to run the machinery, new equipment that gets us more capacity, or new ways to control the equipment. I would say about 80% of my time is in the office and 20% is in the manufacturing area.






  • If you think Christianity is unique in this regard look towards Buddhism, specifically the Vajrayana branches (often associated with Tibet) and you’ll see even more gruesome imagery than any Christian symbolism. Buddhas drinking blood out of the skulls of their enemies, stomping on corpses, and having sex all at the same time, and even more shocking things. These"fearsome" or “wrathful” manifestation of Buddhist deities that display raw power and the trappings of demons to destroy said demons are relatively common. Religion is weird and powerful symbolism is often shocking.


  • I don’t know if anyone has pointed this out (I’m sure they have) but fundamentally I think it’s related to the cultural impact of the Garden of Eden story. God creates Man in His own image, and Man comes up short and disobeys God. Man creates Robot in his own image, and Robot surpasses man and disobeys him, completing the cultural cycle. Both stories are about human nature being flawed, with robot stories being about how the flawed human nature leads us to want to “become God” by creating life on our own, becoming our own Demiurge, creating a shadow of a shadow of the “Divine Image” which represents goodness and morality.


  • The QAA podcast recently had an episode on AI generated images and right wing movements and they said something that really stuck with me- AI “art” is so popular among right wingers and barely literate tech bros because it is truly art the way they see all art, images with only surface level literal meaning and no subtext, context, or anything actually thought provoking. The dumbest thing about this is that there are several Black Mirror episodes that are ultimately hopeful or value-neutral about the effects of technology on the future- San Bernardino and Striking Vipers come to mind. Then again, both of those are about how sexuality intersects with transhumanism, which right wingers generally see as bad things so maybe they see those as dystopian episodes as well.


  • Yeah I think people on Lemmy are delusional about how much people are willing to stick with Trump. Opinion polls are staying pretty high, close to 50% even after the tariff nonsense and Venezuelan concentration camps. Trump’s approval rating cannot go below 30% because roughly a third of the population are completely incapable of finding any fault in their God Trump. The fact that so many people who aren’t in this camp are still sticking by him is a sign of how corrupt and vile the American people are more than anything. It’s hard to continue to love my fellow Americans when they keep being so stupid.