• 0 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle
  • We have vastly increased our ability to produce food.

    And it has been largely the (petro)chemical industry responsible for this. The Haber-Bosch process transformed agriculture, but accounts for percent-level quantities of global energy consumption and carbon emissions. And it requires raw materials that are typically produced from hydrocarbons (although admittedly there are renewable options). And other nutrients typically come from mining (even organic options) - which displaces many species of all sorts. And this does not account for pesticides, etc., that others have mentioned.

    Prior to the development of modern chemistry, our best sources of fertilizer were often animal manures - which require breeding, raising, and ultimately usually killing animals.

    Sure, there is a lot we can do to minimize harm, and generally we should, and I try to myself as much as possible. But I’m not fooling myself into thinking that eating vegan or growing my food organically means nothing or no one suffered. Until we all go back to pre-agrarian societies, we will continue to cause large-scale destruction in some way. But of course this in itself would cause massive population decline and resultant suffering in humans.



  • I honestly don’t know the full extent of the accusations against Gates. But more generally, even if the people involved were adults, how do we know it wasn’t criminal? How do we know the women were involved consensually? And for those that did “consent”, how do we know it wasn’t due to coercion and the enormous wealth and power imbalances at play? The pictures of Gates released with one of the previous dumps sure don’t make it look like everyone was happy to be there with him… obviously a lot of this is speculation, but I’m weary of using the logic of adult = not criminal activity.



  • Several posts are saying this would be a good thing. Maybe, if implemented like the meme shows, but I worry ads in LLM chatbot output have the potential to be the most insidious and persuasive form of advertising we’ve ever seen. Chatbots are – by their nature – conversational and pushed in forms that are meant to eliminate any sort of thinking on the part of the user. And more and more, people are using them as their closest, most trusted confidants. Who’s to say a (e.g.) political candidate won’t pay to control the narrative of a chatbot, and have their propaganda (“ads”) appear as a private conversation between an individual and their trusted “friend” or “partner”?



  • To add to this, the Phillips screw was designed to be self centering for use with motorized screw drivers on assembly lines, with an added benefit of easy cam out that prevented over tightening by said screw drivers. All that is kinda obsolete now and actually disadvantageous, so Phillips is probably the most entrenched and enduring corporate propaganda screw.