Weigh on Earth or on Moon?

Makes me happy to hear this important feature is about to become reality! <3

Because religion evolved to thrive in us.

It’s like a parasite, and our mind is the host. It competes with other mind-parasites like other religions, or even scientific ideas. They compete for explanatory niches, for feeling relevant and important, and maybe most of all for attention.

Religions evolved traits which support their survival. Because all the other variants which didn’t have these beneficial traits went extinct.

Like religions who have the idea of being super-important, and that it’s necessary to spread your belief to others, are ‘somehow’ more spread out than religions who don’t convey that need.

This thread is a nice collection of traits and techniques which religions have collected to support their survival.

This perspective is based on what Dawkins called memetics. It’s funny that this idea is reciprocally just another mind-parasite, which attempted to replicate in this comment.

One is multiple parallel goals. Makes it hard to stop playing, since there’s always something you just want to finish or do “quickly”.

Say you want to build a house. Chop some trees, make some walls. Oh, need glass for windows. Shovel some sand, make more furnaces, dig a room to put them in - oh, there’s a cave with shiny stuff! Quickly explore a bit. Misstep, fall, zombies, dead. You had not placed a bed yet, so gotta run. Night falls. Dodge spiders and skeletons. Trouble finding new house. There it is! Venture into the cave again to recover your lost equipment. As you come up, a creeper awaitsssss you …

Another mechanism is luck. The world is procedurally generated, and you can craft and create almost anything anywhere. Except for a few things, like spawners. I once was lucky to have two skeleton spawners right next to each other, not far from the surface. In total, I probably spent hours in later worlds to find a similar thing.

The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like. Do I lose my “friends” when I stop playing their game?

I don’t think Minecraft does these things in any way maliciously, it’s just a great game. But nevertheless, it has a couple of mechanics which can make it addictive and problematic.

Yes, the most powerful will always have the most power. It still makes sense to set up some rules.

Pigovian taxes can still be beneficial for society, even if the super rich evade the system. They create incentives for everyone else to move in the desired direction. This includes consumers, producers, investors, researchers. For all those people in their different positions, it will be financial advantageous to consider other options.

But my main point was that you can raise prices without hurting the poor. By returning the tax revenue to the poor.

Oh, that’s not what I meant to describe. There are differences in ecological impact of various foods and production methods, obviously. Choosing the smaller options helps to do less harm, to “save the planet”.

I meant to point out that we moved from pre-industrial methods to modern methods because they make more sense in economic terms, in capitalism. And that just going back might lead to unwanted consequences like lots of people with much less access to meat.

Solution to #2: Implement as a pigovian tax. Return the tax revenue to the population per capita.

Yes, why bother with all the specific areas. A general carbon tax covers it all.

Wether it’s meat, flights, propulsion or heating, a single carbon tax sets the right incentives for all these different areas.

this is always used as an argument for new technologies instead of returning to lower tech, pre-industrial solutions that are already well established and known to be safer

Maybe because it’s about economical efficiency. The old ways were abandoned in favor of new methods, because the new approach was cheaper / yielded higher profits.

Yes, we could produce meat like we did in pre-industrial times, but that would mean higher prices or lower volume. Either way, it would mean less people could afford to eat meat. Like in pre-industrial times.

Then null will be returned, as the value of b.

For those who don’t know what Firefish is: https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_Firefish%3F

Thanks, nice to know. Also subbed to !ecosia@mander.xyz, didn’t know that exists.

Ah, top management! Yes, theoretically, that’s another option. They could pay you more, at the expense of their bonus. But managers being involved in that process and more powerful will probably come out on … top. And find someone else to foot that bill.

Not sure if social media in general has failed. That particular point can be solved at the community level.

Create or join a community which by it’s guidelines restricts posting paywalled or otherwise bad content. Which explicitly encourages posting “liberated” content. Have moderation. Problem solved. Moderators will remove all which you dislike. All that remains is the solution you want.

companies have budgets they allocate for salaries. One employee getting a better salary thans someone else doesn’t always mean that there’s no room to give a raise for that someone else, it all depends on the budgeting.

Yes, you will find singular examples where the rule fails. But on average, over long timescales, what you say means what I said.

You can do the same with happy socks, all of the same size. Pick any two, and you’re almost guaranteed to have a fitting, happy pair that doesn’t match. If they do, just repick one. Though I would never replace them just for holes.

This got me thinking. That is more than inflation, right? Where is this coming from? Maybe it’s coming from happy guys who don’t ask for a raise.

So is this pitting workers against each other? Some act, but only for their personal gain, at the expense of others. When together, they could get fair raises constantly and still be happy guys?

“Monad” is a shorter term though. “Structured data type” reads almost as bulky as “Curve of constant normal intersection points”.

Thanks again, though just for the record, that didn’t help either. It’s alright, I’m used to the Thunderbird lags. Let’s stop here :)

First, the researchers excised the larynxes of eight newly deceased domestic cats, all of which had contracted terminal diseases, resulting in their euthanization. (The owners gave explicit consent for this removal.) The larynxes were promptly flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored at -20° Celsius. They were slowly thawed at room temperature the night before the experiments. Each larynx was cleaned, photographed, and mounted on a vertical tube, which was used to supply heated air with 100 percent humidity to the larynx.

The larynxes were stabilized using LEGO blocks and 3D-printed plastic mounts, and mini-electrodes were attached to the thyroid cartilage, one on each side, to record the electroglottographic (EGG) signal. Gradually opening and closing a magnetic valve in the air supply chain controlled the subglottal pressure by pumping in air, which drove the oscillation in the mounted larynxes. (One larynx also underwent standard histological analysis, while another was CT scanned.)

The authors successfully produced purring sounds in all eight of the excised larynxes when air was pumped through them, with no need for muscle contractions—given that all the adjacent muscles had been removed when excising the larynxes. So what was driving the purrs?

Fascinating, this took a few unexpected turns.