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2 yr. ago

  • It's true that it's their choice, but a lot of people grew up hearing the phrase "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life!" so when they enter the workforce and find that they hate it, they look for a hobby they're passionate about, and plan their career around it. But when they make it their job, they find that instead of the hobby making work more bearable, the work instead makes the hobby unbearable, and now they've got a job they hate and have lost one of their passions.

    I'm sure there are some people who can love their hobby even as they are forced to wake up every day and do it regardless of whether or not they want to, but for me, anything I have to do every day becomes something I hate. The best career option for me is to work with something I was already indifferent toward, so it doesn't matter if I start hating it.

  • I get so many people who react to my baked goods with "Wow, you should sell these!" I bake to unwind from work - what would I do to unwind if baking was my work? I already ruined thrift stores for myself by working at one for my first job - I know not to do it again.

  • I think they're talking about "justified" madness. Realistic madness is just seeing things that aren't there, or reacting extremely to mundane stimuli, but if you had somehow been given comprehension of some higher truth about the world that nobody else would ever believe, the actions you take as a result of that knowledge might seem crazy to those around you, even if they're perfectly logical from your enlightened perspective.

  • I've seen this image floating around for a while, which breaks down the reasoning - or lack thereof in certain media - pretty well.

  • Eh, I can understand your outlook when it's something done specifically to post it to the internet, like when people film themselves giving money to the homeless, but the guy pretty clearly looks happy to have his pistachios; I'd imagine the story is real, and this guy just wanted to share it, even if there was a less altruistic undertone of getting positive attention online.

    And at the end of the day, there's a net good to doing things like giving people gifts and giving homeless people some money to help them out, even if done entirely for the sake of internet popularity. I like to focus more on whether the person being helped is thankful for it, and if they are, I just focus on that rather than the guy trying to make himself look good for doing it.

  • RIP

    Jump
  • My groups usually think of them as a powerful fey creature who sometimes just whisks people away for an indeterminate amount of time, only to bring them back later.

  • A lot of cops are so high strung that you essentially have to pretend you're having the time of your life while interacting with them - any nervousness or annoyance is taken to mean that you're potentially a violent criminal who could kill them at any moment.

    Just the realization that a woman holding a pot of hot water could hypothetically use it as a weapon, however unlikely it was in this scenario, was enough to make him instinctively shoot with only minor notice that still did nothing to prevent him from killing her even as she began cowering and apologizing.

    This is the culture we've allowed the police to build in this country; the job is dangerous, and they're only human, so they believe they should be forgiven for being scared regardless of the situation, and should be forgiven for taking drastic measures while they're scared.

  • 🧅- anion

  • Voting is about choosing good candidates well before it gets pared down to 2 options. It's about choosing a good local government, choosing good representatives, choosing good senators. If the only thing you care about is the President, then you'll never have a good pool of options from which the parties will pick a presidential candidate. They're not on our side - it's our job to force their hand with a deck stacked with good candidates. But only the people who pay attention to politics well before election year get to have a say in stuff like that.

  • Okay, and how do you plan to get them into the hearts and minds of around 50% of the population in the next 2 months, when the vast majority haven't even heard of her? It's not enough to have someone who could be a good president, you also need to get people to vote for them. If you want most of the population to vote for someone, they need to be aware of them as a viable option years beforehand.

    I agree that the 2 choices are pawns of the rich, but even if every person who knew about Claudia voted for her, she wouldn't even get enough votes for her to make the news, much less win. We're talking about tens of millions of people voting in unison for an election win to happen in this country. At this stage in the game, there are only 2 candidates with that kind of draw power. If you want to focus on the 2028 election (assuming there is one, since there clearly won't be if Trump wins) to get a 3rd viable candidate on that ballot, that's a noble plan, but by now this election's potential winners are already down to 2.

    Voting isn't about closing your eyes and saying "I want someone good to win!" It's about assessing which people might actually win, and voting for the one that best aligns with your views, however loosely. It's about strategy. If you want to change that, you need to build national presence in the name of your preferred candidate, and you need to start years ahead of the elections. Big changes don't happen at the ballot, they happen during the campaigning stage and beforehand. If your candidate isn't on the news every day leading up to the election, most voters won't even know they're an option.

  • Yeah, people are acting like this is up to chance - rich people throw money at their problems, and so long as someone is willing to spend their time catching it instead of doing their job, it works. It's going to work. The 5 year sentence is for poor people they want to get rid of, not for rich people they want to profit from.

  • As I said, yes, but also, let's work together to stop the slapping...

  • I put my alarm far enough away that I need to get up to turn it off. By then I'm already out of bed, which is otherwise the hardest part for me by far.

  • To be fair, if we did raise minimum wage, they'd use it as an excuse to raise prices again. We still need to get higher minimum wage of course, but we also need get much tighter restrictions on corporations, or any financial ground we gain will be lost shortly thereafter under a million excuses to bleed the extra money out of us.

  • Yeah, my mom used to be upset that I didn't hold onto my old pokemon cards, but not only did I never have any rare ones that would be worth anything anyway, I used them how I wanted to when I wanted to, and when they stopped interesting me, I gave them to someone who was still interested. I don't regret that.

  • My mom died of cancer a few months ago because she was convinced that a combination of sunlight's natural vibrational frequency and some expensive "medical" herbal teas would cure her. Placebos affect people, but if you let them believe that they're an alternative to actual science and medicine, then they'll use them as such.

  • Again, selective breeding suffers from the same issue of introducing changes that can be detrimental to the organism itself and its place in the balance of the environment. Look at dog breeding as an example. Pugs were bred for a specific look, and that inadvertently caused them to have severe breathing issues. Dachshunds are another example, with many developing spinal issues over time. The difference, as I said before, is the speed; making a change causes unintended side effects - when you make a huge change quickly, it will produce more side effects than making a small change slowly will.

    And... again... as I already said... there should be limitations to prevent rolling out new GMOs without specific testing for safety, both in a lab for potential problems to the organism or - in the event of an agricultural product - its consumers, as well as in the environment as a whole, to determine how it may affect the ecology if and when it is introduced. It may take decades to notice changes if the GMO is released immediately after being developed, but if testing protocols are made and followed, we should have no problem quickly spotting any issues before the organism is rolled out into the world.

    Just like newly developed medicines need to go through rigorous testing to prevent things like the Thalidomide scandal that caused an immense amount of birth defects due to lax testing, new GMO's will need to be tested as well. But, just like you likely understand the benefits of medicine for helping people suffering from various diseases, GMO's can provide the same level of benefit to people suffering from malnutrition, among a wide range of other positive uses. The key is to study new developments to the point where we can spot and address issues. Throwing away the technology as a whole is not the answer.

  • The speed is substantial, yes. That was my point. They are essentially the same; one simply uses the organism's own natural genetic variation mechanisms, while the other introduces new variations manually. Yes, that is a difference that requires separation of the two in certain circumstances, but not when it comes to whether or not we've genetically modified all strains of modern agricultural corn, GMO-labeled or not.

    Claiming selective breeding is the same as producing a GMO is like saying an eagle and a Boeing 747 are both utilizing mechanisms that allow them to fly, which is true.

  • Sure, but you could selectively breed rabbits for 1,000,000 years and get a glow in the dark rabbit; GFP is just a protein like any other - if you painstakingly selectively breed for a specific DNA sequence, you'll eventually get it regardless of your starting genetic pool. Classic selective breeding is a form of genetic modification - modern genetic modification methods are just way faster.

    I agree that we don't currently know enough about genetics to utilize genetic modification without unforeseen side effects, and so there should be limitations on what we're able to genetically modify until we can show that we understand it well enough to meaningfully minimize potential issues, but those same issues occur with selective breeding - they're, again, just slower.