• 16 Posts
  • 419 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 25th, 2023

help-circle
  • 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.




  • making the shops pay more to use the payment service, so that the shops then increase the prices, so that you pay the same as before

    Just nitpicking because I enjoy these thoughts:

    When the shop increases prices, it has to do it for all the customers, including the ones without credit card. So a part of the cost is offloaded to other types of customers. While credit card customers should see a slight increase in price, it should not be as much as they saved previously. So still a net win for them, at the cost of others.

    As others pointed out, the real scheme is probably entirely different.




  • The day this country’s tensions between conservatism and liberalism die is the day the USA ceases to exist. That tension is at the core of our republic, literally since its founding, and it’s what makes us great, unlike any other nation on Earth.

    That sounds as if this tension was somehow unique to the united states. It’s not, it’s everywhere. Even worse, the US have less of a political spectrum than most other nations, just shy of dictatorships.



  • You can use more debug outputs (log(…)) to narrow it down. Challenge your assumptions! If necessary, check line by line if all the variables still behave as expected. Or use a debugger if available/familiar.

    This takes a few minutes tops and guarantees you to find at which line the actual behaviour diverts from your expectations. Then, you can make a more precise search. But usually the solution is obvious once you have found the precise cause.




  • I think that’s fine. Unless we’re talking about greenhouses or urban indoor gardening, food grows in the environment. If you want to protect the food, you implicitly have to protect the environment, which makes you an environmentalist driven by food. There are lots of hazards which have little to do with climate (or at least which also have other, climate-unrelated causes), which can affect food. Invasive species, plastic, overfertilization, corporations, general socioeconomic disparities, just to name a few.



  • This is not the way to go about that

    What is your way to go about that?

    If you aren’t doing anything, what way(s) would you deem acceptable? If you know acceptable ways, why aren’t you following through? Honest if-questions, not meant as assumptions.

    Healthy and sustainable food seems to be a decent goal. People should be able to get behind this. So if all the disagreement is about the right approach, where are the people with the right approach, and where are all the people voicing their concern about art supporting them?

    Please help me out. It feels as if people are more concerned about pieces of art which they may never see, than about healthy food, the climate, or other major issues which affect everyone.

    I get why it puts people off, these points exist. I just wonder what the “right” alternative to these “wrong” approaches is, and wether the critics walk the talk.