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ICastFist, in Why in the year 2024 and with all the knowledge humans have now do people still believe in religion?
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

One thing atheists often ignore is that being part of a religion means being part of a community, a group. That alone is reason enough for many people to stick with it.

Sure, the preacher/priest/whatever may be a scammer asshole, but this isn’t about him, it’s about me and the people around me. I belong in here and so do these people.

Remember, humans are social creatures. Being part of a group is a big fucking deal.

Another thing I’ve been giving some thought, religion can be a “lazy shortcut” for the brain to acknowledge some stuff without having to spend too much energy thinking about it. It’s a lot easier to wrap your head around “Because God wants it” than digging deep into the hows and whys of anything. No, it’s not scientific in the least, but humans are lazy. I am lazy, you are lazy, everyone here is lazy, we just opt to save energy in different things.

hakunawazo,

Hey, who are you calling lazy. I,m not lazy, I just choose to do nothing at all. ;)

corsicanguppy,

being part of a religion means being part of a community, a group.

The local crafting circle doesn’t endanger children and carpet bomb the neighbours, though.

hightrix,

Don’t be silly, neither does the local church.

afraid_of_zombies,

No, but they enable those that do.

ICastFist,
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

The funny thing is that that kind of talk of the previous poster is just a bad type of generalization, a lazy shortcut. The existence of bad elements within a large group is a given. There are pedophile priests, just as there are pedophile uncles or teachers. The only difference here is in how accountable they are for their actions, as the Roman Catholic Church is well known for protecting its abusive priests, which isn’t too different from Epstein’s friends having money shields.

As for carpet bombing and general violence, one could say it’s “politics as usual”. When words fail (whether on purpose or not is irrelevant here), violence emerges, because one side wants to impose its will. Religion is just another lazy (and often effective) shortcut to rally people behind a cause, not unlike patriotism

afraid_of_zombies,

When words fail

George Bush said god spoke to him in a dream and told him to invade Iraq to usher in the apocalypse.

GONADS125,

I’ve known atheists who go to church for the community. I’m an atheist, and I have recommended going to a nondenominational church to other atheists who had said they really lacked community support.

Of course, sometimes religious community systems can actually be very hostile and nonsupportive and downright exploitative. Really just depends on the specific church community. Just like there are some great people and some major assholes out there. Churches are no different.

Urist, (edited )
@Urist@lemmy.ml avatar

Wonder why atheists often do not value the communal aspect of a community they are often excluded from. It is almost as if they do not value not being included in the group? Also, lazy shortcuts often lead to bad outcomes. Being wary about that is a good thing, in my opinion.

jordanlund, in Folks in North America, where do you like to get PC parts online these days?
@jordanlund@lemmy.world avatar

Watching this thread. I’ve been LOST ever since Fry’s fell apart. :(

Ghostalmedia,
@Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world avatar

My best buys were always at fry’s.

CatZoomies,
@CatZoomies@lemmy.world avatar

And if you wanted delicious fries, your best buy was not at Best Buy but rather Five Guys Burgers and Fries.

Thermal_shocked,

Microcenter is great, especially for nerds. Sucks if one isn’t close, but they ship.

empireOfLove2,
@empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

They don’t ship anything that matters. Key parts like CPU’s, GPU’s, mobos, hard nope.

shyguyblue, (edited )

Yup. 30 something processors in the website, 3 available in store. I love that microcenter has replaced Fry’s (smaller stores that i don’t get an anxiety attack going to) but the shipping is crap and you have to wait for parts to come back in stock.

empireOfLove2,
@empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

In their defense, I believe a lot of their shipping rules changed during the crypto/covid/AI shortages of the past few years to prevent scalpers from vacuuming up their supply. They limited a lot of the big ticket items to in-store only specifically so you couldn’t order them from Timbuktu and resell them.

Which, props to them, respect. But holy crap does it make them useless as a retailer unless you’re one of the lucky fucks who lives within a 2 hour drive of one.

NOT_RICK, in Why is Australia the only "core anglosphere" country where voting is mandatory?
@NOT_RICK@lemmy.world avatar

Found this online:

According to the Australian Electoral Commission, the decline in voter turnout was the driving force behind the introduction of mandatory voting. It said that voter turnout dropped from 71 per cent in the 1919 election to less than 60 per cent in the 1922 elections.

In order to address the problem, a private member’s bill to amend the Electoral Act was introduced in the Senate in 1924. At the time, it was only the third private member’s bill to be passed into law since 1901.

As a result of the law, the voter turnout at the 1925 election rose to over 91 per cent.

Gradually, states across the country introduced compulsory voting starting from Victoria in 1926, New South Wales and Tasmania in 1928, Western Australia in 1936 and South Australia in 1942.

When enrollment and voting at federal elections was introduced for Australian Aborigines in 1949 it was voluntary, and continued to be so until 1984 when enrollment and voting became compulsory for all eligible electors.

captainlezbian,

Oh wow here in America we have party that banks on reducing turnout

stoy, in What's the best music streaming service?

Keeping a local library on your phone and computer.

No need to worry about if a streaming service changes anything, not pepetual bulls just to listen to music

TK420,

I do love PlexAmp, I need a much bigger storage capacity on my phone these days because of all the bangers.

stoy,

That’s fair, I have about 720 songs bought on my iPhone, and plenty more downloaded from remix64.com in VLC

Pons_Aelius, in What sci-fi-esque inventions are the most plausible and could happen soonest?

we need teleportation frankly

Sorry but not in this universe.

It is the same for pretty much all the narrative hand waves that are used to push the story forward. This is not knocking SF but to temper expectations.

Deep sleep/human hibernation.

FTL travel of any description, including FTL communication.

Sentient, Self-aware AGI.

Directed energy weapons and EM shields.

Deceptichum,
@Deceptichum@kbin.social avatar

How’s quantum teleportation work in this universe? Because that’s apparently a thing already.

berg,

That’s quite the question to ask, but as far I can tell it only works with quantum information. Sending a body would be like you trying to fit into a fiber cable to be bounced inside of beneath the Atlantic to avoid the otherwise long flight.

Deceptichum, (edited )
@Deceptichum@kbin.social avatar

From what I know of sci-fi, teleportation is often a machine that scans, destroys, and replicates the particles in your body at a secondary location.

So if we could figure out scanning and printing at the atomic scale, with zero defects, and pair it with sending information at near instant speeds via quantum teleportation, we could have a teleporter.

berg,

… if we could figure out scanning and printing at the atomic scale, with zero defects

I think this is a bigger issue currently than sending large amounts of data across the globe. Though I wonder how much data a full copy would demand.

Deceptichum,
@Deceptichum@kbin.social avatar

You just made me curious and we're not alone in wondering

To have a scanner that can record the position of every atom in the body to an accuracy of the order of the size of a hydrogen atom would require position accuracy of about 10-10 meters. To get that accuracy over a distance of order 1 meter, this would require 30 decimal digits, which would be about 100 binary digits per atom. However, there would be a lot of redundancy in this data, so let’s be optimistic and assume you could compress this down to 1 bit per atom, so we still need approximately 1027 bits of data to just specify the positions of all the atoms in a human body. According to Wikipedia (Exabyte), the approximate data storage capacity of all the computers and storage devices in the world today is roughly 1 zettabyte = 1021 bytes = 1022 bits. Therefore, the data for the scan of one human would require at least 10,000 times the total storage of all the data stored on Earth right now.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/05/is-teleportation-possible.html

berg,

Ah, that would take a while to send 😁

Xariphon,

Now I'm wondering how long it would realistically take for that to become a not-insane demand. I know data storage multiplies pretty rapidly, but not that rapidly, so are we talking decades or centuries?

Deceptichum, (edited )
@Deceptichum@kbin.social avatar

Apparently we can already do it, a gram of dna can store 215 petabytes and we can encode to dna at 18Mbps.

Gonna be a long upload.

papalonian,

I was getting incredibly confused because the copy/paste didn’t copy the superscript for the exponents. I was like, “there’s definitely more than 1027 atoms in the body… wait, how are there supposedly only 1021 bytes of storage in the whole world? Oooh…”

QuaternionsRock,

Quantum “teleportation” is not capable of sending information FTL. Quantum entanglement means that the wave functions of two or more particles (in essence, the information possessed by the particles) are correlated, but the information must be encoded by a device at the midpoint between the two observers and sent to the observers at a speed not exceeding the speed of light.

Slotos,

Teleportation in that term means “make a thing disappear in one place and appear in another”. No “immediate” is ever implied.

Wikipedia article has a great diagram on the topic. Add an article on “no cloning theorem” to understand why “teleportation” is a fitting term. I recommend reading both without expectation, just read through the steps as if you’re learning a new math tool.

In short, quantum teleportation is a way to take a quantum state (which are fundamentally unforgeable - you can’t simply create a clone of a particle), destroy it, extracting classically communicable data, and they recreate it in another location.

ahornsirup,
@ahornsirup@sopuli.xyz avatar

Directed energy weapons already exist today. They’re mostly experimental, but the US and Germany (and possibly others) are both investing millions into R&D and have working prototypes.

Slotos,

FTL is a weird one.

Speed of light is a singularity in a special relativity theory. Singularities usually indicate model limitations, not reality fundamentals.

The theory happily describes behaviours below and above this “speed limit”, but insists on it being unapproachable from either side, which is weird already. At the same time our other models tell us that matter loses a finite amount of energy when it gains mass and stops moving at the speed of light.

Problem is, we don’t seem to have a vocabulary to discuss ways around this singularity and universe is not so forthcoming with any clues.

It’s a general crysis of physics lately. We know our models have limitations, we often know where they break exactly, and universe just giggles along.

But yeah, it’s highly unlikely that any SF will correctly guess a viable FTL, even if it is possible. Especially considering how seemingly every author thinks quantum entanglement is it.

DerisionConsulting, in Does wind power cause visual pollution in your opinion?

They look pretty sweet and they generally aren’t near populated areas

GildorInglorion, in What made up movie title would make it hard to sell it to the public?

Tapeworm - The Musical

Cosmicomical,

What about “Earworm - The Musical”

eltrain123, in If you got COVID and lost the ability to taste things, did it ever come back? Otherwise, did you experience any other long term consequences from the pandemic in general?

I read something saying that it takes 6-12 months for the neural pathways for taste and smell recognition to reform in a permanent way.

I briefly lost my sense of taste and smell 2 years ago. I ‘got it back’ after a week, but everything is still less intense… maybe 20-30% muted. Some things came back with very distinct differences. Alcohol taste like rotten garbage, dairy tastes off, things I didn’t like aren’t as powerful and things I used to love don’t hit like they used to.

I tried retraining smell with different scented oils over the course of a few months, but didn’t really see any difference. Hell, maybe it worked on some things, but the things that it didn’t work for stand out in my mind… maybe that’s cognitive bias.

Other than that, I don’t have any lasting side effects. I don’t even know for sure that it was from Covid. By the time I realized I had a taste change, I tested a few times and never came up positive. I am assuming I had a case and was asymptomatic until the sense change and stopped shedding by the time I tested, but you can develop anosmia/parosmia from other viruses, like the flu, too.

dexa_scantron, in How to cope with existing right now?
@dexa_scantron@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve been struggling with this too, but doing ok mostly. Here’s what works for me:

  1. Spend time with people who make me feel hope instead of despair. It sounds like you know some entitled assholes; don’t spend time with them if they don’t improve you.
  2. Focus on local. What is happening right around me? What can I do to make it better? How am I interacting with my immediate environment?
  3. Focus on what is improving. In many, many ways it’s better now that it has been at any time in human history. Women have more freedom and power now than they ever have. I can learn anything I want to, find out anything I want to, almost instantly. More people are aware of systemic oppression now than ever before, and more people are willing to resist it than ever before.
  4. Pick what to be mad about. There are too many things to be angry about, so I try to pick the ones that I think are the most worth it. For me, they are: wealth accumulation (we’ve come so far, and built such a great civilization, and we let a few rich fuckers loot it. It was a mistake! We tricked ourselves into thinking it was a good idea! But we’re realizing it’s not, and it’s fixable) and systemic racism in the US (Black infants in America being twice as likely to die before they reach a year old than white infants is UNACCEPTABLE). Yeah, there’s an infinite amount of other shitty stuff, but I’m only one person.
  5. Picking and choosing social media/other news sources that don’t send me into a doom spiral. I don’t go on Twitter. I don’t go on Reddit any more. I don’t have Lemmy on my phone (sorry Lemmy, nothing personal, but it’s a bad doomscrolling hole for me). I go on Discord and I read blogs I subscribe to.

I believe that a person can only handle three big things at a time, and everything else needs to take a back seat to those three. You have your business, your family, and your medical debt. Those are your three burdens. When one of them gets light enough, you can take on something else. Gender equality and entitled rich people and identity politics are not your burdens right now. They can take a back burner until other stuff gets better for you.

Good luck, it’s hard.

solomon42069, (edited )

Thank you, some great advice and feels like affirmation I’ve taken the right first steps on my own, just need to keep at it!

NegativeLookBehind, in What are some small things we should change about the human body?
@NegativeLookBehind@kbin.social avatar

Very short mating season. The amount of people is too god damned high.

vividspecter,

Or just have a built in birth control switch that has zero side effects. Of course, it would have to be entirely controlled by the individual so as not to turn into some dystopian population control mechanism.

HerrVorragend,
@HerrVorragend@lemmy.world avatar

Pon farr!

ImTryingLemmy,

OK, but only if it’s like May or June. No one needs that shit in February.

Kolanaki, in What gifts that you received for Christmas this year are already in the trash?
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

The baked goods a lady from my dad’s church gave me. I don’t even know what they were; it tasted and looked like it was just a bunch of dallops of cake frosting sprinkled with almond dust. I don’t really eat sweets, and these offended my taste buds when I ate one. Nobody else wanted to take them off my hands so into the trash they went.

radix,
@radix@lemm.ee avatar

Meringues?

ultra, in WTF species of spider is this

Of course they’re in Australia

Lifecoach5000,

Nature is wild down there it seems. Maybe they DO need rabies to help curb some of these crazy ass species 🤣

LillyPip,

I hate to break it to you, but spiders live everywhere.

These look rather small, too.

BruceTwarzen,

Bit it's the funny reddit joke. You are supposed to upvote and congratulate on the great joke.

msmc101, in Lemmings in school, what are they teaching about drug addiction, fentanyl, and opiods?

graduated not too long ago, it was basically pure misinformation. the typical one touch will murder you, it’ll ruin your life, with a dash of shaming people who have addictions.

Scubus,

With fentanyl specifically, that’s not too far off lol

That being said, drugs are great m’kay

otp,

Yeah, this is not the best question because you’ll get very different answers from different parts of the world, or even different parts of the US.

I graduated more than a decade ago, and there was a lot more nuance than what you described. They taught us about different types of drugs and what their real effects were. I remember learning in high school that marijuana is less dangerous than cigarettes and alcohol.

In elementary school for me, there were big anti-smoking campaigns, but nothing about alcohol or harder drugs. The “just say no” was about peer pressure and doing anything you felt uncomfortable doing (including inappropriate touching).

geekworking, in What's your favorite instrument that really gets through to you?

Bagpipes. One of the few instruments that can both make you cry and make you want to charge into battle.

tartan,

Wish I could upvote this 10000x

owenfromcanada,
@owenfromcanada@lemmy.world avatar
sanguinepar,
@sanguinepar@lemmy.world avatar

One of my favourite Arrested Development lines is this “And, like all bagpipe music, it was hard to tell if it was good music played horribly, or horrible music played well.” :-)

Seriously though, it can sound mighty impressive when done right - living in Edinburgh though, I could do without the street corner pipers belting out Don’t Stop Believing and the like!

Khrux, (edited ) in What are some dark sides to cute super-powers ?

A lot of people have read this question to mean the accurate scientific implications of everyday superpowers which isn’t really in the spirit of superpowers. I’ll try to say powers that feel generally altruistic or built for cute characters that have cruel implications.

Healing us the classic cute superpower, but if the user of the power chooses to overheal somebody they could probably cause basically mega cancer.

It’s pretty easy to imagine the the implications of controlling animals, and it’s a pretty good power to sit in the background as a utility power until the user decides to have every insect, rat and pigeon in the city bombard somebody.

The ability to share memories is hard to be used villainously but two fucked applications would be to beam somebody’s traumatic experience I to somebody else’s head (or an experience that happened to one person that could trigger someone else’s PTSD), or if the user has trained themselves to be able to alter their memories to fictional events on demand, turning what is basically a truth finding superpower into an abuse of perceived honesty.

Finally the superpower of using Reddit and Lemmy your whole life and generating a very standard way if responding but having the cruel and unusual twist of always sounding like fucking ChatGPT.

Chetzemoka,

The power of healing could be used to infinitely torture someone without killing them. Definitely has a dark side.

All power must be applied ethically

Fades, (edited )

The heal to cancer ratio is a perfect example, deepens the power itself too instead of being a superficial “you’re fixed now!” vibe

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