zlatiah

Hey OP, I am similar to you in most aspects but I’m a lot younger, so please take it with a grain of salt…

I also live in Texas, and honestly I thought a lot of less privileged folks or ppl with family ties would love to be in your situation and just leave? It’s not just about politics. Even if tomorrow Texas becomes a liberal stronghold, it will still take possibly at least a decade to fix ERCOT, the climate issue, and flooding issues (if you live in Houston)… This clusterfrick alone was enough to prompt me to never live in Texas again once I’m done with grad school

Besides, my understanding is that there are a few left-leaning metro areas which have suburbs (or live in the city!) that don’t cost that much more to live in compared to mid-/upper-mid-class TX suburbs, so there’s probably no financial disincentive to move either

For god’s sake temperatures above 40 Celsius are dangerous and claims like this will literally kill some people… But again, after everything happening in the last 3-4 years it’s hard to imagine conservatives putting other folks’ health and safety as a priority

I wouldn’t be surprised if someone does. I mean banks also just shuffle money around and guess who has a bunch of cash lying on hand so… Goes back to the gold rush era, but there are folks who mine the gold and folks who mine the miners

Also some tech companies can be at a loss for years but run on VC money

So… I don’t know, but again I wouldn’t be surprised if they are making something to keep this nonsense going

Ah… so you’re specifically mentioning about the news article in question?

If you repay the loan, [your NFT token] comes back home. If not, [the token] gets a new owner. Simple as that!

I guess this explains everything… Probably just ppl hustling each other lol. And I assume given what types of shady characters are into NFTs, there are probably a lot of them who want to hustle another person out of some cash

Thanks! Wowzers I’ve never heard of Nature Food, didn’t realize this journal had such a high impact factor. A few things of interest to me from the article…

• Vegans are one standard deviation younger than heavy-meat-eaters and eat fewer calories… although they should have adjusted for the difference
• This didn’t show on the fancy Monte Carlo simulation they did, but vegans emit much, MUCH less methane than any other group
• Literally any group is significantly better than heavy meat-eaters, especially low meat-eaters or below

The questionnaire they used to determine categories:

• Do you eat any meat (including bacon, ham, poultry, game, meat pies, sausages)? (Vegans, vegetarians and fish-eaters respond ‘No’.)
• Do you eat any fish? (Vegans and vegetarians respond ‘No’.)
• Do you eat any eggs (including eggs in cakes or other baked goods)? (Vegans respond ‘No’.)
• Do you eat any dairy products (including milk, cheese, butter, yoghurt)? (Vegans respond ‘No’.)
  And meat-eaters are divided by grams of meat eaten per day: <50 g/d, 50-100 g/d, >100 g/d. Apparently one patty from McDonald’s (Big Mac has two) is like 45 grams of beef so…

I mean the conclusions aren’t anything surprising, cows are literally one of the major sources of environmental damage… But it does provide some way moving forward I suppose. I suspect banning steakhouses would have a much better impact than forcing everyone to be vegan lol

(insert astronaut meme) never has been

Jokes aside… This is my personal philosophy & probably won’t align with everyone’s. As someone who started science quite young, I realized quite early that beyond societal issues, literally nothing is “meaningful”… If Earth itself will be gone in a few billion years, might as well practice some optimistic nihilism and do some stuff with whatever life I have. There’s still stuff to do even if society doesn’t prioritize ppl like me

Second this!

Phones give out a lot of personal information on their own lol. On top of the phone, don’t forget that social media apps like Threads also require you to login… with credentials stored at FB/Meta… that they can derive all the aforementioned information on, as well as other type of things (Amazon purchases? Stuff you watch on youtube.com? Google queries?..) by using some creative tracking technology. You basically gave them a dog tag to identify you whenever you sign up for services after all

For shittier apps like Thread, apparently they also do some weird stuff like forcing the app to be on once the OS boots, so… yeah.

Surprised no one else mentioned this… the answer is negative many months (or years?), most are Mastodon instances and probably not many people are familiar with most of those instances tho.

There was a fairly serious controversy months back when mastodon.cloud was purchased (if I remember correctly) by the same company that owns pawoo.net and another large Japanese Mastodon instance, the company is for-profit. Several right-wing shithole instances obviously have ads and are for-profit. Also there are a few instances owned/operated by for-profit companies, Medium immediately comes to the top of my mind.

Problem is a fairly significant portion of Mastodon admins I know were so staunchly against anything touching for-profit companies within a 12-ft stick that they immediately defederated from all of the said for-profit company affiliated instances…

To answer the second question… I don’t know. Again, the larger Mastodon instances (over 10,000 users each) I’m aware of seem to do just fine on user donations now, but the concept of profit comes every now and then. Paid moderators/admins was also something to keep in mind for this topic.

Excellent read. Have just re-posted this on 'key, thanks for sharing this.
I agree that Meta is doing something very dangerous to the fediverse… hope they could be stopped in their tracks.