A mere 20 years ago we could sit in mixed company laughing and groaning during an impromptu “everyone’s best and worst pickup line” contest, that levity among friends. Levity is serious business re-learn it.

You still can. The discourse is because a large chunk of the male population doesn’t understand how to do that without being creeps. Don’t be a creep and women will like being around you

Damn dude, that was such a spot-on summary I feel like I don’t need to log in to lemmy for a month lol

This is such a spurious connection lol but I read the article anyway

The pattern probably emerged as a result of Darwinian natural selection: cicadas that naturally matured in easily divisible years were gobbled up by predators, and simply didn’t live long enough to produce as many offspring. Those who, by chance, had long, prime-numbered life spans fared best, survived longest, and left the most offspring, becoming the dominant variation of the species.

I’m glad the author actually took the time to describe the evolutionary process accurately. When I was an impressionable youngin’ arguing against evolution, a big sticking point for me was how so many people described evolution as if there was some design or guidance behind it all. Nope, just common sense chaos and lots of death

[The Fine-structure Constant] quantifies the strength of the electromagnetic interaction between elementary charged particles.

Why the constant should have this value is not understood, but there are a number of ways to measure its value.

Sounds like we know what it is, we just don’t know the reason for its value. (Edit: Unless I’m misunderstanding what you mean)

Wikipedia link

And he said “Hi stuck in a non-linear perception of time, I’m Dad.”

Oh the definition is fine, I just mean that it seems illogical to adhere to it dogmatically.

Like, ok I’ll try to come up with the best summation but bear with me lol. Basically, let’s say you’re with your current partner. You’ve been into other people in the past. So, logically, you’ll probably be into other people - at some level - in the future, right? That seems like a natural development to me.

So if it’s natural, why should we have the little fine print on all of our relationships that reads “If you’re into other people this contract is null and void?”

Am I making sense? Lol. Like I just mean that it’s natural to be attracted, in some way, to more than one person so why do we default to holding ourselves and our partners to the unnatural? In that way, I’m monogamous with one person at a time seems logically inconsistent to me. It accepts the existence of plurality of attraction, yet denies its engagement

Even then it seems illogical to me tbh (internally inconsistent?), but at least it’s less rigid

No no, I think he said “it’s my-SSN-is-58385747 biased, friend who lives at 2747 Maple Street”

Yeah, the admins deserve all our support on this. Not only to protect themselves as server owners, but to stop the spread. Hopefully a longterm solution will be found soon

Eh, you can definitely use verifiable facts to derail a discussion.* It all depends on context and whether those facts are being framed truthfully and with good faith. There just isn’t enough context to go off of here. I don’t really care about OP’s politics because the point stands whether I agree with his politics or not

*Edit: See the book Merchants of Doubt about how cigarette companies in the 70s misused scientific findings to cast doubt on the link between cigarettes and cancer. Stuff like pointing out how women and men had similar smoking rates, but not cancer rates. They left out the part that women smokers tended to be much younger. Thus, in a couple decades their cancer rates matched men’s, but by then the damage was done. Bam - use of verifiable facts to lie and derail

I’d be curious to see which would be more practical: a decentralized version of Lyft/Uber powered by blockchain, or an employee-owned version of Lyft/Uber where workers keep all their earnings and pay a small portion for administrative fees to keep the app running.

Admittedly I’m always skeptical of blockchain’s ability to actually solve problems. But maybe it would have fewer infrastructural costs? Who knows

“Latino” is still considered by many native speakers to be “neutral”

So like, is there any sizeable Latin community actually calling for a gender neutral term or is this just a middle-class white people thing? Because as a white person I’ve never seen anyone push for this other than white people and it just seems like a white savior/ daddy knows best thing. But my experience is just my experience