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twig

@twig@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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twig , (edited )

Fuck leaf blowers. I don't care if they're quieter. The term here is "polishing a turd." They don't really solve any problems. They're not good at removing debris, but just blowing it to a place where someone else will deal with it.

Also... removing debris on its own is a dubious pursuit, since "debris" could also be termed "stuff that holds moisture longer and slows the effect of drying soil during drought conditions."

twig ,

Absolutely. And all those emissions are taking place very close to a human's face.

twig ,

So I promise I'm not trying to be a dick here. While what you're saying is essentially reasonable, it's actually not true.

The amount of emissions in these small, wildly inefficient engines is considerably worse than even a large pickup truck. The reason is because emissions standards, including the introduction of catalytic converters, etc. don't apply to lawn equipment. The result is that these don't actually burn fuel correctly, and spew out lots of harmful pollutants in a way that even large ICE vehicles don't.

https://www.edmunds.com/car-reviews/features/emissions-test-car-vs-truck-vs-leaf-blower.html#:~:text=Distilling%20the%20above%20results%2C%20the,than%20the%20crew%20cab%20pickup.

https://grist.org/technology/lawn-equipment-pollution-report/

Like sure, there are larger sources of emissions, but I'm kinda in favor of making changes that would offer a large benefit proportionate to the amount of lifestyle change needed to make the switch. As in, making this switch would be easier than not. These emissions produce no benefit to us, and they cost us a weird amount of money to produce.

twig ,

Everyone needs a union

twig ,

Mowing lawns is killing pollinators.

People put so much energy into growing grass. Seeding, liming, fertilising, watering... so they can create endless, mindless busywork and destroy biodiversity.

Lawns were originally a status symbol. A "hey lol look at me I have enough land I don't have to grow food." Shameful that it took off as a defacto standard.

twig ,

Hell yeah. I love to hear that.

twig ,

That's actually amazing. For real, thanks for sharing that. I love hearing about these decisions can have such a positive impact in our small corners of the world.

twig , (edited )

The fact that generative AI is being used as a means of large corporations consolidating even more wealth rather than attempting to free the working class from shitty, menial jobs shows that we're way the fuck off with how we conceptualize of "work".

This should be a good thing, but for lots of people this will suck.

twig ,

America desperately needs to enact policies that put restrictions on wealth accumulation. There are lots of ways to do this.

twig ,

Excellent

twig ,

Yes. This on repeat.

twig ,

Yeah OK this is dumb.

Average household income in the US (I'm assuming that's where you are) are 75k before taxes, after taxes is 58k.

Rent is a national average of 2100 monthly, so, roughly 25k annually.
The average american household spends 270 weekly on groceries. That's 14k annually.
The average american household spends 12k on transportation annually.
The average american household spends about 10k on medical costs.

So -3K is what you're left with on average.

Accounting for only necessities, the averages mean that people can't afford to exist, let alone pay a down payment on an average house. 5% of the national average of 495,000 for a house is 24,750. If we're going off of averages is about 30k more than Americans make per household per year. And again in this case, since the average leaves us with a deficit of 3k just accounting for necessities, extending the timeline for savings doesn't do any favors.

twig ,

So the CEO of Loblaws (the parent company that owns most of the grocery chains/stores in Canada) has very explicitly been engaged in price-fixing of groceries.

These people are stealing from us. It is correct to steal from them.

twig ,

Fwiw I fully support your reasoning that TikTok in particular should be viewed as a source of particularly insidious propaganda at this moment. I've been tracking this for years and it seems very obvious to me.

However... when you're talking about Instagram you're talking about the company that offered the tools used in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Disinformation on Meta is not new, and quite suspiciously, Meta is shutting down CrowdTangle (a tool developed by Meta for tracking disinformation) just months before the US federal election.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-kills-crucial-transparency-tool-worst-possible-time/

Fuck TikTok, and also fuck Meta. I can be happy that tiktok might be banned and also despise Meta

twig ,

On private roads in Canada, the mining giant Teck is starting to use autonomous transport trucks.

https://im-mining.com/2021/05/05/teck-adds-autonomous-mining-trucks-plus-battery-copper-concentrate-road-hauler-introduced/

To me this is less frightening for public safety and more for reasons related to climate change, since this kind of industrial expansion will be less contingent on worker availability.

Mind you, the whole push toward driverless vehicles seems insanely redundant as a concept, since driverless tech in the form of high-speed rail has been around for decades in an infinitely more efficient way than could ever be offered by personal vehicles.

twig ,

My main problem with strict dietary rhetoric is that it doesn't acknowledge the benefit of people eating vegan (or whatever) sometimes. Like it's a good thing to get nutrition from diverse sources and there's carryover benefit to the planet when doing this.

I'm not a vegan, but I eat a lot of plant-based meals and when I eat meat, because I eat less of it, it's generally local and ethically-raised. Militant vegans will often turn people from making decisions like this, and I think that's a shame.

I was a vegan for years. And I was careful about trying to get my nutrients. But I needed to eat so much more and I was lowkey tired all the time. When I started eating some meat again I felt ashamed of myself for not living up to the rhetoric. But it's just silly to treat this as an all or nothing type thing. A person eating beans and rice one day and a small amount of beef in a stir fry the next is... not the same as a person eating fried chicken every day, and I don't appreciate when anyone implies it is.

twig ,

You love to see it

twig ,

Jobs didn't know shit. He made a bunch of predictions, some of them right, some of them not at all right. He just took credit for other peoples' work, mostly Wozniak's. The man was every bit the piece of shit Elon is.

Worth listening to the 3-part series on Jobs from Behind the Bastards:
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-terrible-secret-of-156343561/

twig ,

Yeah OK that's fair.

twig ,

Pay to play speech

twig ,

Which is that?

twig ,

So that's actually not true, but for reasons that I think are weirder and more interesting than anything implied by either side of this "debate."

There are actually about 50% more women who have Y chromosomes than originally expected, and also: microchimerism seems to be extremely common in people who give birth, seemingly regardless of whether or not they give birth to children with XY chromosomes. But the genetic remnants of fetuses that have XY chromosomes stay in the body for many years (possibly a lifetime), and this has a fairly significant effect on genetic composition.

I get what you're saying and I don't totally disagree, but I think the main thing that I keep learning is that "biological sex" is just not actually a particularly meaningful concept.

96% of US Hospital Websites Share Visitor Data with Google, Meta, Data Brokers, and Other Third Parties, Study Finds (www.theregister.com)

Academics at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed a nationally representative sample of 100 non-federal acute care hospitals – essentially traditional hospitals with emergency departments – and their findings were that 96 percent of their websites transmitted user data to third parties....

twig ,

This is called "enumerating badness" and the findings here are both probably not that meaningful and based on a lot of assumptions.

I am curious to see what data is being transmitted, but not a lot is actually revealed by this

Fairbuds are Fairphone’s proof that we really could make better tiny gadgets (arstechnica.com)

But of course we all know that the big manufacturers don't do this not because they can't but because they don't want to. Planned obsolescence is still very much the name of the game, despite all the bullshit they spout about sustainability.

twig ,

I get what you're saying, kind of...

But also, most modern earbuds usually sound quite good. Quality in general has become such a bizarre moving target, but here's my take: We've become so used to constant improvement at the expense of satisfaction. I can barely notice the difference between 1080p and 4k. In my mind they're both "good quality" and therefore I'm satisfied. Same goes for audio quality. I've used a few pairs of earbuds and they have sounded "good."

As a culture, we need to stop with throwing away of perfectly good devices, because it's extremely harmful to the planet's occupants.

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