Yeah, so what? This is the natural evolution of online communities. It's a good thing. When the user base is small, we should have a few, non-specific channels/forums/communities/whatevers so that everybody is in the same place to talk to each other. Metaphorically, it's like sustaining a nuclear reaction: The fissile material has to be in close enough proximity so that the radiation (posts and comments) can strike more fissile material (other users) to keep the chain reaction going. In the past, I've criticized the urge to immediately atomize Lemmy into thousands of highly-specific communities, and indeed, most of them have withered away.
Once a particular topic starts to dominate a community, once it's reached critical mass, then it's time to fork it off into its own community. I don't think that's happened to [email protected] yet.
I think they’re this powerful right now because there are a lot of non-billionaires who are dumb enough to do whatever they’re told by them even if it’s not in their own best interest (or the rest of the world’s) at all.
And they always will be. The thing about one's own best interest is that it's self-interest, always at least parochial, if not outright selfish (as in the US). If the people comprising a billionaire's private security force can obtain a better standard of living, more power, more perks, for themselves and their families than they could by cooperating with the rest of the proles in a (let's be honest) speculative venture, even if it did pay off? Well, some people will take the billionaire's offer, at least enough people to comprise a private security force.
It's the other way around. Residential properties are used as investment vehicles, because it's profitable. It's profitable because the prices are high and rising. The prices are rising because of the housing crisis, which is caused by lack of supply. Lack of supply is caused, in large measure, because of restrictive zoning.
If there were a glut of housing on the market, prices would crater, and it wouldn't be profitable, investors wouldn't buy residential properties. They could still try to buy up all of the properties, and create artificial scarcity that way, but the idea is to make a profit, not just collect residential property for the sake of having it. As soon as they started selling or letting properties in large numbers, supply would rise and prices drop again.
It's the artificial scarcity mandated by law that's driving the high prices. This explanation is confirmed by many cities, like mine, that have a very low rate of private equity ownership, and still have a housing crisis.
Because the rest of us have a right to life, too. Ever heard the saying, "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins"? That's colorful, but it's not even true; people have an expectation of a certain reasonable amount of space around their bodies, and even entering it with your fist might be considered assault. The concept that one's actions and choices affect other people is what's important here.
That's the problem with giant pickup trucks: They affect other people on the road, and the problem with giant pickup truck drivers is that they either refuse to recognize this fact, or they enjoy infringing on the rights of other people to enjoy life. Either way, it's bad for society, where we all have to live together somehow. Mullets and man-buns, by contrast, don't materially affect anybody else in the slightest.
Oh, I'm a little drunk, so I forgot the second point. Maybe I'm not devious enough to lead a bioweapons program, but I would think that research into potential bioweapons would primarily focus on a vaccine or a treatment. Nasty disease outbreaks occur naturally, and as we saw with COVID-19, they affect everybody. Why would any nation release a bioweapon that's going to hammer itself just as much as the enemy? That would only make sense to me in maybe a Dead Hand-like scenario, in which your nation has already fallen, and you release it as vengeance from the grave.
But, that still doesn't make sense to me, because we don't have any reliable way to look at a virus and determine its potential for causing a pandemic. That might not even be possible, since there are/were lots of viruses that seem like they should cause a pandemic, but just haven't.
Turns out it was hygiene theater for a while. In the early days, we just didn't know how it was transmitted, so the CDC recommended hand-washing and surface sanitizing out of an abundance of caution. I worked at a grocery store through the pandemic, where both of the owners were very community-oriented, and one was a low-key germophobe. They took the CDC recommendations seriously, and we all had to wear disposable gloves, as well as follow all sorts of protocols to sanitize surfaces.
Later on in the course of the pandemic, scientists started to question whether COVID-19 could spread on surfaces, because the evidence wasn't showing up. In fact, there was a study done back in the 1980's here at the University of Wisconsin in which volunteers who were sick with respiratory viruses (incl. coronaviruses) would read newspapers, play cards, play board games, etc. in a room, and then the researchers would bring healthy volunteers into the same room to do the same. Zero healthy volunteers got sick, so the researchers had the ill volunteers cough and sneeze directly on the shared objects before handing over the room. Again, zero healthy volunteers got sick. They were unable to demonstrate any surface-contact transmission.
This news came out, but the CDC was slow to update its recommendations. There was a period during which I was highly annoyed at having to wear the gloves, and spray surfaces with the extremely-expensive electrospray gun, when it was already scientific consensus (minus the CDC) that COVID-19 didn't spread through surface contact. Eventually, they did update their recommendations, and we were able to stop with the rigamarole. Sales of hand sanitizer and wipes dropped off (but still were high, because the new information wasn't universally known). If I understand it correctly (eh...), the virus which causes COVID-19 is relatively delicate, and its structure is supported by the water droplets which spread it. Once the droplets hit a surface, the protein structure of the virion collapses, and it's no longer capable of infecting a cell.
Anyway, yeah, it was an abundance of caution, which turned into hygiene theater.
The other commenters have covered some of the points I'd make, so I'll add: After decades of investigation into Patient Zero for AIDS/HIV, there wasn't a single, identifiable transmission event to which the epidemic traced, but rather evidence that the virus was present here and there long before the disease was identified.
Intuitively, I think it's the same with COVID-19, that there wasn't a single, discrete animal-to-human transmission event. Even if my analogy to HIV is faulty, China built the lab in Wuhan to study endemic coronaviruses; that means that anything in the lab had been in the wild for years before researchers collected a sample of it. Therefore, it's overwhelmingly likely that humans had already been exposed to some form of it, and it was present in local populations. At the very least, there would have had to be multiple exposures, because not everybody exposed to the virus got infected, not everybody infected showed symptoms, and not everybody with symptoms transmitted the virus to other people. That, and the fact that it's a respiratory disease, and does not spread by surface contact, makes a lab leak seem exceedingly unlikely.
So, even if the Wuhan lab failed at biocontainment, and people caught a strain of virus it was studying, that wasn't the cause of the pandemic, which could have kicked off any number of ways. I'm not going to dismiss the possibility of a lab leak outright, but on the other hand, even if it's true, there's little practical value to the knowing about it other than improving biocontainment procedures. It certainly doesn't justify the Sinophobia that tends to accompany the lab leak theory, and the Sinophobia is what I think makes people reject the lab leak possibility so vehemently.
(The other "lab leak theory," that it was an engineered bioweapon that escaped, is for drooling morons. Nobody has that technology, not even close.)
The wheel of the metaphor-of-thing-as-wheel exists and is widely understood, but apparently needed to be reinvented as a metaphor involving a roughly rollable shape?
I have to, take issue with this, one. The rules of commas are, pretty, easy actually: Use a, comma where you'd, pause when speaking. If, you read it out, loud and sound like Captain, Kirk then you put, a comma in the, wrong spot.
"Carbrain" is a real mental disorder, though. How else do you describe somebody who looks through a windshield and sees a long line of idling cars into the distance, and thinks, "clearly the problem here is bicycles."
FWIW, I know several developers at Epic who are happy with the job, the work/life balance, and have been there for years. OTOH, I know several people, too, who were project managers, and that's 110% true. Epic is big on academic performance. It wants people who can put their heads down and grind, without asking questions or sticking up for themselves.
Of course, I drive (I kind of have to because of the way our landscape is designed to mandate it), so I have to include myself in this. It's well-established by psychological research that drivers have very little empathy for other drivers, but especially little empathy for bicyclists and pedestrians, viewing them as less-than-human annoyances. Add in that driving in a city requires that one subject other people to the noise, the pollution, the danger, and the arrogation of space by one's vehicle, and you pretty much have to suppress any empathy for the people who live there, otherwise it'd be unbearable to do. That lack of empathy is textbook sociopathy, induced by the activity of driving. It just happens to be widely normalized, but we still see posts even here on Lemmy from new drivers who are struggling to suppress those thoughts.
I feel like this objection makes the most sense in a particular context, like a culture that views beef as some sort of prize, or a marker of being ahead in the competition for social status with one's neighbors. (U.S. culture very much views it that way.)
If Person A eats only 1 unit of beef per month, what would make dropping to zero "unfair" is if we assume that they are too poor to afford more ("losing"), or engaging in asceticism, but holding on to that one unit as a vital connection to the status game, or a special treat that they covet.
But what if it's just food? Person A may just not be that into beef, and probably not even miss it, just like Person B probably also wouldn't notice a difference between 100 units and 99 units. In the sense that neither A or B really would notice a small change all that much, it's fair
Anyway, random thoughts from somebody who thinks steak is just kind of meh.
That was Herbert Kornfeld, in Accounts Reeceevable at Midstate Office Supply, a regular columnist for The Onion in the early years.
ETA: The Autobiography of Herbert K