Body positivity is such a strange concept to me. There's efforts to reclaim words while simultaneously calling them bad if used as an insult. Ideally, people wouldn't be offended by someone describing their body with common descriptors, but socially there is so much value attributed to certain body types that it's almost impossible to avoid having an emotional response of some kind to various descriptors.

For example, It's not bad to be fat, but calling someone "fat" is almost universally considered a bad thing. The same definitely seems to go for the idea of being "short."

I'm asking this question because I can't put my finger on why but something seems to be different about the use of the term "short" from the use of the term "fat." I think that part of it is how, to me at least, the term "fat" is so generic and hard to nail down to a discrete definition, implying that the word really doesn't have a clear connection to reality. On the other hand, height is a single-dimensional number. You either are above a certain threshold, or you aren't.

I recently learned that May 6th to May 10th is "short king week" because it's 5'6" to 5'10" which then prompted me to search for the origins of "short king" and apparently the person most-credited with popularizing the term is Jaboukie Young-White who claims the term was meant to include all men under 6 feet tall. The average adult male height is 5'9" leaving men considered roughly average to be called "short" which is still considered an insult by many.

I dunno. As a term that was intended to champion body positivity compared with how the term is actually used, what do you think of "short king?"

So in the whole anti-natalism/pro-natalism conversation (which I'm mostly agnostic/undecided on, currently), my friend who is a pro-natalist, argued that the success/stability of our world economy is dependent on procreating more children each year than the previous year, so that we not only replace the numbers of the people who existed from the previous generation (and some, to account for the statistical likelihood that many won't have children or will be sterile or die young etc), but also ensure that the population keeps growing in order to produce more and more human labor to "pay back the debts" of previous generations, because all money is borrowed from somewhere else... this is all very murky to me and I wish someone could explain it better.

She is also of the view that this will inevitably lead to population collapse/societal/civilisation collapse because we live on a finite Earth with finite resources that can't keep sustaining more humans & human consumption (and are nearing critical environmental crises), but that there isn't any other option than to keep producing more children because a declining population wouldn't be able to support itself economically either. Basically the idea seems to be that economically & societally we're on a collision course for self-destruction but the only thing we can do is keep going and making increasingly more of ourselves to keep it running (however that as individuals, we should be plant-based & minimalist to reduce our impact to the environment, non-human animals and humans for as long as possible). And she is worried about the fact that fertility rates are falling & slated to reach a population peak followed by a decline in the relatively near future.

As I said I'm not sure how I feel about this view but at first glance I think that the effect of having fewer children in providing relief upon the environment and helping safeguard our future is more important than preserving the economy because destroying the actual planet and life itself seems worse than economic downturns/collapses, but I really don't know enough about economics to say for certain.

For example, I have kept the habit of washing my hands with soap, first thing when I come home.

I'm thinking seriously about getting Google out of my life, and trying NextCloud.

Looking to get a personal account through a managed provider.

Does anyone have any experience with it?

How does it compare to ownCloud?

Any hosts I should look at or avoid?

Any apps I should get for it, or avoid?

Any issues I should be aware of before I switch?

@asklemmy #NextCloud #OpenSource #Linux #Cloud

As a follow-up, is there signs that the internet/technology may play a role in making a better society for all?

I'm working on a side project studying variations in human facial features. It's been helpful to study celebrity faces because it's easy to find numerous reference photos. I've actually got a fairly good range of weird looking white men, turns out Hollywood is pretty flush with those, but it's been harder to find unique looking women or darker skinned people of any gender! Idk if I just don't know as many actors in those demographics, or if it's just harder to break into Hollywood as a weird looking person without also being white and male, but it's probably some combination of the two.

What're y'alls suggestions?

For me : Trippie Redd's "!" Is actually a great album

Currently I'm using #, but it causes issues with certain applications.

Example:

#Top Folder
Games
Music
New Folder
Pics

Currently using mostly Windows, but trying to transition to Linux, so a solution that works for both would be perfect.

Thanks, Lemmy!

Is it a 'thank you for prepping my room' or 'please clean my room today'? If you tip post cleaning, it's likely going to someone else the next day. Many hotels now only do housekeeping on demand. How do employees feel about this - do they miss the tips or are they happy for a less stressful workday?

ETA- I'm in the US. Does the rest of the world tip housekeeping? I always have when traveling because I do at home, but I don't know what the norm is.

Is the Tower of Babel still affecting us or something?

Edit:

We have 8 billion people, yet the best we could muster for the most total speakers of a language is under 2 billion, including non-natives...

1. English (1,452 million speakers) First language: 372.9 million Total speakers: 1.4+ billion According to Ethnologue, English is the most-spoken language in the world including native and non-native speakers.

https://www.berlitz.com/blog/most-spoken-languages-world#:~:text=1.,English%20(1%2C452%20million%20speakers)&text=According%20to%20Ethnologue%2C%20English%20is,native%20and%20non%2Dnative%20speakers.

What I mean is: some boolean flags are perfect for the real world phenomenon they are representing e.g. is_light_on makes you understand perfectly that when it is true the light is on and when it is false the light is off.

There are other cases in which if you didn't write the code and you don't read any additional documentation, everything is not clear just by looking at the variable name e.g. is_person_standing, when true it's clear what that means but when false, is the person sitting? Lying? Kneeling?

I'm obviously not talking about cases in which there are more states, boolean would of course not be a good solution in those cases. I'm talking about programs in which there are only two states but it's not obvious, without external knowledge, which ones they are.

Let me preface this by saying I'm not a fan at all of Bill Burr, but he recently went on Bill Maher's show, and said he was with the students. He's also said some inflammatory things in the past, so I'm not sure. Are we cool with Bill Burr, now?

It’s annoying seeing the same headlines numerous times linking to same stuff because it’s cross posted to 3+ instances.

Is there a setting to reduce that or app that handles that well?

I've seen a lot of people on here be teased for difficulty expressing themselves. Either people complain "you're using big person words to describe mundane things" when they're aiming for precision or "woah, we don't need that damn wall of text" when they're aiming for clarity. It's like people just want to complain.

Most entries in lemmy's RSS feed have a that points to the relevant lemmy post eg

Title: Any DE or distro without touch support?
Author: https://lemmy.ml/u/tarius
Date: Wed, 15 May 2024 01:24:59 AEST
Feed: Lemmy - linux
Link: https://lemmy.ml/post/15632012

That makes sense - clicking the link takes me to the conversation.

Other entries however, include a link to the subject of the conversation eg

Title: Wayland usage has overtaken X11
Author: https://lemmy.world/u/KISSmyOSFeddit
Date: Tue, 14 May 2024 03:30:46 AEST
Feed: Lemmy - linux
Link: https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a71c1b49-fb63-420d-8afc-d40661ffd79c.png

The feed I'm using is https://lemmy.ml/feeds/c/linux.xml

This is unfortunate as clicking the link in my reader (elfeed) does not show the conversation - I rely on the to take me there.

elfeed being built in elisp in emacs, I have been able to concoct a fix especially for lemmy - but it really feels like a bug in lemmy as no other feed needs it. Where can I report it or discuss it?

This is intended as a very abstract philosophical question.

Like Einstein with relativity was inspired by a man falling from a roof and a moving train. Most creative ideas seem to boil down to a person moving ideas across domains. Do you think this is always true even if the person is unwilling to admit the root thoughts, or perhaps they are completely unaware of the connections they subconsciously made? Is there truly a provably unique thought or is everything a product of experience?