Khotetsu

joined 1 year ago
[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 5 points 1 year ago

Similarly, pancakes don't have syrup on them. They pour motor oil over them so it doesn't absorb and looks better in the picture. They put the cardboard under them, too, to make them fluff up better.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 2 points 1 year ago

It's not about the global or countrywide scale. It's about the local scale. If you take a cup of salt and eat it, it's going to end back up in the ocean eventually, but it'll make you sick before it gets there. Dumping salt into an area is going to screw with the ecosystem in that area, in a major way. We actually have similar problems in many areas due to stuff like fertilizer runoff from people's lawns during rainstorms, causing toxic algae blooms in ponds and around beaches.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 1 points 1 year ago

Depends on what you mean by far away and what kind of fish you're talking about. Big fish like tuna are often caught far out at sea, but they're also caught by the same small boats that do charter fishing an hour or two out from the shore. There's plenty of inshore fishing that would be at risk, especially in bays where the salt would be less easily dispersed. I used to work at a fish market, and offhand I can think of multiple fishing industries that would be put at risk by carelessly dumping salt back in the ocean. The majority of shellfish, for example, is caught within sight of the beach. I don't know if it's still the case, but there used to be a ton of fishing done in Boston Harbor, and I've heard stories of crates of lobsters being opened only to find the lobsters carrying pieces of bodies dumped by the mob off the docks and into the harbor.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You're correct, but so are they. In the long term and at a large scale, it balances out, but in the short term, there is a very real concern about local salinity levels wherever you're reintroducing that salt to the ocean. Keeping up with the desalination plants will be a tricky business of logistics to avoid destroying the ecosystem around where you're dumping that salt.

Adding the salt into water leaving sewage systems before it returns to the ocean might be a good idea, as you could basically kill two birds with one stone: put the salt back in the ocean while also avoiding damaging the local ecosystem with the fresh water of the sewage system reducing local salinity levels. But I'm no engineer or water treatment specialist, so I dunno if that's at all a real solution.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 3 points 1 year ago

I think the real issue is with schooling before college, and this article seems to be looking at college as the same sort of environment as the previous 12 years of school, which it isn't. So much of everything through high school has become about putting pressure on teachers to hit good grades and graduating student percentages that actually teaching kids how to learn and how to collaborate with others has become a tertiary goal to simply having them regurgitate information on the tests to hit those 2 metrics.

I have taught myself a number of things on a wide range of subjects (from art to 3d printing to car maintenance and more. City planning and architecture are my current subjects of interest) and I've always said when people ask about learning all this stuff that I love to learn new things, despite the school system trying to beat it out of me. I dropped out of college despite loving my teachers and the college itself both because I didn't like my major (the school was more like a trade school, we chose our majors before we even got to the college) and because I had never learned how to learn in the previous 12 years of school. I learned how to hold information just long enough to spit it out on the test and then forget it for the next set for the next test. Actually learning how to find information and internalize it through experience came after I left school.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 10 points 1 year ago

It's also easier for the ruling class to simply ignore protesters, and it doesn't get your message seen by the general population. This is why the civil rights movement included marches that ground entire sections of cities to a halt and why MLK supported groups like the Black Panthers. Disruption and inconvenience are necessary to enacting change. Even with mass public support, nothing really happened for civil rights until MLK was killed and billions of dollars worth of property was torched. A week later, the civil rights laws were created, approved, and enacted.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

It sounds like your job requires no talent and you could be easily replaced. Is it so?

Just because there are other people out there who can do the same job as you (or them) doesn't mean that it takes no skill, nor that replacing them can be done at a snap of the fingers. But nobody is irreplaceable. That's how companies see their employees. Even you.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 1 points 1 year ago

Very true, but it's precisely that wealth disparity that concerns me. I've seen the current US wealth disparity described as being on par with the disparity in France just before the French Revolution happened, where the cost of a loaf of bread had soared to more than the average worker made in a day. I worry that the more than half a century of anti-union propaganda and "get what I need and screw everybody else" attitude has beaten down the general public enough that there simply won't be enough of a unified effort to enact meaningful change. I worry about how bad things will have to get before it's too much. How many families will never recover.

But these are also very different times compared to the 1920s in that we've been riding on the coattails of the post WW2 economic boom for almost 70 years, and as that continues to slow down we might see some actual pushback. We already have, with every generation being more progressive than the last.

But I still can't help but worry.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The US economy literally depends on 3-4% of the workforce being so desperate for work that they'll take any job, regardless of how awful the pay is. They said this during the recent labor shortage, citing how this is used to keep wages down and how it's a "bad thing" that almost 100% of the workforce was employed because it meant people could pick and choose rather than just take the first offer they get, thus causing wages to increase.

Poverty and homelessness are a feature, not a bug.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've seen Christmas stuff for sale before Halloween stuff in stores before.

Hell cannot exist after death because we are already living in it.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 22 points 1 year ago

I stopped finding this as funny when I learned that some of the "leaks" have been stuff like a person quoting a Wikipedia entry on a WW2 tank, or a recent one where somebody quoted an internationally available manual for a jet.

Still hilarious though that it's such an issue that "Do you play War Thunder" is a question asked by the US military in job interviews.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 1 points 1 year ago

A loaf of bread.

Bread often has stuff baked into it, so what's the difference between a loaf of bread with cheese or nuts baked into it vs. a loaf with chicken, cheese, and marina sauce baked into it.

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