Hegar

You know that feeling you get when you look into your dog’s eyes? The same parts of your dog’s brain became active, so they’re probably feeling similar emotions at that moment.

I’m pretty sure if you’re paying for it, that’s not love.

Didnt we already know that elon opened starlink to the russians? I thought he announced after that call with putin?

I just strongly doubt that. Firstly, heaps of people would be dressing as aliens for Halloween and thus talking about it.

Secondly, there’s just way too many follow up questions, about them, their culture, their home, their tech, their goals, their language, their biology, the impact they’ve already had in our history, who knew and who didn’t, etc.

So many fields would begin looking into it and throwing up new angles and facts for people to chew over.

Just think of how much time christians would devote to converting aliens to jeebus.

Nope.

I know it sounds wrong when you first hear it, but power changes your brain. Sociopaths are more drawn to powerful positions, but getting power makes your brain look more like the brain of a sociopath when it didn’t before:

https://hbr.org/2015/04/becoming-powerful-makes-you-less-empathetic https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-empathy/201909/power-blocks-empathy https://www.npr.org/2013/08/10/210686255/a-sense-of-power-can-do-a-number-on-your-brain https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/how-power-erodes-empathy-and-steps-we-can-take-rebuild-it

Becoming powerful makes you less good, neurologically.

It’s reasonable to assume that people with more status are behaving worse than people with less.

Power - status, fame, privilege, wealth, etc. - causes neurological changes that suppress a human’s ability to excersize empathy. The kind of self-centered behaviour that the nurse describes is typical of a high status inidividual.

Also, I used to work in health insurance and this story just jives well with the little personal experience I have with medical workplaces.

It’s unjust that someone who spends their day goofing off and looking at their phone feels entitled to earn twice what a nurse does, just because they had the privilege to get into college.

Don’t accept it. It’s fundamentally unjust and you’re right to be upset.

impacts small indie artists

How?

I read the article but I don’t understand how bots making and listening to songs to generate royalties for the bot owners affects anyone but the royalty-payers?

persistence hunting was one of the main hunting strategies during a large portion of human evolution before ranged weapons were invented

How do ranged weapons invalidate persistence hunting?

If you’re trying to chase down an animal till it’s exhausted, I think you’d want to be throwing stuff at it to injure or at least to keep it moving.

Also, was there a time before ranged weapons? As soon as humans have weapons we have ranged weapons because we can throw. Atlatls and slings - tools to help you throw sticks and stones - wouldn’t have been developed if we weren’t already throwing sticks and stones at things.

I’m a renter, so I’d throw a brick through each window of my property manager’s tesla.

Our electoral system is just shit.

She’s way more popular and so are her policies, but having the support of the majority of voters doesn’t guarantee victory like it would if we lived in a democracy.

What would this do to the local ecology?

This was my first thought.

Marine tardigrades are the weirder, cooler cousins of the freshwater moss-piglets we all love. They are just one of the species that live in intertidal sand.

Threaded messages seems fine to me, as you said that usage is more well understood than threadiverse which risks conceptually-centering a billionaire controlled platform.

The existence of threads makes threadiverse an inappropriate name for fediverse content aggregators, is the point I was being overly sarcastic about.

Defederating from threads seems like the best way to make it nice. That way there’s less influence from psychopathic billionaires who happily stoke genocide for clicks.

I’m of an age where I agree with almost everything on this list. I don’t know that It deserves a place though, and despite extensive media consumption I’ve never heard of The Dollars Trilogy or Child’s Play.

The people whose deeds reverberate through history are the powerful. The powerful are almost always evil, it’s just how humans work.

Neuroscience shows that as humans get power, our brain’s ability to perform empathy is damaged. So as an organism, a human’s capacity and willingness to inflict misery on others tend to increase in lock step with each other.

Difference enthusiast is fun.

As someone who has identified specifically as ‘weird’ or a ‘weirdo’, I’m happy to keep using the term. I don’t think anyone’s going to confuse my queer-esque anti-heirarchical neurodivergency for whatever the fuck is wrong with those fascist assholes.

This is the correct answer.