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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: February 26th, 2024

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  • These pods are only used on rails with very low ridership. They would switch to a train if ridership increased.

    Look at it this way: you can have a train that has a capacity of 100 people, but it only runs once a day due to the low demand, and only 2 people want to ride it at that time of day…Or you can have 10 pods, which do not require as much railway maintenance, and they can carry the 10 people who actually want to use this railway, completely on demand.

    Yeah, a train is better if you want to move ten thousand people a day at peak hour. But this is a cheaper way to move ten people at different times across a day. And it’s a cheaper way of inducing the demand that would justify the more efficient kind of expansion.


  • Proud luddite here. The original luddites destroyed machinery owned by capitalists which threatened their jobs. The choice was either destroy the machines, or stand by and become unable to feed your family while a rich man gets richer.

    I have no opposition to technology which is used for good, and whose control is placed in the hands of the workers. Your self-hosted AIs are fine, although I do ask that you only use energy intensive processes if you have solar panels. After all, this planet is the only one we’ve got. At our current rate of pollution, soon the world will only be inhabitable to AI.

    But I downvote anything promoting corporate AI designed to replace people’s jobs. I am all for replacing human jobs, if the humans get to relax and live comfortable lives afterward. But I am against replacing jobs if we choose to have a society where you need a job to live. That’s not nature, it’s a choice we make as a society. The minute you automate someone’s job, you do necessarily admit that society doesn’t need that person’s work to get by. The only reason they shouldn’t get to put their feet up and take it easy is political. And politically, we have decided instead what happens is they die. That’s unacceptable, and until it changes, we can’t afford to have job replacing machines.




  • If I were in Olga’s position I’d go create another Natasha account on the same platform and start making videos saying “Hey, Natasha here. I just learned what things are really like in Ukraine and I’m furious about what Russia is doing to innocent civilians. Putin is an evil man. Also my main account has been hacked, please report it so I can get it back.”

    If Natasha is Olga then Olga is Natasha. Olga probably has a case to take over the accounts, given they’re videos of her, and start pushing out antiwar propaganda.

    Maybe I like mischief too much



  • Actually, my GP gave me medicine to help my appetite even though I’m clearly obese. I was struggling to finish meals and asked the doctor for help. Doctor checked that I understood the risks, made sure I knew the warning signs of diabetes and what to do about them, and gave me appetite pills. I have had my prescription renewed at various different GPs and none of them ever made an issue of it. Turns out, doctors are actually very supportive and attentive to the patient’s individual needs, and it’s only assholes on the internet who make a big deal out of weight. Americans’ mileage may vary because their healthcare system is three insurance companies in a trench coat.

    The question is, how many people are nonbinary like me, and feel pressured to live unhealthy lives because of people like you? If I hadn’t transitioned from male to female, then I wouldn’t have the socio-political literacy to have this conversation about gender with you. And that’s most people. How many people are assigned thin woman at birth, are actually fat woman on the outside, but don’t know shit about gender politics because they’re not traditionally trans? It could be a few, it could be a lot. But I guarantee the people who are like me are suffering because of the judgement of those who say there’s no such thing as Health At Every Size.


  • Men and women tend to be different sizes, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Body size and shape is part of gender. Trans people who are too big or too small to fit their ideal body shape suffer dysphoria. And in cis people, the symptoms of obesity bear an eerie similarity to stress symptoms. Part of the unhealth of obesity for many cis people is gender dysphoria. They have a body shape that doesn’t make them happy, it stresses them out. However, not everyone in the world is a man or a woman. There are other genders, and some of those genders have an ideal size that is larger.

    You say gender is nothing to cure, but then you say obesity is always a problem. And you say it to the face of an enby who gained weight on purpose and saw a reduction in physical dysphoria as a result. I didn’t feel comfortable taking pictures of myself until I was what the BMI scale calls overweight. When I was thin, the face in the mirror didn’t look like mine. It looked like some ugly person I’d been told my whole life was me. I’ve grown happier and more confident, and I have fewer suicidal ideations

    And I still pursue physical health at my current weight.


  • Okay you’re still saying someone can’t be overweight and healthy, so like I promised, I’m gonna assert that there’s no such thing as men’s health. Being male will make a man die sooner. We need to give all men estrogen pills immediately and make sure they stick to the regimen. Being male is not okay, it’s bad for you and it’s driving up insurance costs for the rest of us. It’s selfish. Making bad choices out of stubbornness and pride while everyone else pays. That’s not okay.

    Please note these are not my actual views, I’m just applying anti-HAES logic to other parts of our bodies in the same manner.


  • Health is relative. Health isn’t an absolute boundary between healthy and unhealthy, that’s silly. Health is a polydimensional spectrum. If you want to categorise health “objectively”, well then seeing as men live shorter than women, we’d be forced to classify maleness as an illness and put every man in the world on estrogen pills. And that’s ridiculous. No, health isn’t a single standard that’s the same for everyone.

    Health isn’t a point, it’s a direction. Like South. South is a direction. I see Americans say all the time that they’re from the south. They mean Texas. But I live in Australia. From my point of view, they’re from the north. But it’s not like they’re lying. In terms of America, they’re from the south. It’s true.

    Health is like South. If you’ve lived your entire life overweight with poor health, then getting healthy can mean a lot of different things. If you start jogging once a week and get healthier, well congratulations, you got healthy. It’s relative. It’s unreasonable for you to demand somebody in that situation meet the ideal of human health. If you do that, if you belittle their progress and say the best they’ve done in their life isn’t good enough, you’ll kill their motivation and ruin what little health they’ve achieved.

    And if you go around saying there’s no such thing as health at every size, well then I’ll tell you there’s no such thing as men’s health, because being a man is unhealthy. The two statements are equally ridiculous.




  • Always has been, as someone with a grass allergy. I fucking hate grass and I hate touching it. No, getting the sniffles will not improve my mental health. But it might make me puke up my lunch, thanks to a little thing called a post-nasal drip caused by long covid.

    Lawns aren’t some great mental health boon. They’re a symbol of petty bourgeois waste and excess pushed by the racist suburbs that invented them to keep black people out. TL;DR: grass is racist.

    Also outside is where we trans people get hate crime’d. Fuck that place, and telling us to get off the internet is imo violent speech. The internet is the only place where many trans people are gendered correctly and allowed to be themselves. Lower internet use for trans people leads to higher suicide rate.



  • Nothing beats CI/CO ever, no excuses, nowhere in the universe. It’s thermodynamics.

    I got something that beats CICO. And it’s called addressing your specific health concerns instead of just dieting.

    You’ve got poor heart health? Cardio will help you more than fasting.

    You’ve got diabetes? Limiting sugar intake will help you more than restricting everything.

    You’ve got depression? Antidepressants or going outside will help you more than losing weight.

    You’ve got a broken arm? Rest and a sling will help you more than losing weight.

    HAES is about actually fucking treating your health problems at whatever size you’re at, instead of blaming it on your weight and continuing to fail to lose weight.

    CICO ain’t worth shit if the patient can’t lose weight. And if you’re thinking “it’s just a matter of willpower”, well tough shit, people have limited willpower. And being sick doesn’t help willpower either. It’s way more likely for someone to get healthy at their current size, see a willpower increase, and then lose weight, than it is for a sick and suffering person to stick to a diet, lose weight, and then get healthy. HAES is about doing it the right way around, the way around that actually works.


  • Mass Effect is one of those sci-fi series with only one fictional technology, and a whole lot of development on that, and on the stories that enables them to tell. And that fictional technology is the mass effect. In Mass Effect there’s a fictional element called element 0, or eezo, that humans found out in space. Eezo can alter the mass of other objects when electrically stimulated. Eezo can give a spaceship negative mass and enable faster than light travel. It can reduce the mass of a bullet to almost zero as it’s fired from the chamber of a gun, and return it to normal going at an extreme speed. It enables artificial gravity. Humans who are exposed to eezo can gain telekinetic powers. There’s a community of aliens out there, and they also use eezo in their technology. There’s a ton of politics, philosophical commentary, and secrets out in the galactic community and its history.


  • Well, yes and no. Yes, if your child is in need you have a duty to support them. But no, children should not need to rely on child support from an unwilling parent. Becoming a parent is a really big decision, and a lot of people are parents against their will, whether that be because of poor sex education, poor access to contraceptives, laws against abortion, or simply a partner who doesn’t agree. The government should be providing enough money for a kid to live on and have a good life. That’s how we do it in my country and it’s better than America.

    A lot of people have sex in a state where they shouldn’t be held responsible for that decision for a lifetime. Whether it be violent rape, coercive rape, getting drunk, or just being a dumb kid who doesn’t know any better. Nobody should be having one night of poor decision making at 17 and paying for that choice at 35. And it’s really really important that people who are raped not be paying for it. I read that story from America where a high schooler was raped by his teacher and had to pay child support. Now, we can either subject rape victims to the beaurocracy of proving to the government that they didn’t consent, which is a degrading and triggering process, or the government can take responsibility for looking after ALL its citizens and pay for the raising of all unwanted children. Hell, pay for the raising of the wanted ones too, alleviate the burdens of all parents! There’s enough money.

    In an enlightened society, the idea of an individual paying “child support” would be seen as absurd and backward, because all children would be supported by the whole community just for being born. And also abortion would be legal and sex ed would be very comprehensive.