I swear I’m not Jessica

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Obesity itself is probably too vague and non specific to be usefully called a disease. The basic measurement for obesity, BMI, would classify bodybuilders or strengthen based athletes as obese. Bodybuilders and strong people can often be unhealthy, but it’s not quite the same as someone with high body fat.

    Even then, people who are obese because of high body fat might have their lives shortened through multiple mechanisms. It could be heart disease that kills them, skeletal problems due to weight, immune issues, digestive issues, practically every organ can be affected. Any or all of these things could occur in a chronically obese person, so even if pathologized, obesity is less useful as a diagnosis.

    Excess weight is bad, but you can calculate weight/height without a doctor. Focusing on better nutrition, eating habits, and exercise is the solution, even if you’re young and have a high metabolism. That sugar in our food needs to be taxed or regulated, as economic incentives drive obesity rather than people being uniquely stupid or culturally degenerate.



  • Newsom hate isn’t new. There was genuine worry he was going to lose his recall election, replaced by a radical Republican with a plurality of support from only those that voted for his removal. Left wing Democrats who were critical of Newsom united and organized to prevent a fascist rising to power. We put aside our gripes with corpocrats to prevent someone even worse from winning.

    California is guaranteed for the Democrats in the modern era, so we usually sit on the sidelines of the fight for the presidency and hope other states make the right call. However, the recall race showed that we were also willing to hold our nose and vote for the lesser of two evils.

    That’s part of why I get so frustrated by the anti voting shit. Biden is more of a genuine human being than Newsom, yet people fall for accelerationist propaganda. They delude themselves into thinking that not voting will strengthen the left when the opposite is true. The unreliability of young, left wing voters reinforces the establishment bias of not appealing to them. If they won’t even turn out for Bernie in the 2020 primary, why rely on them?



  • America isn’t that free of a country. Democrats were always going to run their incumbent. The time to choose a left wing candidate was the 2020 primary, which is why I was devastated when Biden won. I knew we would be stuck with him for 8 fucking years. The left didn’t turn out enough in that primary, and the establishment went with one of the worst choices.

    The fact that there isn’t some popular Democratic alternative at this point means it will not happen. Biden has been the most left wing president in over half a century, and none of his shitty decisions have been due to his age. Organize with the DSA or promote left wing Democrats if you’re fed up with the establishment. Recognize that becoming cynically apathetic makes you a pathetic asshole, not a person who’s better than those that try.



  • Appreciate how good you have it. In America, child sex abuse material is only illegal when children were abused in making it, or if it’s considered obscene by a community. If someone edits adult actors to look like children as they perform sex acts, it’s not illegal under federal law. If someone generates child nudity using ai models trained on nude adults and only clothed kids, it’s not illegal at the national level.

    Fake porn of real people could be banned for being obscene, usually at a local level, but almost any porn could be banned by lawmakers this way. Harmless stuff like gay or trans porn could be banned by bigoted lawmakers, because obscenity is a fairly subjective mechanism. However, because of our near absolute freedom of speech, obscenity is basically all we have to regulate malicious porn.


  • Linux users are the homeowners who build and fix everything they can, but look down on people that don’t find craftsmanship fun, claiming that they’re saving money by doing the work themselves. Good on you for having that hobby, but if you don’t enjoy it, spending time to learn those skills costs time that could be spent earning more money than you’d save. Paying an expert to do things you don’t enjoy is usually the cheaper option. They can be found almost anywhere, similar to how Linux users use Apple or windows products from time to time.

    Mac users are suburb dwellers who view their way of life as what everyone should aspire to, ignorant to the downsides of sprawl and reliance on cars to go anywhere. Commute times suck, while walkable neighborhoods with public transit make most people healthier and happier. There’s an important classist component, often bundled with racism, that underscores this ideal.

    Windows users are people that live in urban areas for work, trying to find reasonable rent or home prices as unchecked capitalism makes everything worse, but unaware why things suck. They get annoyed when people share their passion for handiwork, and dislike suburban folks for thinking they’re superior rather than the downsides to suburban life. However, because most people live this way, and live this way for work, they usually don’t have strong identities like suburbanites or handy homeowners.

    Homeless people are those who can’t afford computers, overlapping with actual homeless people, and rural people are those that don’t use computers more than they need to, socializing face to face and literally touching grass.



  • I don’t get this under estimation of humanity. If 99% of humans died, the planet became 3-5 degrees warmer, and all computers literally popped out of existence, we’d recover a ton of technology within a few centuries. We’d use a strange mish-mash of old and new tech, but people would write down a ton of information from the generations that remember the before times, and using previously learned principles, new generations would reverse engineer a ton of useful things.

    Radio communications would be relatively easy to remake and will almost always exist in some form. A ton of useful developments like agricultural technologies and energy technologies would be too valuable to be lost for long. Gunpowder and firearms aren’t going anywhere. All of these bedrock technologies would never totally disappear as they’re too useful.

    Even in a world constantly at war, these technologies would be essential to winning those fights. If you forget how to make guns, a group that didn’t will conquer you. If you rediscover an old technology, it could give you an upper hand. If there isn’t perpetual war, the risk of it and the benefits of trade will allow even more development and rediscovery.

    The biggest reason for you underestimating humans is that you forget that most of our technology isn’t physical. A boat may decay and become inoperable within a few decades, but the engineering principles that allow for the boat to function are unlikely to decay and fall out of disuse. Engines are useful. Boats are useful. Construction of high quality versions of these things won’t happen overnight, but low quality and functional versions will get built.

    People, even without writing, are exceptional at remembering useful ideas. With writing, we can store information outside of our minds and write out more complicated ideas than our working memory can handle. You think everyone is going to forget how to write mathematics? Hell no. We’ll never lose written language, and that will allow us to find knowledge that no one alive remembers. The necessity of learning unknown concepts alone will ensure people would remember how modern languages are written.

    The most impressive technology humans have is language, ideas, forms. Without forms, we’d never have built the most impressive physical structures and technology we have. Every advanced building began as a blueprint, and even Stonehenge required planning and communication. If every physical technology we’ve ever made disappeared at once, we’d rebuild many of those things by writing down what we remember and sharing knowledge with eachother.

    TLDR: Ideas can outlive physical technology, and we’ll never stop using useful tech in any apocalyptic situation. Only the Planet of the Apes neurological disease would stop humans permanently.


  • It’s a problem for everyone because the societal changes that would adjust for a population decline and inverted population pyramid aren’t favored by the upper class.

    We’d need to invest in doctors and nursing staff properly, something a ton of places are struggling with. We’d need to make the job more appealing by both increasing pay substantially and improving conditions. We need to get rid of student debt overall, but definitely for medical professionals that care for the elderly.

    We also need to decrease inequality and use redistributed wealth to fund the retirements of younger generations, but that’s more complicated and the more uphill battle.



  • Wild dogs in certain countries may choose to move in with humans or leave when they feel like it. That’s been true for most of their history. Hell, the main reason dogs in most English speaking countries don’t roam free and join humans at will is thanks to a concerted effort to eradicate them because they hunt livestock and can hurt humans. Dogs are apex predators in their own right thanks to superior social abilities over cats. Dogs mostly chose to live with us, and many have the ability to survive without us.

    Other common pets like rodents and parrots can also exist in nature just fine. Parrots are exceptionally intelligent and while rodents aren’t, many are powerful enough to be a major pest to us humans. Cats are awesome, but they’re only more autonomous than other pets in the modern era. Most other pets aren’t allowed that level of freedom for their own safety and for ours.

    If wild dogs or coyotes are common in your area, it might not be a good idea to even let them roam. Where I live, roaming cats have short life expectancies thanks to coyotes and cars.



  • TotallynotJessica@lemmy.worldtocats@lemmy.worldCats understand 'naughty'
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    11 months ago

    I don’t think this is quite right. Cats might do something you don’t want them to do for the sole purpose of pissing you off, but I don’t think they understand stealing any better than other animals. My dog won’t steal things just to make me upset, but she will for another reason. She stole a rag from somewhere when she escaped one time, but she did it to show off to us, not to make us mad. Dogs certainly don’t like it when you take something they’re eating, and probably understand that we don’t like it either. Cats differ from other pets in that they piss you off for fun, not because they understand naughtiness or ownership better.

    Many animals have an understanding of ownership and territory that’s not dissimilar to our own. If they intend to eat or use an object, they’ll protect it with violence. Animals won’t let other animals into their den most of the time, might guard food or water sources, and predators will protect their territory with violence. Modern human ownership simply passes most of the duty of protecting property to the state, while pet owners are in charge of keeping our pets from taking things we don’t want them to take through physical force. That’s all ownership is: protecting things we want the exclusive ability to use through violence.