Ask Lemmy

That democracy and democratic socialism are outliers and fated to be a footnote in the history books.

The unfortunate truth is that hate and violence almost always prevails over peace and love.

USA will keep being a warmongering nation as long there are no wars that hit American soil and civilians.

That the various new and inventive grid scale energy storage solutions people are trying out won't end up being better than just building big chemical batteries. Sodium Ion will probably be good enough and cheap enough.

Israel had a larger hand in Benghazi than is being let on and Israeli intelligence provided Republicans with a lot of intel regarding the attack as Obama was starting to rift with Israel on how to handle the Middle East.

Years of shrimp posture

That the reason imperial Europe had such a huge and lasting impact on the world was because Europe was playing on a harder difficulty than everyone else.

Europe was functionally foodless when it comes to agricultural with next to no edible plants native to the region, most of their crop foods were imported from Eurasia. Boar were as lethal as the wolves and the wolves besieged cities. The living conditions were functional perfect petri dishes that bred so many massive plagues that they accidentally biowarfared the Americas, they literally didn't consider the diseases they had as bad enough to leave those guys home. The history of constant warfare in Europe had them so invested in finding new ways to kill each other that they hit the iron age while the Americas were still in stone age despite being an older population.

In contrast, we're finding out that all the "wasted land" in the US used to be curated foraging gardens. Whole forests regularly maintained by the natives to provide food year round with minimal labor for an exponentially larger population. The great planes tribes maintained a migratory lifestyle that was far less work than the farming efforts we use now. Conflict was frequent, but never to the level that needed technological advancements like Europe.

So when Europeans finally got out of their squalid hell hole, anyone not on their level, which was really just china, was solidly out classed. What was india going to do? They were solidly in the bronze age and fighting an enemy that's very arival might kill villages with disease alone and they never had to fight an enemy that could host long distance supply lines over seas which meant a counter offense could only ever push them out of the area but never back to the source in a way that could prevent them coming back. Like trying to play volleyball but your opponents can be on both sides of the net and you can't. The Americas were even worse off, the Technological disparity made the fight entirely one sides.

Finally, Europe took this "git gud" mentality as proof that they were superior in every way, so they implemented their way of life everywhere they went. Those forage gardens were knocked over and burned to grow fields of low nutritional grains because that's what worked in Europe. The European diet was pushed everywhere despite the local diet being better in most cases. The European work ethic became the standard with no realization that it was born out of desperately struggling to survive and adaptation to any other location would have greatly improved their quality of life.

And all of it still lasts to this day. Half of the things we classify as weeds are edible foods that were dietary staples. Our work life balance, sleep schedule, housing styles, land distribution, hierarchy, are all descendant of feudalism. The whole reason for the midwest dust bowl was because they tried to force Europeans farming tactics into the region with no consideration for the difference between regions.

Of course, I'm not a historian. It's just a hunch. I'm a fan of history and it was an interesting comparison to see how closely the European exceptionalism mindset aligned with the souls like git gud attitude that a specific subset of gamers developed at the height of their popularity.

I have a hunch that there's something fucky with passkeys, and it's gonna turn out to be a security and or privacy nightmare in the near future.

I have a hunch that world leaders know the planet is fucked and are secretly generating all this chaos so nobody finds out they're making all these underground arks for them and their families.

once disaster strikes if you're not on the list, you're pretty much dead.

That if you’re amazed by how good/smart LLMs are, it’s because you’re well below average. LLMs are still incredibly stupid and bad at things.

That putting lead in gasoline decades ago fucked human progress and we'd have achieved much more by now if not for that.

The reason it feels like we're slaves no matter how much technology improves is incredibly simple, but invisible: money can't be created unless an equal amount of debt is also created.

This mathematically ensures that life is a game of musical chairs at all times. Interest serves to model the missing chairs.

I have long suspected - and I don’t know where real music historians stand on this - that a few of the pieces of music attributed to Mozart were actually written by his sister.

Approximately 30% of any population anywhere in the world are utter and complete fuckwads.

That the investor class in America has been panicking for about a decade because there hasn't been a technological innovation on the same level as the smart phone in that time.

If the Trump administration doesn’t kill the ADA law changes regarding digital accessibility set to go into effect soon, Adobe is going to leverage the law to unseat the PDF format on the web in an effort to get people to pay for a subscription-based content management system.

Adobe doesn’t own the PDF standard. They gave it to the International Standards Organization in 2008. Acrobat’s accessibility checker has never been updated to newer standards, even as the federal government has moved to require compliance with WCAG 2.1 (a web standard). Their checker does partial WCAG 2.0 and PDF/UA, which was released in 2008. The ISO is working on PDF 2.0, which is not backwards compatible with PDF/UA, nor will files compliant with WCAG be able to meet the PDF 2.0 spec.
Which means that Acrobat (or InDesign) won’t be able to make files that can be legally shared online by many organizations. Adobe will leverage their near monopoly to steer designers into cloud products integrated into their publishing software as a means up fill the niche vacated by PDFs.

I'm not crazy and I've never heard of it as a conspiracy theory but personally I'm not 100% convinced about Labrador, Canada. The only pictures I can find of the place are either pictures of scenery that could be anywhere, extremely generic, or low-resolution aerial shots of settlements, nothing that concretely convinces me it exists. I know it's remote and sparsely populated, but there are more remote, less populated places that I can get normal pictures showing daily life a lot more easily.