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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • When we switch to DST, we "Fall Back. ". We set the clocks one hour back, at 2:00am Sunday, so basically we get an extra hour of sleep just on that night. Then we lose one when we set the clocks forward in the spring.

    To be fair, I don’t think that extra hour, once in the Fall, is used as a reason for Daylight Savings in any debates.





  • A BTU (British thermal unit) is the energy required to raise 1lb of water 1 degree Fahrenheit…which may actually be even dumber, since it’s temperature sensitive to begin with. Dumbest of all, the Brits don’t use that unit very often. The US, and, I assume, Liberia use it all the time.


  • Andonyx@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzWe lost Keanu
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    1 month ago

    I’m not sure if you’re arguing that it being fictional is an interpretation or that its demise from the ire of the Gods is an interpretation.

    If it’s the former, you are incorrect. The single best primary source being his own protege and student Aristotle who also makes it clear the whole thing is didactic invention. (There are debates that some individual events within the story are inspired by actual events in Egypt and Athens, but its existence is never presented as fact. The entire idea that this was some historical account came mostly from a judge writing his own history books in the 19th century.)

    This is also not debatable due to translation. It’s Plato. The best scholars of all time in both language and history have studied this, literally for centuries. There is not any serious or scholarly debate about his intentions with this story. And multiple, equally capable translations of Aristotle corroborate that.

    If you’re talking about the destruction of Atlantis, it’s been too long for me to argue that specifically, but the idea that it was divine punishment is the prevailing view of that story.


  • Andonyx@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzWe lost Keanu
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    1 month ago

    Plato did not suggest ancient Atlantis existed. He was very clear that he was illustrating a hypothetical “great society” to discuss his views on effective and beneficent government.

    When he discussed it sinking it was a divine punishment from the gods of Olympus because they had strayed from a righteous path. All of it is meant to be a parable.






  • Look at it this way, Google stopped caring about their viewers as anything more than wallets to empty years ago. Now they’re going through the same cycle with advertisers. They don’t care if the ads land, or the targeting works, just that they can convince them to keep buying ad space.

    Eventually the ROI will show as not worth it to the advertisers, but by then Pichai and the rest of the C-suite will be pulling the same scam at another company whose investors are more greedy and stupid than saavy.

    Because the horrible truth of America now, is that CEOs and their ilk have stopped caring about creating value, or building a sustainable business model with long term revenue. Now they just look at witless investors as wallets to be emptied too.



  • Consider how the federalization of Student Loans has contributed to the price of college outpacing inflation by many times, and income by a magnitude.

    That’s still only part of the problem, of course, hiring university leadership from the for profit business sector, privatizing loan servicing, etc. have all made college tuition skyrocket, but the loan program is a major issue.

    A better option for college would be to subsidize universities directly with the requirements that their tuition stay within a linear relationship to inflation. Somewhat like state colleges offering low tuition for residents.

    Housing needs more federal controls, which, to her credit she has explored in her platform along with disincentivizing, exploitative investment in private housing.






  • The counter argument, and I’m not saying this is correct, is that we had electric cars over a hundred years ago:

    “Over the next few years, electric vehicles from different automakers began popping up across the U.S. New York City even had a fleet of more than 60 electric taxis. By 1900, electric cars were at their heyday, accounting for around a third of all vehicles on the road. During the next 10 years, they continued to show strong sales.”

    https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-electric-car

    If we had pursued the electric car at the same rate we pursued advances in ICE engines, perhaps they would have been better by now. They made resurgences in the 70s and 80s during the energy crisis in the west.

    Clearly burning hyrdo-carbon rich fuels was easier, but it’s hard to say how much the pursuit of fossil fuel driven vehicles and machinery was influenced by both momentum, and the manipulation and interference of the fossil fuel industry. It’s possible that we could have had electric cars and still all the of the traffic, infrastructure and urban societal issues that we do today.