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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • This comes from a memory of a digression during a lecture in an ecology class I was in 20yrs ago… so you know, grain of salt.

    From this particular professors point of view. Symbiotic was the term to describe mutualism until recently. And then. A few papers started using symbiosis as an umbrella term for all relationships with sub-terms to describe the “benefits math”. This, to him, was annoying pedantry. But eventually all the textbooks adopted the new hierarchy of terms and the world moved on.

    If you took a biology class with a text published pre-2000s, it’s very possible that your book described symbiosis as a mutually beneficial relationship between species.

    Long story short: the language is fluid and ever changing, even in science fields.







  • People’s take on this stuff always seems so naive to me. All war ever can be viewed as an attempt to arrest the leader of another group for “crimes”. When you get arrested… that means you lost the war. Winning a war means you didn’t get arrested.

    The ICC is such a silly stupid waste of human attention. It’s like an idea that children came up with after watching Star Trek. It has no utility whatsoever for our species. We fight, we have winners and losers. If you start a fight with somebody stronger than you, you are gonna have a bad time. If you start a fight with someone weaker than you, others will think you are dishonorable. That doesn’t mean you get arrested.


  • Pohl@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzFear
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    6 months ago

    The average lifespan for wild passerine birds is probably a lot longer than 3 yrs.

    In general, birds live a weirdly long time. Banding studies show us song birds that have lived up to 15yrs or so. Assuming they make it to adulthood, a cardinal can probably expect to live 6-8 yrs but that is a wild guess since it’s almost impossible for us to really measure that.

    Anyway, that’s enough zoology time, back to the memes!




  • “Privacy” means two different things depending on the audience. For me privacy means that my information is not being used to advance some organizations commercial interest. For others it means that my information will never be shared with a government.

    Don’t advertise to me

    Or

    Don’t narc on me

    I guess I don’t really expect a company to resist pressure from government agencies on my behalf. Especially if I have been using their service to commit crimes in my country. If you are doing things your government would prefer you didn’t, hire a good lawyer and consult with them about what should be sent via email (spoiler, it’s nothing). The mafia doesn’t send emails, or put anything in writing, if you do crimes, you shouldn’t either.



  • It’s the same thing the right does with government. It is a truism that there is all sorts of “inefficiencies” where the money is going to the wrong people for the wrong stuff.

    In both cases, it’s sort of correct and sort of wrong. Corporations, governments, and any human institution beyond a certain scale (a few hundred people), will leak wealth into places it shouldn’t. It’s an unavoidable feature of our species as best I can tell.

    It’s fine to accept it, it’s fine to be angry about it. It’s silly to blind yourself to it in some places and whinge about it in others.


  • Pohl@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzonce in a lifetime
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    7 months ago

    I spent the week leading up to the eclipse looking at weather forecasts trying to give us the best shot of clear skies. When we got in the car Monday we still had to drive around a bit to get out from under the clouds. Ended up on some dirt road in NW OH in the middle of nowhere under a small patch of blue sky




  • Amazingly native English speakers the world over seem to have this genetic predisposition! All of us just can’t seem to get it together when it comes to becoming multilingual.

    OR… maybe it comes from being born into mastery of the language everyone else on earth is trying to learn. I get three words in Spanish out before my conversation partner asks to switch to English. What am I gonna do? Stamp my feet and demand I get to practice my hobby and deny them the opportunity to work on a valuable career skill. Nah. We’ll speak in English.

    Your ancestors (assuming you are British) created a global language hegemony. My ancestors moved from southern Italy to the US and learned their language.




  • Wall Street investors gave him the money. Him knowing that they would be dumb enough to give it to him is the reason he got it. Which is a weird way of “earning” money but it kind of is.

    Despite our feelings on the company, Wall Street ate that shit up, thus his equity package is worth all that money. Why did Wall Street like Reddit stock so much? I sure don’t fucking know, which is why I never thought to ask them for hundreds of millions of dollars for a company that loses money hand over fist.