• 0 Posts
  • 47 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle

  • WiseThat@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyzMythbusters
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    3 days ago

    This is what conspiracy theorists don’t get. The world’s scientists are not skeptical of your claims that water has secret spiritual memory because they hate you, they are skeptical because the claim you make, if it were true, would be so important and world-changing that they want to be absolutely sure of it before they endorse it.

    The difference is that, to a scientist, “this would be amazing if it were true” is not a good reason to believe it anyway



  • Yeah, the definition of “Productive” is all sorts of wacky when you consider that, by the numbers, the people doing high-frequency stock trading are some of the most “productive” people on the planet, because they manage to hoard so much money to themselves.

    Meanwhile, the people actually providing goods and services that make people’s lives better and create new things, those people are “unproductive”, because they don’t get filthy rich off their honest work.

    The real reason we are not “productive” is that foreign investors are paying us to do the hard work of extracting resources (lumber, ore), or generating new research (we have MANY top universities), but then demanding that the money made from refining those resources or selling those idea goes to them, in other nations (typically the US or China)





  • Galt’s Gulch was much more Socialist Commune than libertarian.

    Money had no use as Ragnar was running around distributing gold to everyone on a regular basis, John Galt had built a literal free energy machine and was giving the power away AND giving vanishingly cheap lectures on how to build one. Even the scarce resources (like the only car in the entire society) were being rented out for 50 cents a day.

    Plus all these fiercely competitive supercapitalists would just step aside and just allow competitors to operate with no challenge. The iron mine, and coal mine were all running at industrial scales to serve a town of a few hundred (they had robot labour and free energy) and when the copper miner just showed up they just let him stake a an exclusive claim and start digging with no issue.

    I highly recommend Adam Lee’s critical readthrough on patheos.com https://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/series/atlas-shrugged/







  • Yep. The goal of all of this this is to force people into straight marriages because that’s all that matters to religious zealots.

    They know that if kids practice safe sex they won’t get pregnant and ‘shot gun marriage’ rates will go down.

    They know that if kids discover their gender or sexual identity is non-cis, non-het, or non-monogamous that they might not wind up having a traditional marriage.

    The know that people who only have 1 partner in their lifetime are much, much less likely to successfully leave an abusive partner, meaning there’s a higher rate of divorce if people learn that having multiple partners in your life is normal and okay.

    They know that kids who are educated about healthy sex and consent in relationships are less likely to go along with a child marriage or an assigned marriage.

    They know that removing sex ed means more teen pregnancy, more intimate partner abuse, and more child-rape. For religious people whose only goal is to get young women into marriages, those are good things.

    Example: An actual elected official in the state of Missouri defending his stance that “Parents Rights” includes the ability to marry off their kids to adults at age 12, because “Do you know any kids that have been married at age 12, I do, and guess what, they’re still married”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H6UJ-uCrgc

    These people legitimately believe that it’s morally correct to kidnap a 12 year old girl and force her to be entirely subserviant to, and dependent on, some pedophile husband who controls everything they do, because them being trapped in that awful situation means that there’s one more marriage in the world.




  • Grocery stores know that when people are struggling to afford to eat, they try to save some money by going for the cheaper brands, which are typically owned by the store. Since the store control all the prices, they are able to jack up the price of everything, making their customers go “wow, food is expensive, better try to bargain hunt more”, and suddenly you’re not buying the competitor bread, now you’re buying Western Family / No Name, and they profit both from the price hikes AND because they grow their market share on first-party goods.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good

    It’s fucked up that they are allowed to both make AND sell the same products on the same shelves as their competitor’s goods, but that’s because our antitrust sucks.

    There is NO downside for the store when they make you starve, you still gotta eat to live so you’ll pay anything, and these things are all owned by the same handful of megacorps.