ahfoo
ahfoo t1_jdl1utt wrote
Reply to New research provides evidence that a generalized disposition of distrust towards others and society is a central factor contributing to both populist attitudes and conspiratorial mindset by Life_Is_Empty_Inside
There are many ways to look at trust. At first it seems like trust is an unequivocally good and desirable trait but take the case of trusting a predator. Is it a virtue to trust a predator?
It has happened many times in the past that states have become predatory and fallen into a path of mechanical destruction of the citizens, an orgy of destruction in the name of the state. The Spanish Inquisition is but one example, The Holocaust is another and the War on Drugs is yet another.
When the state becomes an agent of sadism that exists with punishment as its goal and justification for existence, trusting the state is no virtue, it is a vice --a moral failing.
ahfoo t1_jcu48lv wrote
Reply to comment by SwallowYourDreams in AI-generated art may be protected, says US Copyright Office by redbellx86
They're both examples of how simply changing an image doesn't create a new right. The two examples are in separate paragraphs. That's not confounding them, that's two separate examples.
ahfoo t1_jcs82us wrote
Reply to comment by [deleted] in AI-generated art may be protected, says US Copyright Office by redbellx86
This is not a simple case though. If I take a picture of someone's face in public and then apply a filter to it, that doesn't immediately give me copyright ownership over someone else's image who does not consent to it being used. Simply altering it does not make it mine.
If this were the case, I could simply add a second of silence to the end of any audio recording and then sell it as my own work.
ahfoo t1_ja7rfan wrote
Reply to First 2000 inmates moved to El Salvador's new gangster prison - President Nayib Bukele, who has declared a "war" on gangs, claims Center for the Confinement of Terrorism is largest mega-prison in Americas. by mortalaa
Biden's going to get excited reading about this . He's got a long-term obsession with locking people in cages.
Here's a little backgrounder on his obsession with prisons:
ahfoo t1_ja1l70t wrote
Reply to Ford’s EVs are getting faster charging and more affordable batteries thanks to new chemistry by Ssider69
Lithium prices which were down 20% over the five month peak last time I checked are now closer to 30% off the highs and heading south fast.
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
People who paid top dollar for used IC autos in the last few years are going to be regretting it when EV prices collapse and the market is flooded with unwanted ICs.
If you look at that five year lithium carbonate price chart, you notice that the bubble began in 2022. This was when the LiFePO4 patents expired. That meant any manufacturer could make batteries without cobalt and that caused the spike in lithium as that was the next bottleneck. That bubble, though, also led to a massive investment in new lithium production which never was rare to begin with. Now that it's starting to come on-line, we are heading for much lower battery prices. That's good news but it also means there will be follow-on consequences.
If Ford's EV numbers turn out to be accurate or even conservative, what does that mean for oil prices?
ahfoo t1_j9x093m wrote
Reply to comment by cptnamr7 in Fourth Circuit: Individuals Have a First Amendment Right to Livestream Their Own Traffic Stops by mepper
This was what I came here to post, the Supreme Court has just handed down a series of absurdly authoritarian rulings on free speech.
ahfoo t1_j9wzelg wrote
Reply to comment by SgtWaffleSound in Daily use of marijuana raises risk of heart disease, study finds by TheDodoBird
No, smoked marijuana actually reduces blood pressure over the longer term according to a study of 150,000 just published this month in Nature, a peer-reviewed journal.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-22841-6
The important factor is that the paper that is being hyped by CNN is simply a political hit piece that is not peer reviewed. It is nearly certain that CNN is pushing this disinformation precisely because of the big Nature story about the cardiovascular benefits of smoking marijuana long term.
ahfoo t1_j9wuwob wrote
Reply to comment by PPQue6 in Daily use of marijuana raises risk of heart disease, study finds by TheDodoBird
Yeah, in the peer-reviewed world, we're seeing the exact opposite.
Over 150,000 people were studied and they found strong evidence of reduced blood pressure among long-term cannabis smokers. Published in Nature this month.
ahfoo t1_j9n57d8 wrote
I liked the car parked on the streets of Denver metaphor.
ahfoo t1_j8zoihg wrote
Reply to A review concluded that "with its sustainability as a plant as well as its distinctive useful property of the seed protein, hemp has promising value in the development of new foods." by OregonTripleBeam
I like the fact that this paper is coming out of Japan which recently began making concessions on medical marijuana. The paper mentions the fact that it has long been a part of funeral practices in both Japan and China to use burnt hemp leaves to purify the attendees. Just as with India, hemp has been integral to cultures across Asia but they all jumped on the Inquisition bandwagon when the US was leading the parade. Now that the US is backing off, they're left to deal with the shame of admitting they were acting like fools.
ahfoo t1_j67dekx wrote
Reply to comment by LivvyByrdsong in What happens if the largest owner of oil and gas wells in the US goes bankrupt? by geoxol
More like the tariffs on solar are raised once again to bail out the oil sector yet again.
ahfoo t1_j64degp wrote
Reply to comment by DonManuel in UK scientists discover method to reduce steelmaking’s CO2 emissions by 90% / Decarbonising the steel industry is an imperative by Sorin61
https://carbonherald.com/vedanta-to-use-hydrogen-instead-of-coke-in-green-steel-production/
Yeah, green steel is very much a reality. It's good to have multiple approaches though.
ahfoo t1_j4uhll1 wrote
Reply to comment by Demoire in A study found that "about 30% of the sample was able to discontinue the use of prescription medications because of cannabis." by OregonTripleBeam
Be careful of those negative correlations. There is a huge anti-cannabis political agenda that is still going strong. As you yourself put it, you have not noticed any negative effects. Why would you assume that there must be some downside?
ahfoo t1_j4uhgxd wrote
Reply to comment by skyluna411 in A study found that "about 30% of the sample was able to discontinue the use of prescription medications because of cannabis." by OregonTripleBeam
You don't remember dreaming. There is a difference.
ahfoo t1_j4uhf1t wrote
Reply to comment by [deleted] in A study found that "about 30% of the sample was able to discontinue the use of prescription medications because of cannabis." by OregonTripleBeam
Cannabis use reduces dreaming but it does not usually completely prevent it. It's important to remember that THC is only a partial agonist of the cannabinoid receptors. It doesn't completely block them in the way heroin can block off endorphin receptors or methamphetamine can block off dopamine receptors. So it's unlikely that you can pin any dramatic effects from THC like complete cessation of all dreams when it is only partially affecting its receptors. A partial reduction is far more likely than a total prevention of dreaming because of the partial agonist nature.
You need to keep in mind that there is enormous bias against cannabis due to the hysteria of the War on Drugs that continues until this very day. Claims about its dangers and downsides are heavily exaggerated and need to be taken in the context of the political hysteria that surrounds the substance.
ahfoo t1_j4b70os wrote
Reply to comment by Meididkrnfi in Cannabis Use Shows Improvements in Patients with IBD by GivenAllTheFucksSry
No but I do get sick of the obvious bias and hatred directed against the well known medical benefits of a common and easily cultivated plant that have been noted for thousands of years. The cannabis plant has been so profoundly recognized as beneficial throughout history that its benefits have been documented repeatedly across multiple cultures. The reason comments like the above are so annoying is that they feed into the racist and politically motivated campaign to smear cannabis and normalize the bias as if it ought to be some commonly accepted norm to cast disdain and contempt at anything that threatens incumbent financial and political interests. That is truly sickening and not just ugly but sad.
ahfoo t1_j1zubme wrote
Reply to Logged forest compared with an unlogged forest could be better for climate change. A detailed assessment of vegetation growth, bird and mammal numbers, and energy flows in logged and unlogged forests offers some surprising findings. by Creative_soja
Yeah, I went to southern Yunnan in China in the early 90s. They had wiped out hundreds of thousands of acres of rainforest clearcutting it "for progress" and "modernization" there was nothing left. The hills were just covered in mud. The rivers were filled with mud, everywhere was nothing but mud and massive erosion.
One little tiny section had been left, perhaps a few thousand acres. You could pay to go in there and spend the night in a tree house to see all the animals that had fled from the deforested area that were fed bales of hay in order to collect a few bucks from the tourists. There was all sorts of wildlife diversity in that little sliver that was left. You could cynically claim that this was good for diversity.
In fact, it was quite sad. The whole thing was depressing.
ahfoo t1_j1ptf9w wrote
Well being in Taiwan, this would be concerning but since it's behind a paywall, I can't see it so. . . life goes on.
ahfoo t1_j0z6t3h wrote
Reply to comment by ross_guy in How the Graphical User Interface Was Invented by fchung
No, fuck no. That's nonsense. Jobs and Gates and NEC as well as other Japanese interests rushed in to grab a piece of the action when the courts forced it open. It was only because of the Xerox consent decree that any of this stuff ever made it to the public.
The fact you don't know about this is interesting in itself. It used to be widely known but it's interesting how people's opinions have been shaped over time to create this ridiculous narrative. It's actually hard to even find the original documentation anymore because so much effort has gone into hiding it.
But you can still find good info on it but unfortunately much of it is paywalled which is how the ignorance is manufactured:
[The 1975 Xerox Consent Decree: Ancient Artifacts and Current Tensions] (https://www.jstor.org/stable/40843504)
If you search around you can find a copy which goes into what really happened.
ahfoo t1_j0yxuar wrote
Reply to comment by ross_guy in How the Graphical User Interface Was Invented by fchung
And thanks to the formerly progressive Supreme Court of the 1970s that was willing to slap them with the consent decree forcing their patents to be openly licensed. Xerox had no intention of sharing this technology, they were forced to do so by the government in an era when the government actually had the balls to represent the people.
ahfoo t1_iz8oe1r wrote
Reply to Baby girls babble their way to bigger vocabularies sooner than baby boys, but it’s not because parents talk to them more, instead parents appear to talk more to young children who themselves are already talking, regardless of their gende by giuliomagnifico
This is not so different from adult second language acquisition. Many people try and fail to learn foreign languages as adults and an important reason many fail to achieve fluency despite spending many hours listening to tapes and studying is that they lack experience in failed interactions that they can learn from.
The babbling part is generally left out of ESL instruction because it's impractical to package up and sell in a profitable manner but it actually works. I found in my studies of Chinese as a second language that the students I attended class with at a very intensive institute would have less ability than people I met outside of class who didn't even intentionally study Chinese but had lovers who were native speakers. The latter would almost instantly develop fluency in cooing type language that gave them a base to explore other type of language interactions in public.
I myself was making very slow progress until one day I learned a phrase that is often mumbled in a jumbled together fashion which means something like "Is that so?" I thought this was a funny phrase to use because nobody could tell if I really knew what I was saying or just mumbling nonsense so I would randomly just repeat it to native speakers and they would assume that I was fluent and then speak back in a stream of words I couldn't understand but became motivated to recall and try to sort out later. From that point on, my progress was steady and I began to develop fluency. But it all went back to basically walking around murmuring at people not knowing what they were saying and trying to guess from the context which is surprisingly easy once you try it.
ahfoo t1_iyc7c9g wrote
Reply to comment by BunnyReturns_ in Forced Uyghur labor is being used in China's solar panel supply chain, researchers say by chrisdh79
The hit piece article?
ahfoo t1_iyc5x3w wrote
Reply to comment by kurai_tori in Forced Uyghur labor is being used in China's solar panel supply chain, researchers say by chrisdh79
Hah hah! That's amusing. But you must understand that this would not be fair. It's not fair for the government to distort the market you see. That would not be fair. Tariffs --well, that's different.
Tariffs are another story because they punish solar and that benefits oil so that's fair. See? It's all about what's fair.
ahfoo t1_iyc5pvy wrote
Reply to comment by BunnyReturns_ in Forced Uyghur labor is being used in China's solar panel supply chain, researchers say by chrisdh79
Gadzooks! The level of disinformation here is absurd. The US used to be the leading polysilicon supplier to China before the Obama tarrifs that killed the US polysilicon industry. Polysilicon is not rare, it is made of quartz which is found everywhere.
The reason China ramped up their production was because of the Obama tariffs which were designed to shut down the business because oil is what the US is all about. Obama worked for the Big Boys just like all US presidents.
ahfoo t1_jed40lq wrote
Reply to Sublingual Spray With THC And CBD Can Control Blood Sugar, Lowers Cholesterol In Type 2 Diabetes Patients by Defiant_Race_7544
Notice that these well known beneficial effects on blood sugar, blood pressure, pulse and gut health from cannabis are always left out when discussing whether or not there is genuine harm in adolescent cannabis use. When it comes to adolescent use, the razor sharp focus is strictly on changes that take place in the brain while the beneficial effects on the rest of the body are ignored.
If cannabis use is beneficial for the health of adults, why are we to believe there is some special case with adolescents that causes them to be harmed by this otherwise beneficial therapeutic with generalized benefits to health?