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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • Aside from the Shub-Niggurath worship (I’m more of an Azathoth person, myself), I agree with most things here. I’d just add to the list, group B I guess:

    • aquatic animal husbandry and aquascaping (freshwater preferably, saltwater if you are really masochistic and have money to burn on corals and expensive equipment)
    • model railroading

    I feel these are more ‘apex’ hobbies, wherein you need a bit of everything (chemistry, electronics, an artistic sense, lots of patience) and they will occupy most of your time. You’d think electronics and aquaria are not the closest things, but just you wait until you feel the need to build an LED lamp with simulated day/night cycles and moonlight, controlled by an arduino.

    The barrier to entry is fairly low - there are starter sets available and I’ve found that hobby shops of this sort are usually staffed by very knowledgeable people, eager to help newcomers. And, you can go as deep as you want and still have fun. You will also learn an absolute fuckton of things about what you choose to model with your hobby.

    An honorable mention for homebrewing, which I don’t even regard as a hobby at this point, but more of a necessity, like cooking.



  • you’re fighting a losing battle. ‘having kids is a good thing’ is the only piece of propaganda that is distributed to probably every human. and probably the oldest one, too. it’s also a base instinct, sort of hard to override by reasoning, as anyone who’s ever been horny or hungry can probably attest. this is probably the best example on here related to the posted question.

    for what it’s worth, I do think you are correct





  • Any sort of EU federal state I would agree is nigh impossible - as it stands currently there is some lack of overlap on freedom of movement without border checks (the Schengen area) and currency adoption (all members except Denmark are obligated to adopt the Euro at some point in time, but Sweden at least doesn’t seem to have any real intention of doing so) within EU member states.

    On top of that, ‘muh freedumb, they want to take away our right to self-govern’ is used as a very efficient talking point for nationalist parties in all EU member states to shift public opinion against the EU (some possibly due to propaganda, others due to homegrown ideology). Any decision of importance within the EU has to be unanimous, so pretty sure there will be at least one state vetoing any motion to become a federal state.

    Maybe once world peace is achieved, there can be an EU federal state, though even then I’d be skeptical.

    For any brexit reversal, I understand the main issue would be that as a founding member, the UK had some perks (opt out of Schengen and the Euro) that would no longer be on the table for a new arrival. And there’s the matter of breach of trust for already leaving once and causing major headaches.






  • It’s easier to tell people to just use a rubber when on antibiotics rathern than explain to them that it’s only for some unpronounceable substances for most of the population and have them memorize a list of substances for which it’s safe to go on as usual - azithromycin is safe, amoxicillin is not. They may sound fairly similar to a layman.

    It’s because some substances (in this case, antibiotics) mess with the units in your body that process them and prepare them for excretion. They may inhibit or induce them, but these units process a whole load of other stuff. Including birth control, which can lead to less activity from the birth control pills because they’re inactivated quicker (in case of induction) or the biotransformation to the active form is slower (in case of inhibition, for prodrugs that are inactive as is, but have active metabolites, no idea if this is the case for birth control though).

    A similar thing happens with alcohol, for example, which is why you should always be honest with exactly how much alcohol you drink or what other drugs you take when talking to an anaesthesiologist, or any doctor prescribing you any sort of medicine, lest you risk ineffective anaesthesia or treatment (the first one is worse imo).




  • I’d say all these articles about social media saying it’s broken are just about maintaining the illusion of something better. As long as they can keep it up, people are going to think “it’s bad but it shouldn’t be!” and just keep coming back hoping it improves. And that can keep social media alive with everything it can do for everybody using it as an income stream.

    It has never informed users and a pet peeve of mine is governments using fucking twitter to communicate. And businesses too lazy to create their own webpages (or pay somebody to do it for them) and pay for some hosting (deductible as a business expense, by the way) so they use fecebook instead.

    Also, as somebody mentioned in a different comment, it is actually the town square, as it always was (I believe their comment evoked witch trials as an example).