This is not a puritanical issue. I have no problem with porn in its place in life.

I have no desire to control anyone else's body, to shame or judge anyone for sharing themselves online or elsewhere.

Even if I feel there are unanswered questions that our society has not really tackled yet with the speed of change the Internet created, I'm still broadly ambivalent about porn.

As someone with a background in studying historical social attitudes especially around gender, sex and equality we've taken a step forwards I believe, but with more to do.

But I just don't have any interest in seeing stranger's genitals. Genitals can be a lot of fun of course, I have the superpower of enjoying whatever I find in a partner's pants.

I just don't think the fun part is looking at them. When I see a lady spreading her legs in a pose of "check this out" I'm left cold. Yes. Very nice. Gonna keep scrolling.

If I am seeking out porn I'd much prefer something with dignity, make it erotic over explicit.

I think finding an unannounced vulva in my Lemmy feed is a little like an unsolicited dick pic, except it's not aimed at me.

The photos where she's spreading her labia make even less sense to me. Yes, it's a hole. I know how they work. Unless you're hiding something up there that's not the interesting part, and if you are that's not arrousing, just entertaining!

I'm working on the assumption that these things are popular just because of the prevalence. Be funny to find out that this is a normal perspective and those people are sharing their cocks and fannies for a niche audience.

As someone who likes both Cartoons and Anime equally, I have yet to find someone who doesn't get offended by me saying that. They're just animated projects at the end of the day, just made differently through cultural norms. I'll enjoy both like I'll enjoy a burger & ramen, both are good and tasty, don't care which one's better as long I'm munching down

That's it, I'm just writing this because I'm bored

With the sole exception of those mourning their friends and family members who died on that day, and don't politicize it, it all is so hollow and performative.

The US government, and by extension the US voting population who supported the government's actions, have committed orders of magnitudes of 9/11s before and after 9/11.

In Afghanistan the US killed tens or even hundreds of thousands of civilians.

In Iraq, at least 1 million people died in that conflict, and that estimate doesn't even include the rise of ISIS which was a result of the Iraq War.

Even Iran's death toll can be attributed to the US's 9/11 response. Not only did Trump use it to justify the Iran War just yesterday, but the Islamophobia that lead to the Iran war was exacerbated by the colossal surge in Islamophobia post 9/11. Even Bush claimed Iran was in an "axis of evil", and the Pentagon plotted a war with Iran to take place after the war with Iraq, just months after 9/11.

Furthermore, it seems the only people still bringing up 9/11 as a matter of discussion, are those who want to use it to justify far-right talking points and policies. Even the GOP's and many Dem's support for Israel and the genocide against Palestine is constantly followed with talks about US victimhood during 9/11.

I so look forward to the day when Boomers and Gen X lose their stranglehold on US politics and media so we can finally shut this performative bullshit down. 9/11 shouldn't simply be seen as a great US tragedy, it should be seen as the beginning of the collapse of the US empire and the reign of terror the US brought in it's dying days as a global power.

every 10 years while you are under 60, then one every 3-5 years after that

no, i don’t think that the “common man’s position has to be abandoned”. In fact, i think that people should be allowed to believe that the earth is flat. For 99% of people, that is what they can observe in their daily lives, and it’s the simplest model that “gets the job done” (i.e. navigates the person through their daily lifes). You only need to know that the earth is a globe if you’re doing international trade, geopolitics, or spaceflight (or weather prediction, for some reason). For every other application, it does not matter.

Just like 16 years old people can't vote because too young, 80+ years old people should not be able to vote, most of them are too distant from everyday reality of younger people to be able to take a wise decision for the community and also often stick with (way too) old ideals from their years

NOTE: I am NOT defending AI or it's usage or anything like that. So just tie that horse right back up at the kitchen sink. I don't like the whole AI thing. This post is not about AI.

I get that it was necessary at first, but now whenever there's any hint of AI, there's a great chorus of everyone saying the same thing 'AI slop bla bla bla' like a gaggle of sheep jerking their knees.

It's not fucking helpful. It only sows even more division among the peasants, while the oligarchs take zero notice and continue on as usual. The correct way to engage with AI content you don't like is just not at all.

Examples:

Recently I watched as a post for a community event was removed, because it had an AI image. The image was not requested or created by the organiser, it was provided to them, and had information in several languages. But the post was removed because AI slop and now there is less human connection happening. Yay. Well fucking done. You literally are helping the AI overlords now.

I've seen many actual legit digital artists getting hit with the cries of AI slop and even banned, when they have been making art for years before AI was even a thing. People actually can't tell the difference half the time when they think they can, and end up hurting real artists.

Now is not the time to be attacking each other over using AI to generate some stupid meme. There are much, MUCH bigger issues at stake right now, and calling everything AI slop does nothing to help.

/rant

Did an impromptu rewatch during my labour day weekend. Had never watched past Extinction before. Retribution is FAR better than Afterlife and the whole thing ended on a pretty weak entry. But on the whole, fuck the haters; I un-ronically had a blast turning my brain off and watching all of them.

From the community sidebar:

How voting works: Vote opposite the norm. If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it’s something that’s widely accepted, give it an arrow down.

I don't think Pizzacake's comics are terrible or bad or [insert synonym]. Matter of fact, I find some of their comics actually funny.

0: Ronald Reagan 1986

1: Drugs are literally addictive and they don't have any money

2: There's not much else to do when you don't have your own space

3: It is less demoralizing than trying to offer hungry homeless people food and seeing them immediately lose interest

That person asking you for money probably wants drugs. They probably are too distracted to have an actual conversation with you because it has been too long since their last hit. If you have an acquaintance relationship with this person, a protracted conversation should be considered rude because you are preventing their acquisition of change and dollars for drugs. You don't have to take it as an indictment on their character and you can still give them money!

Furthermore I do not think this take is racist when Black homeless people ask you for money. You're still homeless, there's still not shit to do on these streets, you are asking me for money, I know you are trying to get some drugs.

edit: hell yeah i won. i have allocated $40 to central Lexington, Winchester road crack guys to celebrate

(Audio version of this post for those who can't be bothered to read it all.)

If you watch any pop-sci YouTube channel, you have probably heard the old story: physicists used to believe in this silly thing called the aether, but then the Michelson-Morley experiment disproved it in 1887, and Einstein replaced it with his theory of special relativity in 1905, which is "the most tested theory of all time."

But this is historical revisionism and does not accurately reflect the reality of what actually happened.

The 1887 experiment was only intended to test aether models where the aether is directly detectable. Its negative result could imply the aether doesn't exist, or it could imply it is only indirectly detectable.

Indeed, in 1904, the physicist Hendrik Lorentz put forward an aether model whereby the aether is not directly detectable, and thus was consistent with the Michelson-Morley result.

This model is mathematically equivalent to special relativity, and in fact Einstein's 1905 paper was explicitly in response to Lorentz's paper.

Since they are mathematically equivalent, the claim that "special relativity is the most tested theory of all time" makes no sense because no experiment can directly distinguish between Lorentz's 1904 model and Einstein's 1905. If you were to experimentally confirm time dilation, for example, well, both Lorentz's and Einstein's models predict that, so you didn't distinguish them.

Einstein's theory thus won out on philosophical grounds, not empirical grounds. Einstein had, at the time, the stronger philosophical argument: if the aether is not directly detectable, then maybe it doesn't exist, so maybe we should try constructing a model which makes the same empirical predictions as Lorentz's theory but without the aether.

And that is precisely what Einstein's 1905 paper achieves. This convinced basically every physicist to abandon Lorentz's ideas and adopt Einstein's ideas.

So, if Einstein's 1905 paper showed that the undetectable aether is not necessary to make the right predictions, what's the issue? Why do I even bring it up? Seems like all of this is completely reasonable.

I bring it up because of a caveat Einstein was well aware of himself: Lorentz's theory only renders the aether directly undetectable. It does offer a path under which its existence can be indirectly verified, and this bothered Einstein significantly, since he knew it would rule out his special relativity.

What is this indirect verification? The existence of Lorentz's aether can be indirectly verified if we can provide any experimental evidence, at all, that nature contains, anywhere, in any empirical observation, non-local effects.

Why?

Well, if two events occur so far apart and in such quick succession that not even light can traverse the gap, then special relativity predicts that different observers can disagree as to the temporal ordering of the events, measured on their clocks.

If no effect can travel faster than light, then these disagreements about the temporal ordering of events are always causally disconnected, and so it has no real implications.

If an effect can travel faster than light, then the causal sequence can become out-of-order in some perspectives, leading to causal paradoxes and logical inconsistencies in the theory.

This is only true for special relativity, however, because Einstein's theory treats the time-readings on clocks as equivalent to true, ontological time. Lorentz's theory treats the time-readings on clocks as an emergent feature and not fundamental, and so it is perfectly consistent for two observers to disagree about what event happened first without there being a paradox, because one of them can just be wrong and the other correct.

Why is all this relevant?

Newton's theory of gravity is unambiguously a non-local action-at-a-distance theory. Einstein knew that if he wanted his theory of special relativity to make sense, he needed to replace Newton's theory with a local theory of gravity, and so he did precisely that: developing the theory of general relativity.

However, Einstein also realized quantum mechanics is a non-local theory, and tried for the rest of his career to replace it with a local field theory, but never succeeded.

In fact, in 1964, the physicist John Bell proved it is impossible to replace it with a local theory without contradicting its empirical predictions. As Bell concludes at the end of his 1964 paper, either quantum mechanics is wrong, or the states of particles cannot be Lorentz invariant.

If they cannot be Lorentz invariant, they must be Galilean invariant, which then returns us to Lorentz's theory, as there is no absolute reference point in Einstein's theory, so Einstein's theory is incompatible with the requirement of Galilean invariance.

In 2022, the Nobel Prize was awarded for experimentally testing quantum mechanics and verifying that quantum mechanics is indeed not wrong, and, by extension, Lorentz's theory must necessarily be the correct theory, as the existence of the rest frame of the universe has been confirmed indirectly through proving the existence of non-local effects.

Did physicists respond to this by revisiting Lorentz's ideas? No! Because to do so would contradict the last century of ideology centered around the "revolution" that is special relativity.

So, instead, physicists took a different approach. Rather than agreeing with Bell's own conclusion that his 1964 theorem shows that nature is non-local and therefore rules out "locality," they instead claim that Bell's theorem rules out "local realism."

The implication here is that you could deny locality, but you could also deny realism.

"Reality doesn't exist, but thank God it is local!"

Despite a weird common misconception I've seen thrown about, "realism" has nothing to do at all with determinism or randomness. It is about object permanence, the idea that observable objects with observable properties continue to possess observable properties even when they are not being observed in the instantaneous moment of observation.

Bell's theorem does not assume determinism; it assumes merely that at least one of the particle's observable properties still contains definite values even when not being observed, regardless of whether or not those values evolve randomly or deterministically.

The denial of realism leads directly to the "measurement problem," because it creates a disconnect between the fact that you are claiming particles possess no observable (measurable) properties when not being observed (measured), but then this fails to explain why, when we try to observe (measure) them, they always empirically possess those properties.

This has led to a deluge of incoherent, incomprehensible papers on "interpretations" of quantum mechanics which all start with the premise that particles do not possess any observable properties at all when you are not looking at them and then work backwards from this conclusion to try and desperately make it coherent.

None of them succeed in this, and they readily admit they do not succeed in this. The popularization of statements like, "no one understands quantum mechanics" are all just passive admissions that these attempts to make sense of it in a non-realist framework are simply incomprehensible and nobody even knows what is being talked about anymore.

People use these kinds of phrases in an incredibly dishonest fashion. It gives the implication that quantum mechanics is objectively incomprehensible, and that is just a fact of life. But it's not true at all.

As Bell pointed out in 1982...

[T]he subjectivity of the orthodox version, the necessary reference to the 'observer,' could be eliminated...that vagueness, subjectivity, and indeterminism, are not forced on us by experimental facts, but by deliberate theoretical choice

That is to say, the supposed "incomprehensibility" of quantum mechanics, the insistence that it is impossible to understand, the hyper-focus on the observer, measuring apparatus, stemming from its non-realist premises, are not fundamental features of the theory, but are explicit theoretical choices made by physicists.

These explicit theoretical choices all arise from a desperate attempt to preserve locality. The 2022 Nobel Prize shows empirically that, if the particles possess observable properties when not being observed (realism), the experimental results are impossible to explain unless those properties influence each other in a non-local fashion.

That directly renders special relativity non-viable. But, physicists use a loophole where they just argue the particles possess no properties when you're not looking at them.

You see, if you deny that anything exists when you're not looking at it, then the only possible way to prove non-locality is to prove non-locality precisely in what you are directly observing, which requires you to send a direct signal, i.e., superluminal communication.

Under a non-realist framework, you can't prove non-locality indirectly by showing merely that the results are impossible to explain without non-local influences if you did not directly observe those non-local influences. A non-realist framework only allows for the proof of non-locality if you can directly signal with it.

Of course, it has been proven for decades that quantum mechanics does not allow for signaling, so this loophole allows you to continue to claim quantum mechanics is local, but at the cost of denying that particles have real properties in the real physical world independently of you looking at them.

This denial of object permanence, the very basis of realism, then leads to all the absurd interpretations around the theory, interpretations which its own authors admit are entirely incomprehensible by continually repeating that "quantum mechanics is impossible to understand" over and over again.

Indeed, the complete incomprehensibility of these interpretations was proved in a paper by Frauchiger and Renner in the journal Nature titled "Quantum theory cannot consistently describe the use of itself." They proved in a simple four-qubit circuit that every major interpretation of quantum mechanics is logically inconsistent.

The only one which they analyzed that wasn't inconsistent was a realist interpretation, but when they applied this interpretation, they point out in the paper that the time-ordering of events matters, meaning you have to introduce an absolute time-ordering of events to resolve the inconsistency... meaning you need Lorentz's model.

All of this nonsense is just a desperate attempt to preserve the dominant philosophical paradigm for the last 100 years. As pointed out by Bell in his paper "How to Teach Special Relativity," Lorentz's and Einstein's views are mathematically equivalent, so changing from Einstein's to Lorentz's view does not require actually even changing any of the mathematics or the empirical predictions.

It is purely a philosophical reinterpretation of the same empirical results and the same mathematics, yet the reinterpretation allows you to avoid having to deny reality to make sense of violations of Bell inequalities, and to make sense of quantum mechanics in a trivially intuitive framework.

But, of course, if the distinction is only philosophical in nature and non-empirical, a lot of physicists just don't care, since many aren't particularly interested in philosophy and don't really care to know anything about the natural world. They are more pragmatic engineers and just want to build stuff, so they just want to know what the math says and can't care much about the ontological implications of said math.

If a person is a pure pragmatist, they wouldn't care about this debate anyway, one way or the other. So this rant is largely on the side of people who do care.

A high-hooded truck or SUV is far more dangerous to the public than a small car, and a small car is more dangerous than a motorcycle, so a speeding ticket/liscense points/jail time for an SUV should be >4x more severe than a motorcycle doing the same violation, and bicycles should basically only recieve token fines.

Totally ready to take a ton of heat here as a straight arguably white man but I just dont get lip injections, specifically the ones where people look like ducks having an allergic reaction. I know it can be done more subtly to the point where it might not look obviously out of the norm but even then I still dont get it.

Specifically with the large puffy ones, do they think it makes them look better? Whenever I see it in the wild it looks horrendous from my pov. Are there dudes out there who are attracted to huge puffy lips? I understand the way others present their appearance is not for me, not everything cosmetically is done to be "attractive", and my opinion doesn't count but it just seems like a super strange choice.

Is there something Im missing about lip fillers? It just seems like an expensive way of looking weird.

False advertising and manipulative advertising have become far too prevalent, why not see if criminalizing it will reduce it?

With respect to intangible advantages and water efficiency.

Showers tend to be seen as a water efficient option to wash oneself. Rarely are baths usually taken, to my knowledge.

Here is why this is wrong.

An efficient shower head spends 10 litres per minute. At 10 minutes, 100 litres are consumed for a shower.

A typical bath, depending on size, can consume 100 litres flat.

Therefore, with the exception of showers strictly less than 10 minutes in duration, baths become more water efficient per minute.

Now a shift in focus.

Many people suffer from a chronic shortage of focus. This is no surprise, given the fast pace of modern life.

Get up at 7, be ready by 8, commute to work. Commute back home, optionally cook, eat dinner, sleep, and repeat.

There is no time to slow down. No time for ourselves. No time to bring back focus on what matters.

I argue that people should take more baths as a time and place to think. In quiet and peace. For 10 minutes, or 20, or as long as you need.

Are baths the answer to all our problems? Of course not. It is a way to exercise control over how we spend our time. A signal to ourselves that we are not in a race, and can take a moment for ourselves if we wish.

For any concerned about being soap-free after a bath: stand under a shower for 10 seconds.

I’m finishing the 3rd book at the request of a friend and … I’m finding it unfunny at best. They’re were some interesting moments with Donuts but I feel they are becoming spare.

Most monsters are only a derivative name on a 2-3years old meme and I don’t feel no struggle inside Carl

Out of convenience I choose to listen to it and it’s maybe why I find this really dull but comparing it with something like Dungeon and Daddies and D&D it’s much more imaginative

Stores like 7/11, AmPm, & Circle K serve hot dogs, pizza, sandwiches, etc. Yet, THERE'S NO PLACE TO EAT THEM AT. You either had to eat them in your car, find a park near by, or be awkward & eat them in a restaurant. Like, if Japan, Korea, the Philippines, or even fucking MEXICO, why can't the US? Like, are WE THAT FUCKING LAZY?!?!

I'm so over all the remastered games. Like 2 different remasters of Halo, now Witcher, maybe Red Redemption 2 will get a remaster. Just give us new original games or proper sequels. Lucky that there lots of indies out there otherwise you'd play the same game over and over again in a somewhat higher resolution.