A mere 20 years ago we could sit in mixed company laughing and groaning during an impromptu “everyone’s best and worst pickup line” contest, that levity among friends. Levity is serious business re-learn it.

You still can. The discourse is because a large chunk of the male population doesn’t understand how to do that without being creeps. Don’t be a creep and women will like being around you

Damn dude, that was such a spot-on summary I feel like I don’t need to log in to lemmy for a month lol

This is such a spurious connection lol but I read the article anyway

The pattern probably emerged as a result of Darwinian natural selection: cicadas that naturally matured in easily divisible years were gobbled up by predators, and simply didn’t live long enough to produce as many offspring. Those who, by chance, had long, prime-numbered life spans fared best, survived longest, and left the most offspring, becoming the dominant variation of the species.

I’m glad the author actually took the time to describe the evolutionary process accurately. When I was an impressionable youngin’ arguing against evolution, a big sticking point for me was how so many people described evolution as if there was some design or guidance behind it all. Nope, just common sense chaos and lots of death

[The Fine-structure Constant] quantifies the strength of the electromagnetic interaction between elementary charged particles.

Why the constant should have this value is not understood, but there are a number of ways to measure its value.

Sounds like we know what it is, we just don’t know the reason for its value. (Edit: Unless I’m misunderstanding what you mean)

Wikipedia link

What are we considering in vs out of city? Does in city mean just downtown, within city limits, within metro area? And what are we considering a city - 300k population?

Maybe so! Always hard to say with the range of opinions I see on the internet these days

How did volunteers who run reddit’s for-profit business for them for free end up equated with landed gentry?

The fact is that technology advances and makes other technology obsolete,

Yeah, it happens on both sides, it’s an arms race. It will swing the other way eventually - it always has and always will

The second thing you’re not addressing is how long the “ebb and flow” takes anyway

That was intentional. There’s no estimating a timeline, but with the development of technology it’s not unreasonable to expect a reversal even in a decade. Anyway, if you’re trying to ward off doomerism you’re not going to do it by only looking at what you stand to gain

Looking at the world rn, I dont think things have a tendency to get better on their own

This is called a recency bias (I think lol) - you’re looking at the world rn and assuming its trends must continue. When you look at history you see that there are ebbs and flows, and that stasis is rare. If you focus on certain things, you may certainly decide we’re in a downtrend. There will always be an uptrend afterward. And vice versa

Yeah I’m not subscribing to a whole service just so I can watch 3/4 of my team’s games and no others. I want a service I can subscribe to and see all my team’s games, and preferably all the games in one league. If it was multi-league that would be great, but I’d rather subscribe to one league at a time than subscribe to all leagues with randomly blacked out games.

Until then - and I know it’s unlikely to ever happen - I won’t be spending money on watching sports on tv

I always call it Magic Math. There’s so much of it when you start learning about investing/trading. “Buying calls has infinite potential for gains. Selling calls has infinite potential for losses.” Like, yeah, that’s mathematically true. But at the end of the day it’s not practically true, you’re just putting a lot of weight on what you could be getting instead of what you are getting.

I went to my Dad and told him I’m stuck in a non-linear perception of time.

And he said “Hi stuck in a non-linear perception of time, I’m Dad.”

That’s how I pronounce it too! Jw because idk what country OP is from, nor their first language. So they might pronounce it differently, and I’d pair different surnames depending on pronunciation

Pronounced væləntain with an “eye” sound or væləntin with an “ee” sound? Or some other variation?

Are users notified when their report is declined? Lol

Spock and Chewbacca is an interaction I never knew I wanted. Or Data

It’s interesting that people try to explain this away with all kinds of retroactive in-universe technobabble. I mean, I enjoy Star Wars just as much as the next guy but it’s abundantly clear that SW wasn’t meant to be investigated at this level. It’s space mythology, not hard science fiction. And that’s fine! We can have fun asking things like “Why is the Outer Rim considered a backwater if it only takes a few hours to get from galactic center to the rim?” and we don’t really have to stress about answers to those things as fans. Edit: Or we can if that’s what fans enjoy doing, but it just isn’t my thing and I think that’s ok too

Who would win, a B-17 Flying Fortress with no bombs, or the USS Missouri?

Edit: Also the Missouri can fly too, but it’s a little less maneuverable, usually

The Millennium Falcon would destroy the Enterprise somehow. Then Kirk and crew would be stranded on a planet until they find a way to get aboard and commandeer the Falcon. Ultimately they would use it to go back in time and save the whales or something