• 0 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle

  • I imagine if my occupation includes carrying a gun, interacting with citizens, and a historically high rate of extrajudicial deaths amongst people I am supposed to be protecting. A publicly accessible camera would be beneficial to easing the minds of those I interact with and providing evidence for any actual instances where I felt my life was threatened.


  • Linnaean taxonomy classifies apes and monkeys as two closely related groups. This is the classification system most people are taught in grade school.

    Cladistics is a style of classification that seeks to organize species and groups of species from when they branched off of other groups of species. In this style, everything is defined by novel features, but they are still members of the more ancient clade. Birds for instance, would be a novel clade emerging from Dinosaurs, and thus all birds are also dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs are birds.

    Because there are two groups of monkeys with unique characteristics (new world and old world), and apes have unique adaptations not found in either group, we have no way of cladistically defining a monkey in a way that meaningfully does not also include apes.

    As a side note, this is where the phrase “there is no such thing as a fish” comes from. ‘Fish’ in the Linnaean sense are a huge and diverse category. Two random members of the fish class would likely be far, far more distantly related than a random mammal and a random reptile.



  • You don’t necessarily need to roleplay, but something like “I would like to play on their guilt by seeming hopeless.” or “I would like to bring up the horrible acts of the orc warlord to stoke their anger.” or “I would like to convince them to help by pointing out how their oaths may apply in this situation.” would really help sell the specifics. If you are just trying a flat check I have no real way to know what you are planning on doing other than just sort of charmingly asking “Please?”


  • That guy didn’t have a car in the first photo either. They probably just walked home. But seriously, you can fit a surprising amount of groceries on a bike, especially with saddlebags or just a backpack. Plus, if you don’t have to drive to the grocery store you often find you can make a few smaller trips now and then instead of one giant stressful trip that you have to plan everything around.


  • Little_mouse@lemmy.catoRisa@startrek.websiteGonna need a few rewrites
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    edit-2
    10 months ago

    I’ve always assumed that the Borg were once a truly egalitarian faction. One that seeks out other points of view in order to invite them into a collective where every voice has a share in the overall direction of the whole.

    I could see such a collective evolving into the current Star Trek Borg if things like fascism take root. A rabid xenophobia of thought that seeks to destroy any ‘wrong-think’ within the hive mind.

    It would explain a lot of the problems that the Borg seem to have. Why they never seem to learn from their mistakes despite their adaptability, why they all share one mind despite their quest for distinctiveness, why they have a single load-bearing queen despite their usual priority of hyper redundancy in all things.


  • Little_mouse@lemmy.catoRisa@startrek.websiteiPadd
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    49
    ·
    10 months ago

    Honestly if I could just print up a new tablet instantly and without cost, I would have half a dozen around me when I am deep into a research fugue.

    Being able to quickly and easily flip between books or articles (or even different sections of the same book) while at the same time keeping the existing information up on a screen that I can directly reference is great.


  • Exactly. Duplicating a person and destroying the original or truly transferring every atom from one location to another by teleportation results in the same level of continuity of consciousness as just going to sleep and waking up later.

    So why does the cloning version seem so, so much worse?



  • Even without a gameboard, and even without finely tracking movement at all, you can still have players with movement builds and make them feel powerful. Describing opponents like longbow users and warmages as being within range of a move action “for you, but not for the others” is just one basic way to make them feel fast. Things like difficult terrain being an effective nonissue for them is good to keep in mind. Just remember to describe how fast they are in combat, and give them fun things to do with that speed.



  • Being anti-car is more about being pro-infrastructure-that-does-not-rely-solely-on-everyone-needing-cars. It’s not even completely opposed to using cars/trucks for situations where nothing else will do.

    My solution for this sort of arrangement would be to take the dogs and equipment for a walk down the street where a bus or light rail network would arrive every 2.5 minutes to take you to the train station. There, you play with or groom your dogs in a personal cabin on a bullet train that would take you to a similarily networked train station in the destination city.

    Much of the required equipment would likely not be needed, since you could entertain your dogs on the trip rather than locking them away while you drive. If you still need a good deal of equipment, you could rent a car to get the station or hire a taxi cab.

    Really unless you are making such trips daily, it wouldn’t make sense to need to own a car to transport a lot of stuff to the station in a nation with proper infrastructure. Just like you don’t buy a moving van because you plan to move at some point.

    Out of curiosity, why do you take 10 dog crates for 4 dogs?





  • “But, when I talk to people in general, most seem to not worry because they “have nothing to hide”, and most are only worried about their passwords, banking apps and not much else.”

    Sounds like they have passwords and banking apps to hide, You should demand their bank account and credit card details to verify that they have made no illicit actions.

    If they point out that they have no reason to trust you with that information, that’s when you point out that police, government, or corporate groups are made out of people just like yourself. They might have some codes of conduct, or a vetting process, but it just takes one person malicious or careless enough for you to be severely impacted.


  • The trouble with ‘Slippery Slope’ and ‘No True Scotsman’ is that they themselves are not fallacies. Invoking them without proper justification is the fallacy. The same sort of thing happens all the time with ‘Appeal to Authority’, you can probably trust a scientific consensus about a subject in which they are all experts, but you probably shouldn’t trust an individual expert on a topic for which they are not recognized as an expert.

    For an example of Slippery Slope: Fascists will absolutely try to demonize the most available target, and then because they always need an out-group, they continue cutting at what they consider the ‘degenerates’ of society until they are all that remain. (And then they find some new definition of degenerate)

    “No True Scotsman” is valid in that there is at some point by definition after which you are no longer talking about something. “No true vegetarian eats meat” is valid, as this is definitional. “No true member of Vegetarians United eats meat” lacks proper justification, and refers to an organization, not a proper definition. This gets really messy when people conflate what group people are in with what they ‘are’ or what makes them a good example of a group. Especially when religion is involved.