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

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  • Such an interesting perspective, thanks for your contribution! I guess our ‘shopping centres’ are essentially the first condition you’ve described that also have grocery stores attached, and it’s likely the grocery store (in Australia this basically means one of 3-4 companies) that are keeping these structures going in the modern age. Our shopping centres tend to be built ‘up’ rather than ‘out’, with 3-5 storey shopping centres (with up to 7 storey parking lots) being fairly common within city limits that are closely accessible to more than 50% of the population.

    That being said though, I live fairly equidistant between two of the largest shopping centres in Sydney and still choose to go to my local, smaller, single-storey shopping centre which is very small by Australian standards (<40 stores) which feels much more like a ‘mall’.

    Do you guys have a lot of standalone grocery stores that you can drive right up to, park, shop and leave? Because that’s definitely the minority here!




  • Speaking from an outside perspective; malls (what we call shopping centres) in Australia didn’t die anywhere near what has happened in the US. We have a very different geographic landscape (hyper-concentration of population in city centres) and definitely don’t have the same level of penetration that companies like Amazon do, but we have shared a lot of the same economic headwinds that the US has. From my armchair perspective, this would generally suggest that it’s less to do with economic position and more to do with idiosyncrasies of the US, but I have absolutely no data to back that up.










  • His work is important to study from an historical perspective in order to see how psychology grew into what it is today, in the same way that it’s important that we learn about outdated concepts like tabula rasa and phrenology in order to better understand what is correct. The fact that he applied so much of his own subjective thoughts to his brand of psychology shows us how we, as potential future psychologists, also have the same capacity to search for confirmatory evidence and eschew disproving evidence in search of a theory. He’s a great example of what not to do when it comes to psychology.



  • The US needs a a legitimate grassroots movement that is well-funded (fucked if I know how to be honest, hopefully it’s just a lot of small donations from regular people) that consistently lobbies for voting reform. The following changes should be up for debate:

    • Replacing FPTP voting with ranked choice voting
    • Instituting proportional representative voting where appropriate, particularly for state senates
    • Referendum on changing the number of federal senators per state to better represent population
    • Referendum on abolishing the Electoral College and instituting a simple, ranked choice popular vote for president
    • Systematic review of every single electorate by an independent organisation to unwind gerrymandered districts; this organisation then sets the districts on an ongoing basis in an apolitical way
    • Expanding ease of access to voting by every sensible measure possible (much of what AG Garland is doing now) and then considering mandatory voting
    • Real-time full disclosure of all political donations to all political bodies (especially PACs)
    • Sensible caps on political donations
    • Truth in political advertising laws

    I’m sure there are plenty of others but if all of those things were managed to be achieved, the body politic’s state and Overton Window of the US would shift dramatically.


  • I like your idea of using 3 as an approximation to get ballpark figures - if you wanted to add a smidge of extra accuracy to that you can just remember that in doing so, you’re taking away roughly 5% of pi.

    0.14159265 / 3 ≈ 0.04719755

    Add in around 5% at the end and your approximation’s accuracy tends to gain an order of magnitude. For your pizza example:

    108 in^2 x 1.05 = 113.4 in^2 which is accurate to three significant figures and fairly easy to calculate in your head if you can divide by twenty.

    You could even fudge it a little and go “108 is pretty close to 100. 5% of 100 is obviously 5, so the answer is probably around 108+5=113”




  • The kind of people that eat up his “debating” style are people who treat the idea of an open debate of concepts the same way - that is to say that they’d be flipping tables and shitting everywhere themselves. They’re uneducated and hold unqualified and unjustifiable positions, and the only way to maintain those positions is to simply ignore or reject all rhetoric to the contrary.

    They eat it up because that’s exactly how they’d act when faced with reason, logic, facts or statistics.


  • Oh it’s definitely an echo chamber in every sense; there’s no doubt that opinions that tend to be popular on Lemmy are not really representative of true public opinion. The important thing is that we maintain awareness of that and never let ourselves think that what we agree upon, society at large will also agree upon. That awareness helps inoculate against some of the worst effects of an echo chamber.


  • FtM top surgery and MtF bottom surgery both cause you to lose body parts (breasts and testicles respectively). MtF top surgery and FtM bottom surgery usually cause you to gain the same body parts. The only situation where a transition causes people to gain body parts without losing any is hormonal therapy for transfemme people without surgery.