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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Do you think water boils at 212F at high altitudes? No matter which temperature scale is used, the “billions of people” living at high altitudes need to understand how pressure affects the boiling point of water.

    I think the billions of people you imagine living on top of Mount Everest understand they may need to make adjustments to cooking instructions regardless of what temperature scale they’re using. If they don’t, using Fahrenheit won’t solve their problems.



  • Yeah I feel like Lucas didn’t really understand Star Wars. He had to follow a lot of studio notes for the first one and thought it made it terrible. Instead it was the most successful movie ever and he didn’t understand why. It was a smart move to get someone else to direct the next movie. Unfortunately because of his petty squabbles with the director’s guild he didn’t just keep on doing that and instead got a non-union director for RotJ (and ended up pretty much directing it himself anyway) and directed the prequels himself. He just saw it as a way to make money by selling toys in the end.

    But the throne room stuff with Luke, Vader and the Emperor was pretty great. The action was fun in the Jabba part of the movie, but of course that didn’t have anything to do with the rest of the movie. Overall not a good movie, but pretty fun.

    The big problem with Star Wars now is that because it’s so popular and makes so much money, people take it way more seriously than they should. Ultimately it became popular because it was fun action adventure movies, that can at times have interesting subtext. I think only JJ Abrams has made Star Wars movies like that, the rest are trying to do Saving Private Ryan in space or Citizen Kane in space, which results in a mediocre versions of those kinds of stories.



  • It’s a deprecated unit of measure. In a lot of forums like this one, there’s a lot of people that work in the technology field and we’re always annoyed by people that insist on sticking with something that’s deprecated because people invent rationalizations for why the thing they’re used to is better. I use Fahrenheit for cooking but I’m not telling people I do that because it’s better in some why, I know I’m using a deprecated unit of measure solely because I’m used to it.




  • You feel like Fahrenheit is good enough because it’s what your used to. Just say that and it’s all good.

    I use Celsius for weather because a) I’m used to it and b) where I live, knowing the temperature relevant to the freezing point of water is extremely relevant when considering the weather. You use Fahrenheit for the weather only because you’re used to it. There’s no benefit other than that.

    I do use Fahrenheit for cooking, but not because it’s better in any way, but simply because I’m used to it. I know the effect setting the oven to 400, 350, 300, etc, will have. It’s not a better unit of measure, I’m just used to it, and in the context of using my oven, it’s not worthwhile to me to learn the equivalents in Celsius.

    It’s ok to say you prefer something simply because that’s what you’re used to using. But Celsius is a better unit of measure, just you’re not used to it. You know what 70F, 80F, 90F, 100F feels like from experience, ie. you’re used to using that scale. It’s fine… just weird to say something is better simply because it’s what you’re accustomed to.


  • Agree 100% on Robocop.

    With Starship Troopers, it all hinges on what you feel when Dizzy dies. Personally, I was legit angry at the bugs when that happened, and then had the realization of “oh… so that’s how fascist propaganda works.” I think it had to be on the nose a bit for the message to come across.

    The movie ends with a guy in an SS uniform saying they’ve made the enemy afraid and everyone cheers, and still a lot of people didn’t get it. So it may not have been dumbed down enough for a lot of people to get the message.






  • Add a bell button and a whistle button.

    I think instead of promoting a page where people have to choose a server, just send people to lemmy.world directly. We should probably just get people to sign up there at first and have the ability to migrate their accounts to other servers if they want to do that later.

    Having to choose from multiple servers is asking people to choose between a bunch of options they know nothing about. Get people straight to looking at content and posting stuff as soon as possible, once they’re more invested, and understand more about the different instances they can change servers if that’s what they want to do.

    But yeah writhing the code needed to make account migration seamless might be a lot of work so not sure if that will happen.




  • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.caBanned from communitytoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhy do some people defend the billionaires and capitalism?
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    9 months ago

    Well it’s similar to what Churchill said about democracy… it’s a bad system but it’s better than all the others.

    If you can put ideology aside and think in terms of economics, in many industries capitalism offers an efficient way of determining the an optimal price and quantity to produce considering the costs and value something brings. And it’s something that allows for industries to function without an excessive amount of centralized planning which will often get things wrong.

    But it’s like a machine in a many ways. And like any machine it requires maintenance. Things like trust-busting, progessive taxation, regulations, and occasional stimulus are necessary to keep it running smoothly.

    But once you bring ideology into it, it all becomes a shitshow. Some will argue capitalism is a perfect machine and any kind of maintenance on the machine will ruin it’s perfection. Others take any kind of maintenance on the machine as a sign the machine will inevitably fail and needs to be replaced entirely. But then we go back to the beginning where other systems have been tried and they’re worse. Charlatans, grifters, ideologues abound pushing people in every direct except for simply taking reasonable measures to keep the machine running smoothly. There’s an almost religious devotion towards arguing the either the machine is perfect or the machine is doomed to failure and not only should be replaced they should accelerate the failure so it can be replaced sooner.

    Zealots from all sides demonize the mechanics that are simply keeping things running. A lot of emotional nonsense about this thing. But to an economist, it’s just a machine with both strengths and weaknesses. The functioning of the machine is well understood, and the other machines that have been tried didn’t really work.