Dihydrogen Monoxide, commonly used in laundry detergent and other cleaning supplies, is also present in Subway sandwiches

This is where it’s important to remember who exactly is writing the laws for union recognition. Many countries have laws that nominally support the formation of unions but moreso exist to reduce union support or funnel unions into polite, legal activity.

People on HRT have a significantly higher mortality rate than people not on HRT

HRT is short for Hormone Replacement Therapy, a treatment many transgender people use to feel more aligned with their gender identity. It's been proven to increase mental health, and has a low regret rate. However, it is correlated with higher mortality because trans people overall have a higher mortality rate and HRT is primarily used by trans people.

A more extreme example of the same thing would be "People on chemotherapy have a higher chance of dying from cancer than people not on chemotherapy." It's true, but only because people without cancer don't tend to enter chemotherapy.

Mx is common-ish among nonbinary people. Here’s a relevant poll regarding people’s usages of it: https://www.gendercensus.com/results/2023-mx/

Not sure what the use case is for a federated wiki. It lets you... edit a different wiki with your account from your initial one? View pages from other wikis using your preferred website's UI? Know which wikis are considered to have good info by the admins of the wiki you're browsing from?

This is presented as a solution to Wikipedia's content moderation problems, but it doesn't do much against that that wouldn't also be done by just having a bunch of separate, non-federated wikis that link to each others' pages. The difference between linking to a wiki in the federation network, and linking to one outside the federation network, is that the ui will be different and you'd have to make a new account to edit things.

I suppose it makes sense for a search feature? You can search for a concept and select the wiki which approaches the concept from your desired angle (e.g. broad overview, scientific detail, hobbyist), and you'd know that all the options were wikis that haven't been defederated and likely have some trustworthiness. With the decline of google and search engines in general, I can see this being helpful. But it relies on the trustworthiness of your home wiki's admin, and any large wiki would likely begin to have many of the same problems that the announcement post criticizes Wikipedia for. And all this would likely go over the head of any average visitor, or average editor.

I don't know. I'm happy this exists. I think it's interesting to think about what structures would lead to something better than Wikipedia. I might find it helpful once someone creates a good frontend for it, and then maybe the community can donate to create a free hosting service for Ibis wikis. Thank you for making it.

explanation, since this one might be more confusing than most:

Traffic congestion does indeed waste gas. However, any place worth driving to is going to have congestion--driving without congestion is easy, fast, and comfortable, so people generally won't take other options until roads become congested. Thus, congestion actually reduces gas usage overall, because it is only once areas become congested that people stop driving places.

Trying to avoid congestion, on the other hand, usually involves expanding roads, something which increases driving, and makes other forms of transportation less useful/comfortable, thus increasing gas usage overall.

You don’t owe anyone anything as a trans person. I disagree with the notion that you’re ugly, and I disagree with the notion that you look masculine, but even if you did, the goal of the trans movement isn’t “if you let us be trans then we’ll look perfect and fit exactly into the gender boxes that society expects us to!” The goal of the trans movement is to let people be happy and accepted as whoever they are, whatever way they present. Trans women can be beefy and hairy and fat just as much as they can be petite and curvy, and both are important. Transition is a process, and it’s often a long, hard process, and the goal isn’t just to normalize the idea of transitioning but the reality of it, where people of any gender can look like anything and they might even decide they’re happy to keep looking like that for the rest of their lives. Every person who dares to live and be trans and be proud of it is helping other trans people, regardless of how they look and whether or not they pass. If you want to help, talk to other trans people, organize, be kind and compassionate, don’t just give up because you think your very existence is hurting others. Sky, you’re worth more than you think you are, and you aren’t hurting anyone by being yourself.

for context (beyond that being Getting Over It): orteil42 is the creator of Cookie Clicker.

The time interval hasn’t changed. It’s 30 seconds, unless you are replacing a pixel that someone else placed, in which case it is 60 seconds.

That’s the lemmy.blahaj.zone instance logo

This one made me laugh. Most I just find to be novel, silly, or interesting, but a fair few are pretty funny to me.

Stuff like “Unions aren’t guaranteed to give you a raise, or any other benefits,” “Unions just want you to join so you can pay dues to them (think about all the things you can buy with 1% of your income!),” “Unions get in the way of workers having a healthy relationship with management,” “Unions make things less efficient, so we may dip into unprofitability and have to close down the factory…” Employers also often hire “neutral third parties” to tell employees that unions can be good, or used to be good, but aren’t at [employer].

Joining a union is the sensible thing to do, but employers fighting tooth and nail and breaking every slap-on-the-wrist law on the books is also the sensible thing for them to do, so they do everything from anti-union pamphlets to one-on-one intimidation meetings to calling ICE on their pro-union immigrant workers

This question is analogous to “why hasn’t anarcho-communism yet worked on a wide scale?” Which is a question with many, many facets to it. You’d have to ask a lot of questions separately.

If I were to try, though, I think the simple answer is “people who work in X area usually do not own the means of production and as such cannot redirect the end product to horizontalist organizations.” Most people can’t just quit their jobs to join a mutual aid group because, without being able to contribute things, the biggest thing a mutual aid group can pass around is time, and most mutual aid groups that exist irl are focused on doing tasks like “picking up prescriptions for others,” and cannot replace participation in the capitalist economy.

Nevermind how most governments don’t want horizontalist non-capitalist organizations to gain enough power to provide a viable alternative to living under capitalism.

“Poor Mexico, So far from God, so close to the United States.”

No. Extend is the part where they add their own proprietary features to the protocol that create interoperability problems with the rest of the services using the protocol.

Most fascist dictatorships have had large privatizations and all have favored corporations in economic policy. You act like business-state collaboration under fascism was unique to the nazis, but it was also central to fascist Italy, Francoist Spain, and right-wing dictatorships like those of Pinochet or the military in Brazil.

Fascism happens when capitalism is in crisis because it’s better for the corporations than socialism would be. Both Italy and Germany had strong socialist movements in the years before fascists came to power, and fascists are consistently funded by a business community that fears losing everything it has. The fascist emphasis on the state, nationalism, and war, is only because it’s required to suppress organized labor.

I don’t understand this political strategy in the long-run. If the left always unflinchingly votes for the leftmost candidate then the optimal strategy for the DNC is always to choose someone just 1% to the left of whoever the Republicans are running.

The trumpers aren’t strong because they always vote. They’re strong because everyone knows that, if Trump isn’t on the ballot, they won’t turn out to vote nearly as strongly.

Combine this with the fact that basically every business interest wants right-wing politics and you get the perpetual rightwards slide of the Democratic Party.

Every year, traffic congestion wastes billions of gallons of gas.

To be clear, this tumblr account is in no way associated with the actual Amtrak company