• 2 Posts
  • 715 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 1st, 2023
  • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Doesn't tying income class to moving targets within those classes defeat the point of measuring them?
    2·
    13 days ago

    You can track things relating to those groups, though. Like if we consider the 20th percentile and below to be the very poorest in society, no matter how rich or poor society happens to be on average or what the wealth distribution is like - we can see how the very poorest fare in terms of education, health outcomes, etc over time.

    Or like, looking at the median value - sure the amount of money the median-income worker has will change, but the median-income worker could afford a standard of living much closer to someone at the 90th percentile in 1960 than today’s median-income worker can.

    Looking at things like this allows you to draw different comparisons.

  • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.mltoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Have you ever encountered large carnivores in the wild?
    7·
    17 days ago

    Underwater, I have. I’ve seen two - a group of large barracuda and one extremely large eel - looked like a Giant Moray.

    I was probably like 14-16 at the time, diving in the Atlantic and Pacific respectively.

    Reactions for both were just to stay away from them and make sure they didnt come closer, while trying to get a good look. It was kind of surreal seeing them, because you don’t usually expect to encounter things like these.

    Barracuda aren’t particularly scary, but they are some of the largest fish I’ve seen underwater - probably around 5ft (1.5m) long and I was within 20ft (6m) of two or three of them. They are also quite aggressive, though not usually to divers. I was swimming up from below them coming up from around 60-80ft (18-24m), so we got a good view of them swimming around near the surface.

    This Giant Moray is the largest creature I’ve ever seen in the water bar-none. We were diving a reef, and as we swam over some rocky structures, there was this hollow in the rock - like a partly-covered underwater grotto - and in it I could see this absolutely massive eel. I thought it was some kind of coral or something until I saw its face. The surface I saw of the eel had to be nearly 1.5ft wide (45cm), since they’ye ovoid in cross-section I may have gotten the impression that it was larger than it really was. But even still, it must have been nearly that large in diameter and probably about 9ft (2.7m) long, though I couldn’t see all of it at once. I was a bit frightened just because of the sheer size of the eel, and I thought they were more aggressive than they are, but we couldn’t get too close because of the rock. It was really cool to see. In years since then I thought maybe I was misremembering the event because it seemed surreal to see such a large eel - but then I researched a bit and found that giant morays can be… giant… while there are other species that I’ve also seen that are much smaller.

    I think they’re neat. Like with all wild animals, though, I want to keep my distance. Especially to the aquatic variety.

    I experienced a sense of awe in both situations as well as a very real sense of how dangerous these animals could be if they wanted to be.

  • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.mltoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•“ANIMAL FUCKERS WELCOME!”
    33·
    20 days ago

    Patel said the change allows applications from people who have been victims of these crimes to be considered. Before the shift, Patel said, people who were “on either side” of crimes including “prostitution, bestiality and trafficking” were “automatically disqualified.”

    “Whose side of what, the bestiality?” Kennedy asked. “So you disqualified the animal?”

    …

    “Why would you even get into bestiality?” Kennedy asked. He added: “If Joe participated in bestiality, not as the animal, but as the human, don’t you think he ought to be disqualified?”

    “If he voluntarily did it, sure,” Patel said…

  • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.mltoPolitical Memes@lemmy.world•Donnie Does Dallas
    1·
    24 days ago

    We shouldn’t engage in this, to be sure. But it does serve as good propaganda for homophobes(I think), if we’re to find a silver lining.

    If suddenly their political identity is associated with “self-hating gay person”, and they desperately do not want to be perceived that way, they have to distance themselves from that political identity somewhat or defend themselves which will invariably look desperate and keep the story going.

    Similarly, if they know they aren’t using Grindr at these conventions, but they believe there is massive Grindr traffic, then they have to assume tons of people around them are using Grindr - which breeds distrust and ties back into point 1 a bit.

    We still shouldn’t do this - if and when this is widely known to be false, it’ll make the liberals/leftists who traffic in this misinfo, and by extension their views, less trustworthy. I just think that, if you look at it myopically, it’s a good op.