If he were a chicken, he’d probably care more about dealing with bird flu, even if for purely selfish reasons.

x3 is an emoticon, its like xD but more furry as the 3 is like a cat’s mouth shape kinda. Sorta like the difference between :) and :3

In my family growing up, pancakes for dinner was a common enough thing, but my father constantly insisted that if you’re having them for lunch or dinner they’re called flapjacks instead and only pancakes when made for breakfast. And every time we had them I’d mess with him by pretending to forget and asking him if he was making pancakes that night.

Even there though, what is the actual point of a phone app controlled smart toilet, even if you open sourced the whole thing? Unlocking one’s phone and tapping the app icon, and then presumably a button on the app, is going to take more time than one press of a lever that one is right next to anyway, and the latter doesn’t present as many points of failure.

I’ve generally heard the origin explained as coming from an offshoot of the general scifi community in the late 70s to early 80. There are a lot of animal people in sci fi (things like aliens designed after animal people, or stories about animals given human traits and characteristics, or people being spliced with animal dna), and fantasy stuff which has a related audience, and some people particularly liked that trope.

I doubt they really have plans that far, and if they do, I doubt that a full on war to destroy western Europe would be that plan, vs trying the same tactics to manipulate the population as have been tried on the US. The US, and Russia, have the capacity, at least from their nuclear arsenals, to destroy Europe, certainly, but that capacity exists within Europe too. A full on war with Europe is unlikely for the same reason that a full on war between the US and the Soviet Union did not occur.

Beyond that, it should be considered that shared autocracy is not a particularly great incentive for alliance. It can represent a source of common interest for the elite against anything that threatens autocracy in general, but beyond that, there is no reason for an oligarch in one country to not see an oligarch in another power as much more than competition. If you want to own and control all you can, someone else also doing that is to be regarded with suspicion, not natural trust.

Avoiding flushing the water is even harder

Isn’t this the entire “dollar store” industry? My understanding was that these kinds of thing were the entire reason that business model was profitable. Or does this company do it worse than say dollar general or something does?

I mean, the whole “no ethical consumption under capitalism” or “all corporate ethics are fake” type stuff has plenty of truth to it, but at the same time, one does have to get any good or service not made oneself from somewhere, and corporations are made up of people with different views about what they’re personally willing to do, or how much they think taking unethical actions even is the profitable thing. So, there is still room for some businesses to be worse than others.

I don’t think they could actually stop such a technology from being deployed on earth in such a scenario. Nor do I think they would really object, it seems doubtful to me that they would all want to go to mars, and for those that don’t, trying to prevent it’s use is counter to their interests.

The technology to allow them to live the kind of life they would want on Mars would also greatly decrease the human impact of the climate crisis applied to earth. A mars colony fundamentally requires the ability to insulate an entire city, to ultimately civilization, from a climate more inhospitable than we could render earth even if we burned every scrap of coal and oil in the ground, and a billionaire would probably want more than just that bare minimum functional civilization to live someplace.

Ive ended up making one of these myself lol. When I came over to lemmy from reddit around the third party apps thing, I tried to create a community for the game Spore (a bit niche these days, but it had a small but active reddit community that was fun, and I hadnt really realized yet that the small size of lemmy would mean individual game communities wouldnt really be viable except for a handful with very large playerbases).

Ended up posting a few things I made in game myself, and I think I got one or two posts from other people, but nobody else really joined it and eventually I moved on to other games again (I tend to go through my library in cycles of a few months).

I may come back to it if I get back into that game someday, and I am still active on lemmy, so if someone started trying to use it as a space to spread hate thinking it abandoned, I am still around to remove it, so for the moment I dont think mine at least poses a problem per se, though I suppose if I ever tire of the platform as a whole I’ll need to either ask around if anyone else wants it or else look up how to close it/ask an instance admin to if that’s needed.

A hostage implies the purpose of holding that person is as leverage to extract some concession from someone, whereas a prisoner does not necessarily imply that intent and could be held for any reason?

I just use the thing in Firefox where you can attach a website link to the home screen so that it acts like an app and doesn’t show the url bar when opened, that seems to result in the feed being composed of pages (though going back a page isn’t an option at the bottom, just going to the next one.)

To be fair, our ancestors, evolutionary speaking, didnt resemble us that much if you go back far enough. A system that just considers a few key features a “child to be protected” is probably more adaptable than if every change in appearance had to be accompanied with a corresponding mutation to whatever gives us our mental picture of what our young should look like, for them to still get taken care of.

What if I want the reverse, shoes that have nice cushion to them but look like toe shoes?

I just grab whatever random spices I have that sound good and add a few shakes

Dont I wish, but no, don’t even get scales…

The Lemmy three day challenge

We don’t even know if there is a reason or not. If stuff like cause and effect are properties of the universe itself, they they don’t necessarily have to apply to it coming into existence (and if time and space are merely a part of the universe with no equivalent beyond, then the concept of it being caused by something runs into the issue of there being no time before it for a cause to occur and no place before it for that event to happen in).

There could be some equivalent of all those things of course, that the universe exists within, but we can’t just assume that.