Conspiracy being a real phenomenon and the manufacture and spread of conspiracy theories to help one particular narrative are two separate concepts.

MKUltra and Illuminati running the world/flat earth/young earth/great replacement/etc are two different types of things. You have to ask who benefits from spreading the idea around. Flat/young earth is a particularly easy example, certain religious movements benefit from convincing people those are valid ideas.

I think you can reach out via txt, just format your message to subtly acknowledge that a response is unnecessary. So, instead of wording your message normally as something that would begin a back-and-forth, word it more like an old fashioned letter, or something else where a response isn’t expected. Can talk about whatever, updates on you, your thoughts about this or that, hopes she/her family are doing better, etc etc. Then just end with an old sounding “hope this finds you well” type of thing. Just avoid non-rhetorical questions or anything that pressures her to return contact. When she’s ready, she can write you back.

Yeah, this has always bugged me too. It slows down our accumulation of old content, which is one of the big draws of platforms like this. People love to go to reddit for answers to questions originally asked years ago, and they could potentially use Lemmy for that too, if our backstock got substantial enough. As a much smaller userbase, though, we kinda need every thread we can get.

Yeah, but I like to try to use it to move in a certain direction emotionally. Like, instead of pure sad, I’ll put on something sad and wistful to move a little in that direction, or sad and angry to shift a little that way, depending on my current needs.

Like, this is sad and wistful, with a touch of determination:

https://youtu.be/es9MQweZzvc

This is sad and angry:

https://youtu.be/6NXnxTNIWkc

This helps avoid wallowing in the pure sad feeling, which I don’t really like.

Given the distance required, what kind of economic payoff could be possible from such an expensive project? It’s not like overland would be a cheaper transport option than Pacific shipping routes or anything. It’s not just the Bering Strait being the problem with connecting the two after all, but the fact that there’s nothing in NE Siberia or NW Alaska to bother connecting together. Are we making it for the polar bears maybe? Or are people going to drive the thousands of miles from Juneau to Vladivostok to sightsee?

Big yellow flame probably indicates its not getting enough air mixing with the fuel for complete combustion. I’m guessing something got clogged up with soot, or possibly rust. Look around at all the little holes the gas comes out of, see if any of them are clogged up. If you find some, something like a safety pin can probably get them opened up.

5/10 interestingness gets 0 seconds of watch time for me, there’s just too much quality content produced in my topics of interest every day for me to keep up with. I already have to miss some 7/10 projects just because there’s only so much free time in a day.

Regarding the time question, for something that barely crosses the “okay I’ll watch it” threshold, 10-15 minutes is probably what I’ll give it. It can be longer than that, I’ll just skip through parts of the video for the gist to decide if I want to give it more time.

Worth noting though, that for extremely interesting content, a 15 minute duration actually dissuades me from watching it, as I doubt there’s enough time to cover much of anything at a decent level in that little an amount of time. So like, for a neat history vid on a topic I’d like to hear more about, if it’s 30 minutes or less then I’m less likely to give it a chance, unless it’s covering something super narrow where there wouldn’t be as much to talk about. But if you’re going to cover a major historical event, you better be at least a half hour. There are some exceptions to this, Indy Nidell(sp?) is a good example, but it’s my general rule.

Yes, absolutely.

I’d probably take something like 10% of it and go ahead and enjoy spending that, you can get some cool stuff for 1.5k that you can enjoy right now.

How you want to invest the bulk of it depends on your plans, but don’t forget that things like a reliable car or a computer you might need for future schooling are also “investments” of sorts into your future.

I’m not so knowledgeable about all the different sorts of investments out there, so maybe someone else can help out there. Knowing what your medium-long term goals are will help them fine-tune their advice though. Are you planning on any sort of post-secondary education or job training?

I find it useful to remember that entertainment products are designed to be both understandable and fun, where real life was not designed to be understandable and fun.

With that in mind, no, I would not.

Yeah, I won’t say it’s impossible or anything. I just think there’s other reasonable explanations too.

Personally I just avoid mentioning China when I’m over there. lol It’s easier to keep everything civil if you avoid naming names, and China is a particularly sore spot for them. You also can’t forget that free speech is not a foundational part of their ideology like it is ours. They’re more about seizing the means of production than the free contesting of ideas.

It does feel a little like walking on eggshells.

I kinda doubt it. Let’s not forget this is a global community, and Marxism-Leninism has different levels of support in different parts of the world.

If this was a state-funded project, I think the development would have gone a lot more swiftly, and the leads would be even more puritanical in pushing their beliefs. As it is, I’ve argued pretty extensively from a liberal perspective on .ml before, even personally with dessalines, and while they don’t exactly love me over there, I’m careful to respect their rules and they haven’t banned me.

I think they really are just idealistic supporters of communism, mostly from places where that’s a little more common.

When the Generative Agents system was evaluated for how “believably human” the agents acted, researchers found the AI versions scored higher than actual human actors.

That’s a neat finding. I feel like there’s a lot to unpack there around how our expectations are formed.

Vampires…? Uh, garlic. lol

What flavor of apocalypse matters a lot. If it’s zombies, ammo becomes critical. If it’s nuclear, ammo is less important and water filtration probably becomes critical. If it’s a gigantic asteroid that blots out the sun, water is easy to find but food is critical.

For an unknown apocalypse, I think I’ll go with gasoline. Not critical in and of itself, but helps a lot more generally with a lot of stuff, being able to power a generator and move camp more easily.

It actually has a hopeful ending, fyi, despite being about such difficult subject material. It’s not all gloom, though, it is a very well-made movie, overall. Liam Neeson is fantastic in it too.

Schindler’s List was shown in one of our history classes, I probably never would have watched it otherwise due to being black and white and me thinking I wouldn’t like that.

I can’t say that I enjoyed it, it’s not a particularly “enjoyable” film. It was moving though, and talking in class about what humans are capable of was interesting.

I cannot specifically remember any of the others we watched, but I remember that I liked movie days because you tended not to get homework. They certainly weren’t nearly as memorable though.

The line I’ve seen the most is that god uses even sinful unbelievers to accomplish his goals.

In my experience it’s usually the whole factory farming thing that bothers them the most. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone complain about someone else having a pet dog, unless they weren’t taking care of it or something.

Would be interested to see a poll on how they feel about ethically raised livestock, if that’s more acceptable than most of the stuff you find in a supermarket.

That being a Mark Twain quote was apparently just a made-up thing that circulated on social media. According to Twain experts, he never said anything of the sort.

https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check/quote-comparing-politicians-and-diapers-falsely-attributed-to-mark-twain-idUSL1N2P21VE/

Apparently they have a saying in Moldova, goes something like “you should change your underwear and your politicians frequently, and for the same reason.”