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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • Ships can register any nation as their flag state, so they often choose flags of convenience based on whoever has the lowest fees or regulations – or more insidiously, whoever has the least ability to hold companies accountable.

    This is why so many shipping companies register in Liberia, Panama, and the Marshall Islands. Also Mongolia, which is landlocked.

    So unless we want to fill the oceans and ports with ships that have nuclear reactors with no regulation, no safety measures, and no accountability, we’re gonna have to fix the last hundred years of international maritime law.


  • a bit melancholic sometimes

    Viewer be advised: If you’ve ever lost someone you took for granted, or hurried through what should have been a formative time in your life instead of slowing down and appreciating it while you had it, then this show knows how to punch you in the tender bits, and it will not stop.

    I cried during every one of the first four episodes.

    10/10



  • That’s the only way to offer free services?! What about donation-based models? Maybe Mozilla could have set up something like what Brave has, except not based around a sketchy cryptocurrency.

    Please correct me if I’m mistaken, but I thought Brave only gave donatable tokens to users as a reward for watching ads… ads which Brave curated for the user based on their activity. It’s just targeted ad revenue with extra steps.

    At first blush, it seems to me that both Brave and Anonym want to be the middleman for targeted advertising. What am I missing?



  • I’d argue your SO might not be displaying neurotypical behavior.

    Between 50-85% of autistic spectrum people (plus a significant portion of people with PTSD or depression) experience Alexithymia, or significant difficulty in recognizing and analyzing their emotional state.

    When I’m feeling bad, my SO frequently assumes I’m withholding the reason from him in some sort of passive-aggressive mindgame, and I have to remind him that I barely know what my mood is, let alone what’s causing it.

    I’m getting better at it, but it’s a lot of work and I still regularly mistake stomachaches for anxiety.






  • There are quite a few comanies now that follow some version of “name-blind hiring,” where the system scrubs the name from the resume before the interviewer sees it, for the sake of avoiding biases. These companies would be a good place to start.

    Outside of name-blind hiring, a lot of people use nicknames or given names on resumes, particularly if they have non-english names that could tempt biases or be hard to pronounce. It is widespread and completely kosher as long as HR has your current legal name for your background check and W-2.

    No matter what, HR will need your legal name. But in my experience, HR departments tend to be accepting and accustomed to maintaining confidentiality. And they don’t make the hiring decisions, anyway.



  • I’ve only just recently begun exploring my gender identity. This is all very new for me, and very raw.

    Gender is subjective. Defining it is like trying to nail jello to a wall. I cannot think of a single description that is exclusively feminine. When I imagine myself as a woman, I see myself in a new light, through a new lens. It feels like home. Gender is a construct, but that’s not to say it’s meaningless – marriage is a construct, too. If it truly is possible to redefine gender as anything you want, then why do I want so very badly to be a woman and not a man?

    I never realized how much I despised my body hair until the first time I removed it. The first time my spouse called me “beautiful,” I cried, because until that moment I did not realize how many decades I’d been waiting to hear it. Gender is expressive. It’s how I see myself, but also how others see me. The desire to express is the desire to be known; I want people to know that I am gentle and nurturing, fragile yet strong, irrational yet relatable in my strangeness.

    But I could be wrong about this, every single word of it, and it wouldn’t make any difference. Because I started down this path by deciding to want what I wanted, to feel what I felt, to act without trying to justify my actions to some invisible judge. And when I wear a cute outfit and see myself in the mirror, I smile. When my spouse calls me “wife,” I blush. When I think of femininity, I think of reinventing myself. To me, femininity is daring to live a life I have dreamed for myself. It is not troubling my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood.

    Gender is nothing. But it’s also everything.


  • Despite the fediverse’s reputation for leaning leftist, I feel like such a stranger with how often I find myself arguing that the collective action and solidarity of the working class can and has improved the material outcomes of nations, with or without the capital of the owner class, and with or without the approval of the government.

    Fight in whatever way makes sense to you. Some people will carpool or use less hot water. Some will put peer pressure on wealthy acquaintances. Some will alter design requirements or RFQs. Some will [redacted] a pipeline. It all works towards the same end.

    Yes, this is the fault of the owner class, but who do you think is going to force them to change if we all sit on our hands and say, “I dunno, man, that sounds like someone else’s responsibility.”




  • I’m gonna post this link to a former comment of mine, since this subject comes up a lot. Neither EVs nor public transit is a magic bullet.

    The efficiency of public transit depends on ridership; nowhere in the world does it actually achieve 100% occupancy for more than a few minutes at a time, and nothing is more wasteful than a train running a circuit with only one passenger. At least by my calculations, it would take an average occupancy rate increase of 1.6x (for electric light rail) to 2.4x (for electric busses) over pre-pandemic levels for US public transit to reach parity with EVs, both in terms of electricity per passenger mile and tons of raw material per capita (such as steel, aluminum, copper, glass, and plastic). We’d need higher occupancy than the trains in Europe and the busses in Taiwan. Whether or not that’s geographically possible in North America is an open question.

    Ebikes are great, no question there, but thanks to parasitic drain in cheap chargers, they use 1/3rd the energy a typical EV does (kWh per passenger-mile, adjusted for occupancy but not speed), when they should use only 1/10th. That’s a problem I expect to see solved in the next year or so, but it’s a great reminder that nothing runs on magic.

    As I say in the linked comment, public transit has critical advantages in the fields of urbanism and human-centric city design. I like trains and busses, and I vote for them every chance I get, it just bothers me when people conflate these advantages with environmental impact.