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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • Depends on what you mean by far away and what kind of fish you’re talking about. Big fish like tuna are often caught far out at sea, but they’re also caught by the same small boats that do charter fishing an hour or two out from the shore. There’s plenty of inshore fishing that would be at risk, especially in bays where the salt would be less easily dispersed. I used to work at a fish market, and offhand I can think of multiple fishing industries that would be put at risk by carelessly dumping salt back in the ocean. The majority of shellfish, for example, is caught within sight of the beach. I don’t know if it’s still the case, but there used to be a ton of fishing done in Boston Harbor, and I’ve heard stories of crates of lobsters being opened only to find the lobsters carrying pieces of bodies dumped by the mob off the docks and into the harbor.


  • You’re correct, but so are they. In the long term and at a large scale, it balances out, but in the short term, there is a very real concern about local salinity levels wherever you’re reintroducing that salt to the ocean. Keeping up with the desalination plants will be a tricky business of logistics to avoid destroying the ecosystem around where you’re dumping that salt.

    Adding the salt into water leaving sewage systems before it returns to the ocean might be a good idea, as you could basically kill two birds with one stone: put the salt back in the ocean while also avoiding damaging the local ecosystem with the fresh water of the sewage system reducing local salinity levels. But I’m no engineer or water treatment specialist, so I dunno if that’s at all a real solution.


  • I think the real issue is with schooling before college, and this article seems to be looking at college as the same sort of environment as the previous 12 years of school, which it isn’t. So much of everything through high school has become about putting pressure on teachers to hit good grades and graduating student percentages that actually teaching kids how to learn and how to collaborate with others has become a tertiary goal to simply having them regurgitate information on the tests to hit those 2 metrics.

    I have taught myself a number of things on a wide range of subjects (from art to 3d printing to car maintenance and more. City planning and architecture are my current subjects of interest) and I’ve always said when people ask about learning all this stuff that I love to learn new things, despite the school system trying to beat it out of me. I dropped out of college despite loving my teachers and the college itself both because I didn’t like my major (the school was more like a trade school, we chose our majors before we even got to the college) and because I had never learned how to learn in the previous 12 years of school. I learned how to hold information just long enough to spit it out on the test and then forget it for the next set for the next test. Actually learning how to find information and internalize it through experience came after I left school.



  • Very true, but it’s precisely that wealth disparity that concerns me. I’ve seen the current US wealth disparity described as being on par with the disparity in France just before the French Revolution happened, where the cost of a loaf of bread had soared to more than the average worker made in a day. I worry that the more than half a century of anti-union propaganda and “get what I need and screw everybody else” attitude has beaten down the general public enough that there simply won’t be enough of a unified effort to enact meaningful change. I worry about how bad things will have to get before it’s too much. How many families will never recover.

    But these are also very different times compared to the 1920s in that we’ve been riding on the coattails of the post WW2 economic boom for almost 70 years, and as that continues to slow down we might see some actual pushback. We already have, with every generation being more progressive than the last.

    But I still can’t help but worry.



  • And your logic is bass ackwards. The solution is to educate people about how bad letting cats live outdoors is, not pretend that their pet is a feral. All you’ll do that way is eventually come home to broken windows once they find out who stole their cat. Tell them how much better (and longer) their cat’s life will be if they live indoors vs. outdoors and you’re much more likely to actually change something.

    The majority of people don’t know any better. And if they grew up with cats, it’s very likely that that’s how they were taught that you care for a cat. It’s only been in the past 20 years or so that the consensus on how cats should be kept has shifted from outdoors to indoors. Hell, look at how common declawing cats still is.


  • And I want to cull people like you. A shame we don’t always get what we want.

    Cats should be kept indoors for a variety of reasons, including that they’re one of the largest threats to native species in the world and that they live longer indoors anyways due to the lack of picking up parasites and are at no risk of being preyed upon by larger predators. But to say you want to murder animals en masse just because they don’t understand property laws and do their business outside like… some sort of animal would is absurd, bordering on psychopathic. Might as well sit on your porch with a shotgun on your lap in case somebody’s dog decides to pee on your bushes.








  • I saw a series of studies once for HRT (not a surgery, but relevant to transgender research and major bodily changes) that said that 90% of patients reported either an improvement or at least no change in their quality of life after HRT compared to before. Of the 10% who reported a worse quality of life or stopped treatment, the majority of causes were due to external factors such as harassment/hate crimes or being disowned by friends and family. The least commonly reported cause was post HRT regret, and the vast majority of that 10% said that they would be restarting HRT as soon as they safely could.

    Not only is that a huge success rate, but it also says something about the percentage of people who would respond to such a survey, as going “stealth” as it’s referred to, can be a major component of transgender people’s safety considerations. If people don’t know your trans, you can’t be assaulted for it. And considering the sexual assault rate for trans women in the US is 80%, they have reason to worry about that sort of thing. Also, a quick Google search tells me that the average response rate for medical surveys is 76% for in-person surveys, 65% for postal, and online surveys are 46% for website based and 51% for email surveys. So that 59% isn’t too far outside the range as long as it isn’t in-person surveys.