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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I’m sorry, but this is just really kind of disingenuous to start something like this next to a topic such as this. Your experience with one company or something is purely anecdotal and the controversy around Zwarte Piet is also very nuanced to this very day. The kind of nuance someone not from here will not get from a casual google search. For anyone that cares about actually understanding, here’s a rundown:

    Many people attributed Zwarte Piet as a fun and good role model for kids, not some kind of caricature clown to laugh at. Literally almost everyone grew up knowing and having a fond enjoyment of Zwarte Piet, like a childhood imaginary friend that always showed up when you needed a smile the most. And that creates a strong desire to set that positivity forth by continuing the tradition. It takes really good reasons to destroy something most people attribute to be part of the greater good of their lives.

    We try to understand racism, and strive to effectively reduce it rather than just mindlessly treat symptoms. Many people saw the existence of Zwarte Piet as a way to instill positive experiences to kids who might be isolated from having positive experiences with actual people of color. We know that in part racism comes about from not having enough (or too many bad) real world experiences with people of different skin colors. It is a type of fear of the unknown. As such, this still seems like solid reasoning. (Fun note, rats will also not help other stranger rats with a different fur color to escape even with no direct harm to themselves except when they have already lived alongside aside a rat with that fur color)

    Even people of color were not completely on one side, but for the ones that it hurt, it hurt loudly. Black people in the Caribbean (Also part of the Netherlands) still use Zwarte Piet to this day, because they do not care - They do not see the racism in it. Unfortunately there seems to be a correlation between being affected by racism and seeing the racism in Zwarte Piet, as many of us learned as the conversation marched on. And racists definitely did wield Zwarte Piet to make their racism be known. In a world without racism, Zwarte Piet would not be controversial. And many people were not acutely aware of the racism some people of color faced.

    The majority has wanted to get rid of it (since about 2018, actually), and most places have more accepted solutions in place now. But this does not mean that many people agree because we think Zwarte Piet is actually inherently racist. It’s because we’ve heard the concerns of people of color and weighed their burden to be more important to relieve than the perceived benefit of tradition and instilling a positive message on people that look different from yourself. It also didn’t help that the vast majority of people that still wanted to overrule those concerns were pretty obviously racist, which pushed even more people over the edge, because we don’t want to hold traditions in place that shield racists and bigots. Some countries could really learn from that.

    EDIT: Added a video about the rat study :)


  • I’d hope so, and not just a lucky streak from an AI that makes it seem extremely coherent. I’m not trying to take the piss out of them too much, but their responses do really make less than normal sense. But there are some minor signs they’re human, hence my stated uncertainty :P Let’s hope they get back to it soon if they are indeed human yes.



  • As long as you actually support getting funding to these people and actually support implementing when their solutions are proven to work. Starting with the solutions we already know currently work. If you’re not a scientist, it might feel the same as just praying for something good to happen. Just understand the people in white aren’t going to come out and say “we solved it all”. Have realistic expectations.




    1. Solar fusion isn’t a thing that exists as a technology (If anything, you’re referring to the nuclear fusion in the core of a sun).
    2. Nuclear fusion is a technology that does exists, but it’s only just barely able to break even in highly experimental test setups. It does not reverse entropy.
    3. You just simply can’t reverse entropy, not matter what technology you use. It would violate the second law of thermodynamics. You can decrease entropy by moving a place with less entropy to a location with more entropy, but somewhere entropy would still increase more than you decreased it in the other place. Everything lost to heat is permanently lost.

  • You’re not making any sense unfortunately. Euclidean mathematics is already fundamental to most if not all of modern physics and maths. It’s by no means a new concept that hasn’t been explored yet. As @Krauerking@lemy.lol put it in their response, science isn’t magic. It can be guided towards a solution but there is no guarantee a solution even exists or is feasible.

    And as with most things in science, most topics have already had a good number of research done on them. And the future does not look great for a breakthrough. Let alone one that can reverse all of climate change’s effects. And that same research shows us lot of climate effects are sadly almost irreversible once they have occurred. They can only be mitigated.

    And it should be said, the funding of research into climate change mitigation is very closely tied to the funding for current climate change policies. So if one isn’t taken seriously, the other one most likely will not receive much either. It makes it very easy for politicians to pretend they are working against climate change too, by under funding climate change mitigation research and then saying “well the scientists should fix the issue and they aren’t!”