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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • I don’t dispute your point about nurses and housekeeping, but when people talk about underpaid doctors, they’re not talking about the consultants with Teslas, they’re talking about the junior doctors with a mountain of student debt. They may earn more than nurses, but after 7 years of accumulating debt they kind of need it.

    Sure, the rich ones whose mummy and daddy paid for it are fine, but becoming a doctor for ordinary people in this country is pretty thankless and rough, so unless we want doctors to just be toffs we do need to offer compensation on the assumption they won’t be rich going in.

    Again, not disputing that nurses deserve better too, but there’s no need to disparage other groups to make that point.



  • A solution for a small but notable chunk of the problem perhaps.

    There’s no way that we can solve the entire problem that way.

    Before human civilisation trees covered entire nations that are mostly bare today. Humanity cut down a lot of trees during prehistory, and it presumably had an impact on the climate. But it was nothing compared to our fossil fuel burning.

    And that’s pretty much the upper limit of what we can dream of achieving, realistically it seems unlikely that the UK will ever go back to mostly woodland, what countries will? Its have to be most of the countries in viable climates, and probably means most farmland, and we’d still just make a small blip compared to the scale of the problem.

    Once we’re truly carbon neutral, and we’ve covered the world in trees, we’ll still have more carbon in the atmosphere, a lot more, and I guess a few billion starving people since we’ve turned the farms into forests that can’t sustain our population, and we’d still be a few degrees warmer.

    We need a way to turn co2 back to solid carbon that won’t decompose, that’s the only way out long term (lower priority than carbon neutral of course).

    Not to say that planting trees is bad or anything, it’s just not a solution to the level of problem we’ve created, it never could be.



  • scratchee@feddit.uktoScience Memes@mander.xyzT. rex
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    21 days ago

    I don’t think that’s what the meme is claiming.

    I think instead it’s just claiming that all fossils have the same implied increase in maximum size implied by the paper, not just T rex.

    I’m guessing the illiterate paleo fans were excited that maybe T rex was king of the dinosaurs again, but the logic fails if all the dinosaurs get bigger max sizes…




  • scratchee@feddit.uktoScience Memes@mander.xyzLinguistics
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    30 days ago

    “Divorced from the context that brought them about” Ahh, so you’re complaining about all the Germanic words in English, or the Latin words? The whole point of their diatribe is that the “brain rot” words you hate are little different from most words. It’s just that for some words the “in group” is Latin speakers, and for some words it’s some group nerding out about their own topic that spread their word to the rest of us… actually, I’m still talking about Latin speakers.


  • Reasoning is obviously useful, not convinced it’s required to be a good driver. In fact most driving decisions must be done rapidly, I doubt humans can be described as “reasoning” when we’re just reacting to events. Decisions that take long enough could be handed to a human (“should we rush for the ferry, or divert for the bridge?”). It’s only the middling bit between where we will maintain this big advantage (“that truck ahead is bouncing around, I don’t like how the load is secured so I’m going to back off”). that’s a big advantage, but how much of our time is spent with our minds fully focused and engaged anyway? Once we’re on autopilot, is there much reasoning going on?

    Not that I think this will be quick, I expect at least another couple of decades before self driving cars can even start to compete with us outside of specific curated situations. And once they do they’ll continue to fuck up royally whenever the situation is weird and outside their training, causing big news stories. The key question will be whether they can compete with humans on average by outperforming us in quick responses and in consistently not getting distracted/tired/drunk.







  • So because there’s moral limits to when it would “ever be performed”, there should be no legal limits to when it would ever be performed? Surely by that logic we don’t need laws against murder either, after all, that would be immoral and sometimes you have to kill people in self defence, so murder laws just get in the way.

    This coming from a pro choice person, I do think there’s a good justification for allowing later abortions, but as the previous poster said, it’s not helpful to pretend there’s no complexity or that there should be no limits at all.