and by realism, they mean “Everyone is white and all women meet their standards of what is attractive”, because of course, white men and supermodels are the vast majority of the human population in real life /s

And if I refuse?

I don’t think I’ve personally encountered anything too weird, but a family member of mine apparently once had a coworker named “Orangello”, who had a sibling named “Lemongello”

This makes me wonder what happens if a person with dual citizenship that includes one country that makes name changes hard and one that does not, legally changes their name in the easier one. Do the two countries end up disagreeing over what that person’s name is, or is there some kind of international agreement on recognizing the same names to prevent confusion for law enforcement and such?

I’ve actually heard a story from a family member once about briefly encountering a kid with that name and pronunciation. So either funny coincidence to meet the same kid, or there’s more than one set of parents out there that thought that was a clever name idea somehow.

To be fair, you dont actually have to terraform a planet to colonize it, theres nothing physics defying with having a civilization of people living in airtight buildings with controlled climate inside indefinitely. It still isnt a solution to climate change for any number of obvious reasons, but I dont know that anyone that seriously wants to see a mars colony start in their lifetime actually intends to terraform the place first. Terraforming gets thrown around casually in science fiction, but to actually reshape the entire surface and climate of a planet that way, even if we had the requisite technology and infrastructure right now, would be a process that would probably take millennia at best and be incredibly destructive to any infrastructure existing on the surface during that time. If you want to build a mars colony now, rather than at some point where we’re ancient history after human civilization has finished what would be to them the largest and longest construction project ever, then you pretty much have to accept Mars’s climate conditions for what they are and build around them rather than try to change them.

Does cutting fabric not dull the blades? It seems like a lot of fabrics should be tougher to cut through than paper?

thats not-a-lie (maybe that works better spoken than written)

tbf there are some pretty weird looking creatures in the ocean even now. Like, would the giant deep sea Isopods really look that out of place next to stuff like Anomalocaris? We still have plenty of spiky worm shaped things living on the bottom of the ocean. And for the softer side of animals, would things like siphonophores really look that out of place in a lineup of Cambrian fauna, if placed there and shown to someone who wouldnt have the knowledge to recognize what they actually were?

Given how things have been going with the republicans recently, I’m not entirely convinced that “kompromat” would even be garunteed to work on them anymore. If they can seemingly get away without serious consequences for virtually anything, what kind of threat does releasing incriminating information even become?

These days I’d say Henry Ford, which Id argue is even worse.

Assuming that these settings are a universal part of lemmy and not instance specific, I click my name in the top right corner, select settings from the dropdown, and then there is a page with 2 tabs, one saying settings and a second that I can switch to called “blocks”. In the blocks tab, I can view and add to lists of blocked users, communities, and instances. Just go to the instances drop down, and search “lemmy.ml” and click the option that appears to add it to the block list.

He’s an old man. Unless anti-aging research unexpectedly advances several orders of magnitude faster than its been doing in the next few years, he’ll be leaving office one way or another.

honestly, I eventually got fed up enough and instance blocked .ml on my account a couple weeks ago, and Ive barely noticed a difference. It was the bulk of lemmy right after it started to get some migration from Reddit, but it isnt nearly as essential these days already

He’s just turned down a job with the Trump white house though…

Tbf, being with a violently aggressive person in a tight enclosed space is still risky regardless

Wait, it’s been since high school that I read that book admittedly, but wasn’t it kinda reversed, where concepts of demons are in universe subconsciously inspired by the appearance of the aliens, rather than the aliens themselves being demons?

Realistically it is difficult, I agree, as capitalism doesnt look to be going anywhere and the current environment doesnt seem like one where increased regulation is likely to get passed. Honestly I think the most realistic path to some improvement at the moment is research into automation tech for the kinds of farm roles that currently rely on cheap labor. Not that capitalists wont just take the cost savings and still pay people less, but its at least possible to pay people more without increasing the cost of staples if the available revenue can be spread across fewer more productive workers, and because operating complex machinery and maintaining it take more time to learn, such workers at least might have a better shot at organizing and thereby forcing that wage increase, because their skills could be harder to replace. And because the technology theoretically allows for increased profits, funding developing it might stand a chance at still getting through even current political conditions.

Honestly, that might be required even in a more equitable economic system anyway though, at some level that kind of work seems like it would have pretty slim margins, so even if the profits were distributed fairly, it still might not be enough to make those jobs not terrible.

Yeah, I’m absolutely opposed to this deportation thing, it’s cruel and if anything I feel that we should be encouraging more immigrants to come here, but the “it’ll be bad because it’ll get rid of all the people who do these jobs american citizens don’t want to do” line does sorta gloss over the fact that if the job conditions are so bad that if people have literally any other option the role goes unfilled, something probably needs to be done to improve the conditions of that job, especially if it is as vital as food production.

I suspect its more that they just arent as “important”, in terms of extreme wealth or active political power, as some of the other guys. Its not like Trump, who both was running for office, had judges in some of his cases that he put there, and who now has an electoral victory, and its not like the ones in congress, who are, well, in congress and therefore have other congresspeople to protect them or at least want them to stay if theyre on the same side. A lawyer and a guy who is rich, but not like Jeff Bezos rich, just dont have as much protecting them, which both means they cant get away with stuff other guys can, and if one is more cynical, represent people who cant fight back as much if thrown under the bus.