Yes, the upstart-queen is from within the bee’s own hive. The hive permits only 1 queen and others are destroyed. The selfishness is not on the part of the worker who kills it, it’s on the upstart-queen who is trying to replace the main queen.

In the case of body cells and apoptosis, I’d view the actual human being as equivalent to the entirety of the hive/the queen bee, in which case, the process of apoptosis is selfless from the point of view of the cells killing themselves or other cells - in theory it’s for the good of the human being as a whole.

Yes, apoptosis is selfless. Cancer is the selfishness it fights against: a group of cells in selfish rebellion against the body.

Even collective animals have to fight against selfishness. Worker bees detect and kill upstart queens. Human cells are being destroyed all the time (apoptosis). Cancer is the result when that mechanism fails.

Yes, it is a choice. However one of the biggest problems is that so many of the good choices are gone. I’m talking about the positive social institutions and community organizations people used to belong to. The third spaces.

Communities have fragmented. Neighbours hate each other. Both of my neighbours hate our family. One is a childless, alcoholic husband and wife who also hate each other (they used to be nice years ago) who also hate us and give us creepy looks all the time. The other is green lawn-obsessed neighbour who hates us for the pine trees we have growing on our property and refuse to cut down (at our own expense) to suit their tastes.

We’re a society of severely mentally ill, isolated, confused, and angry people. Our villages and communities are all gone. We’re all a bunch of islands unto ourselves.

The manosphere is one symptom of a much larger problem. Look at it in isolation and you’ll miss the big picture. Authoritarianism is on the rise globally. Loneliness is reaching epidemic proportions. Society’s traditional institutions are a distant memory. All we have remaining are loose groups of people shouting at each other as the spectre of war lurks in the background.

As a first step. Really, it’s the easiest step along that path.

The hard part is building the new order among the ashes of the revolution. The leaders of the revolution will in all likelihood want to claim the spoils of victory for themselves. Who could blame them? It’s human nature.

Ultimately it comes down to might makes right. That’s the final argument of kings (the barrel of a gun). For all the progress we’ve made we still can’t escape the account of Thrasymachus.

The dirty secret of any home reno tax credit is that the industry gobbles them up with markups. The price ends up being exactly the same as it would be without the tax credit, so it’s a subsidy for uncompetitive installation companies rather than families who want to invest in green energy.

I like everything except the road-style bidirectional bike lane. They should split the directions of the bike lane. Head on collisions are very bad. Splitting the lanes makes those essentially impossible. It also makes it much easier for pedestrians to cross since they only need to deal with one direction of traffic at a time.

Just put that plant boulevard between the directions of the bike lane and create pedestrian islands to stand on.

Thanks for this.

Greed is a dangerous word on Lemmy. It’s usually associated with billionaires, not people from Latin America trying to make a better life for themselves.

It’s not free. It’s never been free. It’s $1.23 per letter for mail. But that $1.23 is way below cost. Canada Post lost over a billion dollars in 2024. The question is who should pay for the shortfall?

I think big companies sending out all those financial statements and bills should be paying more for postage. Others around here seem to think taxpayers should be subsidizing their postage. That makes no sense to me! We’re talking about billion dollar corporations. Why do they need a subsidy to send people mail?

The point is: do you need that stuff delivered daily? Or would it be fine if it only came on Fridays?

This really baffles me. What does Germany want with a bunch of obsolete Leopard 1s anyway? I guess they could break them down for parts and then send parts they already had to Ukraine, allowing Ukraine to repair some of their damaged Leopard 1s.

The problem is you’ve created a false binary between refugee and economic migrant. In reality there’s a huge spectrum of economic and political conditions which drive people to leave their home country and seek opportunities elsewhere, none of which has anything to do with greed. In so doing you’ve painted vast swathes of people as greedy, the same thing the Trump admin has been doing to justify using ICE to break up families.

Real refugees are a very narrow class of migrants. They’re narrowly defined by the UN because their acceptance is controversial in international politics. Almost all migrants are economic but almost none of those I would classify as greedy (people travelling from wealthy liberal countries to the US to pay lower taxes and make more money). Many economic migrants are people travelling from poor countries with corrupt/oppressive governments to seek a better life in the US, Canada, or Western Europe. These folks end up working as cleaning staff for businesses, delivery/Uber drivers, or working on farms picking produce. Hard jobs that no one would accept out of greedy motivations alone.

The remaining are international students (or recent graduates), usually from Asia, who are classified as economic migrants but I would consider political/social migrants. I know A LOT of these folks. I wouldn’t call any of them greedy. They’re here for a better opportunity, yes, but also to get away from their parents and the social/political problems back home.

Financial statements can be sent electronically. We are literally creating huge volumes of paper, spending a ton of money and creating a ton of CO2 and other industrial waste, just to send a bit of information that could’ve been an email that most people just throw away without reading anyway.

Buses and roads are used by millions to get to work/school. Police are protecting you even if you never call them (countries without credible police are extremely dangerous; police have an extremely powerful deterrent effect against organized crime). Even if you’ve never driven or used a bus you’ve definitely eaten food that has travelled on a road multiple times before reaching you (unless you live on a commune out in the country in which case you probably shouldn’t be paying taxes for all that stuff).

Anyway the point wasn’t even that there shouldn’t be a postal service, just that we don’t need daily delivery. If we eliminated non-addressed mail and made all financial statements electronic then the postal workers would be driving empty vans around town every day. We could easily switch to weekly delivery without impacting service much at all.

The volume of packages is very low compared to letters. I work in a mail room. We send out upwards of 10,000 letters per day. We also send out packages but the number is fewer than 100.

It’s a service that’s mostly used by businesses to send junk mail to everyone. The letter mail stuff almost entirely consists of financial statements and bills (so also business). Since CP is losing a ton of money, they’re effectively subsidizing all these businesses with below-cost mail delivery.

When was the last time you corresponded with someone via letter mail? I can’t even remember the last letter I got. It must’ve been years ago. Why do we need daily delivery for that?

That’s flat out wrong. You may be an immigrant but you have a warped picture of the landscape. Countless economic migrants are borderline refugees. They’re fleeing corrupt, crime-ridden, and low opportunity countries in the hopes of a better life. They aren’t qualified refugees because they aren’t fleeing imminent threats of violence but they’re definitely not doing so out of greed. They’re taking enormous personal risks with the dream of a better life. Many end up being economically exploited in their destination countries, hated, abused, and even arrested by ICE (in the case of many South and Central Americans moving to the US).

You’re also wrong about refugees being left wing. The most conservative people I’ve ever met belong to refugee communities from Somalia. They have extremely tight knit families and they support every new family who arrives from Somalia. They are extremely warm and loving people but they are devoutly conservative Muslims in their beliefs and practices.

I guess I’m one of those weird people who can naturally slip into the role of an evil character in a game and do things in the game I’d never do in real life. I think it may be similar to being an actor who plays villains in movies. It doesn’t work as well if you just try to think “I’m the bad guy, time to kill babies!” You have to think about your character’s backstory and give them really believable motivations for doing the bad things they do.

Walter White is a great example of a well-written villain. He’s motivated by regret over his missed opportunities, resentment towards friends who took advantage (Gray Matter), a sense of superiority and entitlement over his own abilities, and disappointment with a dead-end career. Many people can relate to these motivations.

The true key to any villain is that they don’t consider themselves a villain; they believe their actions are wholly justified. To roleplay an effective villain doesn’t mean you agree with your character’s justifications, but it helps a lot if you understand where they are coming from.

Seems like a lot of people base their D&D on themselves. I don’t really understand that. I always try to make characters totally different from myself to try to put my head in a different space. To me it’s a key part of escapism to try on someone else’s shoes for a bit.