Most of the world actually has legal marriage between first cousins. In many places it’s not even taboo. And on top of that, the chances of genetic issues with it are actually pretty small. It’s multiple generations of first cousins having kids where it becomes a problem.

It’s wild how close the Amazon river basin comes to the west coast of the continent without draining into the ocean on that side.

Fuck Intuit and H&R Block, all my homies use FreeTaxUSA.

From what I understand, some degree of nuclear power is always going to be necessary. This is because while we tend to think of excess power in the energy grid as being stored away, this in fact is not the case and we only use power as it’s actively available. Excess power is wasted. The major downside of renewables is that they’re circumstancial. Solar energy is only available during clear days, wind power is only available on windy days, etc. Until we massively improve our energy storage capabilities we’re going to need some kind of constant supply of power backing the other ones when they aren’t available. Without adequate nuclear energy available, that’s going to be fossil fuels. And when compared to coal, oil, and natural gas, nuclear energy is unbelievably better for the environment. The only byproduct is the spent fuel which is dangerous, but we have control over where it ends up which is more than can be said for fossil fuels.

I’ve always found the Bible to be so arbitrary. A bunch of old dudes at a few councils 1000+ years ago decided what they wanted their core beliefs to be. And then they decided what books they wanted to recognize as legitimate in the Bible. The only difference between which books are “apocryphal” or “heretical” and which are “inspired by God” is which books those old men chose and which they rejected. Why is the fever dream that is Revelations considered legitimate when other more coherent books aren’t? Understanding how arbitrary it all is played a big role in my deconversion from Evangelical Christianity. The people who tout the Bible as the “one truth” rarely understand how arbitrary the process that got them that book was. They would spin some tale about how “God spoke through those men” or whatever, but it’s all just bullshit excuses. You can imbue any event with supernatural backing when it conveniently fits your narrative.

And I’m not even someone who thinks that “all religion is poison” or whatever. Just the “Bible based” belief system that treats the Bible as infallible. I think logic and emotion are just as important of tools when talking about morality and religious guidance as the Bible is.

This is very true in my experience. My college expenses were slashed in half when I moved out of the dorm and into a tiny studio apartment across the city from my campus. It also really hurt my ability to study when I was so far from campus. It hurt my studies even moreso when I needed to take on a part time job to try mitigating the costs of my rent. It’s a really toxic system, because the parts of cities with universties tend to be the expensive parts of cities.

BuT tHe FrEe MaRkEt WiLl HoLd BuSiNeSsEs AcCoUnTaBlE!

True. It does look like Peertube has some instances with videos hosted on them. But yeah, storage and bandwidth costs would be much tougher problems to solve than for lemmy as soon as it started to scale up.

I’m 90/10 on it being YouTube. I mean, they’ve already shit the bed plenty in the past. But with all the fediverse stuff picking up steam, Peertube is just sitting there waiting to enter the discourse.

Ahhh, I completely missed that news among the API pricing bullshit. I guess I was so focused on the fact that they’ve basically just nuked third party apps, that I didn’t notice that even if they reversed their shitty pricing, they also killed NSFW content on those apps.

I’m a bit OOTL on this I guess, but what NSFW policy changes are you talking about specifically? I was under the impression that they’ve stayed committed to continuing to allow NSFW content. I can’t seem to find any headlines mentioning any changes with all this API nonsense.

With that said though, I did see Huffman respond to a question in his AMA in a negative sounding way towards NSFW content, so that’s ominous. Also, I’ve heard that Reddit has recently been cracking down on subreddits with inactive moderators and not allowing appeals, with a specific target aimed at NSFW communities. Is there anything more specific that has come out lately with the API changes? Or are we talking more generally about their bans on subs like /r/WatchPeopleDie and whatnot?

A fitting death knell for Reddit that their CEO would have an emergency AMA go down as one of the worst ones of all time. This week is going to be one for the internet history books. I’m really looking forward to Monday.

It is known.