A mere 20 years ago we could sit in mixed company laughing and groaning during an impromptu “everyone’s best and worst pickup line” contest, that levity among friends. Levity is serious business re-learn it.

You still can. The discourse is because a large chunk of the male population doesn't understand how to do that without being creeps. Don't be a creep and women will like being around you

Damn dude, that was such a spot-on summary I feel like I don't need to log in to lemmy for a month lol

This is such a spurious connection lol but I read the article anyway

The pattern probably emerged as a result of Darwinian natural selection: cicadas that naturally matured in easily divisible years were gobbled up by predators, and simply didn’t live long enough to produce as many offspring. Those who, by chance, had long, prime-numbered life spans fared best, survived longest, and left the most offspring, becoming the dominant variation of the species.

I'm glad the author actually took the time to describe the evolutionary process accurately. When I was an impressionable youngin' arguing against evolution, a big sticking point for me was how so many people described evolution as if there was some design or guidance behind it all. Nope, just common sense chaos and lots of death

[The Fine-structure Constant] quantifies the strength of the electromagnetic interaction between elementary charged particles.

Why the constant should have this value is not understood, but there are a number of ways to measure its value.

Sounds like we know what it is, we just don't know the reason for its value. (Edit: Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean)

Wikipedia link

What are we considering in vs out of city? Does in city mean just downtown, within city limits, within metro area? And what are we considering a city - 300k population?

Maybe so! Always hard to say with the range of opinions I see on the internet these days

How did volunteers who run reddit's for-profit business for them for free end up equated with landed gentry?

You've been downvoted by leftists for bashing socialism, and by liberals for implying that China is actually socialist. A beautiful thing to witness

Looking at the world rn, I dont think things have a tendency to get better on their own

This is called a recency bias (I think lol) - you're looking at the world rn and assuming its trends must continue. When you look at history you see that there are ebbs and flows, and that stasis is rare. If you focus on certain things, you may certainly decide we're in a downtrend. There will always be an uptrend afterward. And vice versa

Yeah, Linux is just not that accessible tbh. I know maaayyyybe a little more than average about computers, meaning I know how to follow tutorials lol.

I installed Ubuntu onto my laptop because it was getting old and slow. Overall, I'm very satisfied with the speed. My laptop is fast as it was new. But, doing some of the simplest things is a nightmare to me. I spent an hour last night just trying to install AirVPN. Why do I have to go into terminal? Why can't I just right click and install? Then when I finally got it installed I realized there's no UI, so idk how to use it lol.

Given, I could learn. Nothing wrong with that. But the opportunity cost is low - I'm really not willing to give up that much for ? benefit.

Thank heavens for the Ubuntu app store

Yeah I'm not subscribing to a whole service just so I can watch 3/4 of my team's games and no others. I want a service I can subscribe to and see all my team's games, and preferably all the games in one league. If it was multi-league that would be great, but I'd rather subscribe to one league at a time than subscribe to all leagues with randomly blacked out games.

Until then - and I know it's unlikely to ever happen - I won't be spending money on watching sports on tv

I always call it Magic Math. There's so much of it when you start learning about investing/trading. "Buying calls has infinite potential for gains. Selling calls has infinite potential for losses." Like, yeah, that's mathematically true. But at the end of the day it's not practically true, you're just putting a lot of weight on what you could be getting instead of what you are getting.

I went to my Dad and told him I'm stuck in a non-linear perception of time.

And he said "Hi stuck in a non-linear perception of time, I'm Dad."

you're a father

Why are you saying so what? You asked a question and I answered

Being into them is being attracted to them which, on an instinctual level, is wanting to fuck them

Edit: simplified, obviously, you can be attracted to someone in a more emotional way but some would argue that's still wanting to partner with them in some way

hug

Oh the definition is fine, I just mean that it seems illogical to adhere to it dogmatically.

Like, ok I'll try to come up with the best summation but bear with me lol. Basically, let's say you're with your current partner. You've been into other people in the past. So, logically, you'll probably be into other people - at some level - in the future, right? That seems like a natural development to me.

So if it's natural, why should we have the little fine print on all of our relationships that reads "If you're into other people this contract is null and void?"

Am I making sense? Lol. Like I just mean that it's natural to be attracted, in some way, to more than one person so why do we default to holding ourselves and our partners to the unnatural? In that way, I'm monogamous with one person at a time seems logically inconsistent to me. It accepts the existence of plurality of attraction, yet denies its engagement

I don't believe that it can't be done, it obviously can. There's just this idea that it's the natural state, or what humans are instinctively given to, and that just seems... incorrect?