Thank you for this excellent story. I found the following paragraph quite harrowing:

During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, a popular radio station repeatedly called for the extermination of the Tutsi minority (a red-alert “1” on the Dignity Index scale: “a combination of feeling the other side is less than human and calling for or approving violence”). But those messages could only be heard in villages with radio reception. That meant that there were natural control groups all over Rwanda — places where people did not hear those dehumanizing messages. In a landmark 2014 study, researcher David Yanagizawa-Drott analyzed the violence across Rwanda and found that killings increased wherever radio reception improved. In all, about one in every ten acts of violence could be linked to the messages from this radio station. Some 50,000 Rwandans may have been killed as a result of these radio broadcasts.

Just wait until it becomes cheaper than meat

looks amazing

Psychedelics and dance parties have gone hand in hand for a long time, but I think the burner community has some loose ties (or rather comes from a fascination with) with the hippie community, specific alternative medicine communities, certain spiritual communities and other groups which happen to all have rather nontraditional views on psychedelics and drugs as medicine which they’ve co-opted.

To be fair though, they do a lot of cocaine as well. It’s not the only drug they partake in. But they often think of psychedelics as less of a party drug and more as a mind-expanding experience. In that respect I agree, I think that psychedelics are particularly interesting and useful in a lot of ways and it’s what we’re finding in medicine now that we’re able to study them once again.

how many have to die before we learn?

What a heartwarming story, thank you 😊

I didn’t hear about this game until well after it was released. But I also think that was partially a reflection of how I’ve cut out so many traditional media outlets from my life that I don’t see ads the way I used to. If you’re a fan of xcom style games this one is great.

cute writing prompt

from my experience with bay area tech burners, many of them like to do psychedelics

Horseshoe theory was never meant to describe political attitudes. Horseshoe makes the classic mistake of confusing economic policy with social in an attempt to oversimplify and classify individuals. Perhaps most importantly, there’s exceedingly little scientific study of horseshoe theory and what little is out there happens to fail to prove the horseshoe theory hypothesis.

Federated down votes are rejected by the instance which has them disabled

At what level do we have control over the images uploaded to beehaw? I know we’ve broached this topic a few times with @dessalines but I don’t remember the outcome. Can we cap how many kb or size in pixels as a stop gap?

Is there anyone who uses our instance that can help to push for more granular control over what can be eating up disk space or can develop scripts to help us manage this? This instance (and likely others) would find scripts for removing old content with no comments, focused on the largest objects first particularly valuable. Something to proactively identify anything taking up a lot of space on the server could help too.

how much more is the next tier of storage?

While I’m not going to tell someone how they should enjoy the internet, there are very real storage costs to host images or even create thumbnails of them. Are those the only pictures that you disapprove of? What about vids?

Thank you for the sentiment. Could you explain more what you mean by “mute noise - especially with pictures and vids”?

A few issues I’ve seen with adoption in the federated/open source world-

There is a technical barrier to entry. The fact that you’re on a website that’s connected to other different websites in the same interface is one that people aren’t particularly familiar with. For a social website, questions around moderation and who you’re interacting with are problems which are hard to address if you’re unwilling or incapable of learning the terminology you need to learn to understand how this works.

Each entry point into this website system is slightly different as well - how it presents itself, the design, who participates on that entry point, what kind of discussions exist. You might stumble across a lemmy instance as your first introduction to lemmy that doesn’t appeal to you and not recognize that it’s not everything that’s available on lemmy and discovering that can be difficult. The same is true of other federated websites.

As you mentioned there’s also issues with algorithmic feed. This is what leads a lot of people to stick with a particular platform. They want content to come to them, rather than searching for it, and they aren’t always aware what content they want. Federated content is much more pull oriented than push oriented and until someone codes an algorithm to push I think there will be a lot of resistance with a particular subset of individuals who are interested in pushed content rather than pulled

Obviously the number of car crash related deaths would dramatically decrease due to COVID lockdowns and remote schooling… leading to the clickbait title

The first graph in the article doesn’t support this. In fact, this very graph is in the thumbnail on this website for the article. Where are you getting this idea from?

This would indicate gang violence

Gang violence is a common dogwhistle used to discriminate against black individuals. The article talks in depth about disparities by race and trends which are not explained by other correlations such as overall crime rates. Where do you think the article is missing information or where do you disagree with the findings? Why does this indicate gang violence?

I blame covid lockdowns, instagram, and tiktok for those deaths more than I blame guns.

This article takes great care to talk with researchers and support their claims with data rather than anecdotes. Why do you think lockdowns, instagram, and tiktok are responsible?

The state of pain medication in the united states just keeps getting worse and worse. The antiquated idea of restricting opiates in response to over-prescription clearly does not work. The federal government overstepped here and we’re scrambling and struggling to find ways to solve this within this broken framework. Unfortunately there’s such a taboo around using drugs that we don’t seem to have any consensus on the federal level on how to fix this problem.

One potential route would be to ease restrictions on prescribing opioids and combine it with more screening for abuse and treating drug dependence instead. Another possible route would be to fast track drugs which we already know and have studied for alternative use, such as ketamine or other dissociatives for pain relief. The most radical route would be to decriminalize drugs and work on support networks as opposed to persecuting those who get addicted.

Yet here we are, with this subject almost never addressed by candidates for governmental positions which need to deconstruct or rework existing legislation to appropriately address this problem.

While this could arguably be placed in science, it made me think about the implications of an entire generation where the brains of children ‘aged’ at an increased rate as compared to peers prior to COVID-19 and what the implications of this might be for society. Mental health as a whole declined over the pandemic, and it’s had me wondering whether it has helped to normalize going to therapy and treating mental health seriously and not as a taboo. Has this affected how children interact with each other and their values and priorities going forward? I don’t think we can answer it at this point in time, but I am curious to follow the research and learn more from others.

Fantastic idea, how do you think that would be possible?

It’s a mix, I am not sure if it causes more good or harm. Would be interesting to see a review paper on the outcomes.

A recent example of how this turned out negatively - the California government moved against uber, lyft, etc. to reclassify workers to try and force the companies to provide health insurance. The companies responded by spending millions of dollars to get signatures, push propaganda, and put confusing wording on the ballot to undo this. They spun it as worker’s rights, more or less. It ended up passing by just a few percentage points.

Looks like there’s a list of some of what’s been passed via statewide initiative on the ca.gov website. https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/ballot-measures/pdf/approval-percentages-initiatives.pdf

EDIT: looks like ballotpedia has a much more comprehensive list for each year. Here’s 2022