So many memories… Thanks !

Sunflower plant here.

I feel like a cannibal munching on sunflower seeds while reading the description of my type of plant XD

I don’t think there is a way to have both the option to host images and have zero risk of getting such image uploads. You either completely disable image hosting, or you mitigate the risk by the way image uploads are handled. Even if you completely disable the image uploads, someone might still link to such content. The way I see this there are two different aspects. One is the legal danger you place yourself when you open your instance to host images uploaded by users. The other is the obvious (and not so obvious) and undeniable harmful effects contact with such material has for most of us. The second, is pretty impossible to guarantee 100% on the internet. The first you can achieve by simply not allowing image uploads (and I guess de-federating with other instances to avoid content replication).

The thing is, when you host an instance of a technology that allows for better moderation (i.e. allowing certain kinds of content, such as images, only after a user reaches a certain threshold of activity), actually helps in a less obvious manner. CSAM is not only illegal to exist on the server-side. It’s also illegal and has serious consequences for the people who actually upload it. The more activity history you have on a potential uploader, the easier it becomes to actually track him. Requiring more time for an account before allowing it to post images, makes concealing the identity harder and raises the potential risk for the uploader to the extend that it will be very difficult to go through the process only to cause problems to the community.

Let me also state this clearly: I don’t have an issue with disabling image uploads here, or changing the default setting of instance federation to a more limiting one. Or both. I don’t mind linked images to external sites.

I am sorry you had to see such content. No, it doesn’t seem to go away. At least it hasn’t for me, after almost 2 decades :-/

At least, not at first. As the scandal heated up, EFF took an impassive stance. In a blog post, an EFF staffer named Donna Wentworth acknowledged that a contentious debate was brewing around Google’s new email service. But Wentworth took an optimistic wait-and-see attitude—and counseled EFF’s supporters to go and do likewise. “We’re still figuring that out,” she wrote of the privacy question, conceding that Google’s plans are “raising concerns about privacy” in some quarters. But mostly, she downplayed the issue, offering a “reassuring quote” from a Google executive about how the company wouldn’t keep record of keywords that appeared in emails. Keywords? That seemed very much like a moot point, given that the company had the entire emails in their possession and, according to the contract required to sign up, could do whatever it wanted with the information those emails contained. EFF continued to talk down the scandal and praised Google for being responsive to its critics, but the issue continued to snowball. A few weeks after Gmail’s official launch, California State Senator Liz Figueroa, whose district spanned a chunk of Silicon Valley, drafted a law aimed directly at Google’s emerging surveillance-based advertising business. Figueroa’s bill would have prohibited email providers like Google from reading or otherwise analyzing people’s emails for targeted ads unless they received affirmative opt-in consent from all parties involved in the conversation—a difficult-to-impossible requirement that would have effectively nipped Gmail’s business model in the bud. “Telling people that their most intimate and private email thoughts to doctors, friends, lovers, and family members are just another direct marketing commodity isn’t the way to promote e-commerce,” Figueroa explained. “At minimum, before someone’s most intimate and private thoughts are converted into a direct marketing opportunity for Google, Google should get everyone’s informed consent.”

Google saw Figueroa’s bill as a direct threat. If it passed, it would set a precedent and perhaps launch a nationwide trend to regulate other parts of the company’s growing for-profit surveillance business model. So Google did what any other huge company caught in the crosshairs of a prospective regulatory crusade does in our political system: it mounted a furious and sleazy public relations counteroffensive.

Google’s senior executives may have been fond of repeating the company’s now quaint-sounding “Don’t Be Evil” slogan, but in legislative terms, they were making evil a cottage industry. First, they assembled a team of lobbyists to influence the media and put pressure on Figueroa. Sergey Brin paid her a personal visit. Google even called in the nation’s uber-wonk, Al Gore, who had signed on as one of the company’s shadow advisers. Like some kind of cyber-age mafia don, Gore called Figueroa in for a private meeting in his suite at the San Francisco Ritz Carlton to talk some sense into her.

And here’s where EFF showed its true colors. The group published a string of blog posts and communiqués that attacked Figueroa and her bill, painting her staff as ignorant and out of their depth. Leading the publicity charge was Wentworth, who, as it turned out, would jump ship the following year for a “strategic communications” position at Google. She called the proposed legislation “poorly conceived” and “anti-Gmail” (apparently already a self-evident epithet in EFF circles). She also trotted out an influential roster of EFF experts who argued that regulating Google wouldn’t remedy privacy issues online. What was really needed, these tech savants insisted, was a renewed initiative to strengthen and pass laws that restricted the government from spying on us. In other words, EFF had no problem with corporate surveillance: companies like Google were our friends and protectors. The government—that was the bad hombre here. Focus on it.

I don’t know whether it is illegal for someone to open a letter addressed to you or not, in the country you live, but this is pretty important. If the information presented here is accurate, this is not simply EFF focusing on the government, its EFF actively resisting similar rules to be applied on e-mail as those applied on regular mail. Would anyone use any of the non-electronic mail service providers or courier services if it was a given that for each piece of mail sent, there would be exactly one open and read, shared with multiple other parties besides the sender and receiver?

It seems to me that this is the whole point of this (quite long, but interesting) article and this instance probably illustrates it better than any other chosen to discuss in the article.

The Reddit-style presentation of topics and ranking comments isn’t really conducive to lengthy, quality discussions that persist over a period of time.

I don’t know whether @Penguincoder@beehaw.org had all these in mind, but as far as lengthy & quality discussions go, everything you wrote to support this sentece, in my experience, seems 100% correct. There was a time, when forums when used more, during which a discussion on a subject would carry on for weeks, even months, between different individuals. Taking the time, thinking over the subject and coming back with a response after days was not at all uncommon.

It’s nearly impossible to pick one, I find beauty in each kind.

I would go with Platanus. They exist near rivers and get really big. I like everything about them.

Then all the wild versions of cherry trees, if not every single stone fruit tree. Most wild versions of them, exist across multiple human lifespans (platanus too), so beside their amazing flowering season, I like the idea that some of them have been standing there for centuries, marking memories of many human generations with their beautiful presence.

I am getting old.

When I was a kid, my parents, my siblings and I would go to very crowded beaches during the summer. Sunny weather, vibrant colors, cool water. It was nearly impossible for me to bother with whatever everyone else was doing. My attention was focused to everything that was fun and new to me. I would swim for hours, climb rocks and attempt the most challenging dives I could, run on the wet sand. Even build castles!

And then, gradually, every next year each summer visit to the beach would become less magical. Every next year, my attention would start to focus less on the beach and more on the people. And not just people who were calm, friendly and enjoying themselves there. No. I would focus on people who were rude, stressed out and annoying. Loud people who would disregard everyone else around them.

Until, at some point, it started actually feeling bad visiting crowded places. Felt like there was no way I could enjoy being at the beach if I were to share it with other people. Now, I can point you to places that very few people know how to reach. And they are great. As long as you have your own company.

I envy my kid self. If you were to ask that kid what it felt like to be at the beach, you would get a lot of excitement and zero negativity.

Now, even though I will mostly avoid crowded places it’s not always possible to do so. So, when I end up in a crowded place I actively focus on what is important for me to enjoy my time. Laughter is music for my ears. Kidding around my friends, swimming and all the good stuff my kid self knew how to do better. I try. Sometimes I succeed, others I feel old and tired ;-)

What if you are toxic to an user, on the other side of your screen, who happens to have depression or other mental disorders, and you don’t know that fact? Would you feel OK knowing that you’re driving someone to hurt themselves, or worse?

This is probably one of the most important things to consider before posting something in a public space.

And this is not something that occurs recently or during the last 5 years. I’ve been browsing internet since 2006, and it was as bad as it is now, just with other intermediaries, like online chats, forums, etc.

What you describe here and above this sentence is true. It happened, it happens still. But, in my experience, not to the same extend. I 've been spending time in online communities since the early 90’s and I believe there is a reason the toxicity is getting worse. Part of it is what @daredevil@kbin.social said. I mean most of the platforms offered by huge corporations try to drive engagement for profit. To achieve this, to get more people involved and engaging as much as possible, the interactions have to get limited to the least common denominator. It’s not just reaction buttons, it’s much more than this. Another part of it is the technological shift. The web was populated by significantly less netizens before certain technological advancements, with probably the most important of these being the smart phones. I believe this combination is the reason. The huge increase of people surfing the web and the appearance of huge corporations actively controlling how new people get used to surfing the web.

Btw at 2006 google was already there and quite big and facebook was already starting to get big.

Anyway, thanks for the link, as a fediverse newbie, I really appreciate it!

It makes sense doesn’t it? Biodiversity will always facilitate better, richer, healthier equilibriums between species than the ones imposed by man-made, narrow-minded motives. The more intricate details I notice in environments unaffected (at least not directly) by humans, the more urban environments seem like wastelands…

Nice article, thanks!

People who grew up doing sports have it quite easier than the rest when it comes to picking up a new physical activity later in life. Yes, I can no longer compete in the martial art I grew up competing, nor can I participate in any serious basketball event near me. But, for example, I can ride my bike for hours, explore very different routes and empty my mind. It is like meditation on my breathing while moving in quite beautiful natural surroundings. Sometimes getting to summits so silently beautiful that I wish I knew how to capture the beauty. It’s a different kind of fun, but it’s still fun.

Team sports… I 've played basketball and soccer as a kid, in competitive settings too, and I don’t think I can remember many occasions where everyone was respectful. It didn’t get better during adulthood. And it doesn’t take many assholes to ruin a game, even if they are eventually contained. Sometimes I miss basketball, which is probably the sport I loved most as a kid, but never the negative side of the team aspect, which was pretty much always present. In cycling (or running) the fact that you don’t need anyone else doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy company of others with similar taste and attitude :-)

And of course it’s the health aspect that is quite important. Maybe you are young and healthy enough still to disregard it, but for me, that alone pretty much justifies sports for as long as my body can handle them. As for watching… It’s easy for me to get bored (provided no unhealthy stimulants are used) when my heart rests at 45 bpm, but it’s pretty impossible to feel like that when it is constantly above 120-130 bpm to support movement. At some point in my life I took living with my heart very literally XD

which is once again improved with the addition of body language and further complexity which comes via video.

Maybe it’s just me, but, I 've never felt that video calls add the body language element that in person communication has. I mean, I get a very different feeling (and my facial expressions, are different because of that) when looking directly at the camera than the one I get when making eye contact with the other person. Doesn’t this mean that you actually add an altered body language to the interaction?

Or is this something included in what you meant with “further complexity”? Not sure what you were referring to there.

Well I am not a doctor, things like my first comment is what I would say to myself if I could go back 20 years. It’s been my experience that the more support my feet got from the shoes the weaker they became. Weakness traveled upwards until my hips started misbehaving. I mean, at some point it was painful to even walk without hip pain. But I wouldn’t even recommend switching to barefoot shoes if you are using too much support at the moment. Yes, barefoot shoes enable the feet to get stronger (and function as they are supposed to), but it takes time to adjust. Wide toe-box though is important and carries no risk. What I will note, again from my personal experience, is that supportive shoes are useful only in cases of injury and should be temporary as they increase weaknesses (I tend to think of them the way I thought of casts used in bone fractures -the longer I used the support, the more work my muscles and fascia needed to recover). So, with that in mind

I unfortunately had a surgery a few years ago and I recently got bursitis on my right foot.

maybe consulting the doctor that diagnosed the bursitis, on what is needed to recover optimally would be a good place to start.

As for posture, the thing is that our brain constantly re-aligns everything so we can keep functioning the best way possible even in non-optimal conditions (i.e. chair, or standing but looking down). And it’s really a very complex sum of way too many details to consciously control. At least for me, even though I know quite a few things about proper posture. This is why a little time doing something repetitive like running, that requires good posture in order to run properly and without pain, creates a habit of standing better without thinking about it. Walking (with little or no support on the feet) can be a place to start after you recover. A nice walk can be stress relieving too!

Dynamic stretching is nothing more than moving (as opposed to holding a lengthening position) certain parts of your body to the full range of motion, without placing load on the movement, slowly and slightly increasing the range in each repetition. If you want to try this, you 'll have to look for the movements that relieve tension created by assuming a certain position for a long time. Tension is created when muscle tissue is shortened for an extended period of time. For example, I bet you can feel some relief if you do 10 circles with your shoulders. Simple movements like this.

Finally, I know that in the beginning it can already be too much to handle the load from the time spent at work. This will get easier, as long as you rest well and eat healthy, adequate, nutritious food. The rest of what I wrote, I wrote because you asked how you could get a more resilient body. It doesn’t have to be at the same time with the initial adaptations to the new work environment ;-)

XD

Don’t think so… I don’t even wear shoes when I run anymore. Been letting the ground re-introduce proper running technique to my body and it’s been doing wonders at that. I am approaching 40 and had begun to think I 'll never be able to run without pain again, before I tried tossing the shoes. Now I actually enjoy running… I got some barefoot shoes, but I only wear them when I can’t be without shoes at all.

Placing orthotics bellow your arches is very harmful in the long term. In general you shouldn’t prevent your foot doing what it is designed to do (big heel drops, fat soft shoe soles, orthotics) unless there is a problem (read injury) and only temporarily (until you recover). So are narrow toe-boxes in shoes, your toes should be able to move freely and naturally. If they can’t, the restriction will create irreversible (read: even surgery won’t completely fix what they cause) problems, that mess up all the bio-mechanics of the leg. I wish I knew this when I was younger, working 8-10-12 hour shifts (yeah, I know), as a waiter/barman.

Btw, it might sound counter-intuitive, but proper running, relaxed and a little each day (even as little as 10 minutes) can help getting your legs stronger, relieve stress, restore fascia (without stretching, static stretching never ever worked well for me) and keep it flexible and strong, reset nervous system firing patterns on your shoulders (moving your hands like you do in running with the proper form is way more effective than PT exercises like trap-3-raises for the traps) to counter balance the amount of time you spend looking down, help re-align your spine, and pretty much invigorate your whole body.

But most importantly, rest and eat well. This will be the defining factor on whether your body will adapt and get stronger or not, and how long it will need to do it. We are supposed to be standing all day (not facing downwards though), your feet shouldn’t be the issue here, your neck & shoulders are the part that is assuming the unnatural positions for extended periods of time, so as often as you can break them and do some gentle full range of motion movements (a.k.a dynamic stretching) the better.

Regardless, good luck with your new job! :-)

I see most of the comments discussing efficiency, the inability to have your own garden, or other limiting factors. And I believe all of them are missing the point. There are many and good reasons to shorten your food chain, and efficiency is not one of them. I would expect to at least see some people (there was one exception) considering the value of doing so in their lives, but nope.

So… Not very long ago, most of the people were actually living as farmers. Eric Hobsbawm, in this book, has done a great job describing what it took for the shift to happen, during the industrial revolution. For the people to actually be forced to abandon their land and start accumulating in urban environments where having your own garden is practically impossible for most of them. And it was not good. Child labor, people starving to death, extreme poverty, extreme exploitation of human labor. Many things changed, and most of them did not actually benefit the majority of the people who were forced to abandon or sell their land in order for people who could actually afford more efficient farming approaches (through machines) to replace them while accumulating wealth in an unprecedented manner. Maybe it’s worth examining this shift. Both the argument of efficiency and limiting factors, are not exactly new and are not exactly serving most of us either.

Besides the historical aspect, the how did we get here, of the long food chains. There are other aspects that make them harmful. The ones that allow for a term like “banana republic” to exist, when most of the people who use it don’t pause and think what it actually means for so many people that actually get exploited so they can have their bananas, cheap and available all year (as if potassium is not abundant in every single plant food). The ones that allow for people to have access to food without actually moving at all during the day (CVD, obesity, cases where being inefficient, like… spending energy to live your life, actually improves your health, like walking, carrying some weight, cycling). The ones that allow for food to be consumed weeks, months or even years after it is produced, dramatically reducing it’s quality while actually raising the cost (storage facilities, freezers, transportations through various environments).

But still, most comments at the moment and upvotes are not about those things. Except one. Interesting…

Hey friend, it didn’t make only you sad. The viewpoint expressed was really not nice. Facing hardships in life because of your sexuality (which is not exactly a choice) seems like is not enough to be understanding towards other groups of people facing hardships in their life by having it be determined by things they didn’t choose. In many cases it doesn’t even seem enough to be a decent person.

Having lived all my life close to people I love and are struggling with the most difficult disabilities caused by autism, I had to try to ignore the comment that made you sad.

Responses from those users are more likely to pendantic, overly argumentative, and unhelpful.

I can’t always be sure for the first two for myself. I do try to be helpful though, which seems a little easier to judge. Now, when I find it difficult to judge how my own comments can be perceived, how is it possible to be sure about other people’s posts and comments…

The rest of my thoughts are pretty much what @HappyMeatbag@beehaw.org said.

Great topic! Looks like a very fun book to read too. So do the Sapiens books mentioned in the article. Nice.

In this scenario, “Bob” is a hypothetical guy who believes that a woman has cut in front of him in line at the supermarket checkout. He and the woman get into a brief shouting match before she informs Bob that she’d just ducked out of her spot in the line to replace a carton of eggs that turned out to be cracked. He apologizes, and that’s the end of it—except someone recorded the incident on their smartphone, then uploaded only the shouting match, reading all kinds of deplorable motives into it. “The video need only include a hint of cultural asymmetry,” Rose-Stockwell writes:

It may be seen as an angry outburst by a man (Bob) toward a woman (the other shopper). Or a Democrat (Bob) toward a Republican (the lady). Or any heightened reflection of their implied group identity. It can be repackaged as an example of a troubling trend in society. People who feel this way who see the clip now have an opportunity to explain exactly why it’s offensive. They can link it to a larger narrative that may have nothing to do with the actual event itself.

That outrage is often stoked by journalists, who, Rose-Stockwell notes, “are shockingly susceptible to reporting on this kind of thing,” furthering what he calls “trigger chains: cascades of outrage that are divorced from the original event.”

This is so common… And not only with incidents where a part of them can be taken out of context and used to evoke emotional response related to rage.

The reason I preferred to respond the way I did in your original comment, is because I noticed two things that make me doubt you are actually willing to discuss with an open mind. The first is that in your original comment there are quite a few remarks in which you assume the moral high ground and judge others en masse while you have actual contact with a limited sample of people through which you observe the behavior you claim you don’t understand. The second is your personal experience, which as you mention it, is equally limited as far as what it takes for a person to end up eating animal meat.

So I wrote, probably quite badly, about a fragment of another person’s life. Trying to paint a picture of a way of life in which there was no cognitive dissonance, hypocrisy (you do realize that these are not nice things to say about another person, right?) or even conflict. What was equally important, in my comment, with the mention of this one person, was the fact that I mentioned that almost everyone lived like this in the past. Which, I guessed, while probably not enough to make you re-evaluate your position, might make you question both the validity of the moral high ground and how your experience formed your beliefs about eating animal meat.

Unfortunately, seems like I guessed wrong, because you reduced my comment to “human eats meat for survival”, when it was more of a “human makes peace with killing, butchering, eating other animals while actually caring for all animals”.

It’s not that I didn’t see what you wrote about “eating meat for survival”. I even quoted this specific part of your comment. So maybe it’s not that great assuming that I didn’t when you read my response.

But who will judge whether or not a person is eating for his survival? Who will judge whether or not someone is being a hypocrite? I mean, most of us, at any given time, are on a different path of life, with our own unique experiences. What might seem obvious to one person, might be something the next person wouldn’t even be able to imagine because of different experiences. It’s not like artificial (books, movies, infotainment, what have you) stimuli are the same thing with actually experiencing the world. Especially when it comes to nature with its extreme vastness of interactions.

You claim you were put off of eating animal meat by watching a butcher killing a chicken. Why should I feel bad (hypocrite? lying to myself?) or less of a sentient being when after, myself, helping to butcher a goat (I mean, do you have any idea what this requires? the sound of skin separating from what is underneath? the sound of internal organs when you slice it’s body open? the flow of blood? the smell of it all? and if you do have an idea do you think the idea is comparable, as far as impact goes, to the actual deed?) and while feeling seriously overloaded by the stimuli (in a young age mind you, less than 10 years old the first time I did it) at the same time being at peace with what I was doing?

Finally, being in an urban environment, at least when I mention it, is not indicative of more options (like food stores, or supermarkets) but indicative of a way more limited environment as far as natural stimuli are concerned and how people’s perceptions of the world are formed. It’s easy, if not a complete certainty, to be completely oblivious of many of the horrors involved in how animals feed themselves. And documentaries, neither smell, nor capture enough of this. So, I, for one, won’t judge neither a person who is put off by a killing of a chicken nor a person who isn’t. I can see how different paths might lead different people to different perceptions of the world. I even find it interesting to observe the differences.

ps. I like to do a little experiment when (which you 'll almost never see me do) I say “I don’t understand X”. I replace that part of the text with “I really don’t like X” and if the text still makes sense, I pause and think.

To clarify, I have no problems with people who eat meat in general, especially if it’s for survival. I just don’t get the people who also claim to actually like animals, claim to care about animal rights, claim to care about whether the chicken they’d eat were raised in cruelty-free free-range farms, but also don’t see an issue with killing them.

Two of my four grandparents were raised and lived most of their lives in a small village, that didn’t even have electricity until they had kids going to school. Extremely poor with almost nothing of most of what is now common in western societies. So, try to imagine living in a place where absolutely nothing is considered waste. Whatever little objects, their houses, everything they used was made by people who knew how to work with some crude material, whether it was wood or some kind of metal. They relied on animals and small pieces of land to get through each year. Literally zero waste. Composting was not a trend, but a necessity.

Now try to imagine a woman, who had little (no plants, chickens don’t lay eggs in the heavy winter, goats don’t have young ones to feed, so no milk either, no fridges, let alone freezers) food to go through the winter and would rather eat a little less and feed wild birds than watch them freezing to death (most living animals need food to regulate body temperature, among other things). Same thing I would watch her do during all seasons. She would always leave fruit on the trees during spring and summer just so that birds would have something to eat near her house. Fruit that was essential to her nutrition, because it was extremely limited, but she did it anyway.

Now try to imagine this woman, butchering a rabbit or a chicken or a goat. Because she did. Feeling no remorse or any negative emotion. And was pretty good at it. The same person who would get furious if someone mistreated a living animal in her presence.

There is some order in life, which is lost on people who never had a chance to see anything except an urban environment. If you were to meet a person like that, who pretty much embodies the supposed conflict you think exists in this behavior, and you talked in the manner you wrote this comment, you probably wouldn’t even get a response. Maybe a smile, maybe a shake of a head.

If you actually want to get how both those actions (butchering and eating a living animal, and caring for all living animals -even the ones you know you are going to kill and eat at some point in their life) can be done by people in peace with their actions, if you really want to do that, to understand, probably the best way is to find people living like this and spend a month near them. Live and observe.

This comment is not meant to justify all the wrongs of how livestock is treated on large scales in pursuit of profit. Neither people eating more meat in a week than their ancestors probably ate in many months. I am not interested in debating this either. Just pointing out that this was the way of life of most people in the past. How long ago, depends on where you were born on this planet.