That could work too. Superstitions and religions were in at the time, so I think there’s plenty to exploit.

You could call coal the Devil’s rock, and spread rumors about it being cursed and haunted. You cal talk about the smoke causing vice, moral decay and sin. Oil could be seen as the blood of the Earth, tears from ancient curses, bad omens etc. Only rebellious sorcerers and heretics would dare to tamper with the natural order of things by burning oil. As the un-godly un-natural smoke poisons the air, it poisons the soul etc. God gave you the sun and wind, so using them is the only righteous choice… You get the idea. The 1800s was a magical period of time.

I have a plan B too, but it’s not so gentle.

The goal is to become the number one energy producer and stomp out all opposition and competition before it has a chance to grow. There are no laws against cartels and monopolies, so you exploit the hell out of it. You file extremely broad patents to prevent fossil fuels and combustion based motors from ever becoming a thing. You play super dirty, no mercy, no remorse. It’s going to be basically like the East-India Company, but with renewable energy.

You lobby governments to adopt renewable energy and electrical devices you provide. You influence the public opinion on fossil fuels by spreading information about climate change, pollution and negative health effects. If the global energy company becomes big enough, you should make your own private army and conquer all the places where large oil deposits exist, and establish massive natural reserve parks in those areas. Lobby the governments to make other similar areas legally protected from all industrial development for the next 1000 years.

You would become the supervillain billionaire of the 1800s, but you put the whole world on a renewable trajectory.

I would go to the year 1800, and bring with me a bunch of books on science and engineering. Basically all the building blocks you need to build wind farms and solar power. I would visit all the universities I can and drop these books in library shelves. Some climate change literature could be nice too.

Back to the basics: Start carrying a yellow pages book with you so that you can find addresses of various businesses. If you need restaurant descriptions, you need one of those tourist guide books too.

So, name and shame kind of site?

Yeah, that’s a real problem. All the really interesting special communities get like 1 post a week at most.

Skip the “all” feed. It’s not interesting to me either, even though I’m familiar with distros and such. I just read the “subscribed” where I’ll find stuff I care about.

Remember these abominations from The Last Jedi?

If the green milk is drinkable, the meat is edible.

Nah. What’s done is done. Hard lessons, but those are the ones I remember.

But let’s imagine I could send a message to an alternate timeline version of past me. I have some ideas.

Don’t hang out with the people on this list. Learn about mental illnesses such as narcissism, bipolar disorder, paranoia, depression, and psychosis. Read a bit about conspiratorial thinking too.

Equipped with this info, you no longer need that list of names. You can notice when it is the time to leave a particular crowd. Now that you didn’t learn things the hard way, you avoided some hardship and trouble.

Oh, that’s a very cool study. However, here’s an important bit that should help with interpreting it.

Our goal is not to provide a comprehensive account of ideology in the U.S. public, but rather it is to make a convincing case that unidimensional treatments of ideology obscure important (and interesting) complexities in the antecedents of political orientations. We believe this goal to be best served by keeping the analyses tractable. We thus exclude a number of issues from consideration, focusing on the two core domains of social and economic conservatism. In particular, we do not address issues associated with race, immigration, or foreign policy. These are obviously core issues in American politics, and future work needs to expand on the present article to explore additional complexities arising from these issues.

I really hope someone has dumped a gazillion questions into a similar process. Would be really curious to find out how many dimensions you would really need to explain the data.

Anyway, the economic and social dimensions definitely are needed as a foundation of any political model. If you did a more comprehensive study, you would obviously add some more dimensions on this foundation.

Hmm. So nowadays that ideology should probably be lumped together with “corporate greed vs. sensible thinking” -axis to keep the number of dimensions reasonable.

How about something about supporting the people who are poor, unemployed, or sick? Socialists and leftists love it, while right-wing capitalists hate it. I don’t know how to phrase it concisely like you did.

And then there’s also the classic socialist-capitalist debate about worker rights. So employee rights could be another axis. Should the owner just exploit the workers or do the workers get to have weekends off, 8 h workdays, various vacations, safe working environment, fair wages etc.

Oh, and then there are various language based divisions too. There are entire parties dedicated to supporting specific language groups, but I guess you could summarize it as “support of minority language groups”. How about just lumping all minority groups into a single axis? How about something like: minority rights vs. majority? Nowadays, that includes sexual and gender minorities too.

How about city vs. rural life? Not too many decades ago, farming was a big part of life, so there were also many farmers who voted. Hence, we had farmer parties, and we still do to some extent. Now that farming is mostly automated, not that many voters care about farming. It’s just another industry, just like steel, paper or electronics. Historically speaking, city. vs rural life was definitely a political axis. Nowadays, not so much.

In any case, it’s a really complicated topic, so we’re going to need a lot of dimensions. Your suggestions are a good start. Just add a few more, and eventually you have enough. If you’re really technical about it, each and every question is a new dimension, but if you should group them together into broader topics. That way, you’re definitely going to end up in at least 20 dimensions.

If it’s technically illegal, but nobody ever gets a sentence for it, it’s actually completely legal.

Yeah. It’s a pretty complicated topic to study. You would have to narrow it down really hard to be able to say anything meaningful about it. If you’re talking about a specific group using Facebook in a specific way, that’s when you can actually start talking about effects.

On top of that, there are also a variety of ways you can use the same platform. What if you’re exclusively focusing on doomscrolling or actively avoiding anything that produces negative emotions? You could spend all day following everyone who spreads doom and gloom, or just pop in for a little bit of #bloomscrolling, and get back to real-world stuff when you’re done.

Just based on my personal vibes, I think social media is harmful if you’re doing it wrong. Most people are. If you allow Meta to manipulate your emotions with fear and hate, while developing an addiction at the same time, you’re not going to have a great time. Quitting that kind of toxic relationship will improve your life.

Mastodon was designed to be less addictive, and that’s why it’s a bit boring to most people. It takes special kind of dedication to get addicted to Mastodon, and I think the same applies to Lemmy as well.

And there’s an “✨Ask me anything” bar at the bottom. How fitting 🤣

Manufacturing things in the Wild West means you can get away with anything. The safety of the general public becomes a concern only when you’re trying to do business with a country that has regulations in place.

If it’s likely to come into contact with water, could that water then end up in the cup?

If yes, you need to consider the safety implications of the materials you chose. I expect the manufacturer chose safe materials, while your glue might not be safe under high pressure and temperature. What if something really nasty gets in your cup as a result?

I’ve found some interesting and even good new functions by moaning my code woes to an LLM. Also, it has taken me on some pointless wild goose chases too, so you better watch out. Any suggestion has the potential to be anywhere from absolutely brilliant to a completely stupid waste of time.