• 8 Posts
  • 148 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle

  • I’ll admit, I was on autopilot when making the first round of posts to populate this community and included this channel without thinking it through completely. As you’ve observed it’s an EDM channel, not synthwave. Despite my mistake I’m leaving the post up because 1) there’s a good amount of overlap between fans of synthwave and fans of EDM, and 2) the DJ seems to be trying hard to make good videos despite his lack of audience, and I want to direct more folks to his channel.



  • You’re completely correct on the exposed demand issue. I would also add that in most cities (in the United States anyway) hotels can only exist in very specific corners of the city due to zoning, often in just three places: downtown (expensive!), the suburbs (so not even in city limits), and “motel alley” (which is usually an old highway in askeevy part of town lined with mid-20th century fleabag accommodations that are slowly being abandoned/bulldozed). For some cities this isn’t an issue, but in others it’s a problem for accessing the tourist attractions, especially if the tourists in question don’t have a rental car. Then there are the non-tourist visitors to consider: if you’re in a city to visit family, you’re probably going to want to stay as close to them as possible. Same with a lot of business travelers. This is a bit of a conundrum when the nearest hotel (or affordable/decent hotel) is a 30 minute drive away.


  • Perpetual growth in a finite system is impossible, and anything that relies on perpetual growth to function is doomed to eventually fail.

    For instance: social services that rely on perpetual population growth (especially youth population; e.g. Japan/South Korea), companies that rely on perpetual increase in users (most publicly-owned companies; e g. basically every social media company ATM), industries that rely on perpetual advancements in technology (e.g. industrialized agriculture, which constantly needs new ways to fight self-induced problems like soil depletion and erosion), housing as wealth generation (to be a wealth generator it has to outpace inflation, but at a certain point no one will be able to afford to purchase houses at their inflated prices no matter how over-leveraged they get; e.g. Canada). [Note that these are merely examples where these issues are currently coming to a head; they are by no means special cases, they’re just in a more advanced state of “finding out.”]

    In other words, a lot of the modern world, in both public and private sectors, is built around a series of ponzi schemes.




  • I just want the communities that already exist to have more engagement. It’s pretty demoralizing making a high-effort post and getting only a handful of upvotes and no comments. And it’s like watching a hospice patient visiting a neat-sounding community and realizing all the posts are by the single moderator (and are getting less and less frequent).

    I think one of the best ways for folks to contribute to the health of Lemmy would be for everyone to spend some time on “all - new” (or even “all - top hour”) on occasion. “New” on Lemmy is not the cesspool of reposts and garbage that it was on Reddit (although there is a LOT of porn if you don’t have NSFW toggled off), and the quality of the first few pages of “top hour” is usually pretty good (except again for the porn, which it turns out gets pretty decent engagement). I visit “top hour” pretty regularly, and nearly all posts that are stuck in zero-engagement/minimal-engagement pergatory are simply niche content rather than bad content.











  • When I started learning Japanese I was impressed by how reliably phonetic their alphabets are, with only a few exceptions (and even the exceptions are phonetic, just by a different set of rules). I was like damn, would be real nice if English’s letters were like this. Then I found out that Japanese wasn’t always this way; prior to the 19th century reading it was a huge pain, with a lot of “i before e except after c…” rules to memorize, no diacritics to distinguish pronunciations, etc. At some point they had a major overhaul of the written language (especially the alphabets) and turned them into the phonetic versions they use today. Again I was like damn, would be real nice if English could get a phonetic overhaul of its written word. But it’s a lot easier to reform a language only used in a single country on an isolated island cluster with an authoritarian government and questionable literacy rates… Can you imagine the mayhem if, say, Australia decided to overhaul the English language in isolation? It would be like trying to get all of Europe to abandon their native tongues in favor of Esperanto.





  • In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z’s mental health is worse than that of previous generations […] What’s gone wrong?

    Answer: Shit’s bad and getting worse (especially for younger generations) while the old & rich people in charge twiddle their thumbs because “I got mine, fuck you.” Any other questions?

    I definitely wouldn’t conclude that anything the mental health industry did or didn’t do has anything to do with the mental health of youth today; given current circumstances the kids who are alright are the abnormal ones.


  • I think it’s because a lot of things are bad (and many are getting worse) yet the only power most people have to do anything about them is to raise awareness of the issues, which means engaging with negative news. Sometimes it can be hard to tell what’s real news and what’s rage bait; sometimes non-news can seem like news when it’s part of an ongoing pattern (such as “Elon’s dumb take of the day”). I think there’s also some degree of trying to maintain one’s sense of reality. To the previous example, despite being a massive fuckwit, Elon is still among the wealthiest people in the world, is incredibly influential, and has maintained some degree of fanboy army; posting/reading/discussing/upvoting an article about what dumb thing he said today is grounding for some folks because it reinforces reality by demonstrating that yes, he is still a fuckwit, even though somehow everything still hasn’t come crashing down around him like it karmically should.



  • That would be great IF you could convince the city that thoroughly-entrenched tools like leaf blowers and lawn mowers and motorized vehicles fell under nuisance laws. Chances are the mayor and most of city council use these things (or pay someone who uses them). The problem is that most people either love these things or don’t find them obnoxious enough to warrant action. Even if you somehow could get them to fall under nuisance laws, enforcement would be complaint-based, and who’s going to risk pissing off their neighbor for being a snitch Karen?


  • I know everyone hates HOAs because they’re usually petty and dumb, but this is where I think they’d actually be helpful. Designate certain neighborhoods as “quiet zones” where similarly obnoxious activities (that have reasonable, quiet alternatives) are banned: no motorized leaf blowers, lawn mowers, souped-up motorcycles or muscle cars. If you want to own one of those things, don’t move into that neighborhood.

    I’ve come to realize many people feel “forced” to move to incredibly space- and resource-inefficient (and thereby ecologically-damaging) places like suburbs and exurbs for basically two reasons: better schools, and in an attempt to escape asshole neighbors. Sometimes it’s so that they can themselves be the asshole neighbors, but generally people are trying to live in a “nice” neighborhood not over usual HOA things like house siding color and properly-concealed trash cans, but rather for a general desire for peace and quiet. I know I dream about living on 40 acres not so I can start a dairy farm, but to escape the various forms of pollution (primarily noise, air, and light) emitted by my current neighbors. But I wouldn’t feel the need to do that if my neighbors had similar desires as I and limited things like car idling, porch lights, and landscape-related noise. Meanwhile the neighbors upset at me for keeping my yard wild to support wildlife could have a neighbor with similarly bland yard maintenance standards.