Hey, I know a pretty similar bus stop in Hamburg, Germany: https://maps.app.goo.gl/SMa5unXew4uAfVtPA

Can confirm, it sucks to wait there. Hard to reach (always tempting to risk your life for catching the bus), noisy, stinky, plus ours has bicyclists zooming through the isle.

To optimize the intersection for car traffic. Or maybe rather to minimize signal wait times.

If pedestrians could take the shortest path, it would roughly double the size of the intersection in both width and height. Which then requires clearing times on each signal pass to be longer. Which ultimately makes everybody wait longer at the intersection, including pedestrians.

So, that is one possible explanation. I guess you didn’t really ask for one, and maybe I should also add that it’s just that; an explanation, not a justification.

Hehe, right! (technically). Context matters! When talking about fruit, people usually don’t include stellar objects when weighing their options. Still true when taking in consideration that “apples to oranges” is usually metaphorical and not really about fruit.

I like that, especially this insight:

when two things have very few attributes in common or the attributes they can be compared on are very broad, general or abstract, it is harder to compare them.

A melon and a pogo stick are harder to compare, for their defining attributes hardly overlap except on a very abstract way.

Good on you to say “harder to compare” :D

it’s all semantic subjectivity. Poetry compares dissimilar things and equates unequal concepts all the time.

Another thing worthwhile to point out; subjectivity. I guess that part bothered me too. “cannot be compared” attempts to establish some kind of objective truth, whereas it only can be a subjective opinion.

The reference to poetry was nice, too.

My point works just as well with an arbitrary amount of options. Someone could say “These quintillion things cannot be compared”.

The number of options is irrelevant to what I tried to address. Though my examples were only pairs, so sorry for causing confusion.

Thanks for taking the time to write this detailed reply. I guess you’re right about the equivocation and I can see the irony :D

Though I have not fully understood yet. Following your example, the two different concepts are …

• in case A, we compare the value of a property (different top speed)
• in case B, we compare the purpose or context-dependend usefulness of an attribute (different types of liquid container holders)

What blocks me from fully agreeing is that still, both are comparisons. And they don’t feel so different to me that I would call them different concepts. When I look up examples for equivocations, those do feel very different to me.

I still guess you’re right. If you (or someone else) could help me see the fallacy, I’d appreciate.

Agreed, yeah. Guess I was taking the word too literally.

Because religion evolved to thrive in us.

It’s like a parasite, and our mind is the host. It competes with other mind-parasites like other religions, or even scientific ideas. They compete for explanatory niches, for feeling relevant and important, and maybe most of all for attention.

Religions evolved traits which support their survival. Because all the other variants which didn’t have these beneficial traits went extinct.

Like religions who have the idea of being super-important, and that it’s necessary to spread your belief to others, are ‘somehow’ more spread out than religions who don’t convey that need.

This thread is a nice collection of traits and techniques which religions have collected to support their survival.

This perspective is based on what Dawkins called memetics. It’s funny that this idea is reciprocally just another mind-parasite, which attempted to replicate in this comment.

Right?

“I would have helped avoiding the apocalypse! But then some random guys sprayed paint on some things!”

Activists (try to) do that as well. But it’s much harder to get close to a rich person or their property, than it is to do something in public spaces. They, too, have to see what they can do with their limited resources.

Next, the media coverage is very unequal, as well as reader’s interest. You are much more likely to click on an article covering a potentially outrageous action, than you are to read about something which does not bother anyone. Although you can rest assured, these things are tried and done frequently.

So naturally, to the uninvolved reader, it may seem as if activists don’t do anything but stupid stunts. And naturally, each outsider seems to think they have a much better grasp of strategy and what actions might make sense than the people who are actually involved in these things.

Of course, a particular action can still be silly. I just want to draw attention to biases at play, in general.

And if you really have a much better idea how to do something about the climate crisis, then go ahead and shine as an example. Not only would you author an actually impactful action (which in itself should be reason enough), you could also show all these rookie activists how to get things done. If your example is convincing, you should see less media coverage about inferior actions.

An (intuitively) working search would be a great step ahead. It should find and show things if they exist, and only show no results if they do not. That a plethora of external tools exist to meet these basic needs shows both how much this is needed, and how much it is broken.

I also feel I have more luck finding communities if searching for ‘all’, instead of ‘communities’. Don’t make me add cryptic chars to my search to make it work. Do that for me in the background if necessary.

It’s been long since I’ve been using it, but iirc, it’s impossible or painful to search for a specific community in your subscribed list.

One is multiple parallel goals. Makes it hard to stop playing, since there’s always something you just want to finish or do “quickly”.

Say you want to build a house. Chop some trees, make some walls. Oh, need glass for windows. Shovel some sand, make more furnaces, dig a room to put them in - oh, there’s a cave with shiny stuff! Quickly explore a bit. Misstep, fall, zombies, dead. You had not placed a bed yet, so gotta run. Night falls. Dodge spiders and skeletons. Trouble finding new house. There it is! Venture into the cave again to recover your lost equipment. As you come up, a creeper awaitsssss you …

Another mechanism is luck. The world is procedurally generated, and you can craft and create almost anything anywhere. Except for a few things, like spawners. I once was lucky to have two skeleton spawners right next to each other, not far from the surface. In total, I probably spent hours in later worlds to find a similar thing.

The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like. Do I lose my “friends” when I stop playing their game?

I don’t think Minecraft does these things in any way maliciously, it’s just a great game. But nevertheless, it has a couple of mechanics which can make it addictive and problematic.

From the title, I had a question and found the answer in the FAQ:

What’s an unconference?

An unconference is a conference in which the participants – rather than the organizers – decide which sessions happen each day and on which topics. In the many years we have been organizing unconferences, we have found that for complex subjects like the Fediverse, attendees get more value (and fun!) out of unconferences than from traditional conferences. Sounds disorganized? It did to us, too, until we actually experienced our first one. So don’t worry, it will be fine :-)

Here are some suggestions for how to prepare for an unconference.

Nice! The market and climate need clear signals like that.

A dark sense of hope here: At least some of us are able to adapt quickly.

And this is another issue which hinders discoverability. It’s nice there are tools and workarounds but their existence also signals the issue exists.

I didn’t say able to locate I said there being a list.

Are you confusing comments?

I see this in the referred comment:

having the capability to locate

While the word “list” does not appear.

But mostly I think we should try to read the message, not focus on single words.

I think that’s fine. Unless we’re talking about greenhouses or urban indoor gardening, food grows in the environment. If you want to protect the food, you implicitly have to protect the environment, which makes you an environmentalist driven by food. There are lots of hazards which have little to do with climate (or at least which also have other, climate-unrelated causes), which can affect food. Invasive species, plastic, overfertilization, corporations, general socioeconomic disparities, just to name a few.

While continuing to tap new oil fields and failing to make sufficient progress. Also, this one isn’t about climate, but healthy and sustainable food. Connected issues, but still.

All that aside, to come back to the somewhat dodged question, what would make things go faster?

This is not the way to go about that

What is your way to go about that?

If you aren’t doing anything, what way(s) would you deem acceptable? If you know acceptable ways, why aren’t you following through? Honest if-questions, not meant as assumptions.

Healthy and sustainable food seems to be a decent goal. People should be able to get behind this. So if all the disagreement is about the right approach, where are the people with the right approach, and where are all the people voicing their concern about art supporting them?

Please help me out. It feels as if people are more concerned about pieces of art which they may never see, than about healthy food, the climate, or other major issues which affect everyone.

I get why it puts people off, these points exist. I just wonder what the “right” alternative to these “wrong” approaches is, and wether the critics walk the talk.