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Joined 23 days ago
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Cake day: April 4th, 2025

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  • It probably wouldn’t work though. Say you wash your hands. Okay that helps some against certain diseases but not against respiratory disease, many types of foodborne illness, the plague, etc. You’d still get all of those just as easily as everyone else without also having a backdrop of the germ theory of disease to explain other ways to prevent disease and antibiotics to cure bacterial infections.

    This is the state of biology in the middle ages. This is a medieval Scottish bestiary, a book of animals, which contains many interesting facts about animals such as beavers biting their testicles off to throw away pursuers, several animals spontaneously generating from nothing, and many animals that don’t exist (my favorite is the Bonnacon, a bull that spews firey shit as a defense mechanism). Medieval scholars also didn’t accept experimentation as a valid means of gaining knowledge - they were stuck on Plato’s ideas about matter being flawed and untrustworthy and true knowledge only being able to come from Reason (and in the case of the medieval era, Divine revelation). Obviously you could show them bacteria (if you could somehow fashion a powerful enough microscope with medieval tech, which is not a trivial task) and they’d have to believe in it but how would you get them to believe that those little guys cause disease when that took us a couple hundred years in actual history?



  • I would die quickly because I don’t have any wilderness survival skills and the land I live in (USA) was inhabited by hunter gatherer tribes whose language is completely unrelated to anything I know and whose customs are completely unknown to me as well. But beyond that, even if I got teleported to England where I at least know a similar enough language to where I could figure out middle English decently quickly, I think people seriously overestimate how useful just having modern knowledge is.

    For example, say you want to build a gun. Do you know how to forge a gun barrel with medieval steel and make gunpowder out of bat shit and sulfur? Because I sure as hell don’t. I could probably make gunpowder but how the hell would you get the money to pay someone to make a gun barrel for you? And further, even if you had the skills yourself, basically nobody today deals with raw materials as inconsistent as what they were working with back then and therefore don’t have practice working with them. Even if you introduced something like germ theory to them why would anyone believe you? You’d probably get just as sick as everyone else even with following modern sanitation standards for yourself because nobody else would be. Same with math. Want to speedrun introducing calculus to the world? Good luck trying to prove it to medieval mathematicians without having deep knowledge of euclidean constructive proofs and philosophy to even allow for something like an infinitesimal to exist. There’s very little one person can realistically do to change the world on their own.




  • 99% of these problems would be solved if copyright lasted a reasonable amount of time. IMO copyright should last for 50 years from the date of publication or the life of the original creator, whichever is longer. That way the author has control over their work during their own lifetime, and like an author’s husband won’t just be screwed if his wife published a blockbuster book and then dies soon after, but we don’t have Disney milking shit from the 1920s for a hundred years. It’s absurd to me that I have to pay Amazon $4 to watch Citizen Kane, a movie that came out before my grandparents were born, and that’s the only legal way to watch it. Literally nobody who was involved in making that movie is still alive to benefit from it, it’s only people making money from doing literally nothing.


  • Idk I know I was pretty excited for Netflix’s early original content because the proposition was like “HBO, but on the internet and you can watch it any time” and they were doing big budget stuff. Things only went south when they didn’t keep up the HBO level quality and ruined their reputation to the point where I see “Netflix original” and immediately think “garbage TV”






  • It greatly simplifies life from a legal standpoint. It’s basically like creating a tiny corporation of two people that can act as a single legal entity. If you’re married it simplifies buying a house together, inheritance, medical decisions, etc. As others have pointed out, these are important especially when your partner’s family don’t approve of you or the relationship especially for LGBT people.

    I am going to break the mold though and say the actual ceremony is important too. Declaring your intention to stay together for life in front of your friends and family changes things. It adds a level of security and finality to the relationship- you have to put your money where your mouth is on the relationship. Although people frequently do it, I don’t know how someone can go through the wedding process without reflecting on how big of a deal it is to stand up in front of so many of your friends and family and declare your intention to stay together forever, even without the religious ritual aspect of it. I wouldn’t want to have kids with someone without having this commitment, for example. Ultimately even though marriage is a social construct, I think it’s still a useful one even in a world where women are no longer considered property of men.






  • Honestly I think that’s just what chocolate actually costs when it’s not full of filler. I made the decision to just not buy American chocolate years ago and I had a Hershey’s bar at Halloween because someone brought in a bag of them to my work and holy shit it was bad, I legit couldn’t finish the tiny bar. It tasted like plastic or something and the texture didn’t even resemble milk chocolate, it was chalky and crumbly. I don’t understand how things have gotten this bad, and how American consumers accept it. Why even buy shit that doesn’t even taste good just because it’s cheap? I’d rather go without than eat the shit Hershey’s chocolate. If tariffs mean I have to stick with American made chocolate (disregarding that you can’t grow cocoa in the US) I’ll probably just stop eating chocolate because American chocolate sucks ass.