this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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[–] Montagge@lemmy.zip 77 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Flames on the side makes things go faster

[–] Cruxifux@feddit.nl 21 points 1 month ago (9 children)
[–] Montagge@lemmy.zip 16 points 1 month ago
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[–] Asafum@feddit.nl 63 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

The Costanza Rule is real, but any attempt to utilize it is a paradox.

Rule: any decision I make is the wrong decision because I made it therefore I should always do the opposite.

But to do the opposite is also a choice I am making and therefore it too will be the wrong choice.

[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 21 points 1 month ago (11 children)

Reminds me of a trolley problem variant I saw once. It went roughly like this:

A trolley is headed for Track A, where a single person is tied to the tracks. You can pull a lever and cause the trolley to switch to Track B, which enters a tunnel that you cannot see inside. Track B might have 3 people tied to the tracks, or it might be free of people. You can't see which.

Two hours ago, a perfect prediction machine inside the tunnel predicted whether you would pull the lever.

  • If it predicted that you would pull the lever (sending the trolley into the tunnel), then it tied 3 people to Track B, thus setting it up so pulling the lever would kill 3 people.
  • If it predicted that you would not pull the lever, then it ensured Track B is free of obstacles.

The perfect prediction machine is guaranteed to have made the correct prediction. Do you pull the lever?

[–] Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org 33 points 1 month ago (4 children)

That's not a problem. It is just an exercise in reading. Two possibilities remain. In one, you kill 1 person. In the other, you kill 3 persons. (the empty track "exists" only if you do not use it).

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[–] ptz@dubvee.org 52 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Patrick's Law: If a comment thread on the internet is more than 7 replies deep, it's a slap-fight that's best avoided.

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 22 points 1 month ago (6 children)

There's also a small chance it's a lame train of inside jokes, or a string of Monty Python quotes you've seen a thousand times before.

I'll start:

"This. Is an *Ex-*parrot!"

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[–] capuccino@lemmy.world 39 points 1 month ago (3 children)

The moon is closer to me than the Eiffel tower since I can see the first and not the second.

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[–] zout@fedia.io 39 points 1 month ago (3 children)

There are people who are always lucky, and those who are unlucky. The lucky ones tend to win more coin flips, have less accidents, and if they fail it will be upwards.

[–] Colonel_Panic@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

"Luck is where preparation meets opportunity."

That has really stuck with me. It isn't so much that some people "always get lucky' it's more true to say they are more prepared to catch the opportunities that happen.

[–] Bubbaonthebeach@lemmy.ca 14 points 4 weeks ago

I've known plenty of very prepared people over the last 60 years to know that opportunity doesn't show up for everyone nor can they make it happen. There is always some luck, good or bad, that happens in people's lives.

[–] Tujio@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'd use myself as a counter example. I'm pretty lucky in life. I've got a decent job, I can pay the bills, I've got a wonderful wife and supportive, friendly family. I'm doing better than the vast majority of humanity.

Games of chance? Unbelievably bad. Statistical anomaly. It once took me 25+ tries to win on a 30% odds lottery ticket.

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[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 34 points 4 weeks ago

The reason the Space Force has woodland camouflage is because SG1 is real and every planet looks like British Columbia

[–] rowdy@piefed.social 30 points 1 month ago (7 children)

I got one - and it’s the only conspiracy theory I give any credence to.

All of Helen Keller’s feats were utter bullshit and were a circus side show to bring money to her family. It’s the perfect “you can do anything if you just put your mind to it” fairytale. Like hell she flew an airplane, ain’t no way she wrote a book.

Before anyone provides evidence of the contrary, I will not accept it no matter how damning it is. Hence the “firmly hold.”

[–] Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone 32 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (6 children)

It’s depressing to me that one of the top upvoted comments here is ‘there’s no way a deaf blind person could have been literate.’

You’re absolutely correct that her legacy has been used as inspiration porn, but that doesn’t reflect on her intellectual abilities at all, just what stories society and the powerful want us to hear. Even during her own life Keller experienced exactly that once she became a socialist, and suddenly all the newspapers and people who went on at length about how capable she was suddenly believed her unable to reason because she was blind and deaf. Keller herself even spoke out against using her story as a way to tell people that anyone can do anything, and specifically that the poor didn’t have the opportunities she had.

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[–] scripty@lemmy.ca 29 points 1 month ago

This "your evidence has no power here" is exactly the energy I was looking for lol.

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[–] LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world 30 points 1 month ago (5 children)

I don't believe there's a spoons worth of plastic in your brain. Ain't no way. It's suspiciously sensational, and confirms something we all believe to be true (plastics bad, humans reckless, etc.). I have zero evidence to the contrary but im pretty confident that in a few years to a decade it will be debunked.

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[–] L7HM77@sh.itjust.works 29 points 4 weeks ago (5 children)

JESUS WAS AN ALIEN, AND WE STAPLED HIM TO A TREE.

NOW THEY AIN'T GON COME BACK.

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[–] kelpie_returns@lemmy.world 28 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Dogs are boys and cats are girls

[–] Colonel_Panic@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago

They asked for unscientific things.

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[–] Fluffy_Ruffs@lemmy.world 27 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I don't care how many studies are done on food safe plastics I still don't like the idea of using them on my kitchen. That's not to say I avoid them 100% but I do what I can to avoid them within reason. Like I feel after the whole BPA scare and banning them from use in food applications is a temporary thing and that it's a matter of time until we find a problem with the new BPA-free liners.

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[–] MECHAGIC@lemmy.blahaj.zone 26 points 4 weeks ago (5 children)

We have higher dimensional organs and we can't see them because, well, they're from a higher dimension. The soul is one of these organs

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[–] FridaySteve@lemmy.world 25 points 1 month ago (16 children)

Without the hate speech and constant invasive political discourse, most people on the internet would lose interest and go away.

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[–] TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 24 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (8 children)

being a shitty person is way more beneficial than being a good person.

and i mean by shitty/good basically morality. being a amoral selfish person is almost always better for the individual.

however, i think such people are always going to be unhappy due to the instability of their life.

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[–] mech@feddit.org 21 points 1 month ago (11 children)

People were happier in the stone age than they are in first world countries today.

Our brains did not evolve for the lifestyle we're living today.
I sure as fuck would be happier out hunting, gathering and making handcrafted tools during the day, then telling stories by the campfire wrapped in a fur at night.
Even if there's no toilet paper, I could get mauled by a bear every day, and if not, the tribe will leave me behind on the next migration when I'm too old and weak to keep up.

I'd rather live 30-60 years like that than edit another Excel sheet. Sadly, our "civilization" made that way of life completely impossible.

[–] EponymousBosh@awful.systems 16 points 1 month ago (4 children)

the tribe will leave me behind on the next migration when I'm too old and weak to keep up.

FWIW, this part is almost certainly not true.

https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/these-4000-year-old-bones-reveal-a-shocking-secret-about-humanitys-earliest-caregivers

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/17/878896381/ancient-bones-offer-clues-to-how-long-ago-humans-cared-for-the-vulnerable

https://news.usask.ca/articles/research/2017/ancient-spinal-injury-a-story-of-survival.php

These are just a handful of these types of stories, there's loads more if you want to search for them. But the upshot is: your family or tribe would have taken care of you to the best of their ability, for as long as they could, and you would have been given a decent burial when you died.

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[–] Nomorereddit@lemmy.today 20 points 4 weeks ago (12 children)

Once your poop and pee hit the inside of my toilet, its legally my property.

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[–] fartographer@lemmy.world 19 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

When I drop something on the floor and then blow on it in short soft bursts, it's suddenly clean enough to consume.

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[–] Passerby6497@lemmy.world 18 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

That if you can't find something or something doesn't work, it will continue to be missing/not work until you complain about it to someone, at which point it will start working/show up and you look silly.

Kyle's Law is harsh, but fair (and rather annoying)

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[–] RodgeGrabTheCat@sh.itjust.works 18 points 1 month ago (11 children)

Tailgaters (people who drive too close behind another vehicle) are idiots.

Cops are liars.

Anti-vaxxers, and other conspiracy nutters, are anti-science cretins.

[–] thisbenzingring 35 points 1 month ago

these are all truism, the OP wants unscientific opinions!

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[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 18 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (2 children)

The best way to find something you've lost is to buy another one, then you'll find the original.

Antivaxxers are chaos cultists who want to share Grandfather Nurgle's gifts with humanity.

Sometimes my dead dogs visit me in my dreams. I know they're supposed to be dead in the dream and I give them lots of pets and belly rubs. Then I wake up feeling great. Yes I'm 99% sure it's a product of my unconscious mind but sometimes...

All animals have limited intelligence. Humans are animals, therefore humans have limited intelligence. Take a chimp or a dolphin and try to teach them calculus. Now imagine what realities lie beyond human understanding. There's a whole epistemological realm of the unknowable out there.

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[–] DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (6 children)

Reincarnation

I just can't get over the idea of:

Nothing --> Existing --> Nothing

So I figured, an unscientific philosophical guess, that existence is more like:

Noting --> Existing --> Nothing --> Existing (again) --> Nothing --> Existing (again) --> [repeating forever]

Maybe "souls" is just an energy.

Einstein said energy cannot be created nor destroyed. So maybe, when we die, we become an energy that, by some ways we can't yet understand, just randomly becomes a part of another living being... maybe a human, maybe non-human, maybe this energy stays nearby here on Earth, maybe it somehow goes to a random alien planet and you become an alien the "next life"... who knows?

Or maybe this is just another coping mechanism my brain cane up with in face of the knowledge of certain death, influenced by the Eastern philosophy that I grew up with? Whatever...

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[–] TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 month ago

My moral values, such as valuing reducing suffering as far as possible, qualify I suppose.

[–] Triumph@fedia.io 14 points 1 month ago

If you have a thing, and you cut it at a diagonal, you get more thing.

[–] JollyG@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago (5 children)

I’ve been playing around with this idea I have called “n-link civic literacy” it’s an unscientific measure of civic literacy (how good are you at extracting and understanding information from the news) that works by measuring the number of links it takes to successfully obscure bullshit from the reader.

Did you read a headline, form an opinion and react to it without reading the article? Then you are -1 link literate. Do you open the article but believe it’s claims without checking the source material? Then you are 0 link literate. Click through to the study cited by the article? 1 link literate.

Probably would not work for edge cases, but I think could work to get a rough measure of the civic literacy of a community.

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[–] callyral@pawb.social 14 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Digital/no pressure buttons are completely unreliable when used to control a physical thing.

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[–] TAG@lemmy.world 13 points 4 weeks ago (4 children)

I am convinced that I will come down with cold/flu if I breath too much cold air. When I walk in the cold, I always wrap a scarf around my mouth and nose. If I don't, the cold air will give me a sore throat. That sore throat will act as a Petri dish for illness to develop and spread into my lungs or nose.

I know plenty of medical professionals and all of them tell me that that is not how it works, but I have a datum of proof. In my first year of university, I had a nasty, persistent respiratory infection during the late fall/early winter. To keep my throat warm while it was recovering, I started wearing a scarf and my illness went away quickly. After that, I started wrapping up whenever I was walking to class in the cold and never got sick again.

I am now used to wrapping my face in the cold and feel wrong without it. When I don't, it seems like I am more likely to come home with a scratchy throat. I can definitely say that many of my flus start in the throat (though it could just be that the first flu symptom I tend to notice is the sore throat).

[–] dmention7@midwest.social 14 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Cold air tends to be very dry, which can most definitely irritate your nose and throat (among other body parts). That irritation and drying out can make the thin skin and mucous membranes more vulnerable to attack from bacteria and viruses.

The only really unscientific part of your post is that the cold air itself is not the direct cause of illness.

People with a strong immune system might not see a big difference, but if you are already more susceptible to getting sick, then the link to cold air may be more obvious to you.

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[–] AstroLightz@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I firmly believe some days you wake up and the world just fucking hates you, yet the next day everything is chill. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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[–] asg101@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 4 weeks ago (3 children)

Aliens have quarantined the solar system to prevent contamination of the universe by humanity. They are waiting for us to incinerate ourselves and keeping the other races safe until we finish the job.

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