Just learned that Wikimedia has a project called Wikifunctions. I'm a big fan of Wikipedia and associated projects, and on its face sounds like a cool site. I do wonder how this would work in practical terms though, like how could it actually be used?

Prompted by another thread about conscription in Ukraine.

I saw a post on lemmy about how we could prevent 133 holocausts by promoting animal rights and veganism. The article opened by doing some math about how many dogs you could torture and kill in order to be equivalent to taking a human life, and then how many animals humans kill, and concluded that we're committing holocaust equivalents many times over.

I have respect for people who question the status quo and think seriously about morality. Thinking about slavery, it used to be argued "this is the natural order," "this is actually the moral thing to do" and so on. It wasn't easy then to stand up for what we now see as the obvious moral position. So I have some receptivity to this type of argument.

That said, I think back to when I was a Christian (atheist now), and was fully bought into the anti abortion movement. They argued that fetuses were human, that we were committing fetus holocausts all the time. Taking that view to its logical conclusion, one could justify things like killing a few (abortion doctors, judges) to save many (fetuses).

The author of the vegan piece was not advocating for such things. But one could ask why not. I think the fact the conclusion (133 holocausts) is so far outside accepted views should prompt some examination of the starting premises. (Is any killing of an animal for food the same as torturous factory farming, should we do something about animals that eat other animals etc)

I'm glad I read the piece because there's value in hearing other perspectives. We can't see ourselves and our own blind spots. I would have responded in-thread but that community description said "not a place for debate", so tossing out this thought here.

I wasn't aware just how good the news is on the green energy front until reading this. We still have a tough road in the short/medium term, but we are more or less irreversibly headed in the right direction.

Man, fuck this guy

Every week or every month each level of government throws a party funded with taxpayer dollars, and attendees are selected at random from the residents and given advance notice of the party schedule.

My default buying process is research + spreadsheet creation, this time thought I'd ask the community here if you have any experience / wisdom with garage door openers. Thanks for any help!

Additional info: Single car garage built in the 1950s in the U.S. The current opener is a lift master, just eyeballing it probably from the 90s. The door could be original? I don't know. It's wood, seems fairly substantial.

Yesterday and this morning started having issues with the door just stopping in the middle of opening or closing. When it stops, the remote button becomes unresponsive for a few seconds. When it starts moving again it goes the other direction so you have to keep pressing and try to get it to close/open before it stops again. This morning I ended up pulling it down part of the way because I'd gone through several rounds of up, down, up, down. It doesn't seem to want to move manually which isn't surprising. Worried my car is going to get stuck in there before work so I figure should probably be proactive here.

Question inspired by the news that Dave and Busters is supposed to be adding gambling to their games. And of course there are the sports betting apps.

I get that all things being equal we should let people do what they want to do. But I don't see much of a benefit, and a lot of downside to allowing the spread of gambling.

Let's assume no zombies or other supernatural occurrences, but could be plenty of people being shitty, consequences thereof, or natural disasters

Edit: to expand on this, presumably if society has temporarily or permanently collapsed there would be issues with things like deliveries, security, digital transactions, utility service etc. Feel free to use whichever scenario seems most likely to you, I'm asking more because I was thinking how screwed I'd be if I was just out of food after say, seven days.

I don't mean the actual rules of passing it, I mean what organization, activities and funding are necessary to do so.

The last one passed was in 1992 and it was just about congressional pay. Last one before that was 1971. Is there some kind of play book? It seems to happen so infrequently that it would be hard to study and conditions would vary enough that the last effort wouldn't be useful as a model.

("The amendment process is very difficult and time consuming: A proposed amendment must be passed by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, then ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states." Link)