I want to thank you for your reply. Hearing about someone like you and your attempt to improve your community and the world I the ways you can is so uplifting!

People are social (even the introverts) and the return on in person, deep social interaction is another reason it’s important to fight the allure of convenience of online media being ones primary and most influencial social interaction. I love that you’re doing it!

Rather than take a defeatist veiw from this line if thinking, it will do well for your mental health to first spend more time, energy and thoughts on things you can control. Not just things related to environmentalism, but broadly reduce energy, engagement and focus from the things you don’t have significant control over and direct them to those things you do have control. It’s good to get a broad picture and observe the world around you outside of your control in small doses, but it’s easy to over indulge in an unfocused survey of problems in the world, especially on social media. (I include Lemmy communities in the social media category).

Furthermore, when you do engage with these problems, do so with more narrow focus and in more depth with an eye towards understanding the level of impact the problem has and what organizations or policy positions you can support to amplify your limited influence over the issues that causee the problem. In this way you can mitigate the feelings of helplessness and sense of there being many existential and imminent problems you need to contend with but cannot remedy. You can turn seemingly untouchable solutions into real possibilities without overwhelming your emotional capacity by working with others.

I am not happy now.

Wikipedia has a great image of orientations on the dates of Saturn’s opposition from 2001 thru 2029 (copied below). It really shows what’s going on and the approximate timing of visibility of the rings as they change from a Northern to Southern view from Earth’s perspective. Between March and November of 2025 the rings will be in the least visible orientations.

That’s an interesting observation, it’d be interesting to see what could be the reason why that pattern might hold in a proper survey. But it could just be chance that it was that way at that particular facility.

Keep talking with your psychiatrist.

Seems like it’s pretty much like any other surface in your kitchen, it requires regular cleaning.

Ford recently announced their decision to use their facility built for the purpose of expanding their EV supply to instead manufacturer more ICE pick-up trucks.

The most recent group of people that acted on their emotional desires in this vain did so in support of the man who is taking money from a billionaire (hundred-billionare?) to stay in power in exchange for changing their policy position to favor the donor. This group failed and many were convicted of federal crimes.

As I understand it, some studies don’t distinguish low-volume drinking from not drinking.

The quoted portion of the meta-study in the post makes it clear that the studies reviewed did distinguish between low-volume drinking and not drinking.

It wouldn’t surprise me if sample selection not taking into account social factors which would cause people who drink at low volumes to lie and say they don’t drink could play a role in certain studies.

Two organizations that are trying to make a difference:

The Journal of Trial and Error.
[The journal’s editor-in-chief was interviewed by Nature.]

SURE: Series of Unsurprising Results in Economics

I found out about these today by the comments linked below:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41057127

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41058569

Citation count has been and continues to be the defacto measure of research importance.

Academic fraud is in no way a thing that is limited or even disproportionately prevalent in China. Perhaps the flavors of it are biased to one form or another in different cultures, but don’t mistake that for more or less fraud in that culture. Perhaps you notice more from China simply because there are simply more Chinese people in the world than any other nation behind Indian people in India.

Incentives matter in any system. The incentives are perverse right now.

There was a whole season of The Wire that was dedicated to the theme of news publications demanding that more be done with less as budgets were cut. Craigslist was a major factor in the trend as it cut revenue severely for local publications.

It would be great if corn got that feature

There’s a variety of maize that does fix nitrogen:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/amaizeballs/567140/

There are some political and technical hurdles to adapting it more broadly to the agricultural industry.

Relevant information:

GovTrack.us posted about the bill in question:

Appropriations legislation covering a bit less than half of the overall funding needs of the federal government was passed by the Senate 75-22 around dinner time on Friday 3/8. The bill was signed the next morning by the President. Even though technically Biden did so after the Friday midnight deadline, the government never shutdown for even a few hours.

The Science section of the bill contains the majority of the Science related appropriations.

GovTrack.us also provided links to summaries of the bill from The New York Times by Catie Edmondson and The American Prospect by David Dayen.

The biggest thing that PieFed has done is get up and running on public data with new accounts open to the public. This trial by fire will make it fail fast or become much improved. It seems that the main developer is quite experienced and has thought about architecture and improvements that have already been implemented. I think it’s promising for all of these reasons.

My biggest potential concern is that moderation tools have not been implimented yet (unless the were very recently).

As far as Python being difficult in larger systems, this can be mitigated by experience and good practice. But I tend to agree that Python is typically not the ideal choice for a large project.

Full text of the bill is linked to in the Senate Appropriations Committee Press Release

4,138,349 were born 18 years ago