Carl Sagan wrote a book, The Demon Haunted World, which is all about why people get sucked into nonsense like ancient aliens, and how to deal with it.

Gesundheit.

Or, if you prefer: “Yahweh bless you.”

Disagree. The movie is a mediocre adaptation of a fun and mediocre book into an un-fun and mediocre movie. The film was never going to be gold, but they spent an awful lot of CGI money to make a movie that wasn’t as fun as just reading the original and imagining all of the nerdy stuff being described.

Mid 30s, USA. I’m smart (Ivy League science doctorate) but I can’t drive a standard transmission because my dad “couldn’t teach me” because I “wouldn’t learn right”. It was just me asking him questions like "What does the inside of the clutch actually look like? " and him yelling “That doesn’t matter, just ease out on the clutch while giving it some gas!” Apparently I can be taught a lot, but not how to drive a standard.

Weirdly, my engineer friend let me drive his standard transmission car once after giving me some basic instructions and I did okay going up and down the road alone, but that was just one day and I fear I’ve forgotten everything. But I must be mistakenly remembering that, because according to my father I “can’t be taught!”

If you get good at it and if you run enough hives each year, it does, eventually, start making money though! Which is almost more frustrating, because every dollar you spend on it could come back some day in honey sales… but will it?

Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf

This is the shortest comment here, and perhaps the most elegant answer I’ve seen. Instead of shooting all of the rioters to prevent them from causing harm, you trick them into turning on each other, devouring just one of their number, and then after their internal melee you round up the survivors and throw them in a paddy wagon.

Brawndo. It’s got what I crave.

I once overheard a pair of utility workers talking, and as I walked past I only overheard a snippet of conversation. The older one yelled up the cherrypicker to the younger one and said, in a heavy Boston accent:

“If only you could use your powers for good, instead of for useless…”

That sentence is seared into my brain.

Cries in Medieval Engineers

Ignore that jerk. You’re great, and your detergent videos explained, in exhaustive detail, (as all of your videos do, because that’s literally the whole shtick,) the nuance and context that you were aiming for. Anyone who missed that just wasn’t paying attention.

Also your snarkiness in your videos is amazing and never stop being you.

I think reddit has just continued making more and more moves down their path towards the IPO, and all of those moves together have shown a lot of us that we’re not interested in staying on for the rest of the ride. Complicity towards corrupt or powerhungry mods of massive communities with tangible effects on the world (e.g. r/politics), censorship, revenue-focused anti-user actions, ignoring the community, downplaying the value of volunteer mods and threatening to replace them… Yeah, thanks, no. I’m good over here in the fediverse now.

I think you have got it slightly wrong. You’re correct that you can’t just go to one community on one instance and see every new technology discussion that is taking place on Lemmy, but you CAN subscribe to all of the technology-related communities on different instances and scrolling through posts of communities you’re subscribed to will show you all the discussions you want to see.

I think your concern is a common one, but what you’re seeing as a bug is, I think, one of the best features of federation.

Drop the mindset that r/technology was the reason all of those tech-interested humans got together in the first place. It wasn’t. The human community of tech-interested people just all joined the subreddit. If that same human community subscribes to all of the different tech communities on different instances, then they’ll all still be interacting together online, all commenting on the same tech posts. No fragmentation.

The extra cool part is how stable this is. Imagine a mod of r/technology went on a power trip? Now the whole sub is gone. Imagine the mod of technology.beehaw went crazy? Not a big deal. Everyome unsubscribes from that community and the discussion carries on in the different tech communities. Or what if beehaw goes down for an hour? (Or forever?) Also not a big deal (unless your account is on beehsw!) because the rest of the instances will still be up.

I expect we will see a feature soon(ish) to set up a multireddit-equivalent so you can just pull up the tech communities you’re subbed to.