Well, most dentists would recommend most toothpaste. They’re a lot more concerned with making sure people are brushing regularly than they are with worrying about the brand of toothpaste they use.

That kinda means the exceptions are weird and highly dependent on the dentist and toothpaste brand involved. Maybe they think it’s overpriced, maybe they think it’s less effective, maybe they have ethical concerns about the parent corporation (looking at you, Crest), maybe they’re super picky about what they recommend, maybe they’ve never heard of the brand before, maybe they just got lousy swag from the company rep and they’re being petty. It could be all kinds of things, and the ads certainly won’t tell you what they are.

There’s also the pesky detail that if minerals in the soil are taken up into plants, and plants are then eaten by animals, then animals need to go back into the soil we grow our crops in or the the soils get depleted of minerals. That’s why most salt is iodized, because we’ve leached all the iodine out of our croplands and never put it back. There is only so much fossil fertilizer in the world. Eventually we are going to have to accept that we are part of nature instead of separate beings above it and doing things to it. Factory farming sucks and needs to end, but we can’t “Just fucking leave animals in peace.” we are not separate from them. They are us and we are them.

I mean, I prefer the real thing to childhood funtime genocide play, but I guess that is a pretty common modern use for the term cowboy.

Plus if we use the actual historical meaning I can point out that most cowboys were Mexican, which is always a good time.

Why? Now the Democrats are going to start tearing each other apart and in the end they’ll pick someone even worse and now we’re even more likely to end up with Trump winning. The only people who ever had a problem with Biden being old were the people who had already made up their minds.

“!” in math is the factorial symbol, and 2 factorial is just 2 times 1, which is 2.

Not a guarantee, no. A very, very strong predictor though. You have to have some kind of evidence beyond just vibes to start making claims that this time is totally different from all the others before anyone should take you seriously.

At every step of modern computing people have thought that the human brain looks like the latest new thing. This is no different.

Sure, yeah, but there are two major problems I see with that. It is a plan that even if it worked correctly would result in the most deadly war in human history if it happened in the US today, and also it wouldn’t work. They’d loose.

I mean, stopping fascists from gaining power is a pretty good way of stopping fascists from gaining power. If the government is to incompetent and/or uninterested in running the country to actually fix the issues people are pissed off about it’s only a stopgap solution, but a stopgap is better than nothing. If you have an actual plan for how to go about the process of creating an actual better system in the real world starting from where we are then by all means feel free to share, but until then voting will save lives.

Haha, sure dude. Deleting a social media account is making the world a better place, but cause that’s what I meant by doing something. You’re just being pedantic and completely missing the point on purpose now.

As for what I do, sadly its not really anything anymore. My health problems have gotten pretty severe to the point that I can’t do any of the things I used to. I really have found my people here in this sad useless little corner of the internet. Even if you are doing something useful with your life its despite spending your time in this sad little circle jerk, not because of it. Nobody ever advocates for that here, this is just a “network of platforms” full of arrogant internet douchebagery masquerading as leftist.

Excuses, excuses. Nobody’s organizing, nobody’s talking about helping their communities, nobody’s doing anything. This whole platform is just a bunch of terminally online losers making excuses for why they’re the only good people even though they’ve never done anything useful in their entire lives. I don’t care what you do, but do SOMETHING. Even if it’s just talking to you neighbors to see what would make the place you live a better one for the people who live there. Make the world a better place, don’t just wait for someone else to fix it for you.

And yet I have never seen anyone on Lemmy actually ever suggest doing anything. Its all just self congratulatory moralizing and zero action. A great big ol’ circle jerk.

Who cares? Hanging out in weird niche communities having a circle jerk about who the “true” leftists are is no better than being a liberal. Buncha feel good crap that accomplishes nothing.

I mean, he can be the most important founding father of modern psychology and also have been wrong about everything he said. Let’s be real. Modern psychology is still very, very wrong about a lot of things. It’s a science in its infancy. Alchemists were wrong about everything, but their work made chemistry possible. Standing on the shoulders of giants doesn’t always mean those giants were right.

From what I understand most can’t spray, except in the west of North America, where the most common ones can. Even here it’s not all of them, and yeah, they are pretty chill. They don’t spray when they’re confused, just when they think something is about to eat them. Dogs are pretty famous for investigating things by shoving their faces into them though.

They’re not particularly trigger happy with their spray, so it mostly happens if you have a pet that finds them before you do. If you just take them outside in a jar or shoo them out the door with a broom you’re usually fine. A dog with stank face is no fun though.

The ones where I’m from are often over an inch long, and can spray kinda like a skunk. They’re good for the local ecosystem and they’re mostly harmless, but you definitely don’t want them in your house. If you want to look them up I think the most common name is desert stink beetle.

Cool. It’s easy to misread tone in a forum like this, so we kinda almost lost the plot there for a minute, but in the end I think we ended up back on the same page. And yeah, I absolutely understand how frustrating it is to have your vote in the big headline grabbing elections be completely meaningless. It sucks. I’m glad you’re getting involved where it matters most though. If we want real change it’s going to have to filter up from the bottom, not be ordained from the top down.

Look, I get it. I’ve spent most of my life living in a very red district in a very blue state. That’s not true now, and I’m happy to be taking advantage of it, but I understand. Just remember to actually vote at your local level. It makes more difference in your day to day life than who is president anyway. I’m just trying to be clear about what’s going on. Historically and this November.

The number of third party votes has gone up and down a little, but over the last 40 years the only third party candidate to get over 5% of the vote in a presidential election was Ross Perot. 2020 actually had very low third party support. The most popular third party candidate left of the Republican party in the last 40 years was Ralph Nader in 2000, and he got about 2.5% of the vote. There will almost certainly be more people voting for third parties in 2024 than there were in 2020, but unless something very weird happens between now and November it will probably just be going back to normal. 3-4% Libertarian and 1-2% Green. That’s not gonna do much of anything.