My local grocery store has half the self checkouts they installed permanently disabled, and plans to remove them. They never got rid of human cashiers, but they misjudged the optimal ratio of selfcheck/cashier way too heavily on the self check side.

I think they lack a diaphragm. It was weird reading in my cockatiel care books that some handling on the neck was fine, but even small pressure to their chest could prevent them from breathing.

Being invested at an identity level is a human trait, not a Republican or MAGA one. It’s not “lately”, it’s all of human history.

We all readily recognize the blind spots in people we consider part of an out-group. Becoming more aware of the blind spots of people we consider fellow in-group members, and especially in ourselves, is more difficult, but I believe important to strive for. Having blind spots is natural. Recognizing them and trying to compensate for them in our thinking can benefit decision-making.

In the case of “are the tattoos on this guy’s fingers MS13-related”, there is way more substantive discussion to be had than demanding the guy’s girlfriend dig up and share publicly a years-old couple’s picture without the emoji. Some quotes below if they are of interest, and the article has a picture with the full fingers and their tattoos fully visible in case that really was what you were going for. https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/01/politics/abrego-garcias-tattoos-explainer

“I see a bunch of symbols that could be interpreted any number of ways,” Jorja Leap, a University of California, Los Angeles professor who has served as an expert gang witness in court, told CNN.

…“These are definitely NOT MS-13 tattoos,” Thomas Ward, a University of Southern California professor who spent years embedded with MS-13 researching the gang, and is the author of an ethnography that studies MS-13, said in an email.

…While some gangs will opt for more low-profile or ambiguous means of identifying members to evade detection from law enforcement or rival gang members, MS-13 tattoos, according to Leap, aren’t exactly subtle. They are used to market the gang’s brutality.

“MS-13 members have tattoos that say ‘MS-13,’” Leap said. “They’re not head-scratchers; they’re billboards. There’s no ambiguity.”

Birthers claimed for years that seeing Obama’s long form birth certificate would alleviate their citizenship concerns. Spoiler: it didn’t, they moved the goal posts.

Once people are identity-level invested in something being true - in this case that deportations are about public safety and not racism, because no way could they or people they respect be racist - sinking time into producing evidence for them is futile. It is no longer about facts, it’s about identity. Sometimes people break out of these self-imposed mental prisons if a main trusted person who helped lead them there loses their trust for an unrelated reason (not one that had become identity-latched). Sometimes being welcomed into a different community that fulfills those identity needs will let them see their previously identity-latched falsehoods as false. But evidence is always futile.

Neat to see a 6-7 solar mass black hole spotted. First one without a companion star to give it away! As we get better at finding black holes of this size, will be interesting to see if they end up explaining part of the “dark matter” problem.

Elsewhere in the thread, someone said non-primate mammals (like mice) are dichromic (can’t see orange), but birds are quadchromic (see even more colors than trichromics like primates). Is your cat only a good mouse-hunter, and comparatively a bad bird-hunter?

Apparently pink works as well, if a hunter wants a second color vest

I guess people eating a basket of shrimp are balanced out by people sharing one cow with several hundred others.

Well, changing it dramatically. It’s going to stay within historical ranges where ocean life flourished, but without any exoskeleton-heavy animals like corals in the mix.

Maybe more with less is possible, but we are currently doing less variety of skill with way, way more energy. From https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/follow-hbp/news/2023/09/04/learning-brain-make-ai-more-energy-efficient/

It is estimated that a human brain uses roughly 20 Watts to work – that is equivalent to the energy consumption of your computer monitor alone, in sleep mode. On this shoe-string budget, 80–100 billion neurons are capable of performing trillions of operations that would require the power of a small hydroelectric plant if they were done artificially.

Or work to implement ranked choice voting. The more localities use it, the more comfortable people get with it (the primary anti-ranked choice argument is it’s “too confusing for voters”), the more chance it has to be adopted by more states beyond the current Maine and Alaska beachhead.

The Republican demands were to NOT do things, which can be moved towards by filibuster and delay. The Democrat demands are to DO things, and filibuster and delay would just get the Republicans what they want, while being able to blame the Democrats for all the negative effects that are surprising to their constituents. They need to find better messages and ways to get those messages out, absolutely, but it’s not a mirror image to the Republican situation four years ago.

It’s not coming from a centrist in this case: the article is written by someone who argues Bernie is insufficiently left.

Reading the article, the argument is that Bernie isn’t left enough, and more radical candidates need to be run in primaries.

Using the original meaning of a word and not chasing off on the euphemism treadmill is hardly shifting to the right.

Both Roberts and Barrett joined the liberal block on this vote, and as a 5-4 ruling both of them were required to get to a majority. That only Barrett is getting social media energy over it says something.

There is a surprising amount of empty space between atoms, and even inside atoms between the electron orbitals and the nucleus. Small black holes are so dense they mostly fall through this empty between-atom space and don’t actually hit anything. Even in a matter-rich environment like inside the Earth, you’d need a black hole with more than half the mass of the moon to be large enough to eat matter faster than it loses matter to Hawking radiation.

It’s wild that there is so much space between atoms (and inside them, between the elctron orbitals and the nucleus), and black holes are so incredibly dense, that a small black hole can fall all the way through the Earth and not hit enough matter to gain appreciable mass.

The 3:2 resonance Klear references is considered a type of tidal locking.

There was a time people thought Mercury would have some “twilight” acreage that was always at habitable temperatures. Then we learned that, while yes it is tidally locked with the Sun, it is locked in a 3:2 resonance so it does rotate with respect to the sun, and everywhere gets both scorched and frozen to uninhabitability.