admiralteal @ admiralteal @kbin.social

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I mean, if you don't think someone like Trump beating someone like Biden is a worse outcome than the alternative, than it truly doesn't matter what you do with your vote I suppose. I think I'm just as happy with folks who think that way wasting their votes or not voting at all.

I maintain that throwing away a vote in a contested election like this is consenting to fascism though. You can justify it any way you want, but I'll see you that way.

Yep, I agree with you 100%.

But voting is also a rational choice you're making. If you throw your vote to a third party and then your second choice candidate loses to your bottom choice candidate, you done fucked up bad.

Voters need to be strategic and rational. In a closely-contested election between an actual fascist and a kind of milquetoast but surprisingly effective progressive, for example, voting for the third party would be a lot like consenting to fascism.

A third party vote can be a very effective way to send a message. But the third party candidates are also frequently weapons and tools used by a power-hungry minority to divide the opinions and values of the majority in order to unfairly win an election.

Most of the people who really advocate hard for voting third party seem to have just completely forgotten that primaries exist.

Conservatives.

It's the conservatives doing it. It always has been, it always will be. No need for enlightened centrism here. And don't pretend they don't do it outside the US because I follow world news.

Don't forget they're cops.

Cops like Trump, generally. Doubt it's hard to find agents that want to be assigned to Trump.

There's also a totally plausible and far more insidious answer to what's going on with the experiences people have of the ads matching their conversations.

That explanation is advertising works. And worse, it works subconsciously. That you're seeing the ads and don't even notice you're seeing them and then they're worming their way into your conversations at which point you become more aware of them and then start noticing the ads.

Which does comport with the billions of dollars spent on advertising every year. It would be very weird if an entire ad industry that's at least a century old was all a complete nonsense waste of money this whole time.

To me, this whole narrative is just another parable about why we need to do everything possible to limit our own exposure to ads to avoid being manipulated.

Did planets form because of electromagnetism?

For myriad reasons, the answer to this is an emphatic yes.

Gravity may attract particles towards each other, but the force that actually causes them to interact with each other is almost entirely electromagnetism. The collisions of grains of cosmic dust are caused by electromagnetic fields interacting with each other. As is the gradual loss of kinetic energy -- the friction -- that allows some amount of potential energy to get converted to heat, allowing the particles to slow down and, as you described it, clump.

Absent electromagnetism, the actual particle nuclei would need to directly hit each other to cause an interaction via the nuclear forces, which is VERY improbable in the vastness of space. Improbable doesn't mean it wouldn't happen, but in this case it does mean the universe is way too big and young. Without electromagnetic interactions, particles just form orbits. Which again, that's what a "dark matter halo" is. It's all the dark matter stuff orbitting around a galaxy's center of mass because it doesn't get easily trapped in the center. It's all the dark matter in a gravitational system constantly whizzing back and forth across the center of mass since there's no electromagnetic force to rob them of the potential or kinetic energy and stop them from heading back out.

And, conveniently, these halos are just what our observations seem to indicate dark matter is doing in a typical galaxy. The observations and theory align well

I'd also bet that a huge portion of those offices rely on at least some kind of proprietary software that doesn't play nice/officially support Linux. MS Office, for example, or Autodesk's stuff. When I saw what a headache it would be to get these working on Linux, I just shrugged and decided I'd keep my dual boot available for when I inevitably have need.

You're turning up the cost dial for every additional workaround or adjustment you ask of people. Just to save what is fundamentally seen as $50-200 up front cost on a system for a new Windows 11 Pro license.

We observe patterns of behavior -- orbits, movement, gravitational lensing -- that are exactly what we would see if, for example, there were great clouds of matter or other galaxies in those places. But we don't see the hydrogen gas. We see non-uniform distributions of dark matter mass that imply there is not simply some consistent calculation error, but rather that there is dark matter that is not uniformly distributed. Again, read up on the Bullet Cluster because it shows a VERY clear example of what I am talking about, where the regular, electromagnetically-interacting matter behaves one way but the apparent shadow of dark matter behaves in a different way that is consistent with lack of electromagnetic interactions.

We've also discovered things like ultradiffiuse galaxies -- likely remnants from ancient collisions -- that have apparently been stripped of their dark matter. MOND cannot explain these observations because these galaxies essentially behave in a Newtonian manner that would be impossible in a MOND framework.

if it has mass, why does it not just clump together?

Why does stuff clump together? For all non-dark matter, the answer is electromagnetism. Outside of the extreme cases of neutron stars and black holes, where gravity overwhelms and defeats electromagnetism and the nuclear forces theoretically take over to create degeneracy pressure, electromagnetism is the reason things clump. Absent electromagnetism, what would cause clumping? Essentially nothing, stuff would whizz straight through other stuff and go into orbits. Potentially HUGE orbits, which is why there's so many theories around dark matter "halos". Maybe if there were DIRECT collisions of theoretical DM particles, that might cause an energy-releasing event -- this is one of the things current dark matter detectors are looking for and may yet find within the upcoming years.

are there any theoretical works on what kind of particle this could be, matching the pattern?

Yep, and more than a handful Many that make specific predictions we can test for and so are testing for. For example, you could look at axions, which are a theoretical particle predicted by an entirely different theory that may be a good fit for the dark matter particle.

The observations of systems like the Bullet Cluster imply that dark matter is actual material -- baryonic matter. Stuff that exists in specific locations and has mass. Modifying the math of the physical laws does not explain these observations without absolutely going into contortions where dark matter explains them quite elegantly.

The Bullet Cluster, among several other systems, are very strong evidence that dark matter is actual baryonic matter that does not experience significant (or any) electromagnetic interactions. What we see when we look at these kinds of systems is that there is all evidence of STUFF there, but we cannot see the stuff. It's not an indication of a poorly-performing math model missing a function term.

It would be like if we saw ripples in the water like we know exist around a rock. But we don't see a rock. Sure, MAYBE we just fundamentally need to rewrite our basic rules of fluid mechanics to be able to create these exact ripples. But the more probable explanation is that there's a rock we can't see, and falsifying that theory will require just HEAPS of evidence.

The evidence we have suggests overwhelmingly that there is actual stuff that has mass that we simply do not have the tools to observe. Which isn't all that surprising given that we are only JUST starting to build instruments to observe cosmological phenomena using stuff other than photons of light.

One of its primary purposes was literally as a distraction to prevent investment in traditional transportation infrastructure like trains. When a car maker is suggesting some kind of strange new transportation technology, be skeptical always.

And it wasn't entirely unsuccessful. Vegas got duped on it (plus boring company) pretty badly, for example. Idiot suckers. But it wasn't successful enough for the auto mogul Elon Musk to continue throwing money at it I suppose.

Cosmic Inflation is a good one to read up on if you never have. Because the slow acceleration we observe right now in the expansion is actually vastly inadequate to explain what we see now, so the big bang theory currently involves spacetime itself having to go through a few phase changes that are hard to wrap your head around.

All of physics is a "math model". One we attempt to falsify. And when a scientist does prove some part of the model wrong, the community leaps up in celebration and gets to working on the fix or the next.

Dark matter started as exactly a catchall designed to make the model work properly. We started with a very good model, but when observing extreme phenomenon (in this case the orbits of stars of entire galaxies), the model didn't fit. So either there was something we couldn't see to explain the difference ("dark" matter), or else the model was wrong and needed modification.

There's also multiple competing theories for what that dark matter is, exactly. Everything from countless tiny primordial black holes to bizarre, lightyear-sized standing waves in a quantum field. But the best-fitting theories that make the most sense and contradict the fewest observations & models seem to prefer there be some kind of actual particle that interacts just fine with gravity, but very poorly or not at all with electromagnetism. And since we rely on electromagnetism for nearly all of our particle physics experiments that makes whatever this particle is VERY elusive.

Worth observing that once, a huge amount of energy produced by stars was an example of a dark energy. Until we figured out how to detect neutrinos. Then it wasn't dark anymore.

In short, you're exactly right. It's a catch-all to make the math model work properly. And that's not actually a problem.

Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). It's been the dissenting voice in the modern Great Debate about dark matter.

On one side are the dark matter scientists who think there's a vast category of phenomenon out there FAR beyond our current science. That the universe is far larger and more complex than we currently know, and so we must dedicate ourselves to exploring the unexplored. The other side, the

On the other you have the MOND scientists, who hope they can prevent that horizon from flying away from them by tweaking the math on some physical laws. It basically adds a term to our old physics equations to explain why low acceleration systems experience significantly different forces than the high-acceleration systems with which we are more familiar -- though their explanations for WHY the math ought be tweaked I always found totally unsatisfactory -- to make the current, easy-to-grock laws fit the observations.

With the big problem being that it doesn't work. It explains some galactic motion, but not all. It sometimes fits wide binary star systems kind of OK, but more often doesn't. It completely fails to explain the lensing and motion of huge galactic clusters. At this point, MOND has basically been falsified. Repeatedly, predictions it made have failed.

Dark matter theories -- that is, the theories that say there are who new categories of stuff out there we don't understand at all -- still are the best explanation. That means we're closer to the starting line of understanding the cosmos instead of the finish line many wanted us to be nearing. But I think there's a razor in there somewhere, about trusting the scientist who understands the limits of our knowledge over the one who seems confident we nearly know everything.

IDGAF if it feeds into the narrative. It also shuts down a recruitment pipeline. It reduces their reach. It makes the next generation less likely to continue the ideology. De-platforming is a powerful tool that should be reserved for only the most crucial fights, but the fight against Nazi is one of those fights.

The Nazis were already full-blown conspiracy theorists. EVERYTHING is spun to feed into their narrative. That ship has sailed.

A platform operator needs to AT MINIMUM demonetize the content and censure it, and is likely only being responsible if they ban it outright. If you aren't prepared to wade into the fraught, complex world of content moderation, don't run a content platform.

The problem being we basically know that's not how it works.

If you push them underground, the main result is fewer Nazis. Intentionally platforming them helps them maintain a facade of normalcy that makes it WAY easier to recruit people into the organizations and further radicalize them. Not to mention the simple amplification effect of having a platform.

The idea that the underground Nazis are going to be a more distilled, pure, volatile form of Nazi SOUNDS theoretically sensible. But if that's your argument, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate it actually happens. And even if it sometimes does, if there's only 10 of them it barely matters.

The simplest solution, to shut down the recruitment pipeline, is also the correct choice for a platform operator to make.

Condone (transitive verb): To overlook, forgive, or disregard (an offense) without protest or censure.

Neat.

It's also right in the article that he was violent. That doesn't really matter though; what matters is whether he's competent to stand trial and whether it is reasonable to release him back to the regular justice system or general public.

I guess your point is that there's no safety hazard since his particular behavior isn't at least murder? Or maybe that cybercrime in particular is actually good and not a problem? It's not really a coherent framework to discuss these things either way.

I mean, he didn't even get a life sentence. That's in the headline, I know, but it's just not true.

He's in the hospital indefinitely, not sentenced to life. There's a big fat or clause that completely undermines the "life sentence".

He’s required to stay in the hospital prison for life unless doctors determine that he’s no longer a danger.

I'm not really sure what anyone thinks WOULD be just and proper in this kind of situation. I don't know many details of this particular case, but if there has been due process that determines someone is unsafe to release into society because they lack social capacity, releasing them anyway hardly seems like justice.

I'd like to believe -- though I know it basically isn't true -- that the justice system exists for the sake of justice. That it is primarily concerned with making whole the victims and making sure the criminals are rehabilitated such that they can safely rejoin society and even contribute to it in the future. I think that's how the justice system should work in a fair and just world. But if you have someone who is actually incapable of rejoining society, what are you supposed to do?

If we want to focus on the awfulness of this situation, I don't think the sentence is the issue. I think the focus would need to be on whether or not the hospital treatment has any chance of being effective -- because if it doesn't, THAT'S the story that matters.

Only in the Northern hemisphere. Current industry trends indicate some major meat-craving markets gearing up as we speak (e.g., Brazil). Likely a growing demand continues far into the future right now, even if some developed nations are seeing the pendulum swing the other way.

The problems of meat production on the climate are NOT going to go away on their own.