Sorry, I had misread.

This sounds really asinine unless I’m missing something.

You say that you’re not interested in ai content, but you do not block communities that have exclusively content that you are not interested (like ai).

And you down vote posts that you don’t like, so if there is a community that has a type of content that you do not like, you only ever downvote them when something of them appears in your feed.

Which is harmful to that community and the people who do like the content of that community. And you believe that we’re supposed to do this? I can’t believe that we’re supposed to be harming communities that we have no interest in. The kind thing to do, would be to leave them alone.

Just block them and you won’t have to see their posts and their votes won’t be disturbed by you. Different people enjoy different things, live and let live and all that.

Is burning bunker fuel in international waters very polluting and should someone try to do something about it? Yes it is and yes they should. And the good news is that they have been working at it: https://www.imo.org/en/mediacentre/hottopics/pages/sulphur-2020.aspx

But were the more polluting cargo ships from the past more polluting than “a continent”? Probably only if that continent was not Asia, Europe, America or Africa. If they were and I’m wrong, then I would love to see a source. Telling me to “google it” is not a source, I already tried looking for it when I first asked the question and I could find no info about this claim. It seemed like a hyperbole comparison that they made up.

I also tried looking up your claim that 10 ships pollute more than all cars combined, and the first result was an article debunking a similar myth (about 15 ships): https://www.oldsaltblog.com/2021/04/no-sixteen-large-ships-do-no-pollute-more-than-all-the-cars-in-the-world/

Which continent? Antarctica? It wouldn’t surprise me, but it seems like an entirely useless comparison to make.

Not all that surprising when you consider that New York is a tiny bit more to the south than Rome. Draw a horizontal line through Italy, Spain and New York and you’ll find similar amounts of sunshine. Draw a line through Scotland and see where you would end up in Canada, it’s probably going to be even more cold and miserable there than in Scotland ;)

FYI, some numbers. The guardian article is still definitely worth reading, it just had no statistics.

*Nationally (USA), Tesla drivers had 26.67 accidents per 1,000 drivers. This was up from 23.54 last year.

The Ram and Subaru brands were again among the most accident-prone. Ram had 23.15 per 1,000 drivers while Subaru had 22.89.

…

As of October 2024, there have been hundreds of documented nonfatal incidents involving Autopilot and fifty-one reported fatalities, forty-four of which NHTSA investigations or expert testimony later verified and two that NHTSA’s Office of Defect Investigations verified as happening during the engagement of Full Self-Driving (FSD).*

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2025/02/11/tesla-again-has-the-highest-accident-rate-of-any-auto-brand/

One of the first speed cameras I remember in Belgium was just behind the crest of a highway. Drivers would give more power to drive up the hill at the speed limit, they’d cross the crest and that same power would make them overshoot the speed limit. So they put a camera right there to maximize the fines. Without the camera there was nothing special about that spot, but with the camera there were a lot of front end collisions. Fine revenue was apparently more important than safety.

Placement of new speed cameras has gotten more sensible with time fortunately, but those old speed traps are still left in place unfortunately. For highways we now have a lot of average speed tracking and that has really improved the flow of traffic. And for villages/towns, there is often a clearly visible lone camera box at the beginning of the low speed zone, those work so well that there is often no camera in them, just the box is enough.

Use the UK flag if the site is in English and use the American flag if it’s in Webster English. Seems pretty evident to me.

Compare it to western Europe or Canada and people will be shocked as well.

Compare it to Stalin’s gulags or call it stalinesque and I am appalled. Stalin’s gulags were so much worse that the comparison is either made out of historical revisionism or out of ignorance. And since this meme first appeared in a period when Putin was working on historical revisionism, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if it was deliberate misinformation.

Yet it still wants to draw the impression that the then USA prison system is somehow comparable or worse to Stalin’s gulags. That’s the thing about implying something: even if it’s not explicitly stated, it’s still part of the message.

Omissions of key facts, misrepresentation, just asking questions, dog whistles, unspoken implications, … None of those are explicitly stating what they are implying, so should I just accept stinking memes like those because whatever falsehood they are implying is not spelled out word for word? Well I’m not, I’m going to continue calling them out as misinformation.

I’ve made 2 other comments in the oldest comment chain of why I find this particular meme so awful, but I’m not going to give the same replies in each new chain.

This is an old meme, it’s easy to look up a fact check, here’s one: https://www.truthorfiction.com/under-stalin-repression-was-so-severe-that-soviet-gulags-held-22-of-the-worlds-prison-population/

But the meme was not about that percentage, Stalin’s ussr had a much higher % of the population incarcerated and consequently also very likely a much higher percentage of the world prison population than the USA has now. This is not checked in the fact check and I doubt enough numbers are even available, it’s just deduction from population numbers. The meme doesn’t care about it either, it’s just doing Godwin’s law to draw a comparison of USA prisons to something like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazino_tragedy It might as well have been a meme comparing Nazi concentration camps with USA prisons (not the new republican ones that are being opened now, but the ones at the time the meme was made). It’s a completely misappropriate comparison to make.

1950 is 75 years ago, not 40. I won’t bother with the rest of your math, just thought I’d pick the low hanging fruit.

I can’t resist to add though, that this meme is drawing a direct comparison between the present USA prison system and the USSR gulag system at it’s worst and somehow wants us to believe that the USA is worse. Now I get that tankjes are all about misinformation and misrepresentation, but I still believe this is an absolutely awful comparison to make.

This is a misinformation meme that gets reposted from time to time. Relative to the population, the USSR at it’s worst had about 2x more prisoners than the USA at it’s worst (so far).

With the new ice budget it seems like the USA republicans will be trying to beat Stalin’s numbers, but so far, this meme is still blatant misinformation.

A link to an old discussion about it: https://lemmy.world/comment/6354847

Another of my comments from then, with some actual statistics for the USSR:

I find back about that it peaked at 1.4% or 1.5% in 1950 in a few sources: 2.5m to 2.7m prisoners for about 180m citizens. So significantly higher than what you found.

On Quora a Russian posted a nice graph, but I don’t see a source for the data : https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-Soviet-citizens-were-incarcerated-at-any-given-time-The-US-has-0-7-of-its-population-in-prison-and-I-was-wondering-how-that-compares-to-the-old-USSR

Having read testimonies of the nazino island gulag and a few Russian prisoner novels, the Soviet prison system really shouldn’t be compared to the USA one. Those percentages might not be far off (“only” 2x more at the worst), but numbers don’t tell everything. Stalin’s reign of terror was so much worse than the modern day USA dystopia. Compare the USA to modern day Canada or western Europe and it will highlight much better how bad it is doing.

Nazi Germany kinda had to start wars because their spending wasn’t sustainable: they had significant yearly deficits and they were always looking for ways to push forward the day that Germany would become insolvent. They stole the assets of outgroups like the Jewish minority, financially raided the banks, had the treasury print money to pay of debts, implemented price and wage controls to stave off inflation because of printing too much money, … None of it was sustainable in the long term. The longer term plan was to conquer other nations and plunder those.

And very unfortunate for the world today: the spending by usa republicans isn’t sustainable either + the usa has a very big army. Some people would say that the usa republicans couldn’t possibly be that stupid to rob or invade their peaceful trade partners, but … a lot of republicans are pretty damn stupid and short sighted, including the president.

As usual with memes, this one too is fake: it’s 2 times the same map (of the Brexit vote) with different coloration.

A 2023 fact check of this meme: https://fullfact.org/online/brexit-map-mad-cow-disease/

Yes, many times. Historically, it seems like the very strong empires first defeated themselves and once they were sufficiently weakened for outside forces to be able to threaten them … they still kept being self sabotaged by their own elite who prioritized maneuvering against each other for temporary power/wealth grabs over working together to face the outside threats.

The late Roman empire has a bunch of good examples: blatant corruption, over taxation of the poor, many assassinations, sabotaging their peers that were trying to improve the situation, constant civil war, the battle that destroyed the military backbone of the western Roman empire was fought between romans, … And all that while the empire was being torn apart by outside invasions.

Or a more recent example: the polish Lithuanian commonwealth had a paralyzed government thanks to corrupt elites with veto powers in their parliament of nobles (sejm) and only once the nation was mostly destroyed and the nation on the cusp of final destruction, did the sejm introduce some sensible new laws, but it was too late.

With smaller regional powers you can have cases like “they were in a golden age and had never been as powerful, but then the mongols appeared”, but with hegemon empires the failure of their inner workings is always going to be instrumental in their own demise.

For the other nations in nato it would be for the best (imo obviously). Republican usa is not a reliable ally and the other nato nations have not all come to terms with that new reality yet. If the usa quits nato, then it instantly removes all doubt and the remaining nations of NATO can immediately start work on improving the alliance, instead of being stuck in limbo for a few more years while they’re hoping that the usa will somehow magically unfuck itself.

The article/slideshow I linked is not a specific scientific study that was done in London, it’s a summary/aggregate of other studies that are referenced at the end of the slideshow. It was a study summary made for London, but the science behind it is a lot more general.

I’m from Belgium and from my own personal experience, I find that well done low speed zones really do improve the flow of traffic. Cities in the Netherlands have been at it for probably over 2 decades, Antwerp has followed their example since about a decade and now other cities in Flanders are copying Antwerp’s homework. When done well, it works really well and almost noone wants to go back to how it used to be. You’re right in that coordinated traffic lights are a big part of why the traffic flows much better, but in congested streets, a lower speed is needed to keep that flow going.

In Belgium we also have a big example of how to not do street renewal/traffic improvement programs: Brussels.

The evidence of studies says that you are wrong.

Here are some key points from a study summary that was made for London: 20mph zones do not appear to worsen air quality and they dramatically reduce road danger. They also support a shift to walking and cycling, generate less traffic noise and reduce community severance. In 20mph zones vehicles move more smoothly with fewer accelerations and decelerations. This driving style produces fewer particulate emissions.

https://content.tfl.gov.uk/speed-emissions-and-health.pdf

I tried looking for it and I found a YouTube video of some Indian street vendor doing it, but iirc my old video had been of some British guy. There’s more than one apparently.

The loss of sensitivity doesn’t happen all at once, plenty of cooks and serving staff have much higher tolerances than non-cooks/waiters. I’d expect that this is at least partly from damaged nerves, but while they have reduced sensitivity, iirc then the British guy said that he had lost all sensation in his hands.