Hi there!

  • 0 Posts
  • 55 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle


  • I don’t think people are “refusing”, it’s not like it’s mandatory or anything. Nobody’s trying to force you to drive a car.

    I know I’ll never be able to afford a car, they’re incredibly expensive to buy and operate, and most of my travel is already covered by our excellent Trams, Buses and Trains, which can get me basically anywhere comfortably and quickly.

    For the times I need something special I can ask someone for a lift, but that happens only a handful of times a year. A car would be a big, expensive, risky piece of equipment to just leave sat around for someone to steal…






  • Sadly I believe you’re right.

    The other side of the coin is desperation, too. Let’s say there’s a truly serious pandemic. Huge numbers of people getting sick, not enough resources to treat them all, even if there is a treatment.

    In that scenario, even in a world with no antivaxers or antimaskers, where everyone trusts the science and the doctors, do we think everyone is going to just stay in their homes following the quarantine rules, when there’s not enough to go around, and doing so could be a death sentence?

    Or do we think they’d go out, and try to get their hands on what they need to survive? Be it food, medicines etc…

    Even in a world of people who trust the science like you or I, we’re probably screwed if things really get that bad, and the only reason COVID didn’t get that bad is for all its awfulness, it’s actually a relatively mild illness overall (not to disrespect the many deaths it caused, just to say that as things go, it could have easily been more infectious, more deadly, harder to treat, etc).

    When things get that bad, good people will be so desperate to save themselves, their families, their children, that they’ll break the rules, spread the disease, and doom us all :-(


  • The Last Of Us.

    Because it could happen. It’s unlikely yes, but all it takes is one lucky mutation and we’re done. They were correct in that game, our understanding of fungal infections in humans and our ability to treat it is almost non existent.

    We were able to product a vaccine for COVID, a far, far less disruptive illness, within two years (via huge global effort) because we’d been focusing on that area of research for decades very closely and producing similar treatments for a long time already.

    But something fungal, and highly contagious? There’s nothing we could do except try to quarantine, bomb and napalm every infected area, and hope we got it all.

    And we’ve already seen how an easy to contain illness like COVID simply can’t be contained even when we’ve had a heads up and some time to prepare. It will suddenly explode into the population, and once it’s out there it’s out there.

    Long ago, we used to be protected from extinction due to disease as a species due to our inability to travel long distances to spread it. Now? All it takes is one infected person to spend a few hours at a large airport, and within 48 hours it’s reached the doorstep of vast majority of the populated world, and is already behind our best pandemic defences.

    If a fungal infection that serious ever does make the leap to humans (which again while unlikely, is also entirely possible, it’s like winning the lottery - it could happen tomorrow or maybe never), we have an extremely tiny, almost non existent window in which we must identify how dangerous it is, quarantine the entire region it was located in, bomb it off the face of the earth and hope to the gods we got it all.

    But, our morals, humanity and our indecision will stop us from committing what would normally amount to serious war crimes to save the human race, and that tiny window will slip by.

    And then we’re done.







  • £1000. I could pay for my entire ADHD treatment programme from start to finish, without having to wait YEARS in a waiting list for the free treatment. It would absolutely change literally everything in my entire life, giving me a life instead of circling the drain waiting to die.

    But I’ll never be able to save that kind of money, I’m an idiot and my ADHD is crippling.

    I considered gofundme, but it’s already full of people who need money for ADHD treatment, and I don’t want to drown them out with yet another plea, you know?






  • Whether you like the company behind it or not, a lot of fantastic niche communities found a home there, and it would be wonderful if they could find a home here too, as this platform is basically identical to Reddit with just a few tweaks and improvements.

    It took them years to get to that point though, why wait for it to organically happen when we already know it’ll be successful and awesome? :-D

    Not talking about you specifically, I see a lot of people that want to replace/kill Reddit and make Lemmy the next big thing, and often those same people will also not want Lemmy to copy Reddit. I find that weird, given that Reddit has been hugely successful and beloved by do many communities, so we know it works, and Lemmy is an almost identical platform, so we know the transfer/“copy” would be very successful.