Here's another good one: The city of Long Beach, California spends close to that much every year to do the same thing to protect mansions built on a sand bar (the Long Beach Peninsula) that are about 50 feet from the water line on a good day. They just keep constantly moving sand from one end of the beach to the other end a couple miles away. That's city money. The article below has some details, but only refers to the city saving $100k to $300k a year by bringing the work in house. The figure I've heard is more like $500k a year. I imagine it's actually higher than that, even. They have dedicated big earth movers, a built facility to store and maintain them, employees dedicated to it, etc. Do the math. This is probably happening all over the country and all over the world.

https://www.presstelegram.com/2022/12/19/long-beach-moves-its-own-beach-sand-to-protect-peninsula/

The uncensored video is here as well: https://theworldwatch.com/videos/1616102/shock-us-air-force-airman-sets-himself-on-fire-to-protest-israeli-palestine-war/

I know teachers aren’t paid much, but if you have the audacity to say that you can do a better job than 4 or 5 professionals at teaching your kid every subject, you should have to take a test to be certified, and your kid needs testing too. Some states require it, most don’t, and it shows.

Jesus, this makes so much sense that it's scary to think it's not universal. Sure, you can teach your kids. Just get certified to do so first. It doesn't even have to be the same certification as professional teachers, but just a bare minimum, pass the GED level of education. To not have this kind of requirement really seems like society failing those kids.

Upvoted for the news that these treatments are speeding towards approval. However, the point that no one knows how these new treatments work seems silly, given my understanding that no one seems to know exactly how antidepressants in general work either (or at least they didn't until recently?), even ones that have been used for decades, like Prozac.

Here's a quote from an article from 2021: I've been making references on this blog for years about how we don't even know how antidepressants work

AI, climate change, and nuclear weapons proliferation

One of those is not like the others. Nuclear weapons can wipe out humanity at any minute right now. Climate change has been starting the job of wiping out humanity for a while now. When and how is AI going to wipe out humanity?

This is not a criticism directed at you, by the way. It's just a frustration that I keep hearing about AI being a threat to humanity and it just sounds like a far-fetched idea. It almost seems like it's being used as a way to distract away from much more critically pressing issues like the myriad of environmental issues that we are already deep into, not just climate change. I wonder who would want to distract from those? Oil companies would definitely be number 1 in the list of suspects.

That few countries take a person's wealth and income into account when fining them for breaking laws. I see examples like these and wish this were the norm everywhere.

Interesting, I haven't personally had any run ins with Hexbears, but everything I've read from them in non-Hexbear communities has generally looked fine to me. Sure, they argue hard and in detail when it comes to anything political and they can also be a little edgy, but I haven't seen any of them be assholes, abusive, argue in bad faith, etc. So far I have appreciated their contributions. It probably helps that I generally agree with (many of?) them politically as far as I can tell, but despite that, if I saw them being assholes I would make notice because I don't believe in defending the people in your team even when they're doing wrong. I would be more likely to call them for taking the wrong approach instead. Do you have any example threads that demonstrate what you're describing?

Plot twist: he can still run (and be elected) from prison.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/06/trump-running-for-president-prison-00090931

I recently switched myself, my wife, and my mom from old Moto X4 Android phones to slightly newer, but not current iPhones (X, XS, and 11 Pro). It's been a few months now (maybe 3 or so?). Honestly, I'm not that happy with them. I think I'll stick to it mainly for privacy, security, and environmental reasons - iPhones are supported with security updates for way, way, way longer than the vast majority of Android phones. Like two or three times as long, in some cases. This offsets the price factor, maintains security for longer, and reduces electronic waste by making the phones viable for longer. By my calculations, I actually come out ahead with iPhones with regard to price. I like that iPhones let you remove most, maybe even all the built-in apps that come pre-installed. I also like that they give you an actual indication of your battery health.

Having said that, many other aspects of iPhones have been a hassle or just plain sucked:

The keyboard sucks. Poor editing, poor layout without a number row, not able to turn off the stupid app bar or whatever they call it on the top row.

The messaging app sucks. First, don't forget that it's Apple's intransigence now that's preventing iMessage from being interoperable with Android, and I say this as someone who has come to dislike and avoid Google as much as possible. I hope that the EU forcing them to make messaging interoperable will yield some real improvements with this. Second, the messaging app doesn't show dates and times on messages by default. I have to pull each message to the side to see this info. Third, there appears to be no search function within a message thread, what a pain. Finally, I also found out that iPhones aren't able to do anything whatsoever with certain common attachments from text messages. I had messages received from Android phones with AMR files in them (audio recording files). The iPhone was completely unable to open them, I couldn't find even an app that could open them, and the damn phone wouldn't let me forward the text message to an email! I ended up having to go back to the Android and forward the text to email in order to be able to open the attachments. Completely unacceptable.

The connectivity with PCs sucks. They allow you to see your photos (only the photos and videos, nothing else) when connected through USB, but it barely works. My photo transfers fail most of the time, and it seems to be impossible to let my photo manager delete the photos from the phone after transferring them. Yeah, iTunes is supposed to work, but you can't manage two different phones with different iCloud accounts on one Windows login. Besides, iTunes itself sucks. Their replacement app for this, Apple Mobile Devices I think it was called, only supports Windows 11, not Windows 10.

The offline PDF storage and reading sucks. I was going to an event that I knew was going to be away from mobile networks and prepared for this by jumping through all the hoops (I'm not kidding) that it took to actually download PDFs locally to the phone so that they were available offline. These PDFs held the map and event guides. I get there, offline, and try to open the PDFs that I painstakingly had downloaded offline. Well, wouldn't you know it, the damn built-in app for reading the PDFs needed internet connectivity! Thankfully it wasn't a life or death situation, but still, how frustrating and disappointing.

The official community support site sucks. The impression I've had in researching the issues above is that someone will give some incredibly lame answer that doesn't really resolve the issue and instead papers it over, that answer will be marked as the correct answer, and it's end of story. You need to find discussions on other unofficial forums for real discussions of technical issues.

This is all I can think of for now. There's probably more, but you get the idea.

In the old days, a friend of mine would carry some paper(?) stickers(?) (labels?) that said something like "I park like an asshole" and superglue it to one of the windows of someone parked like this.

If you wanted to be nicer, you could get some proper pre-printed stickers (most online print/sticker shops should have them) and place them. Wouldn't cause any damage but would maybe make them think about it a little bit.

I also saw a post recently where someone replaced all the tire valve caps with bright orange or pink little dick shaped caps. This would cause more inconvenience and embarrassment, but not be damaging or dangerous.

There are right-wing instances of Mastodon (gab, truth, and others), not to mention many Pleroma ones, as well as Lemmy (exploding heads, and probably others). It's just that they get quickly defederated by everyone else for various valid reasons (usually hate and abuse, sometimes even child porn), so you don't get to interact with them much. They just get stuck in their own bubble.

I tried searching a Titanic sub on my UK instance, and it didn’t show up. But it was deffo still there on my L.W search? What?

Ah, I learned that there's a trick to this specific situation. If a community hasn't been subscribed to by anyone on your instance yet, it will not show up in results when you first search for it (search by URL or !link by the way). However, wait a few seconds and hit search again - the community will now show up and you can subscribe to it! What apparently happens is that your server is not yet aware of that community, but once you search for it with a URL or !link, your server will immediately search it out and become aware of it. This is why it's usually better to search for communities on one of the big Fediverse directory sites, especially if you're on an instance with fewer people in it. My favorite site for this at the moment is https://lemmyverse.net/communities - it will show both the URL and !link right there and allow you to easily copy it to search on your instance.