If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

Except most free and open-source software, major open knowledge bases, literally the social media service you’re using to communicate this point right now…

While understandable when talking about services by for-profit corporations, this talking point without that context is oversimplified to the point of being obnoxious in a world where I can set up a desktop OS with a fully featured environment and software suite then go browse a social media site where at no stage was anything free where I was the product.

Just to clarify, this isn’t To Catch a Predator, the actual series. It’s one of those amateur stings on Instagram who don’t involve the police in the confrontation and pretend to be heroes for clout.

sigh

Who let Elon in here?

“Business owners deserve the profits they make because they’re the ones taking on risk.”

“No, no, not like that!”

“Junk food as a reward” is something every expert I’ve ever heard talk about it says is a terrible idea, and I don’t think this is unique to ADHD (just probably exacerbated by it). More generally, “Food as a reward” undermines healthy eating.

That brushes up against “well then when should I eat junk food? never?”, and that’s something I can’t tell you. The most balanced mindset might be to treat it like many treat alcohol – both poison to your body – and eat something junky occasionally when you’re out with friends or just want to relax one night.

But tying it into “I earned this” is detrimental psychologically, even if it feels natural to gate junk food behind effort so you (in theory, rarely in practice) don’t overconsume. Imagine if you gave yourself a shot of whiskey every time you finished x amount of work.

A telling example of this comes from Massachusetts v. EPA, a 2007 Supreme Court case involving EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gases. At oral argument, Justice Antonin Scalia mistakenly referred to the stratosphere instead of the troposphere.

Rest in piss.

30 chairs is quite generous.

That could buy you about 10 of this one, for example. (Edit: We can rest safe, though, knowing Pete “Cirrhosis” Hegseth didn’t spring for the vegan leather option.)

https://xkcd.com/2501/

Buddy, I obviously agree for MMBtu, which is why I cited it among other unordered points and explicitly called out that people are liable not to know it. If you do know it, though, it immediately gives it away, which is why I included it to cover bases.

But a crude oil tanker is a common thing plenty of people have seen, and putting “power plant” in there is straight-up a self-own: you are profoundly ignorant about energy infrastructure if you think we’re taking gasoline into power plants to convert into electricity. That doesn’t make someone bad or stupid; it just means they have zero standing to complain about how an energy infographic misled them by calling methane “gas”. They lack the bare minimum foundation to even understand what it’s trying to say.

It should also be obvious that when I said “not pure solar”, I meant “generally”, because at that point the reader would need to be willfully obtuse to construe the graphic to be about electric cars. I almost hedged with “generally”, but I (wrongly, naïvely) assumed it wouldn’t be subjected to superfluous pedantry.

Edit: I actually forgot another obvious point because there are just so many things that would tell reasonable people this isn’t about gasoline: why would a tanker be used as an icon to represent gasoline anyway? A jerrycan, an oil barrel, or a gas pump would clearly be much better, because oil tankers don’t represent the final product anyway, aren’t a common icon for gasoline (if basically at all), and don’t have a distinctive side profile. There are a million reasons it’s not the graphic’s fault if you look at it and assume it’s about gasoline.

I don’t blame it whatsoever for calling it “gas”; it should be clear to anyone remotely familiar enough with energy infrastructure to understand anything past “solar better”, i.e. they should at least pick up on one of the following (in no particular order):

• Gasoline and solar power would only be comparable for cars, and the comparison would be nonsense because electric cars pull from the grid, not pure solar.
• The icon on the left is distinctly an LNG tanker. Even if you’ve never seen one, anyone who’s seen a crude oil tanker would know it looks nothing like that.
• The graphic explicitly says “LNG” twice.
• Measuring gasoline in MMBtu would be deranged for this comparison; the sale price is expressed in the volume of crude oil/gasoline, so you’d just convert it straight to Watts. Even if you didn’t know what a Btu is, you’d at least think “what the fuck is an MMBtu?”
• Cars are never mentioned once.
• One of the statistics is “Efficiency of a gas plant”, which is the nail in the coffin for anyone who understands literally anything about energy.

At some point it’s incumbent on the reader to have a bare minimum understanding of how the world around them works; I learned some of this in circa sixth grade. Some of this on its own isn’t common knowledge; all of this taken together should stop any reasonable reader from defaulting to “gasoline”.

Good question. I wouldn’t (we’re assuming casual foraging for fun and not a survival situation); it’s still not vegan, but it’d be arguably less unethical on a spectrum.

A con compared to the apiary is that these wild bees aren’t being artificially supplemented by e.g. sugar water; it’s live-or-die for them, and that’s their food. It’s not in me to take that away from them when I don’t have to.

If someone took like a teaspoon of honey (still the lifetime output of about a dozen bees) while giving the bees something greater in return, then I don’t think most vegans would think it’s inherently wrong*, but like any ethical framework, whenever you try to find contrived boundaries, it’s kind of like “okay, but why?” It’s sometimes engaging on the armchair but rarely in practice.

A huge pro compared to the apiary is avoiding, in addition to the physical mistreatment of the bees themselves, the perpetuation of the exploitation. If you one-and-done plunder a hive, that’s not vegan, but you’re not giving money to someone as a way of telling them “thanks, and keep doing this”.

* I’m making a hand-wavey assumption here that you can just do that without pissing off and killing a bunch of bees or smoking them out just so we can have perfectly ideal ethical conditions.

I don’t agree with the “AI-generated” claim. Gavin Mooney appears to be a real person working with Kaluza, an Australian company which presents itself as:

The Energy Intelligence Platform

An electrified future will be built on data intelligence.

We turn energy complexity into growth opportunity so energy companies can make a cleaner, smarter system work for everyone.

(So a financial conflict of interest, but one I happen to agree with.) I just attribute it to a “shitty, token attempt at sourcing because nobody really checks these things” mindset.

This is dead wrong (edit: kind of; see below). The dollars per million BTU for natural gas this February was $3.62, or 32% of the figure cited in the infographic. You’re thinking of oil.

Solar is clearly more sustainable, economical, independent, and most importantly livable than LNG, but I still need to call out flawed assumptions on my side where I see them.

Edit: I actually have no idea how this infographic reached its $11 assumption. Wholesale prices for natural gas were $4.88 per MMBtu in 2024. Emphasis on “wholesale”, but since this infographic doesn’t deign to cite any sources other than “Ember” (this Ember?), I have no idea what figure it means.

Edit 2: After doing way too much digging into how global LNG prices are measured because this infographic barely even leaves breadcrumbs, they might’ve been using a metric like the JKMc1 (“LNG Japan/Korea Marker PLATTS Future”) (edit 3: or the TFAc1). The prices of natural gas (transported via pipeline) and LNG (transported via ship) are going to be quite different, and there’s no consistent “global average price” for LNG. The best you can really do is use some sort of proxy, for which it appears the JKMc1 is a reasonable one for reasons I don’t fully understand yet. That was approximately $11 in 2024 (it was actually seemingly higher, but close enough; probably close but separate figures) and was $10.73 this February. It was $15.92 March 1, showing at least in East Asia that LNG is about 50% more expensive than last month. I don’t know how well that applies to Lemmy’s predominantly American and European userbase, however (well, I know the US now supplies about 60% of Europe’s LNG and that American natural gas is currently cheaper).

God, it’s so frustrating that this infographic barely cites anything. Anyway, to the person I responded to: you were at least somewhat right; the closing of the Strait seems to have clearly impacted East Asia… somehow. Iran and Qatar are the 3rd and 6th largest natural gas producers, respectively (no clue about LNG shipments), but I feel like I’ll end up with a doctoral thesis on the geopolitics of LNG prices by 2030 from knowing basically nothing if I don’t stop here. What all this does tell me is that an estimate of “global average price for LNG” means very little when prices per MMBtu (liquified or otherwise) seem to vary so heavily by region.

Exactly. If you’re too stupid or lazy to adequately vet what your LLM puts out yourself, it shouldn’t be somebody else’s job to wade through the sewage you’re producing. You either shouldn’t be using one or, if you can’t do your job without it, you shouldn’t have that job.

—Someone who doesn’t use genAI but has spent way too much time digging through LLM slop

Which is why I’m surprised that so many vegans are on the fake meat bandwagon. The fact that they eat so much processed food clearly shows the claim that they’re doing it for health is poorly thought out.

This a fundamental misunderstanding of what veganism is, namely:

a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.

A plant-based diet for health is normally a “whole foods plant-based diet”, for which a mountain of well-studied health benefits exist. But vegans who eat plant-based for the animals can have any level of care about their own health that they want just like any omnivore can; that part is a spectrum.

they won’t eat honey, and that’s only because you’re stealing the fruits of the bees’ labor

Not the only reason. For example, an infamous and common practice in the honey industry is to cut off the queen’s wings, ensuring the hive has no choice but to stay there and produce honey.

I’ve never met a vegan who won’t eat figs; figs’ relationship with fig wasps is symbiotic, and yes, excluding fruit on the basis that “eating the fruit of a pollinated plant is exploiting the pollinator” probably far oversteps the “practicable” part of veganism:

Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.

Anyone giving you a confident answer on this is going to be doing so baselessly. The real answer is “we don’t know”. Journalists for the world’s most well-connected news organizations have been working around the clock just to identify that the missile was even American. That’s the state of information right now, and the unfortunate fact is we’re just going to have to wait for an answer if one ever comes.

The most you can really know right now is “it didn’t need to happen, and it was the US’ fault regardless.”

That amount of weed and money was probably forgotten for a good while to those pants, because it wasn’t central to the dealer’s life or hustling.

… What article did you read? These two had a backpack full of $2200 USD and over 40 g of cannanis – in a country where any amount is illegal – and left it outside a charity shop while they waited for their car to be serviced. They didn’t intentionally donate the backpack which accidentally contained the stash; they straight-up left it unattended knowing what was in it while they waited with the intent to pick it back up.

Yes, that is laughably incompetent. They knew the drugs and cash were in there and left it completely unattended for an extended period in front of a shop that takes donations in a country where its discovery will get them up to years in prison (had they not been 16; I don’t know how that shakes out).

You’re completely removing the humor that elevates this to newsworthiness. It’s not the fact that “low-level drug dealers exist in New Zealand” that’s newsworthy; it’s the fact they accidentally donated their stash to a charity shop – the humor being dually in the real incompetence of two low-level, low-stakes criminals and in the absurdist alternate reality image of two altruistic drug dealers earnestly donating their drugs and profits to make the less-fortunate happy.

It’s okay for some news to just be funny.

Given they accidentally dropped off $2200 USD in banknotes and what I’ll very conservatively call $500 USD worth of cannabis (it’s likely vastly higher than this due to possession of any amount being illegal everywhere in the island nation) outside a charity shop, yes, it’s newsworthy in the sense of being a goofy, one-off story that can go at the bottom of the “More news” section or in the “New Zealand” section.

BBC News publishes a pretty wide spectrum from local/regional news articles all the way up to being a viable source for international news.

Completely different. Obama just wore a regular, well-fitting, well-matched suit, and Republicans manufactured a scandal out of it.

Trump literally killed these six people for his own selfish, impulsive ends, shrugged it off in comments, and then, at their funeral, lacked the bare minimum courtesy to even take off his stupid, tacky baseball cap. The fact Fox News “”“accidentally”“” aired old footage that showed him without a hat illustrates that even they know it’s fucked up.

The “worse things are happening right now so let’s not cover anything that would only be a month-long scandal in any sane administration” position is the one Republicans want you to take. To quote Steve Bannon: “flood the zone with shit.”