echolalia

Hail satan, death to capitalism and American imperialism

I tried to write the most biased scaremongering paper about microplastics for a college course and I couldn’t find much directly linking human health to microplastics that was peer reviewed.

The main paper in this article, the one claiming its human brain samples are 0.5% plastic, is preprint - not peer reviewed. So, reporting on it like this is unethical tbh.

Truthfully, scientists have been looking for this sort of link in animals, and they can’t find earthshaking evidence of it. Most of the papers I found showed weak evidence of harm to animals. Most of the scarier papers have to do with how these plastics absorb chemical pollution in sea water, fish then eat the particles and are harmed. These papers point out they have trouble separating general harm from pollution from harm from microplastics pollution.

Microplastics don’t seem to go up the food chain either, seems most plastics people eat are introduced through processing it. So, stop eating processed food. Stop wearing polyester while you’re at it, a lot of microplastics come from laundry.

I’m not saying microplastics aren’t bad for human health. It’s just incredibly hard to study and it’s definitely not as bad as lead or asbestos. If it was, scientists would have found that link already.

The worst news I ran across was that there is no human control group for this stuff. Everyone is full of microplastics. Those are the only peer reviewed human studies this article mentions - the sort that are like “Of samples from 20 different people, they were all full of plastics! We need grant money for more study”.

I hope they get that grant money.

Yea, I agree. It’s good enough. Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like it was a bad solution, it’s just not perfect and people ought to be aware of limitations.

I used a small instance in my example so the problem was easier to understand, but a motivated person could target someone on a large instance, too, so long as that person tended to vote in the posts they commented on.

Just for example (and I feel like I should mention, I have no bad feelings towards this guy), Flying Squid on lemmy.world posts all over the place, even on topics with few upvotes. If you pull all his posts, and all votes left in those posts from all users, I bet you could find one voter who stands out from the crowd. You just need to find the guy following him everywhere: himself.

I mean, if he tends to leave votes in topics he comments on, which I assume he does.

It would have to be a very targeted attack and that’s much better than the system lemmy uses right now. I’m remembering the mass tagger on Reddit, I thought that add on was pretty toxic sometimes.

Also, it just occurred to me, on Lemmy, when you post you start with one vote, your own. I can even remove this vote (and I’ll do it and start this post off with score 0). I wonder how this vote is handled internally? That would be an immediate flaw in this attempt to protect people’s privacy.

While not a perfect solution, this seems very smart. It’s a great mitigation tactic to try to keep user’s privacy intact.

Seems to me there’s still routes to deanonymization:

1. Pull posts that a user has posted or commented in
2. Do an analysis of all actors in these posts. The poster’s voting actor will be over represented (if they act like I assume most users do. I upvote people I reply to etc)
3. if the results aren’t immediately obvious, statistical analysis might reveal your target.

Piefed is smaller than lemmy, right? So if only one targeted posting account is voting somewhat consistently in posts where few piefed users vote/post/view, you got your guy.

Obviously this is way harder than just viewing votes. Not sure who would go to the trouble. But a deanonymization attack is still possible. Perhaps rotate the ids of the voting accounts periodically?

I think they should be public. They’re already accessible for mbin posts and anyone administrating a lemmy instance. It should be clear to all users that their votes are already not private.

Someone could make a lemmy instance just to get voting behavior and make a website with cool graphs and stuff today and the only thing that could stop them is defederation. If Lemmy gets popular, this is just an inevitability.

Imagine if a large instance decided to do that today. Imagine if lemmy.world released lemmy.world/votes. Would people defederate just for that? Remember: Mbin already displays scores and I don’t think anyone has defederated over it.

Might as well put it on the interface so everyone understands it isn’t private. Rip off the bandaid.

I’m in my late 30s. My public school warned against tampons and told us we should ask our mothers before we use them because it could damage our hymens. Wait until you’re older they said. It was highschool.

They were vague about it but it was a school health class. Rural America.

So yes it was a thing for me. Hopefully schools have updated.

Survivors of the resource wars will send their children to the plastic mines to work for bottle caps

Why is anyone pretending to care about this? Halloween exists. It never bothered republicans before. There’s no way this was part of a drag performance, the costume is way too lazy.

Trump himself had a really weird video involving drag and it never hurt his campaign. Republicans aren’t going to see this as him being a hypocrite. Nobody cares, literally.

He’s a vaccine denier. Edit: Trump was awful at handling COVID but he was not antivax.

ap link

TLDR: On the small island of Samoa, poor hospital management caused muscle relaxant to be administered instead of measles vaccinations in some children and there were injuries and deaths. In the wake of this RFK flew there and spread his antivax nonsense (he makes money off books about this). Afterword there’s a measles outbreak and 83 children and infants died.

It’s pretty hard to compare him and Trump because he never had the power Trump did. Anyone who thinks he’s a reasonable alternative is totally misinformed.

I can’t wait for what John Oliver has to say. The man is a train wreck.

Since you’re not an American, can you explain why you feel the need to comment on this when you don’t really know what you’re talking about?

The fine is from an Ohio state law that is (imho) unconstitutional in the United States. These people have been using their horse drawn buggies on these roads for centuries. The roads they go on are rural. Not interstate highways or autobahn or whatever.

It’s not economically feasible for every country road in the USA to have wildlife mounds/fences because of how vast our country is. Drivers here are required to stop for obstructions, fallen branches and wildlife and if you can’t you’re going too fast. I just don’t buy excuses about this, the Amish aren’t going down the road at 4 am in a blizzard. They’re way more visible than a deer and they have reflectors. I live around here (not Ohio, but basically Ohio), this law is inexcusable and targeting a religious group. It’s also legal to walk down these roads or ride a horse or drive your tractor at 20 kilometers per hour dragging a combine or something. It’s farmland.

The entire county this takes place in has only 50k people. Rural area.

I found that other commenters post about rape distasteful by the way. There are better ways to point out victim blaming.

I get your point of view but I’m not going to argue with you further. I have lost rights to my own bodily autonomy (I am equipped with a uterus) due to trumps judicial picks. I saw the damage done due to his COVID policies. I live in a red state. You can’t convince me that using my vote for Biden isn’t harm reduction.

When y’all decide to do something more with your time other than argue on the internet with people who mostly agree with you, let me know. I will vote in the most pragmatic way I can until there is a better option.

Someone close to me works for the federal government. He is administrative staff supporting government ecologists, and they’re fearing a Trump presidency. Project 2025 will destroy our national parks and ruin years of ecological research, at minimum.

Both candidates will send money in support of genocide. One candidate will dismantle our federal systems (the good ones people forget about) and kill trans kids.

I can’t in good conscience pretend both old men are equally harmful.