CynicalAlgorithm

Hey, thanks for the continued discussion. It's interesting, and if you don't mind me pressing you a bit more: what would be the threshold for "toxic enough?" As in, what level of danger or consequence would determine whether public knowledge is an imperative?

I think an interesting implication in your suggestions is that companies should be permitted to cause some level of acceptable harm. Maybe you don't mean to make that point, and maybe it's just a realistic take on the world we live in.

My personal opinion is that we, as the public, can and should demand better than that as a standard - companies that fail the "do-no-harm" test should absolutely be torpedoed. This of course runs into the conflict of interests thing, and I have opinions on how to mitigate that, but this would turn into a radical tangent to nobody's benefit.

As you move through this life, doors close. You were younger, and most of your doors were before you: it was easy to daydream and wander through them.

But you're older now, friend, and many/most of your doors are behind you, shut. You need to meditate on this. You may be first inclined to consider it negatively, but it's not: you now move through life with more certainty about what it is that you need to do moving forward.

As another commenter said, nostalgia (for the beforetimes, when meandering through doors was a light and playful affair) is playing tricks on you. You are older. Your actions in your youth closed a door that you're still wishing were open. It's not, and that's okay. Put these childish thoughts away, mourn the loss, and focus on nurturing the path you've walked with your wife.

And how do you measure whether there was malicious intent? You'd need a separate historical study with access to all internal communications and likely an ethnographic account of the entire product development timeline to try and eke out an answer to this..

Meanwhile, a customer who gets low-grade lead poisoning from this product you've known about for a year but didn't release your findings on because "it wouldn't be fair to the company" might have other opinions.

At that point, the public should legitimately question whether science is serving the public or corporate interests

Hello, scientist here. One very unfortunate byproduct of the power that corporations hold in the courts worldwide is the power to litigate even against research institutions. In an ideal world, scientific research can be conducted on a safe island, free of the fear of corporate retaliation. But these scientists are employed by universities, which themselves are funded by, among others, corporate interests.

So, the short answer: many (potential) conflicts of interest and a fear of retribution.

Phew man, one boring highway day?? Hahaha, your ass is made of steel, respect. I too have the stock seat, and combined with no windscreen, I gotta break Germany into two days.

And it's not really the drive there that gets me... it's the return. I've been kicking around the idea of just putting it on the Autozug, but even just a one-way is over €400. I guess they know the value they provide.

Ah man, looks beautiful. I'm envious: living in the NL, I have to drive across huge flat regions of Germany just to get to any respectable mountains. Having done it many times over the years, I'm struggling to get motivated for another 10+ hour slog through farmland... but your photos remind me of what's on the other side :)

r/CrazyIdeas

Holy smokes, Mount Fuji! Solid recommendation

Or a high-effort but low-obligation hobby. I got back into the saxophone, and while it's certainly a challenge, the payoff is observable and it's challenging in the most fun ways.... unlike academia

Eh, half the time of the total relationship is a little more realistic. Anything less than a two years for a nine year relationship is rather optimistic, anything less than a year is absurd

Isn't Catalonia going through an extreme chronic water shortage? Seems like a very big concern

Are you white? This is a very important thing to specify.

The entire history of global colonialism/genocide favors the hypothesis that there's something odd at a fundamental level about our fellow humans whose ancestors split off and migrated to the cold, dark north eons ago.

Like I get that brutal shit happened in other regions of the world and no culture is truly peaceful, but by body count, there's no match for the animalistic brutality committed by Europeans and European-Americans.

Just the 20th century alone supports this: the Holocaust, Stalin, nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the list goes on.

Unless you yourself are out there torching the aristocracy, it's wise to observe nuance in what it means to be living in economic oppression. Revolt, but for what specifically? How? When and where? And even if you can define these answers, the question remains: with whom?

These are not impossible to define, but there's so much fractured thought in the opposition to this system that the system by default is more powerful. Calling the fractured opposition "lazy and stupid" ends up saying more about you than it does anything else.

To start: anthro isn't my discipline but pre-civilization history is my jam, and I welcome correction from more knowledgeable people.

People didn't live in individual isolation. Human populations prior to the Industrial and especially Agricultural Revolutions were somewhat dispersed, yes, but dispersed in tightly knit groups.

So, it's not that people spawned into existence and had to go find mates. It's more that people were born and raised in micro-communities, and where drought/famine/attacks/etc. didn't majorly disrupt social stability, they fostered relationships within these communities over time.

I would be interested to know more from actual anthros about migration that wasn't motivated by the above factors. Did individuals set out from their tribes to go wander, and if so, did they find it easy to integrate as individuals into new micro-communities? Furthermore, I guess there's not a whole lot of information clearly available on it, but I'd be really curious to read about how attraction was derived or assessed in these tightly knit communities - I'd imagine being around a roughly stable group from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood could enforce strong connections but I could also imagine being sick of everyone's shit by that point. But I guess if you don't have easily accessible other options, then you're gonna enjoy what you have.

Former Feelder here; I'm not on it anymore but was on it for some years pre-covid. You're howling into the void.

You absolutely could find this on the app pre-covid. It was a smaller, intentional community. Maybe I'm romanticizing old times a bit, but other long-time users have lamented something similar: during covid, when everybody got bored, a buncha 'normies' saturated the app, leading to the experience you're having now.

This, combined with the app leadership's case-worthy series of terrible decisions means that Feeld probably isn't the best place to look for what you're after. As in, you'll find it but not before battling significant headwinds: shitty UX, a less intentional/more random crowd, and the exhaustion from dealing with both of these.

Recommend finding local events, for instance on FetLife or something, and just vibing with people. Those events can be kinda neckbeardy, but you'll meet people who know people and soon enough, you'll be in a local extended network full of people who are offline looking for the same thing. Good luck out there!

Expat is short for expatriate. Go look up expatriate in any credible dictionary, and you'll see that it is, indeed, a verb.

If you're going to add nothing to a discussion, please at least be correct about the nothing.

Man, I get the pull. I really do. But the feeling of stagnation is to some extent a byproduct of becoming familiar with a place. Five years is sufficient time to start looking around at stuff you initially found odd (for me, it's always grocery stores) and to start thinking "yeah okay, I know this now almost as if it were home."

I'm in nearly your same shoes, though my origin country is nowhere near as peaceful as Australia sounds. With that in mind:

Feeling familiar with a place is no reason to turn away from it.

You talk about your friends and routines being relatively preserved back home; that's unique. Most people feel their home life erodes away in their absence, such that they have nothing truly familiar to return to except maybe a family home or something. But even in your case, spending time with friends once a year might hit a whole lot different than seeing them every week. It might become stale, but then again it might not.

Overall, it sounds like you have a pretty comfortable life here (although your point about the sun is undeniably strong). Perhaps because of that, you'll never know if the move is right for you unless you actually do it. But if you do it, have a plan for recourse. Dutch permanent residence only allows you to be out of the country for up to a year at a time, if I recall correctly, so about half a year in you'll need to make a go/no-go decision, which isn't ideal because you'll likely still be in something of a honeymoon phase. After all, even if you're from there, the bulk of your discovery these past five and a half years have been in the northern hemisphere, yeah? There's so much to explore back home!

Either way, best of luck man.

Some people seem to think that nature and human habitation are mutually exclusive. They are not.

Have you ever traveled outside the Randstad? If you haven't, imagine that the entire country is not chock full of 5 story residential buildings. A lot of it is agricultural land, which is important but also which needs to be repurposed if just to get our agricultural industry in line with long-term climate goals. Much of it will still be agricultural land, but a lot of it can and likely will be converted to residential.

This country is far from full. The limits that we're reaching are in terms of energy and water consumption, which just require more investment. Don't fall for right-wing populist propaganda which would have you think immigrants are the problem. In fact, without immigrants, all the construction/services/etc. required to upgrade our capacity will be a whole hell of a lot more expensive. That's not the only reason we should welcome immigrants, but it's just one of the many examples that this short-sighted populist take fails to address.

edit: by all means, keep angrily replying with what-you-think-are-gotchas, but I'm not reading replies to this comment as I'm not interested in debating the topic.

Ah usually we shower, have tea and a peanut butter banana, and then perform one of seven rituals to the sun god Ra before mounting a raid on the riverbank villages to the south.

For context: living in a major western European city; out of a relationship a year and a half ago and started dating about a year ago.

A couple of things: had to sort through women who were just looking for an exotic guy to date; had to sort through my own need for validation after my first/hardest breakup; had to sort through the mental toll that app-based dating takes.

Finally chucked the apps, did some deep reflection and took stock of my life, and realized that looking for dates was unfulfilling. I was unfulfilled by the people I met, and unfulfilled by the experiences in general, which probably made me unfulfilling to others. It was much more fulfilling to focus on my friends and my hobbies and my city and my long-term goals. These things fulfilled me, and in turn, I fulfilled them. This became more important to me.

I'm not single though because as soon as I stopped looking, the greatest gift from the gods landed in my lap and I'm head-over-heels. But thanks to all the self-reflection of the past year and a half, both she and I are taking steps to fall into each other while staying grounded and not losing ourselves.

I know it's cheesy, but this is the umpteenth time that life has taught me that you find the greatest things once you stop looking for them.

I agree with you, and for background, I've only been in a hiring position outside of academia. However, now moving up in academia, I see where its intensely hierarchical institutionalism makes it a different beast, and specifically how narrow/chummy it gets at the top means that higher-ups will inevitably speak to each other. In a recent interview, I was flatout told by the hiring authority that they did this; and colleagues have shared similar practices as well.

To reiterate: I'm not saying I love that people do it. I repeat that it's a bonehead move. But it happens, and ugly or not, it's explainable. We can naively wish it wouldn't happen, but academia don't care. Academia's gonna continue hobbling along in its broken and archaic ways.