Truly an xkcd #1172 situation.

You seem to he framing it as, “scientists went to nature to find out how humans should act,” and in my view you are missing quite a lot. I could be wrong, open to hearing more.

What is important, imho, is what I wrote in my top-level comment: I don’t want to find myself in the same camp as other groups who make “nature” arguments (like “evolutionary psychologists”). If I accept their premise, I will have to accept their conclusions too -otherwise I’d have to be cherry-picking naturalist arguments only when they are politically expedient for me.

So to me, this argument is a retort against lazy, commonly used, longstanding, nonsense arguments.

I believe that this argument is best countered by saying that “regardless of what you think is natural or not, a person has the right to do what they want to do so long as their actions do not violate the freedoms and integrity of others”. That’s a moral value you can reason yourself into and you can be consistent about.

Humans are animals, and this shows non-human animals can be queer too.

I don’t think it shows anything more than that the animals in question engage in same-sex intercourse. Claiming anything more than that is, to me, arbitrary anthropomorphism. I am not prepared to accept that whales can be “queer” until whales start writing sociological papers for us to find out how they understand homosexuality in their system of norms and values.

The fact animals have some behavior shouldn’t, alone, be a justification to punish or encourage some behavior.

Maybe I’m jumping the gun here, but I’ve been in plenty of discussion already where animals engaging in same-sex intercourse was used as an argument to defend queer rights - e.g. my local queer association did hold such a panel discussion at the zoo last May.

To see this news article in /c/lgbtq_plus instead of /c/biology or /c/science does make me extrapolate that this is somehow understood as being relevant to human sexuality.

I dunno, I’m still not comfortable with with linking human queerness with biologism and the natural argument. Other animals also regularly do unsavoury things and those urges might still exist in our biological programming but we have reasoned our way of them them.

I don’t want to accidentally make strange bedfellows with other groups who point at animal behaviours to justify their problematic shit. Such studies on animal sexuality should stay a matter of science, the queer movement should not take them on as political arguments.

I probably didn’t express myself well. What I meant to say is that with an area so spread-out, any placement of the bus stop would make it extremely unreachable from some other adjacent destination.

This kind of makes me feel that the problem starts one layer before: this are is so spread out. It really doesn’t look like there’s any visible reason for buildings to be so far apart.

There’s so few buildings that yeah, I think one bus stop is enough to serve them as far as amount of users is concerned. But the green could have been around the built up area, not between the buildings. Parking could also be compacted, maybe multi-floor or underground to reduce the surface area.

income-proportional fee structure for government services?

This is income tax.

Why was there this law in the first place?

In Europe at least, it was often explained as “same-sex marriage and parenthood are not allowed, and a legal gender change cannot be a loophole to that”. But it appears to be a post-hoc rationalisation since the forced sterilisation programmes have many more targets in the past until it was progressively abandoned for more and more groups. It was also becoming untenable since more and more countries were legalising same-sex parenthood.

So, if we are being more honest, it’s eugenics.

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/68004.html

Garrett’s post makes a great point in only a handful of lines. Strongly recommended reading for anyone who organises a community of any kind.

Thunderbird’s Calendar supports local, off-line calendars and tasks.

It’s the best FOSS calendar I have used, even if it has its rough edges.

Please note that the question is not whether delivery vans can be replaced by cargo bikes. In most situations, the answer is clearly yes, no doubt.

It’s about whether cargo bike-based delivery can guarantee the same level of service that customers expect now from delivery vans, or that, indeed as the Dutch politician warns, people will have to accept that same-day delivery can no longer be promised.

I’m inclined to agree with you. For me personally, at-home delivery is a new thing completely, let alone same-day. Where I came from, that’s still not the norm, we would just go to the post-office to pick up our items.

After some initial interest in at-home delivery when I moved to Europe, I realised that I now find it much more comfortable to redirect my parcels to a Packstation and pick them up on my own schedule.

At the face of it, it seems plausible to me that cargo bikes do not offer the capacity needed to guarantee same-day delivery to all of those who currently use such services.

Let’s not overstate Duolingo’s effectiveness for language learning.

The technological challenge to adopting a self-taught language learning method into an app is rather small. You just need the content. Either you develop the course under a Free Culture license, or you purchase the rights for an existing method and you port it. Plus maybe some volunteers to handle user-interaction.

A good example is the VHS Lernportal which implements three levels of German class in a way that actually has some pedagogical merit. It’s killer-feature is nothing technological, but that they have some teachers in the backoffice that will read your occasional text-production exercises and offer corrections (no, language tool wouldn’t be able to replace humans in that case, because language tool doesn’t know what you are trying to say and therefore gives you multiple guesses but no way to know which one you actually need).

What? No, they’re not. Not for me, at least.

I had truly internalised that one up until my late 20s. In Cyprus, we do see leaves on the ground as trash that needs to be cleaned. Having a lot of trees means a lot of leaves and you need to keep cleaning your yard/balcony and municipal services needs to keep cleaning the streets. Too much work, it gets expensive. You stop doing it, the people start complaining that the area is getting neglected.

It wasn’t at least I was made fun of by Europeans for asking “so when is the city coming to clean this” in my first autumn outside Cyprus, that I realised that it’s not a universal fact that “leaves = trash”.

I cannot emphasize enough the mind-boggling culture around urban vegetation in Cyprus - something that only became apparent to me once I experienced other countries.

This is normal in Cyprus. It’s common for residents to defend it by saying that fallen leaves are a nuisance, and that mature, tall trees facilitate pests entering higher floors of buildings.

At the same time, more than half of the year is unbearably hot in Nicosia, and walking, cycling, or waiting at public transport stops between 08-20h is indeed incredibly challenging.

Greenshot (GPLv3) is a powerful screenshot tool with its own basic image editor.

I have been very disappointed that Fedora stopped making changelogs accessible for years. It used to be that you could easily toggle them on in Yum, but with DNF it’s always “no info found”.

TIL, thanks. This might be a viable path for me.

I can give it a shot, certainly. One of the main contributors behind it is in my RSS reader so there’s some name recognition there. Future pricing is not final though, so I can’t budget for it before committing.