Uhh, I just explained why. People can argue whatever they want, but the actual behavior and performance of the candidate supercedes their biological age as a barometer for electability.
Also I never said it wouldn’t matter, in fact I specifically acknowledged that it would be a talking point, then explained why that wasn’t the most important factor at play.
You do realize that age is not a perfect proxy for mental competence? A good number of people remain mentally sharp well into their 90s, while others experience rapid dementia as early as their 60s.
I’m not saying his age wouldn’t be a talking point, but I’m damn sure Bernie could express his platform with more clarity and vitality than Biden at this point. Unfortunately I dont think it’s a real possibility, but it’s stupid to act like the the actual birth date matters. It’s the signs of cognitive decline that are problematic.
I dunno what that guy was thinking, but it seems obvious to me that nuclear fusion is the long term solution for energy generation.
Nuclear fission not so much, but it’s definitely debatable which has more fundamental flaws between fission and wind/hydro/solar. All renewable energy sources ultimately depend on natural processes which are not reliable or permanent. And they also tend to disrupt the environment to some extent.
Nuclear fission has no such limitations, but instead trades long term risk for short term stability. Basically renewable sources are and always will be somewhat unreliable, and Nuclear fission is the least bad reliable energy source to pair with the renewables. So in the medium term, fission makes a lot more sense than fossil fuels, and in the long term we should be looking to fusion.
Your tone is perfectly fine and you made very good points, thank you for the information.
I’m not insulting anybody. I’m simply stating the fact that it’s smart to wear a helmet, because if you hit your head on the ground, you could die. That’s all.
Walking down the stairs is less dangerous than biking and you know it.
You make some good points.
I still wear one, but I don’t judge people who choose not to.
I don’t wear one and I judge myself for not doing so 🤷
Complicated issue.
Could be even lower if they wore helmets though. I don’t even wear a helmet myself, but it’s objectively smart to do so.
My friend got something caught in his front wheel and went over the handlebars at 20mph. Could have been turned into a vegetable if he wasn’t wearing a helmet.
Not really. Lemmy is filled with skeptics, rebels, and independent thinkers, and there are only like 50,000 monthly active users.
You know what’s a much better target for propaganda? Reddit or any corporate social media site. The users are simpleminded and easily manipulated and you don’t even have to worry about moderators, you can just pay to run ads.
Lemm.ee is actually bigger in terms of userbase now. And SJW is about the same size. But .ml still hosts a lot more communities so I guess that also counts for something
What a time to be alive
NYC is a bad example because it’s an extreme outlier in terms of size and density. But the metropolitan area is actually much larger than the urban area; here’s a map of all the counties within the NYC metropolitan area.
It covers 8,200 square miles, just slightly less than the area of New Jersey.
Metropolitan areas are quite large and typically include the core city along with the entire surrounding area that is economically and culturally heavily linked with the core city.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area
Here is a map of all the metropolitan and metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the US. Micropolitan areas are essentially defined the same way, except the core urban area of a micropolitan area is <50,000 population, while a metropolitan area has a core city of >50,000 population.
You can see that metropolitan areas include vast areas that are not even remotely urban. Beyond that, there is also a category called the Combined Statistical Area, which often combine multiple metropolitan areas.
Here is a map of LA where the red areas are urban areas, the beige counties are part of the Metropolitan Area, and the yellow counties are part of the CSA.
The CSA for LA is a whopping 34,000 square miles, or slightly larger than the island of Ireland or the state of South Carolina. However, it only contains about 2,300 square miles of urban area. Estimating the urban area is even more of an imperfect science than the metropolitan area, so I’m not sure how they calculated that number.
When people say Greater Boston or Greater Toronto, they are usually referring to the MSA, but might also be referring to the CSA. So the short answer to OP’s question is that “Greater” and “Metropolitan” are roughly synonymous. FWIW, I think that metropolitan areas used to be significantly smaller and more urbanized, but they had to modify the definition over time due to trends of suburbanization and decentralization in American city development.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to evangelize Lemmy on reddit, and one of the most common criticisms is the possibility of defederation and getting cut off from major communities. Most people who have been using Lemmy for a while understand that it’s way less of an issue than it sounds like, because there has to be a major reason for a defederation between servers and it doesn’t usually happen out of nowhere.
But in the case of Beehaw, it actually did happen quite abruptly, and it involved 3 of the largest servers at the time. We know that Lemmy slowly bled tens of thousands of users in the months following the reddit API exodus as users drifted back to reddit. Although it’s impossible to know how many of those users were annoyed by the defederation drama, I think it’s safe to say that the number wasn’t zero.
The steep decline in active users on Beehaw in the months following the decision is probably the best source of hard evidence supporting my claim.
The removal of downvotes is not something that I have any particular problem with, although I wouldn’t choose it for myself. I’m just pointing out that in this specific situation of wanting to mitigate tankie posts, the downvote is self-evidently an effective tool.
I think this goes back to a lack of moderation tools and poor moderation in other instances, not to Beehaw’s relatively smaller user base or defederation from other instances.
Can’t it be both? If certain moderation tools existed then you could use them to solve the problem. But they don’t exist, so other instances are currently using the strategies that I have mentioned in order to deal with the problem as best they can.
Sh.itjust.works does have open signups.
I totally understand and respect your perspective as a beehaw user, even as I obviously have a completely different perspective as someone who has never been a part of the beehaw community but instead has been observing from a distance.
Thanks for the response. I didn’t realize that you had conducted polls about refederation, that’s good to hear. I’m familiar with the situation with the Lemmy developers.
I understand why you have chosen this course of action and I don’t mean to say you’re responsible for the health of Lemmy. I was just pointing out that from my perspective, a rising tide lifts all boats, and it’s helpful to have a network of similar communities because it makes each one stronger.
For instance, if someone on SJW complains about us being defederated from lemmygrad and hexbear, I can simply tell them to make an account on lemm.ee, thus allowing them to remain a part of any communities on SJW but also allowing them to have the experience they wanted. And lemm.ee also gets a new user out of it. When you don’t have those options, the disgruntled user is much more likely to stop using the platform entirely.
However, you obviously already have plenty of experience cultivating and maintaining a community, so I have faith that you will be able to continue to do so regardless of the extent of federation that you deem appropriate or which platform you use, and I wish you luck going forward.
My experiences with beehaw users have also been largely positive, but I don’t really use my alt that much, so I don’t have many encounters.
Thank you. I don’t necessarily think beehaw is going to die and I agree that it doesn’t need to get bigger.
But this was just my perspective as a sh.itjust.works user and admin that I’ve been wanting to get off my chest. SJW got cut off from beehaw users and communities soon after I joined Lemmy and it’s been bothering me ever since and this seemed like a good opportunity to communicate my perspective.
Might as well take this opportunity to point out that beehaw is still defederated from sh.itjust.works. I thought it was a bizarre decision at the time and the fact that it hasn’t been reassessed after all this time is even more baffling. Beehaw and SJW are two of the best moderated instances on Lemmy, and yet we aren’t federated with each other.
You can view the original announcement from beehaw here and the reaction from SJW here. You’ll also note that beehaw has since refederated with lemmy.world.
I have been informed that beehaw is still defederated from lemmy.world, my mistake.
Nearly a year later, it’s obvious that the decisions of beehaw admins during that critical period of time when redditors were first trying Lemmy were highly disruptive towards the development of the platform as a whole. The first level of disruption came from the direct fragmentation of communities caused by that defederation decision.
The second and more devastating impact was the impact on the perceptions of new users, who were given a manifestation of their worst fears about Lemmy and it’s federated structure. Many potential users were turned off Lemmy because they didn’t like the fact that they could suddenly be blocked off from major communities on other servers due to arbitrary admin decisions, and beehaw essentially provided the perfect example of that at a critical growth phase.
At the time that they defederated SJW, Beehaw was more that 3 times larger, at about 12k total/3k monthly users. Now, SJW is more than 5 times larger than Beehaw, which has dwindled to just 450 monthly users.
With regard to lemmy.ml, I think the main issue is that beehaw has disabled downvotes. The tankies are significantly outnumbered on Lemmy as a whole and a combination of downvoting and active moderation from other admins effectively minimizes the problem for most other major servers. But because beehaw doesn’t allow downvotes, has dwindled to a small userbase, and has isolated itself from other non-extremist servers (SJW), you have been left much more exposed to the tankie propaganda, with your only recourse being the nuclear option of defederation.
Obviously, my point is that beehaw admins should accept that they made a mistake and refederate with sh.itjust.works. I would also recommend upgrading to the latest version of Lemmy, because it at least gives users the option of instance blocking. I understand that you intend to move to Sublinks or another platform in the future, but in the meantime you are neglecting your users by allowing the current implementation on Lemmy to languish.
I don’t mean this to be an attack on the beehaw admins, because I think they have done a number of great things for Lemmy and the fediverse and I believe that our objectives are generally aligned. But I feel that I must express these frustrations, because as I have just explained, the actions of the beehaw admins also have direct consequences on fediverse users from other servers.
I think that beehaw admins, not dissimilarly to hexbear admins, tend to disregard how their actions impact the fediverse as a whole and focus solely on the proximate impact on their own userbase. This is a faulty mindset, because the fediverse is the ecosystem which we all share, and that ecosystem needs to be protected and maintained in order for all of the different organisms (instances) residing therein to thrive. Without our connection to the fediverse, all of our instances would simply wither away.
And you were incorrect.
I meant what I said. Most people disagree with the comment, but probably for a wide variety of reasons. It’s not a singular reaction, it’s multiple reactions to multiple insinuations that all happen to be questionable.
Trump, Biden, and Bernie are all too old. They could all die at any time, and thus it’s not an effective political argument for either side.
The reason why Biden is being attacked from that angle more effectively is because he is showing signs of dementia. That’s a whole other issue aside from the likelihood of death.