Large beer containers are “rare” for the same reason large soda containers are rare: carbonization. If you store an opened bottle of beer for a few hours, it will go flat, killing part of the taste with it. Beer is even worse in this regard than soda. You want to finish the whole thing in one sitting for beer. Very few people consume 2 litres of beer in one sitting. … But … Every single self respecting bar has beer from the tap, right? That stuff doesn’t appear magically. It comes in kegs. You can buy those kegs from a wholesaler, or from the internet. These kegs work by inserting CO2 to pressurize it. So you will need CO2 tanks and a system to pressurize the whole thing. Not super hard to get, but not something you find in your supermarket either. But if you consume enough beer, it can absolutely be worth it to buy a tap, CO2 and kegs instead of bottles.

Most people here are taking the moral high road or talking about the current state of society. Lets look at game theory instead to get some fundamental understanding.

Consider a game with 10 players. Each player has two options: be charitable or be selfish. If they are charitable, they add 3 points to the collective score. If they are selfish, they add 2 points to their own score. All players decide at the same, and afterwards the collective is evenly divided among all players. So if all players are charitable, everyone ends up with a personal score of 3. If everyone is selfish, everyone ends up with a score of 2.

If you are the only selfish person in the game, you score a jackpot. You get a total score of 4.7.

Now consider the idea that you play this game over and over with random players, accumulating score in each game. If everyone is always selfish, no-one will score higher than 2. But if you, individually are never selfish, you never score higher than 3.

If we consider all players to follow the same strategy, then we get an optimization puzzle for individual score. How often do you randomly choose for selfish? Instinct and DNA, but also culture and social norms create a common recipe in humans for how to make this decision. So while reality is more complex, we still act anough alike to get some wisdom when applying this assumption.

But it turns out that we don’t play these games with random people, but we are grouped by our strategy for choosing selfish or charitable (e.g. grouped by culture). And the groups also compete. If a group does particularly bad with their global score, they will be removed from the game (conquored, culture changed, etc). So not only does your choice for selfish or charitable need to optimize for personal gain to get a survival edge within your group, it also needs to optimize for survival of the group. A group with only selfish people will never thrive.

Hence, in this simple example, randomly doing good can be good for the survival of your DNA and culture. Real life is much more complicated, but a similar balance of interests may be at play. After all, evolution means that life is constantly competing with itself, yet it also benefits from working together with itself.

Whether you feel survival of your DNA and culture are relevant, is up to you. But when entire groups exist that don’t feel like that, they tend to go extinct.

Looking at Ukraine, I’d say a lot.

Literally the first sentence of the article: “The government wants Signal and Whatsapp to be forced to store messages sent using the apps.”

Reads like the result of an LLM getting terrible input and a low word count to work with.

Well, not controlling your Z, and just being awake whenever, won’t help you either. A good nights rest is vital for the brain.

And you might eventually die, after you have become a fallen empire yourself, and get stomped by some next level crisis, while the AI empires are less than useless. I consider this a plus though. Eternity is a very long time, and boredom is a very strong emotion. No game could keep me entertained for eternity.

I recommend buying potatoes. Not for eating, but for planting. Preferably before you lock yourself in for a few months. And along with it, a book on how to farm your own vegies from the library.

Allow me to take some worry away: Pornhub is canadian.

No thanks. We don’t want your nukes thrown back at us. You gotta solve this yourselves.

In an older version of Stellaris, a cheesy strategy is to abduct or force relocate the entire galaxy onto a single planet.

Usually having an overcrowded planet, has a several drawbacks.

Since you can never generate enough food, your population will always be in decline. But this decline is capped per planet, and is quite small. As long as you can keep abducting and force relocating pops from your conquests, you can grow.

Similarly, you ignore consumer goods for the only cost of a reduction in produced goods from jobs. But you barely produce anything via jobs anyway.

The low happyness and overcrowding causes stability issues on the planet. But again, the negative stability is capped, so you enable martial law on the planet, and build fortresses, which provide a stability boost per soldier job they create. And only stability matters for revolts.

You need minerals, but you can get those from mining asteroids.

Your energy credits come from being a mega church, in which each pop following your religion, generates some credits, along with trade generated per pop.

Alloys come from turning the planet into an ecumenopolis. Although you get a -50% production modifier, it is the only thing you need to produce yourself.

But the real trick is giving all the cramped up pops utopian living standards. In this version of Stellaris, any unemployed pop living in utopian living standards, generated science points and trade value. Usually those are barely worth the extra cost of letting the pop live so luxuriously. But even if you don’t provide food and consumer goods, they still provide sciencd and trade.

As a result, you got a stable planet generating insane amounts of science, energy credits, and alloys. While remaining a small empire, which kept tech costs low.

I wonder if blind folk could even use that website then.

Or a beamer if you want a big screen.

Can’t really blame them if the meta favors a low int build.

According to the article, precise GPS data was stolen. That is much worse than info about when and where you charged your car.

“Fully empty your battery before charging it up again, it increases the lifespan of the battery.”

This was true before lithium-ion batteries became the norm. But for lithium-ion batteries, the opposite holds.

Lemmy was first released in 2019. So its oldest user can be no older than about 6 years old.

Yup. Shit is gross. Still, the image of people recycling sewer sludge into cooking oil is burned into my brain, and an order of magnitude worse in my perception.

I hope you don’t live in China. Check out gutter oil.

True. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to break the cycle. Although we are heading towards another great conflict, we are currently in an era with less hunger, more education, and less poverty throughout the world than ever before. We clearly did something right. Let’s try to do even better in the future. Lets evolve, step by step, cause that Is was are good at!