I believe there’s some thinking now that dinosaurs weren’t doing all that well, stagnating, so without a meteor and volcanic activity they still would have changed in some manner eventually. But perhaps not enough to let the mammals fill any niches.

What gets me is how long life was on Earth just as single cell forms, and then suddenly, recently, it took off to bigger things.

Correction in your summary, they date back to 280 million years, before the dinosaurs. Not 280M more years. That would be very old.

All the posts are about combat between some guy with a short sword vs. a spear. No one has considered Paul’s ability to predict future actions and using that to determine the best outcome. Much like fighting a Jedi (who presumably could anticipate the immediate future), how can you fight someone who already knows how you’ll move and the best counter?

I was told in posts from the last disaster that Spain has floods all the time and this isn’t a big deal. I’m beginning to think they might have been not telling the truth.

Something about pigs and lipstick…

When I first saw one pass by me in reality, my first reaction was “jesus”. And the colors I’ve seen on display (a Tesla store is nearby), wtf? Not that a good color would help a lot, it still looks very wrong.

The 5 blade razor is probably the first example I can think of when The Onion broke reality and predicted the future.

We’re going to develop or find some efficient life form to break down plastics quickly. Solve our waste problem. And it’s going to get loose into the wild and start breaking down plastics everywhere, uncontrollably. Straight out of Larry Niven’s Ringworld series (theirs was a superconductor-eating bug).

Probably not though, that’s just science fiction that never happens in reality. The nylon-eating bacteria that naturally evolved found long ago in waste areas never broke out to destroy all nylon. So at least there’s an example of it not happening.

I thought we had a good idea what was where in orbit. How is this a sudden surprise? I had first read it thinking that it had drifted recently for some reason, but it’s been in that place for 50 years. I get that as more satellites go up things become more risky, but this should have been a known problem a long time ago.

I would never say it out loud, but any time I hear a kid throwing their temper tantrum in public, in my head I want to tell them “just wait, it gets worse.”

Many discussion topics can be complex and are much more than one side or the other, so I’ve found doing this in the sense of replying that I agree on these parts, however…

57.2% of voters chose to not control women.

A couple of minutes of eternity.

I’m sure children won’t be pushed towards violence just because they’ve lost family and friends, home and childhood, to Israeli attacks.

I call them ignorant voters, even the really stupid ones. They are a product of decades of GOP manipulation. But why can’t it be both them and a party that is totally clueless of what needs to change to reach people. The combination is exactly what you get, people who aren’t aware of reality and are just going towards the only party that is saying exactly what they want to hear (true or not).

Both Florida amendments were designed to fail. This is the same state where when I was there had an amendment for high speed rail, that passed! And then the government decided it would cost too much, so F the people’s choices.

Josh Stein (the winning Democrat) has been a popular vote for years now in other local races. It wasn’t a given win, but he had a lot of backing historically. Robinson hasn’t been popular as Lieutenant Governor, and his latest stuff didn’t help. But the case another brought up is how he still got 40%. And that’s after Trump cut ties. The rural area amazes me sometimes.

Probably trying to mirror Reddit, which had /r/politics for US, and /r/worldnews for everything else. There was a lot of effort (probably wrongly) to try and copy Reddit over instead of finding new ways to do things. /r/worldpolitics was the original sub, but there’s an interesting drama story there.

If Lemmy and other fediverse discussion areas had developed slower and more naturally there might have been more of a country/instance symmetry, but anyone who was around when the Reddit implosion and migration happened knows that it was total chaos and a grab bag of where a new user should sign up. Lemmy and the rest were not ready for such a shift, and now that everyone’s been in a place or two for a while, short of a closure or blocking or whatever there’s no reason to move around to a matching country and instance, if there even is one. People mainly look for popularity, activity, themes, and engagement, and if that’s found on the other side of the globe it works.

It could be worse than a blank check. Quid pro quo all over again.