PhilipTheBucket

Yeah. If there's an explicit list, then it's easy to extrapolate, too, if some source comes in that's not on the list. I'm sure there will be little disagreements about particular sources, but it's easier if there's a clear guideline to follow.

It might be a good idea to make explicit rulings on some of the borderline sources.

If it were me, I would ban ScienceAlert, for example. "A Physicist Reveals Why You Should Run in The Rain" or "NASA Reveals Spooky Eyes in Space, And They're Staring Straight at You." They have a lot of good articles, too, but some of it is clearly just stuff for clicks. Psypost is also a little dubious. Maybe if it's something a scientist in that field would ever read and take seriously, including reliable journalism sources that are talking about science, then it's good, but if it would be viewed as pop-science clickbait, then we need to talk about it.

These are just ideas. I'm just saying that clarifying by name some of the things near the border, maybe after checking with the community, might be good.

I clicked through to the Nature article, and it sounds like about half the plastic gets used for making energy and exhaled as carbon dioxide, with the other half getting pooped out as microplastics. I'd call that progress. It's not the end goal, but it's a good tool with some potential, is I think what they are saying.

I'm confident that it will happen, these things just take time. There's enough energy floating around bound up in plastic polymers, and the chemistry is simple enough, that something will learn to make use of it. 100 years is just way too short in evolutionary time for it to happen on a large scale.

Life is incredibly resilient. It’s been through way worse than us and it’s done fine.

The right conditions for any single species to keep existing in a safe and comfortable place, like the friendly green-blue paradise we were born on, are heartbreakingly fragile.

Not true.

We found that mealworms on the polystyrene-bran diet survived at higher rates than those fed on polystyrene alone.

While the polystyrene-only diet did support the mealworms' survival, they didn't have enough nutrition to make them efficient in breaking down polystyrene.

Many of the ones fed only polystyrene for a month did survive, they just fared poorly as with any organism that’s eating only one substance for an entire month. But they did live, which is pretty impressive.

They have gut bacteria that can break down polystyrene for nutrition. They just can’t eat only polystyrene and nothing else and thrive. It’s mostly an area of research because they want to use the bacteria in processing waste, not that the mealworms are going to be the answer as-is.

Most of these are pretty shoddy, but this one is really good. It's detailed and accurate about a lot of the idoiosyncrasies.

Like FlyingSquid I would have pushed "The South" a little further north into Western Pennsylvania, and up through Missouri into south Indiana. And what in the world is "The Northwoods," that's the YooPee and Wisconsin is upper midwest. But other than that it's spot on as to a whole lot of the details. South Florida as part of the Caribbean, Washington/Oregon as part of the interior once you get away from the coast... it has a lot of little important details right.

Mastodon is your coworker who’s honestly well-meaning and kind, but seems to have fits of upset for seemingly no reason at all and random beefs and drama with people that arise from nothing at all. She’s not very good at her job, but she can get it done, and she seems like a sincerely good person, which is enough that people like her.

Misskey is the employee who’s incredibly efficient, but has her own system that no one else can make sense of or follow. You have to just let her do things the way she wants to do them, but it all works. She does not hang around with anyone, just comes in and does her thing.

Bluesky is the guy who is always talking buddy-buddy while either wasting time or asking people for things, blows coke in the bathroom, is constantly hyping himself up. He seems to be very qualified, but it’s hard to tell how much of that is an act, and he’s also clearly a huge piece of shit. For some reason he is wildly popular with everyone.

You didn’t ask, but Bonfire is the IT guy who seems to live in his windowless office, wears T-shirts to work, speaks to no one, and is personally responsible for about 40% of the company’s products and services. Most people have no idea who he is.

I said 100,000 who receive at least a year of imprisonment, or deportation, or something similarly severe like getting shot. Someone just getting arrested, I don’t really care about. They already do that, and the damage isn’t always nothing, but I was talking about life-altering punishments.

There were 64,142 felony or class A misdemeanor sentences pronounced in 2022. A year is about the bottom end of prison time for a felony, so that’s probably an okay estimate for the number of people who received that punishment level in 2022.

https://www.ussc.gov/about/annual-report-2022

I’m fine with the six-month timeframe you said. If it goes from 32,000 cases to 132,000 cases then you’ll agree that’s a problem.

I’ll bet $50 against each scenario. I’m fine with not paying each other. The loser can pay that much to the organization of the winner’s choice.

You know what? Sure. I’ll shake on it if you will. If we’re still around and on Lemmy at the end, hit me up and we’ll see how it happened.

So, 100,000 people arrested or otherwise taken from their homes under a new or previously unimplemented legal pretext?

Yes.

I think we need to add a narrow timeframe over which these detentions would occur, like a single week.

Why? 100,000 people over the course of a few months isn't enough of a problem for you?

Is this number separate or inclusive of people who get deported on some immigration basis?

Separate. I'm excluding people who already don't have a legal right to stay in the US. I think the number of people who are technically already vulnerable to deportation, who will be deported, will be much greater than 100,000. As you pointed out, that's already going on. It's hard to measure in a number how much additional cruelty Trump will add to that by doing a "better" job at rooting out and deporting those people, so I'm not including that. The 100,000 is only people who would have been able to stay in the US, or out of prison or extralegal punishment, who now will not.

A lot of people have been arrested at peaceful protests under Biden, so it seems like we’re already at a grim baseline condition. Not sure what the bet is here.

I phrased it as "serious charges" on purpose. Lots of people get arrested at protests and then released, either without charges or with some kind of misdemeanor. Biden didn't invent that, and usually it's being done by local cops who often don't even like Biden, and definitely don't care what he thinks about what they should be doing to the protestors.

I said "serious charges." We can quantify it as a year or more in prison, or something similar or worse that's extralegal. That happens on a very occasional basis here, to a handful of people like the cop city protestors, or to that handful of climate protestors in the UK. I expect that under Trump, the scale of serious charges and prison time or worse for these protestors or some other type of "enemy" will dramatically increase. That's why I quoted the 100,000 people number as a total for all of this extralegal action, deportation and imprisonment and all.

Just to give you a sense of "or worse," what he did last time was issue an order for the National Guard to start shooting them. They didn't, last time, and I expect that they probably still won't in a lot of cases. I think he may create new federal law enforcement agencies which will obey that type of order.

It sounds, to me, like you're saying that Biden is causing BLM protestors to get arrested and held for a couple of days in the local jail, and that's already happening so what's the difference if Trump is creating a new federal law enforcement agency to give them felonies or just shoot them. If I'm hearing you right about that, then I think that indicates a lack of understanding of the grave differences between a Biden presidency and a Trump presidency. That's what I'm trying to impress on you.

Maybe there are some bills or amendment text floating around you can point to that if passed and successfully enforced would meet this expectation? That includes beating first amendment challenges, right?

I think a lot of this will be extralegal. We can quantify it by saying that if people start getting criminal charges because of what they said on social media, or what they allow to be posted on their social media site, because it was anti-Republican in some sense, the bet is passed. I don't know exactly what the legal structure if any will be surrounding it, so I don't want to involve that into the equation. Whether or not the physical people start going to the physical courtrooms or prisons is the relevant factor. Trust me, if it starts happening, we won't need to quibble. You'll know it when you see it.

Are you guaranteeing all of these scenarios or just any of them? Or should each one be a separate bet?

Is there a betting community on Lemmy where we could post our bet?

It's two scenarios. One is 100,000 people getting deportation or prison time for things that are currently absolutely clearly legal, such as being Hispanic or attending a protest. The other is people receiving charges for expressing, or amplifying or not, a political viewpoint. We can limit that second one to social media, as a way of making it more concrete. We can make those two things as two separate bets, I guess.

How much were you thinking? I don't really want to bet, to be honest. I'm happy to give you some amount of money if it doesn't happen. I'll be so happy that I won't give a fuck. If I win, we can set it up that you have to give that amount of money to some kind of charity or operation that's trying to resist. I don't want the money. It's not a fun thing for me to talk about.

Sure. 100,000 people hauled away by the cops when they haven’t done anything or committed what we would now consider a crime. Mass deportations of currently legal immigrants, or serious charges for people who participated in a protest but nothing else, is the obvious possibility.

That and laws or federally enforced law-facsimiles of some kind that mean you get punished just for a certain viewpoint that would be fine now. It could be a crime for a social media company or a private citizen to debunk election fraud claims from 2020, or something similar to that.

Give it a rest. I can argue back my point of view to you, and we can go back and forth a little, and it's pointless.

I can guarantee you that people in large numbers will get their doors kicked in by the police and hauled away, and laws will get passed that make it a crime to be anti-Republican. How wide a scale and how bad that all will get isn't certain, but I think it will be pretty bad.

Your days of pointing at the Democrats as the problem need to stop, and their days of pointing at the Bernie Sanders crowd and the Palestine protestors as the problem need to stop, because even if we (edit: ~~don't~~) do put all that bullshit aside and start fighting together against the real enemy for real, we might not win. I really don't care who's right anymore. Before the election, I did. That stuff is over.

The more people who are still convinced that their own side needs to be made into the enemy in any respect, the harder that fight will get, and it'll already be hard, and bad.