Homelessness. But I don't occasionally think about it. I see it every day. In the richest nation in recorded history.
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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What country? Is it really rich if it can't look after its citizens?
It's always been a rich man's country. All for one, none for all.
And the wealth of only one single manchild is enough to pay housing for them all - at least in this nation...and probably in some more. (Just looked some numbers up - world economic forum reported in 2021 that there are 150 million people homeless in the world, that would be ~2700,- per individual homeless person, taking his net worth into account -for 770. 000 homeless people in the US it would be ~525. 000 per person)
That milk forms such a big part of western diets considering where it comes from.
Yeah dude the more I think of milk as sexual assault the stranger it feels.
In the staff fridge at work someone used to label their milk as "breast milk" and people would go eeeww. Like it was snot or something. But from a cow's breasts? Fine! So weird.
Well humans do be gross
it's the lactose tolerance pyramid scheme
The USA drops approximately 15-20 million sterilized worms on Panama every day. Yes you read that right, it’s The Great American Worm Wall.
This is wild. Good share!
This seems like it would make for a good Wikipedia article, but am I could find was this section:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia_hominivorax#Control
Fortunately, there is a Tom Scott video.
IIRC it's not even the only sterilized insects US government air drops from planes. ( Fruit flies over LA? )
I just looked this up because I didn't believe you, but you aren't spinnin' tales, my friend. This is true, and it's blowing my mind. Thank you for sharing this fact!
Our car centric world. We have somehow intersected everything and everywhere with death zone strips where people can't go. And that's entirely normal and accepted.
I'm fortunate enough to live in a walkable neighborhood. When I moved here walkability didn't really factor in; I have friends here and I liked the apartment.
Man, it is so nice. I definitely appreciate it now and will try to factor it in in the future. I am absolutely convinced that walkability fosters community and cars reinforce social isolation.
I still have my car but I consider it and driving a burden. If I had to replace it I'm pretty sure I wouldn't.
Was kind of mind blowing moment when I was old enough to pay attention to the main underlying plot line of Who Framed Rodger Rabbit being about killing off public transport for cars. Like it is very clearly stated throughout the movie, but as a child it just went over my head. Not like I didn't pay attention to when it was being talked about, just not able to appreciate the meaning. I also am from a more rural area, so things like public transportation were not something I interacted with outside of seeing it on TV shows and movies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Is the inspiration behind it, I think.
Supply chains. It’s mindblowing how that patch of cabbage got to the produce section at your grocery store. Or how the parts of that gadget you bought at best buy were sourced, assembled, and shipped to the store. Some products that have multiple parts are shipped multiple times across countries, sometimes back and forth, as they get built and assembled by different factories.
And some of those parts cost less than a penny to produce or even purchase when done in bulk!
Scale. That’s the one thing I can’t get my head around
4,000 years ago, we were doing trigonometry, but just 200 years ago we were still putting leeches on people and not washing our hands before doing surgery.
Also, we sent people to the moon and got them back using less computing power than a smart watch.
It’s insane how wasteful modern software is. The infinite growth mindset causes companies to pack more useless features into software and load it up with spyware and adware.
Google and Facebook’s tracking and ad software are a big cause of computing waste in most websites and mobile apps.
Those computers has less memory than a dollar store calculator. The bits in memory were physical magnets woven by hand into a mesh. It’s insane that it left our planet and came back with people alive.
to be fair, most of the calculations were done on Earth
Yeah, they even employed weavers to make the memory units, because it was easier than training factory workers to deal with such thin wire.
Driving.
Somehow millions of us go hurtling by each other mere inches away in multiple tons of steel, often in conditions less than ideal yet for the most part, it's a safe way to travel.
We can't even collectively agree on most topics, yet we put our lives in each others' hands every day.
Even disregarding all the other drivers, we put ourselves in a metal can, hurtle towards solid objects, and simply count on the idea that on average, nothing catastrophic will happen.
Pure, random chance is enough to end us - animal pops into the road, a tree randomly falling, etc. - yet there we go, on yet another daily commute.
I have a long commute through the "middle of nowhere" so lots of time to think about things that ought to be downright terrifying. The thought of hitting one moose is bad. Never occurred to me until just the other day that two moose was not out of the realm of possibility.
What if we were able do to travel around in a robot suit that we could fully control. Oh yeah, thats a car.
Driving just gets more absurd the more you think about it.
Had it not been invented yet, would anyone get away with suggesting a machine propelled by explosions supplied by a tank of the most flammable liquid possible kept underneath the passenger seats?
Reminds me of the Asgard from Stargate and how there advanced race was surprised about how we us explosives to propel a bullet and "primitive" things they never really thought of or considered because there dangerous.
Your comment just reminded me of a sci-fi short story about how humans solve every problem eith explosions.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/16fx8tc/humans_solve_problems_with_explosions/
If you think driving's weird, think about flying, too. We put several tons of that explode-y liquid, along with a bunch of people, into a big metal tube and shoot it into the sky. And we made that form of transportation several orders of magnitude safer than driving.
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Last I heard we're still in contact with Voyager 1
Voyager 1 is the antithesis of planned obsolescence¹, with it long outlasting its mission
¹the real kind, no the meme kind liberals often say that things are the result of
So amazing, the amount of incredible science we've been able to do with the Voyager program.
Airplanes. Like I get that we can make them stay up, but we can steer them?? Across entire continents and oceans? What the entire fuck
They are made of steel, lmao... how silly do they think we are.
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The sheer amount of information, feeling and emotion that happens to be conveyable by pressure waves in air. Can you imagine if sound just didn't work? How much that would suck? It's amazing that it's like.. a thing.
Sight too (obviously, now that we're thinking this way). But just how fucking weird can a thing be if you manage to think about it abstractly for a minute? Matter, over there, just so happens to excite a completely unrelated field that randomly permeates everywhere, even empty space(?!). And we went and fucking evolved little squishy organs that connect these intangible excitations in this weird field into the glob of electrical neurons that make our being. And by some complete fucking voodoo I'm sat here with a picture in my mind of all matter around me that's emitting EM radiation in the 400 to 790 trillion wobbles per second range. That's weeiird.
Alternatively, if sound worked in a vacuum, the way light does, The Sun would be the loudest thing in the solar system.
I'm pretty sure in that case the sound alone would kill us..
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