• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I heard about this from a podcast called The Missing Cryptoqueen from the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p07nkd84

    In a way it’s a classic ponzi scheme so in that sense it’s not that novel. But this Dr. Ruja, as she was known by people who “bought” OneCoin, sold herself and OneCoin super well and took full advantage of the crypto craze. The scale and then disappearance are crazy.

    Maybe this is in the article but I think the leading theory is that she’s in the UAE or Qatar or something. I assume she can’t really travel but she can just live like an actual queen over there and those governments won’t care about where he money came from.













  • So yeah “things” are shittier, because nowadays we have the ability to live in a nearly post-scarcity society but we just don’t wanna.

    Humankind could have been living in blissful peace for centuries. We’ve always had the ability to not kill each other or fight for resources. But many people, then and now, don’t want that.

    The way civilizations/empires/countries have operated has largely been competitive. It’s naive to think we’ll all just come together and solve these very complicated problems.

    Saying that people are stupid or racist… I don’t think that barely has anything to do with what prevents all major countries of the world to work together to combat things like disease, climate change, inequality, etc.


  • How do you define “things”?

    On a global scale and on average, life for humans is getting significantly better than, say, a century ago. The number of people dying from preventable diseases, war, natural disasters has been steadily going down for a while now.

    Of course there are many more people on earth than there were 100 years ago, so accumulatively there is a lot more suffering now.

    Also, the lives of individual people, the state of certain countries and areas are certainly getting worse.

    As for non-human animals… For most of them the world is getting increasingly less habitable and for those who are raised in an industrial setting for human consumption, living conditions are largely atrocious.

    I think your question is too broad for a single answer. But you might be interested in this now 17 year old (!) TED talk by the late Hans Rosling, which at least partially answers your question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w


  • Around 2004 we had some people over for a card game night. We were all sitting on our house’s big terrace, where we had also put this type of lamp. The terrace was open to the outside and the lamp attracted a large amount of bugs, which would burn and start to smell, the same smell you are remembering.

    To stop this from happening, my brother decided to put a kind of glass plate on top of the lamp as a cover. Initially this worked great and the smell was gone.

    10 minutes later, the glass had gotten so hot that it exploded violently, shooting shards of glass all across the terrace. It was a lesson learned.



  • But your lifestyle does impact how likely it is you die from covid. Poorer Trump voters are probably more likely to have a relatively unhealthy lifestyle; maybe more likely to smoke, perhaps less likely to do exercise, perhaps older? And I’m fairly certain that Republican voters are less likely to be vaccinated against covid.

    Not sure what your point was exactly, but wanted to point out people absolutely did not die at the same rate across the board and political affiliation (and therefore the likelihood of being vaccinated) could definitely be a factor.