Dharma Curious (he/him)

Same great Dharma, new SolarPunk packaging!

Check out DharmaCurious.neocities.org for ramblings on philosophy and the occasional creative writing project!

  • 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • Yorkshire. Jodie Whitaker’s accent. Fucking love it so much. The way she says radio in the Tesla episode? OMG. I love everything about it.

    Also genuinely love Indian accents, and several southern US accents, but not all of them. Not a big fan of Appalachian or west Virginian accents, Kentucky can okay depending on the region, and coastal Virginia is pretty good. Western Virginia (not west Virginia, but the mountainous western portion of Virginia) can be grating to me.

    Charleston accents are chef’s kiss, and the accent I was born into until I forced myself into a general American accent as a kid



  • The whole idea behind it was radical unity, internationalism, and bringing disparate people together on equal footing. Instead of me speaking a language I’ve known since birth, and you speaking a language you are just capable of understanding, and both of us trying to plead our case to the government, the idea is that we would all have an auxiliary language to compliment (not replace) our mother tongues, and we would both be capable of making yourself understood equally.

    Those ideals don’t really jive with hard nationalism and pseudoscientific ideas around superior races




  • Esperanto! Yes, there are better conlangs, yes, it’s eurocentric, and yes, there are ways to improve it or even come up with something better. But it has a cool history, it’s tied to socialist movements and anarchist movements, it is fairly easy to learn (especially for speakers of European languages), it’s grammar is super simple, it uses a system of root words and affixes that make me think of Legos, and it has real, native speakers already, meaning it is a living language that has changed over time, and is fully capable of being used exclusively to communicate efficiently.

    Plus, the fascists fucking hate it



  • Honestly? Terrifying. Not to get all "mark of the beast"y or anything like that, but they’re not going to have to force us to get brain-computer interface chips, people are going to line up for them and pay for it willingly. And then after a while, actual thought crimes become a real thing. I don’t want to live in a world where I have to worry about the encryption level of my brain. I don’t want Dear Leader, whoever that may be at the time, knowing if I like them.

    10 years ago, this would have exited the hell out of me. Now? All I can think about is how fucking terrifying it is.





  • I’ll post this as a thread if it’s beyond your scope to answer, but you seem like a smart person who might know a thing I have absently wondered about many times.

    Balloons eventually fall back to the ground after the helium escapes. But let’s say you made a theoretical balloon that couldn’t allow the helium to escape, it’s perfectly sealed. Now, let’s say that the material it is made of is also as light as a regular balloon, but our near-magical material is also capable of withstanding extreme cold (like, outer space cold). Would it just float into space? I know that when we shoot rockets up there’s a lot of heat from the friction, but if something is moving slowly, that wouldn’t happen, I don’t think? But can a slow moving thing escape earth?

    Tell me, oh great and wise Heliumancer, tell me the secrets of the light-gas!



  • To preface this comment, I’m very, very tired, and I am providing no sources for this as I am very, very tired and just don’t want to go digging.

    I remember reading a study or 3 in 2015/16 when Bernie first ran and talked about Medicare for all. The consensus from them seemed to be that a single payer system that was free at the point of use would drastically increase the number of people going to the doctor, for about 5 years. Basically, the idea was that the US system incentivizes us to wait to see a doctor until things get Real Bad, Man™, and if we switched it would take about 5 years per group/stage (Bernie’s plan was to lower the age of Medicare enrollment in stages) before things normalized. People would be jumping on the opportunity to get seen for things that they never would have considered before, and would be basically using the hell out of the new system, and each time the age was lowered it would take about 5 years for that group of people to get through that initial stage of doctor-seeing. But once that was done and things normalized, the stark increase in preventative care would grossly overshadow our current system of basically only treating trauma and chronic conditions. The strain on the medical field as a whole would be significantly lessened over time, because preventative care is often easier and cheaper.

    So, again, no studies linked here, but iirc, the consensus was that there would be more people going to the doctor and being seen, especially in the first several years of the new system, but that medical professionals themselves would have less strain (and, my assumption here, less strain means probably less staff needed). I imagine it would change the staffing dynamics, too. We would need more primary care doctors, nurse practitioners, RNs willing/desiring to work in those offices, and probably less need for chronic pain clinics and specialized care units, potentially even things like cancer units and such. If people are seeing their doctors regularly, getting healthier, and generally being less sick, then the need for staffing in situations for people who have allowed things to get Real Bad, Man™ is lessened, and the need for staffing in preventive care is hightened.

    Also, just as an aside, I remember watching this french television show once, dubbed, and there being a thing about a stop smoking campaign, with a tax incentive if you quit. Blew my fucking mind back then, but it makes sense. If the government is backing your healthcare, they want you to less costly to that system, and can offer incentives in other systems they also control. Think about it, “join a gym and get a tax credit for half the cost!” Or “lose 30 pounds this year and get an extra 200 back on your income taxes!” I have no idea if that french cigarette thing actually exists in real life, but the idea of it has always stuck with me.


  • Many moons ago I was in charge of scheduling for all the guards at a security post for several months. Got everyone together and talked to them, and we all agreed to try out 3x12 instead of 5x8. It’d cut a couple people’s hours, but a few others would get some more. Iirc, a few people only had 2x12, but it was a long time ago.

    We all fucking loved it. 4 hours shy of 40 didn’t make a huge difference in pay, but working fewer days than you were off (on for 3, off for 4, every week) more than made up for it. We stopped getting call ours, people showed up on time. It was awesome.

    As soon as I stopped making the schedule they changed us back, and we went right back to all the old problems