• 3 Posts
  • 959 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 9th, 2023

help-circle







  • Can’t even seem to find it now. It was a non-English film. Eastern European, I think. Most of it was shot in sepia tones. It’s about people who put everything into a virtual reality game. Build their whole lives around playing it.

    The protagonist makes a fantastic meal for her cat while eating slop herself.

    Was probably from the early 2000s. I think I watched it because I ran across a review of it and it happened to be orderable on Netflix DVD.












  • We’ll have to see what happens when the final numbers come in, but I suspect the polls had it more wrong this time than in 2016. They actually weren’t that far off at that time. People forget that Hillary did actually win the popular vote, and the national polls were within margin of error. That might not be the case this time.



  • frezik@midwest.socialtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldThe Circle of Life
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    31
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 days ago

    It’s exactly what happens, and we have about as good a natural experiment on this as it gets:

    https://www.gi.alaska.edu/alaska-science-forum/when-reindeer-paradise-turned-purgatory-0

    tl;dr: a Reindeer herd was setup on an uninhabited Alaskan island as a potential food source during WWII with no natural predators. The war ended before anything came of it, so the herd was left on its own. Within a few decades, they had stripped the island bare of all vegetation the deer could possibly reach, and then they all starved to death.

    Also, see predator reintroduction programs, such as how wolves change rivers.

    Elephants and rhinos don’t breed the same way a lot of other animals do. If they did, evolution would very quickly do what happened in Alaska to those deer. Animals like deer and rabbits breed in great numbers with the evolutionary expectation that predators will keep them in check.

    If you think this process is brutal, well, yes, it is. The conservative thing would be to say that this is “natural” and therefore the correct and only way to run human society. This is wrong; we can choose a better path for ourselves while also accepting that nature works this way all the time.