Ecco the dolphin

I am a time-traveling dolphin. An entity made of giant balls gave me the ability to breathe underwater, but this ability was recently stolen from me by aliens.

Sometimes I turn into a bird.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 13th, 2024

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  • I don’t want to drag this conversation into American politics, but I will say ICE has been doing things against USA law. Things are not great here. Even noncitizens have rights that need to be respected, and ICE is failing to do that. They have also arrested lawful residents, citizens too, in their sweeps.

    The ICE tracker app is a protest app/ direct action sort of thing, not a tool for criminality. Surely you can see the value of being able to use technology to resist a tyrannical government?

    By the way, do you want the USA government to potentially control which software can be installed on your phone? Google is an American company. USA courts could decide (international company) is violating (American IP law or something else) and instruct Google to disallow their app from being installed entirely.

    They can pull apps off the app store now, and they do that, but currently you can still side load stuff.


  • I think that other guy’s comment about the ICE tracker app really highlights the most important problem: If only signed apps can run, governments can pressure companies to remove access to certain apps. Even if Google allowed posting the app, the author would have to de-anonymize himself, and Google would have to comply with the law if they were subpoenaed. They would definitely give up the author’s name. It is an issue of freedom, freedom of speech, freedom to do with your device what you choose to do with it. You might not have a use for it (right now) but it’s not necessarily something you’d want to give up.

    And, honestly, I would personally be affected by this, eventually. I use an app called NewPipe to watch youtube. It already isn’t available on the app store (violates google’s ToS), and I doubt they’d let people install this even if the author properly identified themselves, because I use it to avoid watching adds and to be able to “subscribe” to channels without an account. I could just borrow my husband’s premium subscription, I guess, but I really only use NewPipe to watch certain things, and it lacks the algorithmically driven feed (which I am actively avoiding, Google tends to suggest things that make you angry for clicks).








  • I think it’s notable what they didn’t find. No guns, weapons. No plane tickets. No bombs or bomb making equipment. No actual real plans, just aimless searches. This guy is young. You can find a picture of this guy online (I’m not going to link it. I think these sorts of sites should be illegal tbh).

    My guess:

    • Mentally ill, possibly mentally disabled
    • Lives with mom/dad etc, probably unemployed or unable to find a “good” job (Not a moral failing. American society is not giving many options for young adults to live “complete” lives).
    • Mom/dad/whoever notices how angry he is and installs a keylogger, because they don’t want him to become a mass shooter, and he’s a grown man still on Roblox.
    • Immediately confesses everything to FBI

    This guy needs a mental health intervention, not jail time. I have a hard time believing he is much of a public threat since they listed all the cool stuff they found in his house in the FBI charging documents but no guns/etc. This guy didn’t have a plan.

    Highly recommend this podcast episode from Reveal: Lessons From a Mass Shooter’s Mother







  • In the bottom right hand corner, you can see the words “tribute to a comic by BORS”. The comic artist’s website has this to say about this comic: “Tribute to that famous and cool comic by BORS”.

    Its fine I guess? I think he should have linked to Matt Bors’s website (which is easily found on google) but whatever. It is a low effort MS paint comic, after all.



  • I guess I will over-explain my snarky comment.

    I’m making an analogy with robbing a bank, something that everyone would agree is a criminal activity because:

    1. Bill Gates is a billionaire. Billionaires hoard wealth that they cannot possibly spend in their lifetimes and use that excess wealth to influence our political processes to get what they want. The existence of billionaires is violence, just not the sort of direct violence we all recognize.

    If you don’t find that point convincing:

    1. The only reason Bill Gates is as wealthy as he is is due to Microsoft being so profitable. I think it’s funny how quickly everyone has forgotten how anti-competitive and scummy Microsoft was during the 1990-2010s (and even today), and they definitely wouldn’t be where they are today without those practices. If you believe in free markets, this should make you angry, because competition is good for the consumer. Anti-competitive practices could be seen as a type of theft here.

    A great deal of his wealth is unearned and comes at a cost to society in the form of an unfair technology market. He is the benefactor of a system who rewards those who have the most already, a system that allows your neighbors be homeless, sick and/or without basic necessities.

    Kind of like a bank robber has unearned wealth. A bank robber (who got away with it!) giving away their unearned wealth to their favored charities doesn’t really belong in Uplifting News.



  • Ecco the dolphin@lemmy.mltoLemmy Be Wholesome@lemmy.worldEver thankful
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    4 months ago

    I totally love the energy of the poster in OPs image, it’s so warm and wholesome.

    That said, it’s probably true that cats (and dogs for that matter) have a variety of coat patterns because of domestication. Not only do humans choose to breed pets for their coat variations, selecting for tamer, friendlier animals actually also just introduces a variety of differences from their wild counterparts. Coat color is one of them.

    https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/197/3/795/5935921?login=false

    But the [related traits from domestication] as a whole, with its diverse array of affected morphological traits, clearly cannot be caused simply by alterations of adrenal function. What, therefore, might be the common factor? What all of these diverse traits, including the adrenals, share is that their development is closely linked to neural crest cells (NCCs). NCCs are the vertebrate-specific class of stem cells that first appear during early embryogenesis at the dorsal edge (“crest”) of the neural tube and then migrate ventrally throughout the body in both the cranium and the trunk, giving rise to the cellular precursors of many cell and tissue types and indirectly promoting the development of others (Carlson 1999; Hall 1999; Gilbert 2003; Trainor 2014).

    Edit: the adrenal gland is mentioned here because lessening the function of the “flight or flight” response appears to makes friendlier animals with better temperament for domestication. The idea is that domestic animals were selected for temperament first, and everything else is less important (why would you keep an animal that won’t stop biting you?).