Ask Lemmy

Compressed air

Cars.

Digital age verification. It is not "to protect the children". I saw it for what it was right away but literally everyone I talked to about it thought it sounded really positive.

The Republicans

Social media. Every person is now inside a filter bubble that is not reality but they think it is.

Affects how they think about absolutely everything. Thats why its the most dangerous threat to humanity as a whole, with big tech algorithms pushing content to people.

Reading

Cheap, easy to get, abundant and hyper palatable calories.

Ur mom

The ease of gambling in the US.

Ambassador Bridge - Wikipedia

Religion. For most of my life I've seen media both implicitly and explicitly claiming that religion is a fundamental human social need, and that people who aren't religious are the weird immoral outliers. What I've found is true though, is that religion is a primer for believing things contrary to evidence or reason. Faith is often promoted as a virtue in religion, and many aspects of religious thought are fundamentally unverifiable. Once someone starts down the path of believing things without evidence or critical thought, it gets easier to believe things contrary to evidence, and once you get far enough in that you could potentially be convinced to believe anything. You see this with the antivaxers, flat earthers, conspiracy theorists, far right extremists, etc. Many of these beliefs have a root in established religions, if not explicit religious justification. These things aren't necessarily directly because of religion, people don't really need religion to believe wacky bigoted shit contrary even to the evidence of their own eyes, but religion by it's very nature encourages people to be uncritical. Even if the tenets of a religion are objectively good, the uncritical acceptance of ideas can easily start being applied to a person's own biases, because it's just so easy. It's already easy to be uncritical of ideas but practicing it makes it so much worse. Religion is basically taking a major human weakness and promoting it as the height of virtue. Faith is intellectual sloth.

Alcohol

iirc it’s a confirmed, 100% proven carcinogen and is a poison with zero net benefits.

Social media abuse

Before the AI craze, LLMs were a neat niche academic tool. Then the cults started forming...

you know when you see one of those dashcam videos where some idiot has run over a sign or a bollard or whatever and just kept driving with the thing stuck to the car, throwing sparks everywhere and making a big rip in the asphalt behind them?

100 horsepower is a lot.

An AI programmed to produce paperclips

Cat.

Yes, hello, I am here having my third ER visit.

This was my hand on Saturday, one day after cat bites (I counted 8 punctures), and after two doses of antibiotics.

In case you are like me, and have no sense of medical emergency, that is a serious infection.

I have had two butt shots, an X-ray, five days out of ten of courses of two different antibiotics, and I just had a CT scan.

If you do nitrous oxide excessively & often it depletes your B-12 and deteriorates the lining of your spinal column and you can lose feeling and motion and become paralyzed in some cases

Little addictions.

Addiction is a real problem and incredibly hard to diagnose. I'm not talking about drugs, I'm talking about those little additions that subtly sublimely control nearly every decision in your life. Addiction to caffeine, sugar, social media, TV, driving too fast, being an asshole, being a complainer, etc.

There's a lot of reasons why we do what we do or why we think we do them but for the most part it's about chasing those bits of dopamine.

Capitalism

Weed (the addiction part, not necessarilly the drug itself)

Sugar

Plastics

Smartphones

Cars

Proprietary software

Climate change, ~~dumb~~simple people in a complex world, anti vaxxers.

Cows

Bougainvillea

Household ladders

Vending machines