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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2025

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  • Yes, and tunnels too. The issue’s not just the temperature but the altitude, at least on the west coast, and lack of adhesion rail or deep bore passenger train tunnels on Canadian mountain routes. On the flat lands eastwards it’s mostly that passenger engines are built differently than freight locomotives that makes the difference.

    The problem can be fixed, but is it worth it? Maybe. Sadly, no politicians here seem too interested in building rail services in BC, unless it’s to feed the KelVicVanSeaTac metro-economic machine.

    I will say I was trying to make something resembling small talk, so I admit I’m wrong if you know otherwise. Just as far as I’ve seen, that’s what seems to be the truth.



  • Humans, pigs and naked mole rats are the only mammals which never have fur. The mole rats are incidentally NOT found in African diets (afaik), but wild boars and (disturbingly) humans (mind you, there is a nuance) have.

    The nuance is the source. Many cultures around the world consumed their dead but are not killers. They had no choice sometimes, every scrap of food had to be conserved.

    Also, it was rare but a few cultures ate those they killed in battle, which is far less understandable, but not the same thing as “savages who eat other people” which is not just insulting but factually wrong. If you want to criticize the many, many peoples of Africa over that kind of awfulness, point to 20th and 21st Century genocides between tribes during the attempts to create modern nations, not to cultures that were - yes - often oppressed by European overlords and vilified to oppress them. We don’t know enough to say that it was voluntary, famines and droughts and poor hunting seasons happened over history across the world.

    The other nuance is, if you ever end up like the Donner Party, DO NOT EAT THEIR BRAIN. That’s how you get Kuru. Nasty stuff, it’s a genetic illness that can be acquired by eating other people’s brains (hence why nobody eats brains except the zombies in memes). Trust me, you’d prefer to starve to death even considering it’s already like Soylent Green in that hypothetical.



  • Industrial meat farms need to go, yes. Oddly, it is much more humane to completely automate slaughterhouses as long as regulations prevent cutting corners in designing systems or using “cheaper” (which I doubt actually is) methods. The process is like a purposefully-lethal lobotomy, which sounds awful but it means the death is quick and 100% painless for the poor animal.

    That, and it has been shown through actual medical studies AND an actual child abuse case in the US that children cannot receive enough protien to live/grow only from soy and/or beans; you will starve a child if you do not feed them meat (assuming they’ve begun eating solids).

    If there’s anything else to say, I do not condone eating veal or lamb. Seriously, it’s a baby animal. Just don’t.




  • Yes. Tl;dr: avoid (more) tick bites

    I find it disturbing people have forgotten about parasites because we got rid of most of them. Ticks are not “just like mosquitos”, ticks have seriously dangerous pathogens, and even mosquitos transfer Malaria. Malaria. Which is - if I’m remembering correctly - killing more people in Africa per year than all other causes of death globally combined. That’s including coal mining deaths (deadliest job), human war and murder (second-deadliest “animal” for humans is ourselves) and attacks by wild/domesticated animals, and heart attacks and strokes (most common death for the elderly).

    I’m going to have to admit I don’t know the death toll of Malaria for sure, but it IS or WAS the reason mosquitos are/were the deadliest predator for humans. Either way, I’d rather die than have my life turn into an episode of Monsters Inside Me.


  • It’s not just that. Trains don’t run as well or brake as efficiently in cold weather, they have slippery metal rails for a reason. That’s why we switched to cars and trucks too readily, and as sad as that is, I think we might need electric cars more than Americans ever needed any cars.

    (That said, electric cars should be thanks to electrified smartroads, not stuffing the car itself full of computer hardware.)