Thank you. That answers my question. I figured you wanted to remain anonymous, but I liked your answer and I'll be interested in what you find.
I was trying to word my initial post in a way to prevent you from becoming defensive, perhaps I failed. Though, I do feel quoting yourself is a bit... gauche, no? Especially since you are remaining anonymous.
Are you a single person or a group of people? Do you have any credentials that you'd like to share that might give some context to your research?
Where is the quote in your bio from?
We need to stop pretending this is due to a lack of education or critical thinking. Sure, that's true for some, but I'm betting the vast majority of these conspiracy theories are spread by people that know that they are lies and don't care. Evil Russian propaganda bots aren't a great explanation for the totality of the phenomena. People say outrageous things because it gets them clicks on the internet and hurts the "other team".
We saw it recently with the lady lying about hatian immigrants eating cats - link. She didn't care how true it was - only that it hurt the other team. They have it comin', anyway, is their perspective when they're saying these things.
I tried to write the most biased scaremongering paper about microplastics for a college course and I couldn’t find much directly linking human health to microplastics that was peer reviewed.
The main paper in this article, the one claiming its human brain samples are 0.5% plastic, is preprint - not peer reviewed. So, reporting on it like this is unethical tbh.
Truthfully, scientists have been looking for this sort of link in animals, and they can’t find earthshaking evidence of it. Most of the papers I found showed weak evidence of harm to animals. Most of the scarier papers have to do with how these plastics absorb chemical pollution in sea water, fish then eat the particles and are harmed. These papers point out they have trouble separating general harm from pollution from harm from microplastics pollution.
Microplastics don’t seem to go up the food chain either, seems most plastics people eat are introduced through processing it. So, stop eating processed food. Stop wearing polyester while you’re at it, a lot of microplastics come from laundry.
I’m not saying microplastics aren’t bad for human health. It’s just incredibly hard to study and it’s definitely not as bad as lead or asbestos. If it was, scientists would have found that link already.
The worst news I ran across was that there is no human control group for this stuff. Everyone is full of microplastics. Those are the only peer reviewed human studies this article mentions - the sort that are like “Of samples from 20 different people, they were all full of plastics! We need grant money for more study”.
I hope they get that grant money.
While not a perfect solution, this seems very smart. It’s a great mitigation tactic to try to keep user’s privacy intact.
Seems to me there’s still routes to deanonymization:
Piefed is smaller than lemmy, right? So if only one targeted posting account is voting somewhat consistently in posts where few piefed users vote/post/view, you got your guy.
Obviously this is way harder than just viewing votes. Not sure who would go to the trouble. But a deanonymization attack is still possible. Perhaps rotate the ids of the voting accounts periodically?
I think they should be public. They’re already accessible for mbin posts and anyone administrating a lemmy instance. It should be clear to all users that their votes are already not private.
Someone could make a lemmy instance just to get voting behavior and make a website with cool graphs and stuff today and the only thing that could stop them is defederation. If Lemmy gets popular, this is just an inevitability.
Imagine if a large instance decided to do that today. Imagine if lemmy.world released lemmy.world/votes. Would people defederate just for that? Remember: Mbin already displays scores and I don’t think anyone has defederated over it.
Might as well put it on the interface so everyone understands it isn’t private. Rip off the bandaid.
He’s a vaccine denier. Edit: Trump was awful at handling COVID but he was not antivax.
TLDR: On the small island of Samoa, poor hospital management caused muscle relaxant to be administered instead of measles vaccinations in some children and there were injuries and deaths. In the wake of this RFK flew there and spread his antivax nonsense (he makes money off books about this). Afterword there’s a measles outbreak and 83 children and infants died.
It’s pretty hard to compare him and Trump because he never had the power Trump did. Anyone who thinks he’s a reasonable alternative is totally misinformed.
I can’t wait for what John Oliver has to say. The man is a train wreck.
"An ye harm none, do what ye will"
Disclaimer: I am not Wiccan, except for the mandatory year every highschool girl experiences.
(This is not meant to be dismissive of the faith, just a joke about shared experiences. I love my pagan sisters and others)
Only straight men are mathematicians, physicists and engineers. This is why the joke is framed this way.
See: responses from OP, valiantly defending his choice to "piss people off", instead of noticing the joke is just yet another reminder that men are default.
After all, sexism is over, and STEM isn't hostile to women/non-heteronormative people. It's all in our head.
I always enjoy a nice warm cup of candy corn alongside my platter of fried eggs. Doesn't everyone?