Ask Lemmy

Whoever invented jetskis and didn’t call them boatorcycles seriously fucked up

Dark mode should be the default on phones, websites, programs, apps, and all electronics.

My AMOLED screen draws less power this way.

walruses should be called saber-toothed seals

Advertising destroys everything nice (communities, websites, roads, clothes, architecture, privacy, quality of life, etc.).

More games, if not all games, should include cheats or extra sliders for both difficult but also gameplay options.

Let have infinite mana or slow mo or increase my speed or whatever. At the end of the day games are entertainment and you should be able to tweak things to better enjoy it.

(I know mods exist but those are a mixed bag in terms of if they exist and what they support)

YYYY-MM-DD is the only acceptable numeric date format and should be the standard taught in schools.

Making your bed every day is useless.

Nobody's gonna see it and you can't use it without messing it up.

The real thing the US fast food market is missing is Indian food and it could be a serious game changer in terms of providing healthier / vegetarian options.

I guess this hot take depends on the audience... But if you don't have bay leaves on hand for a recipe, your family and friends aren't going to notice the difference. When push comes to shove, it's probably the least important part of any recipe. If you're making soup or a stock, it's gonna be fine without it.

Prefacing this with saying I've previously worked in wildlife conservation for years.

Limited hunting of big game in Africa is perfectly fine. Dipshits willing to pay $100K to shoot something fund entire villages, put kids through school, and define a value of the living animals that make it easier to define how much money anti-poaching efforts need, etc. Even if not well-managed, even with expected corruption, it ends up working out.

Absolutist conservation stances never take into account how ridiculously manipulated these ranges are already. There's not much still natural about an ecosystem in a reserve. Predator/prey relationships are weird, tourism focuses only on charismatic megafauna, and tourist sites bring staff and place humans close to wildlife anyway. Absolutist stances end up being horrible for animals long term because the ecosystems are so messed up, so populations boom, then crash. Why would anyone want to watch hundreds of animals starve to death as a way to "manage" a population when someone is willing to pay to do the same thing in a specifically managed situation?

In most species, the most useless thing there is, is an older male. Humans let them run their counties, which is stupid. Elephants, rhinos, lions and hippos run them off because they get violent and kill their own kind. Humans haven't recognized that's what ours do, too. But when a rich dipshit wants to pay $100K to be brought 30 meters from an old lion and shoot it before it kills 3 cubs from a rival... I'm very OK with that.

Poaching is the real threat, and most people are too ignorant of stupid to know the difference because of an abstract fear of firearms, rather than logically looking at the whole problem.

"Lgbtq+ rights" is a mouthfull. We should call it rainbow-rights instead.

We should continue to gently correct spelling and grammar mistakes online.

Lawns are stupid and I think they look boring

Also pigeons are underappreciated and we are gonna go to pigeon hell for how dirty we did them

Bio 20-30 should be mandatory

I got so many hot shit takes somebody stop me

Hershey is giving other candy/food manufacturers below-market deals on chocolate or above-market licensing deals to produce their chocolate candies in the USA so Americans don’t discover how much better chocolate tastes without butyric acid. Inexpensive foreign chocolate could destroy The Hershey Company and there are big companies like Nestlé or Mondelēz that could do it relatively easily but instead let Hershey’s produce their brands under license with butyric acid added.

"Fuck lawns" energy, but for graveyards. (no not like that, stoppit!)

Or postmortem services in general. If you want to give something to someone, do it when they're still around to appreciate it. Once they're dead, they won't give a fuck about the fancy funeral or coffin or w/e you bought for em.

The Last Jedi sucks, but not for the reasons right-wing chuds complained about. The premise of the entire chase rests on a bunch of Macguffin's (they can suddenly track ships through hyperspace, fuel is an issue for the first time ever, no one can escape except when they can), the Canto Bight sequence is pointless and contrived, the light-speed kamikaze blows a plot hole in basically every other movie, and Poe should have been executed for mutiny.

Structurally, I get what Johnson was doing; everyone complained that The Force Awakens was a beat for beat retelling of A New Hope, so he basically inverted the plot structure of The Empire Strikes Back. It's a fun idea, but his desire to end on a Hoth sequence ruined what could have been a perfect ending. I was having problems with that movie, but after Snoke gets murdered, Rey and Ben have one of the best lightsaber fights in Star Wars history, and Ben asks her to join him, I was expecting the credits to roll, and I was ready to leave on one of the greatest cliffhangers in movie history. But then there's another 30 minutes of movie, and while the Luke stuff is cool, it mostly just drags on.

It's also clear that Johnson wasn't just inverting plot structure, but Star Wars norms. Everything that is established is questioned and turned on it's head. The problem is, by the end of the film, it's all thrown out and the status quo is hastily reestablished with little justification. What's the lesson from Canto Bight and DJ? "Rebellion? Empire? Two sides of the same coin for the weapons dealers. The real battle is between the haves and have-nots." How does the movie end? "Get on the princess' space ship, we're not done fighting the Empire!" The entire Rey/Luke/Ben aspect of the film? "Light? Dark? Jedi? Sith? They're just artificial constructs. Let them die. Burn the temple." How does the movie end? "Don't worry, Rey didn't join the Dark Side and she's got all the magic Jedi books!"

Anyway, there's also a lot of stuff I like (the Rey/Luke scenes are excellent), and it's bad in an interesting way, which makes it better than the rest of the trilogy by default. I guess this is more of a small essay than a hot take, but TL;DR: chuds think The Last Jedi sucks because of wokeness, but it actually suckes for lot of structural, thematic, and plot weaknesses.

American cheese is “real” cheese, and it’s called a “process cheese,” not “processed cheese,” because process cheese is a culinary term for a cheese made from a mixture of cheeses. Also it melts so good because of a perfectly safe food additive called sodium citrate which just prevents the fat from separating.

The seventh planet from the sun should be called Caelus after the Roman sky god to match the other planets rather than using a latinized version of the name of the Greek sky god Ouranos.

I have very suddenly started hearing a strange quirk of grammar that needs to die in a fire. I'm going to write it on an index card and burn the index card.

I swear I haven't heard this before the 2020s: "My kitchen needs cleaned." Not "My kitchen needs to be cleaned", not "my kitchen needs cleaning."

Explain to someone ESL that "My kitchen needs cleaned" has two verbs in it, one is present tense, one is past tense, combined they imply a future action. AAAH!

Despite the risks, raw cookie dough is better in every other way than the cookie it makes. Stop baking cookies and just give me the dough 😋

The world would function 100% better if we made everything autism friendly and behaved autism friendly

Onions are the superior vegetable. Depending on how they are prepared they can taste so many different ways.

People who cannot return a shopping cart to a proper location should not be able to use said shopping cart.

Raisins are under-rated.

If you live in a climate that needs air conditioning to be comfortable most of the year, your roof and walls should be as white as possible. I have seen black shingles on new construction in Texas…

Also, toilet paper direction is a personal preference and is often driven by needs like pets and toilet/wall distances.

Horsepower is a stupid measurement of engine output what is this the 1800's.

Constellations don't look anything like the things people say they look like with some rare exceptions.

Orion? Looks like a guy ok.

The Lizard? Little known one but actually looks like a lizard so ok.

Dippers? Look like big ladles ok.

Oh wait that's supposed to be a BEAR? With a long tail for no reason? Fuck off Greeks.

THIS ONE IS A CRAB no it isn't stfu

The calendar should be 13 4-week months that always end on Sunday.

The leftover day should be considered a worldwide holiday.

Any time there is a leap year situation, all that time gets added to this one day, like the injury time at the end of a soccer/football match.

"It happened by accident" not "It happened on accident".

I get annoyed when people describe the taste and flavor of coffee as "strong".

"Strong" is just the concentration of coffee particles in water. An espresso is stronger than an Americano for instance.

Coffee tastes bitter, sour and maybe a little sweet. The flavors can be quite complex involving fruit, nuts, spices and such. Don't just say "sTrOnG" like an oonga boonga caveman.

No one would ever make fun of British food again if the Anglosphere was more aware of Dutch food.

We surrender language to scientific/other detail oriented pursuits too easily.

According to some, a raspberry is not a berry, but a pumpkin is. That's dumb. The word berry existed before botanists tried (and failed) to determine exactly what it meant, and the original meaning is still way better/more useful than the botany one.

So here it is: a berry is a small fruit, which is usually sweet, and usually edible. Raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, cherries, grapes, gooseberries, currants, and blueberries are all berries. Pumpkins, watermelons, tomatoes, zucchini and bananas are not.

Other terms that have been co-opted this way include "work", "salt", and "rock". I believe the fields stealing these terms should be forced to come up with their own, different words.

Funerals are stupid. I don't go to them and I don't want one.