• rumba@lemmy.zip
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    2 hours ago

    Now that’s an answer to why did the chicken cross the road that I never considered

  • JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net
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    7 hours ago

    We get this in my hometown - people see the place, decide they want to live in the forest. They clearcut a chunk of it and build their house. Then when a bear wanders into their new yard (following the same territory it always has) they call the cops.

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
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      3 hours ago

      I think the reason that deer seem “retarded” in their response to cars is that for their entire evolutionary history there has never been an animal that would hurtle through both the day and night at improbable speeds almost completely silently. No land predator has previously evolved to blind its prey with large powerful sets of lights at night.

      Counterintuitively, in my opinion deer seem to so often chaotically run out in front of cars (and growing up somewhere with lots of deer I know how incredibly infuriating and scary this can be) because it is actually the most sensible survival strategy for being ambushed by a fast moving predator with a lot of inertia that may or may not realize they have stumbled upon a meal.

      Imagine you weren’t a pathetic, slow human being and could outrun most predators, now imagine chilling inside a bush when you see a a grizzly bear sprinting at 40mph almmmossst but not quite straight at you.

      Your impulse is to freeze and then wait for the right moment to bolt, especially because the predator hasn’t seen you yet and likely just caught your scent or is running at something else. However, this predator is scentless, nearly silent and at night blinds you so that the distance they are away from you is very difficult to determine (the opposite of a grizzly bear really), so the right moment to bolt is hard to judge.

      Right at the last second you realize the grizzly is almost upon you and you panic because it is happening so fast and fall back on your instincts. Your instincts, as a prey animal that can run faster and for longer than predators are the same as any human who has ever played a sport where they need to rush past a defender… you erratically cut across their path of motion after you think they have committed to rushing directly at you so their weight shift is committed in the wrong direction and you get just a tinnyyyy bit more of a head start in the chase.

      Please see the scientific illustration I have provided, notice that the bear’s path (red) has to switch directions whereas if the deer had decided to just directly run away from their bear the bear wouldn’t have needed to switch directions/accelerate twice, just make a slight turn to reorient itself into an opportunistic chase with the deer.

      This doesn’t work on cars, especially because if at first a deer doesn’t succeed at getting the timing right they are dead.

      • Sabre363@sh.itjust.works
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        3 hours ago

        I think your probably right on all counts (supported by the highly scientific diagram, 10/10), but also deer are just really stupid, which I can say from having lived in their habitat half my life lol. I think it’s mostly likely that intelligence was just never evolutionarily very useful to deer, it almost never is as it takes a lot of energy and doesn’t generally support reproduction. The strategy deer have adopted seems to involve shitting out a bunch of babies each year and hope for the best. Which works great when the best isn’t 2-5 tons of metal with a bunch of kinetic energy.

        • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
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          1 hour ago

          You are making a basic framing error here which has been deeply ingrained into us as a narrative justification for hyper individualism and late stage capitalism, prey aren’t at war with predators.

          Ever watch a whitetail deer spook and dash away into the underbrush? They flip their tail up to expose a bright white target on their rump.

          Why?

          Because predators overwhelming target sick and vulnerable prey, predators stabilize prey population swings and keep them from catastrophically exploding. Prey in turn sustain predators.

          Whitetail deer display the signal to demonstrate they are healthy. I wouldn’t call it symbiosis, but I also think it is a serious categorical error to conceptualize it as an existential war or arms race. If whitetail deer suddenly evolved to become so fast predators could never catch them even if they counter-evolved to be a bit faster it would either lead to extinction of deer or the extinction of deer and the ecosystems around them, those are the only to possible end states neither of which is good for deer.

          The reason I am saying this is that unlike predators, cars have no consistent genetic forcing on deer, car deerkills are essentially random and thus only function to lower the signal-to-noise ratio on other genetic forcings that continously shape deer into well adapted positive contributors to the ecosystems around them. How can you expect a species to adapt to a process of violence that is so chaotic and disconnected from the surrounding ecosystem that it is evolutionarily invisible except as a force of degradation?

    • Anivia@feddit.org
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      11 hours ago

      You’re completely right. Many other animals understand the concept of roads and will leave them when a car approaches, as long as you don’t surprise them before they have the chance. Foxes for example.

      Deers however will cross a road when a car approaches, and sometimes even change their mind and cross the road a second time in the other direction.

      But deer are a pest in most areas anyways, so they are better off dead. Just a shame for the damage done to the car

      • frayedpickles@lemmy.cafe
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        6 hours ago

        What’s funny about humans is we are more than happy to eat intelligent animals like pigs, but for the most part won’t put forth the effort needed to eat deer which are dumb as rocks. Very sad.

        • pseudo@jlai.lu
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          5 hours ago

          People don’t eat deer as commonly as beef but they do it it. Never had of venison and game meat?

          • frayedpickles@lemmy.cafe
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            5 hours ago

            Sure

            Name more than one restaurant that serves it without looking it up.

            Name the last time you noticed it at a grocery store.

            People also eat bugs, but we slaughter an obscene number of pigs and I think it’s harder to find restaurants that don’t serve a piglet-based meal.

      • Sabre363@sh.itjust.works
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        17 hours ago

        True, it’s retarded we need so many cars. But they also literally connect the world, and if used correctly, help us see new things and understand the world better.

              • qyron@sopuli.xyz
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                8 hours ago

                Very well.

                Then let’s go back to ridding horses and after that we can all deal with the amount of abuse the animals have to endure to provide transportation, for people and cargo. And while we’re at it, let’s also ruin the concept of emergency delivery of organs for transplant or emergency medical care. Not that the last one is relevant for the USofA but since we have the opportunity, let’s stack the shit as high as we can manage.

                Travelling would become a fun endeavour again, I’ll risk, both for work, leisure and family affairs. And aren’t we glad for having wagon trains moving food items across large stretches of land again? Fresh food, nobody real needs it; if you want it, plant and raise it yourself.

                And electrical vehicles are loud and slow? Which ones? I’ll take a fleet of EVs “roaring” by my door the entire night over having one single conventional car with a tricked exhaust line or a lead footed idiot at the wheel driving by.

                About danger? Biggest danger in any car is found between the seat and the wheel.

                • meowMix2525@lemm.ee
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                  6 hours ago

                  Trains. The answer is trains. Just because you are uncreative in using technology as it exists today does not mean that we have to go back to the stone age to find a low-emissions and safe means of transportation.

                • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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                  7 hours ago

                  We can use electric cars for emergency services, but all non emergency personal travel should be buses, trams, trains, and bicycles.

        • Track_Shovel@slrpnk.netM
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          16 hours ago

          This comment was reported for the use of the word “retard”. Watch the language if you please. Having grown up in the 90s, I get that the word is part of an older lexicon, but it doesn’t make it any more socially acceptable

          • Sabre363@sh.itjust.works
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            5 hours ago

            Since you robbed anyone else from participating in the conversation when you removed my last comment explaining myself, let’s try this again.

            I will never again degrade my self worth by editing who I am or what I say to make other people happy. I have NEVER used the word ‘retard’ from a place of hatred or anger, in this thread or otherwise (if I did, this would be a very different situation). I have only ever used it as a descriptive word in a mildly humerous post meant to generate discussion. You are literally the only one here acting like a child that can’t handle a simple word, everyone else is perfectly happy going about their day with maturity.

            • Track_Shovel@slrpnk.netM
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              4 hours ago

              I’m not asking you to censor yourself, or to undermine your self-worth. I’m saying that if your comment ruffles feathers to the point that I get a comment report, I’m going to address it. You’re free to speak how you please, but freedom of speech is not freedom from repercussions. I touch on this in other parts of the thread.

              I’m not interested in discussing this topic further, and would appreciate it if we could shelve it.

              • Sabre363@sh.itjust.works
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                4 hours ago

                If I were truly free to say as I please then you wouldn’t remove my comments. These are not repercussions, they are censorship for you also removed comments that did not use the scary words. Also I’m pretty certain I ruffled exactly one (ok, maybe two or three) feathers, if it’s that big a deal then place a content warning or message around the comment. Don’t obliterate from history so no one can ever see it again, morally speaking it is not your sole place to decide what can be written and read.

                • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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                  4 hours ago

                  Just a heads up, your comment above currently has a score of -9 for me right now. That means at least 11 people downvoted, and more if anyone upvoted.

                  Do you think Nazis should also be allowed to say anything they want without restriction? Should any language have consequences? I assume you would agree some restrictions are good. You just think it shouldn’t effect you.

            • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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              5 hours ago

              Acting like you’re mature while complaining that someone corrected your language on the internet. Lol. Your self-worth is hopefully not tied to the usage of a slur. If it is, well you must not be worth much.

              • Sabre363@sh.itjust.works
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                4 hours ago

                First, I’m not really complaining as much as explaining and my language hasn’t been ‘corrected’. It has merely, rather annoyingly, been censored by the decision of a single person thereby destroying any chance for someone else to come along and join the conversion. In my opinion that is extremely immature, especially coming from a moderator.

                Second, and this is the point I’ve been trying to make, language is mired in situation and driven by intent when it crosses cultural bounds, almost never by social connotation (language is defined solely by small social circles, not by big ones like a bunch of random internet strangers that we all are). In this situation, my use of the word could never have been directed at anyone and my intention was always pretty clear. Avoiding the use of a word simply because it’s not considered politically correct by some, especially when it’s obvious the word is not being used to harm, is really dumb way to live life. Any one of us could simply invent a new word and give it the same harmful meaning, but that only matters if we all pretend it actually matters.

                Third, trying to force someone to change how they interact and communicate with the world is absolutely a degradation of ones self-worth. This is not a kind or equal world if it dictates the words of others unless those words are directly used to harm or control. The big scary R word is not a slur unless it is being used as one (It’s most definitely not here). Again, I could call someone a “Flargasnorgen” with the intention of hatred and anger and cause the same harm. It would likely require the use of several other supporting words to convey that meaning, does that then make all those other words big scary words that we can’t say too?

                Fourth, I never said I was being mature, I can be petty as fuck.

                • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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                  4 hours ago

                  OK, I’ll explain this to you. Using the word as an insult means that it’s a bad thing to be. For example, the word sinister refers to left-handed people (though so far removed that most don’t know this). It was used to say something is evil, and in turn to call people who are left-handed evil. It was insulting to left-handed people by association.

                  If, for example, I were to use blonde to refer negatively to someone, it’d imply that it’s wrong to be blonde and blondes should be ashamed of who they are, right? Consider how you’d feel if we used a part of who you are as an insult. You wouldn’t enjoy seeing it used probably, right? Hopefully you’d have some empathy and stop, but maybe that’s too much to ask for.

                  Acting like you’re actually the one being oppressed is honestly hilarious while you insult a group of people.

              • PlainSimpleGarak@lemmings.world
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                8 hours ago

                Look man, if people are out here dropping n bombs, you know, serious stuff, feel free to intervene. But trying to police “retard” is some reddit/zoomer nonsense.

                • Track_Shovel@slrpnk.netM
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                  6 hours ago

                  Again, I hear you, but I really don’t see much difference between your example, calling people a bundle of sticks, and the R word other than advocacy and social awareness.

                  You’re free to express your opinions, but freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom of repercussions.

                  I don’t like tone policing but if something is reported I’m going to address it