Conception, yes. Hell, many animal childbirths (and egg emergences), also yes.
Human childbirth? Obviously subject to personal taste, but I'm not seeing it. To approach its messiness we must look to some of the most inbred animals we've engineered, e.g. French bulldogs [1].
I don't think you have been to a university recently, considering it seems like literally everything has some donor's name attached to it - including the actual professors themselves. This is an actual professor's title:
"Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, Sequoia Capital Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor, by courtesy, of Electrical Engineering"
Reddit enforces echo chambers mainly on two levels, the user level and the mod level.
Nobody respects etiquette anymore, and rather than upvoting valuable content they upvote whatever they like. As an extreme example, you can make the best, most honest, rational argumentation of a political issue, if the users don't agree with your stance it's going to be downvotted and hidden. Similarly, they will tolerate content that might be against the rules or the spirit of the subreddit if it's something they agree with.
On top of that, the vast majority of the time moderators enforce echo chambers themselves through bias, with a few of them going as far as banning every single user that posts in communities they disagree with, even if they have never engaged with the community they themselves moderate.
The corners of Reddit I inhabit do not suffer from these issues.
I spent a lot of time on usenet in the 1990s discussing politics there (mostly talk.politics.theory which was riven with libertarians). Given that I've lived another 40 years since then, I would simply not bother to do this anymore. Mass discussion of political issues is, in my eyes, mostly a dead end.
By contrast, locale-based subreddits, equipment-based subreddits, how-to-based subreddits remain, in my experience, relative gold mines.
Locale-based subreddits are some of the worst sub-reddits available.
You mean places like /r/korea, /r/australia, /r/melbourne etc. right?
They are the bottom of the barrel and the biggest wasted spaces due to moderator power trips and propaganda. Seriously, the moderators at these places are absolute shut-ins that subscribe to very extreme ideas and ban anything slightly away from what they believe in.
For example, Australia day is a day that celebrates Australia the country. You can be banned on Australian sub-reddits for saying "Happy Australia day" (something most Australians do). This is due to some insane, extremist ideas about Australia day.
Another example, /r/korea will silence anyone who does not agree with the US constant overwriting of Korean culture and Korean social mores. To speak on topics such as whether Korea should legalise drugs (it would be a disaster to do so, but Americans going to America) is a bannable offence.
Love how he used locale based smaller subreddits as some gotcha when those are some of the most heavily propagandized and censored subreddits. He comes off as one of those "I'm too smart to be propagandized" types, won't believe the narrative has been shaped in his small subreddits even when proof is staring at him right in his face.
I don't know what you read, but it wasn't anything that I wrote.
I've written only about my specific experience. I am not too smart to be propagandized.
Big subreddits clearly have major issues, and I acknowledged that. Presumably some small ones too. The ones I tend to hang out in ... I don't see any of the issues discussed here. There are no overarching mods, there is no groupspeak (to speak of), there is little to no banning/blocking.
So sure, maybe you have experience of smaller locale based subreddit that does. That's fine, no argument from me.
It seems that a common thread is that Reddit (and Redditlikes) fail when the topic is too big.
I generally use Reddit for small topics. My home town is 80,000 people embedded in a county with a total of 150,000. Our locale-based subreddit works fine (admittedly with a lot of predictable and repeated whining from certain demographics). Our moderators are rarely in sight or even detectable.
it's sorta like reading the breitbart comment section but it's all left wing. there's some good stuff, but there's also good stuff on mass email chains if you read enough of them.
Pretty much, the first one being more like you can hide a comment that you don't like and if someone wants to see it they can click "see hidden replies"
My reading of "hiding replies" was that people who follow the replier would still see the reply as part of their normal feed. So you are not silencing them for their audience. Which is fair.
The removal of links to yourself is also very welcome.
Both tools have cons, and there's methods to work around them / prevent them from taking effect. But they address the default easy/trivial ways in which people can pollute other users, so in practice the value for users should prove high.
My thought is: if the process is followed properly there is very little risk of these chemicals being in the end product, but if a mistake is made, they could be present in levels that may have some negative health effect. However, if the water or co2 processes were screwed up, the only risk is caffeine being present, which is not ideal, but not as bad as those chemicals. We all know mistakes happen, which is why I'd rather go with a process that has less negative outcomes from a mistake.
If you had a wookie costume and there was peanut butter spread all over it, which would be more effective:
A. wiping it off with toilet paper
B. hosing the costume off
"Flushable" wet wipes are still terrible for the sewer system and honestly that is misleading marketing. They still get stuck in municipal systems and anyone that runs such a system would tell you that these shouldn't be labeled so.
Pretty sure it's becoming increasingly common that one person runs a fleet of drivers that they have imported from a foreign country. The primary person sets up all the accounts, and provides the cars, etc and the drivers do the deliveries and get paid a minuscule amount. In many cases they're akin to indentured servants that also live in packed housing owned by the "boss", to whom they also pay rent. The workers get their tiny sliver of money and send it home to help out their families, with the hope they can eventually establish themselves in the US.
