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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • Lemmy is highly sensitive about transgender topics. We have a very high percentage of trans people, and thus mods tend to be quite zealous when protecting this space from transphobia. They may sometimes be overzealous, but that’s not the worst thing in the world.

    I don’t think a permaban was necessary based on your comments. But I also don’t think you would be happy about making other Lemmings uncomfortable or driving them away from the platform because they feel unwelcome. Is it more important that we all perfectly agree on various semantic definitions, or that people feel welcome and able to connect and communicate with others on Lemmy?

    I’m not criticizing you or anything like that because I don’t think you were trying to hurt anyone and I think the ban was excessive. But I’m just trying to help you see the situation from the other side and maybe approach the topic with a little more delicacy in the future.


  • I dunno man. How can you be sure the comments you’re seeing on reddit are from bots? There are some bots, but there are also a lot of ignorant mfers on that site.

    I would also say that Lemmy is much better moderated, partially because it’s still small enough that the mods and admins can stay on top of everything. Reddit is so chaotic that absolutely horrific comments and threads tend to slip through the cracks quite regularly nowadays.





  • I dunno what that guy was thinking, but it seems obvious to me that nuclear fusion is the long term solution for energy generation.

    Nuclear fission not so much, but it’s definitely debatable which has more fundamental flaws between fission and wind/hydro/solar. All renewable energy sources ultimately depend on natural processes which are not reliable or permanent. And they also tend to disrupt the environment to some extent.

    Nuclear fission has no such limitations, but instead trades long term risk for short term stability. Basically renewable sources are and always will be somewhat unreliable, and Nuclear fission is the least bad reliable energy source to pair with the renewables. So in the medium term, fission makes a lot more sense than fossil fuels, and in the long term we should be looking to fusion.






  • NYC is a bad example because it’s an extreme outlier in terms of size and density. But the metropolitan area is actually much larger than the urban area; here’s a map of all the counties within the NYC metropolitan area.

    It covers 8,200 square miles, just slightly less than the area of New Jersey.

    Metropolitan areas are quite large and typically include the core city along with the entire surrounding area that is economically and culturally heavily linked with the core city.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area

    Here is a map of all the metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the US. Micropolitan areas are essentially defined the same way, except the core urban area of a micropolitan area is <50,000 population, while a metropolitan area has a core city of >50,000 population.

    You can see that metropolitan areas include vast areas that are not even remotely urban. Beyond that, there is also a category called the Combined Statistical Area, which often combine multiple metropolitan areas.

    Here is a map of LA where the red areas are urban areas, the beige counties are part of the Metropolitan Area, and the yellow counties are part of the CSA.

    Greater LA

    The CSA for LA is a whopping 34,000 square miles, or slightly larger than the island of Ireland or the state of South Carolina. However, it only contains about 2,300 square miles of urban area. Estimating the urban area is even more of an imperfect science than the metropolitan area, so I’m not sure how they calculated that number.

    When people say Greater Boston or Greater Toronto, they are usually referring to the MSA, but might also be referring to the CSA. So the short answer to OP’s question is that “Greater” and “Metropolitan” are roughly synonymous. FWIW, I think that metropolitan areas used to be significantly smaller and more urbanized, but they had to modify the definition over time due to trends of suburbanization and decentralization in American city development.