cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16439581

> What have been some anarchist organizations or approaches to the problems of addiction and recovery? I've done a little bit of reading on the anarchist library and I'll continue with that. I know there are concepts of radical sobriety as well as critiques of the hierarchy within twelve step programs and the idea of addict as identity. I'm interested in any perspectives and ideas. > > Something I personally find acutely annoying about recovery programs is that they're almost solipsistic not just about the profits involved and the larger political historical and economic story of addiction. Maybe it's taboo because it's not something one can solve the same way one can make choices in one's own life, but I feel like a bit of a pariah every time I want to remind people that we arent just fighting ourselves but the people who actively make money on our suffering. To me right now anarchism is the best model to describe reality, so I want to know how people who share this model have dealt with and thought about these urgent issues. Keen to be introduced to literature or communities in this vein

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16439577

> What have been some anarchist organizations or approaches to the problems of addiction and recovery? I've done a little bit of reading on the anarchist library and I'll continue with that. I know there are concepts of radical sobriety as well as critiques of the hierarchy within twelve step programs and the idea of addict as identity. I'm interested in any perspectives and ideas. > > Something I personally find acutely annoying about recovery programs is that they're almost solipsistic not just about the profits involved and the larger political historical and economic story of addiction. Maybe it's taboo because it's not something one can solve the same way one can make choices in one's own life, but I feel like a bit of a pariah every time I want to remind people that we arent just fighting ourselves but the people who actively make money on our suffering. To me right now anarchism is the best model to describe reality, so I want to know how people who share this model have dealt with and thought about these urgent issues. Keen to be introduced to literature or communities in this vein

What have been some anarchist organizations or approaches to the problems of addiction and recovery? I've done a little bit of reading on the anarchist library and I'll continue with that. I know there are concepts of radical sobriety as well as critiques of the hierarchy within twelve step programs and the idea of addict as identity. I'm interested in any perspectives and ideas.

Something I personally find acutely annoying about recovery programs is that they're almost solipsistic not just about the profits involved and the larger political historical and economic story of addiction. Maybe it's taboo because it's not something one can solve the same way one can make choices in one's own life, but I feel like a bit of a pariah every time I want to remind people that we arent just fighting ourselves but the people who actively make money on our suffering. To me right now anarchism is the best model to describe reality, so I want to know how people who share this model have dealt with and thought about these urgent issues. Keen to be introduced to literature or communities in this vein

Hi all, I'm really looking for some help. I need to create a reliable system of backing up and data storage. I'm not tech-savvy (will work on that when it's a priority in my life, which it definitely can't be right now) and I'm asking this community because it's forward-thinking and aligns with my values. There are things I have right now, on paper and digitally, that I want to be able to retrieve at least a decade from now (and we'll check in on how the situation changes and what's worth keeping or printing out etc then). Most of the stuff bouncing about in my brain is the conventional advice:

1. The age-old "at least three places"
2. Don't store what I don't strictly need
3. Accessible & simple: the less I have to fiddle, the more sustainable it is (kind of seems to conflict with 1)
4. Privacy-first, don't trust clouds, etc (kind of sems to conflict with 1, too!)

I'm not sure (a) if there are any other principles to keep in mind while designing a system that works for me or (b) how this might translate into practical advice about hardware or software solutions. If anything has or hasn't worked for you personally, please share. My daily driver is a LineageOS tablet and it's not clear to me how to best keep its data safe.

Plants react to and communicate with their environment in sometimes surprising ways that enhance their survival in changing conditions. Does this constitute intelligence? Can you have intelligence without a brain? What do we owe plants? Maybe a little overlong and meandering but important piece. It's a decade old so I wonder how the research has developed since then.

So, obviously, a beginner wants to start with a hardy plant, and I guess a cheap one, and one suited for the conditions the houseplant will be living in, and one they like the look of. But my intention with this hobby is to become more connected with my environment, not to exploit it in the way most convenient for me. I want to understand: what is a good, or minimally harmful, houseplant? Are the ecological footprints very different between different houseplants? I've been told that if you live above a certain floor on an apartment planting natives isn't important since pollinators don't get up to your level anyway--is that accurate? Do people ever uhhh...just like scoop up plants growing around them and just pot them and grow them at home? Are all plants that would thrive as houseplants commercially available or is what's commercially available mostly influenced by other factors like subjective/cultural aesthetic value & hardiness under transport conditions & stuff like that?

First of all, the publication's website counts every time you view a page as a new article being read, so if you view the original and not the archived version you'll just get locked out after refreshing it three times.

Don't bother with the first half imo, it's a useless faff, but the consciousness portion onwards is worthwhile: worker cooperatives being a marginal addition to a capitalist economy where many people are suffering, lack of participation in lower councils even among the Kurds (non-Kurdish groups apparently participate mostly only in name), asayish not becoming obsolete but ossifying into a police force, a war on the "state mentality" of the people. Nothing groundbreaking but updates are always welcome. The author will post a long series. I have my thoughts, what do you guys think?

Being federated doesn't make Lemmy psychologically healthy, it's still a descendant of a design paradigm meant to extract your attention. Every time I see something I didn't want to see, that's a moment of effort to redirect my attention back to things I consider worthwhile. I only have so much time and so much effort. A large part of me just wants to call it quits but I need a way to talk about stuff I can't talk to anyone IRL about, so I'm trying it for now.

I really don't like that the default page (at least on lemmy.world) is "all." I'd like to turn off that page or mass block almost every community but I don't know that the technology exists to do either of those.

Anything folks do to waste less time & make Lemmy work for them?

These past few months I've come back to reading novels for the first time, really, since I was a kid. I just read them an alternative to scrolling, though, so I don't really pay much attention. When I sit down to watch a film, I try to make sure my mind is clear, my environment is undistracting, and I try to watch observantly and engage on multiple levels. Not always easy to maintain that level of attention even for a 1.5-3h movie, to try to do so for a novel seems unreasonable. I've felt mostly indifferent about the novels I've been reading during this streak. I had one moment where I felt moved but I can't really speak eloquently as to why or how. I have too many goals that matter infinitely more to me to make becoming a more refined conscientious fiction reader a goal, but I'm curious by-the-by how other (more experienced?) people approaach their reading.

Especially on an android browser like Mull (especially) or DDG.

Their mothers were Russian sturgeons—large carnivores with creamy bellies, short, rounded snouts, and green, dragon-like scales. Their fathers were American paddlefish—smooth-skinned filter feeders with sensitive, elongated snouts. “Sturddlefish,” as these hybrids were nicknamed after researchers in Hungary announced their creation last month, go shockingly far beyond classic crossbreeds like mules and ligers, whose parent species sit closely together on the tree of life. Sturddlefish result from the merger of different taxonomic families.

“I’m still confused. My jaw is still on the floor,” said Prosanta Chakrabarty, an ichthyologist at Louisiana State University and the curator of fishes at its Museum of Natural Science. “It’s like if they had a cow and a giraffe make a baby.” Then he quickly corrected himself, because the lineages of those two ruminants split only a few dozen million years ago. The evolutionary paths of paddlefish and sturgeons diverged 184 million years ago. For those fish to breed is more like “if a human came out of a platypus egg,” he said.

Hybrids are often shrugged off as freaky living violations of the rules that keep species distinct. But scientific interest in them has grown with mounting evidence that, in nature, hybrids can be important both in the emergence of new species and in the conservation of species on the brink of extinction.

Yet the new sturddlefish are so radical that they’re shaking up scientists’ understanding of what kinds of hybrids may be possible and which species might interbreed successfully. Studies of the new fish could also provide deep insights into how genomes work more generally.

The successful hybridization of these sturgeons and paddlefish was unintentional, but it wasn’t precisely an accident. In fact, the researchers were counting on the cross to fail so that they could learn something about how sex is determined in Russian sturgeons.

In mammals and birds, male and female sex is usually determined by sex-specific genes on sex-specific chromosomes. But with fish, anything goes: Some fish have sex chromosomes, while others take sexual-development cues from their environments or transition from one sex to the other. No one is quite sure how sturgeons do it, but some people are keen to know because sturgeon eggs are highly prized as caviar (some high-end caviar sells for more than $180 an ounce). If researchers can figure out how to farm Russian sturgeon stocks that are mostly female, it could alleviate the problematic overfishing of wild populations.

One way to determine what sets the sex of Russian sturgeons is gynogenesis—a form of asexual reproduction in which an egg and a sperm fuse but only the mother’s genes are transmitted to the resulting embryo. “You want to activate the egg, but you don’t want any DNA contribution from the male,” explained Ken Semmens, an aquaculture biologist at Kentucky State University. Gynogenesis sometimes occurs naturally among fish, but marine biologists and the aquaculture industry also use it as a tool for studying sex determination. With gynogenesis, all the offspring are essentially half-clones of their mother. So if all of them are females, then you know that females are determined by having a pair of identical sex chromosomes (as in mammals). If the offspring are all males, then females are the sex with two different chromosomes (which is the case in birds). If only some are males … well, then an environmental factor is also in play.

Last year at the Research Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture in Hungary, the aquaculture engineer Jenő Káldy and the fish ecologist Attila Mozsár were experimenting with gynogenesis on Russian sturgeons under the direction of the aquacultural geneticist Miklós Bercsényi of the University of Pannonia. To that end, the Hungarian researchers needed sperm that couldn’t possibly fertilize the sturgeon eggs.

Paddlefish sperm looked like a safe bet. American paddlefish (Polyodon spathula) are diploid—with two full sets of each chromosome—and have 60 pairs of chromosomes. Russian sturgeons (Acipenser gueldenstaedtii) are tetraploid—with four sets of each chromosome—and have about 250 chromosomes (the chromosomes are so numerous, and some are so small, that it’s hard to count them reliably). Nearly 200 million years of independent evolution should have seeded the two species’ DNA with countless genetic mismatches and incompatibilities—from missing or added genes to rearranged or relocated genes, mutational tweaks, or variations in gene expression. It seemed certain that the paddlefish-sturgeon hybrid cells would struggle to figure out how to line up their chromosomes during cell division, or to know what genes to turn on or off.

Moreover, aquaculturists had previously used sperm from paddlefish to trigger gynogenesis in other sturgeon species and vice versa, and none of those experiments had ever produced crossbreeds. The Hungarian team had every reason to be confident that their fish could not hybridize.

But when Káldy and Mozsár exposed the Russian sturgeon eggs to healthy paddlefish sperm as a control for their experiment, they were stunned to see that the vast majority of the eggs hatched into live hybrid offspring. “They called me and told me that something’s wrong, because all of the control is living,” Bercsényi recalled. “I said, ‘Jenő, you made a big mistake. Please repeat the experiment.’” And so Káldy did—but the result was the same.

“We never wanted to play around with hybridization,” said Mozsár. “It was just a negative control, which found, somehow, a way to live.”

At first, Káldy didn’t believe the fry were hybrids: Because they looked just like regular sturgeons as youngsters, they might have come from spontaneous gynogenesis or some other “more reasonable explanation,” he said. But a genomic analysis by Gyöngyvér Fazekas, a colleague at the Research Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture, and Balázs Kovács, an aquacultural geneticist at Hungary’s Szent István University, confirmed that the team indeed had more than a hundred hybrids growing in their tanks.

As Bercsényi’s team described it in their recent paper in Genes, some of the hybrids have three copies of each chromosome, a half-genome from each parent. But other hybrids have five copies of each chromosome: They somehow received the equivalent of their sturgeon mom’s full genome plus a half-genome from their paddlefish dad. The bodies of the sturddlefish combine characteristics from both parents, but the ones with more sturgeon DNA look more like their mother—they have more of the distinctive sturgeon scales called scutes, for instance.

How can these seemingly impossible hybrids exist?

Chakrabarty’s hunch is that the answer lies in the relatively slow rate of evolution that occurs in this group of fish. The Polyodontidae (paddlefishes) and Acipenseridae (sturgeons) are the last living families in the order Acipenseriformes, and studies suggest that both have very slow mutation rates. Despite the eons of independent evolution separating them, maybe their genomes just haven’t diverged enough to prohibit hybridization. But that raises the question of why previous hybridization attempts between sturgeons and paddlefish failed.

Semmens leans toward a different hypothesis: that the successful hybridization has to do with the Russian sturgeon’s extra-large genome. Genomicists think that the ancestors of sturgeons were diploid until all their chromosomes doubled and the fish became tetraploid. But only some species—including Russian sturgeons—retained their extra chromosomes. As a result, it’s possible that the Russian sturgeon’s genome carries enough redundancies and variations on genes to help the hybrids survive mismatches in their parents’ DNA.

Back in the 1980s, Semmens attempted to make a sturddlefish by combining sperm from shovelnose sturgeons with eggs from paddlefish; the eggs started to develop but then quit. Because both of those fish species are considered diploids, neither had “extra” DNA to offer as a tetraploid might. “Perhaps that’s the reason why their hybrid worked and our hybrid didn’t,” Semmens mused.

Getting to the bottom of this mystery will inevitably reveal a lot about how reproductive barriers work at the genetic level—not just in primitive fishes but in other animals. “Studying this type of hybrid can help a lot for understanding evolutionary processes,” Bercsényi said, “and they offer good tools also for studying the function of the genes.” For instance, sturgeons and paddlefish both have lots of super-small microchromosomes that are poorly understood. Chakrabarty is eager to see if sturddlefish can help researchers understand how microchromosomes function.

Bercsényi’s team doesn’t plan on making any more sturddlefish right away, but they’ll collaborate with researchers in Japan and elsewhere to study them. If the hybrids prove hardier in captivity than their parent fish—or if they produce more eggs—it’s more than likely that someone will want more of them.

Yet right now, Bercsényi cautioned, it’s not clear whether the hybrids will produce eggs or whether those eggs will be viable. Ichthyologists can’t even tell the males and females apart before the fish are two years old. Given the slow maturation of both parent species, Bercsényi says, it will take a “minimum of three years” of raising the fish in warm water before it’s known if they are fertile.

I'm here seeking advice from those further along in their fitness journey than I am about the mental aspect of fitness as well as about some concrete knowledge. I'm a beginner and in the past I've had a lot of success in staying pretty consistent. 90% of anything is showing up. A golden rule for beginners is find an exercise you love doing and then you'll show up for it.

That's great advice. But there's limits, right? If you want to get strong you'll just...have to do some stuff you don't like. I can't jut play soccer all day, not least because the weather or outside forces don't permit it.

So there's another complementary approach: habit formation, and this is mostly what I rely on. In fact, I see a lot of people talk about how they hate their exercise (running and rowing especially) but they do it anyway--this abilty is inscrutable to me except in light of environmental conditions & habit. The point is that my life and environment are engineered where it's almost the path of least resistance to do my workout plan. I don't love, own, or identify with the workout program I do except by identifying with (1) the successes when I pull it off and (2) the fact that it's incidentally a part of my daily life--I identify with it the same way I identify with any other incidental habit in my life, like my commute, which I don't love or have sentimentality about otherwise. I think there is a subtle emotional cost to ragdolling yourself like this but it's more than worth it because of all of the practical benefits of exercise as well as the feeling of accomplishment.

But, the key word earlier being...almost the path of least resistance. And I think when inevitably Life Happens (TM) and the habit is broken the emotional cost of ragdolling has to be paid. Once the habit is broken and the path of least resistance is simply to not, the identification-by-habit is gone by definition bc the habit no longer exists, and the identification-by-success is gone because there's been a failure. There are a few ways I can respond to this situation, I think:

• Be forced to keep going. Extremely hard, virtually impossible, to force oneself against both the inherent difficulty of an exercise you don't love and the emotional baggage of having failed. To get back on track with the next day of the program is...very hard. Possible with a PT or gym buddy or other support but assume one doesn't have this.
• Summon up self-compassion out of thin air to void the aforementioned emotional baggage. This is basically as inscrutable to me as saying "cast a magic spell to solve the problem." What? How? Everything only works by the logic of effort and reward. God can give grace, I don't think I have that power wthin me.
• Go back a few steps in the program and ease oneself back in. Gentleness and momentum. Very sensible and I think extremely doable when there is an impetus to do anything, anything at all.
• Put a break on the current program and find other ways to move and develop a loving, joyful relationship with one's body and exercise. I think this, too, is a great idea. But because I'm a beginner, the advice I've been given is just "pick a tried-and-tested program and follow it." I don't really want to pick another effective but similarly impersonal program, that doesn't solve the ragdolling problem. But I don't just wanna flail around and do things that have no benefit to me whatsoever and risk backsliding entirely on the gainszsz I do have.

So, two questions: any responses to how I look at working out/programming, does this reflect your own perspectives earlier in your journey or now? And: how do I assess what to pick for joyful, loving, reparative, but still-effective movement? When it comes to food, there are lots of micronutrients and flavours that can guide my decision-making. When it comes to movement, is it the set of muscles I move? Is it the type of movement (squat, row, etc)? Is it the quality of the movement (power, etc)? Where do people learn this stuff?

In which Bateson argues that the efficacy of Alcoholics Anonymous is (in a Western, Cartesian context) comes at least in part from providing a more correct epistemology/ontology that subsumes a reified "self" into a larger system/circuit. The alcoholic is, by "hitting bottom," forced to shift from a destructive symmetrical to a complementary pattern of relation with the system.

I feel like any young person I speak to who is plugged into the English-speaking world will at least have encountered anti-work discourse. I've heard of people lying flat in China and nearby countries. Is there comparable discussion going on in your language? What does it look like?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12700881 because I don't think lemmy is alive enough yet to have a separate questions community. if mods object to my posting a question instead of content here, pls feel free to remove.

> All right so I'm not super well-read in this area but I did a scattershot self-guided reading trying to understand early ancient Mesopotamia in my undergrad. Of the dozens (and dozens and dozens...) of sources I consulted the most interesting was a short article by a woman (I think in the handbook of ancient near eastern history or something like that, I'm not sure) basically very cantankerously pointing out tha the footprint of pastoralism is seriously faint in the archaeological record and we probably seriously underestimate the extent to which civilisations like ancient Mesopotamia were also underscored by and based on pastoralism. I'm aware of famous ethnographies of pastoralist communities (the Nuer etc) but what are/are there important works theorising pastoralism per se and what it can tell us about human history and human ecology?

All right so I'm not super well-read in this area but I did a scattershot self-guided reading trying to understand early ancient Mesopotamia in my undergrad. Of the dozens (and dozens and dozens...) of sources I consulted the most interesting was a short article by a woman (I think in the handbook of ancient near eastern history or something like that, I'm not sure) basically very cantankerously pointing out tha the footprint of pastoralism is seriously faint in the archaeological record and we probably seriously underestimate the extent to which civilisations like ancient Mesopotamia were also underscored by and based on pastoralism. I'm aware of famous ethnographies of pastoralist communities (the Nuer etc) but what are/are there important works theorising pastoralism per se and what it can tell us about human history and human ecology?