A more standard definition in my tenure in academia is that scientists solve problems because they want to know the answer. Engineers solve problems because they want the problem to be solved.

In any case, the difference is just, heh, academic.

I’m very much the latter.

Agreed.

I might also argue that those people are all still engineers.

Engineer just means “problem solver”. Everyone gets paid for solving problems.

The real question in my head is how far does this go?

Sometimes the problem is that these burgers need flipping. Protein disk translocation engineers? I’m cool with that.

I always thought about going to be a farmer. Then I watched some videos from farmers and realized they are also engineers.

A large faction of engineers, especially software-type engineers, have these types of hobbies.

I’m sitting here right beside the heirloom quality (compared to most furniture) coffee table I made in my garage with my nearly complete wood shop.

I make stuff in two ways in my day job. I design something and someone else makes it, or it’s just some idea as software.

Engineers are a type. We’re just wired differently from most other people.

Just say you’re not going to hurt yourself or anyone else.

As an anonymous Internet person, I want you to know that I care about you.

I also want you to know that I’ve gone through a lot of struggles, and I support you.

Are you feeling ok? Can you share some more of your feelings?

Can you clarify this a bit more? I’m not understanding this yet.

Psst. That’s the joke.

I quickly responded to your question with no, but the only people who would do that are people who really want to answer questions.

In any case, I think you’re correct enough for this joke. At least some people really want to answer questions, and I have a questioning 5 yo.

No.

💯🐴🔋(umm, staple)

Music was much better when I was younger and more emotionally vulnerable.

I also like music from before my time, when they used to let ugly people make it.

It’s complicated.

Absolutely.

My cat regularly draws blood. Cats are much less human bred than dogs, but, in any case he can’t really maul a child. Same with chihuahuas and plenty of other small dogs.

Your last paragraph seems pretty extreme to me. I agree in principle and do advocate for trying to remove these genes from the gene pool, which may involve careful breeding and/or letting them go extinct.

I’m curious if there’s a story behind that paragraph?

It’s more complicated than that. If your can’t stop your lab from licking a stranger to death, that’s completely different from not being able to stop your pitbull or doberman from mauling a toddler.

Yes, people should be responsible dog owners, but only certain breeds regularly snap and kill or maim.

If you don’t think that dog breed is a good predictor of behavior, you have not spent enough time around dogs.

For thousands of years dogs have been bred for specific purposes. These behaviors are innate. They do not need to be taught. Sure, you can train them to be better, but the behaviors are written all over their genes

My grandparents had shepherds. The dogs had never seen sheep or been taught anything about herding, but they would attempt to herd all my cousins when they were children, then get agitated when the children wouldn’t herd. Here’s some puppies doing it

Here’s some pointers pointing. They have not been taught this (and frankly I can’t imagine even training most dog breeds to do that)

Here’s a boxer dog boxing. Here’s one spinning. They aren’t taught this, and they all do it.

There’s hounds rolling in stink. There’s sight hounds and smell hounds. There’s retrievers retrieving, being irresistibly drawn to water, and carrying around things very gently. There’s huskies being extremely energetic and vocal.

I could go on.

Do you really think that dogs that have been bred to fight other dogs to the death and bear enormous amounts of pain (game) before giving up are not dangerous? You’re mental.

Sure they’re sweet to their owners. That’s because people who breed animals for blood sports are not the kind of people who would have trouble immediately removing from the gene pool any of their animals that are disloyal.

It’s not like it’s just pitbulls. Dobermans are implicated too. They’re guard dogs but for humans rather than predator animals.

People with agendas can play all kinds of statistical games to show what they want to show. In the scientific world, these kinds of tricks stand out. That’s why any non-trivial summary statistic is useless without a large text explaining the methodology.

This is one of those things that is so obvious it boggles my mind that people even question it.

Of course dogs that are bred to murder are dangerous.

Oh yeah, and you know the justification for indigenous peoples being granted their land back because their ancestors used to live there, and they were removed?

That’s the exact same situation for Israel. The Jews used to live in Israel until they were kicked out.

Let that complicate your morality.

Also please remember that Europe purchased nearly the entirety of products produced by slaves in the Americas.

If there were no European market there would have been little incentive for American slavery.

I guess the slave free northern states also purchased their fair share, but nothing compared to Europe.

There is, but banning these substances is a political process not a scientific one. It’s definitely true that this should be done by experts and not politicians.

The thing is that it’s impossible to set up an experiment to show that something is safe. All you can do is collect more evidence that something is not dangerous. This leads to GRAS.

There’s also the additional fact that the dosage makes the poison. There is no substance for which a single molecule can harm you meaningfully.

Roundup is about as toxic as tablesalt. Caffeine is vastly more toxic than that. And Tylenol, well, that simply wouldn’t be approved if it were invented today. The ratio between the therapeutic dose and the lethal dose is too small.

Then there’s tradition and utility.

Plenty of herbal supplements and even foods are quite dangerous but are sold because they always were and they are “natural”.

We can all agree that certain substances don’t belong in food - either because they are useless or there’s strong evidence they’re harmful.

It’s the useful ones for which there is some evidence that they may cause issues when given in extreme doses, but a vast number of substances exhibit that behavior. Caffeine and Tylenol, for example. You do not think of these as poisons, but they are. Caffeine is so dangerous that you have to go through a lot of trouble to get it in its pure form.

The fact is that those supstances are certainly more dangerous than the substances in the article, but people are not clamoring to ban them.

And all this complexity is before people’s individual interests are involved.

This is why when you compare, say, us and eu food regulations you find substances that are on one list and not the other. One is not a superset of the other.

Anyway, these substances are not “toxic” in really any correct usage of the term, and it’s probably very unlikely that a ban will make anyone healthier or happier, despite what you may read about when you Google these substances. Even if you go to the scientific level.

Scientists can have their own agenda. They’re still people. Or they can just be bad scientists. Or they can just be churning out papers as fast as possible to increase their prestige.

It used to be that the top paper that came up (it may still be up in the list) when you search glyphosate and bees was a bad paper. It did correctly conclude that glyphosate killed the bees when they put it in the honey, but they had to put so much in there in order to see any effect at all that the concentration was high enough to actually kill aquatic weeds. Next it wasn’t properly controlled. Do you know what else will kill bees if put it in their honey? Water. And most definitely caffeine. I assure you a very small amount of caffeine in honey will kill a nest.

It’s just a political thing with good optics because who can argue with banning a “toxic” substance.

I’m assuming the 1997 in your name is your birth year.

If that’s correct, Larson stopped this comic quite a while before you were born.

You live in a very different world from the people that this comic was written for.

Of course not. Their media is controlled by them. It may be worse than fox now.

Honestly, Lemmy is probably worse than Reddit at challenging a comment like this, but it’s better than the shit my father in law turns on when he drives my child around. Challenge it.