WoodScientist @ WoodScientist @lemmy.world

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12 mo. ago

Not my problem. You advocate taking my rights away, you don't get my vote. What kind of arrogant son-of-a-bitch would think they're entitled the votes of those whose rights they are dismantling? The sheer hubris of that is despicable.

Big Dean Philips fan, huh? The 2024 primary was a coronation from the beginning with no serious candidates running against Biden. Several states canceled their Democratic primaries. It was run exactly like an election in a tin-pot dictatorship where the ruler wins with 99% of the vote.

Quit your bullshit. You know damn well there wasn't a real primary in 2024. Dems had a primary the same way Putin holds elections. And you know this. Tired of this bad faith centrist horseshit.

Shove it up your ass.

Shove it up your ass.

Can you imagine the timeline where the second one happened? It's three weeks into Operation Barbarosa, the concentration camps are already up and running. And one day, Hitler's just like, "sorry, my bad. Won't happen again." And then he tries to wind all that down?

Jesus Christ, how old are you if you remember the world before the automobile? 🤣

Correct response:

"Dear Trump administration, please politely shove it up your ass. Sincerely, the City of Portland."

That really is the heart of it. All the skills to make it still exist, in the same way that some artisans still practice making swords by hand. All the skills needed to remake the Saturn V still exist; the knowledge hasn't been lost. Those techniques just are rare enough that they are specialized and very expensive. The Saturn V was built with the most accessible techniques available in its time, and it still cost a fortune. But now? It's cheaper to just design a whole new rocket from scratch, designed and optimized for today's techniques.

This isn't about sports and it never was. Turns out when you're willing to give in to one aspect of unscientific bigotry (the trans sports moral panic), you'll be willing to give into others. And yes, opposing trans athletes in sports is fundamentally transphobic. Notice you never see transphobes like Newsom proposing narrowly targeted regulations that only address sports where some large and clear advantage has been proven. You never see transphobes like Newsom proposing that trans athletes in individual sports be given some handicap that would cancel out an advantage they've been scientifically proven to have. Instead it's all bigoted blanket bans that are no different from bans that used to exclude black people from whites-only leagues. They never start from a position of fairness and compassion and try to intervene as little as necessary. It's all about just keeping the filthy trannies out of polite society. These bans prohibit trans women from women's gymnastics, for fuck's sake. So yes, if you support blanket trans sports bans, you are a transphobic bigot. I'm sorry, but you can't just hand waive it away with, "well aside from this example of unambiguous bigotry, I don't see any bigotry here." You might as well be saying, "well aside from this person being a registered member of the KKK, I don't see any evidence that this person is racist."

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/newsoms-bizarre-interview-with-maga

When liberals tell me, a trans person, that I need to vote for militant transphobe Gavin Newsom after he's handed the 2028 Democratic primary victory, I'm going to tell them to shove it up their ass.

Honestly, unless you can quickly find who it belongs to, you should just eat it. If it's addressed to your nextdoor neighbor and you can easily get it to them, fine. If they don't know you enough to trust you, they at least know where you live and know that you're probably not messing with them.

But think about it. Let's say you order a cheesecake and it gets delivered to a random stranger's house. They call you up and tell you that they have your cake. Would you still want that cheesecake, after it had been in some randos house? You have no way of knowing what they may have done to it. And you can almost certainly get a replacement easily ordered.

So really, unless it was my neighbor's cake, I would just eat it. You can't legally be billed for any unsolicited goods mailed to your house, and I didn't order the cake. I'm not going to have to pay for it. And even if I did succeed in tracking down some complete stranger to give them the cake, they're likely to just throw it in the trash. Really, at that point, I'm the only one likely to actually eat the cake at all. So why let it go to waste? I'm eating that cake!

She’s in jail, not prison,

Aww fuck right off with this pedantic horseshit.

Obviously you're instructing OP to pump chlorine gas into the cabins of loud vehicles.

Three of the biggest critiques I've heard:

1. If you really are a genocidal alien race, you don't sit around waiting for new life to evolve and challenge you. You send out a swarm of self-replicating machines. They fly to every star system and simply systematically disassemble every planet that exists around a star's habitable zone. Considering interstellar communication timelines, some life could go from apes to interstellar threat before the speed of light even allows you to react. If you really are so paranoid that you'll commit genocide at the drop of a hat, then the far more safe and efficient strategy is to simply prevent new life from evolving at all. In the Three Body canon, species have been genociding each other for billions of years, but no one has bothered simply removing the source of new species entirely. The fact that we exist at all is evidence that we don't exist in a Dark Forest condition.
2. There are more than two civilizations. If we discover an alien civilization ten lightyears from Earth, it's likely there is another just a little further out, and even more even further out. The number of expected civilizations should increase with the cube of distance. The point is that if you genocide a new weak species, it's very likely that other species are going to see you do it. And they may be far older and more powerful than you. And there's no better way to convince that third species that you a threat worthy of extermination than to commit an act of genocide against a new species that is no real threat to yourself. It's possible there are dark ancient races out there, but the only species they ever attack are those that prove themselves a threat against others. Who better to genocide than a bunch of genociders?
3. The logic behind it is flawed. The same issues with communication and intentions uncertainty apply to game theory analyses of human beings. By the logic of the Dark Forest theory, I should go bash my next door neighbor's skull in right now. I can't really know what he's planning, and for all I know he's planning on killing me. I can't always observe his actions. How do I know he's not booby trapping my house while I'm at work? As I value my own survival above his, I have no choice but to kill him now. He's never done anything to suggest he has the slightest ill intentions towards me, but you can't be too careful. I can't read his mind. I can't know what he's thinking. Game theory demands I murder my neighbor. See how ridiculous that sounds? It just seems like profound logic when applied to the context of extraterrestrial species. But if you apply it to human beings, the whole thing falls apart.

i hate that people complain how he was not very good at writing people, so was Asimov.

I'm still waiting for my nuclear powered ashtray.

Also, knowing a bit of orbital mechanics really screws up the whole concept of the Trisolarans. There are so much easier solutions to their problem than staging an interstellar invasion.

For example, the only way you can have three stars orbiting each other without one being ejected is to have them arranged how the Alpha Centauri system is arranged. Here, two approximately Sun-mass stars orbit each other at about the same distance as Neptune orbits the Sun. Then there's a distant red dwarf that is a quarter of a lightyear out in a wide orbit, orbiting both of the larger stars in common. You can't have three stars orbiting each other all at a similar distance. One will inevitably get ejected or collide with the others very quickly.

It's entirely possible for planets to exist in such a system. We've found planets around at least one of the larger stars in Alpha Centauri. Now, if you have two Sun like stars orbiting much closer, like Earth-Sun distance, it wouldn't be possible to have a stable planet in the habitable zone of either star, or in a habitable orbit around both stars. So there are arrangements where no habitable planet can stably exist, either orbiting one or both.

But as you note, nothing could evolve on a planet that isn't reasonably stable over billions of years.

But even if you ignore that, there are so many better solutions to the Trisolan's problem that trying to invade Sol. For example, you can almost always find a stable orbit really close to just one of the larger stars. They could build large space habitats really close to one star, closer than the distance of Mercury. And then they can simply use solar shields and mirrors to keep those habitats at comfortable temperatures. And the same works in reverse. Have two large stars orbiting really close, closer than the orbit of Mercury? Maybe there isn't a stable orbit between them. Instead build artificial habitats distant from both of them, like at the orbital distance of Neptune. Then just rely on large mirror arrays to concentrate the dilute sunlight at that distance. Or hell, just skip the mirrors and use reactors to power your habitats.

The point is, by the time you become a real space-fairing species, capable of getting into space in a big way? The "habitable zone" around a star completely loses all meaning. If we had good access to space, here in our solar system, we could build orbital habitats anywhere from a fraction of Mercury's distance from the Sun to well outside the orbit of Pluto. You just need to use the right combination of mirrors to either diffuse or concentrate solar radiation towards or away from your habitats. If you have space flight, you don't need a stable planet in your system's habitable zone. You can just build entirely artificial habitats in whatever orbits your system does have that are reasonably stable. And they don't even have to be perfectly stable, as you can use those same mirrors as solar sails to correct for any slight gravitational perturbations. Doing this is absolutely orders of magnitude easier than trying an interstellar invasion. And in the Dark Forest context, it's a lot less likely to get your civilization noticed by some hungry predator species hiding in the dark. The engines of your giant space armada are likely to be visible at interstellar distances.

This reminds me of a video or discussion I once saw (can't find it now), on why we can't recreate the Saturn V. We still have all the old blueprints for the rocket; NASA took great care to archive those. But the Saturn V was designed for an entirely different era of engineering and manufacturing. Its parts were all designed for an era of manual machining and welding. It was built using many techniques that are now abandoned or incredibly niche and expensive. The plans simply cannot be practically built in an era of CNC machines, laser cutting, automatic welding, 3D printing, etc. Manufacturing methods affect part design. And designs built for one era's techniques may not map well those of a new era. We still have the plans for the Saturn V, but we can't build another one, as the world has simply moved on.

Mwahaha! I can see through your ruse! I'm not a tree scientist, I'm a wood scientist! I'm only interested in trees AFTER they're cut down. I have no use for undiscovered trees. Bring me more Douglas fir wood and we can talk!

And what happens when team blue decides your minority group is an acceptable sacrifice, as they're currently doing for trans people? They already threw the Palestinian Americans on the pyre, and they're going for trans folks next.

The problem with looking the other way when some other group is thrown under the bus is that inevitably your ticket will be called. In 2028, it's going to be trans folks and their allies that are being bullied into supporting a conservative democrat like Newsom, even though he would take the Democrats the same direction as British Labor.

I just can't understand this hubris and arrogance. You actually expect people to vote for their own annihilation.