WoodScientist @ WoodScientist @lemmy.world

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A nuclear booster's excuse dichotomy:

If someone says, "nuclear isn't safe," respond "nuclear is heavily regulated and perfectly safe!"

If someone says, "nuclear is comically expensive," respond "that's only because of regulation!"

Somehow I actually yearn for the days of robber barons. At least they found socially productive ways to build monuments to their own vanity. If Musk wants to spend $20 billion to build social housing in cities across the US, I'm not going to complain if he slaps his name on the buildings. At least Carnegie built libraries.

Obviously duhumanizing someone due to their race, religion, sexual characteristics, or other immutable properties is wrong. But we're talking about someone who Damned themselves entirely through their own actions. No one took Thompson's humanity from him; he threw it away willingly.

Make no mistake. When Thompson hit the pavement that cold morning, he did not stop falling. His soul tried to rise up to the clouds, but he could not. Looking down, his ghost found a shackle tied to his ankle. Bound in fetters to a pile of gold, an otherworldly representation of his own wealth and greed. As his spirit tried desperately to soar upwards, instead he sunk down, down, and down, the ground rising up above him like a diver beneath the surface of the ocean. And he did not stop falling until his soul reached the Pit of Hell itself.

Such is the fate of all men who take the lives of others for their greed. In the end, they all Burn.

And yet, every single civil right you enjoy now was only achieved through lethal violence. The powerful never give up their unearned privileges without at least a little blood spilling first.

Murder? Such strong language. Is CEO killing really murder? If someone has so thoroughly surrendered their humanity as Brian Robert Thompson did, are they really human anymore? You can only commit murder against humans. I think of Thompson more akin to a cloth sack filled with bloody dollar bills than an actual human being. Ethically, what Luigi did is like collapsing a cardboard box or treating mold on a bathroom tile. Technically a destructive act, but hardly murder. There's no need to use such inflammatory language to describe the disassembly of an inanimate object.

The miracles are relatively easy in his case, considering his connection to healthcare. Get enough people with terminal diagnoses praying for his intercession, and some will happen to make a statistically unlikely spontaneous recovery.

They already is happening. You don't need to be an officially recognized saint for someone to sell a candle of you.

That's literally what it's taken in the past. It took the fear of communism to really get unionization accepted in the US. In other eras it's taken the threat of invasion by external powers.

Ea-nāṣir shops at Safeway.

It's not that sainthood can't proceed rapidly. The issue is that Luigi's case is fundamentally different than someone like Kobe. Luigi is a much more complex figure, more akin to a John Brown than Kobe. What Luigi did was heroic, but he still shot a man in the back. Absolution or not, his act was not the unambiguous act of noble sacrifice of Kobe. Kobe gave up his life, Luigi took one.

Under very particular circumstances, Luigi could get actual sainthood. But it would be so controversial that it would likely only happen after the lifetime of anyone currently alive. In the grand view of history, maybe history will find him worthy of actual official sainthood. But there's zero chance the Catholic Church would endorse a murder like that while anyone alive now still lives.

Why not? Sainthood is an inherently political process. No person becomes a saint without intense lobbying and political pressure. You think Joan of Arc got her sainthood without politics involved?

And while the Catholic Church likes to claim a monopoly on sainthood, it really has no right to that claim. Most early saints were simply individuals that people in a community loved, respected, and later revered. A lot of these early saints were simply canonized officially by the church after they had already been venerated as saints by their communities for generations. There's one saint that is likely just a misremembering of the Buddha. So people could absolutely start venerating him as a saint unofficially whenever they want.

And in the long term, Luigi could even end up an official saint of the Church if the circumstances are right. After conviction and sentencing, he could meet with a priest and confess his crimes in full and formally ask for absolution. And in the doctrine of the Church, that would result in him being fully forgiven for his crime. It's the same way the Church recognizes the sanctity of warrior-saints who spent their whole lives killing. As long as they confessed their sins and asked for forgiveness from God, all is forgiven.

So let's imagine Luigi did that. Suddenly his sins are washed away. Now we just have a man who is effectively a martyr for the thousands of victims of Brian Thompson. If that doesn't a saint make, what does? Sainthood is meant for people who give their lives in the service of others, and that's exactly what Luigi ultimately did. If it weren't for the whole murder part, everyone would consider him a hero. And in the eyes of the church, confession washes away the sin of killing. Now he's an absolved martyr dying for the service others.

Now, for official recognition from the Church, there would need to be some miracles attributed to him after his (likely) execution. But that doesn't seem that hard to get. Tens of thousands of cancer patients praying for the ascended Luigi's intercession? Some of them are going to make a statistically unlikely complete recovery. Won't be hard to get the requisite number of miracles.

I don't imagine the Church would officially recognize Luigi's canonization within our lifetimes. But the Church thinks in centuries. If he decided to make a religious turn and really lean into Catholicism, he absolutely could end up saint, maybe in the 2100s sometime.

One key thing is that the Republican party has very much now become the party of the working class. In 2024, Kamala won those making less than $30k, and more than $100k. She won the poor and the professional class, but Trump won the working class, (and I assume) the extremely wealthy.

The Democrat's real base right now is the professional class. Those with college degrees working white collar jobs. The poor also vote more for Dems, but they vote in fewer numbers based both on their poverty and their lower than average age.

We always assumed it was the rich vs everyone else, but it need not be that way. It could easily turn out to be the rich and the working class vs. the professional class and the poor. When someone like Bannon suggests raising taxes on the "rich," he may not mean the actual ultra-wealthy, but the professional class.

And there is a form of taxation that could be implemented to fall on the professional class the hardest - targeting the tax advantages of 401ks and IRAs. That seems the most obvious target. Just raising income taxes would have to also hit the rich, but taking away a lot of the tax benefits of retirement accounts would mostly hurt the professional class, the white collar workers with bachelors and graduate degrees. The doctors, the lawyers, the engineers, the college professors, etc. The truly wealthy don't really rely on these accounts much, as they have limits on them that make them useless for storing tens of millions or more in. And the working class? Well if you have a household income of $60k, odds are pretty low you're going to be maxing out your 401k contribution.

The retirement accounts seem the most likely targets of this. The poor and working class don't usually make enough to put substantial money away in these accounts, while their asset protections are a rounding error to the wealthy. Raiding 401ks and IRAs would be a way for them to raise taxes in a way that zeros in on the Democratic electorate and hurts them the most.

We could even see a very weird political landscape where 401ks and IRAs were raided to pay for social programs like health insurance subsidies, expanded subsidies for new parents, subsidized daycare, and other social spending meant to increase birth rates. They would sell it as "raising taxes on the wealthy to give to the working class," while they would really be raising taxes on the professional class to pay for subsidies for the working class and tax cuts for the wealthy.

The white collar college educated workers are the heart of the Democrat's current power base. They are the most likely targets of any Republican tax increases "on the rich." And the easiest way to raise taxes on the professional class without also taxing the wealthy is to come after the retirement accounts.

And while some might say, "that would never happen, people wouldn't stand for it. It would be the government going back on its word, people would be infuriated!" Well, I just come back to the end of Roe v. Wade. Republicans stripped civil rights from half the country, and the electorate responded by giving them full control of government. If you can strip the civil rights from half the population, stripping retirement account benefits, which far fewer people are actually able to really take advantage of, is minor in comparison.

401k and IRA protections are just tax policy. They can be changed at any time. A law could be passed tomorrow that said, "401k accounts are being wound down. All 401k accounts must be liquidated within the next five years and transferred to regular taxable brokerage accounts. This liquidation will be taxed like any other 401k or IRA withdrawal." Then, everyone has to liquidate their accounts, and the full balance would be taxed as regular income. Not only would this give the government more long term revenue, but it would represent a massive short-term windfall. The treasury would bring in trillions as the government effectively seizes 20-30% of every 401k account in the nation. It would be a temporary windfall, but in the years of this one-time liquidation, it would likely even allow Trump to claim he actually balanced the budget. Anyone with sense would know it was a short-term stunt, but his base isn't known for having a lot of sense.

I would make the money's paw consequences similar, but slightly different.

A bad microsoft update somehow manages to permanently brick every windows computer on the planet overnight. Linux is now the dominant operating system, but mass societal chaos results from 90% of computers being permanently bricked.

I'm pursuing a PhD in structural engineering and wood science. Here's my perspective on manufactured homes, and why they lack the long-term durability of stick built homes.

The problem with manufactured homes is that they're value-engineered to the point of fragility. A stick built home is built by hand on site. They're built from whatever generic lumber is available from local lumber yards. They're built by imperfect human beings using their own imperfect hands. To compensate for imperfect materials and imperfect human labor, they have a lot of redundancy built in to them. The structure of stick-built homes vary more between each home, so every piece of wood hasn't been optimized down to the absolute minimum. Standardized lumber sizes (2x4, 2x6, 2x8) are used, instead of using custom-milled lumber to produce the absolute minimum cross section for every piece in a home.

But if you're making ten thousand of the same identical manufactured home, you can optimize the hell out of them to make construction as efficient as possible. Instead of imperfect human hands, you use robots to place every piece precisely, and install every fastener perfectly. Instead of using industry-standard lumber sizes, you get lumber mills to custom mill you oddball sizes for particular columns, beams, etc. Instead of buying 2x6s, you get the mill or mill up your own custom "2x5.358." You also do a lot more structural engineering. When you're building ten thousand copies of the same building, it's worth putting in more engineer hours to wring every last pound out of a building's frame. On a normal residential home, it's not worth spending an extra hundred engineering hours just to save a few hundred pounds of wood. But if you're making 10,000 of the same home, those hours can be worth it.

Manufactured homes are, from an engineering point of view, far more efficient than a stick built home. Like airplanes, they have every extra ounce of material optimized out of their design. But as we saw in supply chains during the pandemic, efficiency and resiliency are often inversely correlated. The problem with over-optimization is that it's only ideal as long as the building will never face circumstances beyond what the structural engineer initially estimated. Let's say you design your building to survive a 70 mph wind undamaged. If you have a lot of redundancy, that structure may also be able to withstand an 80 or 90 mph wind undamaged. The over-optimized structure will be a lot more efficient at surviving the 70 mph wind, but if the building ever has to face worse conditions than were assumed during its design....well then you're in trouble.

Finally, stick-built homes will inevitably be far more repairable and upgradeable than factory built homes. Stick build homes are built by actual human hands on site. Factory built homes may be constructed in ways that, while cost effective, are only possible in a factory environment. That which is built on site can be repaired on site. That which is built from mass market generic components can be repaired with mass market generic components. Stick built homes cost more up front, but they inevitably have long-term advantages in terms of resiliency and repairability.

The state of New York is about to get a firsthand lesson in the Streisand Effect. They should have just charged him the same charge any normal killer would get - Second Degree Murder, which is the normal charge for premeditated murder in NY. First degree requires rare special circumstances, and the prosecutor chose to use a dubious "terrorism" modifier to up the charge to Murder 1. They just couldn't help themselves, and they shot themselves in the foot.

The advantage to the prosecution to a simple Murder 2 charge is that motive really doesn't matter much. They just have to prove that Luigi pulled the trigger. But with the terrorism modifier, the trial will no devolve into lengthy discussions about his motives and message. Not only have they now given him the world's largest soapbox, but this will also give the defense an opportunity to make him much more sympathetic to the jury. With only a Murder 2 charge, the defense lawyer would have had to fight hard to sneak subtle hints into trial about Luigi's motives. Now his motives will be a core part of the prosecution's case.

With a simple Murder 2 trial, even jurors who thought Thompson got what he deserved could vote to convict based simply on the letter of the law. Luigi killed an evil man, but he still has to face the consequences like any other criminal. Now the jury will clearly see that the system isn't treating him like any other criminal. The prosecutors, through their own actions, are making Luigi's case for him - the justice system is completely rigged in favor of the rich and powerful, and the only way they can ever be held accountable is through violence.

All it takes is one juror of twelve to look around at the situation and say, "this is bullshit. I'm not going to convict." Sure, they can try him again with a new jury if he's not found unanimously not-guilty, but that jury will have an even greater risk of jury nullification. The longer this goes on, the more likely the prosecutor just has to offer him some sweetheart plea deal just to get him convicted of something. And each trial just elevates Mangione that much closer to literal Sainthood in the popular imagination.

The feds also indicted him. There's zero chance a Trump AG isn't going to be pushing for the death penalty. What they cannot seem to understand is that this will only make him a martyr. They should have just given him the standard NY Murder II conviction any other killer would get, but they just couldn't help themselves. They had to really send a message to the proles.

All they will succeed in doing is elevating him to outright sainthood.

Then we need to make him a saint.

St. Luigi of Baltimore, forgive us our debts, deliver us from the greed of the wicked...

Want to know how Luigi found what hotel Brian Thompson stayed at? It's right in his "manifesto." He used social engineering.

Social engineering is when you just take advantage of people's natural predilictions to give you info or access that you shouldn't have. For example, if he were to just call up UHC and ask them where the CEO was staying, they would likely just have called the police. Instead, he had to think of some plausible reason that someone might need that info through unofficial channels. I have no idea how he actually did it, but for example, Thompson was a famous womanizer who cheated on his wife. He was your standard sleazy executive scumbag. That can be exploited.

*Hi, CEO's office? I'm John Doe, an underling over at the CFO's office. My boss wants to give Brian a special surprise at this year's company meeting. We're thinking of hiring a few girls to come over and keep him company one evening. I need to know where to have them sent. I would send an email or look up the info in our records system, but, as you can understand, it's best if there's no paper trail. Can you let me know what hotel he's staying at?"

These social engineering methods are the same tools scammers use, but they work just as well for assassins.

If you're on your deathbed, and looking back, you haven't been on at least one watch list, will you be able to say you have truly lived at all?

This assumes an absolute reference frame, which does not exist in this universe.