WoodScientist @ WoodScientist @sh.itjust.works

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6 mo. ago

Yeah those people that sheltered Anne Frank. What a bunch of assholes!

Did you know certain pressure canners can be used as makeshift autoclaves, allowing you to make your own home brewed sterile injectable medications?

They left a lot of options on the table and then let the clock run out on them.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2024/12/20/biden-student-loan-forgiveness-relief-plan-scrapped/77105533007/

Exactly. And ultimately, voters don't want to hear excuses. They don't expect perfection, but they do expect some results. Republicans, even with limited majorities, always manage to achieve at least some of what they would call progress. Democrats OTOH just fine endless excuses. At some point, you're either incompetent or admitting to your voters that you were lying to them - promising them something you would never be able to deliver.

Biden did student loan forgiveness, which should have given him all the college votes, yet people shurg and go “Well yea! About time!”

He dithered and only reluctantly did this. And then when he did, he did it in a way that a corrupt SCOTUS could overrule. There were other paths he could have taken, but he chose the least-confrontational approach and ultimately the court negated most of his efforts. His fault or not, very few people actually ended up getting their loans forgiven. If he failed to consider a hostile SCOTUS in his plans, then that is a strategic failure on his part.

He puts money into infrastructures and unions and again, people go “I guess, it’s a bit better than Republicans!”

His infrastructure bills are currently being torn to pieces as they were slow to actually spend their money. They were mired in everything bagel liberalism. A thousand requirements for dollar spent meant to solve every social ill under the Sun. But regardless, these bills didn't directly help individuals. They may be necessary to curb the rise of China, but that's not something that affects people's lives directly. Unionization? Biden was unable to stem the decline in union numbers, and he himself chose to be a strikebreaker.

I mean, for legal reasons, I'm not going to tell them to do it. I'm also not going to tell them not to do it though!

Maybe Janeway was just secretly really racist against Asian people. Just because society has left bigotry behind doesn't mean all members of that society have.

Mr Gin just didn't want to criminally implicate himself. Cheating in a casino creates a lot more opportunities to be noticed and caught. Pod racing has better plausible deniability.

You're a machine man, with a machine heart and a machine soul. You've become a living spam bot. You're not even human anymore.

The real reason it's in a Florida swamp is so they can skip the crematoria and just use the alligators to dispose of the bodies.

And they unfortunately clearly didn't kill enough of Ann Coulter's ancestors.

We are realistically looking at losing 2-10% of the total human population over the next 25 years due to hunger caused by simultaneously bread basket collapse. Going out of our way to engineer more births is just adding to the number of victims. Wealthy countries can either adapt their economies to an older population, or they can rely on immigration. But deliberately engineering more people is suicidal. We are on the eve of what history will know as the Great Hunger. It is depressingly obvious that our leaders really haven't internalized the state of the world and what is rapidly approaching.

Well, according to my cats, they get the tuna because they killed the tuna. They are the mighty hunters after all.

Can’t be personalized, as I basically never visit Liquor stores.

Either that, your you visit liquor stores so much your don't remember visiting liquor stores! :D

The first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one. And Texas has a problem of Republican politicians leading the state to disaster. Whenever a disaster strikes due to Republican policies, Republicans circle the wagons, huff and puff, and say, "how DARE you. How dare you make this moment political! Now is not the time for politics!" They commonly do this after school shootings, and now you're doing the same thing after a mass death event caused by Republican policies.

Life is political. The right has trained people to view being "non political" as a social good. This allows them to play politics more freely, while the rest of the population is obsessed with not introducing politics except in a few narrow windows. Republicans bake politics into their entire life from their social circles to their religion. Democrats are more concerned with appearing noble, haughty, and above it all. They hate dirtying their finely manicured hands with the rough business of politics.

I'm sorry, but these hundred people are dead largely due to Republican policies. The flood was exacerbated by climate change, which Republicans support. The relevant federal programs were slashed due to a Republican president, and local Republican leaders refused to invest in badly needed flood warning systems. This is not a natural disaster; it's a Republican disaster.

Natural disasters, in terms of death toll, are always more of a function of politics than nature. Japan manages to have giant earthquakes with low death tolls; their political system is functional and provides and enforces good building codes. In more corrupt nations, the same strength of earthquake will kill a hundred fold more people.

You're sanctimoniously claiming that isn't the right time for politics. But this is the exact right time for politics. If you want to make changes, the time to do it is when political pressure is greatest. Otherwise, we just end up with less-than-useless "thoughts and prayers."

But I suppose you care more about covering for conservatives than you do about actually saving lives in the future.

Rant? Oh don't get me started on how we're dropping the ball on the naming of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. This is by far the largest object in the entire galaxy. The center of centers. The pit at the bottom of the world. The bottomless pit that pulled the whole galaxy together. The monster of monsters. The terror of terrors. The thunder upon the deep. The ravenous maw that devours entire Suns. And what name do we call it? What ancient monster or demon do we invoke to give voice to the howling terror around which the galaxy revolves? None. We call the bloody thing Sagittarius A*.

Yes, that's it. That's as good as astronomers can do right now apparently. How could you call such an unholy terror a name that's more appropriate to an IRS accounting file? How could you use such a mundane name when Charybdis is right there! Or Scylla works too!

Like JFC. Where's the sense of romance? Where's the passion and the fire? We're talking an object with the mass of three million Suns. It has a whole retinue or stars that orbit around it, and it throws them around like playthings. The Earth and the Sun already dwarf humanity to cosmic minutia, and this monster does the same to them. It's a monster lurking in the depths of space. And the best we can do to name it is fucking Sagittarius A*. The thing is a literal cosmic monster, something right out of mythology.

Like, I'm not even some Eurocentric who thinks everything needs to be named after Roman or Greek sources. I like keeping the planets specifically Roman for consistency. But there are no shortage of wonderful names out there coming from other mythologies. Laniakea is a beautiful name. And I would be fine with naming the big black hole after some terrifying monster in any number of mythologies. But we have to stop calling it A*. It's just wrong.

My favorite one-shot was a ranger that was "Stephanos Eoforwine", literally just Steve Irwin. I found a complicated combination of spells that would enable him to have what was essentially a video camera, so he was producing nature documentaries in the wilds of the Forgotten Realms. He was a ranger and had all his stats poured into animal handling. The guy had a +20 animal handling. Half of that bonus came from a homebrew magic item "the shorts of the crocodile hunter."

His animal handling skills were so high, that they were downright reality-warping. During our one-shot as part of a larger campaign, the party met Stephanos. And he was out in the woods looking for some wonderfully ridiculous legendary creature known as the "tree elk." Literally a species of full-sized elk that live on the boughs of trees. I said in character that's what I was searching for, as a joke. The DM had me roll for it. And I rolled a nat 20. Combined with his bonus, he rolled a 40 on an animal handling check to look for tree elk. And by god, he found them. Whether they existed before that moment or not is anyone's guess. But from then on in the campaign we would occasionally see an elk bounding through the treetops. His animal handling skills were so high that with a high enough roll, he could conjure entire species into being!

Somewhere Hari Seldon is laughing.

Or "oo-ran-oose"

"Planet George's Anus."