• 0 Posts
  • 60 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
cake
Cake day: October 10th, 2023

help-circle
  • For a long time, Germany treated any mention of nazis or depictions of swastikas as basically infohazards, scp style. You can’t become the fascist if you don’t know what a fascist is, or so the thinking went. Imo a lot of what was really happening was German guilt and attempting to hide history from their youth.









  • Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds is one of my favorite scifi books and it deals with this question in an interesting way. It proposes that Time is the great filter. Life exists in this galaxy, but intelligent life is so fleeting when considering galactic distances that the probability of one sentient lifeform finding another during their “peaks” is vanishingly small. Extinction, societal collapse, evolution to a higher form, whatever you want to imagine, it all gets in the way of the fantasy of meeting a thinking being from another planet.


  • Time itself is the filter. I don’t think we are the first, but I don’t think we will every find any other intelligent life. The universe is too big and our lives are far too short to make any sort of attempt to travel or communicate across those distances ourselves. I’m also not entirely confident our idea of what a society is will last in any meaningful way over the timespans required. Our longest lasting dynasties rarely make it more than a couple hundred years. Space is just too big for us to work with using our current understanding of physics.



  • Maybe I’m biased because I’m a welder, but it always made more sense to me that electricity flows from the negative. Like , if the positive moved, wouldn’t you change the element of the wire after a while? It also helps that you can tell the difference if an arc is positive or negative relative to the stinger depending on how the metal reacts, at least to a welder. I know that doesn’t make any sense at all but it does to another welder lol



  • As someone who is taking Kaiser Permanente to court over their refusal to release documents, let me confirm that grievance coordinators are the most useless wastes of oxygen ever to steal air on this planet. Even having your lawyer send them the actual text of the law they are currently violating, they will refuse to do anything not explicitly outlined and approved by their policy. Fuck the law. Fuck common sense. If it’s not policy, it doesn’t matter.



  • Nah you’re missing the chemistry. The irritant in teargas is an oil, and using water just spreads around the oil. Enough water will work, sure, but you’re going to suffer the whole time. Milk contains lipids and fats that will actually dissolve the irritant, allowing it to be washed away much easier. Soapy water would also work, but then you’re just irritating your face holes all over again. The risk of bacteria feels like a dog whistle though. Just rinse yourself after, like idk a shower or something, and you’ll be fine. We wouldn’t drink it if it was a plague potion.