WoodScientist
@WoodScientist@lemmy.world
- Comment on Just getting into a little bit of Troubles 2 days ago:
Well, the IRA tends to bring people on more as independent contractors rather than full-time employees. Hence the preference for IRAs.
- Comment on This MF is quadrupling down and dropping Alien files before dropping the full, unredacted Epstein Files. GODDAMN. 4 days ago:
Honestly, if there were alien craft zipping around, I can imagine why no government would want to disclose them. It would basically be an announcement of, “these damn craft are flying around the atmosphere and the space around Earth. They’re utterly beyond anything we’re capable of. We’re not sure if they’re aliens, time travelers, beings from another dimension, literal angels or demons, or something even stranger. But we are utterly at their mercy. They’re spying on us constantly, for purposes unknown. Oh, and occasionally they’ll just abduct people and carry them off for God-knows-what reason. I’m sorry, but there is literally nothing we or any human being can do about this. They’re basically gods to us, and we know next to nothing about them, where they come from, or why they’re here.”
What leader would ever want to give that speech? I don’t consider it likely we are being visited by non-human intelligences. But if we were, it wouldn’t be anything like Roswell and Area 51. We wouldn’t have a base full of downed or crashed alien craft. They simply wouldn’t crash, and we would have no ability to shoot them down. A real announcement of alien visitors wouldn’t be the reveal of some vast secret government project, a revealing of secret strength. It would be us saying, “we’ve been working on this problem for nearly a century, and we’ve learned nothing. All we know is that they’re there, and we can’t do a damn thing about it.” It would a confession of weakness and utter helplessness, a government openly admitting it’s completely powerless to protect its people from an unknown outside threat. Can you imagine a president telling the public, “yeah, you might get abducted by aliens. Sorry, that just happens sometimes. There’s nothing we can do about it.”
It would represent a complete shattering of our species’ sense of value and security. And voters tend not to like politicians who tell them the unvarnished truth.
- Comment on This MF is quadrupling down and dropping Alien files before dropping the full, unredacted Epstein Files. GODDAMN. 4 days ago:
New crazy conspiracy theory: we’re being quietly targeted for extermination by a hostile alien species.
They could wipe us out in an afternoon if they wanted to, but they can’t just come right in and bomb us from orbit, as that would cause an interstellar relations incident, maybe mass unrest back home. But they also want us gone. We gotta go because we’re an advancing young species, near their territory, and are a potential future problem. We’re not dealing with an alien army attacking us; we’re dealing with an alien equivalent of the CIA. They’re here to do the dirty work quietly.
They know species at our level often run headfirst into environmental catastrophes as their technology becomes great enough to threaten the planet they live on. Instead of helping us, however, they’re throwing gasoline on the fire. They’ve brainwashed/replaced with clones the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people. And their behavior was psychologically programmed to maximize the chances of them leading us right into a climate apocalypse. Most species eventually get their shit together and place limits on extraction and pollution, less they all die. But if the right type of crazies are running the place, a species can just slam the accelerator as it drives off a cliff.
And when we eventually do burn ourselves alive in a climate Armageddon, the aliens will run news stories, lamenting the tragic tale of a poor primitive planet that couldn’t right its ways in time. No threat of war between great interstellar powers. No mass protests movements back on the homeworld. Just a potential future rival nipped in the bud, no muss, no fuss. Mass murder dressed up as death by natural causes.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 5 days ago:
‘Oh, our accountant says the valuation is just under the threshold for the new tax, what a coincidence!’
Well that’s your risk to take. No different than if you cook your books now and claim lower income than you actually have. We don’t throw up our hands and conclude we can’t tax the wealthy. Maybe we need to seriously reform corporate charter law, and do things like prohibit corporations from themselves owning subsidiary companies. Reforms like that could prevent a lot of tax-dodging shenanigans.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
If you’re willing to throw one minority under the bus, you will throw all of them under the bus.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 6 days ago:
You have piss poor reading comprehension. I suggest you enroll in an adult learning class at your local community college.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 6 days ago:
Wait, which is it. Are Palestinian supporters too few to care about, or were they numerous enough to blame for the election loss? Cause you’re doing the classic fascist “our enemies are both incredibly weak and incredibly strong” bit.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 6 days ago:
Politics has always been a popularity contest? Did you not learn this in your grade school student council elections?
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 6 days ago:
You’re right. Liberals do love their straw men.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 6 days ago:
Not voting for them has done just that! We’ve seen real change at the DNC, and that is only because the neoliberals have been completely discredited. They can no longer claim the narrative of being the adult in the room, the logical choice for electability.
Party power structures only change after the party loses.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 6 days ago:
People don’t like being insulated and taken advantage of. Why is that so hard to understand?
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 6 days ago:
I remember debates on Reddit. I kept pointing out that the official inflation figures fail to measure the pain people were figuring. But I just got downvoted to Hell by a bunch of troglodytes mindlessly parroting the CPI figures, as if that was the only thing that matters.
There is a severe strain of Orwellian magical thinking among liberals. Speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil. Ignore all bad news and try to give your way to victory.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 6 days ago:
In other words, she lost because she was a Limousine Liberal.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 6 days ago:
The turnout was actually rather high by historical standards. A portion of the population not voting is just a constant of elections. You can’t blame your loss on something that happens every election. And worse, in recent elections, Democrats do WORSE when turnout is higher. If turnout were higher, Kamala would have lost even worse.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 1 week ago:
All that matters is that your portfolio grows faster than the interest rate.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 1 week ago:
Your parents just suck at personal finance. They used their home as a piggy bank and raided the equity every time they moved. Either that or they kept buying more expensive properties.
I’m sorry, but your story is just not credible. If they owned a house in the city, and then the value soared, they should have been able to take their windfall, move out to the country, and buy a cheap property in cash. The only way this isn’t true is if they either did a lot of cash-out refinancing, or if when they moved to the countryside, they bought a much larger property.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 1 week ago:
To actually legally impose anything based on total net worth, you need to actually audit net worth and get a real figure.
So, what’s wrong with that? You have a wealth tax on all wealth over $100 million. If you have wealth anywhere over say, $50 million, you hire an accountant to assess your business’s value. Everyone with that level of wealth already hires accountants. It’s a trivial additional burden. If your wealth is no where near the tax threshold, you don’t need to bother hiring an accountant to get a precise figure.
There is a reason that every time such a policy targeting only the wealthiest is put into place (it’s been tried numerous times over the years in a bunch of European countries)
I’m calling bullshit on this. There are all sorts of taxes that fall heavily or solely on the wealthy. The reason the wealthy don’t all leave is that they don’t actually want to live in places that have low taxes. You can get low taxes in a war-torn hellhole, but most don’t actually want to live like that.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 1 week ago:
The yacht, sure. The mansion…Are you seriously trying to argue that real estate, literal land, isn’t a long-term valuable asset? There is literally no asset in existence with a better long-term value proposition than land.
- Comment on She must be really smart 1 week ago:
This isn’t just misogyny, but lazy misogyny.
- Comment on Sometimes I wonder if the "Quantum Immortality" thought experiment is actually real... considering how many times I could've died. 1 week ago:
I always liked the “one soul” theory. The concept is toyed with in the short story The Egg.
Basically reincarnation is real. Except if a soul can jump through space between lives, there’s no reason it can’t also jump through time. Space and time are one and the same.
Imagine if when you die, you wake up being born in another life. But that life could be anywhere in the past, present or future. Your consciousness doesn’t move linearly forward through time in a series of lifetimes arranged in a line. It bounces all over the place. 21st century US one lifetime, 8300 BC Peru the next, 12000 AD Alpha Centauri after that. And the whole chain of consciousness is a closed loop. Ultimately, there is just one soul, just one consciousness, bouncing back and forth across all of the history of creation. And when the soul’s path is complete, when it has lived every life there is to live? It loops back on itself.
You are a being of this universe. You are the consciousness of this universe. As am I. You and I are literally the same mind, separated perhaps by billions of lifetimes. Or perhaps I will live your life next, or you mine. Eternal life is real, but contained entirely within our finite universe. An endless loop of awareness echoing throughout all of creation. And we need to be kind to one another, as when I hurt you, I am literally hurting myself.
I don’t really think it’s something I personally believe, but it is a really cool concept that I love.
- Comment on Sometimes I wonder if the "Quantum Immortality" thought experiment is actually real... considering how many times I could've died. 1 week ago:
This kind of thing happens even if you don’t assume time repeats. As far as we can measure, the universe is spacially infinite. Finite age, infinite spacial extent. If you ever hear someone talk about the diameter of the universe, they’re talking about the diameter of the observable universe - the part of the universe close enough for its light to actually reach us. But as far as we can measure (based on measurements of large scale spacial curvature), the universe is truly, literally infinite. It’s possible it curves back on itself with a radius much larger than the diameter of the visible universe. But if it truly is infinite, infinities make some very weird things possible.
For example, a diameter the size of the observable universe has a finite number of states. There are only so many atoms and so many ways to arrange those atoms. This number is unfathomably large, but it’s not infinite. But in an infinite universe, on a large enough distance, everything repeats. It doesn’t repeat in a regular pattern, but it does repeat. So get in a space ship and fly off into space. If you could go far enough, eventually you would run into an exact duplicate of yourself, with all the memories and life experiences you have - an atom-for-atom copy of yourself. Travel far enough and you’ll encounter a duplicate of our entire observable universe. And worse still, if the universe truly is infinite, there must be an infinite number of such copies.
I’m not talking about alternate realities or parallel universes here. I’m not talking about getting in a time machine and visiting an alternate timeline. I’m not talking about the quantum many worlds theory. I’m talking about the very space you inhabit, this universe. If you go out in a space ship and could travel arbitrarily far, it would eventually seem like you had come right back home, even though you’re quintillions of light years from where you were born.
Infinity is a terrifying thing.
- Comment on But bro please 1 week ago:
They came very close. You do realize there was a deliberate plan on January 6th, don’t you? The riot was part of that. And they came very close to succeeding. Their goal was to provide enough chaos to prevent the peaceful transfer of power and to kill the people that were preventing Republicans in the House from handing the election to Trump. They didn’t have to hold off the army forever. They just needed to interrupt the mechanism of government at one critical moment. Pence was refusing to go along with the plan to decertify slates of electors under bogus election fraud charges. The rioters attempted to hang Mike Pence, and Trump’s security tried to spirit Pence away to an unknown location for unknown purposes. That was the ultimate goal. It wasn’t just a random spasm of violence. It was a deliberate and specific plan to make Trump the legal winner of the 2020 election.
- Comment on But bro please 1 week ago:
A bunch of Gravy Seals in ill fitting mismatched surplus store body armour carrying AR-15s will never succeed in overthrowing the US government no matter how many childish circle jerk murder fantasies they share.
They came quite close to doing exactly that on January 6th. Have you forgotten already?
- Comment on But bro please 1 week ago:
The US’s violence budget far exceeds any existing well regulated militia, let alone Cletus’ gun cabinet.
And yet the US lost in Vietnam, despite dropping more tons of bombs on Vietnam alone than used in the entirety of WW2. Come on, the entire 20th century was a story of revolutionary groups inventing the science of guerilla warfare. Small poorly armed forces can take on nation states in the right condition. Did you just…forget…the entire last century of history?
- Comment on But bro please 1 week ago:
And why the hell do you think revolutionaries will be facing the army in open honorable combat? And what’s wrong with doing the fighting in urban areas and digging tunnels?
Sure, an AR-15 won’t take down a tank. But if you’re even asking if they can, you fundamentally misunderstand how revolutions and insurgencies work.
- Comment on But bro please 1 week ago:
There has never been a revolution in history that wasn’t massively outgunned.
The real key is that you use the small guns to seize control of the big guns. And you recruit people who know how to use those tanks and other heavy weaponry. Revolutions often start with raiding armories and military bases for this very reason. You might think it’s impossible for a bunch of randos to storm an actual army base. But history proves otherwise. How many military bases are actually, right at this moment, actively preparing for a large group of civilians to storm the fences? The element of surprise is a powerful weapon.
- Comment on outlawing pedestrians 1 week ago:
Your city was built by people who walked.
- Comment on Discord will restrict your account next month unless you scan ID or face 1 week ago:
Sorry. Open source offends corporate interests and is therefore pornographic. You’re a pornographer.
- Comment on Discord will restrict your account next month unless you scan ID or face 1 week ago:
Are you one of those pornographic people? Large swathes of the population are considered intrinsically pornographic by the authors of these laws. Queer people are walking talking pornography simply for existing. Also most politics and any news dealing with violent events is pornographic.
Have you ever shared a story about police brutality? You are a pornographer.
- Comment on Discord will restrict your account next month unless you scan ID or face 1 week ago:
Queer people are pornographic according to the authors of these laws