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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • Quantum field theory conserves mass-energy, so the new mass is coming from the energy in the Higgs field itself. It settles to a lower energy state and basically transfers that energy as mass to all of the particles that couple with it. Since it’s mass-energy and not just mass that generates gravitational distortions, the large-scale gravitational evolution of the universe probably won’t change, as this just moves things around a bit. It’s not creating energy out of nothing.



  • A lot of the far right are millennials and Gen Z. While the proportions in different generations are different, this isn’t purely a generational thing. The implied message is that we can “wait them out,” but that is basically just the same as doing nothing. We can’t do nothing. We have to motivate people to vote, and then get them to volunteer and have them get others to vote.

    If that’s what the map would look like if younger generations voted like 65+, then go get those people voting so we get that map next election.



  • He and his allies have made the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan a central focus of their criticisms of the Biden administration’s handling of national security and foreign policy.

    What I consistently don’t see brought up is the fact that the “chaotic withdrawal” was directly set up by Trump. He signed the agreement with Afghanistan that put a fixed date on the withdrawal squarely in the next President’s term. This gave enemies a clear timetable of US actions beforehand, which gave them a significant advantage. So Biden was left with the choice of either fulfilling the US promise, despite it being in every way a bad construct, and executing an extremely difficult withdrawal, or harming the US image on the global stage by reneging on an already agreed upon deal.

    I would go so far as to say this, like the expiration of the middle class portion of the Trump tax cuts, was specifically designed to make the next administration, which was always very likely to be Democrat, look bad regardless of the cost or collateral damage.




  • Edit: I was thinking about the wrong “immunity” in this comment (the recently granted Presidential immunity to prosecution, not immunity to prosecution for law enforcement officers). I’ll leave the comment for context, but it’s not what the original commenter was talking about.

    Actually it will be very easy for the Supreme Court to give Trump a win and keep qualified immunity. If Biden didn’t directly order the raid on Mar-a-lago, then the immunity they granted doesn’t apply.

    Remember, these rulings don’t need logical consistency because they are bad faith justifications for any actions taken by their team. So when a Republican is in office they can extend the immunity to basically the whole Executive branch, but when a Democrat is in the White House that can shrink to just the President’s actions. And even there only those that are “official acts,” which only the Supreme Court gets to decide, so they can shrink it to almost nothing.




  • Language is magic for these people, specifically the right grouping of words is supposed to be an incantation to get them out of social responsibility, and the wrong collection of words is what binds them.

    Since the state regulates “driving” of vehicles, no sovcit drives. They all “move” vehicles or “transport” vehicles.

    It’s ridiculous, because law revolves around actions independent of how anyone in specific describes those actions, but that’s the mindset of these people. Viewing their beliefs as a kind of word Tetris has at least helped me wrap my head around what could possibly give them some of their strange notions of law.







  • ignirtoq@fedia.iotoWikipedia@lemmy.worldRay cat
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    2 months ago

    The thing about genes is that if there aren’t natural selection pressures to keep certain traits, they tend to drift, and traits can change or become entirely non-functional over a surprisingly short time. I would expect, unless there was a concerted effort to maintain the radiation detection trait over those 10,000 years through careful breeding, the cats would lose their radiation triggered appearance change behavior before it actually had a chance to be useful to people.


  • No, we’re in this position because of a failure of leadership. Leaders can unite people behind doing things they don’t want to do. It’s how rationing was tolerated for years in WWII. But we have an entire political party built around telling people what they want to hear while working against their interests for the wealthy’s short term gains. We could have conquered this from the top-down with a good plan and charismatic leaders supporting it.


  • People need to start changing their behavior about this heat. I know this sounds like victim blaming. I know people shouldn’t have to change their behavior because we saw global warning coming for 30 years and should have prevented this from happening. But it’s happening. You can’t go into Death Valley in the summer anymore. You just can’t. Please don’t put yourself in this position.

    It’s a tragedy that this death happened. We absolutely need to adapt our emergency services to this heat to try to prevent something like this from happening again. But we also need to change our behaviors so we don’t end up in that position in the first place.