yeah, I was lucky to have already taken Classical Mechanics prior to Quantum Mechanics (it wasn’t a prereq so most of my classmates jumped straight into QM), so the math was all perfectly sensible. but the second any prof started trying to use English to interpret the math, I started having these moments where I’d have to sit back and think about the words coming out of their mouths, and sitting with how it was all actually gibberish. Feynman’s “shut up and calculate” started to feel incredibly valid really fast, whereas prior to QM, I was under the impression that physics was natural philosophy. it’s not and QM was the breaking point, at least for me, personally.

they don’t actually spin but they’re little bar magnets as if they do. if you charge a sphere and spin it, you’ll generate exactly the same kind of bar magnet, but they don’t actually spin. and just like bar magnets, like repels like. but they’re neither bar magnets nor spinning. why don’t they spin? because they’re point masses, which don’t have any extent. but actually, you can’t really observe them as point masses because they’re waves.

^^ this was the exact point at which I said quantum mechanics wasn’t for me and I’m done with physics, after completing most of a degree. it sort of all makes sense but at the same time it completely doesn’t. it all makes sense as pure math but the second you try to make sense of the math, sense goes out the window.

iirc, the question that ignited a war was “are outdoor cats vegan?” – meaning “can vegans own outdoor cats?” it devolved quickly into “should outdoor cats be killed?” with radical environmentalists on one side and felinitarians on the other, while the rest of us

yes, this is true. no, this isn’t why wages haven’t kept up with productivity growth or why you must work 40 hours to sustain yourself. you have to work because profit earned must increase and paying you even one iota more than you need to be able to show up to work again tomorrow is a loss of profit. if they could make you work 80 hours a week or 160, they would in heartbeat.

thankfully, this is outlawed because labor movements of the past fought to enshrine in law a limit on how much you can be forced to work and set a minimum bar for how much they can pay you. these laws are under fire - I explore why in the rest of this reply - and will be repealed eventually if labor does not resist collectively.

however, the rate of profit always decreases on a long enough timescale because of dead labor (technology, machines, etc), inter-capitalist competition - capitalists will steal profit from each other if there’s more to be had - and because infinite growth is impossible so eventually externalities will always overcome the creation of new capital.

consequently, capital accumulates in the hands of the capital-owning class - an ever-shrinking group of them, at that - and this continues until you, the worker, make so little that you cannot actually show up to work the next day - the loss of social reproduction. reproduction here doesn’t only refer to progeny but also feeding, clothing, housing, etc. yourself and your family, the meeting of the basic necessities that allow you to continue working, including your health - physical and mental. capital eternally strives to reduce what it must subsidize on your behalf as ensuring you can take better care of yourself reduces profits. a capitalist that makes more profit outcompetes and drives out of business all others who choose to make less profit, eventually.

this is also why capitalism has cyclical recessions, a fact predicted in the 1870s and termed crises of capitalism, when capital has accumulated in too few hands, profit can no longer be made, and workers struggle to feed themselves. you’re just noticing Marx’s second law - the law of capital accumulation.

I mean, if you’re going to pretend this is the first election of all time and the last election ever, sure. or you could take history into account and make a longer term plan so that you don’t have to keep making choices about who the “lesser evil” is. if you abdicate any possible collective power, the ratchet will keep turning the dial further and further towards fascism.

feelin mighty happy I voted for Gloria La Riva

uhh he rides trains sometimes? can we ban him from trains? I feel gross taking trains a genocidier rode.

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anything as incorrect in electoral strategy as voting for “99% Hitler”. elections come every 4 years. a loss today need not remain a loss forever. make the dems come to you! force them to bargain with the left instead of the right!

it’s not a strategic vote! it’s an abdication of strategy that pretends only the current election matters! it assumes the present is eternal and that no electoral strategy could ever consider the future. an electoral strategy would admit the left has no real power absent a dedicated bloc and would work on creating one. to do so, you must be willing to sacrifice a few elections, because you must withhold votes and force the democrats to the bargaining table. otherwise you will forever be trapped in a cycle of voting for the “lesser” evil. FPTP does not preclude a long-term electoral strategy.

withhold your vote as a bloc with the rest of the left. force the dems to bargain with you if they ever want to hold office ever again.

until and unless we collectively withhold our votes and so express real and actual power, the left will always remain powerless. repudiate the democrats or be forever doomed to an endless cycle of voting for the “lesser” evil. (no moral calculus can ever frame a genocidier as the lesser evil - he’s so far beyond the moral event horizon that I no longer care to calculate)

false dichotomy

they’re lampooning liberals’ circular reasoning

when hasn’t the USG been supporting a genocide or three?

where’s that evergreen ratchet meme

there are exactly 4 division algebras (over the field of real numbers): the real numbers, the complex numbers, the quaternions, and the octonians. you can’t add any more complex parts because you lost associativity with the octonians. I’m not entirely sure how the first domino leads to the last, though.

it’s been broken for 50 years

China also appears to be improving on this in real time, though official policy still lags behind e.g. Cuba.

idk, I just know that the old instance already have problems with power users and reifying that will make the problem worse.

I think this was always an intended feature (I’ve certainly been hearing about it for years as something people want/devs want to add), in addition to a user tagging system (i.e. users adding tags to their own usernames (e.g. pronoun tags). the main difference, though, was that it was something the poster or mods/admins could add and not something for the userbase at large to vote on. I think making it a voting system allows abuse. like consider a large group of transphobes adding tags to posts in trans comms, for instance.

a trusted user system is it’s own can of worms.