Uriel238 [all pronouns]

This is a much cooler (and much more 3D) bone than the two nodules at each end flat bone.

I get that they flattened it to make it cheaper to stamp, but still. I’m counting at least three peaks at the top.

This is what I assumed. Assuming its non-injurious, the marble will sting a lot more, on the other hand, I’d be under a bowling ball (or holding it.)

If its at a significantly injurious amount of momentum, there is no right answer.

This raises a valid point. Why is the default bone shape an elliptic cylinder with two symmetrical nodules at each end. Even as a kid (in the 1980s) I noticed this was weird, since no bone we take meat off of or have in our body looks like that.

Money absolutely does buy happiness until you’re in middle class and in a fulfilling job. (If you’re rich but in a shit job, it means you might have the option to work less or look for a better position.)

Money does not buy you happiness applies to people who are already rich and are looking for money to fulfill needs way high on the Maslow hierarchy. In fact, much of the tyranny and cruelty within stratified social systems comes from miserable rich people believing they should be happy due to their vast wealth and power yet are not. And our capitalist society has messages everywhere that promise that a new car, (yacht, vacation, lover, religion, etc.) will totally fulfill them and they don’t.

I mean we’ve had three billionaires shoot themselves into space. If that’s not an obvious plead to the gods or the cosmos for a taste of nirvana I don’t know what is.

Curiously, this is a thing that Jesus (and every other divine-ish wise guy) knew about: If we give away our vast fortune and live simply with that experience and wisdom, fulfillment comes. But it means overcoming greed for wealth and power, which is quicker, easier, more seductive.

ETA: For those of us outside the ownership class, though, money improves our base Maslow hierarchy (better housing, HVAC, better water, better food) and gets us out of precarity (or worse, scarcity) which make us desperate and miserable (which accounts completely for elevated crime in poor neighborhoods). Money buys us out of that hell hole. The only thing better than not being there is to also have the perspective of not being there, which can lead to maybe helping others behind you out… Unless you’re Clarence Thomas. (He’s a very special case.)

There will be a lot of prodigal kids raised in conservative families who stay conservative. But then there will be a lot of kids who will be taught conservative values yet find as they grow up that those values don’t include them or friends, and they end up going through an identity crisis.

Adult children of conservative families grow up liberal or even radical left as they do conservative kids. There are enough unhappy childhoods to assure that’s the case.

We’re seeing this play out in Japan, which not only informs their population implosion, but also their significant rise of demographics like herbivore men who realize they’ve been culled out of the salaryman positions and are not going to be able to follow the path their parents set for them, so they stay single, and live on their own terms, even if meagerly. There is also a strong and rising feminist movement that’s emerged from a majority conservative population.

It’s a good era in which to not have children. Expect a lot of forsaken children.

Also expect some coerced birthing programs such as the Leibensborn program (which was also an excuse to recruit young women as sex slaves for the Schutzstaffel ) and the offspring were supported by the state and raised by the single mothers.

This is the program that inspired the Handmaid program in Margaret Atwood’s Gilead, in A Handmaid’s Tale

And J. D. Vance is super thirsty for it, as is countless other Freedom caucus and MAGA Republican officials.

ETA That said, it might be a good time to get sterilized and commit to not having kids. (That doesn’t mean you won’t have chances to parent)

You’re not alone. Karel Čurda turned in Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš for assassinating Reinhard Heydrich (The naziest nazi of all the nazis, also the chief implementer of the Holocaust. Also the only assassination effort implemented by the Allies). Čurda got the reward of one million Reichmarks for betraying his own sabotage team.

Čurda would then be hanged for high treason in 1947.

Diffusion of Responsibility

It’s a Wikipedia day, today.

Mostly because our ability to organize and unify against the wealthy is overwhelmed by the wealthy’s tools to keep us factioned and distrustful of each other. Hence the necessity of the fascist enemy within rhetoric.

The problem is, we humans are simple emotional beings who are really credulous when it comes to being told stuff we want to hear, and the wealthy have crafted messaging catering to this bias and wishful thinking (hence “you are the chosen people and have to massacre all the others who are spiritual flesh-eating zombies”)

That sounds way cooler to the lumpen-proletariat than “you’re just another commoner, but if we work together we can topple the people who hoard all the stuff and make a fun themepark for everyone!”

The eventual outcome of this sort of thing is more widespread use of steganographic data storage schemes. We already have plenty, such as ones that make your data look like unused LTS blocks of garbage and code blocks with multiple hidden partitions, so that you can open one block showing pedestrian data and the court unable to prove there are other hidden blocks.

These are technologies that already exist for those people who are really interested preserving their renegade data.

But if I own a business and I don’t want my rivals reading my accounting, and open crypto is illegal, I may go stegan whether or not I have secret slush funds.

It sounds like you haven’t observed the conversation.

And it’s not the tech companes so much as the Linux community who have pushed for e2e.

Considering how many abuses (pretty clear violations of the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States) have been carved out by SCOTUS during mob investigations and the International War on Terror, no, the people of the US want secure communication. The law enforcement state wants back doors and keep telling tech folk to nerd harder to make back doors not already known to industrial spies, enthusiast hackers and foreign agents.

You’re asking for three perpendicular lines on a plane. You’re asking for a mathematical impossibility.

And remember industrial spies includes the subsets of industries local and foreign, and political spies behind specific ideologies who do not like you and are against specifically your own personhood.

Look at who owns the copyrights. It’s not Mark Knopfler, it’s Sony.

Copyright is entirely IP and does not serve its original function (according to the Constitution of the United States), To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts rather inhibits innovation by unlicensed actors.

Fuck copyright. Fuck patents. Fuck IP.

The comic appears to be asking why the Rebel Alliance is fighting an autocratic regime with words rather than guns, and the answer is, it’s a different segment in the timeline.

A better satire would be when Hydra ( ALL HAIL HYDRA ) took over SHIELD. That is essentially what happened. Only Hydra agents are instilled with a cartoony compulsion to out themselves, while the MAGAs often don’t realize they are part of the movement, identifying with esoteric subfactions of the movement which feel different but are still loyal and still would kill liberals and immigrants if they had half the chance.

And part of the failing of SHIELD (and the Avengers) is they protect an untennable status quo that allows for people by the billions to do without resources. In the MCU, only the people who can actually afford Disneyland vacations matter. The homeless, destitute and displaced refugees do not.

It was the petit bourgeoisie that started the French Revolution after the Estates General of 1789 and the commoners followed them. I was basing the Rebel Alliance after them, hinted at since among the promoted soldiers in Rebel Alliance command were not-just-a-few nobles.

ETA: Of course the people should, if they can on their own, seize the means of production and overthrow the ownership class. WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS! 💣

A couple of points:

1) The Alliance formed after a good chunk of the Galactic Empire was feeling the pressure of being imperial rather than republic. Granted, the republic was corrupt like Chicago during Prohibition, but while it existed many of the public departments were still actively serving their role (more or less).

2) The Alliance was not formed from the proletariat, but the noble houses and companies pushed out (who fell out of favor) when the empire rose. Their plan was to restore the republic system that recognized their wealth and political power. And there might have been a period like this comic when Imperial interests were willfully lying to opposition parties and interests to prolong the time before they got serious and formed a military.

3) It was atrocities like Alderaan that really fueled recruitment into the Alliance. Every young person who had family lost in the Alderaan event at least considered joining up, and if they were sympathetic to the Alliance (or had no loyalty to the Empire) were inclined to do so even if their prior ambitions were apolitical, e.g. art or medicine or civil engineering or whatever. ALSO Alderaan was only the most recent atrocity committed by the Empire in the name of enforcing its political power. And (as per long-studied Counter Insurgency) every act of brutality by tyranny draws more of the population into the resistance. The Alliance was just the most popular and best supported movement.

4) NOTE: This is speculation based on circumstances, much like the Endor Holocaust (The EH is implied by the ROTJ events but was later rectconned out via additional canon): The final point of the Death Star is not merely to be a planet-destroying superweapon but a mining tool to crack open (lifeless or evacuated) planets to get to interior precious minerals. While its success as such a tool might be uncertain, had it not been destroyed, the hope by its crew, engineers and support staff was that the superlaser would not often be used as a military device (optimally never again!) but could still be used in the process of gathering necessary resources.

Recently Google decided to enforce its storage limits, which is how I discovered most of my Google cloud storage was backed up photos I never once asked Google to back up. It was… tedious getting them deleted, and I had to desync my phone lest it also delete my device’s gallery as well.

It all seemed to be a ploy to force me to buy more cloud storage space. Thank you, no.

The Democratic Party needs to go hard into socialized services or just pack up. Right now it looks complicit in the GOP coup d’etat.

The same, incidentally is true for the Labor party in UK, and for the other neoliberal parties all throughout Europe. Serve the people for realsies this time, or pack up as the Neville Chamberlain party.

Our asses touched the same seat. We are brothers in revolution against the autocracy! ☭💣

Gave it a touch up.

Sadly, during DADT, the rate of discharges due to outing was at a higher rate than before DADT.

In the US military, DEI is not merely about readiness, but about recruitment and retention as well. Seriously, we counter-recruiters already have enough material to illustrate how joining up is a Really Bad Idea.™

For a while it was Leningrad.