woodenghost [comrade/them]

Cool! I hope to befriend some crows someday.

That’s cool, that he comes towards you. Does he already know you? Because last time I tried to feed unknown crows and they noticed me looking at them for two seconds, they got scared, even though I was like 10 meters away and other people had been passing closer than me. You could almost see a small exclamation mark above their head before they flew off. I still left some food and they came back to it, once I was further away.

Ah, that makes sense, thanks for taking the time!

And just to come full circle:

Baalbek, named after Baal, is an ancient city in the Beqaa plane in Lebanon. It was known as the bread basket of the Roman empire. The Romans build the largest temples outside of Rome there and allowed worship of Baal to continue in the large entrance building in front of the Jupiter temple. The temples stood in good condition for centuries and are now under threat by IDF bombing, which has already come as close as 500 meters, while every building in the city has been declared a target and it’s people ordered to evacuate.

Good effort comment, thanks! Are you sure about merit based evaluation for MJ? Wouldn’t people just strategically exaggerate their grades?

MJ encourages honest evaluation because exaggerating grades can backfire if too many others don’t follow suit.

I guess I don’t quite understand this point. Why wouldn’t everyone exaggerate grades?

Dolphin liberals would just tell all the dolphins to give dolphin Harris an excellent grade, insisting she was excellent in comparison to dolphin Trump. (Sorry to break out of the thought experiment.) So this:

This can help identify when all candidates are weak

wouldn’t happen when all the dolphins try to game the system. Did I misunderstand?

It’s just that normal gravity on earth feels exactly like being in an accelerating elevator in space. So you can’t tell the difference from the inside. Like in the elevator you can ask them, whether you’re still on earth or accelerating in space. Einstein used this thought experiment to develop the general theory of relativity.

Basically Einstein thinking about that weird feeling you get in your gut when an elevator starts upwards led to him concluding that mass bends spacetime making light from distant stars go in curves around the sun, which was confirmed during the next available solar eclipse.

Yes and also, nuclear power is really expensive. No one would ever invest in it without state help. No one insures it. The cost per watt is way to high and set to rise further with depleting uranium deposits. And much much higher, if it was mined in a slightly less destructive and exploitive way. Higher still if security precautions were forced to be up to date. Incredibly high, if waste was properly taken care of and the costs included in the calculation.

Nuclear power was never profitable. The only reason it ever gets founded is because governments are motivated by the urge to amass more and more deadly nuclear weapons. Or keep that option open. Or to feed the industrial complex that grew around that.

It’s the most roundaboud, stupid and primitive way to go about creating electricity to collect rare ultra poisonous, slightly warm rocks, throw enough of them into water until it boils and push that through something similar to a steam engine. All the technology around it is just to keep the rocks from poisoning us too quickly.

Compare that to all the genuine novel research that goes into solar and batteries. The advanced materials like complex semi conductor alloys. The clever techniques using the latest in quantum and nano technology. How they squeeze every bit of efficiency out of remotely collecting energy from the nuclear fusion in the sun, that’s already going on for free and at a save distance.

Nuclear energy on earth is superfluous, dangerous and expensive and every month new advancements are made in solar and battery and other genuinely green technologies, that make them even better and cheaper and widen the gap even more. And of course China is investing heavily in both solar and battery research.

I just checked, Polaris is about ten times younger than sharks. The other two stars of its ternary star system are older, but not visible to the naked eye, so early sharks would not have been able to use them for purposes of navigation.

Would you say you inherited some of his ‘working with one’s hands’ sensibility?

Maybe I did to some degree, but I rarely practiced it. Went to university and only did some small projects at home. Maybe I’ll practice more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL_X7GelX5Q

Yes, working together can feel so good if no one steals what you make as profit.

Thank you! It’s really awesome of you to make all these quality posts all the time and share these cool comics.

My grandfather, a machinist, build their house in his early twenties with his own hands. It was in a kind of cooperative, where you could pay in party by working on building sites to help others build their houses. So, even though he had help from others in the coop, he really effectively build identical houses multiple times. He learned as he went and did everything except electrical work, even the heating and plumbing. My grandparents raised five kids in this house. It really was his proudest accomplishment and near the end, he told the story again and again, almost every time I saw him and I made sure to listen.

The reason is that all those other things create actual value, thus cutting into profits of capitalists if publicly funded. If you’re a capitalist state that wants to steal massive amounts of wealth from the people and redistribute them to the rich by funding an Industry, then war really is the industry you want because it only destroys value. For example, if you cancelled the Pentagons budget and funded centrally planned healthcare instead, no private healthcare provider could compete. It would completely close down a huge market. Same with education, infrastructure, etc. War doesn’t have this problem of closing down a market, but has the advantage of opening up new markets (resources, cheap labour, more consumers, even rebuilding after the war, etc.) via imperialism.

Edit: In short, imperialism is in part a reaction to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and offers an opportunity to renew primitive accumulation.

Yes! Finally someone else who is amazed by this! It’s crazy to think, that magnetism can be understood as nothing more than a relativistic phenomenon.

Really? The one in the entrance hall or the one in the whale exhibit?

This would work inverted as well: “Yeah, I’m running a quick vibe check on the data to find out where the noise is coming from.”