This actually is the case. See Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming by Andreas Malm. I saw this argument featured in a video by “Our Changing Climate” that I can’t seem to locate now. But I believe this book was the main source for the video. Coal never actually dropped in price during the industrial revolution. The new tech was just used to expand production. And it makes sense when you consider that for these industrialists, labor and equipment costs were probably a much bigger part of their budget than the bill from their coal supplier. Even today, with all our automation, labor remains the biggest expense of most businesses. And it’s not like they just ran out of water mill capacity. They were still building dams in the UK well into the twentieth century. And ultimately, cheap urban labor combined with expensive coal power beat out expensive rural labor combined with cheap water power.

Exactly. Supermarkets themselves represented a vast shift of work from the grocers to the customers. First they got us to collect our own orders. Then they figured out how to get us to run the check out!

Did you know that during the 18th and 19th century industrial revolution in Britain, coal never became cheaper than water power? All those new steam engines were used to make deeper mines more viable and to increase production. But water power remained cheaper throughout. But water power came with a downside. Available water power tended to be located in rural areas. The smaller population in these small towns consequently had a lot of labor bargaining power. Industrialists instead wanted access to the labor markets of the major cities, cities brimming over with new urban poor desperate for any scrap of work they could get. Cheaper labor overcame cheaper power. A coal plant could be put anywhere, while a water mill could only be positioned on high-flowing streams.

Renewables are cheaper, but we’ve been here before. There’s more to this than just energy cost.

Wait til you learn how grocery stores used to be physically arranged…

We can do better than that if we want to abuse a time machine to forge Lovecraftian horror!

I would use my time machine to steal Neil Armstrong’s corpse from his funeral and then dump it right at the landing site of Apollo 11. First thing Neil sees when he hops onto the lunar surface? His own aged corpse.

One head canon I like:

This actually is a good timeline. And our timeline actually has been heavily altered by time travelers! People have actually tried and succeeded at changing the past.

But time travel isn’t like in movies. This isn’t one of those stories where you go back, change something, and then you come back and everything is a little different. No. In this version of time travel, we get maximum butterfly effect. Going years into the past doesn’t just alter history, it completely rewrites it. Go back a hundred years and hang out on a random spot in Antarctica for five minutes, never interacting with another living being? Your presence for that short time will be enough to subtly alter air flows, which will butterfly up to entirely different storms forming in different times and places. Which means that almost everyone born in the last 100 years simply never existed. An entirely new populace is born. No matter how trivial a change you make, any travel beyond a certain length of time into the past results in a complete historical reset.

This is fundamentally not something you can fine-tune. It’s not physically possible to go into the past and make a tiny alteration. Every trip is an entirely new spin on the historical roulette wheel. Every trip completely remakes the world.

As such, there’s only one practical application of time travel - preventing world-shattering disasters. For example, you could use it to undue a nuclear war. Going back to prevent this apocalypse will result in erasing everyone currently alive, but almost everyone is already dead, so little consequence. Same thing for species-destroying plagues, giant asteroid impacts, etc. Because every trip is a historical reset, it’s only useful for scenarios where you’re content on just wiping all current people from existence. Even the Holocaust doesn’t come remotely close to the level of calamity necessary to justify time travel.

Depends on what units you’re referring to.

Congrats!

And be careful with that HRT doc. Remember, poor care is the rule, not the exception, of trans medicine. Take everything that your doc says with a grain of salt, trust but verify.

For example, NEVER simply trust your doctor when they say “your levels are fine.” There are plenty of doctors out there that don’t actually respect your identity or transition. They don’t want to help you achieve the best results possible. They just view you as a deranged male, and they’ll humor your and try to prescribe you the minimum dose to prevent you from self-harm. That’s the only value they see in HRT; they don’t actually see having a good transition outcome as something worth pushing for. You and their goal may not be the same. Your levels can be fine for the doctor’s goal while completely inappropriate for your goal. Do not assume you and your doctor want the same thing.

DO NOT simply trust the doctor when they say “your levels are fine.” Demand to see the actual numbers yourself. Your E levels should be testing at trough in the 200-300 range.

But that is the point of the post. The discussion was “why are some trans women defensive of men?” And you yourself just answered it. For people who had to live a long period of their lives as male, hearing someone say, without nuance, “all men are terrible”? Well you just declared that it doesn’t matter what’s in someone’s heart. Their actions don’t matter. They’re a terrible person simply for their gender. And that means, if you really believe that, for virtually any trans woman, there was a time in their life you would have considered them terrible. They were outwardly presenting as male; their inner heart is irrelevant. They “were men.” Men are bad. Therefore, they were bad.

When you leave no room for nuance and individual character you end up also including trans womens’ pasts in your definition of “terrible men.”

Only straight cis men benefit from the patriarchy that’s why gay men get it, they’ve suffered the backlash.

Gay men absolutely benefit from the patriarchy. Gay male couples on average earn substantially more than the average straight couple, while lesbian couples make substantially less than the average straight couple.

Do gay men benefit in all the same ways as straight men? No. But they do benefit.

No one is born a cop.

I assume you don’t. But many of the people who say things like “all men are terrible” include trans women in their definition of “men.” Also, trans people certainly understand getting scapegoated for your gender or apparent gender for reasons completely beyond your control.

I’m a trans woman. I identify as a woman. I’ve dealt with my share of terrible men. But for the first part of my life I wasn’t out and I did present as male. And when people said, “all men or terrible,” they didn’t know what was in my heart. They could go only by my outward appearance. That “all men” included me. And until you came out, when a woman looked across a crowd and said, “all men or terrible,” she included you as well.

“Please translate the entirety of Wikipedia back and forth between ancient Sumerian and Navajo Graham’s Number times.”

Are you familiar with the concept of cultural Judaism? Jewish is unique in describing a religion, an ethnicity, and a cultural group. Someone can be raised in Jewish faith and culture, walk away from the religious aspect, but still retain much of the culture. Someone like Einstein was culturally Jewish. He was open about and identified with his heritage, but he was an atheist in terms of belief.

I would say you’re culturally gay. You had your most formative years in the gay community. You may no longer meet the definition of ‘gay’ as an orientation, but you’re still culturally gay. If you spend long enough time in a community, you can retain cultural attachments to that community even if you no longer meet the defining central feature uniting that community.

To maximize this effect, sleep floating in a pool of mercury with a chain mail blanket atop.

I use 31g 5/16" long needles. Docs usually prescribe hormones as intramuscular injections, but they work just as well as subcutaneous injections. These little guys here. Unless you’re injecting something really thick and viscous like castor oil, injecting with anything else is just an exercise in needless masochism.

For needle anxiety, there are two things you could try. First, an autoinjector can help. These are basically little spring loaded devices that turn your regular syringe into something more like an epipen, where it just quickly forces the needle in before you can even feel it. Plus it creates a bit of disconnect which can help. Second, try an ice pack! It’s such a simple thing, but it helps me immensely with pain. Just a few ice cubes in a plastic bag, numb the injection site immediately before injection.

Also, if you want to practice injections to try and get passed your anxiety, there’s a way to do it without using your actual E vials. You can order bacteriostatic water. This is literally just sterilized water with a little bit of preservative in it. It has no active ingredients. It’s usually used for reconstituting dried peptides, but it would work just as well for injection practice.

I had SRS. Full orchiectomy/penetctomy/vaginoplasty/vulvaplasty.

I’ve never felt any phantom sensations. If anything, I sometimes felt the opposite, like a phantom vag before I got surgery. But afterwards? Nothing. The only similar effect was a bit of neural remapping that took a few days. Your body has an internal 3D representation of its own shape. That’s why if something touches your skin somewhere on your body, you can instantly know where it is. SRS is basically genital origami. Things get cut, shifted, repositioned, and sewn back together. Individual bits of tissue and nerves end up in radically different locations than pre-surgery. And this requires a bit of spacial neural remapping. For example, in the technique that was used on me, a clitoris is formed from the head of the penis. Initially when I felt it, there was incongruity. My eyes could see that I was touching something right on the surface of my body. However, the spatial awareness part of my brain was saying, “this nerve correlates to a location several inches outside the main body.” This mismatch was quite uncanny. However, thankfully it only lasted a few days. After a few days the body learns the new locations of all the relocated nerves and the uncanny sensation disappeared. I’ve never had anything that could be described as a phantom penis sensation. And I had SRS back in 2013.

I think Martin Ward may have him beat on crazy.

https://www.theprinceofpeace.net/

That’s literally his campaign website. His platform consists of a bizarre mix of mostly right wing and a few left wing policy planks. He has outlines a manic vision of building a planet-scale maglev train network built with trains 100’ wide. And his website is filled with plans to constitutionally outlaw every petty grievance he’s ever experienced.

What’s this gender test?