Libra00

The problem is that there are also lighter elements (like astatine) that decay so fast we can’t make enough at one time to even know what it looks like. Randall Munroe of XKCD gave a google talk where he covered the problems you would have if you tried to assemble all of the elements, and the problems really maximize around the time of astatine, which he described as the element which maximizes the amount of paperwork you’d have to do. The explosion of heat and radiation from a chunk of astatine would be too large to sweep under the rug as a little woopsie, but not large enough to wipe out your whole neighborhood or city so that there would be no one left to submit paperwork to.

I have to assume he’s working backwards, because if he’d gotten to Astatine we’d know.

LOL, Chuck Schumer is really fucking ‘combatting’ the fascist takeover by appeasing and being complicit with it.

I keep seeing Democrats crying about how little power they have and how much their constituents are demanding that they do something and there’s just nothing they can do. But there is. In fact I’ve put together a short list, and I even numbered each step so you can refer back to it more easily later.

1. Resist. Every. Step. Boot Chuck Schumer out on his ass for voting for the funding bill. Doesn’t matter whether they needed his vote or not, collaborating with fascism = fascism. Make an example of him. Do not cross that line. Not one single Democrat vote on any Republican bill that harms people, tears them from their homes, removes their rights, or otherwise denies them the things they need to live. No exceptions. No compromise. Yeah, maybe they have all the power now, but one day soon that won’t be the case and they will need you and they will know that you mean business and aren’t afraid to spoke their wheels if they don’t fucking behave.
2. Tell every single American exactly what it is they’re doing and what the consequences will be. And I don’t mean ramble on about how they’re hurting America, I mean in specific detail. Build a website that is a point-by-point list of all the shit they’re doing in simple terms and with data to the extent that it’s possible, and make sure it’s accessible and easy to use instead of just an excel spreadsheet or some shit. Talk about it every time a camera is put in your face. Talk about nothing else in fact. You say you have no power so you can’t advance your own agenda, work on undermining theirs at every turn.
3. For the love of Christ can you please talk to the goddamned working class again? You know, the ones who your unwavering base before you walked back support for wage increases and undermined unions and weakened labor laws in the name of proto-fascist appeasement? Yeah, winning elections is important and that takes a lot of money, but all the money in the world ain’t gonna do you a damned bit of good when the working class goes fully right-wing because they at least talk a good game about it even if their policies are incoherent.
4. Shut your whiny fucking mouth about what a terrible burden you bear. You signed up for this job, if you can’t take the pressure and you can’t shut up, give up the seat to someone who can. I will hear not one more word of this ‘Well I spoke truth to power!’ nonsense. No the fuck you did not, you whimpered to power (your constituents) and kowtowed to authority and your little fucking hand-signs mean precisely not one goddamned thing. To misconstrue the one for the other is to fundamentally misunderstand what power even is and how fucking privileged you are.
5. And while we’re on the subject of what you’re doing with your mouth, it’s long past time to pull that oligarch’s dick out it and take a look around you. There is more important shit in this world than whether or not you have enough money in your campaign fund. People are dying and you’re over here all ‘Won’t someone please think of the economy?!’ (read: ‘my/my rich donors’ stock portfolios’)

You want my money? Then it’s long past time to learn that you work for a living and do your fucking job.

I mean they’re not unique in that, there’s that Princeton study that came out a few years ago that shows Congress has a flat 30% chance of passing a law regardless of whether public opinion likes or hates it, but a much higher chance to pass laws when the wealthy want it.

Oh I know, I was being sarcastic, doing the typical redneck ‘lol we shootin’ ‘em fer fun, what’s the problem?!’ type thing.

Hogs are big business here in Texas, where you can pay a couple thousand bucks to shoot them with a machine gun from a helicopter all day, so… what’s the problem? :P

Yeah, that’s definitely a bigger trick than the Keyser Soze thing.

I keep hearing that it’s possible to do this on lemme, but I’m new and haven’t figured out how yet.

Iono, it’s kinda neat, but it makes me kinda nervous and claustrophobic too. It’s a borderline liminal space, it feels hollow and empty and samey even though there’s a person in there.

That’s what we call the dead-cat bounce. The further and faster a stock price falls, the more people think it will go back up and buy in at the new low price, thus at some point there is a short-lived reversal of the decline before it continues as it was. Although much of Tesla’s value recently was from a big jump in November (getting a fancy new oval-shaped office will do that for you), so this is likely as much a correction of that overreaction as it is some protest of or loss of faith in Musk.

Oh shit, I didn’t even realize. Yeah, I’d never heard of them, so that was definitely mobile autocorrect. My bad.

The first one is over. One of the founding fathers said when asked what they had made, ‘A republic, if you can keep it.’ We couldn’t. We didn’t. It’s gone, and has been for a long time (most of my life at least, and I grew up in the 70s). The words and ghosts of dead men will not win it back for you, though with luck they may inspire enough people to work together to get it back for themselves. The tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants they said, and it’s been withering for a good long while now.

This is virtue signaling. None of these bills will ever leave committee much less get voted on or pass, but that’s by design. These Republican congresspeople take stupid ideas, stuff they think he will like, or even just verbal diarrhea from Trump himself, crank the craziness up to 110%, and turn into bill form in the vain and desperate hope that senpai Trump will notice them when it hits the news and grace them with a little bit of that presidential electoral butter to smooth things out when it comes time for reelection.

Man, this one really speaks to me. I see a blue person with one eye and gnashed teeth toward the bottom curled up into a ball to ward off an angry crowd in red that is rioting and setting stuff on fire. But most ominously I see a single angry-red person in the bottom right, isolated from the rest but shouting along with them, perhaps directing them or encouraging them to greater heights of violence. But the poor blue person was swept up in this, maybe even targeted by it, and doesn’t want any part of it; they just want to go home. But also I’m American and one of those being indirectly targeted by the clusterfuck that is our government right now, so maybe I’m just primed to see this shit spiraling out of control.

Last I checked we are the people, you know, the ones the government is supposed to be of, by, and for?

…yes, I am aware that a video game and a band are different things that both exist, but that doesn’t help me have heard of them before I made that comment.

For how long? Cause a couple weeks or whatever isn’t going to cut it, it’s a process that can take months or years.

I would argue that therapy teaches everyone to deal with their emotions and since men have emotions too, therapy is for both. It’s just starting on the back foot with men because we’re taught depending to some extent on age and culture to push them down, bottle them up, and pretend they don’t exist. Some people are better or worse suited for therapy, it is more successful with some people than others, but as a man who would not be alive today if not for therapy, I openly scoff at the idea that therapy is not ‘geared toward men.’ Learning how to put your expressions and emotions into words is a big part of the process, because we think so much in language that having words for the things we feel is really important to recognizing, acknowledging, and addressing those feelings.

You’re right, there is no magic ‘press button, receive well-adjusted and chemically balanced human being’ button, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep trying. Therapy is a process, especially with medication, psychoactive medication is notoriously fucky with a long adaptation phase and weird side effects, some of which stick around and some of which don’t after a few weeks. A couple weeks of therapy and medication isn’t going to cure anything, give them the time they need to work toward your goal, because the alternative is a deep, dark hole you don’t want to go down. Take it from someone who’s been there, and who is only here now, 30 years later, because someone convinced me to stick with the process.

Not even with Musk’s money. No wait, that’s not true, I’d have someone paint Musk’s face on a dummy, put it in the driver’s seat, and autopilot that shit into a landfill somewhere with as many cameras filming it as I could get on short notice.