Maoo [none/use name]

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • Ice is made up of water molecules. Very tiny things.

    When water molecules move around really fast, that’s the exact same as them being hot. They are steam when they move around a lot, and steam is hot - and a gas. Steam might even be so hot it hurts - that’s because they’re smashing into the molecules in your body and making them move around too even when they shouldn’t and could damage you. Your body senses this and sends you pain signals so that you know to move away from the steam.

    Water molecules can also stick together. With steam, the molecules move so much that they’re just bouncing around all over the place and the stickiness doesn’t really matter. If two water molecules stick together in steam, other ones are likely to ram into them and break them up This is why steam billows out in all directions. When water molecules in steam cool down, as in slow down, their stickiness to each other becomes a more important factor than before. The molecules still move around, just less than before. They interact with one another, keeping themselves tied together in the same general area but still moving a lot. This is why water settles into one place in a glass and why you can pour it as a room temperature liquid.

    When water molecules get even cooler, the stickiness starts to matter even more. The molecules aren’t bouncing off each other much anymore, they’re just stuck together. This is what a solid is and ice is a solid.

    Now, I’ve been saying stickiness, but with how small water molecules are, and what they’re made of, it’s actually very specific properties of the molecules that make them interact to “stick” together, with the strongest one being charge polarity. But that’s for a difference explanation!

    Finally: so, for ice to melt, you need to get its molecules moving again. One way to get them moving is to expose them to a hot material, i.e. one that’s moving around a lot. Put your ice cube on a room temperature table and it will slowly melt because the molecules in the air and table are moving along so much that if the water molecules were doing the same they’d be in “liquid mode”. Another way is to add energy to the system in the form of radiation, which induces movement within the molecules and, therefore, between them since they’re in close proximity. The reason it makes them move is complicated and is literally quantum mechanics so I’ll also leave that for a different explanation.





  • No, the problem with housing is that it is a financialized commodity that is engineered to go up in price faster than wages because it’s an investment. Not just for individuals, but for real estate companies and banks that gamble with the loans. Zoning laws are a symptom of this, but even if you basically get rid of them (as happens in various places in Texas), the same trend applies.

    Those construction companies (really, real estate companies) all get big loans to build those apartments and they do so with an expectation of per-unit profits, often with unrealistic targets unless property values increase even more, and often targeting richer people. When they fail to rent enough at that price point, rather than decreasing rents (which would spook their lenders), they just leave units vacant until they can hit that price point. There are half-empty “luxury apartment” buildings dotting every major city due to this.

    The most anyone can point to for the impact of zoning is that prices to rent tend to go up slightly slower.

    Your local government is also likely funded by property taxes that are pegged to property values, which is why they never do anything sufficient to handle this issue.


  • They have too many downsides. Most of them aren’t actually reusing containers because they’re usually too small and they’re coated with toxic materials that prevent mold and pests from living in them. They look large enough at first, but this is before you have to install a floor and walls and a ceiling with insulation all around and plumbing and electrical, etc. In addition, if you want to add windows by cutting into the sides, you’ve just undermined the structural integrity of the thing, as it’s premised on being exactly that (stackable) box. So then you have to reinforce the crap out of it if you want windows.

    Putting all of that together, to safely put together a reasonably livable container home, you’re basically just using it as an aesthetic piece, as you’ve had to buy the shell new and then spend the rest of your budget trying to make it actually work as a home. It’s cheaper and better to build a small home with commodity materials unless you really, really want that aesthetic.






  • It’s your body, you can change it how you can and should feel good about that so long as it isn’t causing you greater harm (the latter would be how I’d categorize an ED, for example). Same goes for someone that wants to gain weight or muscle or change body “types”, like going from big a muscular to smaller or vice versa, etc. Society itself is toxic about our bodies and I’m sorry it (and your father) impacted you negatively.

    I’ll touch on your fears:

    • You might not succeed but that’s okay. It’s not easy to change our bodies! They’re resistant to change. Also things can happen that prevent whatever strategy a person wants to take. Maybe you decide to do a particular exercise bc every day but then get injured, for example. This is all okay. It’s okay to qualify your goal, to work towards it but be okay if everything doesn’t go according to plan on your ideal timeline.

    • People have different metabolisms so it’s hard to generalize about what maintaining a body situation looks like, but generally speaking if your methodology is a concrete and healthy lifestyle change then maintenance is just continuing to do the same thing. I’ll give a simple example: eating more veggies (not extreme, just more!) is a surefire way to cut calories in a healthy way and over time your body will start to crave them and your mind will start to expect more of them in your meals. This is a sustainable habit and you eventually won’t have to think about it deliberately, let alone worry.

    • It’s okay to yo-yo, our bodies do this with the seasons and as we live life. Maybe you get an injury and have to be sedentary for a few months and gain a few pounds. No biggie. Maybe some initial weight loss was water weight and a few salty meals make you “gain” it back. Maybe you have a tough few weeks and breaking your diet helped you cope. None of these things are abnormal or unacceptable. The important thing is to forgive yourself (there’s nothing to forgive!) and feel okay to resume the new habits if you want to. Most people have to make repeat attempts at changing a habit.

    • You won’t lose your empathy or knowledge and suddenly become body-shaming, no need to worry about this. If your changes are healthy (better food and exercise) you’ll probably just have more energy and feel a bit better overall (at least from endorphins from exercising).

    • Yeah other people complimenting your “new looks” is gonna happen and be both annoying and affirming. There’s definitely an emotional contradiction there! I don’t really have advice for that, it’s gonna be confusing.

    • You can definitely still eat tasty food. This will happen in two ways: (1) you should adopt a diet that isn’t about cutting out all of the food you like. If the food is caloric, just have less of it and have a lighter (veggie heavy) meal later to offset. (2) As you find new meals as part of your diet, you’ll start to crave those instead. Some of your previous favorites might even start to feel unappealing as your tastes habituate.

    • More people being attracted to you might happen. Being perceived can suck or at least bring up conflicting feelings.






  • Stripping felons of the right to vote was/is a part of Jim Crow, wherein blackness was systematically criminalized, usually through forced poverty and then a criminalization of poverty (e.g. petty theft for survival). Similar to a poll tax, the goal was to prevent black people from having a political voice, including but not limited to electoral. This is why these laws are mostly in former slave states. They were a reaction to liberation. These anti-black policies also applied to anyone else that would be systematically marginalized, serving as a reusable tool for the ruling class. Make poverty itself a deep pit of disenfranchisement and all you need to do is make your targeted group poor enough. Keeping the poor and precarious from organizing politically is also a goal unto itself for the ruling class, though we shouldn’t get overly invested in the idea that voting would ever be enough to actually properly contradict the ruling class itself.

    The criminal “justice” system is not about reform, certainly not in the US. Every aspect of it makes it harder to reintegrate into society afterwards, usually with your record following you well into your life after leaving the prison. Getting a job, finding housing, applying for benefits, all of these will be seriously hampered by being convicted of a crime and serving time. Instead, the criminal system is designed, again, to marginalize. Take the people that are a threat to the perceived interests of business owners and isolate and harm them, also attempting to create the appearance of a deterrent so that others don’t want to threaten private property interests. This impetus poisons the entire system even when it deals with crimes that are not directly crimes of poverty or capitalist alienation (though the societies and pain constructed by the ruling class are certainly their fault).

    Please note, however, that the fact that so many people are disenfranchised already shows us that the ruling class isn’t going to let folks vote them out or otherwise engage in the political policies necessary to address injustice. They won’t let us solve the climate crisis or systemic unemployment or treating housing as an investment. The overt disenfranchisement is a blatant example of how they tip the scales in their favor, but it is far from the only one; most forms of disenfranchisement are so deeply ingrained that few people notice them as such. Poor or biased schooling so that the public will accept propaganda narratives. The maintenance of an economic underclass stripped of rights (such as undocumented immigrants). A requirement to work so many hours that you cannot rapidly gain political consciousness. A media apparatus wholly owned by the oppressor class and obediently taking orders from it on what to focus on, which reporters to hire and fire. The elimination of public squares and meeting places by which to organize. The cooption of academia through a variety of means, ensuring that their work suits the goals of the ruling class or is at least stripped of its capacity to organize against them. The limiting of the concept of political action to voting and going to cop-sanctioned protests. Etc etc.

    The way out of this is to organize directly with one another, to use our organizations to (further) identify the material root causes of injustice, and to work with more than just the tools offered to us by those who already have power.


  • Well Ukraine itself is definitely losing. They will probably lose territory to Poland as well if this keeps up and they have sold their country out to capitalists, mostly Americans. Loans, land, industries, etc all to pay for “their” war effort. The common Ukrainian is who suffers the most under this. They will be more exploited (paid less for the value of their labor), see more social programs dismantled, and go into a serious recession/depression that may not lift for decades.

    Russia is doing okay. The US is pulling Europe more into its orbit (making them pay more for less from the US while losing a lot of their industry), which is a loss for Russia, but that was the remand endgame of the US anyways. What was surprising, at least to some, was the extent to which Russia could survive and even thrive when subjected to the most significant financial weapons the West has. Overall their economy is certainly in a better place now and a chunk of Ukraine will be theirs and the other chunk will be weak. This is a victory for the ruling class of Russia and its overall geopolitical self-interest.

    The US ruling class is making out like bandits as usual, funding its weapons industry, basically a cash injection for the owner class and the only thing the US ever reliably does (threaten its chosen enemies with destruction).