#just for scale: a trillion is ONE MILLION MILLIONS

[nasa]

Astronomers used three of NASA's Great Observatories to capture this multiwavelength image showing galaxy cluster IDCS J1426.5+3508. It includes X-rays recorded by the Chandra X-ray Observatory in blue, visible light observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in green, and infrared light from the Spitzer Space Telescope in red. This rare galaxy cluster has important implications for understanding how these megastructures formed and evolved early in the universe.

How Astronomers Time Travel

Let’s add another item to your travel bucket list: the early universe! You don’t need the type of time machine you see in sci-fi movies, and you don’t have to worry about getting trapped in the past. You don’t even need to leave the comfort of your home! All you need is a powerful space-based telescope.

But let’s start small and work our way up to the farthest reaches of space. We’ll explain how it all works along the way.

This animation illustrates how fast light travels between Earth and the Moon. The farther light has to travel, the more noticeable its speed limit becomes.

The speed of light is superfast, but it isn’t infinite. It travels at about 186,000 miles (300 million meters) per second. That means that it takes time for the light from any object to reach our eyes. The farther it is, the more time it takes.

You can see nearby things basically in real time because the light travel time isn’t long enough to make a difference. Even if an object is 100 miles (161 kilometers) away, it takes just 0.0005 seconds for light to travel that far. But on astronomical scales, the effects become noticeable.

This infographic shows how long it takes light to travel to different planets in our solar system.

Within our solar system, light’s speed limit means it can take a while to communicate back and forth between spacecraft and ground stations on Earth. We see the Moon, Sun, and planets as they were slightly in the past, but it's not usually far enough back to be scientifically interesting.

As we peer farther out into our galaxy, we use light-years to talk about distances. Smaller units like miles or kilometers would be too overwhelming and we’d lose a sense of their meaning. One light-year – the distance light travels in a year – is nearly 6 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers). And that’s just a tiny baby step into the cosmos.

The Sun’s closest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years away. That means we see it as it was about four years ago. Betelgeuse, a more distant (and more volatile) stellar neighbor, is around 700 light-years away. Because of light’s lag time, astronomers don’t know for sure whether this supergiant star is still there! It may have already blasted itself apart in a supernova explosion – but it probably has another 10,000 years or more to go.

What looks much like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals previously obscured areas of star birth.

The Carina Nebula clocks in at 7,500 light-years away, which means the light we receive from it today began its journey about 3,000 years before the pyramids of Giza in Egypt were built! Many new stars there have undoubtedly been born by now, but their light may not reach Earth for thousands of years.

An artist’s concept of our Milky Way galaxy, with rough locations for the Sun and Carina nebula marked.

If we zoom way out, you can see that 7,500 light-years away is still pretty much within our neighborhood. Let’s look further back in time…

This stunning image by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy NGC 5643. Looking this good isn’t easy; 30 different exposures, for a total of nine hours of observation time, together with Hubble’s high resolution and clarity, were needed to produce an image of such exquisite detail and beauty.

Peering outside our Milky Way galaxy transports us much further into the past. The Andromeda galaxy, our nearest large galactic neighbor, is about 2.5 million light-years away. And that’s still pretty close, as far as the universe goes. The image above shows the spiral galaxy NGC 5643, which is about 60 million light-years away! That means we see it as it was about 60 million years ago.

As telescopes look deeper into the universe, they capture snapshots in time from different cosmic eras. Astronomers can stitch those snapshots together to unravel things like galaxy evolution. The closest ones are more mature; we see them nearly as they truly are in the present day because their light doesn’t have to travel as far to reach us. We can’t rewind those galaxies (or our own), but we can get clues about how they likely developed. Looking at galaxies that are farther and farther away means seeing these star cities in ever earlier stages of development.

The farthest galaxies we can see are both old and young. They’re billions of years old now, and the light we receive from them is ancient since it took so long to traverse the cosmos. But since their light was emitted when the galaxies were young, it gives us a view of their infancy.

This animation is an artist’s concept of the big bang, with representations of the early universe and its expansion.

Comparing how fast objects at different distances are moving away opened up the biggest mystery in modern astronomy: cosmic acceleration. The universe was already expanding as a result of the big bang, but astronomers expected it to slow down over time. Instead, it’s speeding up!

The universe’s expansion makes it tricky to talk about the distances of the farthest objects. We often use lookback time, which is the amount of time it took for an object’s light to reach us. That’s simpler than using a literal distance, because an object that was 10 billion light-years away when it emitted the light we received from it would actually be more than 16 billion light-years away right now, due to the expansion of space. We can even see objects that are presently over 30 billion light-years from Earth, even though the universe is only about 14 billion years old.

This James Webb Space Telescope image shines with the light from galaxies that are more than 13.4 billion years old, dating back to less than 400 million years after the big bang.

Our James Webb Space Telescope has helped us time travel back more than 13.4 billion years, to when the universe was less than 400 million years old. When our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches in a few years, astronomers will pair its vast view of space with Webb’s zooming capabilities to study the early universe in better ways than ever before. And don’t worry – these telescopes will make plenty of pit stops along the way at other exciting cosmic destinations across space and time.

Learn more about the exciting science Roman will investigate on X and Facebook.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[ckret2]

(I said earlier I had a fic excerpt about DEATH LAWYER AXOLOTL, here it is.)

The god hopefully turned to the time giant—

She shook her head, expression flat. "Nope. I'm a civil engineer, not a hostage negotiator."

—and then turned to the Axolotl. "You. You know how to talk to mortals like this triangle that's taken over Dimension Zero, don't you? Isn't he like the omnicidal monsters you represent every day?"

The Axolotl looked nervously at the wormhole into Dimension Zero. He could see blue fire and hear wails of pain on the other side. "Ah," he said.

####

Biologically there was really no such thing as a god, in the same way that botanically there is really no such thing as a vegetable. Tomatoes are fruits; spinach is a leaf; carrots are roots; broccoli is an unfinished flower. The word "vegetable" just indicates the cultural role a plant performs in the kitchen.

The word "god" indicated the cultural role an entity performed in cosmology: a god was anything that exerted enough power that mortals felt driven to worship it.

Different beings so honored with the title "god" handled it in different ways. For the Axolotl's part, he thought it was a useful designation to help with networking, but mostly it was a pain that meant he was put up on a pedestal for doing his job.

The Axolotl was a god of justice. Not the god of justice, but one. He held dominion over an abstract concept; over millions and billions of years, his words and decisions slowly, inexorably altered the idea of "justice" on a multiversal scale. Mercy, retribution, punishment, rehabilitation, equity, equality, fairness, and righteousness were like multicolored clays he could twist, squish, sculpt, and blend at his leisure, permanently altering what those ideas meant to the mortals they affected.

Which was to say: he was a lawyer.

He was also known as a god of rebirth. Which was to say: he specialized in afterlife law. Before going into law he'd only been a psychopomp, but after having to escort too many despairing souls to afterlives he felt were too severe for their sins, he'd decided he wanted a say in where he took his souls. Now he helped clients get their charges reduced so they were eligible for a higher-tier reincarnation, or got their purgatorial sentences reduced, or—on rare occasions—even helped them avoid damnation. (Although he didn't take many damnation cases. He didn't always win—and those ones were too depressing to lose.)

And lately, he'd been developing a reputation.

For the past few centuries, he'd been working on a damnation case. He was defending a supervillain who'd built a weapon that could slice open the fabric of spacetime—a crime against reality—and bisect planets in its wake. He'd died inside the jurisdiction of an afterlife that had legalized eternal damnation. Case law had long since established that the dead had to be sent either to the afterlife system of their native jurisdiction or an alternate afterlife system of their choice in order to be judged, provided that the proper afterlife accepted their transfer request.

But if this villain had been extradited to his home world, the heaviest sentence he could have faced was a thousand years purgatory, with an option for early reincarnation for good behavior after a hundred years. So the jurisdiction he'd died in had summoned up some bureaucratic red tape to dismiss his native afterlife's extradition request, and he'd been sentenced where he'd died. They'd wanted to establish via case law that the dead who had committed crimes against reality could be damned in whichever jurisdiction they happened to die in, and hoped they could get away with it just for lack of anyone protesting the move. After all, everyone involved much preferred that a mortal wicked enough to obliterate multiple populated planets and trillions of lives receive eternal punishment.

Everyone involved except the Axolotl. 

Taking this case hadn't made him many friends. He didn't care; he had his principles. Let an interplanetary supervillain be dragged away to a foreign afterlife just so that he can be forced into damnation, and next it'll be a planetary dictator; let a dictator be dragged away, and next it'll be a murderer; and next it'll be a burglar; and next it'll be a jaywalker that a psychopomp has a personal grudge against. If the Axolotl could establish that even the most undeserving mortal imaginable, a criminal against reality, still deserved the right to be sentenced in the afterlife of his choice, then he could establish that everyone less evil deserved the same right.

If he had anything to say about it, in two or three trillion years he'd see eternal punishment outlawed completely; but untilthen, he was not going to sit idly by and let this flagrant abuse of interdimensional law become the new meaning of justice! He would get that supervillain out of eternal damnation, personally escort him to his native afterlife, and see him reincarnated on his own home world—and mark his words, he would rain so much bureaucratic hell on the judges and psychopomps that had let this abuse of justice take place that no god would dare keep a soul from its rightful afterlife ever again, or he wasn't the Axolotl!

All of which was to say:

Yes, unfortunately. This triangle was like the omnicidal monsters he represented every day.

And so he was appointed hostage negotiator.

####

(And that's why a trillion years later he's the guy helping Bill submit an insanity plea so that he can go to Theraprism rather than get the permadeath penalty.)

[transmutationisms]

any thoughts on the obsession with "hyperprocessed foods"? is there even such a thing and if so how much of the stuff around it is fake?

such a flawed useless categorisation lmao; this phrase comes from the nova scale, according to which an "ultra-processed food" is identified by a lack of sufficient "intact" food and the presence of "sources of energy and nutrients not normally used in culinary preparations" and additives specifically "used to initate or enhance the sensory qualities of food or to disguise unplatable aspects of the final product" (other additives, such as preservatives, antioxidants, and stabilisers, only qualify a food as group 3, "processed"). ultra-processing is defined as "a multitude of sequences of processing [...] includ[ing] several with no domestic equivalents," and ultra-processed foods are "usually packaged attractively and marketed intensely."

......so ok, first of all, this is very obviously reliant on a lot of assumptions about what 'normal' cooking and cooking equipment means, lmao. i do all kinds of shit in the kitchen that would have been inaccessible to someone in the mid nineteenth century; has the food become 'less processed' because i can make it at home now? if i obtained the equipment to hydrogenate oils myself would they magically not be ultra-processed simply because they came from my kitchen and not from an industrial setting?

this is just quasi-scientific language to express a fundamental distrust of food produced in ways that currently can't be replicated in [researchers' definitions of] a [normal] home kitchen. it's barely more sophisticated than platitudes like michael pollan's command to "eat only foods your grandmother would recognise". using the nova classifications to make assumptions about the healthfulness or danger of a food is just silly; the presumption is that the dietary and medical effects are not due to the food itself but to how it's produced, an idea that has led researchers to conclude that "the NOVA system suffers from a lack of biological plausibility so the assertion that ultra-processed foods are intrinsically unhealthful is largely unproven."

fundamentally the only evidence that nutritional scientists have been able to produce is observational studies showing a correlation between certain ill health outcomes and consumption of 'ultra-processed food'.

But the observational studies also have limitations, said Lauren O’Connor, a nutrition scientist and epidemiologist who formerly worked at the Department of Agriculture and the National Institutes of Health. It’s true that there is a correlation between these foods and chronic diseases, she said, but that doesn’t mean that UPFs directly cause poor health.

Dr. O’Connor questioned whether it’s helpful to group such “starkly different” foods — like Twinkies and breakfast cereals — into one category.

[...]

Clinical trials are needed to test if UPFs directly cause health problems, Dr. O’Connor said. Only one such study, which was small and had some limitations, has been done, she said.

ie, when evaluating the healthfulness of foods you have to actually look at what they are and what the human body does with them, and not just make a bunch of wild assumptions based on fears about their lack of proximity to 'naturalness' or propensity to be advertised (unlike, i guess, other more intact foods, which are not commodities. who knew!)

and there are like a million trillion other reasons why this correlation might hold: off the top of my head, for instance, people who rely more on the convenience of ready-made foods likely to be categorised as 'ultra-processed' are likely to be people who can't cook because they don't have time because they're working. so as usual nutrition and health science does a dogshit job distinguishing between the health effects of socioeconomic status and those of whatever some dickwad wants to publish a splashy study about.

there are certainly 'ultra-processed' foods that we can be extremely confident are harmful to human health---for example, trans fats. but the categorisation as a whole is so conceptually flawed as to be useless for any purpose besides as a term that 'scientises' culturally held beliefs about the wholesomeness and healthfulness of home food preparation, and the corresponding danger and artificiality of industrial production and methods.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Galaxies

Galaxies come in many shapes and sizes.

Some are spirals like our own galaxy, but others are fuzzy balls or shapeless clouds. The smallest have just a few million stars. The largest contain trillions.

Although they look packed with stars, galaxies are mostly empty space.

If you made a scale model of the Milky Way with a grain of sand for each star, the nearest star to the Sun would be 4 miles (6 km) away.

The furthest would be 80,000 miles (130,000 km) away.

The stars in a galaxy are held together by gravity and travel slowly around the galactic heart.

In many galaxies, including ours, a supermassive black hole lies hidden in the center. Stars and other material are sucked into this cosmic plughole by gravity and disappear forever.

Galaxy Shapes

Astronomers classify galaxies into just a few main types, depending on the shape we observe from Earth.

|| Spiral || Barred Spiral ||

Spiral - A central hub of stars is surrounded by spiral arms curving out.

Barred spiral - A straight bar runs across the center, connecting spiral arms.

|| Elliptical || Irregular ||

Elliptical - More than half of all galaxies are simple ball shapes.

Irregular - Galaxies with no clear shape are classified as irregular.

How Spiral Arms Form

The stars in a galaxy orbit the center, taking millions of years to make one circuit.

Spiral arms appear where stars pass in and out of crowded areas, like cars passing temporarily through a traffic jam.

One theory is that these traffic jams happen because the orbits of different stars don’t line up neatly.

The Milky Way

If you could look down on the Milky Way galaxy from above, the view would be like flying over a glittering city at night.

Most of the galaxy’s 200 billion stars are in the central bulge.

Curving around this are two vast spiral arms and several smaller arms.

The Milky Way is thought to be a barred spiral (see panel), but we can’t see its shape clearly from Earth since we view it from the inside.

In the night sky, the Milky Way appears only as a milky band of light.

Colliding Galaxies

Sometimes galaxies crash and tear each other apart.

Individual stars don’t collide, but gas clouds do, and gravity pulls the colliding galaxies into new shapes.

End of the Milky Way

In 4 billion years our galaxy will collide with the Andromeda galaxy.

This artist’s impression (above) shows what the sky might look like as they merge.

Source ⚜ More: Writing Notes & References

[transgenderer]

so i was reading egan's "border guards" yesterday, and thinking about how egan's immortals, and how they relate to a philosophy of life, and significance. and then i was reading aztecs an interpretation, and thinking about how *small* aztecology is as a field, there just arent that many people whose job is studying mesoamerica. i mean, its gotta be less than 10k in the world. its a small field, individivuals can loom large. big fish, small pond

i think there's some meaningful sense in which modern humans are big fish in a small pond. the behavior of a system qualitatively changes as you scale it up. below a certain scale, theres free lunch everywhere. but past a certain scale, efficient market hypothesis starts working, and you should be surprised to find yourself with free lunch. and like, obviously there are lots of "scale thresholds" we're well above. but there are tons of scale thresholds we're below!

the protagonist of border guards studies math, but he has accepted he will never expand it, because he lives in the far future with like trillions of humans, all the low hanging fruit is snapped up. i think its logically possible for such a world to exist. but joyfully(?) we do not live in that world! we live in a world where it's not even that hard to find interesting math that nobody has noticed before. i mean, proving things is hard. but the world of math is just littered with unanswered questions, that are answerable. and the same is true for every other field really. we don't live in the eternal reccurence, where trillions of humans have existed for millions of years or whatever. there's so much low hanging intellectual fruit! we dont live in the solved world

and so, when one is emo about how we dont live in post-scarcity utopia, and grumbling about those people who think we need struggle and utopia would be bad, well.... i mean, i think those people are still wrong. but i think theres some meaningful sense in which we benefit from the knowledge-poverty of the current era. like, it sucks, i wish i could have all my answerable-with-the-available-evidence questions answered. but the fact that theyre not answered allows us to participate in their answering, for the first time. no one is keeping score anywhere, but yknow...the act of *making knowledge available to others* is meaningfully different from merely proving something which was known, on a material level. and we get to do that material thing, and someone who lived in a much knowledge-richer society than us wouldnt.

now, our knowledge-poverty maybe doesnt benefit us on NET. but it benefits us. things are less than maximally bad

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive

By Benjamin Mateus

The ninth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States is finally receding, with estimated daily new infections based on wastewater data now standing at 669,000 per day, down from the August peaks of over 1.3 million. However, experts predict that the tenth wave will begin in late fall and continue through the winter holidays, as has taken place every year of the pandemic so far.

With one in 70 individuals currently infectious, the risk of coming into contact with someone in a classroom, work, or dining at a local facility with 25 to 50 people is considerable. And despite the relative lull in cases, there is more COVID-19 transmission now than during 56.1 percent of the pandemic. In other words, the “forever COVID” policy essentially means that COVID is now everywhere all the time.

Under these conditions, forced upon society by the capitalist ruling class, repeat infections act like a battering ram, taking a growing toll on the foundation of everyone’s overall wellbeing. There is a growing body of evidence that each hit weakens the organ systems, aging them biologically beyond the person’s stated age until sufficient injury begins to manifest in physically measurable symptoms.

At present, more than one billion cumulative COVID infections have occurred in the US, at a rate of around one per year per person, with somewhere between 3-4 infections on average among the entire population. Estimates place the number of Long COVID cases at over 410 million globally in just the first four years of the pandemic, while excess deaths are nearing 30 million.

Clearly, the pandemic is ongoing and remains a significant health risk for the global population. The criminality of the “forever COVID” policy is highlighted by the fact that virtually no funding is allocated to the development of next-generation mucosal vaccines, improved treatments during the acute phase of infection, or any treatments for Long COVID patients. While trillions are squandered on war and bank bailouts for the rich, nothing is provided for critical life-saving research.

Last week, results from the first clinical trial of a mucosal vaccine were released, showing remarkable levels of efficacy after a second dose.

The important study published by Chinese investigators demonstrated that an intranasally administered anti-COVID vaccine can induce robust mucosal immunity against the coronavirus in human subjects (128 healthcare workers). The study found that the vaccine provided substantial immune protection against COVID while demonstrating safety and tolerance.

Esteemed clinical researcher Dr. Eric Topol wrote on Twitter/X, “[two] doses of a COVID nasal vaccine spray led to more than a 50-fold increase in spike specific secretory IgA antibodies against 10 strains of SARS-CoV-2, indicative of potent mucosal immunity.” Furthermore, Topol added, “At least 86.2 percent of participants who completed two nasal vaccines doses maintained uninfected status, likely without even asymptomatic infection, for at least three months.”

Emergency room physician and indoor air quality proponent, Dr. Kashif Pirzada, replied, “This could potentially give a real ending to the pandemic. No more waves of illness, no more rushing for tests and antivirals if you’re elderly or vulnerable. Hope this comes out soon!”

However, large Phase 3 clinical trials are costly, requiring multiple participants to obtain statistically relevant information on clinical endpoints, not to speak of the research and development investment to identify a therapeutic that can be tested. Thus, under capitalism, there is virtually no investment in these large-scale trials and nothing is being done beyond offering boosters of the current vaccine, despite their greatly reduced efficacy in preventing transmission.

The mucosal vaccine study was conducted just as Chinese officials acquiesced to the demands of the imperialist powers to abandon their life-saving Zero-COVID public health program, resulting in the infection of virtually the entire population and the deaths of 1-2 million people. What could such a vaccine have meant to these millions that perished needlessly and the millions more globally since then?

This raises the broader question of why the international community, facing a devastating pandemic, could not bring its accumulated scientific bodies to address the need to develop a preventative treatment against COVID?

As a trigger event in world history, the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated and exposed the deep-seated contradictions in global capitalism, which demands the accumulation of profits at any costs. The ruling class has nothing but contempt for workers, refusing to invest in any social programs that can improve the lives of masses of people. Short sightedness, corruption, mistrust, and suspicion epitomize their actions, which are rapidly progressing to a world conflagration carrying the danger of nuclear war.

Simply put, the ruling class cares not one iota about mucosal vaccines, just as they harbor resentment against any public health policy that infringes on their ability to conduct business.

Refusing to invest in these life-saving technologies, the capitalist ruling class has condemned humanity to face a lifetime of reinfections with COVID-19. What are the implications of this criminal policy?

Multiple previous studies have highlighted the dangers posed by reinfections with SARS-CoV-2. A recent study uploaded as a pre-print publication on Research Square (under review with the journal Nature Portfolio) by the Patient-Led Collaborative has once again found similar results when attempting to characterize the association between reinfections and the chronic debilitating condition known as Long COVID.

Among 3,382 participants (22 percent never had COVID, 42 percent with one prior infection and 35 percent with two or more infections), the risk of Long COVID was 2.14 times more likely among those with two COVID infections and 3.75 times more likely among those who had three or more COVID Infections compared to just one. Limitations in physical functioning measured in their study included ability to dress, bathe, perform moderate activities like vacuuming and functioning socially. Reinfections led to poorer overall health and worse immune health, including more severe outcomes and longer recovery from other infections.

As the authors wrote:

"Relative to those who did not report infections or experienced COVID-19 once, reinfections were associated with increased likelihood of severe fatigue, post-exertional malaise, decreased physical function, poorer immune health, symptom exacerbation before menstruation, and multiple other Long COVID symptoms. While vaccinations and boosters prior to infection are associated with lower likelihood of Long COVID, reinfections diminish their protective effect. The probability of reporting Long COVID remission is generally low (11.5 percent to 6.5 percent."

Another interesting finding of the study, which underscores the complete abandonment of public health efforts regarding COVID, is that a tiny number of those infected were prescribed antivirals during their acute COVID infections. Those with reinfections were also less likely to test, as the “forever COVID” policy has inured people from taking any protective measures to prevent infections.

The current alphabet soup of COVID strains is sees KP.3.1.1 dominate across the US and Europe, accounting for nearly 60 percent of all strains. However, a new variant known as XEC that was first detected in Germany in June has spread to more than 27 countries and accounts for six percent of all recently sequenced SARS-CoV-2 viruses in the US. Virologists expect this strain, derived from JN.1 through a complex recombination event and which has nearly twice the growth advantage, to overtake KP.3.1.1 and be the dominant variant during the winter season.

In a COVID update by TACT [Together Against COVID Transmission], the authors explain the dangers posed by these evolutionary developments of the SARS-CoV-2 viruses, writing:

"These variants can evade much of the immune responses from both vaccines and recent infections. Since they can evade antibodies to earlier variants, then that raises the risk of organ damage, vascular and neurological dysfunction, brain damage, and persistent infections which often leads to Long COVID. The unmitigated spread is raising concerns about their impact in the coming months."

Hospitalization rates for those 65 years and older and children were one of the highest during the summer from COVID and remain on par with the prior year’s summer/fall wave. The number of people that died from COVID In the week ending August 31, 2024, has climbed to 1,239, four times higher than the lows seen in June. At the present rate, it is expected that at least 60,000 people will officially lose their lives from acute COVID this year, not including deaths incorrectly attributed to another cause or due to the impact on the population’s health from accumulated infections.

These are not incidental and speculative issues. In a provocative report released by the Swiss Re Group, titled “The future of excess mortality after COVID-19,” one of the world’s leading providers of reinsurance and insurance, who specialize in financing the risk of death, they said, “[If] the ongoing impact of the disease is not curtailed, excess mortality rates in the general population may remain up to three percent higher then pre-pandemic levels in the US and 2.5 percent in the UK by 2033.”

They advised their investors:

"Based on current medical trends and expected advancements, we conclude that COVID-19 is still driving excess mortality both directly and indirectly. In the long term, lifestyle factors that contribute to poor metabolic health and lead to obesity and diabetes may become another compounding factor in population excess mortality. Insurers may wish to continue to monitor excess mortality and its underlying drivers in the general population closely, as well as the differences between general and insured populations."

[ghostinthegallery]

As a transformers fan I love robots who have divorce drama stretching millions of years but also have a body count in the trillions. Thus it has taken little convincing but I think I shall investigate these undead robots.

In the event of my death I'm Telling. This is your fault. How do I start wading into this mess bc my only encounter with Warhammer was when a very drunk frat guy tried to explain the horus heresy at a party.

Well you are in for a treat then! Robots with marriage/divorce drama, severe mental health issues, and body counts best measured on a planetary scale are our specialty in Chez Necron.

If you want a setting overview before you dive in, Bricky's two part series going over all the factions is quite solid. Long, but hey this has been around since the 80s. (no drunken Horus Heresy rambles*)

First, watch this clip of Trazyn the Infinite, as an amuse bouche before your meal.

As for books, there are two main places I'd start for necrons:

The Infinite and the Divine- the classic starting point for necrons (and 40k in general). Trazyn the Infinite, lord of the Prismatic Galleries, battles against Orikan the Diviner, master chronomancer and prophet. Clash of godlike beings over...what amounts to a magic Rubik's Cube. It's so petty. This fight spans epochs, multiple wars, and one legal case. There's no heterosexual explanation for their dynamic. Also this book has dinosaurs. Some of whom carry shuriken canons.

Now, this book has a ton of 40k stuff. Most major factions make an appearance so there's a very good chance there will be words/things that a new person is unfamiliar with. If that doesn't bother you, awesome! Proceed. Ask me things, I'll explain that an aeldar is just a space elf or whatever. Or watch a lore vid beforehand. However if that is a turn off I'd recommend starting with...

Severed- Novella, so shorter which is nice. Do you like angst? The horrors of immortality? Lord/knight love story? One very silly guy? Then meet Zahndrekh and his loyal bodyguard Obyron as they set out to conquer a planet where the necrons are...wrong. Complicating factors include Obyron's crippling depression, Zahndrekh's asshole ex, and the fact Zahndrekh is insane and believes them all to still be the creatures of flesh and blood they were before a bunch of star gods ate their souls and turned them into robots. Prepare to cry.

After those, I cannot recommend the Twice Dead King duology highly enough. Oltyx, an exiled prince attempts to save his dynasty from destruction while battling his own creeping madness. He's got an adorable crush on his hot best friend. The voices in his head were put there on purpose so its fine. Well most of them were. Everything is fine. I didn't cry multiple times reading these...

Then refer to my reading guide for the good short stories and boom! The wonderful world of gay undead space robots is open before you.

I accept full responsibilities for my actions. If you die I promise to say mostly nice things at your funeral.

*mini rant, but I honestly think the Horus Heresy is one of the worst ways to introduce someone to the 40k world. It's a series with like 70 books! Many of them are bad! You need a flowchart to keep track of the timeline! I know there's some good books and characters, power to all who love the HH, but it is not newbie friendly! Also it only has humans which robs you of some of the best parts of the setting (like...y'know. Necrons). Ease people in, then they can make an informed decision about tackling the mountain of buff space men with daddy issues shooting each other.

[mariacallous]

As someone who has closely followed and written about presidential budgets and social and anti-poverty programs for most of the past half-century, I examine here proposals advanced by former President Donald Trump during his years in office—mainly measures proposed in his administration’s annual budgets—that would affect social programs for people with low or moderate incomes. The piece relies primarily on analyses of these budgets by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) during those years, using data from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Congressional Budget Office (CBO).1 The piece builds upon earlier work that I and my colleagues at The Hamilton Project have conducted on the evolution of the U.S. social assistance and social insurance systems and the workings of those systems (Barnes, Bauer, Edelberg, Estep, Greenstein, and Macklin 2021; Greenstein 2022).

The Trump administration budgets were distinguished by their proposals to lower taxes and to scale back or end various social programs and other government spending. The proposed reductions in social programs fell primarily on programs for people with low or modest incomes rather than universal social insurance programs, although the Trump administration budgets did propose a reduction in one aspect of the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program, as described below in the section of this piece on cash assistance.2

This piece examines program changes that these budgets proposed, rather than just those that were enacted. Most of the proposals described here did not pass Congress, including the administration’s 2017 effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that fell just short in the Senate. In addition, the courts blocked various regulatory proposals to scale back programs, including efforts to roll back the ACA through administrative action. (This piece does not examine temporary changes not included in administration budgets that Congress and the President made in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.)

The program reductions or eliminations the Trump administration budgets proposed substantially exceeded those sought by earlier presidents, including Ronald Reagan, although the safety net in place when President Trump took office was significantly larger than that in place when Reagan assumed office more than four decades ago, giving President Trump more targets for budget reductions. Changes that Trump administration budgets proposed included the following:

SNAP. Reductions of roughly $200 billion over 10 years, or about 25 to 30 percent, in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program), as proposed in all four Trump administration budgets.

Medicaid/ACA. Substantial cuts in Medicaid beyond eliminating the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, and in the first Trump administration budget, some scaling back of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The proposed reductions, including ACA repeal, totaled roughly $750 billion to $1 trillion or more over 10 years under the various Trump administration budgets.

Housing and rental assistance. Large reductions in rental assistance and other housing-related programs that, in all four Trump administration budgets, included rent increases that would average more than 40 percent for about 4 million low-income households that rent their units with rental vouchers or live in public housing. The four budgets also called for eliminating various housing-related programs including the HOME program, the Community Development Block Grant, and the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP).

Cash assistance. Large reductions in cash assistance in all four Trump administration budgets, including (1) reductions in benefits for low-income children with disabilities through Supplemental Security Income (SSI) when more than one child or both an adult and a child in the same family receive SSI, (2) a reduction of more than $20 billion over 10 years in federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funding to states, and (3) a reduction in initial Social Security disability benefits for some beneficiaries. The 2017 tax cut that President Trump signed into law increased the Child Tax Credit (CTC), though the increase for children in most poor families was modest. An estimated 10 million children—those in families with the lowest incomes, including families whose earner works full-time at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour—received either an increase of up to $75 or no increase. If these children’s families participated in various programs slated for cuts such as SNAP or rental assistance, those families would in most cases have lost more income from the program cuts (often substantially more) than they would have gained from the CTC increase.

Non-defense discretionary programs. Deep cuts in “non-defense discretionary” (NDD) funding—the federal budget outside of defense, entitlements and other “mandatory” programs, and interest payments on the debt. The first Trump administration budget proposed an overall NDD level for fiscal year 2018 that would have been 13 percent below the 2017 enacted level and 25 percent below the 2010 level in inflation-adjusted terms and that would have reached its lowest level as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) in six decades. The proposed NDD reduction totaled $1.8 trillion over 10 years (Herrera and Friedman 2017). Under all Trump administration budgets, NDD funding would, by the tenth year, have been at its lowest level as a share of GDP since the Hoover years. Along with the reductions in low-income housing programs noted above, the proposed NDD reductions included reductions in various programs to strengthen the ability of low-income individuals to secure employment, as outlined in the next bullet.

Self-sufficiency. Some administration officials justified various proposed reductions in benefits for low-income households by calling on individuals in those households to go to work or work more. At the same time, the Trump administration budgets also proposed to scale back a number of programs to strengthen the ability of low-income individuals to secure and retain employment. Trump administration budgets proposed to reduce job training funds for states and localities by 40 percent (in the first budget), reduce the Job Corps substantially (in the final three budgets), reduce various education, student aid, work-study, and other programs (all four budgets), and terminate the community service employment program (all four budgets). Some Trump administration budgets also proposed to increase funding for apprentice programs, though in dollar terms, those increases amounted to a small fraction of the reductions in education, job training, and related programs.

Trump administration budgets sought significant savings in other budget areas as well. The bulk of the proposed savings, however, fell on benefits and services for people of low or modest income. In the fiscal year 2018 Trump administration budget, for instance, while programs for people with low or modest incomes accounted for 28 percent of all non-defense spending outside of interest payments, those programs would have borne 59 percent of the reductions in non-defense programs ($2.5 trillion of $3.7 trillion in reductions over 10 years; Shapiro, Kogan, and Cho 2017). By the tenth year, overall spending for programs for people of low or modest incomes would shrink by 33 percent below the budget baseline (Shapiro 2017). A CBPP analysis of the final Trump administration budget (for fiscal year 2021) estimated that 44 percent of its proposed reductions would come from such programs (Kogan, Romig, and Beltran 2020).

The Trump administration also sought, via regulation, to limit or discourage participation in various safety net programs by certain low-income immigrants who were legally authorized to be in the United States and eligible for these programs—mainly, immigrants who had applied for permanent residence, or green cards (Bernstein, Gonzales, Karpman, and Zuckerman 2020). These regulations, which federal courts blocked in 2020 (Gonzales 2023), would have made it harder for such individuals to secure legal permanent residence status and ultimately become citizens if they had received program benefits.

[thedepressexpress]

I want to talk about how "we are stardust" has become a cliche and I hate that it's become a cliche

to say that we are stardust isn't a romanticized version of the truth. it is the truth.

a science lesson for anyone who's interested (stick with me here):

when the universe was born, everything was really hot, so hot that it couldn't combine into atoms, and when it cooled down enough stuff like helium and hydrogen (and some other elements in small quantities) were made. there was nothing else.

because of stuff like density and gravity, that gas collapsed into stars. and most of those stars became red dwarf stars which have trapped all that material inside them, burning so slowly that none of them have ever released that stuff back out because they live for trillions of years.

of the stars that didn't become red dwarfs some stars started burning, changing hydrogen to helium then carbon and nitrogen and then they die, exploding into these beautiful noisy planetary nebulae. those explosion are where the material for the carbon and nitrogen in your body come from. that's what we mean when we say we're made of stardust. you are a living tomb for the corpse of a million stars, separated from them by space and time.

only a few stars get really big and burn a lot more and make iron. the iron in apples that makes them turn brown and your blood that makes it possible for you to live and breathe. those stars didn't just slowly build up to that moment over time like the stars that made your carbon and nitrogen. they took a few seconds to make a supernova that blew all the atoms that are currently in your body into space and eventually they found themselves in you, making you everything that you are. those explosion are so powerful that if a lot of them happen in a small enough space they can break galaxy disks and leak into their halos.

and these explosions, they are so incredible and loud and the universe is screaming to make the stuff that you are made of.

you aren't just made of stars, you are the result of billions of years of life and death on such a cosmic scale that we may never experience it, not in this lifetime or the next or the one after that.

in physics, sometimes we simplify interactions and say that matter knows. that matter knows the most stable configurations to be in and it knows how to decay to become stable if it isn't and it knows how to feel gravity.

in that sense, stars know when they're dying but they don't know what they'll become. if they'll get lost in gas that never becomes anything else or if they'll become the heart of a whole new star or if they'll become part of rocks or life or your shoelaces.

idk i just feel like there's more to it than just being stardust. there's billions of lifetimes that go into who you are and that's not to add pressure on you to be something extraordinary in this life. it's just what this is like, exploding and living and dying and always becoming something else so you aren't just from stars and part of this cosmic history either, we're part of the cycle so it makes sense that we explode and live and die and keep becoming someone else.

ok byeeee

[zvaigzdelasas]

The global market for carbon offsets is worth about $2 billion today and projected to grow to as much as $1 trillion in 15 years even as it faces fundamental questions about credibility and effectiveness. Add government appropriation to the list of risks for this climate solution. A shock announcement this week that Zimbabwe will take half of all revenues generated from offsets projects developed on its territory is a harbinger of an uncertain future in the carbon trade. The African nation is the world’s 12th largest creator of offsets, with 4.2 million credits from 30 registered projects last year, according to BloombergNEF.

Zimbabwe’s move gives the government control of carbon credit production and cancels all past agreements with international organizations. That means more revenue generated from credits tied to protecting forests and other efforts to cut emissions will flow into national coffers rather than going to project developers. There’s now risk that other countries might follow suit, creating new uncertainties for businesses that develop and sell offsets, corporations that purchase offsets as a way to counterbalance their greenhouse gas pollution and the cohort of traders who invest in this emerging asset class. [...]

The move “blindsided” CO2balance, a company that runs five carbon offset projects in Zimbabwe. “Everyone knew changes were happening but we weren’t expecting this — it wasn’t on the horizon,” said Paul Chiplen, head of sales, in an interview on Thursday. “It does put a question mark in investors’ minds when you’re not quite sure of what level of return you’re getting.” [...]

“I think it is an entirely understandable thing for Zimbabwe to want to take a proportion of the funds from any exports of carbon from its territory,” said Edward Hanrahan, director at carbon project developer Climate Impact Partners. “But the issue is they acted rapidly and without prior notice.”[...]

Each credit represents one ton of carbon dioxide and can be bought and sold many times before being used. The unregulated structure of the market involving companies, traders and governments creates risk of double counting. What if a government seeks to benefit by trading a credit produced in its territory after its been sold to an investor or used in a corporate sustainability plan?[...]

Treating carbon credits as just another export commodity underscores an imbalance at the heart of this global trade: Efforts to develop credits are usually funded by firms from wealthy countries and sold to corporate buyers in Europe and the US, yet most of the projects are located in emerging economies. This setup has been derided as a form of carbon colonialism that strips developing countries of an increasingly valuable resource. “Rushing to frame the decision by Zimbabwe as ‘nationalization risk’ exposes a sense of entitlement to access those resources by the global North,” said Rich Gilmore, chief executive officer at investment manager Carbon Growth Partners in Melbourne. “We need to acknowledge that the past 200 years of resource extraction have miserably failed people and the planet. And if we want the carbon market to scale, we need to respect the right of the nations of the south to determine their own rules.”[...]

Developers and investors might start to prioritize countries where governments have been transparent about their future carbon policies. Plus, if governments follow Zimbabwe in taking half of the project revenues, that will create a barrier to carbon projects that are the most costly to implement.[...]

It’s “entirely appropriate” for countries to seek a larger share from their carbon resources but they must “carefully consider the economics,” said Martijn Wilder, chief executive officer of Pollination, a climate advisory and investment firm. “If what’s left for a project developer is not sufficient to cover an investible rate of return, the project simply won’t happen.”

21 May 23

[saturniandragon]

Hey Adra. Tell me a cool astronomy fact

You want cool astronomy fact? I'll give you cool astronomy fact!

Andromeda Galaxy is headed towards us. Yes, right now, at this very second. It's traveling at 100 kilometers per second towards the Milky Way Galaxy. It's just uh... 2.5 million light years away, so it will approximately start colliding in 4.5 billion years.

By this time, the Earth would be non existent, pretty much. The Sun would inflate in a phase known as red giant, where it will increase exponentially in size until it engulfs Mercury, Venus, and very likely, Earth as well. Which is a bummer for the future generation of humans, but I think after 4 billion years we should already have the technology for interplanetary travel, if not interstellar.

During this red giant phase, the habitable zone would also expand outwards, approximately towards the orbit of Jupiter and maybe Saturn. Descendants of humans 4.5 billion years in the future could very well live in one of the moons of those gas giants. Maybe Europa or even Titan.

Andromeda Galaxy contains just over 3 times the amount of stars in it compared to our own galaxy, about 1 trillion stars compared to Milky Way's 300 million. But remember, galaxies are also immensely huge that the distance between stars makes it extremely unlikely that stars from both galaxies will crash into each other.

Visualize this by imagining the Sun as a ping pong ball. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would be more than 1000 km away at this scale. The Sun and the remains of the solar system will very likely survive the collision between both galaxies. New constellations will form and the night sky will be vastly different by this point, full of fresh new stars and planets as a result of material from both galaxies mixing into one big soup called the Milkdromeda.

I hope that entertains you!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Lori Ann Larocco at CNBC:

Billions in trade came to a screeching halt at U.S. East Coast and Gulf Coast ports after members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) began walking off the job after 12:01 a.m. ET on October 1. The ILA is North America’s largest longshoremen’s union, with roughly 50,000 of its 85,000 members making good on the threat to strike at 14 major ports subject to a just-expired master contract with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), and picketing workers beginning to appear at ports. The union and port ownership group failed to reach agreement by midnight on a new contract in a protracted battle over wage increases and use of automation. In a last-ditch effort on Monday to avert a strike that will cause significant harm to the U.S. economy if it is lengthy — at least hundreds of millions of dollars a day at the largest ports like New York/New Jersey — the USMX offered a nearly 50% wage hike over six years, but that was rejected by the ILA, according to a source close to the negotiations. The port ownership group said it hoped the offer would lead to a resumption of collective bargaining.

The 14 ports where preparations for a strike have been underway are Boston, New York/New Jersey, Philadelphia, Wilmington, North Carolina, Baltimore, Norfolk, Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville, Tampa, Miami, New Orleans, Mobile, and Houston. New York Governor Kathy Hochul said in a statement issued shortly after midnight that “the first large-scale eastern dockworker strike in 47 years began at ports from Maine to Texas, including at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. In preparation for this moment, New York has been working around the clock to ensure that our grocery stores and medical facilities have the essential products they need.” Rhetoric from ILA leadership has been aggressive in the weeks leading up to the strike, with ILA president Harold Daggett, who was a union member the last time it went out on strike in 1977, telling rank-and-file members — who unanimously voted to authorize a strike — in a recent video message, “We’ll crush them.” 

[...] The most significant issues would be faced by food and automobile industries, Kamins said, as they rely especially heavily on the ports that will be shut down. While a surge in inflation is highly unlikely even with a longer strike, even a modest reacceleration could create uncertainty and force the Federal Reserve to be more cautious about lowering interest rates, which would weigh on the overall outlook for job growth and investment. A one-week strike could cost the U.S. economy $3.78 billion, according to an analysis by The Conference Board, and cause supply chain slowdowns through mid-November. In all, the ports threatened with strikes handle $3 trillion annually in U.S. annual international trade.

Many industries are preparing for major repercussions. Noushin Shamsili, CEO and president of Nuco Logistics, which specializes in pharmaceutical imports and exports, said the strike comes at a critical time for inventory replenishment for the pharma sector. “Almost all of this industry is just on time,” said Shamsili. “Raw materials are being brought in to complete drug manufacturing. Medical supplies for clinics and hospitals are on these vessels. For a while importers did not bring in a lot of cargo because they were overflowing with supplies post-Covid. Now they have started reordering medical devices, gloves, syringes, and tubing.” Shamsili also said the East Coast ports are a gateway for generic medicine made in India. Approximately 48% of the active pharmaceutical ingredients used in the U.S. are being imported from India. Without these APIs, medications cannot be produced. APIs are also manufactured in Europe, which also use the East Coast ports as U.S. points of entry.

[...] The Biden administration finds itself in a delicate political moment, with the presidential election one month away and President Biden vowing he will not use existing labor law to force union workers back on the job, which is within his powers under the Taft-Hartley Act. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947, was a revision of U.S. law governing labor relations and union activity that granted a U.S. president the power to suspend a strike for an 80-day “cooling off period” in cases where “national health or safety” are at risk. 

Today begins the strike along East Coast and Gulf Coast ports after International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) members walked off their jobs.

This strike, depending on how long it lasts, could have a major impact on the elections and the economy.

[tobiasdrake]

People bicker back and forth about killing the Joker but the biggest problem with living in a comic book universe isn't even the recurring supervillains. The biggest problem is that comic book writers have a problem with "One death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic."

Comic writers kill people on a massive scale without hesitation to amp up the stakes on the story they're writing. They don't give a fuck. A comic writer will be like, "And then the mutants founded the nation of Genosha." And then another writer will be like, "Nah, I don't like that. Ahem. 'And then every last person in Genosha, every single one of them, were all slaughtered in a mass Sentinel genocide.' There, I fixed it!"

They just. Write stuff like that. Whoops, this sovereign nation has been annihilated. Whoops, this race has been near-completely exterminated. Whoops, this planet exploded and all of its inhabitants died. Whoops, this entire universe was eaten by the cosmic universe-eater, who has eaten countless universes and will eat many more because he's a force of nature whose existence we must revere.

Thousands, millions, billions, trillions dead just to make this one story seem more epic than all the other stories where trillions of people died. Ultimate comics aren't selling, so instead of just not printing more Ultimate comics, let's kill the entire Ultimate Universe.

Like. After Infinity War, there were a lot of people who were convinced that Endgame wasn't going to reverse the Snap. The internet was full of people arguing that Marvel was going to leave half of the universe dead. And. Like. Of course they'd believe that a death toll this catastrophic wouldn't be reversed. The people who write the comics do this all the time.

If you're a comic book NPC, odds are that the Joker isn't actually going to get you. No, you're much more likely to die in one of the colossal mass-casualty extermination events that happen every other week.

[autisticsupervillain]

FTF Shorts: Not Even Close!

A vs show where the longer analysis and set up is skipped in order to briefly explain why a certain fight is nowhere near close.

This Week's Curbstomp....

Rose Quartz vs Omni-Man!

To get started, Nolan is an absolute beast in combat. A conqueror with hundreds of years of combat experience at the least.

In terms of raw power, Omni-Man is strong enough to, with the help of his son and Thaddeus, punch a hole through a planet, a feat that would require 27 Zettatons at the highest.

He's also fast enough to cross the solar system in at most two weeks:

As impressive as this is, it doesn't even hold a candle to one feat to Rose's name. When the Diamonds attempted to obliterate all life in Earth surface from a galaxy away, they creatsd a diamond blast that lit up the entire galaxy around it. Generating that much light would require an energy equivalent to 3.97 megafoe and to reach earth in the time it did, would've had to have been traveling at 48 trillion times light speed.

In one moment, Rose blocked an attack that was 86,399,998,000,000,000x stronger than Nolan's best feat with help and 1,176,295,800,000x faster than Omni-Man has ever moved in his life.

And that's on top of Rose being much, much older and more experienced than him. While Nolan has been alive for 2000 years, Rose has been alive for eons amd has been fighting against the diamond invaders since the earliest humans first showed up on Earth, roughly 2 million years at the low end. So even if a skill advantage could outmatch a foe billions of times faster and stronger, Omni-Man doesn't even have that. And unlike Rose's regeneration, which could likely let her survive vaporization so long as her gemstone is intact, Nolan's definitively could not survive getting punched to molecules like what that strength gap would do to him.

Now, before we continue, I'm going to head off some arguments I've seen against Rose here.

The Diamond Blast wasn't an attack so it doesn't count for stats. It was just a bright light.

Yes, but it's more complicated than that. Think of it like a lightbulb. Creating light requires energy and in order to function, the lightbulb would have to be durable enough to not melt or explode from channeling that much energy and heat. The Diamonds are very obviously not exploded and Rose is very much comparable to her siblings. Steven inherited all of her powers and he could bring the diamonds to their knees.

It's been stated that Gems can't move FTL.

That statement is very inconsistent within the series itself. Gems can pilot ships that travel intergalactic distances, Lapis can fly to the Homeworld galaxy by herself within a reasonable time span, teleporters move gems across cosmic distances which gems csn still react to, Steven can astral project his soul from another galaxy, etc. Even kn the episode that statement is from, Steven can force himself to the front of his seat to stop the ship, which would require FTL speeds to do.

If you want to throw scientific accuracy into things, then Nolan shouldn't have superpowers because Smart Atoms shouldn't be determined by DNA. Writers are not physicists and sometimes the feats themselves just say "No."

What about crossovers?

A lot of the crossovers with Invincible are dubiously canon at best, even when just restricted to the comic itself. Sticking to just the canon crossovers with the Tick and Supreme, the best Nolan would get is scaling from Suprema who could kick around a star, a planet busting feat.

Certainly an upgrade, but still not in spitting distance of Rose. Only about 8x stronger than Omni-Man's normal feats.

I'm leaving Mortal Kombat and Multiverses at the door because that's a rabbit hole of scaling that never ends and it's obviously not canon. That said, Rose would likely get Superman scaling if you really wanted to go there, so....... (Injustice Superman is not as strong as mainline comics Superman if you want to go there).

That said, this does make me realize that this crossover could totally canonically happen if the companies that be allowed it....

How do you know the Diamonds were on Homeworld when the blast was fired?

Blue Diamond directly states that White hasn't left Homeworld in Eons. She was not speaking exaggerating. Gems who have not spent considerable time with humans consistently do not understand idioms, metaphors, and hyperbole. Neither do the Zoomans, as they were raised in Gem captivity. As such, there was no possible chance for Blue to pick up on that quirk before Future and no reason to take it as anything other than the literal truth. As such, the Diamonds would've had to fire the blast drom Homeworld, which is in another galaxy.

Final Thoughts

Let me end this off with one last point of comparison. In Season 2, Nolan is left so horrified and purposeless from his actions that he contemplates killing himself in front of a black hole. It is heavily implied that the black hole would absolutely kill him if he entered it.

In the tie-in video game, Unleash the Light, Steven and the Crystal Gems are able to walk around inside a black hole without a single scratch on them. Rose was considered the greatest and most powerful of them when she was alive so she absolutely scales to this.

Something that would've absolutely killed Omni-Man did absolutely nothing to people canonically weaker than Rose. That's a wrap from me, chief.

This Throwdown's Winner is.....

Rose Quartz!

[awkwardgaydude]

Omfg earlier my roommate said he thinks we might be in a simulation because Neil Degrasse Tyson said it.

And i was just like wtf no.

He showed me the TikTok and wtf Neil that's fucking stupid his only point that we are was: "so imagine someone makes a simulation of a world and the people in that world make a simulation of another world, and then that world creates a simulation so on all the way down. So millions of simulations and what are the odds that we are in the only one that is real?"

Like dude that's fucking stupid for 1 the very first statement you made is a massive supposition with literally zero evidence. And just the sheer scale and resources it would take to simulatate an entire universe with millions of galaxies, and billions of stars in those galaxies and 10s of billions if not trillions of planets, moons, asteroids and other astrological phonemen and all of it is different and unique????

It's just ridiculous.

I went on for like 45 minutes about how fucking stupid that is and how maybe Neil Degrasse Tyson is just going fucking stupid to get idiots to pay attention to him.

[sukimas]

Kela (in total, not just college; Finland's social security program) costs ~16.9 billion euros per year. Finland has ~5.6 million people. Therefore, Kela costs about 3015 euro (or 3285 dollars) per person. A United States equivalent of Kela (properly managed) would cost 1.09 trillion dollars per year.

The total cost of the US Social Security program for the year 2021 was $1.145 trillion or about 5 percent of U.S. GDP.

Even assuming scaling administration costs, US Social Security provides nowhere near the number and amount of benefits Kela does. There is no reason that its cost should be 105% of what Kela's is (scaled for size).

The United States isn't impossible to make into a welfare state because the money is not available. The United States is impossible to make into a welfare state because its administration should be the laughingstock of the world for how poorly it is managed and run. We can only manage to stop paying more for less if we actually realize this and start taking steps to reduce the administrative bloat that is present in all of our institutions, from the local high school to the Federal Reserve.

A better world is possible! Know this: it is only so if you know the causes of this world's failures, instead of shadowboxing against Elon Musk. Billionaires should not exist- but neither should a Social Security system that costs 105% the price of one that also provides health insurance and university. This isn't just from employee number scaling, either- the Social Security Administration of the US has 60,000 employees. Kela has 6,000. The US has a population 59.3x the size of Finland, with a social security administration only 10x larger. By all accounts, Kela should cost more per head!

The United States is not a "failed state"- that means something very different- but the things it has achieved in the past (interstate highway system, post office, incredible freight rail, scientific innovations) are not achievable now. Institutions drag their feet and chase ghosts instead of looking to their more successful contemporaries. The US is not a failed state, but it is certainly a failure of a state.

I'll leave the post on this anecdote: The Washington DC Metro's Silver Line- connecting the capital of the nation to the international airport regularly used by the President of the United States, and arguably the singular piece of publicly funded infrastructure of most import to Congress- received a funding contract for line completion in 2014. The line was scheduled to open in 2018.

In actuality, the line opened in November of 2022.