Put down the beakers? Please, that’s a graduated cylinder and a round-bottom flask! 🤣

I think this drawing needs to be modified. Add you to it shouting at the guy in the chair, “put those beakers down!” I’m off to the side giving a pedantic correction. And we’re all being carried away by the water.

This happens a lot in the trans community. Cis “ally” artists love to draw trans men with giant garish top surgery scars and trans women with visible facial hair, big bulges in their crotch, and bodies that look like they’ve never seen a drop of estrogen. In other words, they draw us with features that most trans people find extremely disturbing and painful on our own bodies, features we work very hard to hide or fix.

When called out on it, these artists inevitably retreat to, “well, some trans women/trans men/nonbinary folks have that feature.” Are there some radical gender-fuck queer folk who rock boobs and a beard simultaneously, in a kind of anarchist “fuck the system” vibe? Sure. And all the best to those folks. Do whatever makes you happy.

But these folks the exception, not the rule. And the artists in question draw trans people like this as the rule, not the exception. They don’t draw ten normal-looking trans people and one rainbow explosion gender warrior. They draw them all with prominent features that would trigger most trans people. Like, they don’t even bother having their trans women shave. The way some “inclusive” artists draw trans people is indistinguishable from the way literal hate artists draw us. Rather than hate, I think for a lot of them it’s just a sexual fetish.

There is no way to invest in SpaceX while separating morals from money. The only reason to invest in it is vibes - aka personal morals.

If you actually read their IPO documents, their assumed valuation is based on a comically large assumed customer market. In order to justify their IPO price, they assume that long term they will be getting about $30,000/year in revenue from 1 billion people. Take literally every person in the developed world. And then assume every single one of them is paying SpaceX $30k per year for some reason. That’s literally, per SpaceX’s own documents, what it would take to justify their IPO price. And the only way you’re making a profit on that is if the price goes even higher.

In order to grow 400x, SpaceX would have a market cap of $800 trillion. Global GDP is only $130 trillion. The only way to think a SpaceX investment is a good idea is the greater fool theory.

You can configure your 401k to not be involved in this nonsense. I moved my US stock holdings to a few value-based index funds. The ones I’m in now have a 0.25% expense ratio. Still not as low as an S&P 500 or similar index fund (usually about 0.01-0.025%), but still better than most traditional managed mutual funds (1-2% range). But what’s good about funds like this is that they don’t weight the index based on market cap. They don’t try to have the index track the dow, the nasdaq, or the S&P 500, which are all based on market caps based on present trading price. Instead, these value index funds weight based on objective measures, rather than market price. These measures include things like actual revenue, book value, debt level, etc.

You can still get broad market participation at low management cost while avoiding the AI IPO grift.

I’ve kept some US exposure, but I moved to a value-based index fund that weights not based on market cap, but by objective measures like actual earnings, book value, etc.

*401ks of those who didn’t pay attention.

That isn’t really true. Police have a unique disdain for everything related to bicycling and cycling. Most cops are themselves morbidly obese, ideologically avoid exercise, and view bicyclists as hippies and fitness freaks who deserve to be run over. Police will go out of their way to not bring charges in the case of actual cyclists deaths. And they treat bicycle theft with active disdain, putting far fewer resources into bike theft than the value of the goods stolen would justify.

“Engineers and manufactures” 😅

And that’s what’s tragic about SpaceX. It built real technical wizardry on the backs of some of the most talented minds of a generation. Yet, what will the funds from this IPO be used for? To fund the company’s operations for years to come? No. It will be used to fund shitty AI development and to pay off the money Musk borrowed to buy Twitter.

Shit. Maybe that’s what completes the time loop! Musk is a bootstrap paradox. He’s going to spend a trillion dollars building a time machine. He knows how to build a time machine because his future self told him how to build a time machine. Nowhere in this time loop dusk Musk ever actually discover the science of how to do this. He’s just passing a pdf of detailed blueprints around. It’s like something Arthur C. Clarke would pen, except incredibly stupid.

How to test if it’s actually a bicycle:

I propose a simple ontological test by law enforcement. Simply steal one. If the police treat it like they do bicycle theft, it’s a bicycle. If the police treat it like it’s an auto theft, then it’s an automobile.

If the police take the theft of one of these seriously, like they would a car theft, then point to that as justification for why they should be regulated like autos and banned from bike lanes. If the police treat it like bike theft…well…there’s a lot of valuable materials in those loopholemobiles…and the police clearly aren’t taking theft of them seriously…so…well the problem will solve itself.

Places like this still exist to some extent. I’m employed at one. I work as an engineer at a factory that engineers and constructs large pre-fab steel structures. It’s the first engineering job I’ve had that is a part of an actual manufacturing facility. I’ve always done work at engineering consulting firms or been teaching. The culture is very different than my previous positions. It’s definitely a more blue collar environment. On the engineering, drafting, estimation, and HR side (the office work), it’s pretty much exclusively through online applications. However we do get walk-ins for positions in the shop. People do sometimes walk in the office door and ask cold to apply for a welder or other fabricator position.

As for why the difference? I suppose in theory someone could do a walk-in for an office position, but that’s not something I’ve ever seen. Those are fewer, less frequently available, and far more specialized. If you’re a good welder? If you really know what you’re doing, you could get a job with us, regardless of what industry you worked in prior. If you can read a set of drawings and move your body in the subtle ways necessary to make that drawing real, then you can do at least some of the work in the fab. And the rest you can learn as you go. But the engineering side is fairly specialized. Even among engineers, even among just the engineering discipline most relative to our work, only one in a hundred engineers selected at random would be familiar with the codes we design to. And I suppose there’s also a cultural factor. Maybe when you work behind a screen all day, applying to jobs through a screen is most natural. If your work is all physical and in-person, applying for jobs that way is natural. Oh, and for the welders at least, it’s very difficult to bullshit your way through the interview process. We can ask prospective engineers technical questions in an interview. We can give them model projects to test their skills, but there’s no real way to prevent cheating. If someone really wanted to, they probably could hire someone to complete a test project we might ask them to do. But the welders? There’s no bullshitting the process. Part of the hiring process is direct skills demonstration. You create a test weld while being directly observed. That weld specimen is then immediately tested to failure, on-site, there and then. You can either do the work or you can’t. Maybe this kind of “prove your skills” character of the work makes walk-in applications more possible. Also, I do not get me wrong. I think the walk-ins are the exception, not the rule, even for our shop guys. We do get walk-ins, but I believe most do come in through references or online resume submissions. Oh, and I suppose one other factor may just be the ownership structure. The company is still majority owned and run by the original founder. So it’s pretty much what he says goes, for good or for ill. Even if this isn’t the norm in most corporate cultures, it is here simply because he likes it that way.

But yeah, I literally work at a place where now, in the Year of Our Lord 2026, you can still show up completely unannounced, walk in the front door, fill out a paper application, and potentially get a pretty solid job without ever touching an online application. It’s not easy work. Half the people who start in the fab quit after the first week. It’s hot, cold, hard, dirty work shaping steel into large structures using enormous heavy equipment. And I’m not talking some minimum wage gig either. This is skilled welding work, and the pay is commensurate with that. I’m also not in some backwards place time forgot. IDK. For example, I’m not working in some crazy post-Soviet factory in a Central Asian nation that should have been shut down 20 years ago. I live in the US.

But indeed, it does still exist. I literally work at a place you can still do this today.

This is what I’m talking about campist fantasy. If you read my post as supporting Israel, you need to take reading comprehension classes. Or at the very least stop actively trying to read the worst take you can in the writings of others.

Like, I’m sorry. But reality check. Israel is a nation with a thermonuclear arsenal. Owing, deserving, privilege, etc are irrelevant concepts here.

Again, I try to live in the real world. You’re living in some fantasy dream world where millions of Isrealis are just going to give up their homes, voluntarily become stateless and homeless, and go…where exactly? You can say, “fuck them. That’s not my problem. Zionists deserve nothing.” And morally, you would be right. But you won’t actually be doing anything productive. They can point at their nukes and say your concerns aren’t their problem. Millions of people armed with nukes are not just going to make themselves stateless.

Again, there are three possibilities for the future of the Palestinians. If you’re still pushing for a two state solution, you are actively hurting the cause of Palestinian rights, clinging to a fantasy that has been dead for a generation. Wake up. Sober up. Face the music. Start working for actual progress. The best case scenario for the future of the Palestinians is full integration and citizenship into a multi-ethnic multi-religious united Israeli state. The only other possibilities for the Palestinian population are genocide or perpetual apartheid. You are on the side of genocide and endless apartheid by refusing to acknowledge the reality of the world.

Again. Why do you spread lies? Where are the fires you claimed?

God. I’m so fucking tired of hearing liberals talk about a two state solution. Anyone still talking about it at this point is a bad-faith actor. Honestly, the people still peddling this comforting lie are almost worse than the militant zionists killing people in the West Bank. At least they’re not liars.

The two state solution has been dead and buried for over a decade at this point. A supermajority of the Israeli population completely opposes it. October 7 put the last nail in the coffin of any prospect of the idea being a viable position in Israeli politics. And they’ve elected governments that have spent decades working tirelessly to make sure a two state solution is impossible. Like seriously, wake the fuck up people. From here. Seriously, if you think you’re making a nation in this Swiss cheese of a region, you’re smoking crack. Look at this shit!:

Liberals in the West are still clinging to the two state solution fantasy because it’s politically convenient for them. The truth is at this point the West Bank and Gaza have been fully occupied. The areas the Palestinians nominally govern are no more independent and viable as an independent state or states than the bantustans on which Israel’s colonial model was built were. The “West Bank” doesn’t exist anymore. Instead there’s just dozens of small enclaves, each isolated from each other and completely incapable of serving as a unified state. Israel has deliberately made a Palestinian state impossible.

Liberals however still cling to the fantasy. They do this because it keeps them from ever having to make any hard calls. They can pretend that they’re working with the Israelis towards an eventual peace. And it’s conveniently far enough in the future that no real actions are required today.

Anyone still talking about a two state solution in 2026 is a clown. A literal fool. There are only three potential futures for Israel and Palestine at this point. (I’ll leave out the campist fantasy of Israel being destroyed. They have hydrogen bombs; they’re not going anywhere.) Those three possibilities are:

1. A perpetual apartheid state with Jewish Israelis ruling over a stateless class of enslaved Arabs confined into reservations a la the US’s Indian reservations.

2. An Israeli final solution where the Palestinian population is driven out to surrounding countries, executed in death camps, or sterilized on a mass scale.

3. A unified state where both Israelis and Palestinians live as free and full citizens of the country.

These are the only three possibilities. Anyone with a conscience should be pushing for possibility three. If you’re still masturbating to the fantasy of a two state solution in 2026, you’re advocating for possibilities one or two.

There is only one position people in the West with a conscience should be pushing: full Israeli citizenship of the Palestinian population. No more Apartheid. You don’t get the land without the people. You wanted the West Bank. Fine. It’s yours. And now you have to offer full citizenship to all the people on that land. Does this mean Israel can no longer be a majority Jewish state? If someone doesn’t like that, too fucking bad. They should have thought about that before they went and conquered a bunch of land people were living on.

One nation. One people. One country, free and equal for all, from the river to the sea. The religious descendants of the ancient Israelites (the Jewish Israelis) united in one nation with the genetic descendants of the ancient Israelites (the Palestinians.) One nation with justice and equality for all.

That should be the only thing we’re pushing for. Anything else is just a fantasy at this point. Israel isn’t going to be disbanded. Palestinians aren’t getting their own state. But full equality is something that can be pushed for, and it’s something that’s been successfully achieved by international pressure before, namely in South Africa. We need to be demanding our governments make this the only policy they will accept. And until Israel agrees to full equality, we should cut off all diplomatic relationships with the Apartheid government.

Other commenters: “fascists rewrote the law to allow grave miscarriages of justice that violate the very constitutional foundations of a free society.”

You: “nothing to worry about here guys, everything is perfectly legal. It’s not like “they’re just following the law” literally lead to the Holocaust or something.”

Are you one of those sea lions that somehow learned how to type, but you just spend your whole day spreading lies?

Bullshit. The full context of the situation was denied to the jury.

Remember, the entire reason we have juries is to allow for jury nullification. That’s literally the only benefit of juries. 12 random untrained people will never be better at deciding objective facts of guilt or innocence than a judge with a law degree and decades on the bench. We have juries as a final check against the kind of criminal corruption that has currently overtaken the UK government. The idea is that you can write whatever ridiculous laws you want, but at the end of the day you need to convince 12 average people that an offense worthy of punishment has been committed. The system is intended as a check against out of control government. Again, this is literally how the system is designed. (Judges will of course lie about this to protect their own power.) The government can write a law proscribing the death penalty for stealing a candy bar. But the jury system, if it works as intended, would prevent anyone from being convicted under that law.

The government here deliberately perverted the jury system to avoid jury nullification. They tried them under a minor offense. The jurors probably thought those convicted would get community service or a fine. That’s the rightful and just punishment for such an offense. Any greater a penalty, and jury nullification would have been on the table. Instead, the government secured a conviction under a minor offense but was able to get a sentence on par with a serious felony.

For your talk of the system working as intended, you sure are ignoring the government’s complete perversion of the jury system that is the very bedrock of our system of justice.

The only terrorist I see is the judge. They should be extradited to Hamas for trial.

Price is also a major factor. Restaurants won’t balk at paying thousands for an industrial grade dishwasher if it can replace or greatly reduce the demand for a human dishwasher. Even at low restaurant wages, it doesn’t take long for a $6000 dishwasher to pay for itself. On the other hand, if the only dishwashers available cost that much, if there were no dishwashers at a consumer price point? Most people would just go without one in their home.