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.
This is a classic move where the students will get absolutely nothing material but the admin gets everything they want.
If any of you are helping with encampments, make sure to spread the consciousness that merely meeting or planning something is not a material concession is literally in PR playbooks used by universities to pacify student movements.
You could also recognize that voting is a rigged process and is in no way the limit of political action. You can then choose to do things that are better than using bad game theory to try to get people to vote for a genocide.
Dems use the threat against women’s bodies as a way to buy your vote. They don’t actually do the thing they could’ve done at points over the last several years, i.e. codify abortion rights into law at the federal level.
They also could’ve gotten RBG to resign or had literally any fight whatsoever over Garland. Instead they immediately made paper thin excuses and their voters happily clapped along. They even characterized the (milquetoast) call for RBG to resign as sexist, lol.
Y’all are a domesticated animals to your political class and the only thing you seem to be able to do is to try and get others to join you on your path to the abattoir.
Japanese carmakers were trying to go with hydrogen fuel and did a big grift on their government to get it subsidized. I think the idea was that Japan would have a national disadvantage with EV production as they don’t have the material base for batteries but they could have an advantage with hydrogen.
Those failed, or course. Now they’re a decade behind - there were only two Japanese EVs sold internationally just a few years ago.
Free speech has never existed in the form told to us in school and on TV. Every liberation fight has faced violent state reaction and required compensatory resistance on the part of the people actively fighting the system. There has never been a turnaround on marginalizing policy that happened due to peaceful, state-protected debate in the marketplace of ideas. It’s all been precipitated by hard fights that inevitably found enemies in the cops and the feds.
This applies to every Western country, especially those most desperate to cling to their chauvinist myths.
If you know this, you can protect yourself and others by knowing what response your actions will receive and therefore how to avoid unnecessary risks.
Whenever I buy clothes they always end up getting holes quickly, I burn through socks fast, my bags keep breaking, my phones magically shit themselves and my chargers melt. I’m sick of everything being a wear part and I’m wondering where people get things that last.
I obsessively research things or intentionally buy cheap anticipating breakage.
I’ll list what I do for the things you mention but obviously it’s just my experience:
Clothes:
Thrift high quality clothes. Have to literally feel the fabric and judge the stitching and slowly learn brands that often have decent quality for your style. You can also look for cheap mid-quality clothes and they’ll still be way better than the usual H&M or Target stuff. It will depend on where you live.
Roll the dice on AliExpress. Sometimes the stuff is great and has reinforced stitching (certain sock brands, for example). Sometimes it’s paper thin garbage. Read the reviews and look for items with many reviews. Also consider finding one of the groups that uses private links to buy branded dupes. I haven’t done that in a long time but it seems to be something you can still do.
Bags:
It really depends on the kind of bag I guess. But here are some ideas:
Brands with really good warranties will either have good stuff or will give you a new item if their stuff breaks down fast. Patagonia, for example (they also sell to the US military…). Timbuk2 is also decent. You can also judge the quality here by the material, Denier rating, and stitching.
AliExpress “tactical” backpacks are pretty decent. The ones with lots of reviews. As a bonus they’re great for on-the-ground actions because they blend in.
Fjallraven sometimes has good stuff. Most items that use Cordura (any brand) will hold up pretty well.
You can also thrift bags. I have found fantastic backpacks, $300 backpacks, for $30 at thrift stores.
Phones:
I’ve had good luck with phones. I shoot for well-reviewed phones in the $300-$400 range. There’s also that guy that beats up phones to review their sturdiness. It can help you decide on which ones to avoid. OnePlus phones are usually a pretty good bet. If you want to run alternative ROMs there’s a big incentive to get a Pixel of some kind.
Chargers: I just buy Anker exclusively. No problems like melting yet.
Many categories of manufactured goods are becoming higher quality and cheaper due to Chinese productive capacity. See if there are just-as-good Chinese niche products in a given category. The nice ones will often be more expensive than the cheapest Chinese items but still 1/5-1/3 as expensive as the Western name brans stuff they are competing with. For example, there are many backpacks by lesser known Chinese brands that are reportedly very high quality and are that much cheaper. They’re very popular in East Asia and you can often find them on AliExpress if you search carefully.
Many expensive things don’t hold up. They’re just a brand name or status symbol.
There’s also a trend of capitalist vultures buying up well-known and trusted brands and then squeezing them for all their worth by changing manufacturing to something much cheaper and lower quality and slapping the logo on it. Eventually this stops working because the brand loses caché.
Chinese China of China vs. Chinese China China. The former is the correct one.
Jokes aside CPC is a dog whistle for cool people and CCP is a sign that someone is a big ol’ lib. I don’t correct people because the big ol’ libs don’t need to learn this, they should get radicalized first.
The habit of this court is to rule in favor of whatever they want while trying to claim it’s a limited decision (and even saying to not use the decision as precedent!).
I think that’s the most likely outcome. They’ll say it’s a special case because of some technicality and go forward with it.
Or hell they might just do the usual, “national security trumps all” piece of misdirection I dunno.
Russia has announced military exercises near Ukraine that will include deployment drills of tactical nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, six were reported killed in a drone strike on Russia’s Belgorod....
Okay so it’s just a straw man then. Can you have this conversation without inventing things for me to defend?
Russians did not destroy infrastructure because they hope to use for themselves (the fact that I have to explain this makes me think engaging with you is a waste of my time).
Are you sure? Russians also have a cultural connection to Ukraine, particularly the Kievan Rus. There is/was also a need to manufacture consent for invading a “cousin”. Also, how do you discount them simply being less brutal than the NATO countries that have consistently done far, far, far worse to their targets?
It seems you’d like to avoid the reality that Russia has been so much less brutal. After all, this flies in the face of the (usually racist) narrative about the invasion, which seems to have successfully indoctrinated you into a belief in simplistic camps of good vs. bad. You sure do seem to suffer under the childish illusion that if I push back on the anti-Russia nonsense out there I must be offering a defense of invasion, like I support it. In reality, this is so beside the point that I have never said anything remotely like this, but it is inconceivable to your propagandized worldview that anyone would be doing anything other than being for team A or team B rather than looking at a greater context.
That’s the difference between a war of invasion and the mindless bombing the USA likes to do in whatever conflict they get involve in on the other side if the globe
I already gave the example of Iraq, which was two full invasions and a horrific sanctions regime.
Typing on phone is annoying, so my messages get a bit terse. But your whole rant previously is about how bad the Ukrainians are.
No it wasn’t.
OK, sure. I have not much interest in that. But, how does that justify the Russian attack?
See what I mean? You’re limited by your ideology to conceive only a team sports understanding. You can’t imagine that I would (correctly) describe UA from a critical perspective without being pro-SMO. Not only that, you seemingly can’t imagine there being anything else to care about. Only this one thing enters your mind, lol.
I don’t think my framing has been that myopic to leave so much room for interpretation, though. I am pushing back on false imperialist propaganda narratives that have successfully misled those in imperial core countries and among sycophants for those countries. The wider problem is imperialism itself, which first undermined the Soviet Union and contributed to its destruction, then dismantled Eastern Europe, killing tend of millions, and finally isolated Russia et al from the imperial spoils, giving them the third world / peripheral treatment. Capitalist Russia was forced into its current position as paraiah by pushing back against this and attempting to reestablish itself as an independent power (national bourgeois interests) rather than an exploitation factory for the US, UK, Germany etc (intentional bourgeois interests). And in response, it has received a new cold war treatment of isolation and maximum pressure from the groups drawing from the literal legacies of literal Nazi staffing and ideologies and pogroms.
If you want to understand the point of this, aside from the value in not being constantly wrong about geopolitics, it is that you should fight to end this regime of maximum pressure, exploitation, and militarism that your own country, whatever it is, likely either supports, (proximally) benefits from, or has significant movements attempting to do so. I would hope that being consistently wrong and having to literally make things up about what I’m saying to make your arguments easier would be the impetus to become informed and start pointing the right fingers and doing the right work in your own local context. Or maybe just not saying things until you’ve done research?
How is any of this Ukrainian nenonazi stuff relevant?
All of it. The imperialist narrative tries to paper over the coup, the ethnic cleansing, and the nature of the civil war that are proximal root causes of the invasion. The timing and quantity of shelling in Donbas is conspicuous just prior to invasion. So is the Western imposition on killing negotiations right after invasion. These things are all tied together - who funded the neonazis? Why are they in military command? Where and when did they become organized? It all comes back to imperialist projects.
Russia was never under threat from Ukraine.
This is absurd. You don’t think NATO encroachment and a civil war on the border is a threat? What world do you live on?
Even if literal-Hitler was reborn there, how is bombing Kiev helping anyway?
Hitler was just one guy. Naziism was born of the conditions and politics of Germany and its capitalist class, a lashing back against the left that took great inspiration from US empire and genocide.
Anyways, why bomb Kiev? At first, to try and force early contrition and negotiations of a Minsk III type deal. Guess who put a stop to that.
Authoritarian governments LOVE wars
This is a dog whistle for political miseducation. All governments are authoritarian. This includes yours. Many people forget this because they accept, or are ignorant of, where that authority is directed and who has to accept the violence. What is more authoritarian than pushing a coup in UA, for example? Perhaps your government helped with that. Either way, every state is authoritarian.
it gives them an enemy, it gives them power, it gives them a mean to get rid of political opponents.
If the bourgeois that dominate a country don’t want a war, it won’t happen. The main impetus for war is usually a geopolitical struggle that has, at its base, ruling class interests. Russia is a direct threat to the piece of the pie that Western imperialists want for themselves. They want to own and sell, for example, Russia’s oil. They want to have control over the people, resources for which they contend with Russia. Similarly, instability and extraction from countries near Russia benefit the imperialist project but hurt Russia (e.g. Syria). This is a constant and dominant aspect of capitalist geopolitics. They do not let you rest or develop independently. You will be destroyed if you are not aggressive in opposition. There is a massive graveyard of countries that failed to do so sufficiently.
Russia plays a role as a country isolated from the international capitalist pie that faces constant and extreme pressure to become that aforementioned extraction target by international capital. Its international actions are grounded in a reaction to this: the interests of its national bourgeoisie that would aspire to be international were they allowed into that fold.
So we can either believe Putin a philanthropist ready to sacrifice bravely his troops for no benefit but the de-nazification of a nuke-free, not-in-nato country, or we can recognise this as just a pretext for grabbing land (supported by the preservation of infrastructure).
Obviously there are other, more correct ways to think about this aside from this Great Man Theory false dichotomy.
Oh and that part I wrote about authoritarian governments loving war applies to Russia just as well by the way.
I assumed you were applying it exclusively to Russia.
After all of this, if Russia is in it for no personal benefit but a moral victory, why are they not withdrawing? After all they have supposedly nothing to gain by continuing the war, since they don’t intend to occupy the country?
Like I said, Russia initially wanted to force a Minsk III, as evidenced by its actions. The Western controllers of UA, who gladly support its Nazi militaries, prevented this. The RF then had to choose between withdrawal with no gains or an attempt to maintain a status quo invasion, occupying the Donbas and further pushing for contrition. This is, further, in the context of the West using their financial nuclear options on Russia (and really, the economies of Western Europe as well) and utterly failing to directly damage Russia, and in fact subsidizing it via higher oil and gas prices on oil they were still easily selling. The status quo was comparatively tolerable. There is the additional outcome of the long attritional war strategy they have undertaken, which is the effective demilitarization of UA over time due to lack of manpower, materials, and economic base. This accomplishes a similar goal to exclusion from NATO. The territory of the Donbas additionally buys a buffer zone from NATO and access to coastal oil reserves.
In short, Western actions made the current trajectory the most favorable one for Russia to head in.
Why did nobody ever think to just win over Trump voters? Well, the Biden team did, and sees that their path to victory is spending $200mil on ads in small, rural areas where Trump won by a landslide. (hexbear.net)
Life would be so different and so easy if you could just make a living being as stupid as the consultants who came up with this plan....
Actual prison food (lemmy.today)
Proper upside down flag? (lemmy.sdf.org)
This should disambiguate between Jan 6 and generic “fed up”, right?
Hey kid (mander.xyz)
Just getting into JS (feddit.uk)
the new mozilla director is like a "free speech fellow" at the nyt and high ranking faculty at columbia university, worked at buzzfeed too, it's over
Your child has accidentally placed an order (youtu.be)
Apparently a real thing
Harvard’s Gaza encampment ends after administration agrees to meet (www.theguardian.com)
After nearly three weeks, students dismantle tents amid demands including disclosure of school’s financial ties to Israel...
President Biden announces a series of tariffs on green energy products from China. (lemmy.ml)
13% of 2020 Swing State Biden Voters Won’t Be in 2024 Because of Gaza: Polls (scheerpost.com)
Nearly all major car companies are sabotaging EV transition, and Japan is worst, study finds (thedriven.io)
Failure to Safeguard Free Speech is Always a Problem (znetwork.org)
Where do people buy things that don't break?
Whenever I buy clothes they always end up getting holes quickly, I burn through socks fast, my bags keep breaking, my phones magically shit themselves and my chargers melt. I’m sick of everything being a wear part and I’m wondering where people get things that last.
Correcting libs on CCP vs. CPC
It’s tiring to tell libs that its actually CPC instead of CCP....
This post was banned from dbzer0 for being "Tankie" lmfao what a joke of a so-called piracy instance (hexbear.net)
https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/c437af3b-7c7e-40ce-b39d-e099ae471d3c.jpeg...
TikTok challenges US ban in court, says it violates the first amendment (www.npr.org)
Ukraine updates: Russia orders nuclear preparation drills (www.dw.com)
Russia has announced military exercises near Ukraine that will include deployment drills of tactical nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, six were reported killed in a drone strike on Russia’s Belgorod....