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Banks will often have dye packs that can be mixed in with bills that are given to bank robbers. They're explosively rigged, so that when triggered, they will contaminate an entire large container full of bills. So the robber is just left with a bunch of weirdly dyed bills that scream "robbery money."

So, just for entertainment purposes, would it be possible to purchase just the dye used in those cartridges, or a similar dye?

And then imagine you took your own completely legal and taxed currency. You withdraw money right from your account at the ATM. So no actual theft is involved. You withdraw however much you want to dye, dye it, and now you have a large collection of purple money that screams "robbery money!" And then you just spend it as normal, casually handing what appears to be criminal evidence to random services, restaurants, and stores.

Would this be legal? Is there anything preventing you from dying currency, if there is no intention or act of counterfeiting? Can I just dye legal cash purple if I want?

If one actually did this, the obvious risk would be having the cops raid your house thinking you're a bank robber. But if you were willing to take that risk, maybe didn't have any weapons or anything illegal in your home? Maybe not so great a concern for some.

But in terms of actual criminal liability, would this be legal? Is there anything legally stopping you from making your town think you're a gangster who robbed a bank and somehow got away with it?

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And the price? So good, it's to die for!

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I know damn well what I wrote.

[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 157 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

You know, this is actually the type of fear that the zombie horror genre really reverses back on us. Classic zombies are not fast. They're not smart. They can't run, climb, or plan elaborate traps. They have no sharp claws or terrifyingly large teeth. You can outrun them at a brisk walk.

But what makes them so dangerous is that they're relentless. If they get your scent, they'll follow you and keep following you. Blow their legs off and they'll crawl towards you. Remove all their limbs and they'll slither like a snake towards you. Only destroying their brain can stop them.

If you're on foot, it is virtually impossible to escape them, as they'll just keep on coming. And while you need to sleep, they don't. They can just keep right on shuffling towards you 24/7. If on foot being chased by a zombie, your best bet is probably to find a river you can swim across that will sweep them away. Oh, and of course, they are rarely alone.

Zombies are predators that turn our species's natural hunting strategy back upon us.

[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 193 points 9 months ago

Imagine being hunted and killed by a team of power walkers.

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submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works to c/lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world

Need a new gig? Looking for a job with good pay and benefits that's easy to get? Don't need employment for more than a few months? Well ICE is hiring! And they're so desperate for people that their standards have been lowered all the way to the seventh circle of Hell.

So throw in an application and sign up for ICE. Then proceed to be the most incompetent agent in ICE's history. Show up late. Show up high. Arrive to raids late and out of uniform. Brag about your upcoming raids on social media. Just generally be the most unproductive, unhelpful, and incompetent ICE employee in history. Write elaborate equipment check lists and spend hours triple checking your load out before any raid. Be a net drain on the system. Have your incompetence be so great that your very presence actually zeros out the work of at least two other people. Become a black hole of unproductivity that drains the effectiveness and morale of everyone around you. Be the Colin Robinson of ICE!

They're so desperate for people right now, that they'll be extremely reluctant to fire you as long as you don't go full direct insubordination. If you refuse to follow orders, you'll get fired. If you're just colossally incompetent at carrying those orders out, you should get at least a few months of employment before they finally let you go.

"Oops, sorry boss, I was going to the bathroom during that last raid, didn't see anything. Shouldn't have had that burrito last night."

"Oops, I'm so clumsy. I left the door to the van open, and all the migrants we caught got away. Again!"

"What do you mean I can't refer to my coworkers by name when we're all masked up. That's just impolite!"

"Look, I thought I had the right address. How was I to know that address was actually the local Republican Party campaign office?"

[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 271 points 9 months ago

Daily reminder to all ICE agents. By signing up for ICE, you have signed yourself up for a lifetime of fear and criminal liability. There are Nazi concentration camp guards that were tried for their crimes in their 90s. There is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity. Your names are recorded; your deeds are known. And you will face justice for your crimes. And do not count on a blanket pardon saving you. Crimes against humanity are violations of international law that cannot be pardoned.

[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 178 points 10 months ago

Well, my whole life, I've lived in a society where organized Christianity has overwhelmingly been a force for evil, rather than a force for good. Fuck, I straight-up believe that most Evangelical Christians are devil worshipers. If your religion leads you to hate, you aren't worshiping God, you're worshiping the Devil.

[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 157 points 10 months ago

This is some environmental storytelling right here. I see a story of an electrician, all out of appropriate lengths of wood, working past five on the night before the drywallers show up.

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The people of California will be united again! California will be whole once more!

[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 203 points 1 year ago

She did this as an act of civil disobedience and let them know in advance she was coming and was going to use the women's restroom.

But imagine she didn't. Instead she went to the capitol, and, following the law, used the male restroom. Just look at her. Do you think she wouldn't have been harassed or possibly arrested for doing so?

In practice, trans bathroom bans work like this:

Use the restroom the law requires you to: get harassed, beat up, and possibly arrested.

Use the restroom that matches your presentation: violate the law, hope no one clocks you, and you don't get arrested.

I'm a trans woman myself. You wouldn't know it if you saw me in public. And I don't even have any ID documents with an "M" on them. If I wanted to obey the Florida bathroom law, I would have to use the men's restroom. But then when I inevitably caused a scene, I wouldn't even be able to show an officer that I was just complying with the law.

Trans bathroom bans are ultimately just a means of driving trans people from public life entirely. Comply with the law? Get assaulted by some chud who thinks you're violating the law. Disobey the law? Risk arrest for actually violating it.

There's a reason labeling this a genocidal movement is not hyperbole.

[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 194 points 1 year ago

"Gender neutral" - conveniently written in a way that emphasizes the athletic feats that men have an advantage in, while downplaying those that women have an advantage in. This will be "gender neutral" in the way that most unisex shirts are. (Ie, just declaring the male as default.) If you wanted to, you could write a "gender neutral" fitness standard that women would pass at ten times the rate men do.

Hell, the US military learned the flaw of relying on averages back during the 1950s.

[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 153 points 1 year ago

There are fossilized humans. Fossilization really doesn't take that much time, geologically speaking; it just requires very specific conditions.

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So this is a fun thought exercise. Here I dig into my Catholic upbringing and try to make a stretched doctrinal case for why literally praying to St. Luigi might just actually make sense from a religious perspective. I'm no longer a practicing Catholic myself, so take it as you will. This is just me trying to stretch doctrine to see if I can argue that praying to a literal St. Luigi may actually be doctrinally viable.

Inquiring minds want to know. If one wishes to take things too far and take the "St. Luigi" thing literally, how can that be possible? Can you really pray to a saint for divine intervention, when that saint is clearly still a mortal man walking among the living?

First, on saints. There are official saints of the Church, but technically those are just the ones that the Church has decided that beyond any reasonable doubt are actually in Heaven. But according to doctrine, there are likely millions of saints, people that have reached Paradise and can intercede on mortal behalf. We've only had enough evidence, such as repeated miracles, to provide enough evidence for the official list. And the canonization process involves miracles attributed to unofficial saints. Usually someone will pray to someone that isn't on the official list, and when they receive some purported miracle, such as an unlikely cancer recovery, that is attributed as a miracle to that unofficial saint. In fact, the only way someone can become an official saint is if people pray to them while they are an unofficial one.

So, that's how one might pray to St. Luigi, even though he isn't a recognized saint. But what about mortality? The man is clearly not in Heaven right now, he's sitting in jail. How can one possibly pray to a living man for divine intervention?

But here's where the doctrinal loophole comes in! You see, technically, Heaven exists outside of time and space. Time need not work the same way there it does here. If the spirit of a saint can reach beyond the bounds of the universe to intercede on mortal behalf, they can also reach across time as well. Heaven exists outside of space and time.

So if one prays to St. Luigi, you are not actually praying to the mortal man sitting in a jail in New York. Rather, you are praying to his ascended soul, which has the ability to intercede both forwards and backwards in time. Maybe Luigi will be executed. Maybe he'll live a long life and die of old age. But when he does, he will ascend to Paradise and become a saint. And he can then answer prayers from anyone, in any place, in any time.

So yeah, if that's your thing, doctrinally, a case can be made that it is perfectly fine to pray to a literal St. Luigi!

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[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 277 points 1 year ago

We need a maximum wealth cap. I want to see a world where you are literally not allowed to have a net worth over a certain amount. I believe capitalism has its place, but unconstrained capitalism leads to innumerable social ills. You want to let people get rich enough to provide an incentive to get educated, work hard, start businesses, and innovate. But you do not want enough wealth that individuals or small groups of individuals can become a threat to society. We don't allow individuals to own nuclear weapons, regardless of how virtuous they may be. We decided long ago that private ownership of nuclear weapons is simply too much power in the hands of one individual.

Yet with enough wealth, an individual can create human misery equivalent to a nuclear weapon. For example, Elon Musk has a net worth of $400 billion. If he chose to, could spend his fortune on destroying the lives of 400,000 people. He could select his victims based on whatever criteria he chose. And he could spend $1 million per person simply hiring lawyers to make their lives Hell. Target them with frivolous lawsuits. Even if he never won a case, he could drive them into bankruptcy through legal fees alone. Or, he could pick a city of a million people and dedicate his fortune to just ruining that city. He could deliberately fund the campaigns of the worst candidates imaginable, and offer them enormous fortunes to deliberately destroy that city. Wealth is power, and power is wealth. They are equivalent and interchangeable. If you want to have a democracy, you cannot have unrestricted wealth.

I would set the wealth cap for any nation at 1000x the median household income of that nation, averaged over a certain number of years. In the US, that would be at this time about $80 million. That is a level of wealth even the most skilled and high-paid of lawyers or physicians, if they worked til the grave, lived like a pauper, and invested everything else, would still struggle to reach by the time of their death. The only way people reach that level of wealth is by leveraging the labor of others. And it is a level of wealth far, far above the level where increasing wealth continues to meaningfully increase happiness. That level of wealth is only useful to a person if that person seeks to manipulate and control other human beings.

We need a maximum wealth cap. Beyond a certain level of wealth, everything is taxed at 100%. I think 1000x the median household income is a good place to set that level. And I think that is extremely generous. I don't care what the former billionaires do with their extra income that would put them above this level. They could simply retire when they hit the cap. They could donate it to charity. They could give it all to their extended families. They could give it to their employees. They could hold grand parties in their home city every year that rivaled the excesses of ancient Rome. They could spend it all on giant yachts. Ultimately, I don't care. The core problem is the concentration of wealth and power in a small number of individuals. Any method of spreading out that wealth will avoid this problem. Even if they just give it all to their extended families, it would still be for the best. If Elon Musk wants to divvy up his fortune to his 5,000 closest family and friends, so be it. Even if every one of them was as much of a bastard as he was, at least they'll have conflicting interests, and few of them will want to see anyone appointed dictator.

We need a maximum wealth cap. Forget taxing incomes. Forget a wealth tax. We need to drive a dagger into the heart of the evil that haunts our society. The world does not need billionaires. We can have the benefits of efficiency and innovation that come with a free market without letting wealth concentrate to the point of farce. We can provide an incentive for people to work and discover without allowing individuals to become a threat to nation states. Even if you believe in the myth of visionary capitalist geniuses, we don't need billionaires. If Musk is already capped out on wealth, the board of SpaceX can still hire him as CEO. He can still enjoy the social status as influence of being the CEO of SpaceX, he just has to dispose of that wealth each year however he chooses.

1000x the median household income. No one should be able to have a fortune larger than this.

[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 316 points 1 year ago

Just how fucking dense do you have to be in order to be surprised that a man who created one of the most popular operating systems on Earth, and then gave it away for free, might be a leftist?

[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 151 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Elon Musk needs to be charged, convicted, and hanged for treason against the republic.

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WoodScientist

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