WoodScientist

joined 2 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago

Did she genuinely think if she seemed normal-christian-white-girl enough they wouldn't touch her?

There are definitely some strains of thought of that kind in parts of the trans community, especially among the trans medicalist folks. There's a subset of trans folks that believe the present upsurge in bigotry is due to the presence of nonbinary people, polyamorous folks, and any other trans folks that don't present as conventional binary heterosexual. Her vibe really screams that. "I just have to show these police that trans people can be perfectly normal, and they'll leave us alone!"

I see this belief as a tragic and misguided self-defense mechanism. It's really hard to accept that there are simply people that will hate you for no reason. It is deeply hard to accept that there are people that want you dead, and there is nothing you can do to dissuade them. It's really easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if trans people simply all acted "normal," then the hate would go away. This kind of thinking is comforting to some people. It at least provides a path out of the nightmare the trans community finds itself in. If we all just became straight-presenting, then everyone would leave us alone. It provides a kind of desperate hope. There is some path forward for the trans community to escape bigotry. If we just assimilate, we can end the madness.

In truth the recent upswing in anti-trans hate has nothing to do with the existence of nonbinary or any other less conventional form of trans folks. People that we would now call nonbinary have existed for generations. The recent upswing in hate is entirely artificial and the result of a deliberate propaganda campaign by Republicans. They lost on the same-sex marriage issue, they managed to overturn Roe, and now they need a new moral panic to rile up the base. That's it. The trans community could be composed entirely of trans women that look and act like this woman and trans men that look and act like frat bros, and the recent upsurge in anti-trans bigotry would still have occurred. They needed someone to hate, so they found someone to hate. It's fascism 101, always find and target the Other.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Want to know the real irony?

spoilerIn the days after immediately after SRS, you have to pee standing up!

Well sort of anyway. You have to go a few days with a catheter and catheter bag. And you empty it by just walking it to the toilet and dumping it there. And while I suppose you could set up a folding chair next to the toilet to sit on while you empty the catheter bag, you are almost certainly going to just stand next to the toilet and empty it.

So yes, in the few days immediately after SRS, you pee standing up!


[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

I mean there's always this source if you're feeling brave.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

Sometimes the simplest things hit the hardest.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

I mean, theoretically, it seems possible. I have some bioluminescent petunias I bought awhile back when I was really high. So you in theory you could engineer whatever cells generate ejaculate to produce a mild bioluminescent compound. It would take millions of dollars and would be an ethical minefield of a project, but in principle it's quite possible.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago

That's amazing that a patient can be infected by a tumor located 5,000 km away from their body!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Why won't anyone love me?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Or here's another idea. If this is actually a real threat, how about we treat it like one? We can simply choose not to develop certain technologies; we've done it multiple times. We've had the tech for human cloning for decades, but we decided it was unethical and to simply not pursue the technology. We could do the same for AI beyond a certain level of complexity.

Hell, if this really is a threat to the human race, I would fully support just outlawing computers entirely if that's what it took. Fuck it, we'll just go back to pen and paper. It would be an extreme step, but if that's what it takes, so be it. We can go full Dune, "thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind."

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Sometimes ships really are unsinkable. You can build a small boat out of materials that are themselves buoyant. If you make a boat of a foam material or some woods, you can submerge that boat at the bottom of a lake, release it, and it will pop right back up to the surface. It's hard to build an ocean liner this way, but there are truly unsinkable boats. There is a difference between safety by backups/safety mechanisms and intrinsic safety. Your car's engine cannot explode in a nuclear fireball. It's resistant to nuclear explosions not because of some elaborate series of safety mechanisms and backups, but simply because it lacks the capability to generate any kind of atomic reaction. Physics, not engineering, provides for the safety of unsinkable boats, your car's lack of nuclear explosiveness, and fusion-fission reactors.

You speculate that the beam may not be shut off fast enough. But there IS no "fast enough" in this context. This is not some system that has the capability of spiraling out of control. Imagine you had a combustion engine that was provided air by a blower motor. The blower motor can supply a certain m^3/min, and this is all the air the engine receives. The motor can only supply the engine so much air; it is fundamentally incapable of spiraling out of control.

There's no way for a fusion-fission reactor to explode in some runaway process. You design the neutron beam so that its absolute maximum power is still well below what would be required to turn the fission reactor into a pile of slag, like orders of magnitude below. You don't put some big honking fusion reactor in this system. You build your fusion portion so that it's only capable of providing enough neutrons for a gentle slow fission burn. There simply will never be enough neutrons in the system for the fission pile to experience runaway fission.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

One advantage of these reactors is they're completely meltdown proof. You design the fission component to be sub-critical - the fission core can only maintain a reaction as long as the neutron flux from the fusion reactor is maintained. The neutron flux doesn't just enhance fission, it's a necessary component for the fission to keep going at all. And the fusion portion doesn't make net energy, it's just a glorified way of turning electricity into neutrons.

If anything goes wrong, you just flip a switch and shut down the fusion part of the reactor. Temp starts increasing too much? A sensor flips a switch and the fusion reactor shuts off automatically.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

These are actually far, far safer than any pure fission plant. The nice thing about these fusion-fission plants is they can be designed to be completely and utterly meltdown proof. Regular fission plants have a self-sustaining fission reaction; the plant is designed to slow the reaction down and keep it under control. With a fusion-fission plant, you can design it the opposite way. You design the fission part to be sub-critical. You use a fission fuel that cannot maintain a self-sustaining fission reaction. You design it so that the fission part is only able to maintain a reaction if it has a giant neutron beam pointed at it. And that neutron flux is provided by the fusion part of the reactor.

If anything at all goes wrong in the plant, all you have to do is cut off power to the fusion reactor. The fusion component of the reactor cannot itself make net power; it consumes electricity to keep running. So you just it off, the neutron flux collapses, and the fission portion is unable to keep its reaction going.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

I'm impressed. You have excellent language skills for a premie infant.

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