Yes, for us, a gram of caffeine is a double-whopper of a dose (about seven cups of strong coffee). Meanwhile a termite eating caffeine-laced wood gets a dose far greater in proportion to its body weight.

Just remember as much as humans suck, there’s something in nature doing something as perverse, or as heinous. Sure, we have limited empathy, so are inclined to sometimes know better. But we generally don’t know better enough.

EVOLUTION DOESN’T CARE ABOUT HAPPY

Appreciate your gut bacteria. They love you too.

Caffeine is the same thing. A poison to termites ( HUUUGE BUZZZZZZZ! ) that gives us a rush when we microdose it.

While I’m totally behind a world where Frank Zappa lives longer, the political problems of the US federal government are systemic. The Democratic party moved left out of necessity to oppose the Republican party, who has been trying to restore autocracy since the 1933 Business Plot failed, and FDR implemented the New Deal to prevent Communist revolution (because anything is better than living in cardboard boxes and eating flour paste to live.)

The card / board game Chrononauts expansion The Gore Years imagines an alternative in which the GOP delays of the Florida Recount were not successful, allowing Gore to win, but Andrew Looney posits a result of a Palin administration in 2008. To be fair, he also imagines avoiding WWII (hard to do) might create a period of European peaceful prosperity, so YMMV.

The 2024 election is an indictment not just of Americans but of the viability of democracy in a world where billionaires exists who can create disinformation campaigns that can convince the masses to make uninformed decisions against their own personal interests. In fact, the entire 20th century in the US has been a master class in how to subvert democracy, so even if we were able to reform federal elections (eliminate the EC, insert ranked choice voting or some other non-FPTP election model) elections may continue to be controlled by demagogy and massive propaganda machines.

We don’t know (all of) what must be done, but we do know neither US major political parties will willingly relinquish power to move towards public serving government. Considering how much it appears someone is fucking with a time machine to meddle with the past since at least 2000, Frank Zappa may yet live again.

I am left handed and enby.

Though the correlation intersection is between enby (or peripheral to gender norms) and ASD, which is a broad intersection. It also informs my penchant for over-explaining things.

I’m not mansplaining, it’s that the connectedness excites me like dinosaurs excite a toddler!

ETA Re: Anbidexterity, when I was in kindergarten I could, for a very short while, do letters with either hand and it was so cool. Then, in a playground accident, I broke my right forearm, so I learned to write while my right hand was in a cast. But yeah, I played piano (out of practice, now), and while I do mouse stuff with my left hand, I still joystick with my right hand due to early gaming on someone else’s computer.

That said, for fine work or throwing, I do that with my left hand.

PSS: That all said, computer input devices come in three flavors: Right handed, ambidextrous and rare, often not great left handed devices I don’t like. Usually I do ambidextrous options.

Frog frog. 🐸🐸

(Note we still only have a frog face emoji and not a full frog emoji)

Fuck Around and Find Out through the lens of The Scottish Play, so yes. Also noting that the weird sisters show up when someone’s about to FA so they can watch the FO part.

I’m developing a memeset of really common criticisms I have with the psychiatric sector, having been through it a lot and having expressed a lot of these as concerns to my new therapist / psychiatrist.

Speaking of which I’m freshly in therapy after a long stint without! Yay!

I keep having thoughts. Dangerous, untoward MCU Supervillain thoughts.

For instance, the reason we stopped doing outlawry ( wikipedia ) as a thing is because when you unperson someone, their only defense is to fight back and hide, and if that means a wondering child happens upon your camp, well, dead kids tell no tales.

So at the point that a given group is treated is stripped of rights enough that it threatens their life (say putting someone at risk for morbid pregnancy complications, or a homeless person needing to sleep) they are required by necessity ( wikipedia ) to defend themselves violently, since defending themselves procedurally is useless.

Which means it is right and proper for those people to stab anyone whose awareness of them and their predicament is a threat. And it’s right and proper to stab the monarchists who would strip us of our rights. Looking at you SCOTUS.

Relevant conversation from 2016

Oh good, so different from using Terrorists to justify the surveillance state.

Speaking of which the NSA Haiku Generator has been lifeboated!

Consul Leak Toxic
DDOS Agro Burst
Hazmat Ebola

Our surveillance goons are bored and lonely! Give them something to scan every day! 👋

To me it looks like someone in the design department messed up.

And this is what we can expect from enshittified companies!

I took my own name and anagrammed it.

Anagram is a verb now.

The same folks that want to unperson women (and non-whites, and LGBT+) are the same folks who are poisoning our air until 500-year hurricanes become the norm, and we run out water and can’t feed everyone.

So we’re at a point that killing them for their transgressions is literally fighting for our lives and for humanity.

I think we’re one step away from suicide bombers. After all, if we’re going to be executed anyhow…

Eventually it will present a problem. An example of this happened not long ago when Iranian woman Mahsa Amini was harassed to death by the Iranian morality police, and the people decided that was one Iranian woman too many. The humiliation campaign followed, leading to hangings which lead to revolutionaries firebombing official buildings. A lot of people shot each other. A curious development was when the fundamentalists were bombing women’s schools with poisonous gas.

There eventually was an armistice and a negotiation, but the morality police still kills women by overpolicing, so it goes on.

Here in the states, we already have minorities and undesirables getting overpoliced to death by officers eager to use their guns or show them who is boss. When Trump opens the slips again, shit is going to get interesting. (As in that Chinese curse interesting. )

I also assure you in the meantime, Afghani men get a lot of food served with extra ingredients. Spite and resentment do not sit idly by.

Maybe communicate in a code of fire accelerants and sparks?

Sure!

So my original fantasy (during the Obama era) was to create what would start as an wiki of all^† the constitutions of all nations of the world, translated to all^† languages.

Then there’d be a workshop section where amateur legal experts could take known clauses and tweak them so that they’d be better (say, revising all the US federal elections so that they’re ranked choice, and fixing all the instances of two-party procedure so that they accommodate any number of parties. Or, for another example, fixing UK Parliament so that it is appointed by sortition from all qualifying citizens.)

The point of all this when the world isn’t on the precipice of despair is twofold:

1) It provides a resource for new societies to look at what other constitutions look like, so they can pull from what works, which means that coups d’etat are more likely to result in something other than a provisional dictatorship that accidentally becomes permanent. Because we have new states rising from the ashes of the old frequently. And…

2) It provides a place to crowdsource amendments to constitutions already in place (or to change current non-foundational ordinances). Right now, here in the US, we depend on our legislators to write laws, and they rely on their staffers who often have corporate allegiances, when they don’t receive bill text directly from corporate or special interest lobbyists directly. So it would create a place for the public to talk about it and have its own input.

Such a website was a no-brainer to me, so much so that I had assumed that it existed somewhere online. But no, no-one has made it.

I don’t have the skill it takes to start what might eventually become a sizeable project with lots of political enemies, like Wikipedia or Wikileaks. But maybe here on Lemmy creating an interested team would be easier.

For now it’s a pie-in-the-sky idea, as I wouldn’t have any idea how to begin it.

† This is the internet definition of all, id est as many as we could crowdsource.