I’m very interested, and anxiously awaiting my passport.

Never tried changing my name or gender marker but I’m still worried they’ll make up some excuse to deny me anyway.

I regularly wear an autistic trans nonbinary pin on my lapel, have they/them pronouns and a big corporate pride flag graphic in my work email signature, and A-cup tits that I often pad out to a B-cup, but every non-queer person at work still just assumes I’m a guy because I have a flamboyant moustache. XD

That you know of.

Same. It’s weird when people recognize that folks like us exist.

Metaphysics has bigger questions to ponder and doesn’t apply to physics. It’s a branch of philosophy, not science.

And quantization was the solution to an even bigger problem in physics, the ultraviolet catastrophe.

We know that matter and energy are quantized because that’s the only reasonable explanation for why blackbody radiation is distributed like it is. The classical Raleigh-Jeans law, which accurately predicts thermal radiation frequency at low temperatures, fails to do so for higher temps. Only quantizing the emission of photons produces blackbody radiation predictions which match our experiments.

In short, we as a species have had a lot of practice designing governments in the centuries since the US constitution was written, and by their standard America is a dysfunctional backwater.

The checks and balances between the branches of our federal state were designed without political parties in mind, and they’ll need to be restructured to minimize interdepartmental collusion and prohibit self-dealing at least.

The executive should not be the sole issuer of pardons. The judiciary should be responsible for enforcing the penal system rather than the executive. The legislature should not be a competition between two sports teams. The Senate and electoral colleges shouldn’t exist. Representatives should be elected proportionally by state rather than winner-take-all for each congressional district. Recall votes should be implemented automatically if a representative trends down into negative favorability. The president must be subject to the law, and it should be easy for the citizenry to recall them as well. Judges should not be allowed to affiliate with political parties. Nobody in the government (federal or state) should be allowed to maintain ownership or control over commercial entities, and they should be audited frequently and randomly to ensure they have no conflicts of interest. The top marginal tax rate should be 100% and kick in as soon as an individual’s income exceeds some reasonable multiple of the minimum wage, which should itself be pegged to consumer price indexing of the cost to raise a family. Every elected position should have term limits. Etc etc etc.

This isn’t a scientific article. It only barely qualifies as a metaphysical argument, and that argument is false.

The distinction between quantum and classical physics is not merely one of resolution. If that were the case, then we’d have long since discarded classical physics as we developed the quantum variety.

The problem is gravity, a force so weak that we need an entire planet just to have a place to stand. Scientists are working on an experiment that can prove whether or not gravity is not a quantum field, and I’m quite confident they’ll discover that it is not. https://phys.org/news/2024-11-gravity-quantum-entity.html

The problem is that there’s no way to quantize gravity in a way that makes sense with our observations of how it works in macroacopic reality. Most attempts at a quantum description of the gravitational field as we understand it immediately blow up into incalculable infinities of gravitons and fail to explain gravitational time dilation at the same time.

I think the correct description of reality will require a perspective which hasn’t previously been described in mathematic form. I don’t think spacetime/gravity is quantized, I think that’s an emergent property of the same underlying process that gave rise to our quantized fields for matter and energy.

Ugh, my biggest problem is fighting through my executive dysfunction to get started on documentation updates. >_<

Heck, I love explaining quantum physics.

Ask me questions! I can dumb it down enough that even a child can understand!

As an enby that’s considering fleeing the USA, I’d note that it only discourages the most awful Americans. XD

The greatest revenge would be to simply take his money and ban him from working any jobs that pay more than minimum wage.

It makes perfect sense to me and it sounds like a good way to broach the topic with her.

April Fools Day stopped being fun when Woot sold out to Amazon.

Rewriting the constitution is essential, or else the flaws in our government that permitted this state of affairs will not be addressed.

Rewriting the constitution is impossible, not only because of the polarized nature of our politics but because the existing system is designed to prevent amendments our rulers don’t want.

The government does not “give” power, it claims our power for its own and persists only because we allow it to.

I’ll say nothing more except to note that those who make peaceful revolution impossible also make violent revolution inevitable.

Tungsten rings are too brittle to resize, but I do like the necklace idea

Because the system is designed to give people like us zero levers of control.

The only idealist here is the person sugesting that reform from within the system is possible.

It’s not the voters you need to resist, it’s the idea that a government can be valid when it purposefully acts against the best interests of those it is supposed to represent. Our implied consent of the governed is false and should not be respected.

The poor primary turnout isn’t the cause of the problem, it’s the inevitable result of an electoral system that is designed to prioritize money over people.

Merely improving turnout is not our goal, at best it is a means to an end. The actual end goal is the establishment of a government that represents the interests of all, but there’s no way to get there from here even with 100% turnout.

I’m not “throwing my hands up in disgust”, I’m offering a clear-eyed perspective on the challenges we face and the hardships that must be endured to achieve democracy.

If your organization isn’t treating the U.S. government as a threat actor then it can be safely ignored. If it is, then your opsec shouldn’t allow you to talk about it online.

Yeah, because America isn’t a democracy. It only pretends to be one.

There’s no fixing this without rewriting the constitution and there’s no way to do that when our politics are this dysfunctional.

Our government persists in its current form only because the American public is too cowardly to resist it. Those districts could disappear and reform overnight if enough of us stopped treating them as valid.