Alexander the Great’s battle against alcoholism.

Spoiler. He lost.

Water power was cheaper than coal, yet Britain industrialized on coal power.

AFAIK, this one isn’t true. CO2 emissions aren’t going down. We’re not getting a word with renewables instead of fossil fuels. We’re getting a world with both of them used in abundance.

esp use trans people and trans rights as the most important thing ever, which has alienated many many people due to the rage and hatred being spouted

You have completely and hopelessly fallen for Republican propaganda. You’ve swallowed their entire framing of trans issues without any thought. You’re repeating the Republican Party line verbatim.

Democrats have spent the last decade trying to stay the hell away from the trans rights discussion at every opportunity. They’re not over bigots like Republicans, but they try to talk about literally anything else. Republicans however have continued to scream from the rooftops about trans people, as they try to incite the populous to acts of literal genocide.

Where are all these Democratic leaders that spend all their time talking about trans people? Can you name a single one? You’ve been brainwashed by conservative media.

Maybe there’s only one soul. Like in The Egg. It’s just one soul reincarnating into one life after the next, jumping forwards and backwards in space and time. Eventually after passing through the lifetimes of every sentient being that is, was, or ever shall be, the path of reincarnation loops back upon itself. There is only one soul, only one consciousness in the cosmos. One infinite endless circling wheel of experience, all bound in a universe finite in both space and time.

Oh jeeze. Nevermind. I thought I was being clever. I read this asklemmy title as “Obsidian Users of Lemmy, What Was Your Experience Like?” I thought I was being clever, but I misread the prompt!

Don’t think too hard about it. I read the question wrong. Then I wanted to take a different interpretation of the (misread) prompt. Write a fun little story about someone who was an “obsidian user”, addicted to obsidian, the physical material.

Oh well. Enjoy my odd little tale about the strange obsidian addict.

I can’t help myself. I just can’t stop snorting obsidian. Every night I obsessively go to my workshop. There I remove a small flake of obsidian glass I keep in a special leather pouch. Over the course of the next hour, I obsessively grind down the flake into powder, finer and finer. At last, when the right consistency is reached, I take out a piece of glass and create a fine line of obsidian dust on a mirror. Then, I simply snort it. What the strangest of addictions I have. I simply must use obsidian. It’s a compulsion summoned from some part inside of me; I cannot say where. And no, I cannot simply reuse last night’s grindings. I need that fresh glass man. I throw away probably 90% of what I grind each night, but that’s just a necessary part of the process. I don’t even get high afterwards. I simply must snort obsidian, and I don’t know why. Just gotta have my black glass.

We hanged people like Charlie Kirk at Nuremberg. Literally. That is not an exaggeration. Charlie Kirk used the exact same journalist techniques, the race-baiting, the “honest debates” about the existence of minority groups, the breathless reporting of every crime committed by members of minority groups, as Julius Streicher. Streicher was a leading Nazi propagandist and agitator. At Nuremberg, it was recognized that even though his crimes were primarily committed through acts of speech, he was still guilty. His trial consisted mostly of presentations of his own works and speeches. He was charged and convicted of incitement to genocide and crimes against humanity. For all the innocent lives he helped end, he was hanged from the neck until dead.

And Charlie Kirk did the exact same thing. He even shared some of the same targets as the Nazis. His diatribes against trans people could have been taken right out of one of Streicher’s publications. Charlie Kirk openly called for the elimination of trans people entirely. The man was guilty of incitement to genocide. In a just world, he would have been tried, convicted, and hanged for his crimes.

The tragedy of Charlie Kirk’s death was that it was an act of vigilante justice. No one deserves to take a life, not Charlie Kirk, and not his assassin. It is a tragedy that he never faced his day in court. But one should never make the mistake of thinking he was a hero or martyr. The world is objectively a better place with him six feet under ground. He dedicated his whole life to hurting other people and taking innocent lives. His whole project was an attempt to incite genocide against vulnerable minority groups. He was guilty of crimes against humanity and incitement to genocide. It’s a tragedy that he never faced a jury, but there is nothing tragic about the fact the man himself is dead. Him being dead is worthy of celebration. Him being killed is not.

In the US, we should make things even more confusing to anger the metric folks. I propose we redefine the “foot” every four years. The length of the foot will always correspond to the actual measured foot length of the current US president.

Then there’s my favorite cursed unit: the kip! 1 kip=1000 lbs. “Kip” is short for “kilo-pounds.” It’s a unit used frequently in American civil and structural engineering. And it is so deliciously cursed.

If smart glasses with heads-up displays become normalized, you will eventually have married couples that don’t remember each other’s names.

They can inspect the drives if they want. The key is they can’t access anything, as it’s encrypted, and they don’t have control over your physical person.

Why not keep your data remotely accessible and then go through customs with a blank device? If you’re only out for a few days, then download files as you need them. If you’re out for weeks or months, transfer a few TBs if need be. If you’re worried about internet transfer speeds, encrypt the files, put them on an external hard drive, and mail them to someone at your destination ahead of time.

If you don’t want to be called a Nazi, stop doing Nazi shit you sack of human shit.

Good old-fashioned robbery. Then when charged argue a defense of necessity.

To make such a defense, you have to show that the harm you sought to avoid exceeds the harmed caused by the crime you admit to performing. Robbing $40 from a random store obviously meets this threshold if the alternative is multiple people dying.

There are many cases where you can’t argue a defense of necessity. For example, if someone threatens to kill your family unless you kill some other person, you can’t argue a defense of necessity at your murder trial. You can’t sacrifice one life to save another. But if the crime you commit is obviously orders of magnitude less destructive than the alternative? Then yes, simply robbing a store for $40 to prevent multiple deaths could easily be argued as a necessity.

Hell, even if you’re not able to make that defense; it’s 40 bucks. What are the odds I’ll face anything other than probation for such a minor crime?

It’s the obvious answer, but sometimes the simplest answers are best. If I simply have to make 40 dollars within the next 3 hours, or people die? Yeah I’m just straight-up robbing somewhere.

Blahaj is good. But I prefer to make my own furniture out of solid hardwood.

Meanwhile, I just wish signal let you set server-specific nicknames.

We should legalize piracy on the high seas - but only if the pirates stick entirely to sailing vessels, weapons, and attire appropriate to the 17th century golden age of piracy. You can raid commercial shipping if you want, but you have to do it in a tiny wooden sailing boat, armed only with a swords and flintlock muskets. Also no radios or modern technology of any kind.

Sorry, best I can do is the sci fi dystopian option where we grow entire cows in vats, but we make it humane by just growing them without brains.

Yeah, this is one of those areas that capitalism really screws us over.

The natural and most obvious use for these lab-grown and imitation meats are for filler meats. Think a ground beef replacement. Something that would be added to a casserole, a burrito, or any other dish where meat is present, but not the primary focus of a dish.

But it costs money to develop lab-grown meats. And to pay that investment back, for-profit companies have to target the luxury market first. It’s like how Tesla started with building an expensive sports car. Then they used the profits from that to build a cheaper next generation car, and so on. That’s what the lab grown meat companies have had to do. The ideal market for products like these would be things like chicken nuggets or the meat inside hot pockets. But those are also the cheapest form of meat sold, and they need to target the upper end of the market to have any hope of profitability.