They’re just setting the tarriff to half the ‘trade deficit’ percentage.

Where the actual trade amount is trivial, this leads to ludicrous results.

You’re always going to a chunk of political support by oppressing minorities, anyone considered ‘other’. A percentage of people are always going to hate, mistrust and blame the out-group for everything wrong with their lives, and this makes them very easy to lead round by the nose.

Stoke enough hatred, and people will gladly give up due process, human rights and social equity in the name of oppressing those they see as the enemy.

And once you can do that, large corporations can exploit the absolute shit out of the population, way harder than they could with all those pesky laws, regulations, oversight, etc. They can use slave labour from the concentration camps, steal the land and wealth from the people they kill or imprison, and they can rewrite laws to suit themselves, secure in the knowledge that anyone opposing them can simply be disappeared off the streets.

A bunch of Americans pronounce it sen-tar for some reason that I’ve never understood.

sen-tor

As in taurus, which rhymes with torus.

I use dashes all the fucking time, mainly becasue I feel selfconscious about the number of semicolons I’d otherwise use.

I have a bajillion old (pre APIgate) posts on reddit, so perhaps some of the blame for the AI penchant for the things rests on my shoulders. Sorry 'bout that.

edit: :reads harder: oops, as opposed to normal hyphens. Yeah, nobody human got time for that.

how slow acting? As in months, or as in time to get the fuck outta dodge?

Ricin will kill you in a couple of days, was first extracted in 1888, and the plant grows in the mediterranean.

Only half of them are.

The rest are even.

Malazan / Discworld.

Just about any pair of characters would be amazing.

Where do you think lawyers come from?

I worked for a company once that installed a remote-activation killswitch in their drivers, as a secret weapon to force the customer to stay current on their maintenance contract.

The CEO was a fuckup however, and the code killed their system even without being activated - resulting in a bunch of angry phonecalls and some of the most egregious lying I’ve ever heard.

god, he was a piece of shit

Until he dies, you say?

Interesting.

One at the white house, one at the sun.

NPD and BPD are both driven by an eternal sucking void of insecurity and negative self-esteem that can never be filled.

Narcissists try to fill it with praise and social status, or failing that, power and subjugation.

Borderlines try to fill it with limerence and victimhood or failing that, revenge.

But it can’t ever be filled - it’s worse than addiction, worse than being underwater in some shitty MLM scheme. It takes and takes and takes because fuck you, pay me.

So they don’t have friends or loved ones, they have hosts. They suck out all the goodness until there’s nothing left to give, then they start in on the pain.

Assholes, in the other hand, are just driven by simple greed, callousness and lack of consideration. They can and do still hurt people of course, but it’s not an all-consuming obsessive need.

I use bullet points; they probably learned it from me. Sorry.

It was from another username that I don’t hugely want to link to here, sorry. It only had a handful of votes iirc.

Now explain how to convince nazis with facts and logic

I have a bash quote about me.

… or did. bash is gone now.

Apart from concerted sociopolitical efforts to make an underclass that can be harmed at will and blamed for everything, there’s a couple of less deliberately malicious explanation for a lot of people.

1: Category violation -> perversion -> predator -> monster.

2: I don’t think it’s real -> they are lying -> why would they lie about gender -> to lull people into a false sense of security -> predator -> monster

Both are of course incredibly false and hateful, and both of course are pushed maliciously and cynically by many, but I think some people are actually taken in by one or other of these.

And then fundraise on that

Individual oxygen atoms are very very grabby; they’re stage-5 clingers on PCP. They’re straight-up homewreckers, and they cannot and fucking will not be alone. They need a friend or two, and they will go and rip molecules apart to take them because fuck you.

Now, if there’s nothing else available, they’ll pair up with another oxygen atom, and form O2, what people normally call oxygen; the stuff you find in the air.

But it’s an uneasy alliance, and the bond angles are all wrong so it’s kind of spring-loaded.

And the same goes for lots of other molecules - carbon-carbon or carbon-hydrogen bonds ferinstance are also kind of tense and uncomfortable; it takes a surprising amount of energy to snap them into place, like building a tower of interlocking mousetraps.

So smack an O2 at reasonably high speed (or in other words, at a high temperature) at big structure of carbons and hydrogens, and it’s fucking chaos.

The oxygen-oxygen bond splits, and the two halves grab the other atoms, ripping the structure apart and releasing all the energy that went into spring-loading those bonds.

The main byproducts are CO2 (a carbon with two oxygens) and H2O (an oxygen with two hydrogens), both of which are very low-energy, strong bonds.

They’re both gases, and all that energy leftover is released as heat, which does two things:

• raise the temperature enough to do the same thing with even more O2s, causing a chain reaction
• heat up the released gases (and any bits of random gunk that break off with them) so much that they glow red hot, just like hot iron.

So you get plumes of glowing hot gas-and-particles streaming off the stuff that’s burning - and hot air rises, so the plumes point upwards.

But they also cool down quickly in the air, below the glowing-hot point, and that’s why flame has a shape: the boundary is how far as they get while still hot enough to glow.

Of course, hydrocarbons and carbohydrates aren’t the only things that burn, there’s lots of other molecules you can do this to, and the same principle applies. It’s just that carbony things tend to burn easily and well, and we’re surrounded by the stuff because that’s what living things are made of, so that’s what you tend to see being on fire the most.