If you’re the person being arrested, your options are to surrender or fight and hope they only beat you within an inch of your life without actually killing you (with the understanding that the chances of them killing you are increasing every day). Unless you manager to use legal force against them in which case you are 100% dead.

Community defense is when OTHER people come to rescue you, typically using nonviolent methods to harass and inhibit the agents until they give up and leave. Of course, the chances that agents will just kill them are increasing every day, too. Either way, once you’ve been targeted you’ll likely need to go into hiding, and engaging legal council is probably a good idea even if you’re a citizen.

I don’t think this is pessimistic or nihilistic. I feel like it’s a pretty accurate assessment of the likely possibilities. I’m open to hearing other interpretations, though.

Having a hobby with community helps a lot because it gives you the option of channeling that extra ambition into the community. For example, I do historical reenactment (Society for Creative Anacronism) and one if my hobbies is making coins. I’ve taken commissions, sure, but I get a lot more enjoyment out of learning and teaching about historical coin making and giving my coins away to people who don’t make their own (which is most people).

And of course there’s a smaller community of coin makers within the SCA, and we get to share our work with each other, talk shop, collaborate from time to time, etc.

Community really makes a big difference.

NGL I’m not very familiar with the technical details, but I know quartz is pretty temperature sensitive and starts to get damaged about 400F iirc

It’s possible special conditions are needed to really succeed, like low/no oxygen or a long duration at a lower temperature.

But theoretically, the answer to your question is “yes”

Diamonds aren’t stable and will eventually, over billions of years, decompose from their cubic molecular structure to carbon’s more stable form, graphite, which has a hexagonal molecular structure.

Oh, here’s another good gemstone related one!

Amethyst and citrine are both quartz varieties, and if the color source happens to be from traces of iron in the crystal lattice, one can be turned into the other. Heating amethyst can make citrine, and irradiating citrine can turn it into amethyst. This is because the only actual difference between the two is the valiance level of a specific election in the iron atom giving the stone its color.

For the asshole, I would have gone with Dawkins

Approving the post and then locking it before anyone could comment would be a hilarious and fitting way to answer the question!

There are a lot of good answers already but I want to add that this changes the situation for any Hispanic people swept up by ICE. If officials feel like they can connect a person to the cartels in any way whatsoever, that individual can now be accused of being a terrorist. This changes the legal process they face, and that’s not good news for them. It’ll be easier to send the person to Gitmo. It’ll be harder to fight for that person’s freedom. They’ll likely be tortured, and anything they say can be used as pretense for further aggression by the Trump administration, both domestically and foreign.

People say that about the rich in America too. “Don’t tax them, they’ll leave and take all their money with them!”

But I dunno, maybe we shouldn’t let people get so rich we’re terrified of them leaving with their money? Just a passing thought…

But also I call bullshit. Doing business in America is, for the foreseeable future, profitable. The rich aren’t going to leave because they’re making less profit as long as “less profit” is more than “how much profit will I have if I leave”

Of course, now that they’ve completely captured the US government, the conversation is kind of moot.

This isn’t the same as The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Unless you’re talking about a version of the story where there really were wolves every time he cried wolf and nobody believed him until the wolves were eating people.

Still not a perfect analogy but much closer.

Not me!

I cry in the shower at night after work.

I prefer the Ojibwe plural “moozag”

Nice pun, I think you railed it

Why not? Their leader just got elected President if the US, if that’s not cause to take them seriously then what is?

Yup

Radicals ruin everything.