Vanth

I recently finished this and have to agree with your review. Long, but good for the detailed world fantasy folks.

I have a sister in academia who has gone through some rough patches and burnout. I think she would get a giggle out of the comparisons from academia to the circles of hell.

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I'm not a biologist nor chemist, but worked for a while as a manufacturing and design engineer making laboratory equipment they would use so feel like I have slightly above average exposure to labs. I also took at least three undergrad classes in which we used bunsen burners in our labs. I have never heard this decontamination theory before and it sounds like BS.

Are there any practicing chemists or biologists on here? This sounds like something that would have been removed from actual laboratory practices a century ago and someone just wrote this quirky story for clicks, downplaying how much the practice is already long gone.

Imo, you can just jump straight into this one. She wrote it several novels into the Hainish Cycle, but it is first chronologically within the story timeline.

Really, there's not too much crossover between books. I haven't read all of them, just picked them up as they sound interesting in no particular order and it's been fine.

Infrastructure costs would be notable. Vending machines, ATMs, and other money-receiving machines are calibrated for current cotten/linen bills.

Impetus. Changing to polymer bills would take political will and we can't manage anything productive atm.

Personally, I don't want Trump to drive the change because he would end up putting himself on the bills, and other distasteful characters from history.

Yes. I used to say "no" but that was some fucked up internalized religious self-hate shit. I am good. Not perfect, but definitely good within my moral framework and the framework of any people I care about. I have one particular area I'm wrestling with to be "better" and I find it's far more useful to focus on improving that than on self-flagellating over how "bad" I am.

The Left Hand of Darkness and other Le Guin stories. Good timing on when I started expending my scifi reading in her direction; I was in high school, meeting more people outside my little conservative family and church bubble, trying to form new conceptual models for the much bigger world that I was previously insulated from.

also they were saying that normal rules don't apply at a border

Yeah, and call it my middle class white American audacity but I'd be willing to go toe to toe with them on that BS for quite some time. I'd be focused on keeping control and being the most pristine accuser in a civil rights lawsuit that there ever was.

I'm read up enough on US Borders and customs policy to know them confiscating and hooking up my phone to a laptop to try to crack my password is a different thing than manipulating me into volunteering my pin. That's what they're trying to do, pressure people into "voluntarily" giving their pin, which gets the cops off the hook for following their protocol for conducting searches within their more restrictive rules for cracking into a device. Same as letting them in the front door of my house, if a person "voluntarily" lets cops into their house when the cops apply pressure, the homeowner has allowed them out of all the rules and oversight that come with getting a warrant.

I turn off biometrics and power down. They can ask for the unlock pin, I can decline until they produce a warrant and I can request an lawyer. My risk profile is sufficiently accommodated.

I can see someone with a different risk profile, say, an online presence showing vocal criticism against Trump and goons, and/or not white and/or not a native born US citizen and/or has a travel history to muslim-majority countries might want to take further measures.

I've just skimmed headlines and seen a short or two on the guy who gave LEOs the distress pin. I'm not sure why he didn't decline to give them his pin until they produced a warrant, but I think giving a destruction pin was not the brightest idea. But also, fuck the cops and double fuck border cops playing these racist, fascist games with people's lives.

Bingo. Sort of. It includes a lot, to go with the massive breadth that the question entails.

I don't know whether to assume this question is in good faith or not. Can you restate what you think the OP is asking? It's not about whether there was ever a time when no work was needed.

I'm not interested in ~~wasting my time against a sealion~~ debating capitalism.

Capitalism