InappropriateEmote

Nope, no need to stain. I actually haven't really looked at seawater much to be honest, but you're definitely going to get a different set of lifeforms in seawater than you will from fresh pond water. Making comparisons between them might be a good thing to record in your notebook, which is a great idea btw. In the sea water you might see some tiny crustaceans like copepods but not likely to see rotifers for example. Could see tardigrades in either, though!

In either case, pond or sea, you shouldn't need to worry about staining anything. Most of these things have their own pigmentation, especially diatoms. The critters will tend to look semi-transparent or transparent but with very distinct edges, something like this so no, no need to stain. In fact you shouldn't stain anyway because it will likely kill the creatures in your sample so you won't see their activity.

As for the terrariums, awesome. There is a lot to be considered there, but what an amazing way to truly delve into those questions. If or when you do set something like that up, I hope you post about it here. I'd love to read about your findings.

I know you said in another comment

I didn't try looking at pond water or similar with it to find living things, only plant life so far.

But you really really should. Maybe I'm biased but to me, that is one of the greatest joys of using a microscope is watching the teeming activity of creatures that have always existed all around you but that you've never seen before. It's like walking into an alien forest and seeing the rich ecosystem there of fantastical beings and their interactions with each other, only these things have been all around you all your life, they're not alien, they're more common than squirrels, they just operate at a different scale than you do so you have no common knowledge of them. It's like being a newbie bird watcher, but again, in a new dimension. You start to notice patterns, creatures of similar type but that are also clearly different, analogous to different kinds of birds, from various songbirds to corvids (shoutout to @corvidenjoyer@hexbear.net) to birds of prey. You'll get to know types of diatoms that are (no offense) far more varied and exciting than the garlic skin in your OP image, and rotifers making convection in the water to suck up food, ciliates waving their (silly) cilia about, tardigrades (water-hexbears) all over the place. And then you can increase the magnification (depending on your microscope to some extent) and take a look at a whole new level - bacteria.

Experiment with different samples. See what you can find in different kinds of environs. It's awesome to see anything up close, but ime there's much more of a sense of discovery when you spot lifeforms, especially ones that do stuff you get to watch.

He knows all about what makes value, and understands history and how it unfolded, proving him right again and again. Marxists have never really thought about value before, and history? Marxists have been shown to be wrong over and over again. It's just history, Marxists, sorry if you don't have any framework to understand it.

This one is really causing me to twitch. Usually this kind of thing doesn't get to me, but the deep smugness behind the sheer ignorance, the smarmy certainty in their beliefs that are the exact absolute opposite of reality - it doesn't get more pure than this.

It's a perfectly valid journalistic choice.

The temporary raising of albedo from eruptions is not relevant since it does not last, it doesn't exist on the relevant time scales. Volcanic cooling does happen (even in recent recorded history!) but it's very short-lived. Any aerosols injected into the atmosphere by volcanism (what is what causes the cooling) typically only lasts for a few years, as a general rule, not more than a decade, while warming from greenhouse gases is persistent and cumulative. It's not something that is worth mentioning as any kind of genuine mitigating factor. Just like the people hoping that nuclear winter from another world war would offset climate change. It won't, it just makes things even more chaotic on a short time scale without actually helping the problem at all on any time scale that matters.

A "volcanic ice age" would be short, maybe nasty, catastrophic for agriculture and civilization, but it would not help us, it wouldn't do anything to solve the underlying problem of anthropogenic warming. Once the aerosols clear, the warming resumes, but now with added CO2 from the eruptions. So yeah, perfectly appropriate that the article doesn't go into that.

(edit: changed the word "lowering" to "raising" which is what I meant - I'm tired.)

I said this in response to a different comment, but it applies even more here:

A big obvious problem with the "metaphor" (I hate to even give it that kind of credit) is that it presents Israel and Palestine as being equal with respect to the problem, they're symmetric. That to me is what's most lib-ignorant and gross about it.

Either way, a big obvious problem with the "metaphor" (I hate to even give it that kind of credit) is that it presents Israel and Palestine as being equal with respect to the problem, they're symmetric. That to me is what's most lib-ignorant and gross about it.

The "lazy" people you think are living off of your work get a tiny pittance of the taxes you pay, nearly the entirety of which only go to reproducing the economic system that rewards those who do not work but claim to, simply by virtue of their "ownership" of the things everyone needs to live a bare minimum survival. It is these non-working "owners" who live in obscene opulence and have unrestrained power over us all, dictating to us that we must toil while they only reap. The value you actually produce is being stolen from you by those same "owners," and not even the table scraps are afforded those at the bottom struggling to survive in a system that is built around their poverty which serves a threat to all workers if they do not fall in line. The leeches are at the top, not the bottom. You absolutely should be enraged by those leeching off your work, but you've misidentified who the leeches are.

It is a safe assumption that a majority of current US scientists who leave will most likely go to Europe, yes. But long term that's a relatively small piece of the brain drain issue compared to which countries will end up producing more (and better-educated) scientists in the coming years. It's not just a matter of the ones that already exist going elsewhere, it's that there is so much less incentive and ability for a person to become a scientist in the US than there used to be while there is significant incentive and ability to become a scientist in China. I expect the incentive in the EU is also going to rapidly deteriorate, so the influx of US scientists there is just a postponement of brain drain in the west as a whole.

But those are not our ancestors. Those guys (trilobites) are an extinct clade that have no living descendants. The creatures that existed concurrently with them that are our ancestors are agnathans which were jawless fish.

You're very welcome, it's nice to read an appreciative response! And yes, there is a ton to digest especially for anyone that hasn't really been exposed to these ideas before. Marxist theory (which for the record extends far beyond just Marx - just as modern biology extends far beyond Darwin) is something that I'm still in the process of digesting myself and I expect I always will be. But it also starts helping a person to make sense of the state of the world very quickly, even if they've just started the meal. @Cowbee@lemmy.ml has an excellent reading list if and when it's something you want to really delve into. Also, the podcast RevLeftRadio has some really good episodes just laying a lot of the basics out on the table.

Let's get to social democracy first and then we can talk about communism

But that's the thing, social democracy is just a tool used by capitalists as an attempt to stop-gap the inevitable decay of capitalism. If we can just "do social democracy then talk about communism" why didn't the New Deal lead to communism rather than end up at the neoliberalism that is responsible for this current state of hellworld? Why didn't all the "Nordic model" countries achieve communism after supposedly being the paragons of social democracy, countries who are now sliding further and further to the right and even into fascism? Capitalism by its very nature is something that cannot continue indefinitely, its internal contradictions (from the inherent insolubility of class antagonism to the requirement of infinite growth on a finite planet) are such that it will always tend towards its own destruction. Look into "The Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall" to understand that social democracy cannot prevent the declining rate of profit and in some ways even exacerbates it.

There is also the fact that social democracy still necessitates imperialism: the exploitation of the people who don't live in the imperial core (so called 3rd-world countries) to support those who do live in the imperial core. It's easy for the beneficiaries of social democracy to say "let's not be hasty, we don't want to disrupt things too much" while the great masses of people in other parts of the world are suffering and dying in poverty to subsidize the easier lifestyle of the social democrat, sitting comfortably with their citizenship that provides them the "social safety net" that is denied to the children toiling in mines, or drowning in the oceans they attempt to cross to "illegally" gain access to a piece of that privilege their exploiters enjoy.

Also, this debate has been had so many times before (look up Lenin's beef with Kautsky, or better yet read Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution), and those who fall into the trap of revisionism have always eventually been shown to be on the wrong side of history. And by revisionism, I mean the opting for capitalist reform despite the scientific theoretical framework of historical materialism showing us, and accurately predicting that capitalist reform will forever remain inadequate to solving those internal contradictions, only delaying them at best.

From what I can see, you are someone who is genuine with their "heart in the right place," but what you need to look at is how these questions you're posing have all been answered already, but because those answers are a direct existential threat to those with all the power, those whose interests lie in maintaining the status quo at all costs, those answers have been demonized and ridiculed and suppressed, and worst of all, been said to be impossible, unachievable ideals. They are not only achievable, they are immediately necessary if we hope to stand any chance of mitigating and surviving the climate change (that capitalism wrought) before the earth is too scorched to even support our species, let alone civilization. Social democracy would have us set that little issue "on the back burner."