I think Dr. Slotin, by the way, might be the Pnictogen Wing's most prominent Jewish headmate, but there are others. Joseph K. (one of Frisk's headmates) is Jewish I'm pretty sure though he hasn't brought it up. What I don't know is if Slotin ever practiced, though his parents sure did. https://bookoflife.jewishfoundation.org/ebol-donors/a-tribute-to-my-uncle-dr-louis-slotin
~Chara
OK I don't really have a theory, or even much of a hypothesis. But it occurred to me today while going about my business that it might be possible to combine and synthesize two ideas: Dr. Louis Slotin's fascinating analogy of nuclear criticality thresholds to money, and the notion that money can be said to have a physical phase.
Let's start with that—the easier concept to understand. Already we're used to the idea of liquidity with money. To be "liquid", in a monetary sense, means roughly "easy to transfer". You're financially "liquid" if you can immediately produce funds for a purchase or a fee or whatnot. This implies the existence of solid money, and it's pretty easy to guess what that might be: physical, salable commodities which may be converted into liquid money. Metals, precious substances, parcels of property, etc. can be thought of as money in solid form.
That leaves a form of money whose existence seems pretty obvious to me, even though it seems to have escaped the notice of the people who chatter about economies: there's gaseous money, money that exists in some speculative or promissory form. One can even see the phase analogy at work in the implications of money that exists in the form of promises or agreements, i.e. as talk. Talk can be construed as literally air, hot air indeed, and that's apt to the gaseous nature of money in the form of loans, investments, rent payments, and other promissory forms of money. If the promise dissolves—if one loses the social agreements that give value to the monetary promise—then gaseous money effectively dissipates. Gaseous money is, like liquid money, a fluid thing. It may be passed around easily and hoarded, which perhaps gives it the illusion of being like liquid money, which has a much more certain value per unit volume. Liquid money is not easily compressible (i.e. it tends to retain its value when moved around), but gaseous money is easy to compress.
The hilarious thing (to me) is that obviously gaseous forms of money are treated, in the modern economy, as though they were solid. Consider a share in a company, for example, a form of gaseous or promissory money. That's basically a gamble, because the company could fold any moment; there's no true guarantee that the share will hold value. Sure, if it's a share in a company with long-term stability, there's a higher probability of getting money from the share than (say) a share in $GME or $TSLA or $DOGE. But all the same it's still speculation. Cashing in on the share is like condensing the gaseous money into liquid form, and that's an operation which may fail; in addition, condensing some of that gaseous value affects the value of the entire market. It's a bit like trying to extract work from a tank of compressed air; the total pressure, and thus the amount of available work that can be extracted, drops with every use.
Now, combine that with Dr. Slotin's observation that money acts like a fissile substance. Put enough of it in one place, with enough "neutron flux" (i.e. a continuous stream of transactions) to attain some critical threshold, and money explodes! Fissile systems may be constructed with solid, liquid, and gaseous fissile materials. Solid systems tend to be the easiest to deal with, because it's relatively difficult to add or subtract reactivity to solid masses. Liquids tend to be far more treacherous, and most of the serious criticality accidents that have ever occurred involved transferring liquids. (The "Demon Core" accident which killed Dr. Slotin was exceptional.) Gaseous criticality accidents are extremely rare because it's hard to get enough mass into one place; the one example I know involves UF6 vapor that was unknowingly dissolving and accumulating in a reservoir of diffusion-pump oil, and so that's really a mixed-phase accident that was dangerous because of its liquid component.
Gaseous money, however, is very easily accumulated in one place, unlike gaseous UF6.
I invite the reader to draw appropriate conclusions.
~Chara of Pnictogen
My political memories of the United States go back to the early 1980s, by which time the Republicans were already attuned to the right-wing enforcers of "Christian values". Already by that time the GOP and conservatives were making "family" into one of their buzzwords. One of my earlier memories of San Diego is listening to the car radio, tuned to some local AM news station, and hearing these syndicated radio spots featuring Dr. James Dobson, of Focus on the Family, a right-wing Christian political group founded in 1977. I should stress that in these radio spots, Dobson made no overt references to Christianity. His broadcasts of parenting advice were scrupulously secular and presented as advice from "the foremost expert on the American family" or something of that sort, and it was all quietly authoritarian. Dobson's advice, like all right-wing Christian parenting advice, calls for obedience and order and hierarchy within the nuclear family. I couldn't find a sample radio spot but here's a sample of the man in a TV talkshow format. https://youtu.be/4l_NO_wVsas
