for n00bs who don't get the joke but will enjoy it, the 3 laws of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, have famously been paraphrased as a casino where [may

for n00bs who don't get the joke but will enjoy it, the 3 laws of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, have famously been paraphrased as a casino where [maybe think of this like building a perpetual motion machine] (1) you can't win [if you build a perpetual motion machine, don't expect it to generate extra power to run other things] (2) you can't break even [you can't even build a perpetual motion machine cuz friction etc.] (3) you have to play the game [your entire life is like a failed perpetual motion machine, you only survive by killing other things and even so you're going to run down and die, along with the rest of the universe] but it suffuses everything, more than just perpetual motion machines, like if your coffee water has sugar dissolved in it, don't expect it to climb out and reform crystals, and if you have sugar crystals, it's just going to dissolve itself in humidity in the air, and you can neither stop nor make these things happen. If you think you can, if you figure out a way to get the chaotic dissolved sugar back out of the water as organized crystals (rock candy!), that only happens if you have created even more chaos (evaporating the liquid water, burning carbon to heat the water, etc.) along the way.