carapace
Joined 12 years ago
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Recent submissions
Comment · 2 years ago
This. It feels like USA just lost the Cold War.
> Tens of millions of people are going to wake up [this morning] to find that they don’t live in the country they thought they did. Liberals, classical and otherwise, will discover overnight that they’re now outnumbered by a coalition of earnest fascists, partisan Republicans who’ll rationalize literally anything, and millions upon millions of less tribal voters who don’t care how corrupt Trump is or which laws he breaks or whether he overturns elections or not so long as they get the results on their pet issues that they’re hoping for.
> That’s an identity crisis. A big one. And a lot of people are going to be having it at the same time.
Comment · 2 years ago
Yes, that's my point. I'm complaining about the one idiot pointing to the other idiot crapping on science and boasting about eating toxins being top comment on this fractally appalling story.
Happy Halloween
Comment · 2 years ago
> If the technology really advances to that point it will be very cheap to live.
Yes. But the flipside of that is that it's hard to earn money. The cheaper it is to live, the harder it is to make money.
The problem UBI solves is when most humans can no longer compete with machines in the economic system. Once that happens there are only a few options, and the least unpleasant is simply to give them (us) money tokens.
Comment · 2 years ago
Stupidity has always bothered me. Strident pseudo-intellectual stupidity bothers me almost more than cruel ignorant stupidity.
At least now I'm angry in a constructive way.
Comment · 2 years ago
On movie sets the candles and whatnot are props not lighting, there are other lights in use to illuminate the set and actors.
Comment · 2 years ago
(SF is 150 years old and 7x7 miles in size, we do not compare to London on any dimension. My whole city could be a borough of London!)
(This one time I was at a party (it was a long time ago) and these Italian dudes were there, and when I mentioned that I was from SF one of them said, "Nice town." ... I was a little miffed, but they were from Rome, so... *shrug* )
Comment · 2 years ago
> In Gavin Newsom’s book Citizenville he talked about how, after becoming [San Francisco] mayor, he discovered that fare collection cost as much as the revenue generated from fares. He started the process of making the bus free but was told by so many advisors that the busses would become “dumpsters on wheels,” from a combination of homeless people using them for shelter and people not respecting services that are free, that the plan was scrapped.
Comment · 2 years ago
Just a head's up for those of us on the West Coast of N. America, every so often it rains for forty days and forty nights and the whole place floods.
> The Great Flood of 1862 was the largest flood in the recorded history of California, Oregon, and Nevada, inundating the western United States and portions of British Columbia and Mexico. It was preceded by weeks of continuous rains and snows ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862
> An ARkStorm (for Atmospheric River 1,000) is a "megastorm" proposed scenario based on repeated historical occurrences of atmospheric rivers and other major rain events ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARkStorm
The Central Valley (of California) becomes the Central Sea. Sacramento would be washed away, as would most of the communities in the lower-lying areas.
The time to deal with this is now. (E.g. if you live in these places move away!)
Comment · 2 years ago
USA is an early adopter?
Comment · 2 years ago
> Untouched and eighty years old, it was supposed to have been built by men with carts and horses during the Roosevelt years in the 1930s.
> The soil was springy and spongy when you walked on it. Like an uncompacted garden bed it was full of mulch captured by rain water. Eighty years of humus was deposited here during flash floods, without any help from mankind.
> The trees were all self seeded.
> Geoff plunged his hands into the soil and went down 8 inches of moist, black, rich, composted soil. It was still damp.
https://www.permaculturenews.org/2014/10/11/discovering-oasi...
Comment · 2 years ago
I thought this was a good idea too but then a scientist pointed out that those areas radiate heat into space at night and the last thing we want right now is less of that.
It's a little like a bald person putting on a wool hat: great if you're cold, but counter-productive if you're already too hot.
- - - -
In the next twenty years we will build as much city as we have so far. In other words in the next twenty years the amount of urban area will double. We've gotta design and build these new cities to be in harmony with the global ecosystem that maintains life support for everybody.
"Building cities with ecological harmony" | Dror Benshetrit | TEDxAmazônia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OrRCGY_lkk
Comment · 2 years ago
The primary "pressure" at the moment is to develop species-level self awareness to stabilize the planetary life support system before we crash civilization.
Comment · 2 years ago
Cf. https://dynamicland.org/
> Dynamicland is a nonprofit research lab creating a humane dynamic medium.
> What that means is a way for real people in the real world to explore ideas together, not just with words and pictures, but with computation.
They're doing stuff like that.
- Simple computer systems
- Applied ecology (Permculture, et. al.)
- Economic prosperity and ecological harmony.
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