There isn’t some vast array of technologies that exists but that we’re holding back from employing. We’re employing everything. Are there inefficiencies and manipulations from a capitalist system? Yes. But that has been the case for generations. Food yields per acre were increasing quite regularly for decades prior to 15 years ago or so. This is a relatively new phenomenon. And even in the greediest of corporate systems there’s pressure to develop as efficient a supply chain as possible, and to make use of available land as profitably as possible. Ruthless profit seeking could decrease the total number of acres under production, but it shouldn’t restrain the productivity per acre. Land doesn’t come cheap.

Well I meant more the “parts I like and don’t like.” But I suppose building a big-ass wooden boat would be fun.

Look, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but don’t kill the messenger. The media does a piss-poor job of really nailing home to people the short and medium term impacts of climate change.

Did you know that in the last 15 years, global farm yields per acre have been flat? This is despite miraculous improvements in farming technology. Genetic engineering, farm automation, finance markets extending industrial agriculture to underdeveloped countries, satellite planning, innumerable tools and techniques.

Our global average farm yield per hectare should be soaring. Instead, it’s been flat. We’re swimming against the current, above a giant waterfall. All our advancements in farming technology are going into keeping us one step ahead of mass famine.

It’s been projected by insurance industry studies that if we hit +3C above preindustrial levels, that would correspond to a halving of the global human population. And with how fast climate change is accelerating beyond our previous overly conservative models, that could easily happen by 2050.

Again, the media has done an absolute shit job of explaining the perils of climate change to people. You think grocery prices are bad now? You haven’t seen ANYTHING. This is NOTHING compared to what is coming. The real danger of climate change isn’t slow sea rise or even wildfires. The real danger is the fact that at any given time, the planet only has a few weeks of food reserves stored up. We need to continuously make enough food to feed 8 billion humans. And if climate change causes multiple simultaneous bread basket failures? If we don’t make enough food for 8 billion humans? Well, quite quickly we will not have 8 billion humans anymore.

If you really want to understand the magnitude of the climate catastrophe, I suggest conceptualizing it in terms of wars. All of the fervent efforts in government and the private sector are trying to address climate change? All of them are trying to constrain the casaulties over the next few decades, to merely WW2-level casualties. We’re already going to face that; that’s already locked in. We’ve already guaranteed a loss of life on the scale of the Second World War. We’re trying to keep the casualties from spiraling up to “global thermonuclear war” levels of destruction.

Because the climate is becoming hotter, wetter, and highly unpredictable.

And we grow our food outside.

Why not use regular library software? Surely there’s a FOSS solution there.

Never trust an automated vehicle you have to buy insurance for. If it’s truly autonomous, then the actual person in the driver seat is irrelevant. There is no need to price risk individually. Any true self driving car should have a lifetime insurance policy included in the purchase price. The manufacturer is the one determining if crashes will occur. The liability should be entirely on them. Any company selling you a “self driving” card that still requires you to buy insurance is selling snake oil.

Peak human population will occur within the next ten years. Previously this was driven by falling birth rates. Now it will be driven by rapidly rising death rates. Within the next ten years, I think 300 million - 1 billion dead from starvation due to bread basket collapse is a conservative estimate.

Evangelicals will decide that, despite being nominally Protestant, they’re suddenly OK with sainthood again.

I practice both a radical form of progressive Christianity and agnosticism.

This is basically me.

My favorite version of “killing Hitler” is instead of murder, blackmail the school dean so Hitler gets admitted to art school. Goodbye genocidal tyrant, hello moderately successful landscape painter!

when did you last move your bowels?

Technically when I walked in to the exam room!

Yeah it just makes sense. Everything has a little bit of consciousness in it, even subatomic particles would have a non-zero amount. But the consciousness of these particles then combine in complex and nonlinear ways. Something like, IDK, the combined consciousness of a collection of particles is proportional to their individual level taken to the n power, where n is equal to the number of particle interactions. Totally guessing on the actual math, but it would be something complex and nonlinear like that. If you could quantify consciousness, and humans had a measure of 1 consciousness unit, then the consciousness of an electron would be something like 1/Googolplex consciousness units. Something insane like that. Technically nonzero, but so small as to make an amoeba look like a intellectual giant.

I’m partial to pan-psychism. Consciousness is a property of matter.

Or, you can be, Abserd!

http://historyonfirepodcast.com/episodes/tag/Aztec

You will not be disappointed.

Oh my God. This could be the greatest international publicity stunt/real life squid game possible!

Canada creates an annual contest. Contestants must be Americans without Canadian citizenship.

The task is simple. Consume as much poutine as you can in one sitting.

The sole winner of this eating contest gets automatic Canadian citizenship.

Not to be confused with aligning yourself with Poutine, which can only mean one thing - you’re undeniably Canadian.

They’re fascists. MAGA is a fascist movement. That’s the right word for them; they meet all the textbook definitions of a classic fascist movement. They aren’t looking for particular outcomes. They’re just looking for people to hurt. And they’ll just keep doing that until they’re forced out of power or the whole system collapses. If the Nazis had won and murdered everyone that lacked blond hair and blue eyes, soon enough they would have been killing people for having the wrong shade of blue eyes.

Ah yes, zip ties. I also carry them every day. Along with plastic sheeting, a machete, a shovel, and a bottle of moonshine.

See: Clarence Thomas

Considering the insanely high domestic abuse rate among police officers, I wouldn’t be so sure about that.