The key difference between all previous civilizational collapses and the one we potentially face is that most people in the past were farmers. Even in the grandest empires like Rome, less than 10% of the population actually lived in cities. Most people lived in the countryside working the land. The city of Rome lost something like 95% of its population. But those people didn’t just crawl in a hole and die. They abandoned the city and joined the vast majority of the population that was living in the countryside. Many in the countryside actually saw their quality of life improve substantially. Many who had been slaves found the old legal system enforcing their slavery no longer existed. Rome collapsing just meant the end of the grand cities; political and economic systems could fragment, and people would just live more locally.

But today? Less than 5% of the population actually works on a farm. The vast majority of the population lives in cities. If the political and economic system collapses, the countryside can’t just absorb all those extra people. Hell, the farms can’t even operate without the equipment, fuels, and chemicals produced by the larger economic system.

Historically, when civilizations collapsed, the common folk just left the cities, abandoned the corrupt elites to their madness, and returned to small villages and rural life. But now there is simply nowhere for people to retreat to.

You mean in how magnificent they are?

AAPPOMBUANYNTKTUWTHSITA

Really? I never would have thought Captain Planet would take up that much space on a hard drive. Are you storing fucking Captain Planet as a 4k video? It was a cartoon from the early 90s. I think 480p would be more than enough! Sure there were 114 episodes, but they weren’t that long. How much space can the complete Captain Planet really take up?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/26/blackstone-group-accused-global-housing-crisis-un

https://pestakeholder.org/reports/helter-shelter-how-blackstone-contributes-to-and-profits-from-californias-broken-housing-system/

https://fox5sandiego.com/news/local-news/almost-a-crime-report-finds-blackstone-hiked-rent-nearly-double-market-rate/

https://prospect.org/education/2023-02-28-university-california-blackstone-housing/

https://www.archpaper.com/2025/01/blackstone-cushman-wakefield-landlords-justice-department/

While I don’t support mass shootings in general, if someone is so far off the deep end that they’re going to throw their life away in an act of random violence, I at least hope they choose targets like Blackstone instead of a random elementary school. At least they’re smiting someone who deserves it, for once. The country would be a lot better off if we had several hundred corporate shootings and zero school shootings each year. No shooting period would be better. But if you’re going to go on a rampage, at least go after evil people first.

The meme is just that it’s a book with a funny-sounding title. Like, “yup, it’s wood!”

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/identifying-wood

If you want to take a look at the book itself, you can probably find it at a local library, or a digital copy can be found here:

https://annas-archive.org/md5/cda044e9fa42876a51bb245e8b3ac251

But it’s really what’s right on the tin. When just given a peace of lumber, it can often be very difficult to identify a specific species. You’re not going to pay for DNA testing for most scenarios where you need to identify lumber. So you have to learn in detail about wood anatomy, using features that can be identified with nothing more elaborate than a hand magnifier. And if you know enough about wood anatomy, you can determine the species with high degree of accuracy. That’s what this book is meant to help you do. Ideally you would be able to be handed a board, a light, and a magnifying lens, and be able to estimate the species. I actually had to do this on some assignments and exams.

My favorite photoshop of this.

I have actually had this as a course textbook. I have a copy literally just three feet from where I’m typing this. It’s legitimately a great book!

How are those related? It is possible for some conservatives to want to purge LGBT voices from the internet at the same time other conservatives want to advance crypto. These are not mutually exclusive goals.

“Flight risk criminals and terrorists had their accounts frozen!!!”

Yes, those criminals, for example, LGBT people who conservatives believe are pornographic simply for existing. God forbid LGBT artists want to have a way of earning a living. Crypto is relied on by a lot of marginalized groups. It’s used by artists who make perfectly legal art, but whose content conservatives object to. Crypto is used by many queer content creators as they face being cut off from payment processing systems, as again, conservatives consider queer people pornographic simply for existing. Crypto is used by sex workers, often people with few other employment options. Oh, and crypto is used by trans people to get access to healthcare that is quickly being criminalized.

How insane do you have to be, in 2025 Trump’s America, to fall back on the idea that anything criminal is bad. Republicans are trying to criminalize the existence of entire swathes of the population. And those people face being cut off from the banking system entirely, if folks like you, who blindly consider legality=morality, have their way.

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Yeah the motive is revealed in the methods. Conservatives never propose legislation that specifically addresses any advantage trans women have, instead opting for blanket bans. The science shows that trans women have very little if any advantage in sports, and in my sports we’re actually at a competitive disadvantage. Hell, even the chuddiest of chuds could realize that trans women certainly can’t have an advantage in all sports. Do trans women have an advantage in women’s gymnastics? Have you seen the type of bodies that excel in that sport?

I would be open to conversations of sports fairness if they came from a place of honest good faith, but they don’t. The default stance should be equality first, with restrictions only introduced when absolutely necessary. Is it possible there’s some sport that trans women have some massive advantage in? Well trans women should quickly dominate that sport’s upper echelons. If you find such a sport, then maybe we can have the conversation about fairness. But even then, it should be limited to just what is absolutely necessary to ensure fairness, nothing more. For example, maybe some handicap system would be appropriate for an individual sport. But even then, such intervention should only be done if there is some enormous unfair advantage that trans women are systematically demonstrating.

Instead, we just get bigots that talk about a trans girl “stealing” their spot in a sports competition, as if she doesn’t have the exact same right to compete as any other girl. It’s fundamentally about devaluing the humanity of trans people all together. Trans identities aren’t to be respected, they’re to be tolerated and humored at best, persecuted at worst. It’s no different than the same instincts that kept sports racially segregated for generations.

That wouldn’t help protect companies from liability from their LLMs. Companies are still liable for what their employees say. If your doctor gives you really bad medical advice that results in you getting heart, the hospital that employs them will be named in the medical malpractice lawsuit. If an employee at a local business throws out a minority customer, telling them “we don’t serve your kind,” the company can’t escape legal liability by saying, “that isn’t our official policy, it was just the employee exercising their first amendment rights.”

The first amendment just means that the government can’t tell you what to say or not say. It doesn’t shield you, or the company you are an employee of, from liability for damages that arise due to something you say.

If it doesn’t work for actual human employees, it certainly won’t work for LLMs.

Scene: design board meeting room, car manufacturer

“What if instead of designing the ventilated seats to blow air, we reversed it? What if we used them as the air intake? Turns out if we consider how the ducts are plumbed, rough calculations indicate we could save $5/car!”

Skyscrapers and large office spaces are on paper horrible investments and have an awful time filling enough vacancies to offset their upkeep. The only thing that makes them a “safe” investment is that every company uses them as a way to bank equity. If those same companies pulled the rug from under themselves they would all lose that safe equity piggy bank.

This is just the sunk cost fallacy though. You can inflate the paper value of assets by playing games like this, but the bill always comes due in the end. Yes, companies that do this can juice their books a bit in the short term, but they’re harming themselves in the long term. They retain a bit higher book value for their real estate, but they make whatever goods or services they provide noncompetitive in the marketplace. They have competitors who aren’t bogged down by past bad real estate decisions. Those competitors can outcompete them on price and can attract better talent. Meanwhile, they’re stuck in their ways, fruitlessly trying to inflate their real estate holdings, all while their revenue is plummeting because they can’t attract good people and have to charge higher for their services than their competitors.

It’s just the sunk cost fallacy. You could inflate the book value of real estate by doing all sorts of foolish things. You could create a subsidiary and have that company rent out some of your floor space for absurdly high rates. But you’re ultimately just robbing Peter to pay Paul. Those commercial real estate properties have already lost their value. The value was lost the minute it was proven that work from home was a superior work model.

These companies are going to go bankrupt at a mass scale when the next recession rolls around.

Fuck, these companies might actually be violating the law. Deliberately choosing unproductive business practices just to cook your real estate books is something Enron would do.

Honestly, I’ve been pawing through the list of medical conditions that let you still be eligible for the new covid booster. I have something that I think will qualify. But my funnier goto is that depression is one of the eligible conditions. And nothing makes me more depressed than an anti-science quack running our vaccine system!

I’ve been on tirzepatide for maybe three months at this point. I highly recommend it. I think the risks are massively overblown. It’s predictable fear-mongering that is simply an understandable reaction to how greedy the pharma companies are with their pricing on it. If you can’t afford it, it’s tempting to convince yourself it would be a bad thing to take it anyway.

I can’t afford it, but instead of spreading FUD about it, I found a third way. I just pirate the shit out of it! I’m not just taking tirz, I’m taking bootleg tirz! So far I’ve dropped from about 180 to 150.

¿Por qué no los dos?

I’ll take every vaccine I can get. Hell, I would sign up for the smallpox vaccine if I could get it, even though that disease hasn’t existed in the wild in decades. I want every covid booster. I want it all! Jab me up, give me that sweet MRNA!

And I’ll take the other stuff too. I love me a good edible. I’m on tirzepatide myself, even though insurance doesn’t cover it. How do I afford it? Simple! I pirate the hell out of it!

What really gets me is that not even ordinary autoclaving can destroy the CJD prions. Those things are fucking terrifying. Look at sterilization recommendations for surgical instruments that have been exposed to them. The first recommendation is “destroy them.” The second is, “if you simply must reuse them, boil them in lye in an autoclave for an hour.” And even then we’re not really sure if this is effective at sterilizing contaminated instruments; the recommendations are based more on lab studies, studies in Petri dishes basically. They’re largely not based on actual studies on contaminated surgical implements.

Sure, there is that difference. But the series doesn’t even address the fact that he’s already killed hundreds of people. Intentionally or not, it’s still absurd to hand wring about killing when you’ve already killed hundreds of people, accidentally or not, and the one person you’re worrying about taking down is literal genocidal maniac. To me that just sounds like not being willing to take responsibility for your own actions. Intentionally or not, Aang killed hundreds of people. And it’s not like he never went into the Avatar state again after taking out the Northern fleet. Hell, he fought Ozai while in the Avatar state. Maybe he should have just “accidentally” killed Ozai while in the Avatar state and just washed his hands of moral culpability, just like he did all the other people he killed before then.

Regardless, Aang found a way to make peace with the fact that he had taken hundreds of lives. But when the person in question is someone of power and renown? Then it becomes something to fret over.