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.

Thanks! Fixed.

For me, the best version of this is Avatar: The Last Airbender. Aang spends an entire arc lamenting how he may need to spill blood and kill the Fire Lord. Meanwhile the very same Aang had previously sunk an entire naval fleet single-handedly.

How many thousands of sailors, most of them probably people drafted against their will, did you kill that day Aang? Remember when you literally sliced entire ships in half? Your hands cut through steel, would you have even felt the flesh you were cutting through? Or how about all those ships you sank? A fair number sank instantly. You think everybody got out safely from those ships? Or how about that time you destroyed that giant drill machine, the one manned by thousands of soldiers, outside the walls of Ba Sing Se? You think everyone managed to miraculously escape that fireball? And those are just the major battles. How about the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fire nation soldiers you casually tossed around like rag dolls with your powers of air, water, and earth during dozens of minor skirmishes? What are the odds you managed to toss all these men around like playthings and NOT have a few of them have their skulls bashed open on rocks when they hit the ground wrong?

The point of this is not to condemn Aang’s actions through the series. His actions were fully justified, as he was fighting a war against an expansionist colonial military power. What he did was an objective good. But by the time he’s hand wringing about having to kill Fire Lord Ozai, Aang had almost certainly already taken hundreds of lives. Hell, he probably killed hundreds just in that final climactic battle against the airship armada. The Hindenburg disaster saw 1/3 of the passenger and crew parish. And that was from an airship that crashed when it was already landing and close to the ground. Aang was dropping ships from miles in the sky. Maybe some soldiers with fire bending powers could somehow slow their own descent enough to survive, maybe they had some parachutes. But there’s zero chance that Armada didn’t have a fatality rate at least comparable to the Hindenburg disaster.

So Aang blithely kills hundreds of conscripts without a second thought. But then he has a crisis of conscience that takes multiple episodes to resolve, and that crisis of conscience is all about…Fire Lord Ozai? This is like if someone nonchalantly participated in the Firebombing of Dresden and then suddenly developed complex moral doubts about putting a bullet in Hitler’s head. Aang had already killed hundreds of people that Ozai had sent to their deaths. No one was forcing Ozai. He wasn’t a conscript. He had full autonomy; he’s the absolute ruler of the Fire Nation. He doesn’t even have a Congress or Parliament to answer to. He has absolute total moral responsibility for every evil thing the Fire Nation has done. Yet, when it comes to actually holding the powerful accountable, suddenly Aang wants to talk about the morality of killing.

Why? Why not?

How? He’ll walk here!

Honestly, academically speaking, that is an interesting question. It probes at the heart of what race really is.

Is race how you are perceived? Then if someone darkened their skin and had surgery to take on certain facial features, sufficient to the point that people read and treat them as black, are they then black?

Is race genetic? What if a white person used hypothetical generic engineering to give themselves a genotype of someone with largely African ancestry? Their phenotype is still white, but their genotype is black. They aren’t read as white, but any children they have will be. Are they black? Will their children be? What if the genetic treatment also changes their phenotype? They now have the genes and a visual appearance that most would identify as black, but they know nothing of black culture and have lived in predominantly white communities their whole life. Are they now black?

Is race more about culture? Do you have to be raised as part of a black community to be black? If a white person adopts a black infant and raises them to adulthood in an entirely white rural town, is that child black? What if the parents are super racist and try to turn their adopted kid visibly white by lightening their skin, and they do this to the kid from birth? Is the kid still black? What about the opposite? What if it’s a white baby adopted by black parents and raised in a predominantly black community? Is that child black? What if the parents alter the child’s appearance to be visibly black, and do so from birth?

It’s honestly a really interesting question, and countless dissertations and books have been written on the subject of what exactly race is. So I’m not really qualified to answer this question. I frankly don’t know what precisely defines a person’s race. My impression is that ultimately race is a very squishy, poorly defined concept. The questions above probe the definition by investigating its edges. Another way to do so would be to consider the concept of passing (in a racial sense.)

I don’t really have any answers here, only questions. But your question, “how do you become black?” really sent me down a rabbit hole. When you take the question seriously, it really starts getting to the heart of just what this thing we call "race* really is.

Jesus is about to fly off that cross and go punch Lex Luthor.

The opposite is true. If you’re gay, God made you that way for a damn good reason! Who are you to question His will? It is a mortal sin for a gay man to sleep with a woman!

But what is ownership? Ownership is the society-recognized right to the exclusive use of property. But society establishes certain limitations on those rights, including requirements to allow the lawful access by law enforcement to the property.

You intrinsically give law enforcement permission to access property if they have a warrant. It’s just part of the bargain of land ownership.

I don’t have to worry about being drafted, I’m officially morally unqualified to serve in my nation’s armed forces!

Except if you print a Cthulu, then those kinds of errors happen spontaneously.

Drug smugglers have figured out ways to not only hide drugs inside statues, but to actually make drugs INTO statues. I remember reading about some Columbian drug gang that figured out a way to embed cocaine in a plastic in a manner that could be chemically separated once smuggled across the border. They were sending shipments of religious statues made out of cocaine. So I suppose that Cthulu statue could actually be 30% coke.

People also have this idea that collapse is this overnight thing, like a zombie apocalypse. But while that does sometimes happen historically, a gradual degradation is much more common and realistic. What that actually looks like on the ground is just a general decline in the standard of living all around. In an advanced capitalist economy, we rarely have actual shortages, where the supply of goods simply runs out. Rather, whenever the supply of anything gets tight, the price soars until demand drops.

As things degrade, everything’s just going to become ever more expensive. People used to eating beef will have to switch to chicken. Then they’ll switch to tofu. Eventually just rice and beans. And as prices rise, the world’s poorest, a few million at a time, will find that they can’t even afford rice and beans, and no one will be able to afford to give them food aid either.

Housing will gradually become ever-more expensive. We have a finite capacity to construct housing. And as natural disasters destroy more and more homes and infrastructure, we have to spend more and more of that finite capacity just rebuilding what we’ve lost, rather than constructing new homes. This drives the cost up ever-higher. People switch from owning their home, to renting an apartment, to living with roommates, to abandoning the nuclear family entirely and living in large extended households again.

This is what collapse actually looks like. Prices on everything slowly rise until we look around and realize that the global population has been cut in half by starvation and all but the riches survivors are living in penury.

I just want to live long enough for the anti-aging vaccine to be invented.

BRB, off to go wish for more wishes…

Reminds me of a story of a friend of mine… She did her undergrad and masters in classics and archaeology. As part of her studies she participated in a summer dig on the island of Cyprus. She spent the summer working on remote archaeological sites in the rural countryside.

Well one day she needed to go into town for something. She goes in to the only store in town, a tiny little grocery store. She finds what she’s looking for then goes to check out. Suddenly, with horror, she realizes, “wait, I don’t know how to talk to this guy. I can’t speak modern Greek.”

So she attempts the next best thing. She tries to talk to the shopkeeper…in ancient Greek. She tried to have a random conversation with someone in ancient Greek in modern Cyprus.

The shopkeeper looks at her like she has two heads, pauses for a moment, and says, in English, “lady, no one has talked like that here for two thousand years!”