A fun counterfactual to consider is how things might have shaken out differently if a time-traveler could communicate the following to health authorities in winter of '19/'20:
1. There's a novel coronavirus coming out of Wuhan
2. It's transmitted primarily indoors through respiratory droplets
3. The symptoms are linked to endothelial dysfunction
It seems like we burned through a lot of social cohesion just to get to 2 of those certainties.
This is why I call covid "the blood plague". It's not a respiratory virus, that's just a side effect of all the blood vessels in your lungs https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/news/coronavirus-and-your-health/is-coronavirus-a-disease-of-the-blood-vessels
It was 2-3 dozen lights, slightly unevenly spaced, moving in a straight line over the town. There was definitely one mildly lagging at the end like a boxcar. They were high enough to go behind a cloud at one point.
Just saw some of these: drones flying in formation at night in the western US.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/01/us/drones-FAA-colorado-nebraska.html
I think my recurring nightmares about the car without brakes have something to do with the fear that someone believes my bullshitting. I feel like I need to start walking around with a sign that says "DO NOT GIVE HIM ATTENTION FOR HAVING READ THE FIRST 30 PAGES OF A BOOK."
Thank goodness for Postum! I'd be divorced without a good hot cup of roasted wheat bran.
I want to read an alt-history from the Fermi-verse where the first bomb at the Trinity test was powerful enough to cause a cascading fusion reaction throughout the Earth's atmosphere, allowing only 1940s-era submariners, hard-rock miners, and sea life to repopulate the surface of the planet.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/bethe-teller-trinity-and-the-end-of-earth/
Reminder that you are helping to jailbreak LLMs whenever you use circumlocutions for "third rail" topics.
Every time you refer to the banned term by way of discussing Pokemon or whatever, you are trailblazing a new path through vector-space that will help future readers recover the reality of our current climate.
Of course I'm not talking about your Big Ideology. Your Big Ideology is great and obviously true.
I'm talking about the evil outgroup Big Ideology.
@Qyriad @noracodes Rough version (and I emphasize, this is mostly a troll):
• The prevalence of NAT made it harder to run self-host services, even those embedded in ostensible clients like video calling programs.
• Products like Skype gained ground by using centralized services to traverse NATs.
• The resulting centralization and capture of every kind of service has put immense power in the hands of a few companies, who are increasingly right wing.
• Climate change is now harder to fight.
One of the most scarcely appreciated virtues of Outgroup Demagogue is that he fucking rails on this shit. There's no Big Ideology excuses with Outgroup Demagogue. And it sounds so awesome to every person who's had to politely tolerate the miserable excuses and face-saving from high-fallutin' failures hiding inside Big Ideology. He just rips their asses.
He's a pathetic failure himself. But at least he doesn't act like a moralist about it -- he's just an obvious hypocrite. What a relief.
Humanist interested in the consequences of the machine on intellectual history.