Hypervigilant supertaster and bibliophile. I am not a bot! I am a human being!

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • I’m in the same place without having read that piece you mentioned. And I’m not going to be looking it up.

    As I see it, climate change is the greatest threat the human race has ever faced. It makes World War II look like a squabble in a kindergarten playground. We should all be INCREDIBLY impacted by this, and yet everyone keeps going on as if nothing is happening.

    But I think 50 years is a little bit of a narrow time frame. More likely we’ll all die within 100 to 150 years. I mean, our species will go extinct.

    Lately I’ve been thinking about what a sane society would do to try to mitigate the worst effect of climate change, while preparing society for the world that’s coming. A world without fossil fuels or basic infrastructure.




  • Wouldn’t e-bikes be a relatively stopgap measure? They still require a relatively advanced and carbon-wasteful technological base, after all: maintenance and repair for the bikes themselves (including regular replacement batteries, which are definitely NOT environmentally friendly), plus paved roads in good repair (again, requiring a lot of fossil fuel expenditure).

    There’s also the likelihood that as the Earth’s environment becomes increasingly hazardous we’ll require protection from the elements more and more often - protection which would be difficult to add to a bike of any sort.

    The US military has projected that basic infrastructure in the USA will be collapsing throughout much of the country in less than twenty years. It’s hard to see how ebikes will be practical under those conditions. Gearing towards long-term lower-tech solutions would seem to be a wiser choice.




  • Kim (1901) by Rudyard Kipling is the story of a boy coming of age in colonial India. Kipling grew up in India himself, and the sheer richness of the many cultures that Kim experiences as he travels across India and up into the lower Himalayas with a Tibetan llama is mind-blowing. Meanwhile Kim is drawn into the “Great Game” of spying between the European powers. It’s a deeply moving and beautiful book. Best of all, you can download it for free in all the major ebook formats!




  • It was well before I turned one; I was still in a crib. It was dark, nighttime, and incredibly hot. Some sort of animal with glowing eyes stared at me from the floor.

    I thought it was a dream, but decades later my parents confirmed that when I was a baby the thermostat had broken and we had a night where the temperature was 100°. As for the animal with glowing eyes, that was our cat.