The world without complexity was only able to feed around 2 billion humans

Bold claim. Why do you think complexity itself can improve efficiency? I can easily tank efficiency by adding complexity. Complexity also necessarily destroys resilience. Every time we’ve tried adding complexity, all of those societies disappear, from ancient Egypt to Rome to the Incans.

Often it’s a bit difficult to make an abstract point out of examples. You seem to be countering those examples with today’s zeitgeist, the exact thing the article is looking to counter.

The person decided this was the normal they wanted and where they chose to live.

This would be true if all else were equal, but it isn’t. Society built roads. It had to tear down housing to build the roads. The house prices went up because corporations bought up the housing stock and are using it to manipulate rents. None of that was the “choice” of the farmer. One cannot just opt out. “oh no thanks. I’ll just take efficient public transport and we can just rip up the road network. Just give me one of the houses we build through more dense development.”

Things are going to increase in complexity unless civilization collapses

Why? Many folks today are talking about making society resilient over efficient, with respect to COVID and supply chains. This is a direct ask for reducing complexity. The 15 minute city is an ask to reduce complexity. Complex societies fail.

Ultimately, the issue is cultural.

The issue is hegemony. Every company claiming to benefit you are building a fiefdom and you are the bricks. You can work around it but you have to beat the products and services you buy into submission. This is true of phones, computers, cars, TVs, subscriptions, AI, and increasingly how it asks more and more of us. People say “the things we own end up owning us” but no one says that about a fridge, or a washing machine.

They’re green growth. Relevant Think that through video.

Voting isn’t going to do shit.

Convince the people around you to protest and vote.

Which is it?

The issue is, the “wisdom” isn’t “don’t worry about personal emissions”, it’s “take voting extremely seriously. Become a single issue voter, that issue should be climate”

But there’s a psychological thing where people take the discount today and the payment later.

Not a premium user but Youtube has poisoned its own waters with its algorithm. You can see the “top” content basically gaming that algorithm as well as it can. Literally every part of it from the title to the thumbnail to the content itself is hollow except for the skinner box.

He was fired

He owns the business. His ownership was liquidated by the other owner without paperwork, and most of the other owners dispute that the ownership was ever diluted. The decision over whether he should have been “fired” are really upto him and the other business owners.

It’s also unclear why the other employees, who may or may not have been coerced, were not siding with Kurvitz. I agree it’s a mess, but there’s a big gap between “feelings” and “actually grossly illegal stuff”.

There are other videos on the internet about this, but basically PMG have done a terrible job here. One person is accused of serious corporate misconduct, and the others have allegations of being hard to work with, and PMG effectively treats them as equal, not even realising that the reason maybe some people were hard to work with was because of forced labour from the guy also doing the corporate misconduct.

They’ve just not done a great job overall here.

It’s honestly silly. I have a minor interest in Olympics coverage but it’s so often difficult to be able to watch a sport or see more context from a meme that I just stop caring. Like imagine if you saw that shooting meme and thought “yeah I’ll watch the whole thing” but you can’t. The wheeling and dealing makes the whole thing harder to get excited about.

I joined it specifically for the solarpunk and I still think of it as Slurp Nik.

Writers give publishers legitimacy. Publishers will regularly pull the writers out to trot out some “copyright is important” line.

Modern day book burning. Done by the writers this time.

I wonder how they deal with flash storage degradation.

EDIT: Apparently the Switch uses something called XtraROM. See This for more info.

I was having a chat with someone about how they are more “Star trek future rather than Solarpunk future”, and I found something off about it but didn’t really think about it, but it’s this. It’s the idea that the key conceit of Star Trek being they are exploring for the hell of it can’t really be true, and that exploration in itself is to try and get some dividend off it. Any “Star Trek future” which is not colonial is necessarily a Solarpunk future first.

OK she didn’t say it out loud, but there’s a pretty strong link between what she’s talking about (homeostatic awakening) and what Solarpunk is.

I think this may be the way the explanation comes across. Historically, there were many lakes, but now the lakes don’t exist because there’s a large city there instead. So, to replicate the behaviour of the lakes, you need to get the water to traverse rock to remove some impurities and then settle in aquifers.

I may as well respond to the Youtube video here given the age of the other post:

I think despite the disclaimers, the video is actually encouraging people to blow up a pipeline, but to do it right. It offers some examples:

• If you are part of the community, you can get access to the materials at scale, something the loners in this movie couldn’t do (and therefore risked their lives). That is, if you want to do this, a lot of people need to / should know about it and help you get the materials you need.
• The chemistry that is being used is unsafe, so don’t just copy-paste it. I’d think that was obvious but, I think the specific thing the video is trying to tell you is that bombs can be made safely, and anyone trying should do so in a way that their safety is not compromised.
• The processes and procedures used in the film are unsafe or nonsensical. This is only really made in the context that no one should copy the film.

The conclusion is a bit crazy though, that the expert opinions they got in the film purposely made the bomb making unsafe or that informants should be trusted. I think more likely is the idea that they wanted to depict the characters as a bit derpy, and the plan as crazy and dangerous. That’s what ratchets up the tension.

• A community all organising together doesn’t make sense because the point of the book is that the community is currently against property destruction (and the movie by extension is trying to advocate for that community engaging in property destruction, that’s arguably what happens at the end).
• Safe bomb-making techniques would make the film laborious and less interesting
• Not trusting the informant wouldn’t leave a twist in the film.
• The video seems to be advocating for a how-to guide rather than a fictional film.

The video is a bit “If you’ve played the Uncharted series don’t try rock climbing like Nathan Drake”.

The movie doesn’t pull punches, it’s very much the “how” and not the “why”.

non-commercial file sharing is not piracy, the industry just re-defined it because they don’t want anyone to share stuff.

Was Empress also the one who did the unhinged “you are all my simps now” rant thing?