monotremata

If the AMOC shuts down, all bets are off.

I mean I'm about a billion dollars short of being a billionaire, and I don't know how to live without exploiting labor either. I can't farm, I can't hunt, I can't identify edible berries, roots, and mushrooms, I can't sew beyond fixing a button. I know a lot about mechanisms, but it's far from clear to me I could do anything useful in that field once the electricity is out, let alone once source metal starts getting hard to find. Everything would get so much harder so quickly. Hell, I don't even know how to dig a latrine that'll prevent the water supply from being contaminated, assuming we can find a water supply. (On the plus side, sources of pollution in water supplies should start to fall apart pretty fast.)

I dunno. I just think everyone thinking about the collapse wildly underestimates how hard everything will be. I can't really picture my sorry ass lasting long at all.

We coulda had Local Loop Unbundling all this time.

I mean, redraw this graph as "happiness" vs "year of birth" and it'll look way less optimistic!

"Just glue some gears on it and call it steampunk..."🎶

thanks!

So is it being used as slang outside the context of describing people as non-Jewish? I grew up in Skokie, IL, so I was familiar with the yiddish term, but I haven't heard this new usage. Are non-jewish kids online using "goyim" to refer to outsiders of some other in-group?

To quote professor Farnsworth, "No, no, no one's saying that. But I'm certainly thinking it loudly."

They do very occasionally blunder into something that has merits. Like, they rescheduled marijuana, and they're fast-tracking research on therapeutic psilocybin and MDMA. Those are positive things, broadly speaking. Removing the tax on tipped workers was also helpful for some working-class people.

I can't think of anything else off the top of my head, but part of that is probably availability bias: the vaguely positive stuff that they do is a lot less emotionally charged, and therefore less memorable, than the wildly awful stuff they also constantly do.

I thought of another one. This is an odd one, because I think the dev is actually quite well known: it's Yahtzee Croshaw, formerly of Zero Punctuation and now of Fully Ramblomatic. He's made a number of games over the years, but one that almost nobody ever mentions anymore is Poacher. (Note: link is to Archive.org rather than Steam; I don't think the game is available on Steam.) I didn't actually beat this one, as it ramps up quite a bit in difficulty as it goes on, but the basic controls and whatnot are very nice, and the humor is great. Here's Wot Rock, Paper, Shotgun Thought about it, since it's a bit of a faff to actually install at this point and Archive doesn't offer reviews and whatnot.

The catch is that it's "unlimited" in that sense that the mobile companies have made people accept now, i.e., deprioritized. I'm on Visible, which is Verizon's MVNO; my plan has unlimited deprioritized everything, and it's $25/mo, with $5/mo discount for the first two years so I'm actually paying $20/mo for now. It's mostly good enough for my purposes; I'm usually on Wifi anyway. When I was leaving a protest and turned my phone back on, I couldn't get enough access to check the bus schedule or text my family, so that was frustrating; dense crowds are a problem. But I was previously paying like $130/mo for Verizon, so it's more than worth putting up with. I got some mesh radios for emergency comms.

I've recommended this before, so it's possible people will have heard of this from me, but Gateways by Smudged Cat Games is pretty great. It's a puzzle platformer but it gets very, very complicated as you go on, especially once you unlock the ability to use all the different mechanics at once. It's a pretty smooth learning curve up to that point, though.