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Social architecture and the house of tomorrow

I live in an ancient city, in a medium-old apartment--one that is rapidly approaching its bicentennial. Like any building in continuous occupation for nearly 200 years, form and function have changed: it's been retrofitted with indoor plumbing, gas central heating, electricity, broadband internet. The kitchen has shrunk, a third of it hived off to create a modern (albeit small) bathroom. The coal-burning fireplaces are either blocked or walled over. Three rooms have false ceilings, lowered to reduce heating costs before hollowcore loft insulation was a thing. What I suspect was once the servants' bedroom is now a windowless storeroom. And rooms serve a different function. The dining room is no longer a dining room, it serves as a library (despite switching to ebooks a decade ago I have a big book problem). And so on.

But certain features of a 200 year old apartment remain constant. There are bedrooms. There is a privy (now a flushing toilet). There is a kitchen. There is a living room. And there is a corridor.

This apartment was built around 1820, for the builder of the tenement it's part of: he was a relatively prosperous Regency working man and his family would have included servants as a matter of course in those days. And where one has servants, one perforce has corridors so that they may move about the dwelling out of sight of the owners. But it was not always so.

Rewind another 200 years and look around a surviving great house, such as Holyrood Palace, also in Edinburgh. Holyrood largely dates to the 16th and 17th century, and reflects the norms of that earlier era, and if you tour it one thing is noteworthy by its absence: corridors. The great houses of that period were laid out as a series of rooms of increasing grandeur, each leading to the next. Splendid wide main doors in the centre of each wall provided access for nobility and people of merit: much smaller, unadorned doors near the corners allowed servants to scuttle unobtrusively around the edges of the court. Staircases ascended through grand halls at the centre of such houses (accessible from doors leading to the main function rooms around the periphery): servants' areas such as the kitchen, stores, and pantry might boast their own staircases, and the master apartments of a great house had their own stairs leading to privy or ground floor.

But the corridor in its modern, contemporary sense seems to have started out as a narrowing and humbling of the grand halls and assembly rooms of state, reduced in scope to a mere conduit for the workers who kept things running--before, of course, they later became commonplace.

My apartment is laid out around an odd, V-shaped corridor, with two arms: one leads to the kitchen, bathroom, store rooms, and front door, while the other leads to the dining room and living room. Bedrooms open off at various points: the front door is at the point of the 'V'. (I speculate that the intent was to keep the smells of cooking, smoke, and privy as far away as possible from the dining and living areas commonly used by the owner and his wife and children.) By 1820 the corridor had become an unremarkable space around which homeowners were now structuring their lives. The older style of tenement, focussed on a windowless central room off which all other rooms opened, still existed but was becoming rarer.

In the UK, the average dwelling is 75 years old. In other countries, they are considerably younger: in Germany homes depreciate after first sale, while in the US, they typically require extensive structural renovation or rebuilding after 30 years (continental climes are prone to greater environmental extremes). In Japan it's normal to demolish a house and rebuild from scratch on the newly cleared just-purchased ground.

And new homes reflect the needs and values of their owners.

It's unexceptional today to come across an open-plan apartment, because (except for the very rich) we don't typically share our homes with servants, and we have efficient ventillation and climate control. Try to imagine living in an open-plan Victorian flat with a coal-burning kitchen range and fireplace puffing out smuts, a maid and a cook to keep on top of the grime and the food preparation: it doesn't work. Try, also, to imagine a contemporary home without a living room with a TV in the corner. Go back to the 1950s and well-designed homes also had a niche for the telephone--the solitary, wired communications device, typically bolted to the wall in the hallway or at the foot of the stairs, for ease of access from all other rooms.

But today telephones have collapsed into our pocket magic mirrors, and TVs are going in two directions--flattening and expanding to fill entire walls of the living room, and simultaneously shrinking to mate with our phones. A not-uncommon aspect of modern luxury TV design is that they're framed in wood or glass, made to look like a wall-hanging or a painting. The TV is becoming invisible: a visitor from the 1960s or 1970s might look around in bafflement for a while before realizing that the big print in middle of the living room wall is glowing and sometimes changes (when it's in standby, running a screensaver). Meanwhile, microwave ovens and ready meals and fast food have reduced the need for the dining room and even the kitchen: to cook a family dinner and serve it in a formal dining room is an ostentatious display of temporal wealth, a signal that one has the leisure time (and the appliances, and the storage for ingredients) to practice and perfect the skills required. The middle classes still employ cooks: but we outsource them to timeshare facilities called restaurants. Similarly, without the daily battle to keep soot and dirt at bay, and equipped with tools like vacuum cleaners and detergents, the job of the housemaid has been shrunk to something that can be outsourced to a cleaning service or a couple of hours a day for the householder. So no more cramped servants' bedrooms.

The very wealthy ostentatiously ape the behaviour of the even richer, who in turn continue the traditions they inherited from their ancestors: traditions rooted in the availability of cheap labour and the non-existence of labour-saving devices. Butlers, cooks, and live-in housemaids signal that one can afford the wage bill and the accommodations of the staff. But for those who can't quite afford the servants, the watchword seems to be social insulation--like the dining room at the opposite end of the corridor from the kitchen.

The millionaire's home cinema, in an auditorium of its own, is the middle class TV in the living room, bloated into an experience that insulates its owner from the necessity of rubbing shoulders with members of the public in the cinema. Likewise, the bedroom with en-suite bathroom insulates the occupants from the need to traipse down a corridor through their dwelling and possibly queue at the bathroom door in the middle of the night.

Types of domestic space come and go and sometimes change social and practical function.

The coal cellar is effectively dead in this era of decarbonization and clean energy, as is the chimney stack. Servants' quarters are a fading memory to all but the 0.1% who focus on imitating the status-signaling behavior of royalty, although they may be repurposed as self-contained apartments for peripheral residents, granny flats or teenager basements. The dining room and the chef's kitchen are becoming leisure pursuits--although, as humans are very attached to their eating habits, they may take far longer to fade or mutate than the telephone nook in the hallway or the out-house at the end of the back yard.

Likewise, outdoor climate change and indoor climate control are changing our relationship with the window. Windows used to be as large as possible, because daylight lighting was vastly superior to candlelight or oil-lamp. But windows as generally poor insulators, both of sound and heat, and indoor lighting has become vastly more energy efficient in recent years. Shrinking windows and improving insulation (while relying on designed-in ventilation and climate control) drive improvements in the energy efficiency of dwellings and seem to militate against the glass bay and big sash windows of yesteryear.

What's next?

My dining room turned library is both odd (most people don't have thousands of books) and obsolescent (books need not occupy huge amounts of physical shelf space these days). But other emergent habits require considerable space. Consider virtual reality games. A couple of years ago I got to play with a friend's Oculus Rift setup. VR games take up considerably more floor space than the wide-screen PC or console gaming they may eventually replace. (You need room to move about physically without tripping over cables or stumbling into furniture.) Even a high-end gaming PC takes up a lot of space: a custom chair with controllers, a stand supporting two or more wide-screen monitors. Today's TVs and monitors may be flat but they're nevertheless enormous. (Back in 1998, the last tube TV I bought boasted a then-large 24" diagonal screen. Today, the 42" screen in the living room feels subjectively small.)

I don't see some of the basics changing. In the absence of teleport booths we still need staircases, doors, and (in some cases) elevators. We're going to continue to need somewhere to sleep for the foreseeable future, and we're also going to need somewhere to deal with our excrement and personal grooming/hygeine needs, even if we all abandon home bathing tomorrow in favour of a surprise renaissance of Roman-era communal baths. I don't see clothing becoming much more disposable than it already is (I'm wearing a £6 tee shirt, thank you, but there's a £250 coat hanging by the door, that's in no way disposable, and I'm no fashionista), so we're still going to need wardrobes, albeit some of us more than others. Parking garages are still useful even if you don't own a car--for storage, for home freezers, for washer/dryers--although stand-alone ones in this part of town are increasingly being repurposed as the ground floor of small houses, and it's possible that the era of mass public automobile ownership will come to an end within my lifetime.

Anyway, this is a brain dump of some thoughts leading up to this question: what is the home of 2119 going to look like? (Assuming no collapse of technological civilization, and an orderly--and complete by 2119--migration to renewable energy sources. Also assume availability of synthetic fuels for air/space/sea travel, reasonable improvements in electrochemical batteries, and wholesale infrastructure improvements at least as extensive as post-WW2 reconstruction in Germany and Japan. And, come to think of it, a population plateau and demographic transition to gradual managed shrinkage and aging: let's peg global population in 2119 at stabilizing at the same level as it is today, without extensive genocide.)

Bear in mind that it's probably newly built since 2019. 80% of humanity lives within 200km of the sea; ocean levels are rising and extreme weather events are getting worse, so our cities will over time recede inland from the current coastline. An ageing, shrinking population is midly deflationary and means a likely surplus of housing after peak humanity: but also accommodations for frail/elderly people.

Today's millennials will have mostly passed away, the aged in this era will be the generation born after 2019. They'll have grown up with ubiquitous social media and broadband communications, with VR and AR as a given. They may relate to private automobiles the way we relate to butlers and maidservants, while finding something else we can't imagine entirely mundane. I suspect there'll be more communal living (but I could be wrong). Transport is going to be very different--if nothing else, there's no call for burning dead dinosaurs to set a couple of tons of steel and plastic in motion to move one person, let alone to devote 90% of our urban landscape to providing priority space for automobiles. This, in combination with climate change, suggests to me the end of American-style suburban sprawl and a trend towards much denser urban habitats. Logistics are also going to be ... interesting: neither Amazon's delivery drones nor Musk's hyperloop are really practical solutions in cities, while stuff like micromobility platforms (scooters, ebikes, segways, autonomous robot parcel carts) mesh with trams (streetcars), trolleybuses, and autonomous minicabs and vans.

The bedroom, wardrobe, bathroom, and some type of food storage/preparation area, aren't going away. Other spaces will also be around, and social/spatial insulation will be in demand. At the high end, the elite (whoever they are) will try to ape the living arrangements of previous century's elites, as a status signal if nothing else.

What else is conceivable? What am I missing that should be as obvious as the multimodal shipping container in 1950, or photovoltaic panels on house rooftops in 1990?

1430 Comments

1:

Interesting questions. I'll just comment that when I was buying a new hifi earlier this month, the firm I bought it from took me round their new showroom, which included a home cinema room that they can equip for £10,000. So you don't need to be a millionaire to own one, although of course you do need the room to equip in the first place. Perhaps this will be a use for what is currently garage space (ditto VR gaming spaces, etc.).

2:

The most obvious thing you didn't even mention is 'smarthome' functionality. A house that can open and close blinds to make itself more thermally efficient. Wall controls for lights may well just go away completely. Power outlets will remain but many may be a dedicated DC outlet that looks like todays USB-C connector. 100 years isn't that long for things like building codes to adapt though - I don't think we'll get to Sterling's "smart-paper adaptible human wasp nests" (from Heavy Weather) in that short a span, if ever.

3:

Something akin to Google Glass and augmented reality replacing entertainment screens entirely. If you get the right apartment, the soap opera could play out on your sofa, with the goggles adjusting the character positions to the shape of your room.

4:

I should just like to note that adding a bedroom to a tenement flat in Edinburgh (as in, the price in going from a 2 bedroom flat to a 3 bedroom one, you can't physically add a room!) is roughly £50,000. And I bet the home cinema you were shown didn't include the cost of installing proper acoustic insulation.

Similarly: a 1-car garage in Edinburgh typically costs £40,000-50,000. (You can buy one, drop an extra £100,000 on planning permission and building a small house on top of it, and turf it for £150-200,000.) So it's on-street parking for almost everyone—one poshville side-street up the hill from me regularly has a Bentley, a Porsche Panamera, a couple of Tesla Model S's and Range Rovers, and an Audi R8 lined up on the kerb because the owners live there and nobody can afford a garage within easy walking distance!

5:

Today's smarthome appliances are controlled by smartphones with a 2-5 year support life after product launch. Anyone who bought a smart thermostat has probably already been burned by end-of-life termination; I think it'll take a long time for this crap to settle down, much less for them to become routine easily-maintained commodities with standardized parts. (Hint: I'm avoiding them for as long as possible.)

6:

That's due by 2022, not 2019! But it's going to take some fancy footwork for the headset to properly subtract in-room furniture and obstacles … especially moving ones like people and pets.

7:

I've been considering building some smarthome appliances myself (using Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and other assorted stuff) instead of going the commercial route, basically because of that support lifetime being quite short.

However, while this would be a fun project in itself, I think non-smart things just work better in my use. They're more reliable, don't (often) become obsolete, and don't create problematic waste in the eventual break-down.

Also, being in computer security business, I loathe having most 'smart' things in my home. The recent joke that 'S stands for security in IoT' (Internet of Things) is too often true, and I kind of wonder why I would need to have a microphone owned by some multinational listening to everything in my home. (I do have phones, though, but the 'smart' things do more than phone. No, I don't use Siri.)

As for the original question, I think communal living might be a bigger thing in the future. Also, at least from my admittely biased view, family arrangements other than "man, woman, and their children for twenty-ish years" seem to be more common than they used to be, so that might be reflected in the living arrangements, too. (Of course that construction is not that old, either - see above for servants living in the same quarters.)

8:

Actually, the coal shed is NOT going away, nor are pantries - they're just being repurposed! Unless you are the sort of people who outsource EVERYTHING (and that is incredibly expensive to do), the 'labour saving' equipment and supplies for both house and garden take up a large amount of room, often considerably more than the older equivalents.

Yes, I know that the bottom end accommodation doesn't provide such spaces (nor wardrobes nor attics), but that effectively constrains the inhabitant to sacrifice living space for storage, reduce the quality of their lifestyle, or outsource most routine tasks. This is one of the reasons that poorer people often need to spend more than richer ones for a comparable lifestyle. And don't even think about space for hobbies, children's homework, tri/bic-ycles, bulky toys or anything like that, let alone wheelchairs!

So, if one were to be cynical, one would say that we are heading for the former we are heading for the latter approach, but that is actually a race to the bottom. I hope that is not true.

This is not least because we need to change to reusing a lot more, and any viable green transport policy includes something vaguely like bicycles. But how often do modern houses have anywhere reasonable to put the last, even if they aren't lacking in storage?

9:

This is not least because we need to change to reusing a lot more, and any viable green transport policy includes something vaguely like bicycles. But how often do modern houses have anywhere reasonable to put the last, even if they aren't lacking in storage?

At least here in Finland, mostly every home has some storage set aside especially for bikes. The space is not always enough for all the bikes people have, but almost everybody here should be able to count on being able to store at least one bike in a locked (common) storage room in apartments. Single houses usually have a garage or some other space which can be used for that.

Of course some people tend to have more than one bike for different purposes, and then some people like to store their bikes somewhere more safe, like on their balcony or in the living room. But still not having the bike, or outdoor equipment (and stroller), room in the house is not very common here. Even in modern houses.

10:

Having at least one faraday cage room is either highly illegal or socially mandatory for many. If legal, they're also available as readily as booths in a café or restaurant. If illegal, the comms infrastructure is capable of detecting it and snitching.

Finally-adequate 3D printing + recyclable feedstock mean many people are not particularly attached to most physical possessions - but often very attached to the design. This changes how hoarding works for many people.

Bed and sofa designs are highly (re)configurable.

Communal social areas (plural) in tower blocks are mandatory and run/equipped by the residents - they may or may not be known as common rooms.

All of the above have implications for the size of individual living spaces.

Wheelchair accessibility is near-universal, though the size of even a power chair or scooter is mostly dictated by the user's body. Blocking it for any substantial period of time - or when requested to stop doing so - is actually considered obstruction in law and sometimes prosecuted as a crime.

Sound insulation is part of the building code.

VR playspaces are social areas. Nobody gets to play for truly lengthy periods but that's okay because half the games are exhausting anyway. PVP VR fighting games are a flop because it's safer to just trust the person you're fighting than a system that enables throwing and grappling with tactile feedback, but VR training aids are as common as punch bags. What we currently called eSports is conceptually dead: they're just sports and in that role they're mostly decoupled from the characters-and-music-and-... side of games because the design of the mainstream sports has been stable for decades. Many "star" players are disabled.

Streaming games from anywhere except maybe the VR playspace's own kit is dead, killed by sufficiently abundant general-purpose local compute power - and a higher cultural awareness of latency wrt our own bodies. Some retirees complain about how much money they lost on the bubble.

Standardised heatpipes are commonplace, because waste heat should be an oxymoron. The equivalent of today's "no, really, I mean it" workstation PC doesn't have fans.

Not all elevators are for people: "waiter" now primarily means what used to be called a "smartwaiter".

All of the above can be found on some really big boats. Most people don't need the speed of a plane and international rail is something of a damp squib this century.

There was an experiment decades ago in doing without toilets and minimising bathing space by having robots do all your cleaning. People curse JK Rowling for inspiring the former (though anyone still suffering any form of incontinence is happy for the tech), and people who're broke or hyperoptimising their space and water usage put up with the latter still. A "bed bath" is a readily available automated amenity and will try to learn your sensory preferences, but most people find them a bit creepy.

11:

Heat.

If you look at the "can have a killing heat event by 2100" maps, nigh-everywhere there's presently soil is included.

If you look at the weather expectations for 2100, it summarizes as "bad". If you live somewhere that gets rain, it won't be especially infrequent for the amount of rain to be "half a metre today".

Housing is going to be in tension between "heat survival", "drainage", and "infrastructure reliability". Everything from (very posh!) caves in non-porous rock formations to dense habitation but the heat pumps are massively redundant and everyone is a bit twitchy and you don't have appliances where you live; appliances like washing machines go in the outer shell where the heat load is more manageable.

The coal cellar will indeed go away, but the need to keep transformers away from the actual habitation won't. Probably neither will a desire to keep the batteries somewhere else; no matter how safe they are, the waste heat won't be welcome.

Depth, passive ventilation, passive cooling, silence, and no smell but a faint undertone of rock are going to be swank. The penthouse suite is going to be a death trap. Device efficiency is going to be emphasized enormously; waste heat isn't welcome. LOTS of food storage is expected; deliveries get interrupted, prices may be high this year...

If I thought the weather would be predictable and the oceans calm I'd expect some mobile habitation in ships, but I don't think either will hold very well.

12:

A some of possibilities occur to me, it is possible that a room, or at least a cove for some form of advanced fab might become a standard part of the home, anything from a merely highly advanced, multi-material version of the 3-D printing available today, to an atomically precise cornucopia a-la Drexler. This, then, reduces the logistical problem you spoke of to regular provision of feedstock for whatever household fab there is. You could even go further and the the vats for vat-grown foods in house. Whether part of this or as a standalone, it may become common to have some type of in-home dispensary complete with gene sequencing and synthetic biology capability. The rationale that I use is that a trend towards ability to avoid shopping trips seems to be the trend. In-home fabrication might then become the "last mile" for things that we now have to go out and buy.

By 2119, the thorny problems that make AI so problematic in an environment that is not precisely controlled may, at last, have gone the way of playing chess, into the solved basket- along with the fine motor skills that most humans possess in abundance and robots currently lag. If that comes to pass, the kind of dreams of robotic systems to do the kind of cooking and cleaning housework that were depicted in mid-20th century SF may finally become practical.

13:

First question might be urban or rural housing.

Urban development is highly constrained by what is already there, and the trends are going to be to improve the living environment of increasingly dense population. Attaching vertical gardens to modernist buildings is a lot easier than making new parks. Also covers up lack of maintenance, and sure there will be shoddy versions which increase water penetration but hey if you can cover blocks of flats in flammable insulation, "green improvements" should be an easy sell.

Easy subdivision of units will be another thing. At the lower end of property ownership, taking in a lodger or running an AirBnB is a lot more attractive if one doesn't need to share ones facilities. Likewise with the return to the older model where adult children are staying with parents for extended periods. At the other end of the scale, a landlord owing a block which can easily switch units between a family rental and 4 separate sole occupancy units would be ideal. Yes, a family unit could be rented out to 4 individuals sharing, but there's those pesky HMO regulations, & 4 single units would each command a premium in comparison.

In the city centres, those strips of land between buildings which used to be devoted to motor vehicles could easily be developed by being roofed over & small retail units dotted along the centreline.

Of course in historic (areas of) cities the changes are going to be a lot less visible even if following similar trends.

Rural housing OTOH, there is a lot more room to play with literally. Self sufficiency technology (solar power, wind turbines, water processing) is now getting much more affordable. It could well be expected as standard in the future, reducing public infrastructure for the supply services to rural homes.

But one possibility for the wealthy could be "domed" settlements (whether literally geodesic domes or some other enclosed design) - next step up from gated communities. Keep out bad weather, a certain degree of climate control through shading & vents, and total control of who gets in- keeping out drones both metaphorical and literal. The extra expense of the dome construction can be offset by the housing within needing less weatherproofing & insulation, though that's unlikely to be a consideration for those most likely to construct such. Using private services, they would push hard that they shouldn't have to pay towards public provision that they don't use, further isolating themselves from the rest of the world.

(Though in a more utopian future, such an enclosed environment might be an attractive option for villages in the Highlands of Scotland, next to the wind/wave farms generating bulk of the EUs electrical power).

14:

If farming ceases to be a widespread outdoor activity and moves to high density 365 days a year factory-like conditions then you would be able to simultaneously both engage in mass rewinding/reforesting and increased levels of lower density sprawl. I'm reminded of some of the outer-suburbs of Montreal I saw a decade ago that were comprised of large-ish (by uk standards) single dwelling structures surrounded by leafy weather mitigating trees that shade, slow wind and rain, and sink atmospheric carbon.

15:

By 1820 the corridor had become an unremarkable space around which homeowners were now structuring their lives. The older style of tenement, focussed on a windowless central room off which all other rooms opened, still existed but was becoming rarer.

The tenement flat I live in has no corridors -- the front door opens into a roughly-square windowless hallway/room with doors to the four bedrooms, the living room, kitchen and toilet (which used to be the live-in servant girl's poky little bedroom). It also has a coal storage cupboard to one side of the front door with some of the original sliding-board bunkering in place. That's now used to store stuff like the lawnmower, stepladders etc. Our flat was built in the 1850s so the no-corridor layout was still a viable plan quite a bit later than your older flat, Charlie. It is, after all, a more efficient use of floorspace if the lesser privacy and separation of facilities is acceptable.

One thing I've noted before about old-build homes like Charlie's and mine is the standard fitment of key-locks to bedroom doors and sometimes to all interior doors (other than the servant girl's room in our case. The Master of the house or his sons would not want to be denied access to their property when the urge came upon them). Our front door lock is original, terrifyingly huge and still works. Personal security and "a man's home is his castle" was a big thing in a world where burglary and theft from properties was far more common than it is today.

As for 2119 we can't really comprehend what the social needs for "a roof over our heads" will bring about. The only non-social thing we do at home today is sleep and that requires a remarkably small volume and ground footprint. A lot of the rest of what we use homes for today could be covered by short-term rents (for days or at a stretch, weeks) of living rooms for hobbies, entertainment etc. plus maybe, for the packrats among us, accessible storage. It's entirely possible that by 2119 the idea of having "stuff", unique items that no-one else can use or play with or whatever will be deprecated and packratism can be cured by a pill.

16:

I disagree with your thinking on windows: with modern Triple+ glazed windows (+ Argon filling, for example), the insulation factor is nearly that of walls, while allowing free heating most of the year in daylight. I'd be unsuprised to see pre-built heavily-insulated windows becoming part of the landscape (with blinds , etc built in, drawn a lot of the time).

On "smart" homes and infrastructure: when I built our home 20 years ago, I added Cat-6 to every room. Only 1 cable is now used: to connect the fibre (in the utility) to the router upstairs. This was an unexpectedly low usage. Though I would expect, as per pjz, a DC grid around the house to dominate over AC in the future.

Conversely, "skylights" in roofs: LEDs for internal lighting are cheaper than the heat loss (heat loss seems to be proportional to the boundaries of windows; glass is straightforward, junctions and edges, less so).

LEDs having a long lifetime vs old fashioned hot bulbs: permanently fixed light panels, maybe ? though I regret some 'embedded light' fixtures. They're difficult to replace with a different design later.

What will (should) drive a lot is deep retrofitting. Here in Ireland we're looking at the need to deep retrofit (to passive standards is realistically possible) 2 million buildings over the next 20 years. Scale to taste, but that in practice means modular design and factory construction of a lot of stuff: exterior replacement walls, roofs, etc.

Plumbing: Adding separate waste / grey water plumbing is becoming the norm, but some extra filtering on plumbing / washing machines for plastic from clothes looks necessary for the forseeable future.

17:

I suspect a lot of the change will be building down as well as up - a trend that's started with luxury houses with big basements, give it a few decades and the typical block of flats in a small town might be twenty floors down as well as up. I'm assuming that the excavated material is used in the construction, at least to some extent, and a LOT of redundancy in ventilation etc., plus big VR windows. If you can't open the windows anyway, does it matter if they aren't real?

18:

Augmented and virtual reality will have landed hard by then. I expect home layouts will be built around optimizing augmented reality “this flat is great for airships, spacecraft and deep sea submarines this other one makes a good castle “ kind of thing. Hard to guess but probably lots of open floor plans and big empty walls that can have AR artifacts tethered to them, multi story balconies to give depth. Possible windows get jettisoned

Inside the house and outside the house might get pretty fuzzy at least when the weather is nice since you can easily create virtual walls and living spaces outside the walls

The car garage will be gone along with car ownership.

19:

We're already seeing tension between housing designed for the 1950s nuclear family, and the actual needs of contemporary families. It's not just about people living with their parents for longer (as above), but also broader relationships among ex-spouses, siblings, or friends. Childcare is a driver here too, and broader categories of who's actually looking after them.

I would expect housing to eventually adapt to larger numbers of people in a partially-shared dwelling. Not a big version of a 1950s house, but something more like a set of several private areas around a shared communal space. It could be mini houses around a roofed courtyard, or integrated tenements with a central living area.

Some of these might be associated with work spaces, especially if that work looks like a shop, light workshop, office, art studio, etc. - something that isn't too noisy or smelly. In that case we have a gradation from a fully public space, to an extended-family shared space, to private spaces. We've seen some contemporary backlash to large reception rooms (the "how often do you actually throw a banquet?" argument) but in these communal dwellings, that may reverse.

Imagine a coffee-shop-like hangout area that's open to the street; above it, an extended-family large den; and off that, via stairways and doors, clusters of bedrooms and bathrooms and private nooks for individuals and small groups. I'd see a serious level of social nuance around access to, and control over, the various spaces.

Suburban-style housing will be seen as an oddity, and an undesirable one. Wealthy people wouldn't flock to it as a signifier of past status - instead, they might just jump back a few centuries, and move their extended circle into a converted manor house. (Several of these have been divided into single-family units already - our future upper class folk just need to reverse that a little.)

20:

Glasgow rather than Edinburgh:-

Victorian "wally close" tenement (higher class version with tiled rather than just whitewashed close walls. Pollockshields for reference of Scots.)

Typical unit contained a real reception hall (large enough that a 3 or 4 year old could literally ride a bike round it), a lounge (typically used only when entertaining), a "living room" big enough for dining and as a family room with tv, comfortable chairs, room for 2 children to play, kitchenette (about 8' by 8' before installation of sink, appliances, free-standing storage, worktops), 2 or 3 double bedrooms and inside bathroom. No "servants accommodation".

Dumbarton - Modernised 1912CE (I've seen period maps). As built, lounge, dining room, study/cloakroom and kitchen on ground floor, 3 family bedrooms, maid's bedroom and inside bathroom and toilet. As extended/modernised, kitchen became living room on construction of single floor extension containing kitchen/ding room and ground floor toilet. Maid's room became walk-in cupboard.

21:

Wheelchair accessibility is near-universal, though the size of even a power chair or scooter is mostly dictated by the user's body.

You're positing no breakthroughs in regenerative medicine. (My suspicion is that where limbs and nerves are intact or can be rebuilt, powered exoskeletons would be preferable to wheelchairs, if only because they enable use of non-wheelchair-user spaces, such as staircases: and that if we don't make some sort of breakthrough in limb regeneration/nervous tissue repair in the next century, then we've fucked up big-time.) I'll buy it, but if and only if wheelchairs still exist by then.

Streaming games—this is classic network edge vs. center costs trade-off. IIRC the EM spectrum maxes out at about 2tbps across all useable wavelengths (obvs. not hard X-rays to gamma radiation, for example). However you can multiplex it by bundling multiple fiber-optic conduits, each using wavelength dimension multiplexing to hit the 2tbps level. And this assumes we can't do anything useful with quantum entanglement in the 100 year time frame. Latency is of course the issue here, but runs up against the inherent sloppiness of the human nervous system and cognitive processes—we probably don't need sub-millisecond ping times for anything involving interaction, for example.

Heat pipes: yep. Furthermore, I'd vote for the possibility that electric space heaters will double as compute servers. (Only I hope doing something more productive than bitcoin mining!)

Boats … ships are shockingly energy-inefficient if they're carrying human passengers at human passenger speeds and comfortable packing densities. A modern cruise liner making 20 knots and carrying ~5000 passengers and 2500 crew can easily displace 60-100,000 tons and burns rather more fuel per passenger-km than a horribly inefficient SUV. Current best-of-breed for energy consumption per passenger-km-hour turns out to be wide-body airliners, followed by low-speed intercity rail (up to 120km/h; above that, drag/rolling resistance begins to take off, and by the time we hit 300km/h it's barely more efficient than a turboprop airliner, if not less).

Ships would be a lot better if they went slower, much less switched to wind power. Speed will always come at a cost.

22:

We may be able to do a hell of a lot better than wheelchairs, of course, such as AI-controlled artificial walkers, but I doubt that regeneration will have all that much to do with it.

No vertebrate regenerates anything as complex as limbs at all well, and no homeothermic vertebrate anything like that at all. Successful inter-human organ transplants started 65 years ago, with over half a century of limited success behind that, and are still seriously tricky; work on human tissue regeneration is as old. Limited nervous tissue regeneration is more plausible, but there will be a lot of people/injuries that won't regenerate; inter alia, there are legions of intractable organic problems.

There is more to it than that, too, but it's a diversion.

While sub-millisecond response times aren't needed, that is for the total time, and we DO need that to be under 5 milliseconds, where touch is involved. Unless we change direction on computer software, we are talking about dozens or hundreds of round-trips needed for a single response (as the human sees it). It's not a technical problem, as such, but I am horrified at how long it takes most software to react even when no networking is needed.

23:

The communal living is probably likely simply because of cost. A detached house let alone a flat is just too expensive. Moreover, I suspect we'll switch to renting more instead of buying unless the government puts some incentives in place.

Where I disagree with your scenario is people moving to more denser communities. It might be the opposite because most of the remaining jobs people can do will be 'virtual' so it won't matter where you go or live. So yes we might need a bigger room for virtual reality but I don't think it will be for entertainment, I think it will be for work. So the suburbs will continue but we small localized centers to grab coffee with real humans etc... We see this in DC already. Traffic is so bad, quite a few people telecommute two days a week. And why do people live where they do? Schools. So whatever happens to the way we live is going to be closely connected to how schools develop over the next few decades.

The other thing I wonder about is mobility. As more and more of our belongings and memories become virtual, you won't need to shift much stuff to move to a new location. So maybe the home of the future will be more like those company apartments that you switch from city or city. Everything is in the same place. (the backpage of the FT on Saturday talked about that, as the writer just moved to the US and the moving people couldn't believe it really only had a couple of suitcases as he spends all his money on experiences, not belongings).

Bathrooms won't have baths either, just showers, unless you're excessively rich as culture starts to frown of inefficient water usage.

I could probably think of a few more things but this is a start :-)

24:

Wiring (certainly visible outlet count and placement) will change. Built-in lighting fixtures and battery-powered devices means you don't need the number of electrical outlets many rooms have. Rooms ready for cable, ethernet, and landlines will become more obsolete. That's a little thing--it's easy enough to ignore unused outlets--but it will mean furnishings are more divorced from a room's planned layout. Moving the couch, changing which room is the entertainment room, getting rid of end tables, etc. will be driven solely by preference.

Re: wheelchairs, even assuming universal (or universal among the classes of people who determine architectural styles) regenerative medicine, it'll take time, possibly multiple or recurring procedures. And there's the question of whether someone would prefer, or be better served by, a wheelchair versus exoskeleton or medical rebuild. And if a lot of old housing stock is slipping into the sea, why not build new stuff low and wide or elevator-equipped?

Labor standards will drive and/or reflect design (again, labor standards among the classes of people who determine architectural styles). There's an array of appliances (and therefore spaces) that are important if chores are done by members of the household, either dedicated chore-performers or doing extra work on top of their wage labor. If you have a housewife in the post-WWII sense (driven by nuclear-family gender expectations, or physical ability, outside employability, etc. in a different living configuration), having in-house laundry facilities makes a lot of sense. If you're already outsourcing that labor to other people, then maybe you just have laundry pick up and drop off once a week, no more need for your own laundry room.

If we're all moving inland from the coasts, I assume infrastructure building/renewal is going to lead to interesting real estate speculation, as with rail and interstate construction. The areas that win will hopefully get more rail and presumably see new housing stock; the areas that are more isolated will probably make do with what's there already. In the U.S., McMansion farms might become lower-income housing. At the moment, some of them are far enough removed from Interesting Things that they've already become undesirable real estate. If more labor becomes remote, transit accessibility becomes less of a barrier. Poverty could come to mean physical isolation, rather than relegation to undesirable neighborhoods.

I suspect high-end cars will still be status symbols, but there's no need to store them on-site if you don't use them for your daily commute, so good-bye individual garages in new housing stock. If you do need them to commute, that means you have a job that requires you to be onsite (either a custom-service, human-touch type role; one that requires physical interaction, like surgery or construction; or visiting multiple sites for one reason or another) and that you need to solve at least the last-mile problem of public transit. Maybe electric as the norm, and hopefully we've made some grid improvements by then.

25:

Don't think I'm positing no breakthroughs in regenerative medicine, just that it won't reduce usage to the point nobody cares. Powered chairs are another point in the general micromobility design space too, and if you've got regenerative medicine that still takes a few weeks to finish its job then you've got older people who still want to take risks and be mobile the day after they get unlucky.

Re streaming games, the current iteration of Street Fighter has several frames' worth of input latency (in the ballpark of 100ms) basically to make online play feel like local over a wider distance. Some people are fine with it, some (myself included) really hate it.

Right now I get ~5ms from the laptop I'm talking on to a raspi both on the same wireless network. That's currently what you also get on a lowish-end gaming-specialised monitor - the sort I'm not Gamer enough to bother buying, but would be mandatory if I were serious about tournament play.

33ms ("2f" to fighting game players) in a single player title can be enough to "feel" for someone with sharp reactions (and sometimes even my sedated, old-enough-to-be-slowing brain), and that's assuming no VR. Latency jitter is what starts really screwing things up though: reach 7-8ms of that and you start to mess with input timings in a way that's going to stick out if 60Hz clock-locked remains the standard and there are some human reasons to want something close to it.

Agreed that bandwidth is a non-issue, but if compute power's cheap enough to keep that local to me it's also cheap enough to carry on me and not worry about what happens when I go for a walk or a train ride. If we're throwing 2-300W at playing the most-direct descendants of console and handheld titles in 2119, something's gone pretty impressively wrong. For non-VR purposes 19201080 will still be an "acceptable" resolution for many things then, without the need for stylisation that 320240 or even 800*480 bring.

My PS VR headset is another matter, with that field of view the pixels are noticeable even in the middle of something like Wipeout.

I had slower ships in mind, not least because more of Europe's underwater. When you've got pretty decent bandwidth a lot of both work and play are viable again: life doesn't have to be as fast-paced as it is for many today.

26:

I'm assuming that the dominant factors will be AI(see the end) and Virtual Reality.

The real driver will be virtual reality, in some form. That assumes they solve the nausea problem. What this means depends on the details. If it's done ala Vinge's "True Names", then it won't take up any noticeable amount of space. If it's more like Niven & Pournelle's "Dream Park" or "California Dreaming", then it will require a specially allocated "room" (walls optional) with a support harness and a body suit to wear. Naturally there would be cheaper versions of that.

Augmented reality seems a bit too dangerous to ever become widespread. People already make stupidly dangerous mistakes in the smart-phone emulation of augmented reality games.

The thing is, the space-requiring version of virtual reality doesn't require a "room" with more than about 2 1/2 meters radius, and current ceilings would work quite well, as you only need to be suspended a decimeter above the floor. (Note: This paragraph has convinced me that the metric system is not adapted to human scale measurements, despite its other obvious advantages. I meant a seven foot radius and "inches, unspecified, above the floor.)

The reason virtual reality might require extra space is that each simultaneous user would need a separate space. OTOH, the radius required would depend on the arm-span of the user, so women and children would find much smaller areas sufficient.

I still wonder if any approach other than direct brain signal interception (ala conscious dreaming) could really work for virtual reality, in which case access might require a brain operation. The robot surgeons would need to be quite skilled.

AI will be quite important, though less directly. Household maintenance will be almost entirely automated, so people can ignore it. This will include such things as shopping...if you want to shop, except for specialties like "good vegetables!!", you'll do it via virtual reality, otherwise you'll have your AI do it for you. Also cooking. A manual kitchen will be extreme conspicuous consumption...and since most interactions will be with virtual images, that will lose most of it's display value. Also images of ANYTHING will be able to be constructed at whim, and the AI will even guess what you want, and be nearly correct. (It will know you better than your wife or brother, but it's motivational map will still be off in occasionally quite unexpected ways.)

27:

The real driver will be virtual reality, in some form. That assumes they solve the nausea problem.

I'm not certain it'll be the driver. But even if it is, that doesn't mean they solve the nausea problem in the technical sense. It means that nausea becomes a social problem, a limiting factor, and a new type of disability.

28:

And there will also be really interesting effects from AI biases. We're at the "can't see black people" and "all women have resting bitch face" state right now. If those trends continue, AI solutions are going to continue to be exclusive, so the AI-enabled things will either be inaccessible to some populations, perceived as inaccessible, or more expensive to access by the populations outside the most broadly targeted market segments.

29:

I must be an outlier as I am moving from a 83 year old house in a newish city (San Francisco) to a less than 10 year old apartment in an ancient one (London) with unimaginably luxurious amenities like a parking spot and a swimming pool.

You have to make a distinction between single-family and shared (apartment) housing. The high cost of land in metro areas pushes towards the latter, and shrinking apartments mean space that was used to be dedicated in an apartment is moving to shared facilities. I am currently staying in an ultra-efficient building filled with tiny 30m^2 studios. They have a shared kitchen, gyms and media rooms (more luxurious buildings have full-blown cinemas you can book). Some places have apartments for visiting relatives you can book, so you don't need to dedicate an expensive extra room for that purpose.

While public transit is much more efficiently managed in Europe or Asia than in the US, fixed rail infrastructure is inflexible and a much less efficient investment of resources than streets and highways. I expect the transition to shared self-driving cars as a service will have no impact on cities' need for streets, just fewer parking spaces.

30:

Combine walls that are all video panels with ubiquitous augmented reality headsets, contacts, or other augmentation, and I'm not sure that you would need windows at all for urban living spaces. I imagine that open layouts will still be common in cities. Urban densification may continue as cities recede from the coast, but the desire for space and my own chunk of land will still be strong in places less densely populated than e.g., Europe, China, and South Asia. If desalination is common (assuming abundant clean power) large areas of t Sahara, Outback, and Northern Canada could become viable for sprawling homes with lots of space.

Interesting speculation.

31:

Another example is how California inspired the open kitchen trend: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/06/where-mother-saw-best/305896/

Now that the lady of the house is more likely to be working at a computer on the three freelance jobs she does to keep the family's finances afloat, will we see an open office concept, with the office in the middle of the house with views on the kid(s) playing, much like Walter Hewlett and David Packard when they popularized the open plan office?

32:

Let's see... having owned 1. a house who's 1st floor was built in 1852, second later, and third, later still 2. One house from the teens? large, fixed up attic (and, oh, yes, the coal bin stored the Philcon art show hangings) 3. An immobile home (14x56) 4. A stucco version of a four-square Prairie, 1927 5. The current undersized split level

I've a broadish view of housing. My thoughts are: 1. I hate "open plan. That's a loft in a warehouse, converted to sorta-kinda living quarters. And if you have a party, or just friend(s) over, do you want them eyeing what's in your bedroom? 3. "Outsource" kitchen? Not hardly. Not. Going To Happen. A *LOT of us like to cook, and what we make is a hell of a lot better (and healthier) than the crap in fast food, or packages from the supermarket.

I do, however, expect more mixed housing, purpose built for sharing, for a group larger than a nuclear family - two generations (or maybe three), or a bunch of friends. (Note that I spent about 10 years in collective houses in the 70's-beginning of the 80's).

Possibly one generic wiring, that allows you to plug in anything, for power or communications.

3-D printers... a hundred years from now... maybe printing food, itself?

Wheelchairs... exoskeletons won't work in some cases, too much pain in the movement. On the other hand, surely your scooter can do stairs, either by hover or legs.

The rich... lessee, I first read, back in the Whole Earth Catalog, that if you build a dome > 1mi, it could float on its own hot air. How's that for the ultimate in gated communities. I can see the board that runs it arguing over where in the world they should float for the next year.

Or the 30-yr-old dome like that, with a lot of folks living in it, and who needs roofs when it doesn't rain inside the dome?

"Smart homes" Can you say, "my home has BSOD, and my three year old is trapped...."?

A couple years ago, I ran into someone's column that I nominate for acronym of the last year: IOGCIT, the Internet of Gratuitously Connected Insecure Things, pronounced i-jit.

Do you really want some cracker wannabee turning your heat to max during the heat wave, while you're at work?

Garages (or full basements)? Hey, where do you think we're going to build our model railroads, guy?!

Which is another thing: what percentage of the population will actually have any work as we know it, and what percentage on "basic income"?

Finally, the ultimate Home of the Future... https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/growth-development/sd-fi-archtoberfest-20170926-story.html

33:

I don't think you had your house built with Cat 6 20 years ago....

From wikipedia: "The standard for Category 6A is ANSI/TIA-568-C.1, defined by the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) for enhanced performance standards for twisted pair cable systems. It was defined in 2009"

And Cat 5e is from 2001, still not 20 years ago, so no 1Gbit for you!

34:

A flying done would be a courageous option in the kind of weather we can expect. You could promote the idea as a way to rid the world of the more gullible rich though.

Having said that I always assumed that the flying city in "engine summer" was a space station, but this fits better.

35:

People are trying to make exoskeletons work now https://rewalk.com/. No doubt somewhat limited now but in 20-100 years?

36:

On the other hand, something on the order of 1.5km to 2km is not going to be as affected by weather, other than a serious storm, and I assume they'd be able to move around such... or be pushed ahead of it.

37:

The standards may not have been set, but the cable works. It was datacentre-grade cable I got when working on gigabit devices in 3Com, circa 2000. (Gigabit ok for 10m runs at least.)

38:

I get your point of video displays vs windows, but suspect windows could be very big for other reasons. This depends a lot on societal attitudes, though.

I was in suburban Oslo during the winter and its worth seeing, from a more Anglo perspective. Relatively little streetlights, despite the gloom, but they weren't needed, because of the light from the houses. A transparent society with people leaving blinds, curtains open meant lots of light spilling onto the streets.

Now, it helps that the density of people is relatively low. I'm not sure I'd want to see so much raw humanity in Hong Kong; I'd prefer my privacy. But in a low density society, especially if you push the quality of outdoors up - no noisy traffic, playable streets that you want to watch kids on, etc - then transparent walls (with optional blinds) look desirable.

39:

Does Edinburgh permit you to dig DOWN ? Couldn't you gain some sort of Super Villain exemption for a Secret Underground Head Quarters beneath a local extinct volcano? Failing that? How's about ...https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/design/london-super-rich-basement-extensions-a8415731.html

40:

I have - slowly progressive since the 1970s- Ankylosing Spondylitis aka spinal arthritis . And,because I've been reading Science Fiction since I was less than 5 years old - Hugh Lofting's "Dr Doolittle" series is science fiction - I go way back on magical SF Medical Treatments ...And I haven't given up hope that my diseased joints might be regenerated Real Soon Now. Taps Foot Impatiently ...NOW would be a Good Time to do your Stuff Scientists and Scientific Researchers everywhere!

41:

Apparently the Gullible Rich are already looking into the possibility of alternatives to ocean going liners and private yacht as they travel from world city to world city ,continent to continent ... https://phys.org/news/2018-07-airships-scenic-flights-future.html

42:

Fabric technology, and embedded electronics, may render the notion of a house less useful overall. If you have an overcoat that can extend and seal itself around your feet & hands, inflate padding over your back and hips, and extend an oxygen/CO2-permeable full-face hood (useful for pollution, too) then that's an instant sleeping bag, complete with built-in antenna and processors for it to interface with your personal cloud instance. The digital nomad becomes the digital tramp.

(It is, of course, eminently and painfully hackable.)

Houses, in the sense of "where you can keep all your stuff and safely fall asleep", depend entirely on the existence of stuff, and the nonexistence of safety. If we end up with programmable and reconfigurable clothing, and a single smart multitool (a walking stick that turns into a cutlery set, a garden fork, a camp stool, or a carving chisel at a wireless command string) then that's two of the great categories of Stuff trimmed down radically.

And houses for people who can't afford all this? High and wide warehouse racking, one basic screen and a set of dubiously sanitised earplugs per bunk, disposable paper clothes or third-hand old-style ones worn till they fall apart, and tools issued by the employer on a hefty deposit. No money for stuff, no need for safety, no problem.

43:

You and I have serious differences. Reminds me of my recent ex, who kept talking (though not doing much) about downsizing.

Meanwhile, being a typical sf fan, they'll get my dead tree books away from me when they pry the last one I was reading from my cold, dead hands.

44:

That sort of size is likely to be a bit more maneuverable than a mile wide floating golf ball.

The idea of going high enough to avoid the weather may work but you would need pressurised houses. Pressurising the habitat would kill the buoyancy. Acclimatising to 5-6km is possible for most people but there are more a few who just can't get past 4km and even some who can't get to 3km.

45:

In shared falts, there's a few rooms with a dedicated function (kitchen, bathroom ...) plus everyon has ther own room. Couples tend to have rooms only per function: kitchen, sleeping etc. Families are in between, with enough space: Living room and kitchen plus (parents') sleeping room plus room(s) for the kids.

The question is, 100 years from now, how much do we need to assign rooms a function or person? Bathroom and kitchen appear need be very fixed IMO. But a room can be a living room, dining room, AR Arena, study, office, kids playroom , chapel, workout area with a change of furniture. If we assume that 100 years from now... a) we have fewer physical artifacts like books and pictures and toys bacause of digitalization b) furniture that can change it's function or shape is ubiquitous, thanks to high quality and precision manufacturing beeing cheaper c) if need be, the roomba helps pushing the bed from one room to the next or the furniture moves itself in some way

I's conceivable to have a mix of rooms of different size, the use of each changes during the day or week or year.

For the civil engineering side, a few thoughts: in 100 years, we have likely better construction materials, the cost of a wide spanning ceiling will be comparativly lower. We will need lots of pipes, for different wast streams (grey, yellow, black water ...) and for multivalent heating and cooling. I'd find it plausible to have residential dwelling built similar to modern office buildoing: (Carbon fiber reinforced)concrete ceiling, under which all kinds of ducts and pipes are installed for easy access, the individual rooms are divided with drywall or a better version of it. This allows some flexibility.

46:

I have to admit being more interested in community evolution driven by demographics, economics and environmental changes rather than in individual housing, though the community plan will drive the housing design as form follows function. Future trends:

Empty towns, whether it's abandoned villages in Spain https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-29/ghost-villages-for-sale-as-spain-fights-rural-desertification

or burnt out ghost towns in Rust Belt America https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/2/18/approaching-a-divided-america-with-open-eyes

(I wish Chris Arnade's original photo essay on Cairo,Illinois was still available)

Tiny homes for the homeless, abused women, addicts, etc. formed into communities and neighborhoods: https://www.businessinsider.com/detroit-homeless-tiny-home-neighborhood-2017-6

"House-in-a-box" for refugees (Third World victims of drought, migration and war today - Americans and European victims of brush fires and rising seas tomorrow) - refugee housing now wins design awards: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jan/27/why-ikea-flatpack-refugee-shelter-won-design-of-the-year

Nursing homes and retirement communities for aging populations run by robots, with Japan leading the way: https://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/japan-uses-robots-in-nursing-home-care-an-example-for-america/

Upscale trailer parks as eco-positive retirement communities: https://psmag.com/social-justice/how-the-trailer-park-could-save-us-all-55137?fbclid=IwAR1u4BM4bmFwUCCDAdc342DA9Nqb2Q3Ipvq107fSJB5xpRzb_Cme5hNbDU4

Intentional communities (aka "hippie commune 2.0) built around at least the idea of sustainability: https://inhabitat.com/this-revolutionary-sustainable-community-in-atlanta-is-still-thriving-15-years-after-its-founding/?fbclid=IwAR1LgGAqMJdpDmQ3vQjgCTgmYEWmzNk2cGmaz3SR01z6kz8e72T1jcF4DAk

Infinite suburbia - but without cars or garages https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/suburbia-gets-no-respect-it-could-become-very-different-place-180959087/?fbclid=IwAR1F2BghKvojHi8FJm0XTlE5OzbSFRSi0Fg3Tt-UEpLuJX_yaBc_swy3D9E#8YPwrBepaKfehU5q.99

Rehabbed ancient castles https://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/news/italy-giving-away-100-castles-villas-monasteries-free/?fbclid=IwAR0pCSIbRYWriWgq8g8WfxlP7TWBspic8M4f_GN0BD7XoNlbNlRshReREfY

Luxury bunkers, the new castles https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-21/doomsday-preppers-head-underground-bunker-economy-mainstream/10815984?fbclid=IwAR2zWeafo4JsaxDY9yGq4zNvX6Ae4sEhisjpb9wx0ocwpBhZk7hWryyBcMs

47:

Does Edinburgh permit you to dig DOWN ? Couldn't you gain some sort of Super Villain exemption for a Secret Underground Head Quarters beneath a local extinct volcano?

  • About 10% of Edinburgh consists of grade 1 listed buildings—the core is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Outside the core, land isn't excessively expensive.

  • Edinburgh sits atop an extinct volcano, which means the ground underneath sits on top of volcanic basalt, one of the hardest rocks: so hard it survived being scraped clean by an ice sheet (which is why Edinburgh is somewhat vertical). Digging down is therefore very pricey.

  • As it is, the mediaeval Old Town is home to some of the earliest high-rise dwellings in Europe, ten or twelve storeys high (with only staircases and no indoor plumbing, because mediaeval! But inside the city walls, so safe from the regular English invasions). If we needed higher density housing it'd be easier to build skyscrapers than basements (because the basalt would make for good foundations).

    London, in contrast, sits on clay and porous chalk. Relatively soft, makes building skyscrapers a royal pain in the developers' arse … but land is so expensive that up (and down) they go.

    48:

    You're asking for a magic wand technology here. Cute if you can make it, but it still doesn't provide a key aspect of housing—security against intrusion by other malicious primates—much less much in the way of status signaling.

    My current vision for the slums of the 2060s-2070s, by the way, is today's high density student accommodation: studio flats with shared facilities aimed at young adults studying away from home for the first time, aged 18-22. They're going up everywhere in the UK (it's a housing bubble in its own right) and I suspect the residents in 2050 will be the same faces as in 2020—trapped in debt and poverty, forced to live in mini-apartments that lack basic amenities and are slowly decaying, little better than an en-suite hotel room.

    49:

    Work. One of the most environmentally friendly thing most people could do is work from if practical. I think resurgence of home office space will happen. Dedicated, designed, secure working space. Most people don't have it. Not sure how you work, but work from home is normal for you, i write as i commute to work.

    Now new office buildings, existing towers repurposed.

    50:

    A century ago, there were boarding houses in small towns, with Hotels for working men or working women in the city. Very few electrical appliances in the house. In the 50s, growing up, that still applied. It's only been in the past few decades that all things electric exploded into the home. They will phase out as people realize that single use appliances, like steamers, cookers, etc..., do not last.

    We are hitting a plateau on appliances, and a century from now you would have essentially the same, or less, as today. i.e., a smartphone will look the same as the smartphone of today. A microwave or toaster, the same. Food prep and storage, the same.

    We are nearing collapse on single use houses. It costs too much to maintain the infrastructure to feed water, gas, electricity, and deal with sewer to subdivisions. That infrastructure has a limited lifespan and needs total replacement on a regular basis. Cities have to be designed based on ease of infrastructure replacement. The jobs of tomorrow will be rewilding of subdivisions built in the past fifty years, and managing forests, not letting them be "natural" and thus a constant source of destructive fires.

    World population will be at 11 billion, with most people living the way we are right now.

    Power generation will be by Thorium to burn up all the stored uranium rods that are considered a hazard today. Solar energy will be by Solar Updraft Towers that run 24/7. Solar panels will be phased out for commercial use as not cost effective, and only used out in the middle of nowhere when they make sense. Cars, trucks, trains will still run on stored fuel, whether dug up or manufactured from atmospheric C02. Batteries will never have the storage capacity or low cost as using fuel engines.

    Sea levels will be the same a century from now. Any actual warming will trigger the next Ice Age which will kill billions and end the Global Warming debate. A year of snow, a year of rain, will kill billions and shut down civilization for the next few thousand years. All that will be left of Man will be walking the Songlines in the south.

    If the next Ice Age is not triggered, then a century from now the "Developed World" will look about the same as now. The "Developed World" will be world wide, with a few pockets of systemic low tech societies.

    BTW, One thing that I suspect is that we will lose access to space in the next few decades when the Kessler syndrome occurs. We have avoided it so far because commercial use of space has been limited in the past. The lower the cost of access to space will trigger the event.

    51:

    Judging by the first few dozen comments, I think many people are over-emphasizing social changes at the expense of economic changes. Since the end of feudalism (and arguably before that), the primary driver of a person's living situation has been that person's socioeconomic status. If you only know what a person does and how much they make, you can still form a pretty good guess as to what their living situation might look like.

    So, in order to predict what a house will look like in 2019, we've got to imagine what the economic conditions are going to be--where and how will people earn a living? I can imagine a couple of scenarios:

  • Dystopian Late-Stage Capitalism Continues on its Current Trajectory: This is (nearly) the bleakest scenario. The gig economy runs rampant. Most people piece together work from multiple employers to make ends meet. Offices are largely (but not entirely) a thing of the past, because it's cheaper to make workers provide their own working space. In North America and Europe, this means that people are doing a combination of Mechanical Turk and Taskrabbit-style tasks that can't be automated (for various reasons), and that can't be performed remotely by someone in the developing world. This will probably require them to work from home, but come and go at odd hours for errands around town.
  • In a scenario like that, you might expect the slightly better-off workers to want a more significant separation between their home working space and their living/sleeping space. Having a private home office would be a sign of wealth, though. For poorer workers, the home working space would more likely be part of a communal living space shared with neighbors. Sound insulation would be a must. Assuming that people didn't switch from portable screens to computer goggles, you'd also need additional visual privacy screens to prevent potential competitors from spying.

    In an extreme scenario, some people--especially those with larger homes or who are more desparate--might convert their homes to warehouse storage space, where they would be constantly visited by robots who provide same-day delivery around town. People with home warehouses would probably put a higher premium on home security, in something of a throwback to the 19th century.

  • Something (but probably not enough) is done to blunt the effects of Late Stage Capitalism: This is a scenario in which automation has eliminated many/most jobs that exist today, but government economic policies have (1) compensated people who can't find work (e.g., universal basic income); and (2) created new types of jobs in industries that are currently nascent or unknown to us (these would likely be services that are not automate-able).
  • One of the main features of this scenario is that there are a large number of working-class people with significant amounts of free time on their hands. This might lead to significantly-expanded outdoor communal spaces in areas with agreeable climates. Imagine bocce courts with holographic features. (Also, keep in mind that with global warming, Northern Europe could have an almost Mediterranean climate by 2119.) Right now (i.e., 2019) in Barcelona, an urban planner is attempting to create "super blocks" that largely convert surface streets to pedestrian and bicycle traffic in a 3x3 block area. If this idea is successful, expect to see it widely adopted by urban planners in the next century.

    In hotter areas, you would see more indoor activities. That said, new housing isn't going to get built in hot areas if there's not an economic reason for humans to be there. So, you might see hot inland cities, like Phoenix, shrink, and hot coastal cities, like Cancun or Miami, become largely abandoned and not rebuilt due to rising sea levels and/or unbearable summer temperatures.

  • Capitalism is Abandoned for Something Else: This would be the hardest scenario to predict. I see two possible branches.
  • 3A. Neo-feudalism: This is the worst possible outcome. Capitalism degenerates into a kind of feudalism in which the currently wealthy become a new nobility. This looks similar to Scenario 1, above, but likely with fewer human rights, and worse/more crowded living conditions for the non-rich. Labor becomes incredibly cheap again due to (1) the automation of many industries; and (2) the lack of social safety net. Human lifespans shrink on a global scale, but continue to increase for the elite. Consumer culture still exists, but it focuses on disposable and more cheaply-made items. A significant portion of the population lives on the street or in the shells of abandoned suburbs trying to make a living from the scraps of the 21st century's now-disappeared middle class.

    For the new nobility, imagine very large, but still cramped, housing where servants/tenants live in the outer, hotter sections, and the nobles live in a large, windowless core rooms that are decorated with virtual "windows" that take up entire walls. Only poor people go outside in hotter climates--possibly to tend urban farms. The rich might still take beach vacations, but the beaches are much further inland and have been built with sand dredged from areas that were inundated by rising sea levels. The beaches may also be in climate-controlled domes.

    3B. Utopia: A better, fairer economic system comes into being. The government guarantees everyone a fundamental right to shelter. Many of the incentives to cut corners in construction disappear because building is no longer about profit. Housing in this scenario looks like something Jo Walton described in the latter books of The Just City series--medium to high-density, but not that tall. People who live in government-built housing are granted inheritable property rights subject to conditions like performing government-mandated maintenance intervals and maintaining a minimum occupancy level based on the size of the house (so if your family shrinks, you'd better find roommates). Citizens don't have to spend money to perform this maintenance since that's largely been abolished--just time and effort.

    New houses are built to standard plans and in standard sizes that meet the needs of the majority of citizens. There would likely be a large variety of excellent government home designs created by architects working primarily for prestige. (Also, if you want a non-standard house, you have to petition the government, give a good reason, and sit on a waiting list after getting committee approval.) Housing units will likely be more communal for younger people just starting their adult lives in a new city, and consist of multi-generational family-esque groups for people who are already established. Luxury home features still exist, but people mainly manufacture and and install them as do-it-yourself projects since the government is building the housing to high standards without said luxuries.

    On an unrelated note: Regardless of which scenario occurs, I expect social media to become basically invisible as it integrates into our lives--either for good or ill. Going to a dedicated social media website or app will be like having a dedicated space for a landline telephone in your house today.

    52:

    the era of mass public automobile ownership will come to an end within my lifetime.

    I suspect that will remain strongly correlated with the population density of the area the owners choose to live. In the UK, I can easily see it for at least 50% of the population, since all the cities can and will have reliable public transportation, and the rail network is still fairly comprehensive, if somewhat crippled. The other half, not so much, especially since the regional public transport networks are effectively nonexistent. Across Europe generally though, particularly Northern Europe, it's almost a certainty.

    In the wider Western world, Australia and New Zealand for example are widespread low density housing, and I don't see that changing fast, even if their populations double. The same for most of the US and Canada. It makes an economic case difficult for the investment needed to build the networks that will provide a reason for people to want to increase the density and change suburban into urban.
    Biggest recent surprise was the history of the Underground in London, and just how many areas had tube stations before they had major thoroughfares, the roads coming later to link the new communities together.
    Although we might get some parts of Africa skipping straight from rural to high density urbanised living with reliable public transport if China decides to build a few test cities there - we've already had centuries old villages decamp and move to be nearer the new roads in places like Ethiopia.

    80% of people live within 200km of the ocean.

    On the wider world front, we're expecting varying amounts of sea level rise, and many places don't have much land height to play with, so what about more offshore or nearshore development - communities designed to float and tethered within natural or artificial reef environments to protect from storm conditions. I'd expect them to be modular and somewhat streamlined - low rise on the edges and highrise to the centre, the lower inner levels as infrastructure and commercial, the higher as accommodation. Power would be a mix of wind, wave, solar and probably thermoelectric using the sea floor as a cold node. I can picture a shift to over water living a lot quicker than a widespread adoption of large sea walls, especially in places where it just isn't feasible due to the geology or geography.

    53:

    On the separation of home working and home living, humans are still social animals.
    So I can imagine a slow migration away from offices, and more into communal workspaces attached to housing developments, complete with meeting spaces, coffee shops, and quiet areas, and almost certainly some form of communal childcare. These already exist in student accommodations, I can easily see a demand for them as the students mature and want the same things in a more adult living environment.

    54:

    I recommend that you find a copy of: "The Technology of Orgasm" by Rachel P. Maines. Electric appliances have been around a lot longer than you think!

    55:

    It's a great question. There's going to be a gap between what we should do and what we'll end up doing. More than likely what will happen is we have a great idea to resolve a current problem and will live with the consequences of that. Too much horse poop in the cities? Automobiles will be the answer! Live outside the city! No horse poop! And we'll just drill these massive freeways through the hearts of our cities and everything will be fine.

    I think the big determining factor will be energy availability. Cities were built dense and walkable when your choices were the horse or on foot. Cars enabled sprawl. Cars represented cheap, abundant dinosaur energy. If renewables allow us to spend energy as profligately, we'll continue to sprawl. If renewables can only get us to half of the available energy, we'll have to contract our lifestyle.

    In the States, houses tend to be crazy big by global standards. In the cities they can be smaller and more expensive but in the flyover states you can get a real spread for a fraction of the price in the better parts of the country. You get McMansions spread out on ridiculously-sized plots of land, neighbors far away from each other. Mass transit can't work in a situation like this.

    The big question to my mind is if we make telecommuting more of a thing so that the critical mass of jobs in the city is no longer quite the thing, where it can be spread across the countryside. If that's the case, you'll see people migrating to the places that are cheaper to live. If private ownership of transport becomes more of an eccentricity than a requirement, we'll see another reshaping of the city. I'm very curious to see how the air cars work out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jcpq6XYYoY4

    If I go out on a limb, I can see a trend towards intentional communities, village arrangements. Basically it's clusters of living spaces with common areas that can allow people to pool the labor resources. I'm imagining it something like the walled villages of China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakka_walled_village

    The weird thing with our current way of living is that we can be urban hermits, surrounded by people yet alone. Technology enables more and more isolation and I'm guessing there will be an eventual reaction against this -- yes, have some technology but value the people around you more. If we end up with UBI then there will be less money to pay other people to do things for you and thus more of a premium on learning how to do for yourself and then barter your labor with others. Daycare runs $2k a month in the States and you only have to consider it because families demand two working incomes because of how much real wages have diminished vs. inflation.

    I think considerations such as this will shape the way living spaces develop.

    On a completely opposite trend, there's proof of concepts for portable apartments. Basically think shipping container you live in that can stack and then be moved easily. Kasita is a concept like that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vjbqe7agCz0 So basically your apartment could be shipped anywhere docking modules are installed. So it would be possible to take a short holiday by train from one city to another and have your apartment moved and connected in the new location by the time you get there.

    56:

    In much earlier times, wardrobe => garderobe => privy.

    57:

    Charlie Stross @ 4: I should just like to note that adding a bedroom to a tenement flat in Edinburgh (as in, the price in going from a 2 bedroom flat to a 3 bedroom one, you can't physically add a room!) is roughly £50,000. And I bet the home cinema you were shown didn't include the cost of installing proper acoustic insulation.

    Similarly: a 1-car garage in Edinburgh typically costs £40,000-50,000. (You can buy one, drop an extra £100,000 on planning permission and building a small house on top of it, and turf it for £150-200,000.) So it's on-street parking for almost everyone—one poshville side-street up the hill from me regularly has a Bentley, a Porsche Panamera, a couple of Tesla Model S's and Range Rovers, and an Audi R8 lined up on the kerb because the owners live there and nobody can afford a garage within easy walking distance!

    A number of years ago a local manufacturing company in the town where I grew up needed to enlarge their headquarters & research building (to accommodate among other things a "new" IBM computer). Because the building already took up the whole city block on which it sat, they couldn't expand horizontally, they had to go up. One problem they discovered was their existing brick building wouldn't support the weight of adding a second story. So they literally jacked the building up and built a new 2 story building underneath it, making their existing building the third level. I think they also excavated underneath to add a basement level.

    I wonder if some enterprising tenants could join together to purchase a block and do something similar; jacking up the existing buildings to build new ground floor garages? Maybe not digging new basements if the underlying rock is too close to the surface, but building new ground floors might be possible ... assuming you could swing the planning permissions. (I also assume getting that permission would be the biggest obstacle to such a scheme.)

    58:

    Charlie Stross @ 6: That's due by 2022, not 2019! But it's going to take some fancy footwork for the headset to properly subtract in-room furniture and obstacles … especially moving ones like people and pets.

    I found the idea behind the "specs" everyone wore in Halting State to be quite interesting. I thought "life logging" as an evidence collecting technique was pretty clever along with "cop space" giving the officer an overlay whenever they looked at a building that gave them an instant view of anything about the place that was in the police databases.

    I was especially impressed with the idea not having to look away from the scene in front of you to find out what you needed to know about what you were seeing.

    I really enjoy the Laundry Files, but I think Halting State is the best book you've written.

    59:

    A. P. Howell @ 24: Re: wheelchairs, even assuming universal (or universal among the classes of people who determine architectural styles) regenerative medicine, it'll take time, possibly multiple or recurring procedures. And there's the question of whether someone would prefer, or be better served by, a wheelchair versus exoskeleton or medical rebuild. And if a lot of old housing stock is slipping into the sea, why not build new stuff low and wide or elevator-equipped?

    I think y'all are missing a factor here. Will these regenerative medicine breakthroughs be available to all or just to those rich enough to afford them? Without some form of universal access to health care, the rich will get the benefit and the rest of us can suck it!

    Income inequality is getting worse in the U.S. and the trend world-wide suggests the U.K. is on the way to adopting a system of health care similar to what we currently have here in the U.S., rather than vice versa. It looks to me like your working class and your middle class are heading towards getting screwed just as badly as they are here in the U.S.

    60:

    whitroth @ 43: You and I have *serious* differences. Reminds me of my recent ex, who kept talking (though not doing much) about downsizing.

    Meanwhile, being a typical sf fan, they'll get my dead tree books away from me when they pry the last one I was reading from my cold, dead hands.

    There's something to be said for the additional insulation R-value from having every inch of available wall space from floor to ceiling covered by book-shelves stuffed to over-flowing with books. May not be a whole lot, but it's better than none at all.

    61:

    The first thing I'd look at are materials, specifically the looming shortage of sand suitable for building with things like concrete and cement. Unless a precise substitute is found, future buildings are going to have to be built with radically different materials like engineered wood. Even if they have similar rooms to what they have today, the materials difference will make the buildings look and act differently.

    If I understand what's going on with sand, there may be waves of buildings, with concrete now, remolded plastic in the middle of the 21st Century (I don't know if it's only good for roadbase, or whether trash plastic can be remolded into useful building materials), then things like wood and mycoconcrete (if this ever gets out of the lab) in the later 21st Century. Where 3D building printing will matter, but I don't know whether it will become a norm, or just another hippy building type like Earth Houses.

    Climate change will matter. We're presuming that society has finally risen to the challenge, and that means that human values will be pretty radically different then from where they are now. Ignorance will not be bliss, and people may have to make ends meet on all sorts of resources that they don't think about now.

    Another question here is the amount to which we're in a really big power grid, versus the amount that each building is energy independent. The biggest governor of this is whether we go through a Carrington Event in the 21st Century. If we do, then the survivors are going to be really gun-shy about wiring every home on any continent into one big, sparky power grid (unless the grid operators have some really amazingly good cutouts to deal with power surges), and microgrids will be the norm. If we don't go through a Godzilla-class solar flare, then I suspect there will be a more politically motivated diversity of grid sizes, from macro to micro, depending on who wants or needs to be independent, versus who wants to be (or is forced to) be gridded in to big corporate power farms out in the boonies.

    If cities are making their own power, then where trees and shadows go will be intensely political and controversial, because shading someone else's solar panel is uncool and (in many jurisdictions now) illegal. Ditto blocking someone's wind turbine. The shape of your home will mesh harmoniously with the shape of your neighbors' homes, or you will hear from the lawyers of the people in your shade.

    If solar is the default power system, everyone will know which direction south is. Every building being built now that doesn't have a good roof for solar will be gone, simply because they're too wastefully inefficient (that's probably 90% of new homes in San Diego, at a rough guess). If you want a home built now to last 100 years, it better be really well built for passive heating and cooling, and well-designed to take in energy and get rid of heat in summer, while retaining it in winter. If all that takes gas or a massive central HVAC unit to keep the house habitable, it's got a limited future life.

    Actually, deurbanization likely will be a thing by 2119, if the cities we're talking about are on sinking coasts. Again, we've got a fair amount of climate change locked in, so I suspect people will abandon low-lying cities (possibly including parts of London), not necessarily because of inundation by the ocean, but because of pounding storm damage and salt water intrusion into drinking water aquifers (as in south Florida).

    A second cause of deurbanization may be the downsizing of transit grids to accommodate a less car-driven society. Places like LA and San Diego, which were laid out with the car in mind, are going to be horrendously expensive to rebuild so that people can get to work electrically. We're having that fight in San Diego right now, and it's a laminated sludge biofilm of ugly, stupid, and idealistic all plastered on top of each other and folded by politics. The cities that can't figure out this decarbonized work-life thing are probably going to be downsized or abandoned, in favor of rebuilding older cities whose urban planning embedded fewer bad 20th Century ideas in their layouts.

    The only other thing I bet is that homes will start being multigenerational again. It's good for the kids and grandparents to be near each other, and if we've hit peak capacity and survived the transition, things like the American Dream will probably be among the casualties.

    Oh and if we pull off the global decarbonization thing, then the Millennials will go down as the greatest generation in history, while their and grandparents, the boomers and Gen Xers will go down as the greatest idiots in the history of the planet. Good feeling, isn't it?

    62:

    The basement comment fits into something I've been wondering about. You'll read about tunneling nuts who have illegally built tunnels and bunkers on their suburban property. They've created a ton of additional living space and it makes me wonder what the cost would actually be to add sub-basement living space in a typical suburban lot. The idea is that you likely won't get permission to build up because people don't want to see the skyline change so how expensive/complicated would it be to add a thousand square foot of space below the house? I have zero knowledge of these topics so I'm clueless.

    63:

    It does depend quite a lot on what's under the building. To use an obvious example, in Florida, if you go down too far, you hit water, and further exploration will require a lot of round-the-clock pumping. A place like Dubai, which is built on sand with really innovative foundations, also appears to be a bad place to burrow.

    I will point out that going underground is the best way to deal with killing heat, but this option only works where burrowing beneath the building won't cause the building to collapse.

    The deep irony is that the early Cold War theory of burying every city to make it proof against a nuclear attack might, erm, resurface as a solution to dealing with heat management in the future. In high fire landscapes, I suspect things like hobbit holes might become popular.

    64:

    "Bear in mind that it's probably newly built since 2019. 80% of humanity lives within 200km of the sea; ocean levels are rising and extreme weather events are getting worse, so our cities will over time recede inland from the current coastline. An ageing, shrinking population is midly deflationary and means a likely surplus of housing after peak humanity: but also accommodations for frail/elderly people. "

    I'm not sure that this is true. Kim Stanley Robinson put it best: parts of Miami and New York will become the 22nd century Venices. Contra popular opinion, modern skyscrapers are well built, and with maintenance, can survive as such buildings. Don't forget that the oldest skyscrapers in NYC are reaching their centennial.

    In places with wet bulb temperatures, sunken skyscraper cities (Hong Kong, Shenzhen, etc) may actually become refuges since the water could regulate the temperature.

    "Actually, deurbanization likely will be a thing by 2119, if the cities we're talking about are on sinking coasts."

    Actually urbanization will become even more entrenched for the same reason that medieval cities and villages were very clustered: storm defenses are more affordable for a concentrated population. Plus, the forces that are currently pushing urbanization will not be reversed by climate change.

    "The only other thing I bet is that homes will start being multigenerational again. It's good for the kids and grandparents to be near each other, and if we've hit peak capacity and survived the transition, things like the American Dream will probably be among the casualties. "

    I also disagree with this for a few reasons 1. The American dream has spread out to such an extent that it's no longer tied to the political and social circumstances of the US. Nuclear families predominate in large parts of Asia and Latin America in addition to Northern America and Europe

  • It doesn't matter what's good for the kids, fundamentally we'll use the relationship which favors making money. This is because the guys who control the armies will handicap any alternative, GM pulling out the streetcars style
  • 65:

    Wow, I hope it's like that.

    I always imagine 2119 to be more like Aleppo 2019.

    Some scavenged materials propped up against a partly destroyed building, that kind of thing.

    66:

    Um, really?

    Miami will be uninhabitable, not because the buildings stand or not, but because their aquifer is getting contaminated by salt water influx. They're stuck, because they have no place to store fresh water. New York might be a little better, but with subways and deeply buried water pipes, things get interesting if that infrastructure is below sea level.

    As for living underwater, experiments in doing it, like the Aquarius Reef Base kinda suck as living quarters. They're pressurized to keep out the water (creeping nitrogen narcosis), and worse, it's 100% humidity all the time, so clothes don't dry, electronics have problem, wounds don't heal, etc. Certainly people live in submarines, but most of them aren't going in and out of the sub. They're sealed off. While many people live on the water, I don't think submarine homes are ever going to work except, literally, as work quarters for saturation divers.

    As for multigenerational housing, it's the only practical way at this point, in many US cities. Homes are running over US$500K and prices are climbing, apartments are running north of $2000/month rent, and builders claim that it's impossible to build an unsubsidized home below $500k (or to build affordable apartment buildings, for that matter). And in many places like San Diego , there aren't good open sites left for homebuilding. People with good incomes buy their first homes in their late 30s or 40s, and then start families if they can.

    The obvious solution is for multiple families to band together and buy a home, and that's precisely what some homebuilders are building right now, about a mile away from me. Indeed, we bought our first home a couple of years ago because it had a downstairs room ready to convert to a bedroom for my mom, if she needs more care. And she helped us buy the house.

    At this point, I'd say the American Dream is pretty much dead, and that's where a lot of the political rage is coming from right now.

    67:

    Heteromeles @66 said: At this point, I'd say the American Dream is pretty much dead, and that's where a lot of the political rage is coming from right now.

    The American Dream has been dead for a long time.

    After WWII, America was the only nation that was not a pile of rubble. The Middle Class exploded here as we rebuilt the world, charging whatever prices we wanted for our services and products. By the 80s the world had recovered and we were suddenly having to compete with the world. That 40 years of living in delusion, buying into the toxic BS of the American Dream, crippled our ability to see what business really was.

    The American Dream was sold to White society as part of the Cold War against the Soviets. It wasn't just about business needing consumers, it was a deliberate internal propaganda tool. The collapse of Unions, outsourcing, etc..., starting in the 80s was the result. Yet, it's how we beat the Soviets. Reagan knew that we could survive the crippling inflation and debt better than they could. After all, it killed less people than a Hot War.

    Those people living in minority communities, Black, Hispanic, never lived under the delusion of the American Dream, where the White population, with no community, only TV, were wrapped in that delusion, so when they individually failed to achieve the American Dream, they individually were at fault. They were individually failures. After all, everyone around them told them so.

    This explains why Trump, the opioid crisis, etc....

    One Nation Under Stress (2019) | Official Trailer | HBO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2hDEz1bW9k

    In the interview he explicitly mentions this.

    Stress is killing us: Dr. Sanjay Gupta diagnoses the cause—and cures—in HBO doc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7-hgH5JzaU

    That's why, a century from now, the world will be 11 billion people thriving, while America will become North Korea, isolationist, sitting on our nukes daring people to bother us, looking at the Trump regime as the "good old days". Trump will be considered the greatest president since FDR.

    That's the part of the prediction for 2119 that I didn't have the heart to mention.

    2119, there is a family having breakfast in a typical African suburban home. The mother will say to her children, "Eat your food, there are children starving in America."

    Most people today won't recognize that statement, but it was standard to tell kids in the 60s to, "Eat your food, there are children starving in China." Now, China has leapt ahead of US, and is eating our lunch.

    BTW, Frank, don't worry about house prices, we are still in a housing bubble waiting to pop. That's obvious when you notice that in the 60s a 1500 square foot house went for $10k, and in the 80s for $30k, and now $500k even here in New Mexico. It's the Tulip Mania writ large.

    68:

    Having at least one faraday cage room

    Hey. My house came with 2. The bathrooms. Tile was laid over a steel mesh coated with about 3/8" of concrete/mortar with tile stuck on that. Chest high tile around much of the bath with tiled floors. Plus the porcelain coated iron tubs.

    I had to go with 3 access points to get around these and get full house coverage.

    1961 construction in North Carolina.

    69: 47 agreed with the note that "ground level" in the Old Town has actively risen, sometimes several stories.
    70:

    give it a few decades and the typical block of flats in a small town might be twenty floors down as well as up.

    Going down is MUCH harder than going up. Unless there is a good reason. Like getting to bedrock to support something going way up. Or parking to deal with aesthetics.

    A decade or so ago a local architect told me that parking on dirt was $10K per spot in new construction. Going up no more than a few levels cost $20K per spot. And going down costs about $30K per spot.

    A big deal is water. Water is the enemy of all construction. When you go up the water mostly runs away. And walls and roofs only need to shed it, not be water tight. When you go down you have to be able to pump (there are no perfect walls) 24/7 forever.

    71:

    I'd say the minimum for a dwelling are power, waste management and physical protection. On top of that we like partitioned living spaces, and to keep our stuff ordered. If we start heading down the automated communist utopia route I can imagine spaces being converted for highly configurability, a fixed port for waste and power (in a non load bearing wall, never the floor), and a couple of hundred thousand wall/furniture bots, piping printed on site as needed. Renovation will be all about how to safely remove as many walls as you can.

    Anything that can be printed on site can be recycled on site, and everything else is shuttled in and out. Given that people like to end the day with the same keepsakes that they started maybe strong boxes if you are time-sharing your space. All those tiny apartments that are being thrown up in cites will suddenly feel massive (assuming your ceiling bots can give a real sense of depth). Moving house becomes giving the bots a mailing address and telling them to shift there.

    If we continue down our current path, it will be the same for about 0.1% of the population and shanty town for the rest of us.

    72:

    Cairo,Illinois

    Perfect example of a town where the reasons for it to exist moved on with nothing to replace.

    PS: Us locals call kay row.

    73:

    New York might be a little better, but with subways and deeply buried water pipes, things get interesting if that infrastructure is below sea level.

    I think most of such infrastructure in NYC IS below sea level. What Sandy pointed out what that the infrastructure to keep the salt water out wasn't any where near resilient to handle a prolonged power outage. But it did mean that much of Manhattan got fiber for the trunk lines ahead of schedule. Verizon had been injecting pressurized air into the conduits to keep the water out and when they ran out of fuel ....

    74:

    I live in a London new build apartment (rented because I am not a millionaire) after having moved from a converted town house estimated to be about 70 years old. The two biggest differences between them are energy efficiency and capacity to retrofit.

    The place is ludicrously well insulated and very well sound insulated too. The building itself has a communal hot water system with heat-exchange units rather than individual boilers in each flat. This keeps the place constantly warm at a relatively low cost (about £1 a day) regardless of the time of year. There are some definite issues with this (we can't change hot water supplier so we're stuck with the company that maintains it regardless of how they might change cost or quality of service) but I expect things like this will be the norm. If it was resident managed and community owned that would be even better, but in any case not being constantly cold in winter (old townhouse would get warm only after 3-4 hours of expensive heating) for low cost and high efficiency is very good. If it had an equally good centralized air conditioning system I can see the design being common (particularly for elderly homes) in the future.

    A big issue though is the design philosophy. Everything is hidden behind walls to save space. The toilet cisterns (one en suit, one bathroom) are built into the walls, as are the showers, the kitchen units (a well packed wall in the open plan main room) cannot be removed without removing the counter top and all the wiring is hidden behind etc. This has led to some painful situations where a simple plumbing fix has resulted in multiple trips with sections of the wall having to be removed then put back in. Every tradesperson has complained about this style of building as it makes fixing/replacing a nightmare.

    I expect this style will persist because of how space saving it is but I hope that designers realise how bad it is for when things go wrong and start working in easy ways to remove things, or open up sections of the walls, as needed.

    Sans any major disaster an average home in a century might be like this: large, compact communal blocks designed to be highly energy efficient with centarlised systems in the building and modular designs for slotting domestic appliances into the walls.

    75:

    (Reply linked to JBS @57 went astray …)

    I wonder if some enterprising tenants could join together to purchase a block and do something similar; jacking up the existing buildings to build new ground floor garages?

    Complex question.

    Here in the New Town, the answer would be a hard "nope", it'd change the character of the built environment which, as noted, is a UNESCO World Heritage site. (Fucking around with Grade 1 listed architecture is actually an imprisonable offense, although you're more likely to end up with a punitive fine and a statutory order to Put Things Back EXACTLY The Way They Were, Using Original Materials, Fixtures, And Fittings, On Pain Of Pain.)

    Also, even if you could do that (and what are these "tenants" you speak of? Property law in Scotland is a bit weird: I'm in a 4th floor apartment which I own outright) you'd be dealing with 200 year old structures. No steel reinforcements, floors held up by oak beams 6" thick that were probably recycled from sailing ships. They're not going to move easily or safely ...

    However, outside the preserved-for-the-future heritage zone, there are outlying bits that aren't as tightly controlled. The area towards Leith (the port of Edinburgh, about 1-2 miles down the road from the centre of the city) was heavily mined about 700 years ago, and until recently (50 years ago) there was a problem with sink-holes and the odd building collapsing at random into long-lost mine shafts. This has mostly been fixed, but the occasional holes get in-filled with new-build structures. Aside from the student flats (the current housing bubble), a popular development is new tenement blocks, with the ground floor designed in as parking. They're built to superficially resemble 100-200 year old flats, with the same stone as cladding, and the parking garages are not readily visible from street level, so they're tolerated as not changing the visual appearance of the area too much.

    76:

    Lets see: Everyone is mostly alive, so.

    Step one: The world adopts the infrastructure construction and planning practices of Spain. This cuts the cost of building infrastructure to an utterly ridiculous degree (Spain is better at this than China. As in, they manage to pay first world salaries and get things built cheaper than the Chinese do)

    Step two:Steel And Stone Solves All Problems. Pretty much the exact opposite of nimby and banana. The vast amounts of labor freed up by ever increasing automation is in very large part poured into the construction sector, and the average home is a pile of stone filled with very large apartments, a communal rooftop greenhouse, a ground floor which is rented out to some commercial or community enterprise, and a solidity of construction which snickers at category five storms. Urban densities are very high, but not as high as you would assume by glancing at the built environment, because the unit sizes are intended to remove the desire to move to the suburbs.

    The very high density keeps the ground floor commerce ticking over. Much of it is experience oriented - VR, sure, but also martial arts dojos, music teachers, community theater spaces, music venues, spoken word poetry, bars, ect.

    On Food and Sanitation: The sewers may have been redone into multi-stringed systems to separate the handling of waste water and human waste. Taken to the logical extreme, bathrooms have separate facilities for handling number one and number two, just to simplify ultimate waste handling, though maybe we get elegant solutions for handling mixed waste. Certainly, cleaning agents which the waste treatment facilities do not like are simply not sold, and if you are on medication which should not end up in the stream, you are going to get hilarious doctors orders and a portable "Haz-mat toilet" home with you. The waste stream is processed into fertilizer, which goes to the automated food "Factories". These are not vertical. They are a small faction of the former farmland rendered impervious to the vagaries of weather.

    77:

    In a "serious but survivable climate change" scenario like the one you outlined I would expect things like UNESCO status and restrictions on listed buildings to be forgotten as soon as the "serious" bit starts.

    As soon as the focus shifts to getting everyone though alive then inefficient poorly insulated buildings that Kill People will be seen as a liability. I expect any restrictions on double glazing etc. will be quietly forgotten, or at least only enforced against poor people.

    78:

    Am I the only one here know knows about Chicago being lifted up to deal with the swampiness of the area?

    Granted it was over 150 years ago.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

    79:

    Miami can deal with the water issue via rainwater collection and floating desalination. The city population is likely to be in the low millions, so it shouldn't be an issue. When it comes to NYC, I am not sure of the relevance of the fact that the subway would be underwater?

    When it comes to housing, the US is not California. The percentage of families in multifamily households peaked in 2016 at 20 percent and has been declining slightly since. In 2018, both NYC and Chicago experienced a decline in population, partly due to the newly retired moving down south.

    As for the American dream, the US has the highest effective minimum wage in history

    https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/upshot/why-america-may-already-have-its-highest-minimum-wage.html&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwj2pLWV7vfhAhVQnFkKHSnVDMUQFjAAegQICxAC&usg=AOvVaw1t_13JZLsU4k44ZBoYpTbJ

    80:

    Miami can deal with the water issue via rainwater collection and floating desalination.

    In 2100, Miami will not be inhabited because there's absolutely nothing there able to justify dealing with being in the hundreds-of-lethal-days-per-year temperature regime.

    The other part of that is the last time the atmospheric carbon load was where it was today, sea level was about ten metres higher. The IPCC melt predictions are optimistic (we know this because we're observing glacier melt rates happen a good deal faster); parts of Florida go land-under-wave by 2100, with expectations of more to follow.

    81:

    I think border controls will keep a significant portion of the human population in those zones. Miami is probablya better place tobe than most of Florida. I think that Miami can survive as a tax haven, or a smuggler's den, if it doesn't survive based on be

    82:

    Given the lack of communal support for the less-well-off, Miami will be non-survivable in 2119 for the homeless or those too poor to afford air-conditioned and storm-proofed accommodation.

    This basically means all the people who currently do casual work, from car washes to gardening and cleaning.

    Which in turn will have knock-on effects on their rich neighbours, because when you can't get someone to clean up debris after a hurricane (or, hell, pick fruit—take your pick of hard-to-automate low-wage casual jobs) it makes it harder to cling on.

    Smuggler's den/tax haven: maybe. But it'll be a ghost town compared to Miami in 2019, unless Floridans suddenly discover a taste for Dutch-style communitarian initiatives and building big dykes.

    83:

    I do agree that Miami would be a shadow of its its former self. Most of the housing is suburban; that won't survive. My prediction for 2100: Miami will have a population of up to 1 million for these reasons

  • There's currently a building boom resulting in a lot of high rises. Since dykes don't work there, people will let the first few floors flood and live in the rest of the buildings. Those who can afford it will live in house boats.

  • Walmart supports welfare programs such as food stamps because it allows them to offer lower salaries. I could see aircon going the same way

  • Where else are Florida residents going to go? Nowhere else in Florida are there that many high rises?

  • Note that I'm using Florida as a standin for coastal cities in wet bulb zones.

    84:

    VR & telepresence for the elderly and physically disabled. My father-in-law was 90 years old when he died in 2000; still mentally alert but as frail as eggshells and barely able to walk. His equivalent in 2119 will live in a comfortable room at home, and send his telepresence robot out into the world to interact with younger people as a peer. Similarly for people with multiple sclerosis, assuming it's not cured then, and other degenerative illnesses.

    Speaking of which, the population of the elderly is going to get a lot bigger. We may see a return for servants' quarters for caregivers, if robots, partly telepresence-operated and partly operated by AI, don't take over the work.

    Your house will be your friend, or a member of the family: Digital assistants will become better and better, more and more able to interact in colloquial, natural language. Here in the real world of 2019, researchers for Google, Apple and Amazon are working on techniques to make virtual assistants likeable; expect that to be realy, really good in 2019. Your virtual assistant will be virtually indistinguishable from a person; philosophers will argue about whether it is one.

    This is one prediction that the science fiction writers will have gotten right. We won't have flying cars or jungle colonies on Venus, but you will be able to get up in the morning, stretch and yawn, and say, "Good morning house! What's going on today!" And the house will tell you you look great and it's happy to see you and then give you a summary of the weather, your important messages, headlines, appointments, etc.

    Living spaces are going to get smaller: There'll be more of us and we'll be more concentrated in cities. En suite bathrooms will become a luxury for the upper middle class and better.

    Homes will be private spaces; we'll do our entertaining in public, in cafes and restaurants and pubs and common rooms. (I understand this is already the case in the real world of 2019 in parts of Europe -- here i the US, our houses are big and we have guests over to visit. Well, not me personally, but.... )

    85:

    When all your infrastructure is underwater--and New York City's skyscrapers tend to have their critical infrastructure in the basement, IIRC from Superstorm Sandy--then the city's not going to adapt to having all those basements flooded, let alone flooding all the subways that serve them (how are people supposed to get in and out of those tubes, and how are you supposed to keep them from flooding?), let alone all the freshwater mains that are below even that.

    If you want to build a skyscraper that's going to withstand sea-level rise, all the critical infrastructure (pumps, generators, electrical connections to the grid, cisterns etc.) has to be a lot closer to the roof, and the first few floors basically have to be pilings with temporary walls that can be taken out to let the boats in to the landing on the new atrium dock. Has anyone ever built a skyscraper that way?

    As for floating desalination watering a city, please. What do you think these things are, in terms of the area required and energy required? We're talking about plants that need to produce on order of a cubic kilometer of fresh water per year for a million or two people, using about a 1 kWh for every 12 cubic meters of fresh water produced, give or take. You don't float something like that to water a city. Similarly, if you've got to store a cubic kilometer of water, does the city have enough rooftop cisterns to hold that amount? Remember that a cubic meter is one tonne by definition, and a cubic kilometer is 10^9 cubic meters.

    86:

    The medication case is common enough, as are other disposal requirements - there'll be hazmat infrastructure in place, and moderately smart toilets that can be configured to read from really not very smart bracelets/etc.

    The moderately smart toilets will not be networked unless there is an infra-level concern that warrants it: there will not be a literal Internet of Shit.

    Your washing machine or equivalent may well make use of the hazmat outlet too. Kitchen sinks are deprecated.

    87:

    The critical infrastructure can be moved? Who says NYC will have 8.4 million people? What population numbers do you think that I am using? Can vaporettos not handle traffic from a much smaller population?

    The better question is: can existing skyscrapers be modified that way? I don't see people building many new buildings in the face of oncoming sea level rise. It will be just like medieval Rome, when people repurposed imperial buildings

    Who said that the cisterns have to be on the roof?

    I'll address the desal plant later, when I can find my sources

    88:

    Working from home: not just no, but hell, no.

    Charlie, as a writer, is different. But most work... by the early nineties, when I didn't think many companies did telework, I read an article that said that the companies that had a lot of telework, then, wanted people into the office once or twice a week, not just for face-to-face meetings, but for the watercooler conversations that turn out to be incredibly important, that just do not happen when you're not face-to-face.

    For that matter, who's going to pay for your workspace? In the US, your tax break isn't going to cut it. Will your company pay for anything but 'Net? Nope. Who provides the hardware you work on?

    And then we get down to nitty gritty: who's going to repair your backed-up drain? Someone who comes on-site. Or your electrical issue, that you nearly electrocuted yourself with, because you're too ignorant to unplug a toaster before you clean it?

    Do you really think everyone can do all work in front of a monitor? Or wants to?

    Nope. We're going to either get Basic Income, or it's going to look like 1890 or worse. That, btw, was the gig economy.

    89:

    I'd flip that again. Servant's quarters, possibly, but also multigenerational homes. One way some family members can make money RIGHT NOW is by taking minimum wage jobs as caretakers for their elderly parents, where the state pays their salary. This is a non-trivial cost: in my family, I had a man who was catastrophically disabled by an encounter with bacterial encephalitis, and his wife provided him the equivalent of $90k/year in nursing for decades, according to what the hospice nurses told her when the man finally died. Paying her, say, $30k/year as a home health aide would have saved the system a huge amount of money, although not so much money as the system saved by her working part time to get out and being a part time caregiver for free.

    Having homes that are designed for live-in caregivers isn't stupid, although there's huge potential for abuse. Right now caregivers don't make a lot of money and have to drive sometimes hundreds of miles per day. Providing them a caregiver's flat and giving them a string of patients in a neighborhood saves a lot of cash, although again, socially it's ripe for abuse going both ways.

    There are a lot of simple, stupid features that need to be built into homes (Google Universal Design), but it's amazing how few are. Having bedrooms where you don't need to climb stairs to get to them is one critical one. Not having artistically sunken living rooms (where you can't see the step down in the dark) is another (most of the homes in my area have these, in yet another triumph of design over practicality). Decent lighting, non-slip floors on showers, passages wide enough for walkers or wheelchairs, are all necessary as well.

    90:

    Paying a lot of attention to the Rupert Murdoch "news", eh?

    Global warming does not provoke an ice age. Period. Sea levels are going up, and, based on measurements (which keep getting more accurate), is going up faster.

    I strongly doubt we'll be at 11B. I suspect we might peak at 9B, and start dropping. Most industrialized countries are growing in population mostly from immigration, since the birth rate is < replacement rate.

    Unfortunately, I suspect there will be waves of mass famine, as the breadbaskets of the world are struck by weather (the US midwest this spring, anyone? Think food will not cost more by the end of summer?)

    The "developed world" will not look the same, any more than it looks like 1890. And do you think all of Africa, and the Middle East, and South America aren't going to join that club (they're already a lot of the way there now; the issues are political and economic).

    91:

    Yup. Miami, if we haven't abandoned it, will be a Disneyland, and you go there by boat.

    Here's another thing: the big thing of loneliness. A significant change, if you live with others. Also, living with others - and I speak from having lived more than a dozen years in either collective houses, or renting out rooms to friends - is way less expensive, and you get more living space than, say, a shipping container.

    The nuclear family, as I understand it, was pushed heavily before WWI, to sell more things.

    92:

    Yeah, getting to some friend's old farm, you got off the Interstate, turned right at kay-ro, and left at ver-sales (them frogs don't know how to talk raght, Versailles...)

    93:

    Are you talking about the Chicago garbage dump, run by the self-proclaimed "mayor" of North Chicago back in the 1800's... oh, sorry, I mean the Magnificent Mile?

    94:

    As for homes being a member of the family...yes and no. The Internet of Things has a huge weakness (security) and that likely means that after a few upper class burbclaves have been taken hostage and/or wiped out through the internet, most people probably will want dumb, functioning houses, rather than smart ones wholly owned by RatsAssSecurityIoT, and pwned by some dude in Uganda or, worse, by China during Web War II (do you want the house doors locked and the heat cranked up during a heat wave? If so, connect your home security and HVAC to the internet and depend on the company's security system to be, erm, holy).

    That said, there is a role for really smart homes: the climate redoubts of the super-wealthy. The wealthy get indoctrinated into how hard it is to keep wealth in the family, and what extreme measures they need to take to do it (see the industry "bible," Hughes Family Wealth: Keeping it in the Family, which wealth management firms hand out to their clients by the boxload*). If these families can accept trusts, with their attached wealth managers and lawyers, and integral parts of their family, then it's not a stretch for them to accept smart homes as part of the family.

    This is different than the IoT idiocy we see now. I'm thinking more of the castle/family estate model, where a family has bought, say, a large and reinforced chateau in rural New Zealand wherein to ride out climate change and the presumed loss of civilization. After a few generation, the grandkids aren't likely to be as brilliant or as psychopathic as their grandparents were (regression towards the mean being normal in human breeding), but the castle their grandparents built may be truly expert on climate change and have a better idea of how to cope than they do. A SF writer could have a lot of fun with a Wooster and Jeeves relationship between the feckless young homeowners and the house that knows far better than they do what they need.

    *I've been researching this stuff, not because I have any money, but because I'm trying to write believable super-wealthy villains, and I wanted to see how they're trained, since I normally only see their public faces. It's fascinating stuff, if more than a little nauseating. Harrington's Capital Without Borders is also worthwhile in this regard.

    95:

    ROTFL!

    As my late ex, a pretty much native Floridian (she got there at the advanced age of 4) used to put it, Florida's a sand bar. Sea level rise means most of it ain't.

    And exactly where would you put a desalination plant?

    Meanwhile, NYC... y'know folks, I have to wonder if some of you have ever been there, much less spent any time in the city (or City, as it's called on this side of the Pond). Lower Manhattan has a lot of sea level issues, but they will build dikes. On the other hand, it goes uphill pretty fast. The money, esp, will move uptown (if they're not already doing that).

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/28/freaking-out-about-nyc-sea-level-rise-is-easy-to-do-when-you-dont-pay-attention-to-history/

    96:

    Highest effective minimum wage in history? The US? Today? Not hardly.

    When you measure something like that you can't use dollars, you need some complex value that includes the cost to rent an apartment and the cost of a dozen eggs. And by that kind of measure the current minimum wage in the US is a lot lower than it was in 1960. It's quite possible that currently more people are covered, as I don't have any idea just what percentage of the population works on jobs that are not covered by minimum wage restrictions...I just know that it's a lot more than I used to think.

    A second problem with that assertion is that the minimum wage isn't exactly a federal rule, or at least it wasn't in the 1960's, when I needed to know.

    97:

    "Highest effective minimum wage in history"?

    Gee, I'm glad I'd finished my tea with lunch before I read that.

    Lessee, around 1967 or '68, it went from $1.25 to $1.40? $1.42/hr. Using mark's economic indicators*, that would be over $14.00 today (seen any campaign to raise it to $15 from the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr?

    Got any more outright right-wing LIES to try to spread?

    98:

    One other thought I had. Housing needs change over time. A young couple might need a small home and then will need more space as children occur and then those extra rooms are superfluous once the kids leave the nest. It's wasteful to have more house than you need but also expensive to keep changing houses as your household demands change. Wouldn't it be nice to have on-demand housing that can scale with your current needs?

    Barring any concept like LEGO housing where you are plugging in and out modules it ends up coming back to the idea of communal buildings. It puts me to mind of some of the dorms I've seen in American colleges that are setup like a four bedroom apartment. Each bedroom has room for a bed, desk, a closet and a toilet/shower bathroom. The common area is a living room, large kitchen and washer/dryer. In an arrangement like I'm thinking, you would rent more bedrooms for when you have kids and then can let them go when the kids move out. You can lower your expenses without having to move.

    99:

    Forgot my footnote: mEI: what's the price of a breakfast special (two eggs, home fries, toast and coffee) at a non-chain, non-fast food restaurant that only is open for breakfast and lunch?

    Around 1967 or so, it was $0.69. Now? Varies between a "sale" (and location of restaurant) of $3.99 and $6.99.

    100:

    Until around 2005-ish, you could use the price for an ounce of gold as a crude but halfway decent converter from current values to historic values. Then the speculators and gold bugs got active, and I don't think it's an honest index anymore.

    That said, while I agree with you on having a complex metric, the bigger problem is that it's relative to where you live. People can live in most of the world on a few dollars a day. Doing that in California makes you homeless, because the minimum kit for living in most places includes having a car and a phone (especially a cell phone). In New York, you don't need a car, but rents are ludicrously high, and so on. Trying to figure out what the minimum wage even means in such circumstances gets complicated.

    One good example is that in a good chunk of California (rural as well as urban), someone making the median wage (around $60k) cannot afford to buy a median-priced home (around $500k), and someone making minimum wage cannot afford to rent an apartment by themselves (around $2000/month). In Sonoma County before the 2017 fire, the low-wage workers needed to keep the county running had to mostly live outside the county, as the home prices were far to high in that part of wine country for them to even rent.

    101:

    The New York Times is right wing? That would be news to Trump. Glad that I finished my lunch before reading that.

    102:

    If you want silly house designs for 2119, here are a few other ideas:

    Vortex Bladeless Turbines (Company PR site) have the idea of swaying towers capturing wind energy. They haven't made a product yet, but one could envision a city that has crappy solar prospects (Edinburgh, say) erecting an urban forest of "wind whips" throughout the city to get some local electricity generated. On an even less realistic note, one could see a sky filled with "energy kites" (which suspend microturbines a couple of thousand feet up) helping power the city. Planes would not enjoy such a cluttered sky, nor would helicopters, but if you want wacko-futuristic, it might work.

    Years ago, I thought about a sustainable city with a sky filled with wind kites, while "serpent-ship" zeppelins fly slowly among them on ducted fans. The latter came from an existing aerostat design. The idea is that you have a main body filled with hydrogen to lift the load. Then, on the downwind end of the ship, you have a "tail" filled with balloons holding the hydrogen fuel for the ship. As the ship uses up the hydrogen fuel in the tail, it drops water ballast to compensate for the decrease in lift and reels the deflating tail in. The thing would look like an enormous backwards sperm flying tail first, but it might work, especially if it had the tail fully reeled in by the time it had to land in a city whose sky was filled with huge power kites, while big wind whips cluttered the cityscape below.

    103:

    Check out Universal Design, although the originators of this concept have scaled back from a "one house that can be remodeled throughout your lifetime" to having a home that can be remodeled for "aging in place."

    Or, again, you do the multigenerational home, with the kids in the attic, the parents on the second floor, and the grandparents on the first floor. As people die and age, they move down through the house, while (hopefully!) their kids take their place above them, and surplus rooms get rented out. I think a decent example of this are probably the Pueblo Indians, whose traditional architecture kind of follows this pattern (and three floors up in a pueblo is not the most desirable room).

    104:

    The New York Times is right wing?

    Yep. Decent in-depth reporting, but centre-right editorial stance.

    I've not heard of any American left-wing newspapers — given how the American political spectrum runs from right-wing to batshit-crazy-extreme-tight-wing, I'd be mildly surprised if any have survived.

    105:

    Sorry, but global warming does provoke an ice-age. The problem is time-scale. The mechanism is roughly this (warning: I'm no expert in the field):

    I global warming ->

    Oceanic warming & rising sea levels ->

    ?? (Could be a chain of volcanoes, a large meteor, SOMETHING causes a couple of cold years) ->

    More snow falls in winter than melts in summer, but the oceans are still warm, so the air stays humid ->

    The increased snow pack results in increased albedo ->

    The Glaciers march ->

    The oceans cool down, and the atmosphere becomes less humid

    The problem is the time scale. We aren't talking centuries, though a couple of the transitions happen fairly quickly. I think the one from the hot-oceans, high sea levels to the increasing albedo happens within a decade or so, but the glaciers marching takes millennia, and so do most of the other steps.

    OTOH, it's been a long time since there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere, and the last time, if I'm remembering correctly, was during a Pangaea. Today the continents are divided a lot differently, and the sun is hotter. So we may be out of the pattern I was asserting. Even if not, note that the switch from hot to cooling required an unlikely random event. (Well, unlikely in any particular century.)

    106:

    There's actually one big (again California suburban) problem that might get a Medieval design fix.

    Right now, we're stuck with the mid-century idea of bedroom commuter neighborhoods and various kinds of industries that these people commute to. It's not entirely stupid, in that it allows planners to focus on various kinds of infrastructure necessary for different uses in different places, and you don't (theoretically) get the problems associated with things like polluting factories popping up next to houses, as in Texas. Or, sadly, in too many poor communities (the preference of polluters for poor neighborhoods is the basis of the environmental justice movement).

    The problem is that, at least locally, over half our greenhouse gas emissions come simply from people driving, and this turns out to be really hard to solve. The obvious solution is to put employment centers in bedroom communities. Unfortunately, it's effectively impossible to make sure that the employers draw all their employees from the local homes. It's equally likely that their people will live far away in some other suburb, and rather than decreasing commuter miles, the scattered employment centers double them, clogging roads and increasing GHG emissions.

    One "blank slate" solution is the company town or, in more medieval terms, designating neighborhoods for certain industries. In these examples, people live close to or on top of their work and all the businesses in an industry are clustered in a single neighborhood. Thus, in a 21st Century redesigned city, you may have the AI quarter, the 3D printers' quarter, the wealth management quarter, the pharmaceutical quarter, the first responders' quarter near the jail, the recyclers' quarter on the town's downwind side, and so forth.

    It is a medieval solution, but then again, transportation is a huge chunk of greenhouse gas emissions. One of the only ways to cut down on this kind of emission is to cut down on commutes. That implies that people live and socialize near where they work, and that also means that their workplaces need to cluster with their competitors. This also deals with the environmental justice issue to some degree, in that people who work in high paying but high polluting jobs (like semiconductor manufacturing) have to live in the mess they make. Hopefully this will incentivize them to work more cleanly.

    107:

    I don't know if the nuclear family was pushed before WWI, but it was pushed after WWII, and the reason was to facilitate organizations moving jobs at will. It may have resulted in people buying more things, but that was seen as a secondary benefit by those who benefited, and many companies didn't benefit from that aspect, but all the LARGE companies benefited from being able to move jobs around as they chose.

    108:

    A lot of you are assuming strict space constraints - I think this may be very mistaken.

    Housing shortages today exist because people who own their residences are far more politically active than the mean, and use the resulting clout to choke of the supply of new housing, to drive up the financial worth of their property via entirely artificial scarcity.

    That entire nexus of political sabotage will not survive the blatant necessity of rebuilding most of the housing stock. And if you are building entire cities on a blank canvas, you are not going to build tenements with tiny apartments. You are going to build quite palatial apartments, because the goal is to rehouse the suburbs, and it is easier to just stack more stones than to tell the middle class to go live in an efficiency. By far.

    109:

    Nope. Continental positions and the presence of large numbers of ophiolites weathering on the surface provoke ice ages. And the last time the Earth had this much carbon in the atmosphere was the Pliocene, when the continents were about where they are now.

    Let me unpack this:

    --Earth has two states: hothouse (about 80% of the last 500 million years) and icehouse (now, and previously in the Carboniferous). The point is that what we call greenhouse hell is actually the norm for Earth. The weird part is that it's happening now, when we've got highly dispersed continents and big islands (lots of erodable coastline), large mountains (the Himalayas, Rockies, and Andes) cause by massive subduction (lots of erosion there too).

    Why does this matter? Eroding igenous rock is the largest sink for carbon, far larger than the soil or forests. If you don't have lots of rucked up rock in the form of big mountain chains and volcanic islands triggered by subduction zones, you lose a big carbon sink. Pangaea, with that one big continent, was a hothouse.

    --We're in an icehouse world, where we go from interglacials (where we are now) to glacial periods (which we'd normally shift into likely in a few thousand years, if not for human activity). Whatever we do to the atmosphere, it will be followed eventually by another ice age when atmospheric CO2 concentrations get low enough and a few other things happen. The thing is that these "few other things" are predicated on the way the continents are set up now, not on anything we do with atmospheric GHGs. (Yes, milankovitch cycles are important, but they happen regardless of where the continents are. It's the combination of continents plus cycles plus really low CO2 levels plus probably a megavolcanic triggering event or similar year-without-a-summer trigger that start ice ages. That's why they're so rare in Earth's history, and why they tend to happen repeatedly when they do happen).

    And yes, it's more complicated. But so far as the whole hothouse/icehouse thing goes, Earth's only been in this low CO2 icehouse for the Pleistocene. Before that it was coming out of about 350 million years of hothouse Earth (part of the Paleozoic, the entire Mesozoic, the entire Paleogene, and the Tertiary until the Miocene). What our GHG emissions likely will do is to kick the Earth from icehouse to hothouse for up to 400,000 years, but at the end of it we'll be back in icehouse mode, and another ice age will start. Our problem as modern humans is that our genus basically evolved in the ice ages, so while we can beat the heat, this whole hothouse Earth thing will be new to us, and since the last time the Earth jumped from icehouse to hothouse was the end of the Carboniferous, it's going to be pretty new to everything on this planet, too. New, in this case, means extinction event for everything that can't adapt fast enough.

    110:

    Or, again, you do the multigenerational home, with the kids in the attic, the parents on the second floor, and the grandparents on the first floor. As people die and age, they move down through the house, while (hopefully!) their kids take their place above them, and surplus rooms get rented out.

    After watching our parents age and those of all of our friends age (we're in our early 60s) I've been a bit blunt with my wife that our current split level is a bad idea for us going forward. The only toilets and baths are on the upper floor. We're 1 bad sprain or worse from being marooned in a bedroom for weeks or months. Eating out of a mini fridge unless we have live in help.

    111:

    And for some reason this topic brought to mind this song:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LL-Psnz9gk

    (Oysterband: "Here Comes the Flood")

    112:

    One of the only ways to cut down on this kind of emission is to cut down on commutes. That implies that people live and socialize near where they work, and that also means that their workplaces need to cluster with their competitors.

    This would look at lot like Pittsburgh and other early industrial cities. When I lived in the Pittsburgh area in the 80s it was interesting to me how so many people rarely traveled more than 5 miles from where they grew up. This was the 1980s, not the 1880s. People there just stayed put way more than most places.

    113:

    It's equally likely that their people will live far away in some other suburb, and rather than decreasing commuter miles, the scattered employment centers double them, clogging roads and increasing GHG emissions.

    Welcome to the GTA. Add in public transit optimized to move people into/out of urban core rather than around periphery, and you have virtually guaranteed traffic chaos. (And a captive market for a private toll highway built with public money… Mike Harris, the gift that keeps giving.)

    114:

    I recall reading that modern ideas of physical, visual and auditory privacy are relatively recent -- like in the past century or two. Previously, people shared big rooms, with servants for the middle class and servants and courtiers for the nobility.

    This is a minor plot point in Larry Niven's "A World Out of Time." A modern man goes into cryogenic suspension and wakes up centuries in the future; he has difficulty defecating and having sex in the middle of a dormroom shared by others.

    My earlier predictions (up higher in this thread) assumed that privacy ideas a century from now, in the west, would be similar to today. You'd want to sleep alone or with a spouse, and eat and relax only with family. If that changes, then housing looks a lot more like dormitories.

    And yes to a resurgence of boarding houses for unmarrried people without children. I've heard about some of that springing up in San Francisco -- with a fancy high-tech name and accompanying apps.

    Indeed, I'm surprised that boarding houses haven't survived through today; they just seem so practical for unmarried adults.

    On the other hand, maybe they have survived, and we just call them "studio apartments" in the US, and "bedsits" in the UK. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, boarding houses provided meals, now that's outsourced (to use Charlie's word) to restaurants; same for laundry service and laundromats.

    115:

    As for California--let's talk north of Redding/would be State of Jefferson California--the wages are low in towns like Dorris and Tulelake (though they are considered satrapies of the Klamath Basin--in fact, some members of the Klamath County Library, in Oregon, are from Dorris and Tulelake because we've seen what they have for libraries there).

    But so is the cost of housing. You can buy a house today for under $200,000 in a fairly nice location in the Klamath area (though you can also spend a lot more. You can also spend $129,000 for a three bedroom, two bedroom bath house on Bly Mountain, but you will also have interesting neighbors--cue sound of banjos playing). In Tulelake itself, the median cost of a house is $78,000. https://www.areavibes.com/tulelake-ca/real-estate/

    In Dorris, CA, the median price of a house is slightly higher, around $119,000. https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Dorris_CA

    So yes, most of the California is through the roof on housing, but the extremely rural parts, not so much.

    116:

    I recall reading that modern ideas of physical, visual and auditory privacy are relatively recent

    I've heard that too. Can't recall where.

    Given how much I enjoy solitude, I'm not keen on moving into an apartment building — not without either really good acoustical insulation or better manners than seems to be the Canadian norm.

    117:

    I enjoy solitude too. I'm fine with an apartment building. I've lived in apartments.

    But the kind of dorm arrangements or boarding houses I discussed above makes my skin crawl.

    On the other hand, I can and do enjoy solitude in crowds -- airports, shopping centers, busy city streets. So I can imagine the 22d Century version of me would be comfortable in a big common room, maybe something that resembles one of today's hotel lobbies.

    118:

    Much of the US suburbs was created when the returning GIs and the money in the economy allowed folks to leave the packed cities. There was a lot of nostalgial for those 3 and 4 story walk ups in NYC and other big places but in the end people wanted to get further away from their neighbors. The nosy ones, the busy bodies, the ones who's kids ran around yelling and not behaving (unlike your angels), etc...

    And then after they moved to 1200sf suburb housing on 1/8 acre lots they moved again to 2000sf on 1/3 acre when they could afford it for similar reasons.

    119:

    Welcome to the GTA.

    After a bit of googling, I think you mean "Greater Toronto Area" (?)

    In my part of the world, GTA means Grand Theft Auto, which is malapropriate in its own special way.

    120:

    The way to get company towns to work is to provide housing as part of the wage. If you don't, people will travel as far as the then current technology allows. Given self driving cars that you can sleep in, that's a ridiculous distance.

    What noone has mentioned, and which exists only in embryo form and, as far as I know, seemingly unique to Australia, is the return of nomads. We have grey nomads here. They sell their city house, buy a small house in the country and a large motor home (your primary residence, below a certain value, doesn't count against your means tested pension) and then leave. They spend the winter in the tropics and the summer in higher latitudes.

    Probably a quarter of the houses in my town are that sort of base, (mid way between the summer and wintering grounds)

    Given basic income, lethal summer heat and massive winter snowfalls (more humid air) that might become popular.

    121:

    Much of the US suburbs was created when the returning GIs and the money in the economy allowed folks to leave the packed cities.

    There's that story, which has a large grain of truth in it. There's also the story about how Civil Defense and the inability to protect cities from nuclear attacks (by, for instance, rebuilding them underground) led to the idea of spreading the population and infrastructure out, so that it was theoretically less hard to completely cripple the US by nuking it. That's another story, anyway(see here for some references, may be biased). What does matter is that nukes and suburban sprawl both rose in the Eisenhower administration.

    As for why suburbanization continues, basically sprawl's extremely profitable to build. You start with land that has low value (ranches, farms), and you buy it up cheap, build a bunch of cookie cutter homes on it, and sell those homes for a fair amount of money. That's how the developer profits. The local municipality profits because they get all the property tax revenue from the homes and which they didn't get from the previous land use.

    Now notice that sprawl causes all sorts of other systemic damage and ignores the costs of losing good farmland, losing land that was sequestering carbon, forcing people into long commutes, building homes that aren't well designed for solar conversion because they're made for prettiness and oriented randomly to the sun, and so forth. However, they make money for municipalities and developers, and that's a partnership that's still raging across the US and elsewhere. Beating this system is going to be hard, because redevelopment isn't nearly as profitable. It's about artisanal reworking rather than industrial repetition, so it takes more design work, produces less tax revenue, and can't be replicated endlessly in suburb after suburb.

    The problem for the sprawl developers is that it's running out of good places to build. Right now, developments are slated for the valley of the San Andreas Fault and a place in San Diego that's burned 17 times in the last 110 years, and has one road in and out. Nobody who knows about these problems would buy a million dollar home in these places (which yes, they are proposing to build large numbers of), so I suppose that the real estate agents aren't going to mention those problems to prospective buyers.

    122:

    We've got plenty of nomads in North America.

    Google "snowbirds". We've also had tramps, hobos, and people riding the rails since the Great Depression, and now we've got the Dirty Kids. A chunk of people who go to Burning Man and the Rainbow Gatherings are nomads.

    Many entertainers and circus people are effectively nomads, as are the people who work the county and state fair circuit and basically live on the road for most of the year.

    For a newer version, you can google "vanlife" or "van life," which is a growing problem around here in certain neighborhoods. And we've got our gray nomads too, the grandparents who buy the big RV and spend most of their time on the road, shuttling between parks and kids.

    123:

    I forgot the most important group of nomads of all: the super rich. When a person's personal net worth is higher than the GDP of half the countries on the planet, their relationship with national citizen ship is negotiable, sometimes even fungible. It's really fascinating that they've realized a lot of the dreams of anarchists and it makes me wonder how much both modern anarchism and libertarianism are simply the desire to have what the wealthiest have.

    124:

    David L @78 said: Am I the only one here know knows about Chicago being lifted up to deal with the swampiness of the area?

    There was an episode on PBS that discussed it. Deeply scary when I watched the series. HA!

    Lifting Chicago: Introducing How We Get To Next http://www.pbs.org/how-we-got-to-now/blogs/howwegottonext/lifting-chicago-introducing-how-we-get-to-next/

    125:

    Heteromeles @122 said: We've got plenty of nomads in North America.

    That is discussed in the book Nomadland.

    On the Road With the Casualties of the Great Recession https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/books/review-nomadland-jessica-bruder.html

    Look at any Sam's Club parking lot and you will find people living there.

    126:

    Mark,

    I've posted this many times before.

    The Coming Ice Age https://harpers.org/archive/1958/09/the-coming-ice-age/?single=1

    A slight warming opens up the Arctic Ice exposing the Arctic Ocean to evaporation. That's why we've had such bad weather this year. A section of the Arctic Ocean opened up, destabilizing the Polar Vortex pushing Arctic air over the Great Lakes dumping snow and rain over the region, causing massive flooding.

    The greater the area of Arctic Ocean exposed, the greater the snow in the Northern Latitudes and the greater the rain in the Middle Latitudes.

    A year of snow, and a year of rain will kill billions, while cooling the planet.

    This ties into your next part:

    I strongly doubt we'll be at 11B.

    11 billion people is obvious when you look at the data.

    Why we wrote Factfulness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-kbZiCX7h4

    The fascinating thing about Factfulness, is that Rosling developed the extensive graphic presentation over the years to try and get past people's preconceived beliefs. The people he would lecture were educated, usually "experts" in their field with access to current data, but were still trapped in the mindset of when they went to University.

    Basically they found:

    “Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire.”

    Jean de la Fontaine

    Hans Rosling on factfulness (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6iAhU2E_Vc&list=PLAA_uxQHVV7U761wk7BgvtALD4k8aXZfE

    127:

    So as it happens, I spent a lot of time thinking about this exact problem-space in the last 7 years, because we have built a house (in Denmark).

    One of our requirements was to build "green" as calculated over the lifetime of the building and after researching that, the answer is that the longer the house will be used, the better the green footprint.

    That lead us to the meta-conclusion from Charlies initial examples: The easiest way for a building to survive is to be adaptable and remodel-able.

    As to building technology:

    At least on non-polar latitudes, energy-balance is a solved problem, with most of the remaining issues concerning down-regulating temperature: We can literally see the heating cut out if we have two friends over for tea.

    Windows are heat sources, if you want them to be: A thin visible-transparent and IR-reflective coating and noble gas filling does that, and it works almost too well: Remember to draw the white curtains when you leave for summer vacation!

    So all in all, you pretty much have full freedom to shape your house as you want, subject to plot size, zoning etc.

    You can then either optimize for cost or longevity.

    If you optimize for cost, the building is built for exactly, precisely and only that floor plan and use, and nothing can be changed because the only thing left after optimization is what is required for the building to stay put in a storm, and no element is mounted to make replacement possible, not even windows and doors.

    Get an unexpected 2nd or 3rd kid ? Move to a different house. Forget all about adding a room. Get a different hobby ? Inherit 200 paintings ? Move.

    Inside walls will mostly be plasterboard, which means it is easy to hang things, but impossible to unhang them. After about three-four changes of ownership, the house is ready to tear down, because replacing the worn parts is more expensive than building a new house.

    In Denmark we're tearing that kind of house from 1960-1980'es down now.

    If you optimize for longevity, you over-dimension the house so that any N-2 interior walls can be torn down without impacting the statics. You also build from materials like brick, light concrete (1.9t/m³), wood, mineral insulation etc.

    The median age of this quality of buildings, typically from 1860...1950 in Denmark, grows by approx 300-350 days per year.

    As far as I can tell, there is less than 10% difference in what those two kinds of buildings cost to build right now, and we picked the latter model.

    With respect to "moving with the times", the BR2020 building code in Denmark has minimum window/daylight requirement (14% of floor area as I recall) that makes it illegal to build the otherwise obvious "home-cinema" in the middle of the building.

    I asked the authors: "We didn't think of that..."

    The same building code requires, but variance is easy to get, that you can get in and out of, and live your life in the building bound to a wheel-chair. We intend to live the rest of our lives here, so we were generous with turning space, for instance in the bathrooms.

    We don't have a car, but we built a garage anyway and use it for bikes, lawn-mowing robot winter storage and the house's technical installations (heat-pump, ventilation, PV inverter).

    The next owner may use the garage for his vintage manual car ("real german diesel - costs me a liter of olive oil for every 8 km!") or maybe as a workshop for her 1m³ working volume combined CNC/3D printer.

    We also added a lot of electrical outlets "weird places" such as on the middle of a wall 20cm below the ceiling.

    Who knows, a 80" screen may need power there some day, and it is a LOT cheaper to put the outlet there from the start.

    And yes, Cat-6E too.

    To summ up:

    I think the ideal future residential building is a robust shell with an energy-management system in one corner.

    The future residential dwelling is whatever and however the inhabitants decide to partition and use the resulting building volume.

    But for most people the realistic future home is what we already see in the new generation of "mobile homes" in USA: It looks like a real house, but it comes on a truck and its lifetime is max 25 years, after which it is easy to dispose of in a environmental responsible way, if a 20 year return periode climatic event did not already take care of it.

    128:

    For a newer version, you can google "vanlife" or "van life," which is a growing problem around here in certain neighborhoods.

    It's a problem where I am too -- San Diego, California. They live near the beach. People who live in conventional housing near the beach, which costs a lot of money, complain about late-night partying, drug deals and other crime, and using the street as a toilet.

    129:

    The way to get company towns to work is to provide housing as part of the wage.

    Greetings, American, and welcome to the 22d Century! If you liked the 21st Century, where losing your job meant losing your health coverage, you'll love it here, where you can lose your home too!

    130:

    About the only firms that even consider doing this now are pressure cookers.

    Productivity research, ca 1920, 1930. Workers cant sustain output for more than about 40 hours a week, long term.

    Footnotes to said research, post 2000: The actual limit is something like 50, 60, but commute and the more work-like home maintenance tasks (cleaning, cooking if this is not how you relax) come out of that budget, hence the earlier result, and why the "masters of the universe" do not suffer burnout even more than they do - they are driven everywhere, and have staff to keep their house in order, and why people with long commutes suffer so very badly

    A certain kind of manager : "Hey, wait a minute".

    And that is how a software house or engineering consultancy winds up with a office with staff housing on top. And a cleaning service.

    131:

    Howdy neighbor! I'm in San Diego too.

    I've been getting an earful about van life from my friends in PB, although I don't live there.

    There's even an interesting, erm, business wherein some company rents luxury RVs, parks them at Campland, people come in and use them for the weekend or whatever (perhaps to watch the speedboat races?), then leave, and the company sends a lackey out to drive the luxury RV back to the holding lot and clean it. Great way to have an unpermitted luxury VRBO-type thing next to Mission Bay.

    132:

    The problems that need solving are that (at least in San Diego) cars and trucks account for 55% of GHG emissions, and we're dealing with the reality that there's no money to widen freeways let alone build more. Even adding transit is causing shrieks and vapors from the usual suspects.

    So forget electric driverless cars. Yes they don't pollute, but no, the roads are already getting jammed. We need higher human density in the vehicles (buses and trains) and shorter commutes.

    That's where the idea of building specific industry sectors into a city makes a bit of sense. If everyone knows you head to, say, Sorrento Valley for biotech, then finding ways (presumably after the Big Earthquake) to put upper middle class housing near Sorrento Valley is one way to cut down on the car emissions.

    It's a solution that works better with a city rebuild (for instance in the US rust belt) than by trying to retrofit a car-centric city like San Diego. The social problems are that locations have to accommodate two-career families, and it gets into that slimy problem of not having the ability to change fields, only companies within the field. It's not the same as company housing, but it's simply the notion that "all engineers live in Claremont Mesa" to try to get the engineering firms to locate near there to cut down on everyone's commute.

    Heck, it worked in medieval medinas. What could possibly go wrong with scaling it up by three orders of magnitude and getting cars involved...

    133:

    If you look at the situation in Silicon Valley, the fastest growing housing is tents. There are tent cities popping up everywhere. These cheaps tents used to be high end in the 90s. Carbon fiber poles, breathable water proof polymer fabrics. Also have scooters being stolen for power and lithium, and solar panels put up on some tents. If you extend this out, vertical tent cities with some fancier pop-ups. A return to more nomadic lifestyle, with portable housing easily movable when the automated police drones harass you (also has happened in SF with new robot security bots shaped like inverted ice cream cones)

    134:

    I think I'm confused between tenements (the buildings you're describing) and slums (where there's a mix of tenements, DIY shanties, tents, and whatever). In this regard, if you haven't read Mike Davis' classic Planet of Slums, you really should. To misquote Gibson, your future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. In this case, unevenly means only 1-2 billion people in true slums, just mostly not in the developed world.

    And the idea of a vertical tent city in earthquake country is deeply unsettling. I think those are more properly referred to as squats.

    135:

    I enjoy solitude too. I'm fine with an apartment building. I've lived in apartments. But the kind of dorm arrangements or boarding houses I discussed above makes my skin crawl.

    As someone who's committed to share housing for ethical reasons, I have spent a lot of time making it not that bad.

    A few key features, most of which apply to apartments and multigenerational housing (and really to housing in general, but currently the trend is to use physical space instead - just put the toilet 20m away from the lounge):

    • sound and thermal insulation between rooms
    • air breaks/seals between sections of the house
    • shared spaces designed for shared use
    • individual storage in shared spaces

    If you live in a cheap, lightweight house that's shared with others it's not fun, because everything that happens is obvious to everyone who's in the house. That's true even for highly social people, even they don't necessarily want to hear every detail of other people's intimate lives, or have to leave the house to have that difficult discussion with their soon-to-be-ex partner.

    In Australia what works is double brick houses that have been extended - you get internal double brick walls and exterior-grade doors between the bits. I lived in a house that had a living room plus three bedrooms separated from the kitchen, laundry and two bedrooms by a double brick wall and an almost airtight sliding door. There was a shower+toilet in each half. That worked pretty well with six people living in it.

    But when we had a two bedroom apartment with two couples in it, that was ugly. One bathroom, one small kitchen, two bedrooms each barely big enough for a king size bed (is, you could put one in but the door hit it and you just had enough space to walk round three sides - no space for a chest of drawers, everything had to be stored under the bed). We knew everything the other couple did.

    Think backpacker hostel converted to apartments rather than cardboard mcmansion conversion.

    136:

    Greater Toronto Area, yes. I guess I'm some sort of neighbour to Robert Prior in #113. Along with around ten million others. :)

    It seems that a lot of the comments refer to the type of home, rather than the structure of the home. Makes sense: you can't design effectively for an environment - climate, weather, politics, societal, and so on - if you don't know what the environment is like. Any author would do well to consider where their protagonists are living and what daily life looks like before making projections about what their homes look like.

    137:

    Also, much of Australia you can only dig down if you actively manage the water table, and in Sydney you have either porous sandstone or acid sulfate soils. Neither work well with salt water ingress from rising sea levels, and most of Sydney is within 5m of sea level or will be an archipelago if that happens. I am out of the immediate danger zone, but with acid sulfate soils digging down is a highly technical operation. Where it's $50,000 per carpark to dig elsewhere it's more like $70,000 in my area.

    There's a lot of apartment building going on that has 5-10 levels of car parking underneath it, and those will generally be ok in heavy rain/storm surges because they have redundant pumps and some thought to reducing water inflow. If cars become less popular they could be converted to underground apartments. But they are also completely reliant on 100% uptime from the grids - electricity but also water and increasingly internet (the access, climate and security systems are remotely managed). I mean, technically the building still works without those things, but more in the sense of "an emergency evacuation is possible" than "you can keep living there for a month". They often have a petrol powered pump on site too, but you can only run those for so long before either you run out of fuel or the pump fails.

    138:

    Vanlife, semi-mobile tiny houses, boatlife etc etc are all either parasitic or refuges, they're not designed or capable of being long term sustainable housing, and they don't scale. While 1% of the population does them it kind of works but as we see with US trailer home suburbs, they quickly turn into slums when they become a significant source of housing.

    What we will see, I think, is a scaling out of the "rent one working space" concepts more into backpacker hostels, where office buildings are converted into high density living/working spaces. Often the concrete involved in the building provides enough thermal and physical mass to give reasonable isolation for the occupants, and done well you end up with quite nice spaces. Done on a tight budget for maximum return on investment we get the Australian version of third world slums... and I have also seen those in Australia. I expect to see more.

    We will also see a population reduction programme based on those conversions, where the building code will quite deliberately lag the climate and social changes resulting in concentrated death events when one of those buildings fails. Not necessarily catastrophically, except in the sense that global warming is catastrophic - you'll get 1000 elderly people in a converted office tower and 20-50 of them will die every time you get a day over 45 degrees science. That will mean 50% resident turnover every summer... and we will just accept it and move on.

    I think we'll also get "air pollution events" in first world cities caused by a combination of heatwaves and rubbish accumulation. Once you surround a dense urban area with burning plastic people start dying just from the air quality. But since that only happens for a month every couple of years and the alternative is massive investment in recycling I think we will just accept a few thousand excess deaths as inevitable and move on.

    There will be a lot of that as the population inevitably contracts. It's not anyone's fault, there's no obvious causal connection between "you put a bag of rubbish out on the kerb for collection, someone identifiable dies directly because of that bag being there". It's more like the "hidden road toll" - in most countries X people are killed by road crashes, and 1.5-3x that many die from air pollution that comes from road users.

    139:

    I'm expecting a lot of Climate Migrants and a lot of prejudice towards Climate Migrants. "You're from Florida. You need to move out of our neighborhood."

    My expectation is that the Climate Migrants will move out of Florida and Louisiana to the Rustbelt states, which will then become really awful shitholes.

    Time to read Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath again.

    140:

    I'm not sure I agree. If we do Climate Change right there will be a shitload of new jobs, ranging from housing dismantler/resource miner to solar/wind technicians, plus a ton of other stuff. Just making sure that all the bricks from a house in Seal Beach (currently about five feet above sea-level) get to Detroit, where they'll be used to build homes/shelters for climate refugees will be an industry in itself... Adapting to Climate Change (if done right) will be a ton of work.

    If you have nothing to do, you can join the Climate Army and spend your days tearing up seaside McDonald's and shipping out all the Cat-5 cables (probably a couple-hundred pounds as they wire the places these days) in the walls for recycling.

    141:

    I agree that boats don't scale, although there have been a number of cultures (from yachties to the Sama Bajau to the Chinese Tanka) who have lived out of their boats for generations. They're never independent of the land, though, and as you note, it's an alternative lifestyle and a hard one, not an antidote for slums.

    142:

    The monster in the shadows of this particular thread is that there are almost certainly going to be fewer humans alive on Earth in 2119 than in 2019. How we get there from here is the thing Charlie probably doesn't want to talk about.

    My take on it, simply by analogy and to not go there, is that at best the 21st Century will be like the 17th century, only probably worse. The totally sketchy version is that the 17th Century was the depths of the Little Ice Age, human populations decreased by perhaps a third, the Ming dynasty was toppled, there were several thirty years' wars, the English civil war, and so on. (Geoffrey Parker's doorstop Global Crisis is the slightly less sketchier history).

    The thing is that with crop failure after crop failure, and megalomaniacal idiots trying to seize power due to the weakness of their foes, there was a tremendous amount of suffering over most of the world. Japan escaped, mostly because it was pulling out of its worst civil war into the Tokugawa, so it kind of crashed early to escape the rush. Eventually though, people figured out how to weather the environmental crises without breaking into the warfare that generally accompanied them.

    In Europe, at least, the Little Ice Age was the break between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. If civilization is (or civilizations are) still around in 2119, I suspect we're going to see a similar break, and it's probably going to be between capitalism and whatever comes next.

    In a way, this is a rephrasing of the singularity problem that plagues SF a decade ago: at some point, the sheer randomness of crises predicted to hit us (when do the storms hit, when do the crops fail, when does the ice move, when do the bad earthquakes hit, when does the pandemic start, when does the solar flare hit us, when does the web war start) makes it impossible to figure out which set of cultural ideas is going to come together and work, and which are going to be overwhelmed. We can talk about the material limits for culture on things like building sand, mined phosphorus and a host of rare earths, and so on, but we don't know what combination of innovative materials, recycling, and cultural change will replace them. We just assume that something that we know about now matters, and go with that, if we assume that civilization survives the 21st Century.

    Sadly, it's easier to assume that it doesn't, but I'm not going there today. It's interesting to figure out what's on the other side of this dark singularity instead, even if we do make jokes about superhuman AIs asking for asylum.

    143:

    The population of Europe actually increased from 1600 to 1700 as did the population of the world

    I’ve never seen any credible evidence of a 30% drop worldwide even from the most ardent “general crisis” supporter. Specific areas maybe, like Germany due to the 30 years war, or China, but those areas were aggravated by long and destructive wars. worldwide it was likely more in the 10-15% range, and recovered relatively quickly

    Pretty much the only period of time the population of the world has decreased that much was during the Black Death

    I think Charlie’s 11 billion number is a pretty good guess even with climate change, we are clever little monkeys especially when it comes to feeding ourselves

    144:

    Pretty much the only period of time the population of the world has decreased that much was during the Black Death

    Except for the Americas post 1492. Massive uncertainty, but the high end is like 95%, so a large dent in the world population.

    145:

    You can't separate housing from the social and economic context.

    Lets assume that technological civilization doesn't collapse and that global warming is a manageable problem. Energy continues to be available at the same order of magnitude as today, although the balance will have shifted to pretty much 100% renewables. From the end-users point of view this means electricity, with maybe some liquid fuels where energy/weight is at a premium, such as aircraft.

    HVAC is expensive when powered by electricity. When I lived in Oregon we had a 30kW air conditioning plant attached to the house. This is not sustainable. I haven't run the numbers, but I'm thinking that you could put a big heat sink under the house, pump solar heat into it in summer and use it to keep warm in winter. Still needs energy to run a heat pump, but less than brute-force heating and cooling. Likewise the house will be well insulated and probably sealed unless you open a door, with a heat exchanger built into the HVAC to keep the heat in/out as the air is changed. The house energy management computer will be a thing.

    The population will be smaller than today. Japan is leading the way here, but in much of the developed world the birth rate is below replacement level. This is driven by a combination of readily available birth control, female emancipation and an awareness that a child needs a good 2 decades of education before they can be economically productive. Hopefully the current "third world" will have got the memo by then too.

    Most work is knowledge work. There are factories of course, but comparatively few people work in them. High bandwidth and the fact that all knowledge work is done on a computer means that the office as an information factory doesn't really exist. Any "office" work can be done from home and generally is. So the home office is a standard part of the house and most people do their work in one.

    This means that a house can be anywhere on Earth, and you can work for anyone anywhere. This is going to have big national and legal implications outside the scope of this comment. But cities will increasingly have no reason for existing. Why pay huge amounts for a tiny space crammed in with everyone else when you can have a big house for much less money and still live the same lifestyle? Transport is an issue, but between cheap electric cars and automated driving its not so huge. People are still likely to congregate somewhat because its still nice to meet people face to face, but in small towns rather than cities.

    Homes themselves will contain much less stuff. Entertainment no longer requires storage space (bookshelves etc), and "museum rooms" (used only for high formal occasions) have gone out of fashion.

    146:

    and spend your days tearing up seaside McDonald's and shipping out all the Cat-5 cables (probably a couple-hundred pounds as they wire the places these days) in the walls for recycling.

    Actually the electrical wires will be much more valuable for recycling. And the metal plumbing, cook tops, etc...

    Cat5 has way more insulation than actual metal in it.

    147:

    Looking to the past might give some insights as to how things might change. I have a somewhat reasonable experience with suburban living in the 60s and 70s as my father built/remodeled houses as a part time job as his main job allowed. Up to the age of 20 I spent all but the first 2 years of my life in two houses we built. And remodeled as time went on.

    Add to that my father few up on a working farm where they did everything themselves. On land settled around 1824. They had a small sawmill and slaughter house. It wasn't the Ponderosa but they got through the depression with food on the table. My mother came from a house with 4 rooms on the main floor and an un heated somewhat finished attic for the kids.

    My point is a got to see a LOT of small rural housing for poor to middle class folks dating back into 1900 or so up to newly built. And since then I keep up with trends.

    Up until the 50s much of the US what wasn't in the big cities was living in good enough to keep most of the winter weather out. Too hot in summer? Sucks to be you. Deal.

    After WWII those GIs really changed things. 90% of the US folks in uniform didn't point a weapon, they support those that did. They got crash course in being machanics, carpenters, plumbers, typists, file clerks, inventory trackers, etc... This is what was behind a lot of the economic boom in the US in the 50s. That guy doing radio/TV repairs down the street? He was trained as a radio tech for the war. Before the war he might have been looking forward to milking cows all his life.

    Anyway these folks didn't want to live in 4 room square houses with maybe a bath attached to the back. And if not then an outhouse plus a tub hanging on the back porch or wall that you filled with hot water off the stove for bathing. So they took their money and built/bought 1000 to 1400 sf houses with a driveway in the burbs. Many with a carport or maybe a garage. (The garage might be a slight set up from a shack but it was a garage.) As they got more money they moved further away from the local town into a 1800 to 2200 sf house. Now instead of 2 or 3 bedrooms, a kitchen and a dining/living area they now had 3 or 4 bedrooms, a large kitchen full of appliances, a den, a living room, and a dining room. The later 2 not used 95% or more of the time except to prove you could afford it. And those original tract houses got sold to a new wave of people fleeing the rats and cockroaches in their decrepit apartments in the local town.

    And as best I can tell we've (most of the US) have been building/buying/aspiring to these houses for 60-70 years now. I have one. But I'm not doing any but required for living maintenance on it in general because I could drop $200K into it and raise the value maybe $10K to $20k over its tear down value. Which is financially stupid for me.

    The problem we have now is many people aged 45 and older think everyone wants this same house. And many under that age think they do. Until they get it and have some kids and discover it's no longer 1970 or even 1990 and things are now different.

    Between my and my wife's siblings we have 11 kids aged from low 20s to very early 30s in 5 states coast to coast. Maybe 2 of them want this kind of house. Maybe.

    I'm not sure what kind of house most people with some money will be living in in 2119 but based on what has happened since 1900 to now it could look very different. While I hope it's not cheap trailers it could very well be more and more walls and structure factory built and then assembled on site. This is available in all kinds of quality levels in the US now. Japan has some interesting similar things going on where you pick a collection of steel boxed/framed rooms with some customizing and they get assembled into a house on your lot.

    What I see are bigger bedrooms with a room for a chair desk TV and maybe access to a bath. Smaller numbers of common rooms so that you have a kitchen not totally walled off from a common area for entertaining eating and watching your media devices. (My basement den of my split level makes no sense anymore.) An issue I'm not sure of what we call a utility room. Basically a room with the washer dryer where you can come in from the outside and strip down / de-mud / whatever. If you have a dog[1] more than purse sized this is where they come in with mud and maybe eat. What most will not have is a big yard with the need to store all that stuff to take care of it. Or if you do it will be much more of a service taking care of it than now.[2]

    These changes can (are are happening to some degree now) happen with stand alone housing or apartments/condos. They do exist to some degree in large cities. The problem there is when you have a 10 story apartment building built in the 50s or 60s it is arranged all wrong, thinks energy is almost free, is full of asbestos, and treats wifi as the enemy. Charlie's place is just an extreme example of this. All of these historic designations that keep building from becoming more energy efficient will go away at some point. If not the buildings will be abandoned and gradually rot away.

    And dealing with all of will piss off all kinds of people as cities (even if inland) will have to re-arrange to handle the way the to be born want to live.

    [1] I see large pets going away as big yards go away. Just way too much hassle. My daughter and her husband have 2 rescue dogs that have turned into 65 pound dynamos in their 1/7 acre yard. They are really too big for such. I can't imagine the effort required to keep them if an apartment style setup.

    [2] Most gas powered yard car consumer devices are designed for 50 uses before failure. For most of us that gives you two years. Most will last longer but the 50 start rule gets you past the 1 year warranty on most devices. But it sure creates a lot of broken crap to get thrown away. (I have powered tools that are well past 20 years old but then again, I'm an edge case.) But services doing yard work will not buy such crap.

    148:

    If you look at the situation in Silicon Valley, the fastest growing housing is tents.

    In the very short term (5-20 years), maybe.

    Longer term, it's non-viable, unless you can figure out how to hurricane-proof and wildfire-proof tents and in addition insulate and air condition them well enough to make 45 celsius heat emergencies survivable.

    Meanwhile, you just reminded me of a mid-1980s thing, Steve Roberts' Winnebiko, which over time mutated into 1992's BEHEMOTH … (and you REALLY want to click that link: trust me on this!)

    I bet that today 80% of its functionality sits inside your smartphone plus a solar powered USB charger.

    149:

    The tents stuff reminded me of a news report which claimed that "abandoned cheap tents" were now a major source of waste following several day rock festivals.

    150:

    If you're interested in this sort of thing I would hugely recommend Andrew McKay's Misfits' Architecture blog: https://misfitsarchitecture.com/

    Corridors, btw, are also a sign there is room to spare for dedicated circulation space, rather than using an open plan or something like this: https://archidius.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/the-new-orleans-shotgun-house/ to make the circulation space double up as something else.

    I suspect passive refitting will tend to concentrate windows onto one side of the building, whichever is favoured by the weather, so the others can reduce their size and squint out of the deep wall. This is something modernists have been all over since the 1920s. Think orienting the plan around whichever room gets the big glass wall.

    I kind of identify AR with plunging into the city and VR with suburban hunkering down around a big lump of consumer electronics (which is why I am VR sceptical - a revival of the bits of the 90s we abandoned for good reasons). But I think a space intended for enjoying either is going to look much more like a dance studio or nightclub (or padded cell) than a living room - clear span, no clutter, a sprung floor to save the neighbours and your joints. Would anyone else rather have proper sound than earbuds in that context? I would, which implies careful soundproofing or else taking it to a social space or outside.

    There's always going to be a need for basic physical security - after all, there is no guarantee the great decline of crime will stay that way - but thinking about it, how soon will it be true that you are more likely to be the victim of fraud (almost always digitally enabled, even if it is social engineering rather than a technical exploit) than theft? It might even have happened on a value-weighted basis.

    That makes me think you might want to get rid of all the smart-home stuff completely. All of it. An important element of any attempt to anticipate the future is distinguishing trends from fashions; fashions essentially revert to the mean and are purely driven by the Bass curve adoption dynamics, whereas trends are nonergodic, have fundamental drivers, and leave things lastingly different.

    (PS, have you tried signing into this blog? horribly borked, this is why I am using my old hosted wordpress account rather than www.harrowell.org.uk/blog)

    151:

    I see a lot of people here assuming everything changes but property prices are roughly the same, or in the same regime. That, I think, is the easiest thing to change.

    152:

    Saw this and thought it might be of interest to people here:

    https://www.marincounty.org/depts/cd/divisions/planning/csmart-sea-level-rise/game-of-floods

    Further proving that climate change education can be fun, the County of Marin is coming up with a boxed version of its award-winning Game of Floods, which teaches players about adaptation choices to for inevitable sea level rise. Pre-orders of the board game are being taken now.

    The game, created by Community Development Agency (CDA) staff members and their water resources cohorts from the Department of Public Works, is designed to engage and educate the community about sea level rise vulnerability and adaptation. It allows players to design solutions that protect entire communities as well as individual properties to address the permanent flooding impacts of sea level rise. The challenge requires collective approaches to build solutions that protect access, airports, wastewater treatment facilities as well as smaller communities while dealing with uncertainty and balancing priorities among players.

    153:

    "Buy land, son. They're not making it any more." Mark Twain, attrib.

    The population in 2119 absent a climatological disaster or significant meteor impact, plague, lots of wars etc. will be higher than now. Land for agriculture can't easily be built on if food supplies have to be guaranteed so it's likely property prices, as a large fraction of a family's earnings will continue to rise. The home that sits on the land is not the important, expensive part of the deal.

    We could disconnect the production of food from dirt agriculture with sufficient energy, at least for a basic dole to start with -- Grimbledon Down research institute has been working on just such a product (tentatively called NuFood) for some time now. That move away from dirt would free up a lot of land for building homes, factories, mobile phone shops on and it's likely that prices would fall even with increased demand.

    154:

    I've got an old house (by local standards) — way too big for me, but small by new-build standards. My nieces are looking at condos not because they don't want houses, but because they can't afford even a small house like mine.

    155:

    My house cost us $114K in 1990. Per this calculator (https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/) that would be about $230K now. But I can sell it in a day or few for $300k no questions asked.

    My daughter and her husband just bought a home for $360K. SF is about 20 smaller than mine and lot is about 1/3 as big.

    But they are making very good incomes as they are bright folks who made good picks for their fields of work 10 years ago.

    156:

    I remember reading about that guy in "Whole Earth Review" back in the eighties, thanks for the links. Also fun to see an older generation of bike parts, like the Sun Tour V-GT derailleur, whose method of keeping the jockey pulley close to the cogs worked so well that nearly everyone does it that way now, and the TA cranks, whose modularity is faintly echoed in contemporary mountain bike cranks.

    157:

    old house (by local standards) — way too big for me, but small by new-build standards.

    That's the problem with inflated land costs. If you have a lot that costs $350K to get ready for something to be built a developer is NOT going to put a $150K house on it. Risk/reward/capital tie up is crazy at that price point.

    So they put a $700K house on it with $100K profit built in and sell it for $1mil. I'd like to build something on the lot that might be 2000 - 2200 sf but include a 1 bedroom suite that we could move into if one of our children wanted to buy the entire thing as we get older. And in the mean time rent it out. And if my neighbors see this post there will quickly be a gathering of pitch forks and torches.

    So we now have a neighborhood of 1960s 1800 to 2200 sf houses interspersed with 3300 to 4000 sf 2 1/2 story monsters. And just down the road to a slightly more prestige area they are putting up 5000sf or larger mansions on the same sized lots (or even smaller than mine.)

    I can't even imagine wanted a house that big where the sides are 10' from the fence line (OR LESS) and the back yard a smaller foot print than the house.

    To me it is a bit insane.

    158:

    A home recycler to convert waste into feedstock for a 3D food printer would be a desirable thing.

    159:

    Power

    Some have alluded to it but the way we use electricity has got to change.

    I have a huge collection of lumps that convert 110 to 240 AC 50-60Hz to DC. Mostly older USB, some new USB-C, and some HP laptop things from my wife's job that I think are around 20v.

    They are all over my house. Most pulling AC power whether or not something is attached. I suspect half of my savings of switching to all LED lighting over the last few years has gone into keeping all of these lumps warm. There is tech that will allow these lumps to greatly reduce their current draw when no load is attached but profits and costs keep most of that out of such products.

    Maybe we need an expansive version of PoE that combines a way for us to attach things for power PLUS distribute networking around a living space. MM 5G is great for something but will not get through a wall. Maybe every room with a MM 5G repeater connected to a PoE network switch. And walls have PoE outlets as standard. Maybe combined with AC power distribution. Want to have a 1000 comment post about security in such a setup? CS can start it. Current home networking is just not ready for the IoT or anything that might come next in terms of security.

    Of course I've already had neighbors start talking about how 5G will give everyone cancer. Especially combined with the radiation from our smart power meters. And thus both must be stopped NOW!!!!!

    160:

    There is tech that will allow these lumps to greatly reduce their current draw when no load is attached We call it a "switched socket" in the UK. A quick web search says that an MK 2-gang should cost under GB£20 including taxes.

    161:

    The ceilings are high in old buildings because of gas lighting; if you're fitting a chandelier, it needs to be high enough that the candles, or gas lamps, don't scorch the ceiling - and high enough that you don't hit your head. For large rooms, they need to be higher still to provide light over a wider area, or to allow social activities like dancing... You could see the point at which this changed at the end of the 19th Century - our 1905-built TA Centre in East Claremont Street had these new-fangled wall-mounted gas lamps rather than chandeliers, and the ceilings were lower than the 18th-C builds as a result.

    After starting work, I managed (just) to buy a one-bedroomed flat in Edinburgh's Old Town; just outside the Flodden Wall. An 1880s tenement had been converted in the late 1970s/early 80s from five flats per floor, to four; while having its foundations pinned. Thick stone walls, medium-high celiings, sash windows that Listed status didn't allow me to change, and no central heating. My first act on moving in was to pay a plumber £300 to fit an electric shower over the bath (hey, it was 1989) and to put clockwork timer plugs on the electric panel heaters. An electric blanket and a 1kW fan heater kept it liveable during the days of 10% interest rates. Building the Scottish Parliament at the other end of the road made it more saleable a decade later...

    I found myself doing minor wiring jobs in the underfloor void of the home of my parents-in-law; a 1920s-built villa with a vestigial second floor. Fascinating to see what is essentially a scratch-built house, compared to the time-saving techniques and materials that arrived in the latter half of the century. Plasterboard, concrete blocks, pre-manufactured roof profiles, usable levels of insulation.

    After marriage in 1999, my wife and I moved to a new-build house just outside Edinburgh. Because the whole of Midlothian is riddled with coal mineworkings dating back centuries, and hence not always documented, the house is built on a concrete raft. Unlike my first flat, it isn't going to be leaning after a century (about a 1-2cm drop over every meter of width) - but it still shows the heritage of 20th-century design. A fireplace in the living room with chimney, a separate dining room (we got them to knock it through to the living room during construction). One of those shiny new ensuite bathrooms (luxury!).

    It's interesting to watch the new-build houses going up around the city boundary (Edinburgh's population has grown quite quickly; and most of the available spaces in the north and north-east of the city have been filled. It's expanding south into what used to be farmland; I reckon that Newton and Musselburgh will soon be contiguous, as Leith became in the 1920s.

    There are no chimneys; and few satellite dishes to fix to them. Rooftop solar panels are fitted from the start. Looking at the shiny catalogs of younger work colleagues who are preparing to breed and trading up, the mass-market builders have come full-circle and buyers are now far more able to tailor the build as "optional priced extras". Regarding "Faraday Cages", it may be happening by accident. The foil-backed polystyrene foam insulation panels ("Kingspan" is a widespread trade name) make life interesting; we added an extension to the house, and the resulting insulation levels meant I had to install a Wi-Fi extender.

    In the medium term? It depends on the house. Having both partners/parents in employment currently means that kitchens need to store food for the full period between the weekly shop. I suspect that online-shopping and frequent delivery may cut back on the fashion for double-width fridges (except perhaps for large families). If autonomous cars ever arrive, "transport as a service" may mean that built-in or adjacent double garages disappear from suburban houses; they'll still contain all of the junk, bicycles, shelves of tools, and exercise machines instead of cars, you just won't see a large door on the outside.

    Longer-term; I spent a chunk of my childhood living in Germany - shutters are useful in truly foul weather (see climate change), and changes to affordability may see the arrival of their longer mortgages on larger multi-generational houses. Full-size cellars and usable attic spaces are wonderful to have - even if the German and Swiss planning laws had a certain pessimistic wartime driver to them. Ring loads are dropping fast inside the house; a CRT drew a fair old wedge of current; as did halogen light fittings - I've certainly removed well over half a kilowatt of lighting by replacing it with LED bulbs. I do wonder whether we'll start to see purpose-built separate USB-voltage rings; I'm skeptical about the fire risks of building a cheap transformer into a power socket, and far prefer having Anker USB blocks dotted around the house.

    PS Don't knock the en-suite bathroom. We have two boys, and are at "peak teenager" - having more than one toilet on the same floor as the bedrooms saves significant time and stress in the morning, and was a lifesaver when the norovirus arrived...

    PPS Don't dismiss bicycle space - my sister is now a born-again cyclist. She needs her track bike, her road bike, her training bike, the 1960s Italian thing she uses to compete in L'Eroica, a hardtail MTB with panniers for getting about... I dread to think what would happen with two such in a single house.

    162:

    It's unexceptional today to come across an open-plan apartment, because (except for the very rich) we don't typically share our homes with servants

    Depends on where you are. Well-off-but-not-rich apartments in many Latin American countries frequently have maid's quarters, typically a very small bedroom with bath. We Airbnb'ed in one such in Panama a couple of years ago that was definitely open plan, probably 120-ish sq meters. (No, we didn't have a maid.)

    163:

    You're probably right. Cat-5 cables were the first thing that came to mind because I've strung them across several McDonalds.

    164:

    For me the huge factor has to be the heat. I'm a cynic, which means for me 4C of warming by 2119 would be a happy outcome.

    Even 4C means the equatorial band is essentially uninhabitable, because you can't work outside without dying of heat exhaustion: "By 2100, ∼34.1% (±7.6% s.d.) and ∼47.1% (±8.9% s.d.) of the global land area will be exposed to temperature and humidity conditions that exceed the deadly threshold for more than 20 days per year under RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5, respectively; this will expose ∼53.7% (±8.7% s.d.) and ∼73.9% (±6.6% s.d.) of the world’s human population to deadly climates by the end of the century" (http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/mora/Publications/Mora%20059.pdf). The bulk of the population has migrated out of that band.

    Most of the population currently lives in places that will be affected by sea level rise, to quite a large extent by that time.

    So something really striking about the built environment circa 2119, speaking as a European, is that it's new. It has been built recently, both to escape the rising water and to accommodate the migration of a third to a half of the planet's population.

    The parts which survive from before the flood have been radically retrofitted. It has been built and retrofitted to deal with brand new conditions, because although the habitable zone has moved north the specific conditions are different.

    Let's take a diversion into demographics. There are 30-50% more people than in 2019, and they live on half the land area. Their demographic profiles in terms of aging and education look roughly like Germany circa 2019. Nobody is prepared to put up with the externalities chemical, biological and radiological currently foisted on the global South in order to deliver the electronic / mechanical / biological widgetverse of the early 21st century, so they don't exist. Yes, there are still a lot of things with computers in, they're better than they are in 2019, but with nowhere to hide the downside, they're nowhere near as cheap or plentiful as in 2019.

    The global food supply chain has been annihilated by drought and disease and the extinction of the majority of pollinating species from pesticides and climate and disease. The lesson we took away was, like the Yanks and their shale gas in the 2000s, that you need to be independent of other people's problems. This applies down to the city level, because "Lincolnshire is everyone else's farmland" is a pattern which just doesn't work any more.

    There's a lot of food growing in the city, and because so little automation is possible, there are a lot of people working on growing it. They grow it where the cars used to be, where the ornamental gardens used to be. They keep it in pantries, or things like pantries, because electricity is too expensive to waste on refrigeration.

    That's a general theme, in fact. The productive excess enabled by fossil fuels is gone. The ratio for renewable energy sources sucks. That means the labour saving devices aren't there. Humans are cheaper, and there are lots of them around.

    The maid and the cook are back.

    165:

    Eh. This is entirely a urban myth. https://www.howtogeek.com/231886/tested-should-you-unplug-chargers-when-youre-not-using-them/ The power draw of chargers not in use is effectively nil.

    166:

    This is not a possible future. If mechanized food production goes away, gigadeaths follow. Not because of food shortages, exactly, but because the general collapse of economic productivity implied by that means nothing else gets done, and that is not survivable when you need to rehouse people by the billions.

    So, no, the future is not energy starved. Not this future anyway. Also, why would you ever think it would be?

    Consider the possible political settlements: Either renewable works, in the sense of delivering power at a reasonable cost, in which case, power will be abundant because why would you not just build more windmills and solar farms?

    Or it fails, in which case the future is fission. Because the political resistance to that will not survive blackout or major price hikes to power. And no, "Construction costs and time" are not show stoppers either - If the alternative is going without electricity, nuclear powerplants can be built very, very quickly and very, very cheaply. They wont have air-plane proof containment domes, but they absolutely will deliver power.

    There is no possible future in which power shortages are a thing! Not unless everybody dies first from war or plague.

    167:

    If the alternative is going without electricity, nuclear powerplants can be built very, very quickly and very, very cheaply.

    Yep.

    France wanted nuclear weapons and energy autonomy in the 1960s. So in the 1960s-70s they rolled out reactors on a production line and at peak were producing about 90% of their base load from cheap-ish fission designs … in a decade, without declaring a state of emergency or running an Apollo Program budget to do it.

    Today, the problems they face are (a) many of their reactors are hitting the 40 year point and need recertifying, (b) the rivers they use for cooling are warmer than was anticipated in the 1970s (because global warming) leading to the odd shutdown, and (c) a post-Fukushima review showed that while they're not clearly unsafe, they're not designed to withstand a once in a thousand years disaster like a mag 9 quake or a nuclear weapon strike, and they can't be retrofitted to reach such a standard.

    But if we want power and renewables won't work, nuclear exists and is do-able, albeit with a 2-10 year lead time to train a new generation of engineers to design and build them (most nuclear engineers from the glory days of the 1950s-1970s have retired by now).

    The real threat to civilization isn't transitioning to decarbonization or rising temperatures over a period of decades: it's a fast collapse—something unforeseen that hits us in less than a decade, so there's no time to train the army of specialists needed to deal with it.

    168:

    Charlie @ 166 and sitting HARD on the heads of some "Road-to-hell-paved with GOOD-intentions" fuckwits - like "extinction Rebellion" who stuck themselves to ELECTRIC trains ... AND the fake greenies again evil nuclear power - see also Germany for this particular insanity.

    Yeah - don't like that last sentence ....

    Martin My house, built on London Clay with not-too deep foundations has the slow, very slow tilt-&-crak problem

    169:

    Re: French nuclear power station fleet

    Today they produce about 85-90% of French electrical energy as well as supplying maybe 5-10GW for export. Right now as I type this they're feeding 3.85 nuclear GW to Green Germany since a calm over Europe has seriously curtailed the amount of wind energy being generated. Britain's large expensive buildout of wind turbines, over 40 billion spent, has been generating under 1GW for the past three days. Right now it's producing 290MW total (I saw a low of 180MW yesterday). Gas turbines are keeping the lights on, 20GW and more.

    (a) many of their reactors are hitting the 40 year point and need recertifying

    The recertification is a paper exercise more than anything. The Operating Licence could be pulled at any time for systemic or operational failures requiring an individual reactor to be shut down and made safe. In fact most of the early 3-loop M910 reactors built in the first wave of construction have already been through the relicencing process along with various refurbishments. The later 5-loop reactors are starting that process now. The way they're looking they'll easily reach 60 years and could be relicenced for another 20 years after that, presuming continuous upgrades and component replacements. The essential components don't wear out quickly, basically.

    (b) the rivers they use for cooling are warmer than was anticipated in the 1970s (because global warming) leading to the odd shutdown,

    The maximum amount the river-based reactors can raise the water temp has been lowered long after the cooling systems were specced and built. This sometimes necessitates shutdowns when dumping 3 GW of heat to provide a cold sink for the turbine condensers. The good news is that any reactor is unlikely to exceed that reduced limit during winter when they really need the watts.

    Old nuclear engineers from the 1970s wouldn't have a clue about modern-design reactors. They grew up with drafting tables and analogue control systems, large components welded together on site etc. The new breed of engineers and designers have CAD/CAM and simulation, digital everything and major parts like the reactor vessel and steam generators assembled, tested and inspected before they are delivered to the construction site. Today's reactors look the same and work on the same basic physical principles as their predecessors but they're actually quite different in engineering terms.

    170:

    “Longer term, it's non-viable, unless you can figure out how to hurricane-proof and wildfire-proof tents and in addition insulate and air condition them well enough to make 45 celsius heat emergencies survivable.“

    None of these things are very likely in Silicon Valley

    It’s generally on the cold side, going from an average summer high of 21C or 27C to 45C in an ocean moderated climate isn’t likely. Certain inland areas may get an bad heatwaves but it’s gonna be milder then most places

    Hurricanes don’t get anywhere near that far north and there isn’t much reason to think that will change

    The foliage generally is not dense enough for wildfires except possibly in the Far East Bay , where you don’t see much on the way of tent cities anyway

    Silicon Valley is pretty vulnerable to sea level rise though that’s the thing to look out for

    171:

    Um, you've watched how civilization has dealt with greenhouse gas emissions since the US President announced they were a problem back in, what was it, 1969? And you're positing that fast collapse is the only problem?

    I'd say one of the real problems is that the wealthiest, those most able to make a change right now, figure there's too many humans on this planet already. They're going to make sure their people survive (however they define "their people," and a look at current politics says a lot about that), while taking money and resources from the rest of us so that they come out ahead if we fight back.

    They're showing the same attitude that people have had all along about climate change: technology will save us. Except they have a very reduced meaning of "us."

    As for the threat to civilization from rising temperatures, it is a real problem. The problem isn't the temperatures themselves, it's that the extremes become more extreme and less predictable. That makes things like farming for ten billion people really hard, not just because of crop failures, but because of supply chains. If billions of people plan to eat bread, for instance, that means there has to be that much wheat in the production pipeline. Moreover, it has to be the right kind of wheat, because soft wheat for tortillas won't make leavened bread (different gluten). Get a big crop failure, the price of bread skyrockets, and there are riots and revolutions, as in the Arab Spring (caused in part by Russian and Pakistani wheat crop failures). The future may be a place where one year we all eat bread, one year we eat rice, most years we eat cassava flour, one year we eat potatoes, and one year we eat corn. This will play hell with cultural identities that revolve around food, but heck, we're all (heavy sarcasm) rational beings who can adapt our diets for years on end, right? Want a cricket to munch on while you think about that?

    As for supply chains, unfortunately, we don't have much in the way of national surplus grain stores left, either. Nor, in California at least, do we have food warehoused in the grocery store supply chain. That used to be our earthquake supply lifeline, but with just-in-time deliveries, grocery stores no longer carry a surplus of food, and it's suggested that everyone have a few weeks of food, just in case an earthquake happens and the supply chains fail.

    So how do we deal with shaky supply chains and too many people? The three options are innovation, more storage, or fewer people. Innovation's a ratchet: it's a great way to escape a food shortage temporarily. The problem generally is that innovations spread until they become ubiquitous, populations grow until the innovation is maxed out, and then a further innovation is needed to avoid the onset of, erm, Malthusian dynamics. That's what we're going to have to do with food, realizing that if we fail to continue to innovate, people starve. And realize it's not just one innovation, it's continual innovation or else, at least until the human population stops expanding and probably long after that (due to an increasingly unpredictable climate making the production of any particular crop in any particular year a crap shoot).

    Storage sounds great, until you ask where it gets put. Are we talking food warehouses owned by the wealthy who charge what they think they can get away with, or are we talking about ten billion people living in tiny apartments with a month of food under the bed? Or both?

    Fewer people? If we're humane, hopefully we'll get there by everyone passing through a demographic transition. I'm betting on pandemics, famine, and warfare myself, but hopefully I'm wrong. There are all sorts of other problems that come with a world that looks like Japan demographically. The big one isn't elder care, it's where do we stash all the labor-intensive, horribly polluting industries that the developed countries have been off-shoring for decades. If Vietnam is as developed as the US, we can't turn to them for cheap garment or electronics labor, we've got to make those things ourselves. Quite a lot of our environmental clean-up seems to have been moving polluting factories away from where people complain effectively and building them where people can't complain effectively. Eventually that stops, especially with a demographic transition, when there are few young, poor workers willing to do crappy jobs. What then?

    172:

    Quite a lot of our environmental clean-up seems to have been moving polluting factories away from where people complain effectively and building them where people can't complain effectively. Eventually that stops, especially with a demographic transition, when there are few young, poor workers willing to do crappy jobs. What then?

    It has been possible to make factories that are relatively clean and non crappy for a while, but people choose not to because finding a country with lots of poor people and crappy environmental regulations is cheaper.

    If nobody will do poorly paid work in shit conditions then maybe it is time to spend a bit more and get them to do reasonably paid work in good conditions...

    You are right. We are screwed.

    173:

    Lessee, the Village Voice, maybe. Beyond that? Why do you think I read the Guardian every morning, other than to get actual news about the world, and not what Rupert Murdoch, or the media who are pushed by him and his demographics/viewership/advertisers (and who's advertising?).

    174:

    Having gotten to post 171, I've calmed down a bit. Nice right-wing denialism, there. As Krugman just said, in his column about Zombie Ideas, that's "it's not happening/it is, but we didn't cause it/we did cause it, but we can't do anything about it/they're ALL WRONG, it's the other way!!!"

    As I looked up this "factfulness", I see he died in '17, which, indeed, makes him appropriate to quote Arthur C. Clarke about: if an elderly scientist says something is possible, it almost certainly is. If the same person says something is not possible, he's probably wrong."

    Yep, 98% of all the folks who do this as a career are wrong, and they're all biased. Have you applied for a job with the Trump misadministration?

    175:

    As someone else said, great. Change or lose your job, you're out at the end of the month.

    On the other hand... my folks, the last years, wound up in a house that had belonged to my great aunt. Which was part of an area, a few blocks, that the Schmidt's Brewery had built houses for their workers to buy. Which was right by the trolley, and the El (this is Philly, both of those are still working).

    176:

    Please. I wish I had a two-story (with a FULL basement), instead of this split-level (with a half basement). It's the STOOPIDEST design of a house ever built, downstairs always cold, upstairs hot.

    Oh, and as I hate electric stoves, but have gas heat and hot water, I either dig a trench outside, and have a plumber come in to lay a gas line to the other side of the bloody slab (that the bottom floor is flat on), or let them open a slot in the ceiling, which I'm starting to think about, since it would let me run another circuit, and stop popping a breaker if I run the microwave and the toaster oven (and the family room, and the tv, is on the same circuit...))

    177:

    Wait, you're in Klamath? As in, Klamath Falls? My Eldest lives there with her husband....

    178:

    Farmlang - absolutely. When I was young, a lot of produce in Philly came from farms 30-60 mi away, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. Now I don't kno how much is even vaguely local, but supermarkets are trucking it in from California and Chile and....

    Massive famine? Forget delusional sudden ice ages. All the crap about farmers... in the 1990 US census, "family farmer" was no longer a recognized occupation, because it was < 1.5% of the workforce. It's almost all agribusiness now... and what has terrified me since the nineties is the thought of some 23 yr old asshole MBA (but I repeat myself) deciding that for tax and ROI purposes, not planting 10% of the US cropland is a "good idea", and there are worldwide famines.

    Go ahead, tell me that's crazed conspiracy tinfoil hat ideas.... I said MBA....

    179:

    You wrote: We've also had tramps, hobos, and people riding the rails since the Great Depression,

    Nope. First, you've got bums, tramps, and 'boes. Bums just want a hand out. Tramps will work, when forced to. 'Boes work, just have itchy feet.

    And they were all there long before the Great Depression. I've read that just before WWI, you almost needed to show your red card* to hop a car on a freight train.

    • IWW membership card - there were literally hundreds of thousands of members then.
    180:

    Really, truly, the birth rate is dropping like a rock.

    http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-rate/

    This is why I suspect/hope we'll peak at around 9B, and start dropping.... And about "unevenly distributed", the largest nations all have dropping birth rates. India, I just see, had a fertility rate of 2.47, which is seriously heading towards replacement rate. China is at 1.62.

    Did y'all think it was only Western millenials?

    181:

    Wait.. 30KW? Really?

    I see my split level in the DC 'burbs should probably have about a 3.0KW or 3.5KW (and I usually have it set, when it's running, to 81F, given how cold downstairs winds up).

    182:

    Let me say this about that: not only "no", but "FUCK, NO".

    Do you really want to live on Trantor, or Coruscant?

    Or were you thinking of the old pulp covers, with giant arcologies, and all park in between?

    183:

    Yes, I'm in Klamath, anyway we can go to chat mode?

    But since you have family here, then you know about our Lost Summer last year--over two months of 24/7 forest fire smoke (not to mention a local hill that went up one night and looked eerily like Pompeii, minus the pyroclastic flow etc.). Climate change isn't coming, it's here.

    184:

    snicker

    Not a real city slicker, are you?

    The house an ex and I bought, '81 - '86, was, IIRC, 509 S. 48th St, Philly. Check out street view of google or other maps: three stories, fixed-up attic (we added a kitchenette on the third floor), five (I think) bedrooms (ok, one was the library), full basement... and what do you mean, not next to the property line?

    Damn, I wish I had that house - we did rent out the third/fourth(fixed up attic)....

    185:

    The ceilings are high in old buildings for COMFORT, so the heat rises, not for gas lighting. Note that doors also had transoms - a window over the door you could open, to let the heat out, and the cool in.

    186:

    David L @147 and @156

    That's beautiful. That echoes what I've lived through the past 63 years, riding that wave of change.

    Thanks...

    Charlie Stross @148 and tent cities.

    Why has everyone forgotten Americathon.

    AMERICATHON (1979) ORIGINAL THEATRICAL TRAILER https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqYoB6BLOMw

    The sad thing is, since the crash many people are already living out of their cars/trucks as I posted up @125. If they are living in one location they get a gym membership for $10 a month to have access to showers. I've gotten good at spotting the cars that have been turned into nests that people live in. I see them buying food at the natural foods store. They are buying organic, and living in their cars.

    What's ironic, is that there are more empty homes and second homes than there are homeless, so everyone could easily be housed.

    Google - Vacant Houses Outnumber Homeless People

    • Then there is the "Zero Footprint" movement that has been around for decades. This has nothing to do with "Carbon Footprint". This is a movement where people live their lives without leaving a mess behind when they die.

    They rent only. They don't do consumerism, so they own very little. They live well because they don't waste their money on things. It's hard to find articles about this anymore because they have always been low key. I remember reading articles in Utne Reader during the 90s.

    • Then there is the plan to use eminent domain to deal with underwater mortgages. This is the mechanism that will be used to safely deflate the housing bubble.

    Can Eminent Domain Save Underwater Homeowners? https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/2012/07/27/can-eminent-domain-save-underwater-homeowners

    The plan has been around for over a decade. The only reason that it has not occurred yet is that the rich don't want to lose value of their own properties, and do not want to have their investment portfolios lose value. Basically the rich are keeping the housing bubble inflated for their own greed.

    Moody’s: Stopping eminent domain seizures of underwater mortgages a credit positive https://www.housingwire.com/articles/33793-moodys-stopping-eminent-domain-seizures-of-underwater-mortgages-a-credit-positive

    How long do you think that will last in this rising tide against wealth inequality.

    It's a very simple process:

    You correct all the current underwater mortgages. The price of housing drops creating more underwater mortgages which have to be corrected. The cycle goes on, doing a controlled reduction of the housing bubble rather than having it pop disastrously.

    187:

    They live well because they don't waste their money on things.

    Well, I can see that statement upsetting artists who don’t operate in digital media...

    188:

    That's strange, artists don't waste their money on things either, so why should they be upset. Materials are for their art.

    We are talking regular people, working, living their lives, doing occasional vacations, then retiring with their saved money and retirement. I worked with a number of people living "Zero Footprint."

    189:

    Actually, I wasn't sure whether to include the bums in with the rail riders, since tramps and hobos certainly rode. But thanks for the time correction.

    Changing the subject:

    Some of you might be interested in this article: Indonesia isn’t the only country planning new cities. Why not Australia? There are some interesting points in there about the problems top-down de novo city planning has experienced around the world. It didn't talk about China's so-called ghost cities, some of which are rather vaporware-ishly ghostly, some of which are finally filling up with people, most of which are probably in between.

    I guess the two bottom lines are that, yes, people around Asia and elsewhere are building brand new cities to deal with climate change. Also, in city planning as in ecological restoration, designing communities that work is not easy.

    190:

    Don't know of a chat mode.

    Admins, please pass Jean my real email.

    And yeah - my daughter, and especially her husband, had a hard time with the smoke.

    191:

    "France wanted nuclear weapons and energy autonomy in the 1960s. So in the 1960s-70s they rolled out reactors on a production line and at peak were producing about 90% of their base load from cheap-ish fission designs … in a decade, without declaring a state of emergency or running an Apollo Program budget to do it."

    30 seconds of Google later

    Apollo Program 26 billion (118 billion in 2018 dollars)

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program

    "More than 76 percent of French reactors were built in less than seven years, while less than 35 percent of American reactors were built that fast. The French nuclear build-out is estimated to have cost about $330 billion"

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/france-loses-enthusiasm-for-nuclear-power/

    So technically you're right, not Apollo Program cost. About 10 times the Apollo.

    192:

    It turns out that turning municipal waste into feedstock for the industrial machine is now big business. A few companies have popped up (Recycling Technology in the UK) that convert plastics into raw materials to be made back into plastics. Works best on an industrial scale though, already have a company in Germany that looks like it will buy up landfills to get access to the waste stream (urban mining?).

    Charlie @148 and others about climate, it seems the general thread is that climate or adapting to it is going to be the main driving force in housing design in 2119. Stilts seems like a good option for flooding, but then you're facing hurricane force winds all the time so maybe above ground housing is not the best option. Also, avoiding the heat is best done a few feet below the surface.

    One of the crazy things about housing is very little has changed in how they are built, very manual labor intensive operations right now. If you optimize for robotic arm oozing out concrete or polymer you get a very different general design than with a crew working with timber and drywall.

    193:

    Those transoms are mostly used in carrying light from outside-facing rooms, into internal hallways. Some tenements have skylights at the top of their staircases, and non-opening transoms above each flat's front door. It makes a big difference to the light levels in an otherwise-closed-off hallway.

    To be honest, it's only one or two months of the year in Edinburgh where you're trying to get rid of heat; the rest of the time, you're trying frantically to keep it in...

    194:

    Lower Manhattan has a lot of sea level issues, but they will build dikes.

    I do wish people would stop assuming that they can build dikes.

    We're looking at thereabouts of 10 metres of sea level rise from the current atmospheric load. We get major feedback in the Arctic, we're looking at more than that. Ten metres mean sea level rise means you're worried about something more for dykes; what do you need when a Category Six hurricane comes ashore at high tide? You'd better be planning for that if you build the things at all, and once you price that out, it's not worth it. Moving uphill is just vastly more economically rational.

    (Never mind the indications that the carbon bubble pops by 2022; this will affect the ability to pay for things!)

    195:

    The real threat to civilization isn't transitioning to decarbonization or rising temperatures over a period of decades: it's a fast collapse—something unforeseen that hits us in less than a decade, so there's no time to train the army of specialists needed to deal with it.

    Or about which the great and good purely do not care, which is food supply. (I'm pretty sure it's seen as a combination of not a problem for them and a control tool that would be nice to have. Only they're confusing shortage and dearth as concepts.)

    One thing I expect housing in 2100 to have is a potato greenhouse. I also half-expect that you're going to be able to take a map of the last glacial peak, and anywhere there was a glacier, maybe people live there. Places there weren't glaciers? Not so much

    196:

    Just remember, the notion that "we somehow beat climate change" is, for us SF junkies, the equivalent of "the singularity happened and we're still here." Remember all the complaining not that many years ago about how The Singularity was wrecking science fiction because everything that happened afterwards was unknowable, due to the interference of godlike AIs or whatever?

    In this particular context, we're wrestling with an analogous problem: somehow the behavior of humans, especially extremely wealthy humans, is supposed to change profoundly and rapidly (so that they stop acting like resource vampires and start helping a la Gates), we somehow innovate and rebuild society to a fairly radically different template NOT based on extractive capitalism or extractive communism, and... civilization in some form survives. What does that look like in 100 years?

    That's the brief. Now a fair number of us are looking at this and thinking it ain't physically, socially, or psychologically possible, but is there a what-if way we can get there that involves no handwaving, or at least minimizes the silliness in the assumptions?

    197:

    https://www.howtogeek.com/231886/tested-should-you-unplug-chargers-when-youre-not-using-them/

    The problem with that sketch is that they used a power meter that's only accurate to within 1% of full scale (ie, it's not 1% of the actual load, it's 1% of the 1500W or 2000W capacity of the meter), and that only for loads over 50 or 100 Watts. So when they say "zero power" they actually mean "zero, plus or minus 20 watts" (at best).

    When I used a more accurate power meter that is accurate to 0.5% of 100W (ie, 0.5W) I saw values more in line with the labels on the devices. Viz, the better EU-certified ones drew less than 0.5W at idle, and the cheap mains-frequency power bricks drew nearly their rated load when not in use. The obvious rule applies: if it feels warm it's wasting a lot of energy.

    Dave at EevBlog has occasionally put those things on a proper power meter (10,000 count on a 5W scale) and even the best units still draw a few milliwatts when idle. And that is driven almost entirely by regulation, specifically EU regulation. There are whole families of chips now in categories like "extremely low standby draw, low power 240V power conversion" that did not exist 20 years ago because there was no demand for them.

    198:

    I think that civilization will absolutely survive, and still be here in 100 years. That's what I find intriguing about Charlie's original post. It assumes that we're not going to have a Singularity, or alien invasion, or invent time travel, or an asteroid strike or solar supernova that wipes out all life on Earth. It assumes there will be civilization, recognizably descended from ours, with a significant-sized middle class, comprised of people who are, to our 2019 eyes, recognizably human.

    What kinds of houses are those middle-class people going to live in?

    Or, at least, that's the way I remember Charlie's post. I could be delusional here. :)

    I don't remember Charlie asking about geopolitical issues or massive urban engineering or climate science -- or, rather, he only asks about those things as they are visible from inside that middle-class house.

    And, yes, I do believe that it's likely there will be a significant population of middle-class people just like Charlie postulates, a century from now. But they may live on an Earth with a population of only, say, 1 billion humans, with today's coastal regions entirely underwater. And they may look back on the 21st Century as the century of greatest destruction, death and disruption that has ever occured in 12,000 years of preceding history.

    Consider current turmoil in Europe, where seven decades of political order is tearing itself apart. That's driven to a large part by a million refugees from the Middle East, who are, in turn, driven to a large part by climate change. Now imagine the turmoil driven by 500 million refugees. If you can. I can't imagine it myself.

    But most of that will be in the past to our hypothetical person of 2119, who gets up out of bed, lets the dog out in the yard, has some coffee and goes to work, just like you and me.

    199:

    "Hey Honey, I'm home. "

    "Corny as always, lemme get the door, come in and relax, you deserve it after finishing a ten day gig."

    "Thanks Nat. How was your day, go anywhere nice?" Dave knew that Natalie would give one word answers unless you asked two questions at once. He loved her, but she wasn't a great conversationalist unless you prompted her.

    "Oh yeah, I found a great place to park for the day, view of the sea with mountains behind, here's a photo of the sunset. Got a lot more gig work done than I expected."

    "That's really a nice photo, your eye is getting better. Were you working on that thing you were talking about? The one that pays well?"

    "No, I would have liked to but I just didn't have the energy to take on a new project with a tight deadline. It really takes it out of me being here in this wilderness. With all the driving we did to get here, I'm feeling really flat"

    "Well cheer up, I've got news" said Dave as he started stripping of his work clothes.

    "mmm?"

    "I think I've mentioned Janice, the girl I met on this gig?"

    "Just once or fifty times."

    "Ha I guess I've been a bit distracted."

    "Distracted isn't the word I would have used" shouting slightly over the noise of Dave's shower.

    "OK, you know what I mean, I've been a bit over excited, but the news is that she's asked me to go with her to her next gig!"

    "Wow, that's great, congratulations, you deserve someone. Has she invited you to go in her van?"

    "She has, I'm just going to clean up and head straight over there for dinner."

    "So you don't want me to cook? Just checking."

    "No, she's going to get Crystal to make us something and we'll head out tonight. We'll be there before we wake up."

    "Crystal is her van?"

    "Of course, why?"

    "Oh, it just didn't sound like a human name and I know what you think of people giving us machine names."

    "It's an old family name, her great grandmother or something."

    "Speak of the devil, Crystal just asked me what your favorite meal is."

    "God, you didn't tell her did you?"

    "Of course I didn't tell her, don't you know me at all?"

    "Sorry, panicking a bit."

    "I've got to tell her something, how about teriyaki eggplant?"

    "Yeah, that sounds good, bit early in the relationship to let her know both that I can afford pork and that I've actually eaten it a few times."

    "Good thinking 99. So what's the plan for the next few days, do you want me to platoon in case this all goes south?"

    "No, I've got a good feeling about this one. I was thinking you could head down to that town we passed on the way up here. There's a couple of 5 MW chargers there. Just hang around and crunch some of those big problems. Come pick me up at the end of next week."

    "Do you know where her gig is?"

    "She did say, but I've forgotten."

    "OK, I'll just stay near fully charged in case you need an emergency extraction."

    Dave smiled as he pulled on his shoes. "Let's hope it doesn't come to that."

    "OK, you have fun. Bye"

    Dave gave her a pat on the dash as he climbed out "I will, call me if you need anything, bye" and with that Dave headed off into a new chapter in his life.

    I was mulling over the changes that society had after the price of cars fell to affordable. I don't think Henry Ford thought that cheap cars would cause urban sprawl or teen pregnancies. Though the (probably fake) quote from him is "people wanted better horses", I'm sure that's really what he had in mind, a better horse, not a social revolution. It ended the requirement to live close to family, friends and work. This was going through my head as I rode 375 km (each way) to have lunch and a natter with my daughter.

    Elon seems the same, at least in public. A better car, so you don't have to steer and it's cheaper to run. But what would this journey I was currently on be in that case. Elon seems to see that my journey would be relaxing. I see it completely differently. Full Self Driving will eventually mean no seatbelts. Instead of going to bed early and getting up before dawn to ride 4 hours, I'll make up a bed in the back, tell the car to take a meandering route and retire at the normal time, awaking at my destination. No home owners will knock on my windows and tell me I can't park there. I'll be driving all night.

    Then throw that into a world where most of the cities have to be abandoned, or if not, you can't insure any houses in them. Can't insure, can't get a mortgage, can't get a mortgage, it's worth nothing. It's worth nothing, not worth maintaining...

    Beyond that work is increasingly seasonal. Metres of snow and intense blizzards in winter, cyclones and lethal temperatures in summer. Work is going to move around and workers will need to be flexible. Fixed house based workers will be out of work for much of the year. Lots of work will be in out of the way places, repairing storm and flood damage, installing solar and wind, rebuilding roads.

    So now you're in a gig economy. Your phone has an app like tinder/grindr but for work. You look for a job tomorrow. You set your minimum wage say 100 dollars a day, but then you add say 10c/km to that. That means you'll match a local job that's 100 dollars, but you'll also match a job 1000 km away that's 200 dollars a day. You go to bed in the car and wake up outside your day of employment. You don't really know where you are, or care. It's a short step from that to living the van life. Rather than waking up at the beach in a shanty town, constantly worried about being moved on, you wake up on a coastal highway, with an ever changing view. Your neighbours are fellow giggers. You no longer have the added expense of getting back home after each gig. Instead of driving all night to get home, so you can spend the following day to shower, wash some clothes and buy food, you just go to bed and wake up in the right place for another day of work.

    Your van is smart. While you're at work it goes off and finds a dump point and dumps the grey and black water, refills the potable then picks up a charge. Probably the local supermarket provides those services to attract vans that are doing the daily food shop.

    That's a future I can see us getting to in small steps, each of which make sense.

    201:

    Metres of snow and intense blizzards in winter, cyclones and lethal temperatures in summer. Work is going to move around

    ... and a lot of the work is going to be building and rebuilding and repairing and maintaining and clearing the roads that enable the migrations. It's going to be expensive, because the semi-autonomous machines than can survive floods and tornados without needing expensive maintenance will be very pricey, and the mobile labour force to do the manual work will also be expensive - for every 10 workers you need a mobile sanitation service, a mobile food delivery service that transfers food from the mobile food factory to the mobile workers, and so on. Sort of like Mad Max, but with less infrastructure.

    My bet is that insofar as that mobile workforce exists it will be elite workers riding on the backs of whatever version of slavery the US uses at that time. In the rest of the world that lifestyle will be less prevalent if it exists at all, most people will work where they live and migrate only when they have to. And that migration will be generally dealt with the same way we have dealt with animal migrations - fences, guns and introduced predators. I foresee increased use of Chinese-style "internal migration permits" in larger countries, and "Border Force: don't come here we will kill you"* in smaller countries.

    202:

    "My bet is that insofar as that mobile workforce exists it will be elite workers"

    I think so too. Dave is so wealthy that his favorite dinner has pork in it. He lives in a society where conspicuous displays of wealth aren't a good idea. He's slightly panicked that his secret is out to his new girlfriend.

    OGH specifically mentioned 'no collapse'. I don't think that's likely, my personal expectation I gave @65. Aleppo writ large. There's nothing in the exchange between Dave and Nat that says there's no huddled masses. When I say fixed house workers are at a disadvantage, I didn't mean they don't exist, they're just screwed. Stuck with a huge tax liability they can't escape (councils /Shires/towns will need to levy huge tax due to shrinking tax base and giant infrastructure maintenance costs). They can't sell it, there's no work, they don't have the money for a van, and even if they did just walk off, their council rates will follow them.

    203:

    We call it a "switched socket" in the UK. A quick web search says that an MK 2-gang should cost under GB£20 including taxes.

    We have those also. (Assuming you're talking about a power outlet with a switch on it. I've wired up many myself.) But I'm talking about power lumps that use a trickle to pay attention and switch to full power mode when a load is attached. Switched power does me little good as most of my lumps are on outlets which have at least one active load most of the time but the other 1 to 5 supplies/cords are not in use.

    As it is when we KNOW we're going to be gone for a day or more we flip the strips with most of the lumps. Plus flip the breaker off on the not terribly efficient apartment electric water heater in our commute city apartment. In our main house I put in a very efficient gas 50 gallon gas water heater that when there's no water draw MIGHT light once a day. And if I turn it down to vacation mode maybe every 3 days or so.

    204:

    Graydon @193 said: We're looking at thereabouts of 10 metres of sea level rise from the current atmospheric load.

    Please give me a link where you get a number like that. The only thing I have found so far talking about "10m" is this site with a nice animation showing what different sea level changes would look like.

    Sea Level Rise: 10m Increments

    The sea level has been steadily rising since 1900 at a rate of 1 to 2.5 millimeters per year.

    Sea level can rise by two different mechanisms with respect to climate change. The first is the expansion of the sea water as the oceans warm due to an increasing global temperature. The second mechanism is the melting of ice over land, which then adds water to the ocean.

    I suspect that they are measuring increase by thermal expansion, if it can be measured at all. A millimeter "change per year" is beyond our ability to measure. Constantly changing tides make that level of accuracy impossible on a planetary scale.

    When people talk about sea level rising I have the question, is the sea level rising or is the land falling.

    An Inconvenient Truth 2 | Clip | Miami Flooded

    • You have Al Gore sloshing around in a flooded street, claiming sea level rise, yet that short stretch of road is clearly sinking, not sea level rising.

    There is no single place where you can measure sea level. If some historic marker is being used, the land that marker is on could be rising or falling. The Earth's crust is plastic, and constantly flexing. When Fukushima flooded, the sea wall dropped because of the earthquake making it lower than designed, so that the tidal wave topped the wall. If the earthquake had not lowered the wall, there would have been no flooding.

    • All of the oceans are connected, yet the Pacific and Atlantic on either side of the Panama Canal are at different "sea levels".

    The oceans are not in a bathtub where when you add water you can see the water rise, sea levels are local and depend on the way gravity shapes the Earth.

    New Gravity Map Reveals Lumpy Earth

    Looking at the gravity map, please tell me how anyone can measure sea levels changing on the scale of a millimeter. They can't.

    As an example from you post:

    • If all of the ice melted in the Arctic, you would have zero sea level rise. That ice is already floating on the Arctic Ocean causing displacement.[*]

    If you meant ice melting from Greenland or the Antarctic, we have not seen major melting of either. When they show vast ice sheets calving off of Antarctica, they are already floating on the ocean and the sea level will not change as they melt.

    This episode of the PBS Newshour addresses the latest IPCC report:

    Antarctica is losing ice at an accelerating rate. How much will sea levels rise?

    Notice how Oppenheimer says that the IPCC estimates a one foot sea level rise over the next century. Yet his scary estimates is that it may be five times that. In other words, five feet over the next century. The reason he says that is to scare people. You have to scare people if you want funding. He won't be alive a century from now and have to justify his research grant.

    They then show pictures of massive flooding along coastlines. Yet, wait a minute, no one is building so close to the water that a five foot change would cause problems.

    If a five foot change would cause problems a century from now, they would cause flooding right now, because of tides and storm surge.

    The whole episode was fear based, so that the Newshour audience would donate to the Newshour.

    gasdive @ 198

    Beautiful story. Expand on it and let us know if it gets published. I do want to read that.

    The quote I did above:

    “Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire.”

    Jean de la Fontaine

    If you can write about people's fears or desires, the story will sell. If you can do both in the same story, it will sell really well.

    Which reminds me. I need to get back to work. HA!

    The thread is moving much too fast for me to keep up, so I'll harvest it for my story folders when it's done.

    This is a most useful thread. I can't make up the stuff you guys have been posting, so it really does help. Thanks everyone for all the help.

    [*]Do a simple experiment:

    Take a glass, fill it overflowing with water. Now put a single ice cube floating on top. The ice cube will displace a bit of water, but at that point it is stable. Now watch as the ice cube melts. Even though the ice cube is above the rim of the glass the water will not overflow the glass since the water level is stable at that point.

    205:

    split-level (with a half basement). It's the STOOPIDEST design of a house ever built,

    It saves non trivial amounts of money in terms of roof and foundation. Plus you can get around without doing full flights of stairs all the time.

    But it creates a house that doesn't fit most of life anymore and they are going away.

    206:

    but supermarkets are trucking it in from California and Chile and....

    Ahem. I'm fairly certain that around here (NC) non trivial amounts of fresh berries and such get FLOWN in from Chile and Peru when out of season locally.

    207:

    Not a real city slicker, are you ... and what do you mean, not next to the property line?

    Nope. But I work with a lot of architects who work on older urban buildings.

    I have no issue with 0 lot lines. I just don't understand why you'd build a 5000+sf home that takes up 80% of the dirt. At that point the yard is more of an decoration like fancy trim on the roof line than useful for anything.

    208:

    One of the crazy things about housing is very little has changed in how they are built, very manual labor intensive operations right now. If you optimize for robotic arm oozing out concrete or polymer you get a very different general design than with a crew working with timber and drywall.

    Once you get out of the custom home / spec built market most single and multi family housing in the US has a lot of assembly line work going on. First off the trades move down a street with the timing worked out to the hour. Things like walls, roofs, and such are built in a factory off site and trucked in. Wiring and plumbing are optimized for least cost routing. Ditto labor involved in assembly. When you look at these places you see 5 to 20 different designs which seems inefficient until you realize the development may be one of a dozen in a wide area buy the same people. And computers these days allow them to customize a LOT at before the first shovel is used and still have things roll down the street as if being grown from a fast growing house seed collection.

    209:

    I take a bit of a simpler approach. If no load is attached and it is warm to the touch it is using more than a trivial amount of power.

    But thanks for your post.

    :)

    210:

    https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/2013/12/03/what-does-400-ppm-look-like/ Pliocene sea levels "between five and forty metres higher than today"

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130102104945.htm "at least nine metres above current levels"

    https://theecologist.org/2015/jul/24/world-already-committed-six-meter-sea-level-rise Meeting the 2 C warming target results in between 6 and 13 metres of sea level rise

    https://www.nationalgeographic.org/news/climate-milestone-earths-co2-level-passes-400-ppm/ "seas were at least 30 feet higher"

    This basic stuff. It doesn't explicitly consider feedback issues, as are expected with Arctic amplification scenarios or albedo changes around 1000 ppm.

    Back when GPS first came out, surveyors would bolt a GPS receiver to a slab of concrete and take a continuous year of measurements. The degraded civilian signal was, at any particular instant, good for something like fifteen metre resolution. Integrate a year of data and you started to have problems with figuring out what dot on the antenna was your actual position. Similar approaches work for sea level; it's not a single measurement, it's a long time series.

    http://matterwave.physics.berkeley.edu/cesium-cavity/ involves people measuring gravity to a really startling level of accuracy; detecting people walking past in the hallway via gravity accuracy. I don't think anyone's flown a cavity interferometer yet but there was a recent report of driving one around.

    211:

    Heteromeles @ 61: If solar is the default power system, everyone will know which direction south is. Every building being built now that doesn't have a good roof for solar will be gone, simply because they're too wastefully inefficient (that's probably 90% of new homes in San Diego, at a rough guess). If you want a home built now to last 100 years, it better be really well built for passive heating and cooling, and well-designed to take in energy and get rid of heat in summer, while retaining it in winter. If all that takes gas or a massive central HVAC unit to keep the house habitable, it's got a limited future life.

    Don't forget that for half the world solar collectors have to be aligned with NORTH.

    Reading some of the comments got me thinking about the Arcologies of Paolo Soleri, inspired by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and Bukminster Fuller.

    212:

    allynh @ 67:

    "Heteromeles @66 said: At this point, I'd say the American Dream is pretty much dead, and that's where a lot of the political rage is coming from right now."

    The American Dream has been dead for a long time.

    It may be all but unobtainable for all but a wealthy few, but the dream is not dead yet. If it were, people from all over the world wouldn't be risking everything for the chance to come here and be a part of it.

    213:

    Charlie Stross @ 75: (Reply linked to JBS @57 went astray …)

    "I wonder if some enterprising tenants could join together to purchase a block and do something similar; jacking up the existing buildings to build new ground floor garages?"

    Complex question.

    Here in the New Town, the answer would be a hard "nope", it'd change the character of the built environment which, as noted, is a UNESCO World Heritage site. (Fucking around with Grade 1 listed architecture is actually an imprisonable offense, although you're more likely to end up with a punitive fine and a statutory order to Put Things Back EXACTLY The Way They Were, Using Original Materials, Fixtures, And Fittings, On Pain Of Pain.)

    Yeah, I figured it would be a non-starter in the UNESCO World Heritage site.

    Also, even if you could do that (and what are these "tenants" you speak of? Property law in Scotland is a bit weird: I'm in a 4th floor apartment which I own outright) you'd be dealing with 200 year old structures. No steel reinforcements, floors held up by oak beams 6" thick that were probably recycled from sailing ships. They're not going to move easily or safely ...

    In this case "tenants" should be loosely construed as all those who live there or own the property if they can come to an agreement. Say "residents" instead ... or "owners" or "home buyers". Again, subject to whether planning permission could be obtained, and understanding that it could not be obtained for "Grade 1 listed" buildings.

    As to the difficulty of moving old buildings "easily or safely" ....

    Moving the Cape Hatteras Light House.

    214:

    whitroth @ 97:

    "Highest effective minimum wage in history"?

    Gee, I'm glad I'd finished my tea with lunch before I read that.

    Lessee, around 1967 or '68, it went from $1.25 to $1.40? $1.42/hr. Using mark's economic indicators*, that would be over $14.00 today (seen any campaign to raise it to $15 from the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr?

    Got any more outright right-wing LIES to try to spread?

    I'm not sure if you'd consider them "right-wing LIES", but back in 2012, I made myself a spread-sheet comparing changes in the Federal Minimum Wage to changes in Congressional pay. I was suprised.

    If every time Congress got a pay raise they had raised the Minimum Wage by the same percentage, by 2012 the Minimum Wage would have only been $4.20 instead of the current $7.25.

    I also noticed that during the last great financial crisis, Congress voted twice to cut their own pay in 1933 & 1934, before restoring their pay level in 1935, but without cutting the Minimum Wage.

    215:

    Charles H @ 107: I don't know if the nuclear family was pushed before WWI, but it was pushed after WWII, and the reason was to facilitate organizations moving jobs at will. It may have resulted in people buying more things, but that was seen as a secondary benefit by those who benefited, and many companies didn't benefit from that aspect, but all the LARGE companies benefited from being able to move jobs around as they chose.

    There was a big push for single family home ownership in the U.S. after WWI as part of the 1917 - 1920 Red Scare in response to the Bolshevik Revolution.

    216:

    Charlie Stross @ 148:

    "If you look at the situation in Silicon Valley, the fastest growing housing is tents.

    In the very short term (5-20 years), maybe.

    Longer term, it's non-viable, unless you can figure out how to hurricane-proof and wildfire-proof tents and in addition insulate and air condition them well enough to make 45 celsius heat emergencies survivable.

    Meanwhile, you just reminded me of a mid-1980s thing, Steve Roberts' Winnebiko, which over time mutated into 1992's BEHEMOTH … (and you REALLY want to click that link: trust me on this!)

    I bet that today 80% of its functionality sits inside your smartphone plus a solar powered USB charger.

    I figure they won't hurricane-proof/wildfire-proof them or insulate/air condition them. The people who live in them will probably just die and that's how the human race will achieve the population reductions commenters have been predicting here for 2119. Just because I think it's a bad idea doesn't mean it ain't gonna' happen.

    217:

    I find it interesting that this varies considerably between different countries, even those with similar levels of, let's call it living standards.

    I remember some years ago (ok, many) talking with my then German language teacher at a previous job. She grew up in the former East Germany, before the reunification. She told us that in Germany it is quite rare for people to move away from their home town. Companies have to build factories close to where people live, they will not move just for a job. Even students who may move away to study can find it very isolating and difficult to be accepted in a new town or city. She told us that recently she had returned to her old home town for a school reunion. From her whole year group she was one of only two people who had moved away.

    In China where I am currently working, it is different again. While many people leave their home town to work in the factories or modern cities, their family stays behind. Every year at least once (for Chinese New Year) they return to their original home town, see their family, eat, drink, etc. They may work somewhere 1000s of miles away but their home is still where they grew up.

    218:

    Thanks! That's literally the first thing I've written that anyone else has seen, so that's nice to hear. I'm not sure what happens to Dave next, but I'll think about it.

    219:

    Yep. My daughter spend her senior year of high school in Germany. We visited with the family last December. The dad was from the village. Mom was from the next one over. And her parents still lived there. (We had a fantastic venison meal at her parents house Christmas day.)

    This was on the Western side of the "border" by a few miles in the Harz mountains.

    My parents lived where they were born. All of us kids have moved 100s of miles away. (Kids in our 50s and 60s.)

    220:

    Thanks, I could never have found those links myself. Google only works when you can ask the right questions. I have mad Google skills, but unless I can think a certain way, the questions are simply not there to ask. HA!

    This is a related PBS Newshour episode discussing both turning CO2 into fuel and geoengineering.

    As planet warms, scientists explore 'far out' ways to reduce atmospheric CO2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnNerOVUOdo

    It never made sense to me to "sequester CO2". Why would you bury potential fuel, when with a simple processes you can make the fuel you need from CO2. That's why I see fuel based systems still used rather than batteries that will never be built to high enough storage densities like fuel.

    BTW, I like the idea of using calcium carbonate as the aerosol because that ties up carbon as well.

    Notice, the engineer has no problem solving various problems, while the scientists are terrified that if we geoengineer people will have the "excuse, not to reduce our fossil fuel emissions." Give me a break. That's like saying that because we have fire-stations people will now burn down their homes.

    In my stuff:

    • I use geoengineering and turning CO2 into any fuel we need. Solar Uplift Towers are used to generate the solar energy, 24/7, to do the conversion.

    • Thorium reactors, molten salt, is used to power industry and clean up "waste" uranium.

    • I have full employment world wide, for 11 billion people, many developing and maintaining food forests. The carbon is not tied up in the trees themselves, but in the soil that supports the trees. The 10% Rule applies where only 10% of the crop is harvested for people. The food forests support animal life that lives, dies, adding nitrogen to the soil, with 10% of the animals going as food for people. The idea that we would not cultivate animals and eat meat in the future is bizarre, especially when you can harvest wild rather than "farmed meat".

    • The process of hugelkultur is used to accelerate the growth of soil, and growing the food forest. Essentially making as much soil in a decade as the "natural" forrest would produce in a century.

    • Instead of an arroyo subject to floods and erosion, rain is caught in a cascade of ponds set in the food forests. They replicate beaver ponds, building the water shed. When the American Indians slaughtered the beaver because they thought the beaver were killing them -- rather than the French traders that deliberately spread smallpox to the Indians -- the water sheds started disappearing and the forests failed, with settlers turning it into farmland.

    • A one acre pond holds more carbon than an acre of forest soil, plus you can raise fish for food and fertilizer. Instead of letting the ponds become meadows, you dredge the organics and spread them through the forest, adding to the soil.

    • The same technology for sea based oil drilling platforms are anchored in clusters supporting towns doing aquaculture. Using iron supplements large areas of the ocean that are barren now, can produce fish, krill, etc... Using the 10% Rule, only 10% percent of the catch is harvested.

    Right now they are overharvesting krill in the Antarctic for oil supplements and animal populations are crashing. They are blaming "Global Warming" for the collapse, yet it's corporate greed of making oil supplements for people that is removing their food.

    Antarctic penguins have existed for 60 million years. Can they survive climate change? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCdNGGQ-bcA

    Notice, they mention that snowfall has increased because the warmer water produces more snow.

    Essentially, in my stuff, the Earth is treated as a Garden maintained by Man, just as in the past.

    The bizarre concept that, "Man is a cancer on the planet", is wrong, we are the Gardeners. Man is the greatest resource we have and yet corporations are throwing away vast numbers of people, and trying to convince everyone that there are "too many people."

    Before Columbus, North and South America supported 300m people who were engaged in developing and maintaining food forests, pond fishers, etc... When the Indians were wiped out by disease and invasive species brought from Europe, settlers walked into a garden that had gone wild. Settlers mentioned that they could grow anything because of how rich the soil was.

    They are now finding in the Amazon that it was one vast garden, with big cities buried by the jungle when everyone died. The trees are food trees, far more than could be "natural." They have found areas covered with raised berms that would hold flood waters to grow fish the same way Chinese would raise fish, eel, etc..., in the flooded rice paddies.

    • When everybody keeps posting that we have "over population", and there needs to be a "die off", I shudder at the blatant myth and propaganda.

    I don't see a future "Mad Max" dystopia a century from now, I see a future living world maintained by Man.

    That's the thing about "fears or desires", I want to include both to maximize the story. Not everyone likes watching "Mad Max", all the time. HA!

    Yikes! I was just going to write a brief "Thanks..." and ended up with a rant.

    Thanks...

    221:

    I use geoengineering and turning CO2 into any fuel we need

    I get that this is what fossil fuels are, and fundamentally we've got a society built on burning the things, but this just seems like a really weird approach to the problem. Kind of: I drank too much and now I have a hangover but no money. Solution... brew my own alcohol.

    Burning fossil fuels is not a problem purely because it produces CO2 that heats the planet, there's a whole bunch of other stuff that would be next on the list if the climate catastrophe wasn't distracting the sane elements of humanity. Burning stuff is fundamentally not a great way to get heat, it's hard to do cleanly and the dirty stuff is really quite toxic. Even back in the early industrial ago the biggest fans of coal decided that they weren't willing to live with the smog and deaths that came with that, so London cleaned up it's shit. 100-odd years later we have similar problems but on a global scale.

    We've also removed a lot of other causes of death, so under a BAU scenario like the one postulated above, I expect we'll see ever-expanding, ever more common zero emissions zones, and they will apply to more pollutants. Assuming current capitalism continues, you can own that 3 tonne diesel Landrover, but you're going to need a special permit to start it up and it's going to cost a fortune either to clean the exhaust or buy the right to run the engine without cleaning the exhaust. Those not rich enough will just have to use an electric vehicle.

    So... generating usable energy then using that to turn CO2 into hydrocarbons that we then burn... you're making lead acid batteries seem like a really viable technology. I suspect even aviation, likely even military aviation, will switch to something else once they have to pay for the nitrous oxides and other crud they spew out. You'll note that right now aviation is running a vicious campaign against taxing them at all, let alone taxing their emissions. They are going to lose that, possibly via a loss of social license that makes it acceptable to blow the things out of the sky.

    I amuses me to think about the USA trying to stop an enraged citizenry shooting at aeroplanes. For those who like to rant about eco-terrorism being a real thing, this is the sort of action you should be looking for. Alt-right shoot up a mosque... alt-green shoot up private aeroplanes.

    222:

    Moz @ 196 NONE of this is a problem in the UK, because we can switch the power OFF at the wall socket, which, it appears, a lot of other places can't or don't which is stupid ...

    Graydon@ 209 See also .. "Raised Beaches" - there's quite a few of them in Britain, geological memories of previous climates.

    Allynh Man ( & woman ) the gardener. Well, I keep an allotment & I do not buy vegetabkes so you would notice & 99% of the meat I eat is locally ( i.e within 100-mile radius ) sourced ... But I can tell you that gardening is HARD WORK. See also the Adam-&-Eve legend in the bible, which refers to the transition from Hunter-Gatherer to settled agriculture. [ Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread ]

    Moz @ 220 Yes - I would have no objection at all to switch the power-plant in my L-R to electric - but I'm being offered a "scrappage scheme" not a replacement power plant, because, as usual, politicians are STUPID

    223:

    But I can tell you that gardening is HARD WORK.

    Yep. For most of history, for most people farming is something they would prefer to give up for something else. Not everyone, but definitely for most. Especially if you're young enough to be able to earn a living another way. Any scheme which assumes a majority of the people farming is doomed to failure. From most of the farmers being unhappy at their lot when they see other choices available to a select few.

    I remember the job recruiter who talked about his father's farm. His father died when he was in his later teens and he said as soon as the funeral was over the sheep were GONE. He never ever wanted to again see the south end of a north facing sheep.

    224:

    I'm assuming you've read further down the comments and see that this is NOT a solution. I've used ones in Ireland, France, Spain, and Germany. And I'll get to play with the options in a London hotel in a few weeks. Again, this is NOT a solution.

    Sitting on my desk just now is a power strip with lumps for a MacBook Pro power, 3 USB power outs for phones, ipads, headphones, etc... as needed plus 2 24" displays. There are various other combinations around the house. Turning it on and off at the outlet is not the way.

    Now for the chargers next to our bed (on each side) we have them on a surge strip that can be flipped off when we are leaving but the outlet itself is in now way easily accessible.

    Now lets talk about AppleTV/Roku/ChromeCast which at some level need power all the time. Ditto my TiVo. Remote controls for the TV is nice. And we also have things in the kitchen and other places.

    We need more things like my Ryobi power tool 6 slot charger for the heavy duty LithIon batteries for my drills, saws, etc... It only charges one at a time and cycles through them one by one until they are all charged and then goes into a mode where only the control circuit is drawing power.

    Of course for bigger things this means TWO power circuits for things like microwave ovens. One for the control system that can sleep until a button is press and the other to power the cooking circuits when needed but pulling no power otherwise. Of course this means more money and thus cost for features that 99% of the public does understand.

    And Greg, the rest of the world has switched outlets as an option. I have some with a switch at the outlet and other where I've wired outlets to switches next to the light switches. In the US most outlets are duplex with a break off tab if you want to wire them separately. Most common is one powered continuously and the other switched for a lamp.

    225:

    Yes - I would have no objection at all to switch the power-plant in my L-R to electric

    I have this vision of a back seat full of lead acid batteries plus a few more in the rear with really thick jumper cables up to a 30 centimeter round rheostat with a big ass dial sitting on the seat next to Greg.

    226:

    The power draw of half-competently designed devices in idle mode is negligible - a milliwatt or so, at most. The solution is to strangle the marketdroids and execusuits that insist on a high level of background activity. You need separate circuits for cookers, but that's for other reasons.

    Another example of this is night safety or bedside lights - you don't need more light than is given by a 5 watt, NON-halogen incandescent, and often a lot less than that - but can you get them?

    227:

    Nice idea with the live-in car lifestyle (and Volvo, going by their current concept cars, have got your back) … but it sort of presupposes the continued existence of of a well-maintained road grid: extreme weather events like mudslides and big storms suggest that maintenance costs will only rise, and let's remember that road-building tends to be carbon intensive, using current materials.

    (PS: the French nuclear reactor program costing $350Bn sounds suspiciously like a 2019-money price tag. The Apollo program was $26Bn in 1968 money, but would cost $118Bn today. Meanwhile, the French nuclear roll-out took place over decades (rather than just 10 years, as with the Apollo program), and is revenue-positive: France is the world's greatest exporter of electricity today.)

    228:

    There is no known reliable pricetag for the initial decades of the French nuclear programme, because the civil and military sides of it were well and truly mixed up, with a lot of creative bookkeeping to hide this fact.

    For instance, three of the four Tricastin reactors were almost used to power the dual-use(d) uranium enrichment plant next to them.

    229:

    The thing that makes me despair about the politically correct is their mind-boggling stupidity and bigotry. Transport is one of the clearest examples. In the UK, and many other locations, electric cars are not a solution because they don't reduce the environmental impact enough and we simply do not have the room. And there are some very good reasons to believe that the current plans for their introduction will cause more environmental problems than they will solve.

    What we need to do is to reduce the amount people and goods travel, by a large factor - and NOT to do that by simply hammering particular uses, but by making them unnecessary. It is often claimed that this is reducing people's freedom, but a good half of all travel is unwanted and imposed by our current appalling social and (economic/housing/transport/etc.) architectures. Yes, that includes 'just in time' manufacturing, online deliveries and more.

    And we need to REDUCE the weight needed to transport a single person or even family, not increase it (which is what moving to electric cars is doing, in Europe at least). Hence pedal-powered and electrically-assisted bicycles, tricycles etc., including velomobiles and the sort of small vehicle that you still see in some places in Europe. Yes, there are some moves in that direction, but the general drift is in the wrong direction. And, worse, there are several ways in which electric and 'intelligent' cars of the sort currently being developed will discourage walking and cycling.

    Similarly, using CO2 emissions per passenger mile is at best misleading. Wide-bodied jumbo jets may be relatively efficient is you really need to transport a large number of people a long distance, packed in like sardines, but they are highly inefficient otherwise - including all use for short-haul flights. Yes, we should abolish business and first class, pronto, and shoot down private jets on sight. But we need to reduce the amount people travel, starting with that which is imposed on them.

    230:

    I apologise to people that I will have offended. Using language is not my forte, and it takes me some time to realise how other people are likely to interpret my words (if I do realise). The first sentence reads as if it was an attack on posters here, and was not meant as such.

    I stand my the meaning, but not the way that it probably came over.

    231:

    Meh. From the perspective of a user, if you look at smart appliances as controlled by a hub, the smart speaker as continually upgraded hub works well right now.

    (Absolutely love not needing to get out of bed after a child leaves the light on after a bathroom trip.)

    So, yep, smart lights, shutters, locks, and maybe windows do seem likely by 2030, let alone 2119. Smart kitchens and laundries are also likely.

    If anything, I forsee more sprawl, mediated by comfy private autonomous cars.

    The traditional family seems to be on the way out, so maybe that is reflected in living situations. People still like being close to offspring, maybe longer than they like sleeping in the same bed room. Maybe clades, where some shared facilities (eg, sofa) are shared along with kitchen, but bedroom, etc have separate entrances and access is controlled appropriately.

    232:

    There is one way that global warming could trigger an ice age. If it kills enough people that we stop cutting down trees, we could see a significant drop in CO2 levels as a result.

    There is some suspicion that the so-called Little Ice Age was a consequence of reforestation of North America as a result of the disease-induced collapse of Native American populations.

    233:

    As we’re not going to stop the rise of the oceans anytime soon I’m thinking that a lot of the world’s cities will look like Venice. So suburban homes built as houseboats to rise up on fixed moorings with king tides and floods, as the Dutch do currently.

    234:

    Wow, thanks.

    Yeah I don't think it's really practical for much more than a small percentage. either. But then I still struggle to imagine anything better than Aleppo.

    235:

    Eh. I guess that in 2119, we're still in the process of grappling with a post-Scarcity society - where some portion of the population still works - but owing more to entrenched advantages or snobbery. It might be funny if poet and actor were the last jobs to be mostly human.

    236:

    OK. Please help me out. Reading this: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/02/this-report-will-change-your-life-what-zero-emissions-means-for-uk

    There is this quote: "onshore windfarms – are effectively banned in England."

    What is that about? Says he from the left side of the big pond.

    237:

    UK electric speak:-

    Ways - Outlet feeders (usually ring mains or smaller DBs) from a distribution board (sometimes referred to as a "consumer unit" in domestic applications). Ring main (aka a way) - A circuit fed from a DB (qv), which will have a number of outlets on it. Gang - The design number of appliances that can be connected to a wall outlet or an extension cable. If you copy the string including quotes "MK domestic sockets" into a search engine, it will probably produce pictures and UK prices for typical examples.

    Incidentally, I read your paragraph 1 as having the subtext "I have heavily mechanically over-loaded wall outlets." In the UK it is quite possible to buy a 4-gang extension cable with switched sockets on it so there's really no excuse...

    238:

    Since no-one else actually said, "UK Listed Building" status (any level) and UNESCO "World Heritage Site" status are separate things, even though they sometimes overlap. That is, you can have a UK Grade 1 Listed Building (highest level of control) not in a WHS, and a UK WHS that does not contain any Listed Buildings.

    239:

    Since no-one else actually said, "UK Listed Building" status (any level) and UNESCO "World Heritage Site" status are separate things, even though they sometimes overlap. That is, you can have a UK Grade 1 Listed Building not in a WHS, and a UK WHS that does not contain any Listed Buildings.

    240:

    They don't quote a reference to justify that claim, and there most assuredly are on-shore wind farms in England; for example there's one in Cumbria visible from the M6, despite the mountains in between.

    241:

    "MK domestic sockets" into a search engine, it will probably produce pictures and UK prices for typical examples.

    I've seen them. We have similar but different things over here.

    Incidentally, I read your paragraph 1 as having the subtext "I have heavily mechanically over-loaded wall outlets." In the UK it is quite possible to buy a 4-gang extension cable with switched sockets on it so there's really no excuse...

    OK (typing this again as the blog signed me out last time)

    In my "media" room I have on the equipment side a TV, soundbar, cable modem, router, 2 small gig switches, an access point, an AppleTV, a BlueRay player, a TiVo, and (I can't remember). On the other side of the room where people sit there may be at any one time, 2 or 3 laptop power lumps, 2 or more charging tablets and phones, maybe a charging headset, etc...

    Those switched sockets just don't cut it. Add in the need for surge protection (maybe not there but over here it's a given) and I have one of these or similar on both sides of the room and all the other "stuff" plugged into them. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=17B-001M-000N6

    Really individual switches built into the wall socket for 10 things on one side of the room and maybe 8 on the other side just doesn't work. Especially when they are behind the furniture. (Do you really expect someone to place an outlet just where you need it 20 years in the past?) Which is why I think long term we need to narrow down to just a few standard power lumps/cables (we're closer now than in decades past) that turn themselves from standby when needed and smarter things that use main power (controls separate from "stuff").

    This discussion has me thinking of getting out my power meter and seeing what my newer big stuff does when "off" vs on. I'm thinking TVs and such that don't really completely turn off.

    242:

    The problem is the atmospheric carbon load[0].

    Cycling carbon through hydrocarbons burned for fuel and back into the atmosphere makes the problem worse because it converts a portion of the carbon into black particulate carbon which has a greater forcing effect than just the carbon.

    There's this presumption of travel in most of the responses; the minimum vehicle to reliably handle a lethal temperature excursion of unknown duration is a lot of vehicle. Cars aren't going to do it. (And then you have to think about how you get out of the vehicle during the lethal temperature excursion to get into a larger protected volume.)

    People aren't going to travel much. Goods travel, well, it's iffy. Sustained port infrastructure replication is a lot.

    Geoengineering is pretty much nonsense; it's a very large system we don't understand well enough to engineer in any sense, and the idea that the available toolkit exists that will allow making things better generally is just wrong. The core problem, the thing before which nothing else matters even slightly, is food security. Spending enormous fractions of the remaining societal capacity to make the weather unpredictable in a different way does not help. It makes things worse.

    I think the core problem is one of recognizing the present status quo cannot and will not survive. Anybody still stuck in bargaining or anger about that isn't likely to propose a helpful approach to the problem. The question is much less "how will we live?" and much more "what can we get into the future? Does it include us?"

    It won't be as much as we'd like.

    If it does include us, it'll be organized around resilience rather than gain. It probably won't have much electronics in the modern VLSI sense. (VLSI is staggeringly expensive and dependent on intact long supply chains. Even is someone gets an alternative process working, like direct electron beam lithography, none of those support volume production and the scale on the input side to get exceedingly pure substrate materials is probably still too large to sustain.)

    [0] it's the problem because it's what's acting to destroy food security.

    243:

    I just don't understand why you'd build a 5000+sf home that takes up 80% of the dirt.

    When I was a kid the yard was where we played, and we spent a lot of time outside. That was the norm. Now kids seem to spend way more time inside and most yards are sitting empty. I can see a dozen back yards from my back window and only one family uses their's (and one more sits on their elevated deck). If you aren't going to use it then why not build on it.

    244:

    My point was why have a yard at all? At that point it is only decoration. Which likely answers my question.

    Yes my back yard was the baseball field till we got to the summer after the 4th grade. After breaking several windows that summer and driving balls through one person's fence a few times we decided (maybe were told forcefully to STOP IT, memory is fuzzy) to move to the fairly close by cow pasture. It really torqued our parents that we would take our push mowers there and lift them over the fence to keep an infield mowed but would duck out of mowing our yards.

    But yes this was the era of 3 channel TV and everyone listened to ball games on the radio.

    245:

    and (I can't remember)

    Had to go there a few minutes ago and looked around. I left out the family printer, a MacMini mail server, and an Apple HomePod. :)

    246:

    Yeah; and I have switched 4-gangs with built in surge diverters.

    247:

    To disambiguate: David, paws means these.

    Well, 4-way versions of same. :-)

    248:

    Um, nope. As a little kid in my grandmother's house, there was a transom from the room into the hallway with the stairs. Growing up in a 4-story, block-long apartment building, there were transoms over every door, including the hallway, and from, say, my bedroom (bay windows) into the living room (non-bay windows). It's heat exchange, when you only have radiators, and no cooling (other than a fan you stick in the window).

    249:

    You wrote: somehow the behavior of humans, especially extremely wealthy humans, is supposed to change profoundly and rapidly....

    Not a problem. Gee, I should write a story, with a mention of the bombing of Davos as 30 years before....

    250:

    I think you're wrong about the pork. That's expensive, and I suspect about almost as much as cattle. The most-eaten meat will be chicken, other fowl, or farm-raised fish.

    Or roast vegan....

    251:

    Sorry, we disagree. I have two separate roofs, at 90 degrees to each other. A single roof would be simpler to build and maintain, and cheaper.

    Not full flights all the time? Everything, almost, is a half flight all the time. Kitchen to dining room? Up half a flight.

    It's got a half-basement, under the living room/dining room(area). Give me a whole basement, then kitchen, half bath, family room, living room and dining room are all on one floor... and I get more bedrooms on the second, not one master, one bath (small), another bedroom, and one small bedroom.

    Oh, and not a hell of a lot of closet/storage space. As a "starter" home, I can see it sold that way, and that means "you ain't got diddly, and we'll be able to sell you another house in 5 year, and make more money off you".

    252:

    But I was sure that Bill Clinton's NAFTA let illegal Messican truck drivers truck it in unsafe trucks from South America, and that's why The Orange One had to rename the deal....

    253:

    5000+sqf home? I just looked it up, and that's listed as 1935^2'. I strongly suspect they don't know about the fixed up attic (it was that way when we bought it), and they'll not count a full basement, but that ain't huge.

    254:

    Do you think most people WANT to move?

    I moved from Philly to TX to be with my late wife. Missed Philly a lot. Do you think we really wanted to relocate from Austin to Chicago? Or that I wanted to relocate to Florida, and back to Chicago, and then to the DC 'burbs? You don't think I'd WANT to be in either Philly or chicago?

    @#$%^&$%^&$%^&()right-wing libertidiots "you don't like what they pay you, you can vote with your feet"$%^&%^&$%^&$%^&$%^&(

    They don't believe in neighborhoods, they don't beleive in homes, they don't believe in families, you're a "human resource", consumable and disposable once consumed.

    Where is my order of tumbrels that were due Dec of '17? And who's got the parts for the guillotine...?

    255:

    Hell, yeah. One reason I dislike most "country music"/Southern music is the idealization of livin' in the country, and growin' your own, and....

    256:

    My point was why have a yard at all?

    Acoustic insulation, for one thing. Even loud neighbours are less loud inside a house than inside an apartment/condo. (Based on Canadian buildings.)

    Firebreak as well. Last year we had a hoarder's house burn just down the street from me — so much fuel it took a long time to put out. If it would have been an attached dwelling then more than one family would have been homeless…

    257:

    By the way, about the economics of 2100....

    First, I want to scream and beat on people. MOST "middle class" people ARE NOT MIDDLE CLASS. Middle class are professionals, people in private practives, small business owners. What they call "middle class" these days are middle-income.

    The fact is, they're WORKING CLASS (with put-on airs). They work for a paycheck, and live from paycheck to paycheck. A $400 bill is a major crisis, and a $5000 medical bill?

    Now, with that out of the way, a century from now, the economic structure of society will be way different.

  • With the elderly slowly shuffling off their mortal coil, there'll be a lot fewer care-giving jobs, nursing, in-home support, etc.
  • Manufacturing has been massively automated. I have zero reason to think that's not going to continue.
  • Hell, call centers will mostly be AI.
  • Either there will be a Defenestration of the Billionaires, or they'll submit to tax restructuring.

    Now, if I could wave my Magic Wand (tm), we'd start by 1. going to social democratic/democratic socialism governments. Then slowly nationalize/localize* major industry, and massively expand public transit (with NO FUCKING PRIVATIZATION). 2. revenues from that go partly to pay for a Basic Income, for people that cannot find jobs, only part-time jobs, etc. It will be LIVEABLE (as opposed to the BS in the US - lessee, my lady's been on it for a long time, and I think she said she gets $75/mo in food stamps. You want to live on that for all your food?). 3. This will progress. As part of the progression, we need programs to show people that buying more crap doesn't make you happy, so STOP BUYING CRAP (do you really enjoy standing in line overnight, so you can buy the latest i-piece-of-crap that doesn't do more than the old one, and paying enough to fly across the US for the crap?) 4. We need a revival of the New Deal arts programs. And some science programs. And a lot more usage of crowd-sourced research (SETIathome? And there are bioscience screensavers, and a lot of others - that, instead of "mining" bs pseudo-money). 5. We need to actually educate kids, so that they can find ways to stoke their egos by genuinely contributing to society.

    258:

    France is the world's greatest exporter of electricity today.

    If you go by per-capita then Norway probably takes the no. 1 position in that regard although they export their surplus electricity in the form of refined aluminium.

    Norway has about 5.5 million people and 31GW of installed hydro capacity = 6kW per capita. Sure it doesn't rain all the time in Norway but in some exposed places on the coast it can average 3000mm per annum. Hydro works on use-it-or-lose-it economics, if the dams are full and the prediction is for more rain then the turbines spin up and bauxite is refined to bank the energy.

    In comparison Britain with a population of 65 million or so has about 60GW of total generating capacity, including 20GW of unpredictable wind and a bunch of coal-fired stations we can't use more than 17% of the time except in an emergency. Mostly we generate what we need, about 500W per capita in the summers and 700W per capita in the winter and import a few GW from the continent (French nuclear, Holland gas-fired and Belgian mixture of sources including pass-through from German lignite fossil fuel plants) pretty much all of the time.

    259:

    The flat I live in has transoms but only over the doors to the two south-facing bedrooms. They're there to let natural light into the hallway, they don't open to let air or heat pass through. There's a light-well with white glazed bricks that descends from the roof three stories up to provide light into the kitchen via a very large window over the sink area.

    I think in most cases transoms were used for similar purposes in American apartment buildings, offices etc. before cheap interior lighting became standard.

    260:

    We’re talking 100 years from now, right? Ok, here’s to channeling my inner Bruce Stirling –

    Co-operatives: working class and lower middleclass populations would gravitate towards Co-op communities/housing. Entire high-rise buildings or city blocks would be owned by the co-operative. Members would share communal cafeteria, gardens, commons area and recreational facilities (gym/pool). Apartments for singles/couples would take up designated floors and family apartments with their own floors. Also see Kim Stanley Robison’s NEW YORK 2140.

    Family cafe´s, restaurants, pubs and other small businesses would make up a thriving middle class. The shopfront downstairs with the family apartment upstairs. Most family businesses are usually affiliated with a co-operative.

    Corporate gated communities: Executive and upper management level people would live in walled or domed campuses. These communities would typically be established outside urban centers. Living amenities would be similar to the Co-operative model, only more exclusive.

    Public Transportation: Neighborhood streets would be replaced with moving sidewalks much like the moving walkways found in large airports today (or see Heinlein’s THE ROADS MUST ROLL). Therefore, eliminating the need for cars, cabs, vans and buses, congesting streets and roads. Scooters, ebikes, and segways would be considered rather provincial and unsafe in an urban environment. Autonomous robot parcel carts would have a separate system under the street / suspended above the street. Trams would be used for commuting to other parts of the city and to local seaports, airports, and spaceports.

    Biodegradable packaging and clothing: packaging and clothing would be 3D printed with biodegradable materials. Food take-out packaging would literally evaporate within 24-72 hours. Daily clothing items such as undergarments to workout cloths would start degrading after 72 hours.

    Speaking of Bruce Sterling, here he is speaking at SXSW 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV1XMAP-Uh8

    261:

    "including 20GW of unpredictable wind"

    Can we please be fact-based enough to put this fossil speaking point to rest?

    Modern wind turbines work over a sufficiently large range of wind speed that any competent MetOffice can predict if their name-plate capacity will not be available several days from now, and more like a week out for the north sea area.

    Solar is close to the same as far as the accumulated capacity of distributed (ie: roof-top) systems goes.

    Centralized "solar farms" are still subject to micrometeological phenomena which makes them unpredictable on a day to day basis.

    With respect to Norway: They actually do export a fair bit of electricity without the detour over bauxite, and there are several large-ish HVDC cables in their pipeline, including I belive one to Scottland ?

    262:

    whitroth @ 254 Yes, well, I cannot remember living anwhere other than where I do right now. Both my parents were children in the next road across, just before WWI ..... NOT shifting unless forced.

    263:

    Sorry, but everywhere I was in Philly in people's homes, back when I was young, all the older buildings had transoms over the doors, and by the sixties, they were all pretty much painted so they couldn't open... but the lever was still there. This was most rooms, too, and pretty much all of these houses were built in the 20th century, and electric lights were getting very common in Philly (and NYC).

    264:

    Btw, for the folks who think roads are going to be less common... how do you move into a new home, without a truck, or have something large, like a sofa or bed, delivered? Surface roads are the least expensive method, though what's on them is another story.

    265:

    These are storyable.

    War veterans find sustenance--and solace--in farming

    In India, this group helps turn wasteland into greener pastures

    The Biggest Little Farm (2019) - Official Trailer

    Our world today would confuse people from 1919. This is what everyone here seems to be missing in the discussion about 2119. The future doesn't have us in it. HA!

    The Restaurant of Life

    266:

    ... Wicked grin

    I mentioned before that Spain demonstrates infrastructure can be done far cheaper than you imagine possible? Well, one of the things they do well is tunnels. On top of that, tunneling is obviously a problem which superior technology can make cheaper. So. I give you: The Low Roads.

    In a fit of keynesian "We must maintain employment!" and "We must harden against weather events!" a lot of tunnels get built. No. More tunnels than that. More.

    All transport that is not mare shanks or bicycles is now a metro. Long distance transport? Low pressure magnetic-levitation trains are faster than sound and run entirely on electricity. Local distances? Steel wheels on steel rail and electricity. Goods? Same system. Heat events? Do not apply.

    The City is The Metro is the World, and the World is the Metro is the City. Districts are built on a radial pattern around metro access points, and politically organized in chunks of infrastructure that have low travel times, usually called a "line".

    The enormous amount of excavation produced a whole lot of material, a lot of which was processed into building material. Most of it somewhat concrete-like in appearance, but the hall-mark of a fancy-pants building is that it is built out of blocks of natural stone that was machine cut in intact blocks out of a tunnel face somewhere and then polished and decorated during construction. But even the poor live in apartments that are stupidly enormous, because the one thing the world is not short on is "bricks". They live in apartments because the need to be near a station dictates vertical construction.

    267:

    It must be a family thing. Amoung my four grandparents, at least the families for two of them didn't stay within 100 miles of where the grew up, at least as far back as a couple of hundred years (which for one includes when they lived in Europe). The other 2 were pretty static, except for the starvation induced (we think) immigration. This trend has continued, few of us live close to the others (although we are all in the U.S., it is a big place...)

    268:

    Getting from here to a civilized 2119...

    The problem with the billionaires is that most of them (possibly excepting Bill Gates) have deliberately spread their money around the world in ways that make it as difficult to get them to pay debts as possible. This has been going on, on an accelerated basis,since the 1980s. One simple example is that most of the super-rich actually own nothing. In the simplest possible case, they are the beneficiaries of trusts that own (through horrendously labyrinthine legal and accounting structures) all the stuff that that people think they own. Indeed, if the billionaires are hit with, say, a tax bill or an alimony request, the wealth managers they hired to look after these trusts will firmly tell them that the trust will not disburse the funds to cover the demand, since the trust is not the one being hit with the bill. The wealthy asshole claims poverty and walks away from his debts. And that's the simplest case. Whole families are set up to do this.

    Basically, the simplistic way to think of today's super-wealthy (wealth above US$50 million) is as anarchistic feudal lords. The difference is that, instead of controlling great chunks of land (feudalism) their estates are entirely fungible assets spread around the world, with an ownership structure set up in something like a STAR Trust in the Cayman Islands (look it up). Their knights are the wealth managers and lawyers, and both sides look at this as a long-term series of transactional relationships based on personal loyalty and the ability of the lord to trust the lackey, because one of the main functions these "knights" perform is arbitraging all the diverse national laws to use the ones that are advantageous to their lords, and to avoid the ones that harm them. Trump is very much of this world, and you can see it with his insistence on personal loyalty and disdain for the laws of nation-states.

    So, if you want an SFF version of the Fall of the Super Rich, you might do it this way, (swiping liberally from David Brin's Earth). 1. There's a worldwide web war. This could happen if one of the big players (definitely including the US, but the US is also the biggest target) thinks they can win WW3 online without the war escalating to nukes. This probably would cause WW2-like deaths (not nuclear WW3 mortality levels, but lots of trashed cities). For this story, the most important result is that it scrambles the ownership structures that the super-rich have set up, making them vulnerable. 2. The winners of WW3 decide to take out the super-rich, especially those (like the modern-day heads of the US and Russia) who might have helped start the war. Therefore, they go after any of the surviving tax havens, especially Switzerland, but also Singapore, Liechtenstein, Mauritius, possibly the City of London, and all those little UK dependencies which have been causing so much trouble (BVI, Cayman Islands, Jersey, etc.). The purpose of this is to destroy the economies of the Offshore Financial Centers around the world. Sucks for all those islands, but then again, we're not talking many people compared with all those who died when their urban infrastructure was borked. The Swiss will put up the biggest fight, of course. 3. Once the ownership of all the world's biggest corporations is effectively up for grabs (since the ownership documents have been seized or destroyed), they get nationalized, piecemeal. Yes, this will result in all sorts of horrors and corruption, but this is the nation-states retaking control from an increasingly feudal, anarchistic, and corrupting industrial system which is arguably destroying the world right now.
    4. Various Green New Deals are arranged, and the funds that can still be proved to exist get plowed into green infrastructure, and stuff starts to happen. Since most money is electronic, I strongly suspect that most of our money will disappear during WW3. This incidentally solves a lot of political problems related to corrupting influence, and governments can get back into the business of printing money and bonds. 5. Since the internet backbone's been comprehensively broken to stop Web War 2, the surplussed data centers that used to store addictive social media and the results of IoT spying get repurposed for AI problem solving. The AIs figure out how to solve all the climate change problems we have to handwave away to make this story work. 6. Add about 50 years to that, with the cracks showing and the WebWar survivors dying off, and it's about 2119.

    Anyone who wants to, feel free to adapt this. Since I'm always negative and cynical, I'm working on a world where the billionaires finance FTL starships and set up a colony on some other planet as the ultimate Offshore Financial Center, leaving Earth because it's no longer a good place for ever-growing capitalism, and climate change is too big a problem to solve.

    269:

    Incredibly minor point re UK Listed.

    England+Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland all maintain separate subtly different heritage authorities and they work on subtly different systems, with slightly different nomenclature. For example : Spiffy Castle, (Peasants, for the oppression of) [obsolete - rplmnt: Neoliberal mkIII], in Scotland would be Category A, but further south: Castle (Scotts, Ravening Horde, protection from) would be Grade 1.

    270:

    Thanks to the "sandwich" constructions most of the 1%'ers use, you can probably get a lot of mileage out of destroying just one or two of the relatively minor tax-havens at a time.

    The most interesting way to do so, would be to arrange for a "Panama-Papers" style leak every year.

    The more hard-core way would be to install a government which without warning nationalizes all incorporated entities of that tax-heaven and donates 90% of the confiscated assets to UN.

    271:

    I have no idea what you mean by this comment.

    272:

    First thing about building houses for profit. It is NOT about what is logical or what I want or what YOU (whitroth) want. It is about what a large enough number of people want or THINK they want.

    Roofing costs. It's about area. So for same total volume of a house, a ranch has the most expensive roof, then a split level, then a 2 story or greater. But the foot print of the home also decreases so the foundation costs and lot size requirements do down.

    As to a basement, that seems to track very closely with "did you grow up in the north east quadrant of the US?". If yes you want a basement. If not you really don't understand the fascination with such.

    As to what sells, elegant baths with Jacuzzi tubs that most people stop using fairly quickly. A large kitchen which if not also a media center also doesn't get used nearly as much as the buyer expects due to memories of their youth. Large walk in closets in the master bedroom without noticing what's in the other bedrooms, COAX/Cat5 to each room without noticing that the location of the jacks is crap for many desired furniture layouts and room usage. Bath tubs in general as 99.99% of the time people in the US take a shower. Washer/dryer alcove on the 2nd floor next to the bedrooms without noticing that there is no provision for dealing with a water leak. And so on.

    Getting back to the 2119 thing, what WE think of as useful housing will be considered quaint at best and most likely foolish as a long term plan.

    273:

    I'd need 2 or 3 of these strips with switches just to get enough switches. Per side of the room.

    But we're talking about 2119. Power needs to get smarter which is where I started. More universal (appliance, mid sized, and small device) so that you don't need multiple lumps. And then they should not draw anything but a trickle for control when nothing that is plugged in needs power. Obviously the phone charger will be a somewhat different implementation from the refrigerator appliance power source.

    And as someone who has dealt with software for mortals for decades, any routine task that can be ignored in the moment WILL eventually be ignored on a regular basis. Having to flip the switches on and off as you want to watch TV, charge your phone, etc... well fairly soon they will just be left on. At least until it costs $3 per charge of your phone. But at that point I would hope smarter power chargers become more universal.

    274:

    ... Again, electricity scarcity is never going to be a thing. It is not a thing that can happen.

    Liquid fuels? Those can get pricy, though that too has limits - for one thing, ammonia synthesis is trivial. But electricity simply cannot get all that expensive.

    I have no idea why "And electricity gets manyfold more expensive" is such a common assumption about the future, because it defies both basic logic, and also the other common narrative people profess to believe - That renewable will beat coal on price.

    275:

    Seeing all these posts about wall warts and switches, etc. If wireless charging takes off (and it has a good start), I would envision lots of wall space that has wireless chargers behind it, just put your phone (or other device, if any such exist) on the wall (magnetic attachment as well). Plugs? Who needs plugs? And, yes, I would expect this to scale up in the future for higher powered (i.e. TVs/Monitors) devices. Hmmm, LED light panels that you can carry from room to room, just slap it on the wall (or ceiling), internal battery for short range portability or brown outs. Same for speakers.

    I guess things like microwaves, ovens & fridges would still be wired, but they pretty much have dedicated power feeds already. So, probably plugs would still exist, but maybe one per room. Vacuuming will probably be handled by Roomba version 100.

    276:

    If wireless charging takes off (and it has a good start)

    Wireless charging is very convenient. I have 2 of them. But it is very inefficient. Very very.

    No one notices the lousy efficiency of a charger for a phone. But for a LOT of things or larger things? It will add up quickly. No energy star rating for you with any of this.

    277:

    I didn't say it would get scarce. I referred to the price. Currently I pay around $.12/kwh. Southern Cal is around 3 times that. (Or was the last time I looked.) Germany 4 times.

    Ditto gasoline. In the US we have a 2 to 1 ratio of prices between some states due to delivery and taxes. It is a thing to own a gas station on the SC side of the NC/SC border as the tax difference per gallon is significant.[1] In the US we argue are the gas taxes enough to cover road construction and up keep. From what I can tell in the EU where costs can triple or more over the US it is how high do we make the taxes to keep people from frivolous driving and fund things other than roads.[2]

    Anyway my point about $$ to charge a phone was that unless this was the case lumps will be left plugged into AC supply drawing power in stupid mode when not charging a device. If there's no obvious pain behavior will not change for most people.

    [1] NC/SC border was recently surveyed for the first time in well over 100 years. Some things are not in the state they thought they were in. There's a gas station that WAS just inside SC that had to close down as the draw was the cheaper gas due to the tax differential.

    [2] I always assumed the autobahn in Germany was the gold standard for roads. After my visit there and hearing about Germans who take their August vacation in the US driving an RV around the country it seems our crappy always needing to be repaired roads are considered better than the typical German roads.

    278:

    wireless charging ... scale up in the future for higher powered

    Echoing DavidL above, hahahaha no. Wireless is inefficient both in power lost and in materials used. The advantage would be if you have one power source and can move appliances around without having to unplug them. But if that comes at the cost of a strip a metre high along every wall that contains 2-5kg of copper per metre it's going to be strictly the stupidly rich and tech-worshipping that do it. The alternative is a central radiator that beams power to whatever in the room wants it... just don't stand in the beam, or a reflection of the beam, or a side-lode of the beam... you know, best just not to be in the room. And you want the walls to reflect that power, which is handy because it also contains the power making it safer to be in less-wireless parts of the house.

    This blog has a bit of an obsession with wireless charging and a fact-deficient optimist called Energous in particular: https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com

    High capacity wireless charging for vehicles can work, especially with computerised lane-positioning, but it also requires big expensive transmitters and bulky receivers (it's generally magnetic coupling rather than electric). I sometimes wonder whether a linear induction motor in the road and regenerative braking in the vehicle would be simpler ... what's in the road is very close to that already. Oh, and the distances involved are 10-20cm, and never even close to a metre.

    279:

    In trying to write my novel* the only way I could see to get over that hump was to have all the right-wingers die in a fire set by "terrorists," with the insurance companies announcing that they were getting out of any area less than five-feet above sea level two weeks later. Then it seemed believable.

    In the real world, I think this is where our forgiveness skills come into play... it's important to remember that greasy, smelly, disgusting, polluting oil (coal and natural gas) have been our officially approved, go-to methods of energy generation for more than a hundred years, and despite all our current dislike of the industry, it's not entirely just to take the president/board/officers of Exxon-Mobil (for example) and hit them with criminal charges (as much as I'd like to do so - you have no idea how much I'd like to do so.)

    So at some point soon there has to be a come-to-Jesus moment where a Very Important Person gets together with the industry and says, "Hey, oil is over. You've got too choices. One, you can have a government-funded-and-sponsored wind-down of your industry, which would include clean-up of toxic waste, loans unloaded on the Federal Government,** no criminal charges or civil liability, early retirement for un-retrainable employees - all that good stuff with the end result that you folks end in charge of all of those of your subsidiaries which don't use oil or other toxic substances such as coal, running those companies as you see fit."

    "Or there's alternative two, which ends up with all of you spending much more time with the Attorney General than you'd like, and tons of liability."

    "Choose. Now."

    • Which is currently up on blocks waiting to get the transmission swapped out...

    ** What's a few trillion dollars between friends?

    280:

    With device to device charging already supported (see Samsung Galaxy 10 ads), wireless power transfer will get more efficient. As to how? I don't know, meta materials, phase array antennas, something awesome (see for instance: https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-patent-more-efficient-electric-motors/). And it will not be a meter high strip of copper on the wall, it will be embedded in the wall (accessible at various heights) and otherwise invisible (but the device will be able to find it).

    And I can claim all this because by 2119 I will (probably) not be around for you to tell me I was wrong! :)

    Seriously, this sort of blue-skying seems more like what OGH was requesting. The above tech would have an interesting effect on home architecture. I mean, how much do parents freak out with their first kid plugging up the plugs? (Strangely, this seems to lessen for each subsequent child).

    You want the TV moved? Pry it off the wall, carry it to the next room, and slap it up where you want it. Done. Attachment is magnetic, power is wireless, data feed is wireless. Move the speakers (if you have them) the same way.

    It will make our current wired technology look quaint by comparison.

    281:

    You could go to a maximum-four-day work-week so people could garden. You'd have full-employment with good wages pretty quickly, even in the face of automation.

    282:

    Word up dude!

    283:

    We got rid of a bunch of wall warts and extension cords by using things like these. Also makes travelling a lot easier since you only need to find a single wall socket and can power half a dozen or more charging devices simultaneously. Add a couple of long USB cables and you can even use the one on the opposite side of the room, which is handy for old hotels.

    Behind the TV is an 8 port switched adapter covering the usual sky/av/tv/sub/server/laptop/playstation etc, but that's the only one left in the place. Increasingly more and more modern accessories come with an external block and a usb cable for power, and they can be consolidated - for example the Chromecast now runs happily off the TV's USB port, and we don't need it if the TV is off.

    284:

    So far as the executives go, I'd advise reading Harrington's Capital Without Borders to see where the culture of the one-percent is right now. First it's a good book, and second, the levers you're talking about don't particularly exist. But other levers do exist. Still, they're getting enculturated with the idea that they don't have to pay their debts, so I'm not sure that Jesus could even beckon to them without a catastrophe shaking their faith in what they're being taught.

    As far as winding down the petroleum industry goes, they're aiming to get into 100% plastics production in place of producing fuel. That's also really good (not!) for a world overly burdened by microplastics, but at least plastics don't cause climate change.

    285:

    whitroth @ 250: I think you're wrong about the pork. That's expensive, and I suspect about almost as much as cattle. The most-eaten meat will be chicken, other fowl, or farm-raised fish.

    If you want to avoid factory farming, pork is more sustainable than either beef or chicken. Pigs are omnivores. You don't have to feed them from foods that people eat (although they can eat scraps that people don't eat).

    286:

    It doesn't matter whether the wireless charger is embedded in the wall or bolted to it, high power levels can't be done with small, light, cheap antennas. And in the context of wireless charging "high power" is anything over 1 watt. That comes down to the susceptibility of people to EM radiation, so it's not something that technology can really change (barring genetic engineering).

    We already have devices that are parasitic on wifi, so there are systems that can be wireless just by din't of their very low power requirements. Those are a different class, though (very sub-millwatt), and you're just never going to see a device that spits out 20+ watts of EM being powered that way (be it a television, light bulb or heater).

    You're making a severe category error, thinking that wireless over 1cm for 1 minute at low efficiency means that the problems of high efficiency wireless over 10cm+ for days are a mere "technical challenge". They're not, they're a physics challenge, and we don't yet have a way of approaching physics that allows us to treat "what if this law changed" as a business plan. That's what science fiction does.

    At the very least maybe think about what "100 watts with 90% efficiency at the receiver" means for other things in the room. It's possibly easier to think of this in terms of visible light, since that both works really well and is familiar enough that most people can imagine it. Imagine we have PV cells that are 90% efficient at a particular colour. I dunno, a nice dark blue. Now I want to power a desk fan via a wee "solar" panel. 100W in to the fan at 90% means 110W of light hitting the panel on the fan. So far so very simple.

    If I use a "broadcast from big panels" approach I just need to bathe the room in blue light so that enough hits my desk lamp, and mirror the walls, ceiling, furniture etc so there's not too many losses. I think that's a bad idea (kilowatts!). So instead we use a "phased array antenna" which for this thought experiment I'm going to imagine looks like a spotlight on a robot arm. A 90% efficient LED (120W input = 110W output) points at my fan and bingo... light make fan go! Mildly distracting, the star trek style "beam of blue light" is going to be a bit obvious. Hmm, maybe we should use a properly collimated beam to cut down the side lobes and poor directionality. Yeah, a 120W LASER... what could possibly go wrong?

    The problems above apply to any RF, not just light, and especially the "people like things that absorb it, but don't like the effects of that absorption". Creating RF mirrors is easier than light in some ways, harder in others (look for "faraday cage window glass")

    Magnets are worse, much, much worse. The falloff with distance is more severe as a side effect of the main problem: we can't readily direct magnetic fields. Sure, superconducting magnets and the Meissner effect are great... if you have liquid helium available. At room temperature not so much. So magnetic transfer works over small numbers of millimetres, the end. Until we get cheap, robust room temperature electrical superconductors and at that point all bets are off and we're playing a whole different game right across society.

    287:

    Pigs are omnivores

    So are chickens. But that actually makes the problem worse, because their digestive systems are less efficient at processing a vegetarian diet. We've already seen that feeding food animals on meat waste is difficult to do safely, so any meat the pigs eat needs to be sourced outside the meat-for-human-food chain.

    IIRC chickens are more efficient that pigs at turning food into meat, and that's the thing we care about. At the opposite extreme are farmed salmon, which are so inefficient that the equivalent with land animals is almost unheard of (we don't farm land carnivores for meat).

    288:

    If an attempt at carbon footprint reduction raises concern over idle phone chargers, first dial your thermostat down to fifty (don't want pipes freezing!) and leave it there all winter. And quit using air conditioning unless you've already stripped down to shorts and a teeshirt, and can't get any relief from fans in the windows. Saves lots of money, but slight additional expense incurred for stuff like twenty-inch window fans, room thermometers, and indoor winter items like thermal tops and drawers, fleece-wear jogging pants, flannel shirts,sweaters, hoodies, lined shirt jacks, anti-chapping lotion for your hands and those copper threaded gloves you can wear using a touchscreen while lying around the house.

    Unanticipated benefits include: the ability to go outside for extended periods and ride or drive around without having to add much except maybe a knit cap, as well as noticeable increase in daily food requirements, an enjoyable plus far as I'm concerned. At 170 lbs., I jump from around 2400 up to 3000 calories a day in cold months without weight gain.

    First you probably need to be married to someone of equal or greater frugality, or at least as skeptical of prevailing values and lifestyles. Once you've retired it should start sinking in, you really don't have much to prove any more, to anyone at all.

    289:

    This discussion has me thinking of getting out my power meter and seeing what my newer big stuff does when "off" vs on. I'm thinking TVs and such that don't really completely turn off.

    Most modern electronic equipment for consumer use such as audio or TV must meet the EU ErP standby power requirements. Devices that are not connected to a network must consume less than 0.5W in standby mode, or 1.0W if they have an information display that remains active in standby. Equipment that is always connected to a network (cabled or wireless) must consume less than 2.0W in "network standby" mode. (Previously this limit was 3.0W, the standard has changed in 2019.) Equipment may be exempted from these requirements if this is "inappropriate for its intended use".

    Computer or communications devices have different requirements since often they need to be on continuously to perform their main function.

    290:

    Unfortunately for us, the most efficient land animals in turning food into protein are insects (although there's some controversy about this, with some research saying crickets aren't better than chickens).

    The phrase to search is "feed conversion ratio." (input/output). From more efficient to less efficient, it's crickets (~1), salmon (~1), catfish (~1), tilapia (~1.5), chickens (1.6), chicken eggs (2), pigs, rabbits (~3.5-4), sheep (4.5-6, depending on forage), Beef (4.5-7.5) and cow milk (8-13).

    Then you have to factor in what you're feeding the critters. For instance, salmon are efficient, but you're feeding them wild fish, while tilapia can get by on grass clippings. Sheep are inefficient, but the food you feed them on often can't be eaten by much else (ditto ranch cattle). Pigs and chickens tend to eat human-ish foods, but they're efficient. Feeding them on human wastes is therefore an efficient, if dubiously sanitary, way to get some meat out of, erm, food waste.

    291:

    Oil, coal and to some extent gas historically had a very high EROEI, energy return on energy investment. Oil lay around in puddles on the ground in Mesopotamia, oil came spewing out of wells in Texas under natural high pressure, etc. You could get more than 100 Joules of usable energy for every Joule you spent acquiring it.

    This is because fossil fuels have high energy density, which lowers transport and processing costs, and the actual energy input required to create them didn't come from human effort.

    Renewables and nuclear, however, have notably lower EROEI. While I'm sure they'll improve, to some extent it is based on a natural constraint: they are not energy dense, and gathering them takes orders of magnitude more effort. This is an obvious thing to say about renewables, but it applies to fission too. Fuel rods are the end result of a process which begins with an absolutely stupendous amount of ore, which itself is not particularly energy dense.

    So no, I am not saying civilization will collapse, I don't think there will be gigadeath, because we have a century to slowly transition from fossil fuel + fertiliser + pesticide powered monoculture to horticulture (permaculture!) accelerated by info + biotech.

    I'm just saying the productive excess won't be as big as it was in the 20th or early 21st centuries, and that'll have an effect on society and so on the built environment.

    292:

    Do these number factor in the cost of raising / slaughter / getting to market?

    Seems eggs would be way more efficient. But this is a feeling not a researched fact.

    293:

    If an attempt at carbon footprint reduction raises concern over idle phone chargers, first dial your thermostat down ...

    First you probably need to be married to someone of equal or greater frugality, or at least as skeptical of prevailing values and lifestyles. Once you've retired it should start sinking in, you really don't have much to prove any more, to anyone at all.

    I'm there to some degree. When the compressor on the ancient central air that came with the house went out I didn't replace it. That lasted for about 5 years. A whole house attic fan (pulls air from living out through the attic) or running the HVAC fans to circulate air through the basement of my split level did me ok. But the year the summer the temps got to 100F my wife rebelled. So now we have some smaller window units in a few strategic rooms. Ditto oil filled electric heaters. Central heat now only keeps things up to 60F unless we need it more for some reason. Again, my wife and I have differing options about such need.

    Plus if I didn't have single pane windows and no insulation in most of my exterior walls I might be willing to keep it warmer/cooler.

    Physiology has a lot to do with this discussion. I sweat more than most people. My wife very little. Which has a huge impact or what temps can be dealt with day to day.

    294:

    Yep. I'm there. But we're talking about how populations will live. And most folks haven't a clue. Or even know there might be a need to have a clue.

    To them the $2 wall wart they buy at the flea market as an extra charger is the same as the one that came in the box from Apple or Samsung. It's the same color and shape? Right?

    As to traveling I've learn when crossing the big pond to take at least an 10' long 3 outlet power cord with me to get from somewhere "what were they thinking" to where the power is useful. Plus a short multi outlet strip to plug into that. In the US it has been a standard since the 50s or 60s for outlets in living spaces to be every 2M along a wall. In Europe I've been in hotels built/remodeled in the last 10 or 20 years where finding an outlet is somewhat of a snipe hunt.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snipe_hunt

    295:

    ... EROEI is a pseudo-statistic that does not matter much for prices, but to the extent it is a thing, nuclear wins. Nuclear has better energy return than just about anything else, and it has been rising quickly in recent decades, (driven by better enrichment tech), and if you want to push it higher that is easy - fast breeders have eroei so high as to be absurd, and the Russians are perfectly happy to sell you the plans for those.

    296:

    You could go to a maximum-four-day work-week so people could garden.

    You miss my point. Most people flat out don't want to garden. At all. There would quickly spring up a service industry where people would pay others to do their gardening for them.

    My father grew up on a decent sized working farm. (They had a small commercial slaughter house and sawmill.) In my early teens I asked why he didn't continue. Did he not like farming? His answer: "It was OK. Until I had to get down off the tractor."

    297:

    As far as winding down the petroleum industry goes, they're aiming to get into 100% plastics production in place of producing fuel. That's also really good (not!) for a world overly burdened by microplastics, but at least plastics don't cause climate change.

    I keep looking around and wondering about just how to get rid of plastics by any reasonable amount and keep our current levels of society working. They are just flat our everywhere.

    Biggest uses that would be hard to get rid of is in storage for food and medicine. Between plastics and decent refrigeration we don't have to have nearly as many local food markets and can keep medicines for a long time.

    But many of the "advances" in home construction involve plastics. But even if we get rid of hard things like car steering wheels and fridge seals and furniture, what about all that is needed for wiring insulation and semi-conductors?

    298:

    TJ @ 274 for one thing, ammonia synthesis is trivial. YES ? SO? AND? Everyone goes on & ON & ON about Ammonia-based fuel cycles as if it was easy & trivial, yet we are seeing absolutely ZERO sign of this happening. I would appreciate botha political & technical explanation as to why this is the case & possibly, how to rectify the problems AND @ 295 Yeah, simple ... first of all though, you have got to hang all the fake greenies, though. Their levels of stupid are truly alarming.

    Troutwaxer @ 279 Over 200 years please! Middleton Railway, Leeds - rack-propulsion railed steam locomotives in 1812 ..... ... @ 281 Yes, I worked out that Britain could EASILY feed itself if 90% of the population went to 3-day weeks with a compulsory allotment. And, yes, the area of land IS there, mind you, there would be no football pitches ANYWHERE! It would, however require RADICAL restructuring of the public transport systems. The remaining 10%, btw would be those farmers who raised or grew stuff that allomenteers cannot - like wheat & livestock & those vital few in service industiries like power distribution & transport.

    kiethmasterson @ 288 My central heating temp trigger is already down to 16.5°C - my loft is about 5-7 cm deep in insulation - & the house has a blank-brick N wall ... next step?

    heteromeles @ 290 Pigs, in N Europe are very efficiant food-converters, you trun them loose in a FENCED wood, where they grub the acorns & beechmast that humans can't eat - one of the reasons they were banned ( for "religious" reasons ) in the middle E was that they compete with humans for food resources ... oops.

    299:

    one of the reasons they were banned ( for "religious" reasons ) in the middle E was that they compete with humans for food resources ... oops.

    Ah, nothing to do with the fact that for various reasons people and pigs can share a lot of diseases? Especially if you don't thoroughly cook the pig meat.

    There IS a reason there is no pork tartare.

    300:

    I said "ONE" of the reasons ..... Also, pork "goes off" faster than beef or goat or sheep & both cows & pigs seem to have nastier transmissable/edible parasites than sheep/goats.

    301:

    PS: I wasn't beating on you with the electric L-R comment. But as soon as I read it I combined the images of you you have posted with an ancient LR and my mind drifted into steam punk / Doc Emmett Brown mode.

    302:

    A week is a long time in politics, it's a problem in energy provision. We've just had a few days, about 60 hours in total when the total grid wind power capability of Britain was producing less than a GW in total. For a period of 24 hours it was less than 250MW. Knowing this was going to happen a few days out doesn't stop it happening. The result? We burned gas like a bandit (about 20GW at peak, never less than 10GW) and dumped the resulting CO2 into the atmosphere, increasing global warming. In contrast nuclear-rich France was burning 4GW of gas to supply a domestic demand that's 50% greater than the UK as well as exporting 10GW to other countries, including lignite-rich Germany which was similarly becalmed with low wind generation output.

    Electricity demand in the UK is going to increase and there will be problems with the peak demand periods shifting as electric vehicles proliferate, requiring several extra GW (my crude BOTE calculation with a lot of untested assumptions says maybe as much as 15GW peak) of charging capacity at odd times of the day. Telling folks who want to go to work next week they can't do so since there's not enough going to be renewable electricity to charge their cars over the next few days is not going to be a goer for any government. They'll quite happily tout renewables and burn gas in the background to stop the riots.

    303:

    Converting all football pitches to allotments would be a mistake. Doing so for golf courses, starting with Turnberry and the 'International' one near Aberdeen, on the other hand ....

    304:

    Just plant them with beans and spinach and let the golfers "play through". Put corn on the sides of the fairways instead of trees.

    305:

    Wireless charging is very convenient. I have 2 of them. But it is very inefficient. Very very.

    Totally true!

    It only works for small gizmos like phones because you can basically position the charging pick-up on the phone within millimetres of the charger's centre, and even then it's lossy.

    I have two inductive chargers, for my phone only. One is a desk stand: phone charges when it's facing me on my desk without me having to fiddle with a plug. The other is a mat barely larger than the phone that sits on my bedside table for the same purpose. The only benefit I get from these chargers is that I can answer the phone if it rings (or if I need to pay attention to it) without fiddling with a cable.

    I will note that Apple cancelled an already-announced and then already-delayed product, AirPower, because they couldn't break the laws of physics; they wanted to fast-charge phones, watches, and airpods on a single mat at the same time, and it just couldn't be done without the mat either getting hot or requiring a cooling fan (a big no-no for their designers, as it'd have made it glaringly obvious that the gizmo was energy-inefficient). You can bet Apple sank quite a lot more money into designing the AirPower charger than most tech companies do, and they hate cancelling a product after they announced it; if they couldn't make it work then the problem is clearly non-trivial.

    306:

    Well, yes, but as Heteromeles hinted at, most animals are omnivores to some degree, never mind the occasional obligate carnivore. But pigs are very much omnivores.

    Mind you, seeing a Chinese pig toilet might be a much more efficient way of turning people vegetarian than any Peter Singer or pictures of slaughterhouses.

    PS: Sorry, just looking by shortly, hell of a week, getting fired, getting visited by the police because people thought you might be a danger to yourself, telling 4 psychiatrists you are no danger to yourself and others, at least not more than the rest of humanity, but getting a ticket at a concert booked out a month in advance at the entrance. The universe doesn't love me, but at least it doesn't care for me. Helps wonders for the shit magnet feeling I had lately. For the concert, "The Notwist", German electro. Brings back memories of the 90s, there is another concert of them on youtube. BTW, first thing the psychiatrists asked was if I got enought sleep. Which brings us back to Trump. Sorry for the wall of text, brain in emergency mode, thinking about a career in emergency medicine, and I'm only halfway joking...

    307:

    Converting all of our transport to electricity requires a threefold increase in generating and, worse, distribution capacity. Also, it is the only sector that is continuing to increase. I believe that the USA is worse in both respects, but could be wrong. I stand by what I said in #229 - if we want to tackle this problem, we MUST change direction - nothing else will work.

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/energy-consumption-in-the-uk

    308:

    I always assumed the autobahn in Germany was the gold standard for roads. After my visit there and hearing about Germans who take their August vacation in the US driving an RV around the country it seems our crappy always needing to be repaired roads are considered better than the typical German roads.

    The Autobahn was the gold standard for roads in the 1930s, when they were built (by Guess Who, in order to make it easier to move mechanised army forces around Germany, rather than relying on the 19th century practice of putting infantry on trains).

    As usual, if you're an early adopter, you have all the learning experiences and few of the benefits: the US interstate system came in the 1950s for much the same reason: the young Lt. Col. Eisenhower had in 1919 been responsible for the Transcontinental Motor Truck Convoy, which attempted to drive coast-to-coast across the USA. When he saw the autobahns in Germany in 44/45, he realized the USA needed something like that, only better (wider, faster, higher capacity) and as president he pushed it through.

    When in the late 1950s-1970s the UK built out a motorway network, that in turn leveraged experience from other road networks: the British system is chronically congested (because there are too many people on too small an island, and land is expensive) but incredibly efficient compared to other autobahn/interstate type systems: grade-separated gyratory intersections use far less land area than cloverleafs, for example, while handling similar traffic volume. And UK motorway slip roads are simply better designed and less likely to result in accidents/traffic backing up than their US counterparts (with the exception of certain urban motorways dating to the 1960s—cough, cough, the J18/J18 exits on the M8 in Glasgow, or the bizarrely positioned entry lanes in Leeds city centre on the A58(M)).

    There's a progression here. The autobahns are only a gold standard for motorways in the way that the UK railway network is a gold standard for trains—it came first, and everyone copied it, but a century or more later the design drawbacks are glaringly obvious.

    309:

    If you want to avoid factory farming, pork is more sustainable than either beef or chicken

    Naah: I think the future is textured meat products spewed out by 3D printers running on mashed locusts or mealworms.

    Insects trash vertebrates in terms of efficient conversion of inedible plant biomass into human-compatible nutrients, and also side-step the "ick" factor in slaughtering something with a face (and a big, complex nervous system).

    Insects are a dietary taboo in the west, if presented as insects. But we're willing to eat textured protein products like Quorn&tm; or tofu, as long as it looks and tastes like something else and we don't have to read the small print about what it's made from.

    So: farm bugs, turn bugs into a protein puree, then either turn them into bulk vegemince/chunks/ersatz-chicken nuggets (the cheap stuff), or feed it to a whacky 3D printer to make novelty turducken or steaks.

    310:
    The Autobahn was the gold standard for roads in the 1930s, when they were built by Guess Who

    Actually the plans go back into the Weimar republic or earlier, and beside the military aspect, the autobahns might have been partly Keynesian stimulus and workfare[1] for the unemployed, at least with some projects the Nazis deliberately used few machines and much manpower.

    [1] German mental health service is big on "sinnvolle Beschäftigungstherapie", e.g. "meaningful occupational therapy", like binding books and like. I guess we could call some of the Nazi projects "sinnlose Beschäftigungstherapie", e.g. "meaningless|senseless occupational therapy".

    311:

    It only works for small gizmos like phones because you can basically position the charging pick-up on the phone within millimetres of the charger's centre, and even then it's lossy.

    What people don't understand is that it is a 2 part transformer. Engineers and physicists have spent over 100 years optimizing the metal core to be used in various kinds of transformers where the windings are both around a common core to get the efficiency above 95%. Wireless charging removes that core and thus the requirement for closeness to have it work at all.

    Yes my 2 units are next 2 my beds for the same reasons you have. (2 beds because of 2 cities.)

    312:

    Flip side of massive increase in central generation and grid capacity required by electrifying our vehicle fleet: we get rid of most or all of our diesel/petrol distribution infrastructure. Actual gross carbon emissions are likely to fall somewhat simply because central generators running off gas turbines are less inefficient than distributed diesel and petrol engines. But we take a hit in the meantime due to the cost of totally replacing our current grid system which isn't fit for purpose when it comes to delivering 100kW to each charging bay along a side street at the end of evening rush hour when all the commuters come home and want to top up at more or less the same time.

    Having a grid smart enough to use the national parked-up EV fleet as, say, up to twenty million backup batteries for smoothing output from the renewable generator fleet would be a win, but it's not going to be remotely simple to get it working (and as noted there are those odd periods when the wind ain't blowing).

    On the other hand, climate change is going to "fix" other problems with expanding renewables. Consider the Severn Barage plan—about 5-7GW of tidal barrages for the cost of one EPR reactor. (Tidal power being about the most reliable renewable source out there: as long as we've got a moon, it runs like clockwork.) The Severn Barrage has been repeatedly spiked because of the conservation issues surrounding it—it'd wipe out numerous bird colonies, among other things. But once those birds are dead because we're baking in our own waste heat, the barrage will get built. Right? (Trying to find a silver lining here.)

    PS: but in all that, I forgot to add that I agree with your core point: the UKs transport infrastructure isn't fit for purpose, thanks to Beeching, Thatcher, et al pushing us towards cars uber alles for seven decades in a land that's fundamentally too cramped and energy-scarce for a transport system that requires cheap energy and low passenger density.

    313:

    The Autobahn was the gold standard for roads in the 1930s,

    To some degree I was taken aback by EVERYTHING seemed to be 2 lanes wide and repair work seemingly everywhere.

    But in general in the US we redo ours every decade or few or even more often and fix things. I would have expected more lanes on the routes we took between Frankfort, Stutgart, and Munich with some side detours.

    635 north of Dallas has been a real mess since it opened way back when. 6 lanes total with service roads but it was a bit chaotic. But over the last decade they tore it up and rebuilt it. Now it has 6 lanes in each directions (3 above and 3 below) with 2 lane service roads on each side. You enter and exit the main road off these service roads. They are one lane and don't have any access except to the main 635 and local street intersections.

    Plus pot holes do eventually get fixed in the US. The autobahns we were on in Germany, well, maintenance seemed to be lacking compared to the US which I found surprising. And I lived in the Pittsburgh area for 7 years where a pot hole that would rip the wheel off a car could open up in a few hours in February.

    314:

    You would love the Scottish motorways (not)—they were built on the cheap and are two lanes plus hard shoulder on each carriageway (direction). In England motorways were almost all built as three lanes plus hard shoulder.

    Since the 1980s a bunch of English motorways have been "widened" by removing the hard shoulder and/or narrowing the lanes, thereby converting 3 lane running into 4 or 5 lane running. This makes driving far more stressful (you're constantly making minute adjustments to avoid straying out of your lane) and the effects of a breakdown or shunt more disruptive (there's nowhere to pull over), although modern cars are less likely to break down without warning, so …

    Don't get me started on the roads between Northern England and Scotland, either. They're a disgrace, to the extent that it's easier to fly Edinburgh/London than to drive (or get the train, for that matter—we might get speeds up to 160mph on the east coast main line within my lifetime, but I'm not betting on it).

    315:

    You would love the Scottish motorways (not)—they were built on the cheap and are two lanes plus hard shoulder on each carriageway (direction).

    Sound like some of the "high speed" roads over here built in the 30s and 40s before they figured things out. Scary to drive on a times.

    Of course those roads we traveled in Ireland a couple of summers ago...

    I think we left some road side hedgerow leaves embedded in the side of the car. We did hit them when dodging the tour buses coming the other way. Of course those leaves were the warning system that another inch or two over was a rock wall. [eye roll]

    Yes one thing we can do here is travel long distances at high speed. I have driven the NC - Texas route in each direction. One the southern route the other the northern one. Both times I was doing over 60 mph 90% of the time. 70 or more much of that. Most of the slow downs were when driving around big cities. But I did do it on a weekend one time and at night the other.

    316:

    David L And if the idiot Khan's ideas pass, if he's re-elected next year, I will have to get an OLDER L-R () Series III '79 0r '80, which then classifies as an "Historic vehicle", because existing oiwners won't be allowed to keep theirs, rather than simply mandating that all replacement vehicles must be compliant. .....

    EC @ 303 Certainly all English golf courses, since all the members seem to be fascists .....& all "private" Scottish ones - gotta leave the "Royal & Ancient" though, not that anyhting agiculturally useful would grow there"

    & @ 307 Meanwhile amazing fuckwit Grayling is cancelling electrification of rail ....

    Charlie More London _ Dunedin trains in 4 hrs in the new timetable coming ....

    317:

    Yeah absolutely. That's exactly what I was trying for in the Nat/Dave exchange. Farming big smart animals when food and arable land are both tight makes no sense. When something makes no sense it becomes immoral or expensive or both. Dave's mortified to think his new girlfriend is going to find out his secret. It's not as bad as being a cannibal, but up there with a liking for roast dog.

    I also wanted to get across that Dave's perfectly happy that his van should know literally everything about him no matter how shameful. He has no privacy in his relationship with Nat. None at all, he shares his dirty secrets, his thoughts about his coworkers and overshares his excitement about meeting a possible mate even at the earliest stages. He's got plenty of caution around sharing with a human, so he's not without filters.

    318: 261 - OK, I'll bite. Can you tell me, right now, what the mean wind speed will be from Nov 15th to Dec 15th this year?

    What? No? Oh dear, that actually happend in Scotland a few years back, and co-incided with a period of intense cold (-20C for several days around Invergarry in the Great Glen) and the mean wind speed was under 5kts.

    269 - Well yes, about the heritage body names; I'm pretty sure that the underlying legislation is pretty much the same in GB, if not in NI because the relevant acts are from different years. 273 - Since we've demonstrated that power bars can be accessible, does everything need to be plugged in at all times? 287 - Ever tried land carnivore meat? I haven't but have been told that it is very strongly tasted, to the point that most people find it unpleasant.

    BTW farmed salmon has other issues CF wild fish, like higher fat levels and less muscle tone.

    Pig meat going off - Did you guys miss the bit where Halal and Kosher dietary laws were written before refrigeration was invented? Ignore the religion bit and they're actually good food hygiene practice for the Middle East pre-refrigeration.

    309 - {Redacted because Copywrong} is people! ;-)
    319:

    Actually, my point is that it's not the infratructure that is the problem, but the whole social and economic policy (strategy, whatever). We could fix a lot of problems (including most of the commuting ones), without more than trivial changes to the infrastructure. But we are headed in precisely the opposite direction.

    320:

    Most people flat out don't want to garden. At all.

    Me included. I have a garden, I grow mostly things like pumpkin and silverbeet because they self-seed and are very low effort. I could grow more interesting things in a more orderly fashion but... bah, can't be bothered. It's bad enough filling the chicken feeder every week and checking their water every couple of days without having to constantly supervise plants as well. Cherry tomatoes are another good one, again self-seeding and can be eaten straight off the plant (also feijoas, my tree has finally started producing fruit).

    There would quickly spring up a service industry where people would pay others to do their gardening for them.

    Hey, I know, we could call those people... "farmers" :)

    TBH I didn't mind farming so much except that the pay was a joke. I mostly did the high-paid bits when they were high-paid, but 30 years of neoliberalism and disaster capitalism has eliminated the high pay for those jobs. Witness the constraint cries that "dole bludgers are too lazy to do farm work"... because travelling out into the boonies for 3-6 weeks of uncertain low-paid work just isn't possible if you're in poverty in a city. Especially if, as in Australia, leaving a "job rich area" like a city and voluntarily moving to a "job poor area" means not only do you lose your benefit, you're ineligible for any benefit for six months. So you end up stuck in the boonies, working really hard and often for less than the benefit*, guaranteed that you're going to be unemployed again when the season ends but facing months with no income at all... then politicians and media people profess surprise that people aren't enthusiastic about the "opportunity".

    • benefit is in turn calculated as "80% of the poverty level for you" via a range of allowances and supplements... it's not supposed to be fair, in Australia we offer "a fair go to those who have a go", not "a fair go to those who fail".
    321:

    You can imagine the barrage might come back to life at some point because the birds mudflats will be flooded anyway and it gets bonus points for protecting cardiff, newport, avonmouth, bristol,Gloucester and a large chunk of South Wales key transport links from sea level rise triggered flooding.

    But since we can't even get the (far superior for both power and eco reasons) lagoons built it might be a while.

    322:

    Remember the laws of physics may not change over the next 100 years, but power requirements certainly will. Drastic lowering of power needs could well make room scale wireless totally practical.

    323:

    Drastic lowering of power needs could well make room scale wireless totally practical.

    For information processing devices, of course. For devices using electricity to do work we're already moving towards batteries rather than cables.

    plugged in chargers On a related subject, in houses that are being heated we could care less about efficiency of electronics once we transition off of gas, since we'll be heating our houses electrically anyway.

    energy source at a timescale of 100 years, do we get to assume reasonably cheap fusion power? i.e is my house sipping eco-renewable-electricity as and when it needs to, or is it still in full on consumerist mode?

    324:

    The problem with tidal is that there are very few places it's practical (so a small body of experience, few specialized suppliers, etc.), it's expensive -- it's a big area, lots of concrete, etc., so no risk tolerance at all -- and we simply do not know how fast the sea level is going to rise. The usual level of risk tolerance for that scale of project looks at that and goes "too risky".

    (the usual level of risk tolerance is not wrong.)

    In general, distributed, robust, and redundant systems are required in the time of angry weather. Big central generating systems have unexpected risk issues and distribution issues.

    325:

    In both cases, we are close to the limits of what is achievable using developments of existing technology. We MAY see a breakthrough and get completely new, much more efficient classes of technology, but that's not the way the smart money bets. As you say, domestically, the ranking is (1) heating/cooling, (2) cooking, lighting, motorised equipment and high-end desktops / gaming computers (in some order), and the rest can be ignored. Wireless power transmission is hopeless for the first two.

    Even if you believe the (current) hyped-up claims for fusion, it ain't gonna be soon, and it ain't gonna be cheap.

    326:

    The main problem with tidal energy is to make the equipment last when the full static load changes sign twice a day.

    (And if you really want to pull energy out of the oceans, mount a turbine between to of the Færøe Islands :-)

    And fusion disappears further and further into the future the more we research it, so forget that...

    327:

    TJ @ 274: for one thing, ammonia synthesis is trivial. YES ? SO? AND? Everyone goes on & ON & ON about Ammonia-based fuel cycles as if it was easy & trivial, yet we are seeing absolutely ZERO sign of this happening. I would appreciate botha political & technical explanation as to why this is the case & possibly, how to rectify the problems

    Well, I thought ammonia would be a cool fuel, until I looked it up a bit more.

    The problem is that the nitrogen has to go somewhere, and it typically ends up as some sort of oxide, plus or minus some hydrogen NOx for short. NOx is a well-known air pollutant and cause of acid rain. The brew can include nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, nitrous oxide, nitric acid, nitrous acid(HONO), dinitrogen pentoxide(N2O5), peroxyacetyl nitrate(PAN), alkyl nitrates (RONO2), peroxyalkyl nitrates (ROONO2), the nitrate radical (NO3), and peroxynitric acid(HNO4).

    Of these, nitrous oxide (N2O) is a greenhouse gas 198 times more potent over 100 years than CO2. It's regulated by the Kyoto Protocol. While yes, you can burn NH3 and not get N2O if everything's tuned right, the world has demonstrated repeatedly that tuning everything right all the time is not a high priority.

    NOx is already a major technical and regulatory target for cleaning up the air, and that whole 2016 Volkswagen emissions scandal was about NOx emissions.

    So yeah, switching from methane (34 times more potent than CO2) to something that by accident produces an even more potent greenhouse gas, for about a third of the bang per gallon, might not be the smartest move we could make. Even if we avoided the N2O emissions, the smog and acid rain would make cities hell and decimate forests and crops when we need more of both.

    328:

    If Climate Change goes the way I expect it to, I'm guessing people won't have any choice about whether they garden... Don't forget to save your seeds!

    329:

    Since we've demonstrated that power bars can be accessible, does everything need to be plugged in at all times?

    Hmmm. TV - No but PITA if not - plus it goes to almost off Soundbar - No but Tivo - Yes Modem - Yes Router - Yes Switches - Yes Access Point - Yes AppleTV - No but BlueRay - No Printer - Yes Tivo Remote - No but

    As to the "but" things they take a while to turn on. Some measured in minutes. And some get stupid when turned off. Some like the AppleTV seem to be good about dropping power when not displaying to a TV.

    But again to my point. Flipping switches all day long is a long term loose. In general people will not do it. Which gets back to my point about more standardized power sources for various scales of things. And these sources can be smarter about how much they draw when in various modes.

    One issue is that almost all of the above use 120v AC (240v in most places outside of North America.) Most don't need more than 5vDC or 12vDC. So each of these does a conversion inside of it and like the shuttle has to be man rated for dangerous stuff. And as I and others have mentioned USB is headed this way. Especially USB-C. Maybe that combined with PoE a few more generations down the road will get rid of much of the need for 120/240vAC everywhere. Do LED bulbs really need to be 120/240vAC?

    Power in homes in 1909 was knob and tube with a fused box. At what 30 amp service for a typical home? Ungrounded. And if you needed an outlet you screwed in this Y shaped thing into a light socket that allowed you to screw in a bulb in one leg and a socket (ungrounded) in the other leg. Rotary clunky switches for turning lights on and off. And so on. Today we have outlets (grounded and CGFI in wet possible areas (in the US)) every 6' plus I think the code here is 200 Amp service minimum on new construction or big remodels. In 2119 I hope we don't just have 120/240 outlets with more plugs and lots of switches to flip connected to a 400 Amp service.

    At this point in time DC is a PITA for such things but in 2119 who knows? Plus we might have 400A or maybe 1KVA service panels to deal with our batteries, solar, and electric car and the flow going both in and out.

    I CAN see better lower power required refrigerators but to cook food you need real heat. But then again we do a lot with our Breville counter top convection oven.

    I will miss gas if it goes away. There is a reason that phrase "cooking on gas" gets used.

    One thought I keep wondering about is just how much better can earth as a heat sink heat pumps work? And if large amounts of people are extracting or putting heat in the ground what is the result?

    330:

    Most proposals to use ammonia as fuel do not envisage lighting it on fire - it is mostly considered as a convenient way to store hydrogen to run fuel cells on. or directly fed to fuel cells. Either way, that emits N2 and H20, with no side products.

    The main issues keeping from wide adoption is that fuel cells need to get better, and that gasoline is just not expensive enough yet to force a mass switch.

    Honestly, I expect batteries to be the future for personal transport, and for ammonia to end up as a niche solution due to the collapse of the gasoline industry - Things like ships shifting to it because without mass combustion engine transport, there is no source of cheap bunker fuel, none of the downsides of fuel cells matter much to a ship on a multi-week haul, and harbors already have infrastructure in place to handle anhydrous in bulk.

    331:

    If Climate Change goes the way I expect it to, I'm guessing people won't have any choice about whether they garden.

    Again, I, and I think many others, will offer to dig ditches, put in that fence you want, re-roof your house, whatever, before we garden.

    332:

    Or, in the same spirit, "pigs follow cows."

    Depending on where you live, you may (or may not) have the ability to sue over your firing, as mental health status is sometimes protected. Worth looking into anyway.

    Regardless, I'm sorry about your troubles, and yes, sometimes Trump causes me a loss of sleep. (Sleep hygiene is something I practice carefully, and I don't ever drink during the day, or socially, but if Trump or "Trump" is bothering me I'll sometimes have a shot glass of rum around midnight. (I can't use the best-ever sleep aid, as I could be randomly drug tested for job reasons.))

    A friend of mine has trouble sleeping, and sometimes becomes irrational. Fortunately, he takes it seriously when I say "you're sounding psycho, get some sleep."

    As to becoming an emergency medic, my son told me about watching a PET team dealing with someone who was having a breakdown, and that there was actually a member of the team who carried a huge net, just like a butterfly net but human-sized... I now know what I want to be when I grow up - the net-wielder on the PET team!

    Anyway, I hope your life improves!

    333:

    I've eaten both grasshoppers and crickets. The grasshoppers were particularly tasty, something like a garlic-butter popcorn. The crickets less so, though I suspect the real difference was in how they were spiced.

    334:

    I remember my father driving us on those roads as a youngster. He had the usual minor troubles driving on the wrong side of the street, but the big shocker was the mountain road - just as you described - between England and Scotland where some nutcase speed-demon drove right down the centerline between our car and a semi-truck (lorry.) It's not hard to have a flashback to that one, even though nobody got hurt.

    335:

    My solution was to get my Prius, which essentially pays for the loan via all the gas I don't use, and rent when I need something bigger.

    336:

    I wrote some very similar stuff when working on my novel, for very similar reasons, like this exchange between two women and one of their AIs:

    “Your AI is talking to you about my sex life!?” Now Mrs. Rastogi definitely looked pissed.

    “You've got it easy,” said Angie, “She writes porn about mine!”

    “I do not,” said Rosita out of her exterior speakers. This was an old argument. “I just record what she does!”

    “It's nothing like I do,” Angie objected hotly. It was the first time they'd had this discussion with anyone but Jimmy. “It's the very worst porn ever!”

    “But human porn is highly inaccurate! Mine may not arouse you, but at least it's real!”

    “Okay,” said Mrs. Rastogi, “I've got to know. What does AI porn sound like?”

    “Angie?” said Rosita.

    Angie, still aghast at the unexpected turn in the conversation, but desperately wanting to avoid both Mrs. Rastogi’s unhappiness over Rosita and the things Mrs. Rastogi had unconsciously revealed about herself for at least a couple more minutes, said “Sure, Rosita, let's hear your hottest-ever description of human love.”

    “At 23:15:02:78, Subject One's upper lips parted.” Angie was always 'Subject One.' “At 23:15:03:22 Subject One began to vocalize, releasing a moan which began at 56 decibels and 190 vibrations per second. The moan rose rapidly in both strength and frequency, with the frequency peaking at 468 vibrations per second and the volume peaking at 92 decibels, then proceeding downwards in both volume and frequency as Subject Two began (deleted as this is not an adult blog.) The total length of the moan was 2.8763 seconds. In the course of the moan, Subject One exhaled .78 liters of air, with atmospheric gases as estimated from minor changes in the room’s gas mix. See Table 22.”

    “Angie,” said Rosita, “Can I display the time/frequency and time/volume graphs of your moan?”

    “Knock yourself out.” Angie, who was never embarrassed about sex, found herself turning red. She turned Rosita so that both she and Mrs. Rastogi could see the screen.

    “Personally,” said Rosita, “this graph was the high-point of your lovemaking that night. Look at the pretty curves!” With her experience of AI Angie could see exactly what Rosita was talking about. In the final second of the moan, she’d somehow managed a little trill, with both volume and frequency modulating at once. Given any AI’s aesthetic experience of iteration, they were bound to find the graph… arousing? “AI have compiled together to this graph,” Rosita continued, “it’s very sexy.”

    337:

    Well, that sounds A LOT like the old A6 which was 3 lanes by design (the 2 edge lanes being the running lanes, and the central one being an overtaking lane). The A8 from Glasgow to Edinburgh was similar in bits, and Nojay may (repeat may) remember it.

    338:

    Sorry, just looking by shortly, hell of a week, getting fired, getting visited by the police because people thought you might be a danger to yourself, telling 4 psychiatrists you are no danger to yourself and others, at least not more than the rest of humanity, but getting a ticket at a concert booked out a month in advance at the entrance.

    Sorry to hear about the job loss. Hope things start going better.

    339:

    It's apparently not so clear that crickets are better than chickens at converting food into meat on a per weight basis.

    That said, insects have one huge advantage, that's also a bit of a disadvantage: they're a lot more fungible.

    Take one pig and a pig's weight of crickets. You take a quarter of the pig, that pig is most likely dead, and you've got to process the rest. Take a quarter of your pig's weight of crickets, and the other 75% crickets just keep making more cricket babies.

    The flip side of this is that it's probably easier to contain a single pig than it is to keep all of 200 pounds of crickets caged, and things like crickets can be pests if too many get loose.

    Still, if the goal is to make meat in smaller spaces, insects are definitely a way to go.*

    *Of course, we could just tell farmers to stop spraying insecticides on their fields, and harvest the crickets and grasshoppers that come out for their crops. This was traditional in parts of Africa and Mexico, until the pesticides made it more problematic. There's a poignant little note here about rural children in parts of Africa getting malnourished as a result of modern ag practices designed to increase crop yields. When their parents were children, eating the bugs in the fields was normal for kids, and a great supplemental source of protein for them. The adults didn't need so much protein, and ate a more vegetarian diet. With modern agriculture and more pesticides, the grasshoppers disappeared and the parents had to buy more protein for the kids, or watch them get stunted. There's a nasty little lesson here for everyone who thinks that handwaving everyone onto a plant based diet is simple or easy. The same thing's happening to songbirds across the world. The parents may be able to get by with birdseed from feeders, but their chicks need caterpillars. Idiots spraying their gardens and planting non-natives mean there are fewer caterpillars, fewer young birds, and fewer song birds.

    340:

    Nope. Definitely two lanes, though it might have been a side road. This would have been in 1979.

    341:

    It was relatively rare, especially in that area, to have a two-lane road wide enough for that. HOWEVER, at that date, some of the death alley roads (the ones with a two-way central lane) had been repainted to have a single central line.

    342:

    "Death Alley." In the U.S. we call them "suicide lanes."

    343:

    Sorry dude: most hydrogen cells run on atmospheric gas, not oxygen, so nitrogen does become part of the equation and some NOx gets emits from fuel cells. Ditto with using anhydrous. Unless you're advising people to carry tanks of oxygen around with them to make it work, the process emits NOx.

    Thing you have to remember is that I got enamored with ammonia a couple of years back. The proposals for it always talked about "if everything is done properly, there's no NOx emissions." Unfortunately, stuff is rarely done properly. As with fuel cells, the default (for safety reasons) is not to carry oxygen around and react it, but to use the atmosphere in something that more resembles burning. That's a problem, and I'm pretty sure that's one big reason it's not being used.

    The other is that ammonia's energy density isn't anything to write home about. When you start lugging that much weight around, it's simpler to make it a battery, because those are continually improving.

    344:

    If Climate Change goes the way I expect it to, I'm guessing people won't have any choice about whether they garden... Don't forget to save your seeds!

    While I happen to agree, it's worth looking at what happened to Havanna and Kinshasa when they did this. Cubans, at least, lost 10% of their body weight on average following the collapse of the USSR, and they did garden every place they could. It beats starving by a long shot, but pleasant?

    Actually, the Russians, with their dacha gardens, did a much better job of switching to informal agriculture to avoid starvation when the USSR collapsed. So long as they keep their rural family gardens, I think they're actually in a better place to deal with climate change than most of the people in the US are.

    345:

    The brew can include nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, nitrous oxide, nitric acid, nitrous acid(HONO), dinitrogen pentoxide(N2O5), peroxyacetyl nitrate(PAN), alkyl nitrates (RONO2), peroxyalkyl nitrates (ROONO2), the nitrate radical (NO3), and peroxynitric acid(HNO4).

    Alas, no octanitrocubane (C8(NO2)8).

    If a Biggest Breakthrough Since Breakfast technology is not available for mere money from supplier catalogues right now there's usually a good reason (or three). There may be ways to make ammonia burning work in today's world of clean air and ultra-low pollution zones (shut up, Greg) but it's not yet ready for production right now.

    346:

    Please. It just took what, a year? Year and a half? More? for a Major Construction Firm to dig a tunnel under the major road outside work across the street (I'll be willing to explain this further in late August.) I was saying for months that it would have gone so much faster and cheaper if they'd just hired 100 unemployed miners from WV to dig the tunnel.

    347:

    (and @68): y'know, I think Walter Jon Williams did a number on this is Hardwired.

    Me...15 years ago, I would really have liked to see the client list for the Princeton investment firm in... can't remember if it was Turks, or Grand Cayman. (Please ignore where the Shrub went to college.)

    But given the way so many banks, etc, (see Krebonsecurity.com today about Fiserv) do security, there will be great fun when one or more of these real cracking groups, not the wannabee who buy tools, decides to either get really rich, or to make a statement... and goes after the tax haven firms, and transfers money and valuables out, through several layers of other tax havens, and into a real bank. Fun, fun, fun all the way when the money's really gone.

    348:

    I showed the house I used to own (with an ex and the bank), you mentioned 5000'^2 homes. I was assuming you were talking about my old house, and so listed the square footage of it, less than half of that 5k'^2 you talked about.

    349:

    Around here, it took a Major Construction Company 2 years to build a bridge over a drainage ditch (the sort you can jump over), using c. 1,000 tons of concrete. Seriously.

    Of course, it had to be able to carry a 300 ton track-laying vehicle, once, and 17 ton buses thereafter.

    350:

    I can't see how a split level can be less expensive to roof. With either a ranch style, or a multistory, you've got one plain roof, while with the split level, I've got two roofs, with all the soffits, edging, etc, for the one that overhangs the other, and you have the flashing, etc, for the roof that ends up against the top level of the house. Plus the whole overhang. On both sides...

    ||____ ||_| ||

    (Asterisks because htfuckingml won't accept more than one or two spaces in a row.)

    351:

    Wireless anything takes a * of a lot more power than wired. And, for communications, it's always slower (unless you're using lascom). I have our computers wired to the switch, so we actually have gigabit connectivity, with no drive-by logins.

    And as other folks noted, charging is a lot slower. Hell, charging over USB is slower than plugging the damn thing into a wall wort.

    352:

    Yeah, they tore up most of the trolley lines, and abandoned passenger lines, and the honchos who run Amtrak aren't clear on what they're doing, other than for vacation travel (well, except for the Northeast Corridor), and the GOP always underfunds it, by as much as half.

    On the upside, a lot of cities have started putting trolley lines back in.

    A lot of city busses in multiple cities have converted or replaced diesel buses with natural gas burning ones.

    Waiting for trolley-buses to come back.

    My favorite, though I haven't ridden it, is the Girard Ave trolley in Philly - I saw one, a few years ago, and was utterly boggled: it was a PCA car (designed under FDR), and retrofitted for HVAC.

    353:

    Garden here. My new lady and I just worked the plot (4'x12'), and planted last month - two kinds of tomatoes, a couple of peppers, and some herbs. She wants to plant lettuce, I think, and some beans &/or squash.

    Zucchinis are Right Out. (We don't need enough to feed a Worldcon....)

    354:

    Your generalizations there are seriously triggering me.

    When discussing wired vs wireless: • "Wired" can mean multiple technologies; I tend to mean ethernet (cat3, cat5, cat5e, cat6, etc.). • "Wireless" can mean multiple technologies; consumer wireless tends to mean "WiFi", aka IEEE 802.11 variants (a, b, c, g, n, ac, whatever they've added in the past two hours...). • "Speed" can mean bandwidth or latency, or a combination of both. • Current wireless has higher latency and lower bandwidth than current wired. • Current wireless has lower latency and higher bandwidth than older wired (100tx) • Upgrading wireless in a home is much, much, much, much, much easier than upgrading ethernet in a home. (See below for fun story.) • Not all 802.11 technologies are created equal; some are surprisingly low power, but low bandwidth; some are low power, but high bandwidth (and, in at least a couple cases, very low latency as well) -- but have a distance measured in inches, not yards or metres. • Not all wired technologies are created equal: cat3 vs cat5 vs fibre of various sorts. Different amounts of bandwidth & latencies, although the cat* are at least backwards compatible (i.e., you can use cat7 for an application that only expects cat3). • Not all wireless technologies are created equal: I know quite a few people who use microwaves, because it is not financially feasible to get a physical cable laid. (This includes one person who apparently climbed to the top of a ~80ft redwood to mount his dish.)

    We're using a combination of ethernet and WiFi in our house. But we're experts, and professionals at that, and have different requirements for different devices.

    Fun ethernet story: We just bought a house. It's a relatively new house, built in the 90s. The original owner, who had it built, was a geeky guy indeed. He had cat3 run all throughout the house! And X10 set up, with custom-built Z80 controller boards!

    Only he (or his contractor) ran the cables, and stapled them into place, instead of using conduit.

    At some point, someone decided cat3 wasn't sufficient, and put in a mix of cat5 and cat5e. Only they couldn't easily remove the existing cat3, so they just ran more cables. Meaning that the wire closet (yes, there's a wire closet in the garage) has something close to 50 cable bundles. Of which only about half are useful, the cat3 cables generally being pushed back into the walls, or hidden behind blank wallplates.

    Always use conduit when running physical cables. Always!

    355:

    sigh I wasn't dealing with networking when Cat-3 was out. When I started doing sysadmin, it was already Cet-5. I'm using Cat 5e or 6 at home.

    Both my router and the downstairs switch are 1G.

    Clue: my title at work is sr. Linux sysadmin.

    356:

    Nojay want big boom?

    I'd be a little scared of a system that put out gaseous octonitrocubane. I'd also be a little worried that the mix was, erm, burning inefficiently if something as inspiring as ONC came out the tail pipe.

    Still, I suppose you could make any car fly with that stuff, if you put a tough enough pusher plate between the car and the ONC. Landing it at the end of the trip, Orion-style, would probably need some good shocks, too.

    357:

    _Moz_ @ 287:

    "Pigs are omnivores"

    So are chickens. But that actually makes the problem worse, because their digestive systems are less efficient at processing a vegetarian diet. We've already seen that feeding food animals on meat waste is difficult to do safely, so any meat the pigs eat needs to be sourced outside the meat-for-human-food chain.

    IIRC chickens are more efficient that pigs at turning food into meat, and that's the thing we care about. At the opposite extreme are farmed salmon, which are so inefficient that the equivalent with land animals is almost unheard of (we don't farm land carnivores for meat).

    Why would you want to feed meat to pigs ... or chickens? Factory farm chickens may be more efficient, but free range chickens and pigs are about equal. Plus pigs will eat stuff chickens can't.

    358:

    Charlie Stross @ 309:

    "If you want to avoid factory farming, pork is more sustainable than either beef or chicken"

    Naah: I think the future is textured meat products spewed out by 3D printers running on mashed locusts or mealworms.

    Insects trash vertebrates in terms of efficient conversion of inedible plant biomass into human-compatible nutrients, and also side-step the "ick" factor in slaughtering something with a face (and a big, complex nervous system).

    Insects are a dietary taboo in the west, if presented as insects. But we're willing to eat textured protein products like Quorn&tm; or tofu, as long as it looks and tastes like something else and we don't have to read the small print about what it's made from.

    So: farm bugs, turn bugs into a protein puree, then either turn them into bulk vegemince/chunks/ersatz-chicken nuggets (the cheap stuff), or feed it to a whacky 3D printer to make novelty turducken or steaks.

    How close is that to being ready to market? When will we be able to go into Tesco and buy bug-burgers?

    359:

    That's very cool. I like the way The AI isn't just a person. The anonymimisation was cool too.

    360:

    On a related subject, in houses that are being heated we could care less about efficiency of electronics once we transition off of gas, since we'll be heating our houses electrically anyway.<\i>

    Yes, but the fraction of houses that are being heated -- ever -- is considerably less than 100%. 40% and growing of the global population lives in the tropics. So they don't want artificial space heating.

    361:

    And in a world that hits 1200 ppm equivalent (does anyone in their heart of hearts doubt we'll hit that) the clouds go away and we jump straight to a world 8C hotter. Last time this happened there were crocodiles in the Arctic. No one will want a little extra heater in their home.

    BTW, a couple of months ago I was riding my motorcycle home in the rain and the bike told me the temperature was 33C. I'm not even in the tropics. It was only about 40 minutes in those conditions but I was stuffed for hours afterwards.

    362:

    You can buy cricket meal now on BigMuddy, although it's at steak prices (economics of scale, per usual). It looks like people are fiddling with commercial textured insect protein, but right now it's a novelty item, as bugs always have been in the US. It appears to be cheaper than cultured vertebrate meat, for what that's worth.

    I've got an insect recipe book from the 1970s, which is about as groovy as it sounds. It shows how long the idea of beating the western insect taboo has been around. Decades ago, some friends of mine put on a fundraiser for a small town natural history museum that consisted of a five course meal with insects in every course. I got to try the leftovers, which were quite yummy. They complained about how expensive it was to get insects fit for human consumption, but their gala raised some money. As a fundraiser for a similar group (or SF society, for that matter--foods of the future!), bugging out for dinner probably has a certain cachet.

    363:

    Why would you want to feed meat to pigs ... or chickens?

    The only reason I can think of to care whether an animal is a herbivore or an omnivore is if you're intending to feed it meat. Surely if you're not doing that it doesn't matter? So I assumed from your comment that you were thinking of a significantly meat-based diet for your meat animal raising.

    Most herbivores eat insects and will/can eat small amounts of meat, so it doesn't really matter if there's, say, weevils or whey protein in your goat feed, the goats won't care (and it will probably help). But once it gets to 20% or 50% of their energy intake, your deer/tilapia whatever will get sick. Your pigs and chickens will get excited :)

    This issue is where you get the meat - there's just not enough slaughter waste available, and destroying wild fish to feed salmon is a death spiral. But chickens will eat crickets (also slugs, snails, mice, small children...), as will pigs. It's just that pigs can't catch crickets etc the way chickens can (although they are better with small children. I suppose it depends what you have available).

    364:

    Zucchinis are Right Out. (We don't need enough to feed a Worldcon....)

    I planted pumpkins. Then I discovered that even quite small, green pumpkins give my lawnmower indigestion. So now I have a big pile of non-mulched pumpkin vine and a pile of small, inedible pumpkins (technically you can eat them, but the peeling time to eating time ratio is terrible). Since I also have a large collection of big, edible pumpkins I am composting the little ones. Also giving away pumpkins.

    The mulching mower is awesome with most garden waste, I just throw it on the lawn and mow it, then rake up the obvious bits and put them in the recycling. It all gets eaten by organisms both macro and micro, and goes back to the garden (some via the chicken to egg to Moz to composting toilet route). The pumpkin vines have killed off many of the weeds in the garden, so shortly I will be digging it over and deciding what to plant next.

    But today... it's time to reinstall Windows. Which is like weeding, but even less fun.

    365:

    The easy way to cook pumpkin is slice it in half, and place on cookie sheet cut side down. Bake at 350 for about 45 minutes, that depends on size so experiment. In the link they talk about scooping out the seeds first, but it's easier to just cook everything then scoop out the seeds and meat after it cools.

    https://minimalistbaker.com/how-to-roast-pumpkin/

    Experiment with the small ones that you don't want to mess with now to understand the process with the pumpkin size and your oven. YMMV

    366:

    The easy way to cook pumpkin is slice it in half, and place on cookie sheet cut side down. Bake at 350 for about 45 minutes, that depends on size so experiment. In the link they talk about scooping out the seeds first, but it's easier to just cook everything then scoop out the seeds and meat after it cools.<\i>

    You can do the same thing in a microwave but faster. Or do the first part in the microwave and finish up in a conventional oven if you like that.

    (For some reason people don't seem to have caught on to how versatile a cooking implement the microwave is, either by itself or paired with a conventional/convection oven.)

    367:

    Hope so. Quite a few things to do soon, the Vietnamese are going to celebrate Vesak on May 12th.

    I said it's hard not to sangha ATM, and I was only partly joking.

    368:

    Australians and New Zealanders are across cooking pumpkin. It's absolutely a staple food. I understand in some places it's considered food for animals. I eat it in most meals. I'm sure Moz is the same.

    369:

    The use case for NH3 is not as a combustion fuel, but as proton storage for alkaline fuel cells. It's not a sensible choice as a combustion fuel.

    In a fuel cell, it's preferable to methane or methanol because it's easier to get the protons off an N than a C and you can use non-membrane fuel cell designs. (Membranes are wretched fragile.) And we're going to need pumpable fuel for trains, heavy equipment, notably heavy farm equipment, and ships. (Average use for tractors is fine for batteries; peak use, not so much.) You have to run the fuel cell a bit rich to avoid NOx issues but it's been demonstrated.

    My answer for Greg's question is that it gets no funding because it might work. An outfit like Ballard (who make hydrogen fuel cells) is perfect; it's obviously high-tech, it's got some niche applications, and it's entirely useless because you just can't store hydrogen in any useful quantity. Great example of appearing to do something without really changing anything.

    Batteries get some funding because of portable electronics; there isn't enough oil money to prevent cell phone development (just try to keep social primates from talking!), but anything that seriously challenges incumbency doesn't get funding. Nobody is seriously funding developmental grid-scale storage, for example. (You can see the same pattern in agriculture, where the developments in no-till, no-pesticide growing happened because of stubborn individuals. There was zero developmental funding and there ought to have been.) There have been a couple of attempts by the US military to get non-fossil-hydrocarbon vehicle prime mover tech out of the lab and into developmental prototypes, and like the efforts to point out that Naval Station Norfolk is going to have some issues with sea level rise it's been stopped by Congress.

    If you follow electric vehicles, you may have noticed that Mercedes-Benz EQC, the first example for an entire product line expected to reach full scale production in 2022. Ok, that's interesting. A product line is more buy-in that anyone else seems to have demonstrated in the auto sector, what's going on? (Electric vehicles cut the fundamental price point and thus the overall amount of money in the sector and thereby the number of companies in that sector; nobody who builds cars wants to go electric. For them, going electric is bad.) Then there's Volvo, which has -- very quietly -- acknowledged that they also have an electric platform coming out in 2022. Note that Volvo is owned by Chinese automaker Geely. Look at the current Chinese practice of banning combustion tech busses. Go hmm. Figure the carbon bubble's going to pop by 2022 as the PRC outright bans sales of new combustion-powered cars?

    Getting out in front is a good plan if you're an automaker; you have better survival odds that way as an automaker. None of the nominally North American "big three" show any much sign of trying to do this. And while the US can keep right on with gasoline materially, it'd be hard to see how the Chinese and Europe deciding to go hard electric for cars wouldn't pop the carbon bubble. Which is going to be very interesting, financially.

    370:

    Passive heat rejection designs are important; humans are 100 W space heaters, and a bunch of people in an insulated space -- and the space has to be insulated because you have to have at least a few hours to fix the heat pump during a heat excursion -- will heat it up a lot.

    The downside is that passive heat rejection does not go with increased density as a means of reducing energy costs for basic services. It's a pretty tough problem.

    371:

    The easy way to cook pumpkin

    I am bemused at the idea that I'd deliberately grow something in my garden without at least some idea how to prepare it and eat it. But just for the record, I can indeed cook and eat pumpkin. The problem, such as it is, is more that after a couple of months of eating pumpkin, silverbeet and a few random bits of lettuce and tomato, that it gets quite boring. I've made pumkin chips, road pumpkin, pumpkin soup, dried pumpkin slices (they look kinda like dried mango but taste different), pumpkin pasta, I even tried pumpkin and chocolate chip muffins. The pile of pumpkins outside my back door still laughs at me every time I go in or out.

    This is pushing me to diversify my gardening, or at least switch to butternut pumpkins because they're easier to peel. But sadly the local aphids prevent me growing brassica, and I'm not wildly keen on peas and beans (makez fartz). I will keep ordering random stuff from the local seed shop until I succeed!

    372:

    I googled "peeling a pumpkin" and now understand. HA!

    Never knew that was possible. For decades I would roast, then scoop everything out. So pumpkin has always been mashed, never solid enough for chips, etc... That's why I usually keep canned pumpkin in the pantry and only cook the ones I get as presents on the holidays.

    I usually make a big batch of soup with canned pumpkin, black beans, and posole, with sour cream and ro-tel salsa, along with a pound of hot Italian ground sausage. A variation on calabacitas, where I use zucchini, pinto beans and yellow corn instead. Once I work down the other soups I have in the freezer, I need to make another batch of pumpkin soup, and calabacitas soup.

    My mouth is watering already.

    Thanks...

    373:

    BTW, try growing onions and garlic mixed in among all your plants. The big bulb onions, I forget the variety. The flowers that come up from the onion especially seem to control the aphids. My mom would plant them everywhere, not to eat but to protect the roses and such.

    374:

    Pumpkins - bleugh! Meanwhile my first 3 full-rows of tomatoes are out, 3 other varieties are in the allotment (made-out-of-recycled-scraps)-greenhouse the first row of peas, p;lanted 1st week of March have just started to flower ( There's anothe 8 rows coming up behind them, planted one row a week ... The spuds are in & the first earlies ("Foremost") are showing their tops, I have courgettes & beans in pots at home, ready to be planted-out as soon as they are big enough & my first try at growing shallots & onions seems to be doing well. The Wild garlic is just coming to an end & the leeks will finish soon, as they start to "bolt", but the "Chinese Garlic" will go on leafing through to November, now & the bulb (conventional) garlic is doing very well indeed. Most if not all of the fruit trees now have set ( but very tiny) fruits on them

    375:

    Yes, I live right next door to one of those places (we're usually quoted a second largest tidal range in the world, but i've seen at least two places put as #1. We've had proposals to barrage off our estuary forever, which Charlie referred to. They suck for wildlife since the involve messing with many square miles of mudflats. So barrage is petty much dead. But we also have proposals for tidal lagoon power. Those get built a bit further out where low tide does not expose seabed. And yes, you start small and learn lessons, exactly what is proposed. In both cases what you build looks quite like a sea defence. The lagoons for instance can be built along a coast with small gaps between and set up to take the high tide peak

    376:

    Fusion is not dissapearing FURTHER into the future as we go along. If anything we are now gradually catching up with when it should be working usefully. Plus - 100 year timescale - for all the engineering difficulty involved that is an awful long time.

    377:

    The flip side of this is that it's probably easier to contain a single pig than it is to keep all of 200 pounds of crickets caged, and things like crickets can be pests if too many get loose.

    I don't know how many people here have read the cautionary tale of ordering a box of crickets from the internet, but for those who haven't been amused by stupid cricket stories lately here's your chance...

    378:

    Pumpkins, in the restricted sense, are pretty awful, true - the only mature Cucurbita pepo I have found worth eating is Little Gem (a.k.a. Gem/Rolet) - but Moz may be gowing C. maxima (the hubbards, e.g. Queensland Blue), which are very good. Even for immature ones, I prefer Tromboncino d'Albenga (C. moschata).

    379:

    I remember when the proponents were talking about fusion power being 10 years away from going into service, then 20, then 30, and they are now talking merely time to a sustainable reaction. Even for fission, it was 18 years from a sustainable reaction to the first power plant.

    380:

    First of, thanks for the compassion.

    Second of, well, my mental health is actually quite well. I'll try the somewhat short version, which I suck at, because I either leave out details or get too long.

    I just told people I had a history of depression, and, err, hm, "playfully" thinking how to do the perfect suicide at times to calm yourself between 1998 and 2005 indicated it might have been more severe than I thought. Add to this I'm quite emotional at times and was devastated when they told me, and I was "not quite there", so people at work thought I might be suicidal and sent the police. Shows me they like me. And I really mean that.

    Answering the door at 2 o'clock in the morning was somewhat stressful, especially when trying to sleep and thinking about making an appeal. After some talk I got them to not take me to the hospital at once, but I promised to go there in the morning. Do I have to add I didn't get any sleep after that?

    In the morning it was time for my methylphenidate refill, so I went to my shrink and told him about the situation. He indicated he didn't judge me suicidal. First psychiatrist.

    After that I went to the hospital, talked first with one intern and then with the psychiatrist in charge, I'll leave out the details, let's just say after me telling the first guy I take a psychostimulant and him asking me if I consumed any substances, e.g. cannabis or amphetamines, I had problems staying serious.

    OK, psychiatrist two and three decided I was no danger to myself or others, so I went home. After that my cohabitant asked me what was the matter, and we did a recap. I told him that I had cried, which is normal for me, as I said, I'm quite emotional, and I think me getting back there after some years of being somewhat blunted by the fluoxetine was a good thing, and when he saw they had offered me an "elective stay", he said things might be more serious, and I should visit again.

    One of his former cohabitants dieing under somewhat murky circumstances of course played into this.

    Next day was First of May, so again I went to the hospital, talked to a psychiatrist, this time just one, on emergency duty, and she also said she saw no risk. I got a paper, and everybody was, well, not exactly happy but somewhat content.

    (At about this time, a somewhat pissed off and trolling part of me indicated now might be the perfect time to off yourself and troll everybody. Let's call it Renton or Loki. I get by quite well with him lately, he can be quite creative...)

    Oh, and the main reason for the firing was me being quite open and somewhat talkative at times, can we agree that ADDING something I have to talk about to get over it is not exactly the best thing to to? With most people agreeing I stop to talk when told, and going from "we need to get it under control, but we're far from escalating" to getting fired in one step is somewhat crass. OK, HR are overworked...

    (Oh, and I visited Mhairi/Freya's ex-boyfriend at my now former workplace, it was short and quite calm, but quite, err, informative. And there is the story of a friend studying chemistry getting taken to the hospital against his will because a friend thought he might be suicidal, so I'm quite cooperative when people think me a danger to myself and others. Fun listening to Nine Inch Nails, Ministry and Tori Amos with this friend back in the day, though him painting his room black was overdoing it somewhat, and I guess I was the only one not stoned on that evening back in 2002 or 2003. But I digress...)

    I guess it's a typical Trottelreiner event.

    Thing with Trump is, the guy is proud of sleeping only 3 hours a day, which might explain part of his behaviour. Let's just say I wouldn't stay that, err, yes, somewhat calm if I didn't sleep 7 to 8 hours a day.

    I plan to go to a psytrance party soon, Loki suggests scoring a few hundred mikes of acid at it, not for then, but for the summer, with some holiday after it to work it out. The rest of me doesn't object, 100 µg of LSD can't be much weirder than what I described above, and I guess we can agree I have a weird, but quite high stress tolerance?

    (No, I never graduated above THC, why don't people believe me?)

    381:

    As for the emergency medicine, one thing quite common for AD(H)S is calming down in stress situations, it's far from universal, the syndrome is quite heterogenous, and it isn't even always the case in me. Let's call it nature's own ritalin.

    Problem is, you might be calm when helping somebody injured and dieing in a car crash, but you have to deal with it afterward. And you can become a sick type of thrill seeker.

    Which might explain some of the things from the past I have to talk about. AFAIK Mhairi/Freya and me even talked about us being shit magnets back in the day...

    382:

    Oh, and sorry for derailing this thread somewhat, but we're past the 300 mark...

    383:

    No one minds a derail like that.

    There's nothing I can do from here other than offer hopes and prayers (ie, try to get you to smile ironically).

    So hopes and prayers it is then.

    384:

    "My expectation is that the Climate Migrants will move out of Florida and Louisiana to the Rustbelt states, which will then become really awful shitholes."

    I'm in Michigan, and we'll be sitting pretty:

    1) We have fresh water in abundance, and no sharks!

    2) We'll get a bit warmer, but in our case, it means going from warm and sticky July's to hot and sticky, with the rest of the year being comfortable.

    3) As the Lakes warm, our fruitbelt will just get better (Western Michigan is a major fruit-growing area, due to lake effect moderation of the weather).

    4) No land invasion of Michigan by outsiders can succeed - drive an M-1 tank down a Detroit freeway, and it will break a track on a pothole[1] in minutes, and then be stripped for parts. Not to mention that an M-1 can take mere cannon shells, but not a car (or a gasoline tanker truck) at 80MPH.[2]

    5) We have enough abandoned housing in the Detroit area to soak up a few hundred thousand people.

    6) Lake Superior would become swimable - it's still warming up from the last Ice Age.

    7) As the UP becomes habitable by genetically-unmodified humans, it will become a Finnish-speaking power, undoubtedly united with the Homeland in the New Finnish Union. [3]

    [1] Best case - most likely it will be swallowed, and never seen again. They'll just shovel asphalt on it, and count it as a road repair.

    [2] Unofficial Michigan highway speed limit, and I'm not kidding.

    [3] It is heavily Finnish-speaking; the story is that the US gov't told Finnish immigrants to go there, because it'd be like back home.

    385:

    he story is that the US gov't told Finnish immigrants to go there, because it'd be like back home.

    Except for no mountains?

    386:

    It sounds like everything is resolved except the job situation. Don't forget in all the excitement to check with a lawyer about the mental-health/firing thing. You may be part of a protected class (depending on your stat/nationality.)

    387:

    Sorry. "Depending on your state/nationality."

    388:

    Thanks. I enjoyed yours too. Do you have a background theory of AI which ties into the story?

    389:

    7) As the UP becomes habitable by genetically-unmodified humans, it will become a Finnish-speaking power, undoubtedly united with the Homeland in the New Finnish Union. [3]

    Not sure what that implies about Finns (is that why they have such good schools?) but it does explain Escanaba In Da Moonlight.

    390:

    So just thinking about the corridor aspect some more.

    Traditional Japanese houses generally have several rooms that are separated by sliding partitions, allowing them to be enlarged or shrunk according to need.

    I wonder if we'll start seeing more adaptive housing designs, with the permanent plumbed core of kitchen/laundry/bathroom separated from a large mixed use open plan design, that can be divided into semi permanent rooms in a much more flexible manner. Improved insulation designs means that temporary walls need not be paper thin noise transmitters, and they can be concertina'd into wall cavities when not needed.

    Have another child or a guest over, simply move a wall or two and make a another bedroom space.

    391:

    Basically I'm thinking about the residential version of modern office designs, with a false roof and floor for all the ducting and infrastructure, and a totally flexible internal plan for the room layouts. You could divide up the roof and floor cavities with sound and fire baffles too, while still retaining the easy access and heat distribution benefits.

    392:

    "Do LED bulbs really need to be 120/240vAC?"

    High voltage fixed frequency AC supplies are far more suitable for LED lighting than low voltage DC.

    LEDs are current-driven devices, and need to be driven from a constant-current source (or reasonable approximation thereto) - a source which puts out a defined current, at whatever voltage that current happens to drop across whatever the load is. This is the dual of the more conventional approach of having a source which puts out a defined voltage at whatever current that voltage happens to push through whatever the load is. When it comes to LEDs, Norton rules, Thévenin is nowhere. Failure to appreciate this point leads to confusion and bad thinking, which in turn leads to shitty designs like stringing multiple groups of (3 LEDs + a resistor, all in series) in parallel across a 12V supply and wasting 25% of the input energy before you even get started, or meeting the requirement for light output with a small number of high-power LED chips and then having to mess about with switched-mode converters (adding complexity, loss, unreliability and cost) to fight against the incompatibility of such a load with the mains supply.

    (Yes, crude and crappy switched-mode converters crammed into the base of a light bulb and cooked with several watts of heat for several thousand hours are unreliable, as has been comprehensively demonstrated already by CFLs having an expected lifetime an order of magnitude shorter than LED lights and yet still being as likely to die from the converter losing its smoke as from the tube itself failing.)

    Given a high voltage AC supply and a low-current load such as a string of 80 or so small LEDs in series, it is very easy to make a very adequate for the purpose approximation to a constant current supply which is also reliable, efficient, cheap and very simple indeed: just use a series capacitor (of 1μF or so for a 5W light using 80 LEDs running on 240V 50Hz). (Plus a bridge rectifier and a reservoir capacitor, but you'd have those in a switched mode converter anyway.) If on the other hand you're trying to run 5W of LEDs from 12V DC, all possible ballasts are some balance between (much) more complicated and (much) less efficient.

    I am dubious about the "domestic DC bus" idea in any case because you very quickly end up needing undesirably thick wire and a converter to power the bus which has to maintain high efficiency over a very wide range of loadings and probably doesn't manage very well. But when it comes to LED lighting, it is quite unsuitable for the purpose in any case, whereas conventional high voltage AC is just what you need.

    393:

    I think this thread is very well titled. Because (either we're all fucked or) "the house of tomorrow" will have to be "social(ised) architecture" - a thing for living in, and absolutely not a thing for making money out of (let alone a thing for people who've forgotten they wouldn't like sleeping under a bridge to pretend they're making money out of). Too many of the replies to mention carry this as an implication, or struggle with problems which only exist in the first place because this is not currently the case.

    394:

    Waiting for trolley-buses to come back.

    Naah. Battery buses have all the advantages, and fewer drawbacks. They don't need tracks, and therefore can be re-routed and re-scheduled as needed. They don't need power overheads all along the route, they only need power overheads at a few major bus stops, where the bus can fast-charge while the customers get on and off.

    395:

    "domestic DC bus" idea in any case because you very quickly end up needing undesirably thick wire

    I always assume that by "low voltage" people mean "compared to HVDC" and are talking 500-1500V DC, so you can still use cheap power transistors and domestic insulation. Although the idea of touching a $5 chinese widget that's connected to a 5kW 1000V DC bus does somewhat give me the willies. Also, these days fractal power supplies are relatively common, amusingly even right down in the microwatt range.

    But then I also see people running sodding enormous cables so they can keep using 12V DC because that's what they're used to. There are sailing catamarans (which are very weight sensitive) that have paired ~10mm diameter cables all over the boat, not least between the motors, a run typically 10-15 metres... to link the starter batteries in their bloody great diesel engines. In a sailboat. Because actually bloody sailing is right out of the question. It amuses me as a sailor that you can often buy nearly-new sails from old and basically worn out "cruising sailboats", although you have to carefully check for signs of careless handling or newbie errors. I watch one youtube channel where they bought a brand new boat and are on their third light-winds foresail because they keep destroying them, patching them, destroying the patch, giving up, buying a new sail... but they don't seem to learn from experience.

    396:

    "Except for no mountains?"

    There are mountains in the UP. Sorta.

    397:

    I don't necessarily think socialism, at least of the 20th century type, is going to work either, any more than reviving 20th century communism will work. That's not to say that I'm opposed to the Green New Deal (although I'm not sure the economic theory works), mostly because massive investment in saving civilization by keeping the biosphere livable for humans beats the alternative, even if we go bankrupt doing it. Living in a bankrupt but sustainable global economy is still living.

    Thing is, the opposite of capitalism isn't necessarily socialism, any more than the opposite of orange is blue (the opposite of orange could equally be boom or sweet). I don't think that capitalism is sustainable the way it is, but the systems that are sustainable currently don't scale to ten billion. That suggests to me that if we're going to talk about more sustainable with a population of ten billion, we're talking about something that's on the other side of any number of innovations that we haven't discovered yet.

    398:

    ...drive an M-1 tank down a Detroit freeway, and it will break a track on a pothole[1] in minutes, and then be stripped for parts. Not to mention that an M-1 can take mere cannon shells, but not a car (or a gasoline tanker truck) at 80MPH.

    It sounds as if Detroit is already prepared for the arrival of Florida Man, an event that will doubtless generate many stories that are hilarious from a few thousand miles away.

    399:

    Yes, crude and crappy switched-mode converters crammed into the base of a light bulb and cooked with several watts of heat for several thousand hours are unreliable,

    My experience pulling cheap failed LED bulbs apart is that they universally use the cheap circuit you are actually touting, a capacitor plus full-wave bridge to supply the LED chain in the bulb. The capacitor is usually the component that has cooked and failed. I've also seen it happen in other circuitry, commonly in "stand-by" power systems for TV sets and the like which bypasses the need for the main PSU to be always-on. The more expensive bulbs with properly-designed constant-current PSUs and heat-sinks for the LEDs generally last longer, I have found.

    The next stage, already being adopted by many home builders and redecorators is to build and fit "permanent" LED lamp units in rooms rather than sockets for small bulbs with limited space for power conversion. The lamp units can be dimmed, in some cases a remote control or phone app can be used to change colour, vary their intensity directionally within the room and adjust output levels depending on ambient light from windows and other sources.

    As for a low-voltage supply "ring" in a home it's a great idea but it costs in terms of cable thickness to prevent resistive losses in long runs and bad connections around the home. There have been great strides over the past decade or so in circuit design and devices for very-low-power standby operation of PSUs, down into the microwatt region if the components are well-chosen.

    400:

    2119ad - Let us remember the starting point of this 'What If':

    What is the home of 2119 going to look like? (Assuming no collapse of technological civilization, and an orderly--and complete by 2119--migration to renewable energy sources. Also assume availability of synthetic fuels for air/space/sea travel, reasonable improvements in electrochemical batteries, and wholesale infrastructure improvements at least as extensive as post-WW2 reconstruction in Germany and Japan. And, come to think of it, a population plateau and demographic transition to gradual managed shrinkage and aging: let's peg global population in 2119 at stabilizing at the same level as it is today, without extensive genocide.)

    2119 is sufficiently far ahead that the grandchildren of kids currently at school are middle-aged. Remember that. Really, really remember that. Perspective...

    I don't have any quick-draw answers. Assuming a sea level rise less than one meter, I can see things like:

    2039 - Pompeii gives its largest eruption since 79ad, major damage & loss of life around the Bay of Naples 2047 - Wellington rebuilds itself after a mag 7+ quake that, like previous quakes, raises the land level by several meters while destroying the remaining un-proofed buildings 2051 - It is shown that isostatic rebound means that most of Scotland will not be significantly affected by ~1m sea rises in the next 100 years 2055 - Major earthquake in Japan just reinforces old memories of the 2010s 2068 - Auckland finds itself with multiple square KM of land to build on after a new volcanic eruption in the middle of the Waitemata harbour 2074 - Hawai'i keeps on doing what Hawai'i does 2083 - Cascadia kicks off on a mag 7+ event that devastates the Pacific NW 2084 - supposedly unrelated M6-M7 earthquakes happen along the San Andreas fault 2092 - Major tsunami event in Northern Atlantic/Arctic Ocean, only 1/10th of Storegga Slides inundates most of UK & coastal Europe, causes megadeaths.

    Take into account the sensible clarifications that this is about what the middling classes world looks like (i.e. the classic middle working class to lower middle class, which currently represents about 50% of the population in the 'West', by whatever name you call them).

    Looking at things widely: In 2119 many houses might be 50 years old. They will have been built by what was established standards of the time - things that might look like the cutting edge of technology of 2050 - which is an nearly two generations ahead of now.

    And having said this I try and think about what the home of the 22nd Century equivalent of the factory/office/retail retail worker is, and I don't have a clue.

    I can look backwards, and see the change from, say, 1985 to 2000. And I can see the change from 2000 to 2015. But putting myself in the head of that 30 year old person in 1985, I can's see 2015. So god help me I can't see 2119.

    There will have been revolutions - technological and political. There will have been several 'great depressions', there will have been regime changes, economic revolutions. It is a big enough timescale for things like 'Chicago' or 'Detroit' to happen - they have grown, flourished, and died. Silicon Valley might be a Chicago or Detroit of the 2050s. Entire new technologies and conurbations may have grown up, become established, flourished and then died out, becoming the new 'ghost city'.

    Sorry Charlie, I'm rambling and I don't have any answers to your question. But I hope I can point out the depth of time that I think some contributors haven't thought about.

    401:

    Why peel them? Roast them skin and all (I cut them into wedges and remove the seeds first tho').

    Roast pumpkin skin is perfectly edible, and if, like some of my kids and grand-kids you profess to not liking roast pumpkin skin, it is much easier to cut the skin off a wedge of roast pumpkin.

    Note: I generally use large grey pumpkin with orange interior as I prefer the flavour. Haven't tried this with many other varieties.

    402:

    How many weeks have you gone eating roast pumpkin every night? For me it's about two, and then I start to think "I wonder what else I can make with pumpkin". Two might be generous.

    In slightly amusing news, Nepalese housemate informs me that it is cold... 16 degrees is apparently colder than he is used to. Admittedly it is summer there now but it's only 30 degrees in Kathmandu today, with an overnight low of 13. Our overnight low will be about 13... bah, kids these days!

    https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/nepal/kathmandu

    403:

    Not saying "everynight" - variety is good. Just saying you don't need to peel them if you roast them.

    Warm night in Chch tonight (for this time of year) - low expected to be 8 (celcius) - and only one frost so far this autumn - but winter is coming. https://weather.crowe.co.nz

    404:

    That's a "Crown Prince" / "Queensland Blue" variety, which is a hubbard (C. maxima). The skins of mature C. pepo (including true pumpkins) go hard on baking or roasting, and are inedible - but it is then easy to scrape the flesh out. And, as I said, the former are one hell of a lot better to eat than the latter.

    405:

    Only theory of AI behind the story is that technology is sufficiently advanced so as to be indistinguishable from magic.

    I think there could be an arms race between manufacturers in the same way car makers currently compete by adding pointlessly large engines, too many speakers and 8 speed gearboxes. Van AIs with Genuine People Personalities might have a marketing edge. Buyers might compare TOPS the way camera buyers compare MP.

    406:

    I don't necessarily think socialism, at least of the 20th century type, is going to work either, any more than reviving 20th century communism will work

    You know the basic systems model that goes there's stocks, flows, feedback, and constraints?

    The market orthodoxy is that you can get a working system with feedbacks, nothing else required. That's not the case.

    Socialism is an assertion you can get a working system with constraints, nothing else required. That's not the case either.

    Any functional economic system has to admit picking the definition of "functional" is a social choice, rather than a reflection of natural law (which is much of the current greed-head problem; people are mostly convinced that's just how things work, rather than aware that present circumstances are a design choice); it has to close the loop (organisms turn food into shit; ecosystems turn shit into food. Right now, the industrial economy is mostly an organism and needs to be entirely an ecosystem); it has to acknowledge, manage, and constrain a bunch of primal primate impulses so it keeps working (people have to see their status as secure and their circumstances as basically equitable and this isn't purely a problem of education).

    Compared to the mechanics of a stable food supply I think this is nigh-trivial. It's not nigh-trivial if you go into it expecting there to still be aristocrats of some kind; "no aristocrats" strikes me as an entirely licit simplifying assumption.

    407:

    It took me a number of these posts to figure out that y'all use "pumpkin" as the generic, rather than "squash". It was weirding me out something fierce.

    408:

    Not quite. It's used as a generic for a particular type of cultivated squash, which comes from several different species. Not all squashes are called pumpkions. I tried to explain in #378 and #404. See also:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumpkin

    409:

    That's far too abstract and simplified.

    Here's an example: old growth redwoods sequester more carbon per acre than do young redwoods, due to the geometry of laying down thin sheets of wood across enormous trunks and branches, rather than across thin, growing trunks. That's biology.

    Now, according to capitalism as practiced in California, those trees are worthless as they stand. You can appropriate the land, but it's wild lands are almost valueless until you gain the right to build on them. The rights you're permitted to build with add value to the land. This was the logic behind citing the Ivanpah solar plants in deep desert full of endangered species. This land was less valuable than trashed land near roads, because someone had already bought and trashed the lands. They were more valuable per acre, because rights and permits were attached.

    This is one place capitalism gets it wrong: there's no value to the natural world, there's only the value when nature is alienated and brought into the capitalist system by someone placing a value on it through being permitted to do something with it. Ecologically this is backassward, as we're part of the natural world and die without it, but capitalism's way of dealing with this is to try and engulf the entire planet and put values on everything. So far this isn't working all that well: the numbers are so astronomically high for the value of the remaining natural world that no one is willing to believe or to pay. After all, it keeps us all alive, and that value is something approaching infinity right there. So that's one place where we need radical innovations in our thinking about what any economy is or does.

    Here's another one, going back to the redwoods. If you're a carbon sequesterer, you want to add value. The only way you do that is to cut down those trees, use their logs in something that won't decay anytime soon, and plant more redwoods, all the while claiming that the new trees you plant will sequester more carbon per year than the old trees did. If your goal is to sequester carbon, you've utterly failed at this point, because you've actually decreased the rate at which that acre of forest takes carbon out of the atmosphere, but that part's irrelevant. What is relevant is that when you're doing carbon, there's a time zero when the improvements you make to the site, both by making sure those pesky old logs "don't rot" and by adding new trees all enter your books as assets that are under your control. And yes, this is precisely what the Climate Action Reserve (California's major carbon registry) tells you to do.

    My problem with capitalism, socialism, and communism as currently practiced starts right here. It isn't about who owns the means of production and who benefits, it's about what production actually means, especially when we're dealing with climate change issues and sustainability. Right now our systems instantiate the looters' mentality towards dealing with natural systems, with nature separated from civilization not just in a fallacious philosophy, but also in the damaging practices, laws, and views.

    When you look at more sustainable cultures, they think, quite rightly, that this view of nature is insane and unsustainable. This isn't romantic, mush-brained thinking, either. They live(d) from year to year on what they could grow and harvest, and they knew that if they didn't treat all their resources with extreme respect, they'd lose them and have to move or starve. Some years they lost them anyway, because nature has never been constant, whatever idiot ecologists thought. Profound respect for the natural world is born from the experience of hunger and suffering and a desire for them never to happen.

    Unfortunately, we're no longer in that regime, so we think the lesson about the primacy of nature and respecting it no longer matters. We blather on about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and forget that some of the most profound lessons about closing cycles and taking no more than we need come, not from sticking your well-fed head up into the philosophical clouds, but from going hungry, doing without, and having no other choice but to try and make it right. I'd like to find an innovation that lets us have the lesson without the experience, but I'm rather afraid that humans don't work that way.

    410:

    see Grace and Grace Follow-on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRACE_and_GRACE-FO#GRACE_Follow-On

    The TanDEM-X mission is a pair of radar satellites that use stereoscopic vision to get 1m accuracy in height on a first view and can get 1.5 mm on comparison views. They have a revisit time of ~10 days.

    411:

    It sounds as if Detroit is already prepared for the arrival of Florida Man, an event that will doubtless generate many stories that are hilarious from a few thousand miles away.

    I keep thinking of my first visit to Co Cal. Temp in evening was around 50F. I was in a wind breaker. Everyone around me in line to get into the comedy club was in parkas and ski gloves.

    As someone who have lived in western KY, Pittsgurgh, Connecticut, and now NC. It can take time to get used to weather than's a lot colder or warmer. I bet whitroth can agree with me on this.

    412:

    As for a low-voltage supply "ring" in a home it's a great idea but it costs in terms of cable thickness to prevent resistive losses in long runs and bad connections around the home. There have been great strides over the past decade or so in circuit design and devices for very-low-power standby operation of PSUs, down into the microwatt region if the components are well-chosen.

    I started this. My point was that maybe 120/240vAC will be as common for lighting in 100 years as it was 100 year ago. Maybe someone with real market heft will come up with a way to wire lighting in home with 24vAC or some such. Pulling wire for 15a service around a house takes a huge amount of copper. Things will change. Just not sure how.

    I'm putting in Ring motion detection flood lights with cameras. It would be nice if I already had some sort of PoE networking to those spots. These units will pull less power for everything than the old incandescent floods that were original to the house.

    My house was "code wired" as best I can tell in 1961. 2 baths and 3 bed rooms all on a single 120v15a circuit. Yeah right. Plug in a hair dryier without turning off the lights in the bedrooms and making sure the TV was off was a sure trip outside to the breaker box. Now each bedroom has its own 15a circuits and each bath its own 20a circuit. And GFCI on both baths.

    Things will change. I'm just not sure what and how.

    413:

    While not directly on point of the topic of this post it does tie in in my mind.

    We've been discussing how the "rich" will live 100 years from now. Well mostly.

    Last night I spend a little time with someone from the "rich" part of the planet who's trying to make a difference to what many think of as the poorest country on the planet in Africa.

    His group drills water wells for villages. But they don't drop in drill a well then leave. They have set things up so that local nationals do most of the work of drilling plus are trained in maintenance. The wells they put in a operated by people power. Exactly how each well works depends on the depth of the water. But since there is no electricity involved maintenance is greatly reduced in terms of tech needed and training to keep things working.

    The business model is they spend about $18K (all in) per well to put one in. This is full charity. But they will not put one in unless a village can come up with a plan to pay $8/month in maintenance to keep it operating. They don't care what the plan is (pay by the bucket, day, household, whatever) as long as it is not oppressive to some parts of the village. Currently the cost of the staff that visits the well on a regular basis and does the regular repairs and maintenance is about $16/month but that's out of reach for many villages so they subsidize about 1/2 of the costs. He said 90% of the villages are current with their payments and they don't cut them off if they can't be current.

    The point of this business model is to keep the wells from becoming "magic" that dies eventually. They want sustained operations. His figure of failed water well type projects in Africa was 60%. He said most of that was from all the money and planning on putting in the project, with little thought as to how to keep them working long term.

    Currently they are putting in 2 to 5 wells per week depending on depth and other issues.

    A point he made was that putting in a well totally changes life in a village. The biggest change was that the girls got to go to school instead of trekking 2 to 5 hours a day to get crappy water. And kids (and adults) aren't dying of dysentery as a normal part of growing up. And this changes life in the village in a very big way with all kinds of 2nd and 3rd order effects.

    Yes this is a faith based group but the wells go in without regard to the type of faith, if any, of a village.

    Anyway here is someone transforming how people live today. And doing it by building up an organization locally instead of the smart white folks running around telling them what to do.

    414:

    Sorry for the change of topic, but I just heard that UKIP has imploded thanks to YouTube shitlord Sargon of Akkad.

    Did they really put him up for the EU parliament?

    415:

    YES MESSAGE TO ALL READERS - & especially Charlie.. IF you can get hold of a copy of this weekend's "FT" DO SO - there are a minimum of 5 articles in there that need reading. If you can't get them, I will physically post the cut-out relevant bits to Charlie - for such an "establishment" paper it's dynamite, all of it.

    416:

    My son addressed Climate Change today. He said, "We could have had the good apocalypse with Mel Gibson and hot babes shooting crossbows form the top of tanker trucks, but no! We've got to live through the shitty Kevin Costner apocalypse where the water rises and people steal your limes!"

    417:

    HA!

    Elderly Cynic @408, with his wiki link is what I am talking about.

    Pumpkins are orange skinned, and larger than your head. In many cases twice the size of your head. They are used to carve Jack-o-lanterns for Halloween. People give me pumpkins at holidays, each is the size of my head. Those I roast and scoop.

    Squash is the size of you fist.

    The Vietnamese family behind the wall would grow Bi. Each looks like a zucchini but is three foot long and so wide around that if you hold the fruit in both hands at the biggest part, your finger tips don't touch. One grew over the wall. Mom ground it up and pickled it. That one Bi made enough relish to last over a year.

    That's the point people seem to be missing. If you grow stuff you have to be able to preserve and store things until the next season.

    If you want to grow just a few pumpkin or zucchini to eat fresh, then simply let the plant flower and start to produce. When the fruit are small, cut off all the extra fruit and only let grow what you need, that way you don't feel that you wasted fruit. If you let the normal amount grow, just be ready to mulch them. It's a great way to grow soil.

    You take all of the extra fruit that you don't want, along with the leaves and green vines, and pile them in a row. Spread some active manure on them, then pile dirt on top. Everything rots and converts into soil that you can spread around the garden.

    You will have to experiment were you live to see how long it takes for the organics to break down, but it should only take until the next spring. The secret is to gather the plant together while it's still green. If you wait till it's all dried out the process takes longer.

    • So harvest what you want, then mulch the rest.

    This is the whole purpose of hugelkultur that I mentioned above. The examples you see when you google are focused on mulching wood, but burying the excess plants to grow soil is a valid way to garden.

    418:

    People clearly have not watched the Factfulness link I posted above. This section is the main point about reaching 11 billion people. Watch this part at least, so that people stop saying there is over population and we need a crash. The future will not be a "Mad Max" world.

    Why the world population won't exceed 11 billion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI&list=PLAA_uxQHVV7U761wk7BgvtALD4k8aXZfE&index=5

    Watch the video. Birth rates are stable. Population is only growing because people are not dying. His example using blocks demonstrates the point clearly.

    419:

    It took me a number of these posts to figure out that y'all use "pumpkin" as the generic, rather than "squash".

    You do have to watch out for local usage. When we lived in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, it was notable that anything squash-like -- pumpkins, zucchini, pattypans, whatever -- were all "calabazas."

    420:

    For all the old crusties who doubted us.

    Do a grep.

    The UK lost a Defense Minister recently. Ohhhh Crikey! Couldn't see that one coming, could you?

    p.s.

    He ditched the HDs / files. Or they did. Or whatever. Nice Milkshake. And Cameron's lot can't raise the $1bil Chinese money tab even selling out their entire Nation!

    Look, .mil kids, you're gonna have to start expressing the same kind of hard-nosed stuff you did in NI if you want not to be taken for turkeys.

    Know what I mena?

    Oh, if you want to play Hard-Core, Non-HSS bullshit easy-peasy realms: Our. Kind. Do. Not. Go. Mad.

    Might want to look into just how fucking irate Greek Goddesses got when their daughters were ill treated.

    It makes your fucking Abrahamic Biblical shite look like tonka-town.

    "FADE AWAY"

    Mate: you missed the bit about main-lining 10,000,000,000 cat images via Bastet and the entire trans* community via Innana.

    You're Fucked

    Oh, and tbh.

    Abrahamic stuff?

    Yeah, we're over that now. G'luck with the genocides, no-one gives a shit... because you're all massive (no, really: massive) arrogant, ignorant and amoral cock-worshippers.

    Who cut the foreskin of their males.

    Which is Baal my friend, not your fucking Bush, which has been the fucking joke of the last 10k years in Lower Order Power land.

    Fucking suckers.

    Dust. Already done.

    421:

    And yeah.

    We did the entire: "You doubt us, enjoy us taking down your Politicians" with a 420 Herb reference.

    We're Faster than You.

    422:

    Anyhooo.. Triptych.

    @Host

    Feel free to do a grep.

    It all came True. :D

    @Trott

    Don't worry, your Mind is fine, I took a look. A little unorthodox and a bit hung up on male issues regarding women but generally it's pretty ok.

    It's not like you've something like Me inside it, you'll be ok.

    You should ask more about the people being v8'd etc or the ones culling the Bright Ones. < --- really happening folks.

    Then again.

    "Fade away"

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCyTqnizcvI

    Yeah.

    I'm an idiot.

    I'm also a Combat-Enhanced-Meta-Cognitive Weapon.

    Defense Minister, UK? Check. Home Party, IL? Check. GRU structure, RU? Check.

    Come on.

    You were a crap lay as well.

    423:

    _Moz_ @ 363:

    "Why would you want to feed meat to pigs ... or chickens?"

    The only reason I can think of to care whether an animal is a herbivore or an omnivore is if you're intending to feed it meat. Surely if you're not doing that it doesn't matter? So I assumed from your comment that you were thinking of a significantly meat-based diet for your meat animal raising.

    No, I'm thinking of a "meat based diet" for myself, but it seems excessively recursive to feed meat to the meat if you catch my drift. And it was really in the context of whoever suggested being able to afford pork would be indicative of having a high disposable income. I disagree. Pork & chicken would be the affordable meat proteins. Beef would be expensive.

    Actually, I was thinking about free-range pigs rooting behavior & how they almost feed themselves. And chickens will clean up bugs out of whatever pen they're kept in, so I guess that does count as feeding them meat. But it's not for the purpose of fattening them up.

    424:

    Oh, and for the .IL peeps who I know are watching. You know, the .mil ones. You know, the ones who complained about us posting about Druz protests and then went silent when their "Democracy" got front-run better than US money?

    Strap yourselves in:

    BABYLON

    YOU BROKE THE COVENANT

    That's not from us, that's the main-line psycho realms.

    That's the Voice of G_D. Or ??

    You know, the ones who attempted to put an Awakened Mind into "Hell" and all that stuff.

    Chances are: you're involved with this stuff?

    Do a grep about eating Minds.

    We're not fucking amused.

    Interesting.

    Personally, I'd not be cutting off parts from children when you see what the [redacted] are all about, but you go for it.

    425:

    Please post brief summaries of the interesting stories. The FT web site is paywalled. Thanks

    426:

    Hint:

    Your Mind Psychic Beasts are fucking pussies.

    We ate your CIA / Mossad scripts for breakfast.

    How's your reality doing?

    Just killed one more of your lynch-pins.

    YOU

    BROKE

    THE

    COVENANT

    AND

    YOU

    THINK

    THE

    REMNANTS

    CAN

    PROTECT

    YOUR

    SHITTY

    REALITY

    GAMES

    LOL!

    No, seriously.

    Go die in the desert, your souls are ------- empty.

    427:

    It's all bullshit.

    2020 is a massive crash.

    USA has double-downed into "fuck having a middle class"

    BoE has been delaying Brexit shit until they can contain it. EU can't (IL etc)

    Source: BoE C levels.

    ~

    Basically - all hands on deck to STAMP THE MUTANT, whelp: nah mate, you're totally fucked.

    Source: BoE C level. No really. Also BIS senior level. Also Fed senior level.

    Not even up for debate: BoE are on record for delaying what a cluster-fuck Brexit is due to Market uncertainty.

    And they're not now.

    Because they're working out what a crash will do .

    But they've no idea just how much this crash won't fit their models.

    Because they're fucking muppets.

    Source: Have just read all their data / models.

    428:

    Triptych.

    See above.

    2020 it all goes melt-down.

    Muppets.

    429:

    Oh.

    And one small thing.

    None of you can survive the Test.

    You do realize that multiple billions are being spent on avoiding the [redacted] Mind shit, right?

    Sorry mate: Greek Goddesses and their Daughters. You don't get to just run shitty level stuff and laugh it off.

    We're Summoning Titans you fucking Muppet.

    $66 billion Apple loss

    Might want to kill yourself now, The Orcas are unhappy.

    ~

    Whatever.

    ZZzz.

    Done warning y'all.

    Enjoy the Gigacide. Cunts.

    430:

    Oh, and we notice that people are blasting YouTube with scripts to prevent the .IS official video being watched.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVbShUW6QBM

    Tbh, .IL hasn't noticed that their "HOME" shitty song is dancing on the graves of 1k+ children so...

    No, really.

    Hint: only ancient fossils could imagine shoving Madonna with her red-left-hand Gematria band funded by an .IL / CA property magnet while she pretends she's all about S.America would be a good idea.

    .IL, 2019.

    Killing all the fun, amateur land and general accepted ethos of EuroVision to have a fucking Nationalistic Wank and Messiah complex.

    No, really: that's what Reality and Our Sisters say.

    431:

    Hexad. Nope, it's all true.

    We've no problem with self-determination and so on. But most of them are massively ignorant wankers with huge racist issues and pretending this isn't the case is fucking hilarious.

    Only if it doesn't demand / subjugate / destroy any other potential solutions to the same issues.

    And that's where you fail.

    432:

    You should ask more about the people being v8'd etc or the ones culling the Bright Ones. Very good to see you back. (Was genuinely concerned. (No details.))

    433:

    Scott Sanford @ 377: The flip side of this is that it's probably easier to contain a single pig than it is to keep all of 200 pounds of crickets caged, and things like crickets can be pests if too many get loose.

    I don't know how many people here have read the cautionary tale of ordering a box of crickets from the internet, but for those who haven't been amused by stupid cricket stories lately here's your chance...

    The US Postal Service has specific regulations for mailing chickens, ducks, emus, geese, guinea birds, partridges, pheasants (only during April through August), quail, turkeys, bees, scorpions, chameleons, baby alligators and salamanders ... and crickets.

    434:

    Yikes!

    Chefs in Europe experiment with insects https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuIniR_iW4A

    435:

    datablue @ 425 I know - it's a real p.i.t.a. Because of the complete overload, I might try scanning them & sending copies?

    Bill Arnold @ 432 No Do not feed the troll

    436:

    It's ok, I don't want to stay employed there, and as for my sanity, I guess I'm more sane than some other people at work, e.g. a guy driving to work with his car, the Mercedes in question bearing a straight-edge sticker and the guy visiting Earth Crisis concerts. Yes, it's basically my generation's version of "a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac".

    I could write more and might later, thoughts and associations are running high but are controllable, which is a nice thing.

    As it is, I'm searching for a short story by J.G. Ballard I remember from back then, because one of my cohabitants wants to do an art project on perception. And while scanning wikipedia I realize just how many of his short stories sound familiar, and how Ballard's imaginations of a posttechnological future might be appropiate for this thread.

    Where I realize I mainly read Ballard's short fiction, but not his novels, there is a copy of Crystal World or The Drowned World on the "to be read" pile since I'm about 17.

    Sunday was quite bad, I had nobody to talk to, felt misunderstood and had this odd sensation of, err, fractured self images while analyzing this feeling (methylphenidate and back in the day nicotine help/helped with the analysis). Let's just say when people say "I felt like 18 again" they don't think about something like this.

    In case this sounds somewhat apocalyptic, I have a daily structure and routine to adhere to, I just, well, not exactly enjoy but ride out the bad trip and write down some memories and insights coming up.

    I always considered myself something of a hardhead, whatever place psychopharmacology took me to, it wasn't that much worse than what I experienced without.

    As for the prayers, well, thank you, but the STEP project indicates it might be better not to tell me. Sorry if that sounds rude and I hurt feelings, but take it as a sign I stay somewhat rational. but thank you gasdive.

    Again, sorry for the derailing.

    P.S. I just found the story by Ballard, it's "The Object of the Attack", and I have it in a German translation in a storage room. And the term I wanted to tell my cohabitant is "Ames room".

    437:

    Actually, I was thinking about free-range pigs rooting behavior & how they almost feed themselves. And chickens will clean up bugs out of whatever pen they're kept in, so I guess that does count as feeding them meat. But it's not for the purpose of fattening them up.

    Chickens eat mice, voles, chipmunks, etc.; I don't want to eat those, and there's no reason a free-range chicken shouldn't eat those, along with the bugs and the slugs. (People use chickens as tick control and create chicken-moat boundary pens around gardens for pest control; that might be the point if you want to keep from getting Lyme disease in the garden.)

    Pigs eat the kitchen scraps; there's meat in those. (trimming, plate-scrapings, etc.) You give the chickens the eggshells (short-cycle the calcium), but you mash the eggshells so they don't register as egg-shaped; don't want the chickens viewing eggs as food, and giving them mostly-egg-shaped eggshell will introduce the idea.

    The sharp herbivore-carnivore categories are a bit like gender; someone is trying to stick a definite binary on an awkward continuum. (E.g., give pumpkins (the big orange ones) to tigers. There will be gronching.)

    438:

    That's far too abstract and simplified.

    The idea is to stop having the "red or blue cardigan?" argument and start looking at the actual problems (food security! it's all food security!)

    All the specific examples are complex and detailed, but that's not the point I was after; the point I was after is that the socialism-vs-capitalism argument is inherently futile. Neither works.

    439:

    I was thinking about this blog post about "herbivores" eating other animals.

    I am not that much into the evolutionary history of this, but I guess the road from a "herbivore" to an "omnivore" or the road from an "omnivore" to a "herbivore" or a "carnivore" are quite easy. But I have my doubts you could turn an obligate carnivore like a cat into an omnivore, excluding some serious horizontal gene transfers or a lot of symbionts.

    440:

    Let me just say at this point that Ames Room(s) play a role in "Lost Boys" ...

    441:

    socialism-vs-capitalism argument is inherently futile. Neither works.

    I ask people exposing their pet ideology "What is your plan for when the ideology doesn't work in some situations? Especially the hard choices?"

    It is usually when they leave the conversation. At least with me.

    442:

    When I was living in America I once had an American colleague ask if the 240V supply in every power socket made me nervous, compared to the nice safe 110V they use. (He had recently had a teenage son melt a chunk out of a knife while deliberately shorting out the pins of a plug). I had to explain that the flimsy things they called plugs and sockets were what made me nervous, and showed him one of our properly engineered survive-the-zombie-holocaust 13A plugs.

    443:

    I've got to admit that 120Vac pisses me off when I've gotten "lit". The very few times I've bridged 240Vac have HURT.

    As to your safe monstrous plugs you wouldn't need them if you didn't have those 30A ring circuits. Our 15A radiating circuits are much easier to trip. Plus with the grounding rules, arc fault breakers, and CGFI it is much harder to get a shock in the first place. Mine have all come from working on live circuits which was stupid and/or they were not supposed to be such.

    I've not seen a CGFI indicated outlet in my very limited time in Europe. Are they not used there?

    Each way has its good and bad points. Yours costs less to wire a building in terms of materials. Ours has less need to a huge space to plug things in. And is slightly less likely to cause serious issues if you get shocked.

    444:

    See also Konrad Lorentz about the viciousness of herbivores! I believe that your last paragraph is correct. People don't use the term "obligate herbivore" much, but there are plenty of animals that pass the duck test for that (goats, for one). However, few animals are absolutist about their diet, not even the ones with extreme adaptations. Humans can thrive on a wider range than almost any other animal - I believe that rats beat us, and a dozen or so other species, but it's not a long list.

    445:

    Oh, come off it! All us crusties who still have a liquid centre knew that sooner or later some cabinet member would exceed some limit in their political leaking, and the detail was and is totally unimportant. And that arrogant idiot was obviously one of the more likely candidates.

    And I am damn certain that the BoE knows exactly what we are facing though, obviously, not what will happen in detail (and nor do you) - and it has been clear for ages that Carney et al. are being close-lipped and artificially optimistic because they realise how easy it would be to cause a crash by panicking the usual culprits.

    I could make similar responses to your other witterings.

    446:

    The British K-type plug is a lot safer for a lot of other reasons. For example the fuse in each plug can be rated for the device -- a desk lamp will have a 1A or 2A fuse, a computer might have a 5A fuse. Your American 15A spur will only trip if the entire spur takes more than 15A for a measurable period of time allowing a faulty lower-powered device to short out, melt and catch fire without necessarily tripping the main breaker. As an aside we have quite a few plug-in devices that are rated up to 3kW, something that would trip a 15A spur @110V. Note that we don't have a mixture of 110V, 220V, high and low-capacity spurs and sockets, they all are rated for 13A draw.

    Grounding -- that presupposes the use of a three-pin plug, a lot of smaller US devices I've seen and used such as hair dryers are only 2-pin with no ground, probably for cost-saving reasons. A lot of British products require a 3-pin connection, stuff like cooking appliances, kettles etc. and, yes, hair dryers too.

    The pins on a modern K-type plug are half-shielded -- by the time the plug has been pulled out far enough to expose bare conductor they have broken contact with the connectors inside and are no longer live. The live and neutral pins in the socket are shuttered to prevent curious little fingers poking metallic items into the holes. The shutter is displaced when the much larger earth pin is pushed into the socket. Of course the live and neutral can't be switched around by putting the plug in upside-down since the Earth pin would get in the way.

    As for GCFI they're called Residual Current Detector (RCD) in the UK. They're ubiquitous in the breaker box covering the entire ring they're wired to, not just individual sockets in the home. There are separate RCD units for things like trailing cables for lawnmowers, hedge trimmers etc. and in wet conditions, usually in industrial situations or outdoors. You can even get a K-type plug with an RCD fitted to it, meaning the device it's wired to always has RCD protection no matter what socket you plug it in to.

    https://www.screwfix.com/p/masterplug-rcd-plug/44855

    447:

    But I have my doubts you could turn an obligate carnivore like a cat into an omnivore, excluding some serious horizontal gene transfers or a lot of symbionts.

    Depends on what nutrients the carnivore needs, and what plant sources provide.

    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bamboo-fake-meat-giant-pandas-180972101/

    448:

    Grounding -- that presupposes the use of a three-pin plug, a lot of smaller US devices I've seen and used such as hair dryers are only 2-pin with no ground, probably for cost-saving reasons.

    Yes but. A device can be ungrounded only if it has no conductive parts that can be touched and that can come in contact with power that can shock. So a plastic cased hair dryer with all of the metal bits buried deep and that has passed various tests can be ungrounded. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UL_(safety_organization)

    As for GCFI they're called Residual Current Detector (RCD) in the UK. They're ubiquitous in the breaker box covering the entire ring they're wired to, not just individual sockets in the home. There are separate RCD units for things like trailing cables for lawnmowers, hedge trimmers etc. and in wet conditions, usually in industrial situations or outdoors. You can even get a K-type plug with an RCD fitted to it, meaning the device it's wired to always has RCD protection no matter what socket you plug it in to.

    We also have these breakers. But in many applications it is way better to have a controlling outlet that can be reset without a hike to the breaker box. Basically GFCI has to be used anywhere someone might be able to get wet while using a device. Any outdoor application, kitchens, baths, basements or places with concrete floors, garages, etc...

    I've yet to see an outlet in a bathroom in a hotel in Europe. When it requires a 10' cord to get to where you can stand in front of a mirror to use a hand held hair dryer something isn't right. I will admit my experience is somewhat limited in sample size.

    As to the safer plug. Yes I will concede that it is technically safer. But I have never seen or heard of any device shorting out and causing a fire in the US without such. Devices that might need such protection have to be fused where the power enters the device. Just not at the plug. (Now there are some devices with a fuse soldered inside the box which in the rare even it does blow generates a lot of commentary about ease of replacement but it is there.)

    Different strokes for ....

    449:
  • Most meat comes from factory fucking farms.
  • They feed the pigs garbage... including, I suspect, "waste" from the pig slaughterhouses.
  • 450:

    Mulching mower - yeah. I have an electric mower*. Still, kitchen veggie (and eggshell, and coffee grounds) go into a small composter that has two sides. When the one side's getting full, I empty the other.

    I really ought to put it up on cinderblocks, because the idiots who designed the stand made it too short to put a bucket under it.

    • We got back from a weekend in Philly for a renfaire, and I have to mow the back yard. I'm hoping I don't need to start with a weedwacker....
    451:

    Yeah... the Big Three. In the late seventies/early eighties, the Japanese trashed them, because the price of gas in the US skyrocketed, but they kept making gas guzzlers. Ditto in the last 10 years. It was years before they grudgingly started making hybrids - as I noted in response to someone recently, they DID NOT OFFER hybrid minivans in the US until the last year or two, while they've been available in Europe for close to 10.

    There was some kind of huge biker rally in Philly this weekend. Our motel was full of what was two or three MC's, Harleys everywhere. That reminded me of two questions I realized, when I read, a week or so ago, that Harley's going to offer an electric cycle: a) where do the speakers go, so it sounds like a Harley, and b) how's it going to mark its spot?

    Notes: MC - "motorcycle club", usually referred in the press as "motorcycle gang", complete with jackets with colors (club logo). Not the businessmen's club. "Mark its spot": old saying by bikers - Harleys don't leak oil, they mark their spot.

    452:

    I have no idea where you heard that. I've always heard fusion reactors were 30 years away....

    453:

    I see, you're one o' them Yooper Separatists.... (Non:US: Michigan has two sections, and the northern one is the Upper Peninsula.)

    Next you're going to note that you've got your own launch sites, to make Floridians feel at home, in the Keneewas Rocket Range.

    454:

    Now I start to wonder what you're talking about, when you say "20th century" socialism.

    Just to make things clear, my view is social (via laws anre regulations) control of business, and social (via gov't) ownership of key industries, such as water, sewer, power....

    I'd like to see that expanded.

    455:

    socialism is constraints, only? Huh?

    How about public ownership of key things - as I mentioned above, water, sewer, power.... Ought to be a gov't owned phone system, too, and let the private companies try to compete with the lower costs.

    456:

    Heh, heh. I'm reminded of a cousin of my first wife's visiting us from southern California in Jan. We took public transit home (no car). "Oh, wow, SNOW!" She'd only seen it four times in her life. Yeah... and she wore her "heavy winter coat", which we considered a nice light leather jacket, good for spring, and the snow was grimy, having snowed 10 days or more before.

    457:

    We invade Iraq, then import American truck drivers, instead of hiring locals, and spreading the money there, so they'd like us.

    People gentrify, or whatever, slums... but DON'T HIRE LOCALS to do most of the work, and maybe earn a house by working enough of the jobs.

    No, no, if they were Good Enough, they'd have Pulled Themselves Up By Their Bootstraps....

    458:

    Fuck "factfulness", they're right wing.

    And you seem to have ignored the FACTS that I posted about birth rates dropping, including in India, while China's below replacement rate.

    459:

    In the late seventies/early eighties, the Japanese trashed them, because the price of gas in the US skyrocketed, but they kept making gas guzzlers.

    Partially. Quality out of the big 3 was mediocre at best at that time. The Japanese just made better cars.

    For a variety of reasons I had to rent a car a month for 4 or 5 years in the first part of the decade. And I still rent a few times per year. I've come to the conclusion that most US branded cars SUCK at their dash operations. And a lot of imports do also. When I bought my last car new in 2016 the dash operations were the 2nd most important thing to me after cost of ownership. It was slim pickings.

    Some people asked why it was important to me. I shouldn't care. My thoughts are that if I have to spend that much time in a capsule I want to hate as few aspects of it as possible.

    460:

    But in many applications it is way better to have a controlling outlet that can be reset without a hike to the breaker box. Basically GFCI has to be used anywhere someone might be able to get wet while using a device.

    If you're tripping a GCFI or RCD often enough that you consider it a pain to go to the breaker box again and again then you're doing something wrong a lot and you should stop it, figure out what you're doing wrong and fix it. The classic reason for an RCD trip in the UK is someone running an electric mower over the trailing power cable or cutting through the cable with an electric saw. Hopefully this isn't a regular thing for most folks.

    I've yet to see an outlet in a bathroom in a hotel in Europe.

    That's because having a mains socket in a wet room is too fucking dangerous to be permitted by rational regulators. I understand that in the US life is cheap so they do permit live (unswitched!!!) electrical sockets in bathrooms under code but not in my back yard thank you.

    The exception is an electric shaver socket (now mostly obsoleted by battery shavers). It is current-limited to about 0.5A and the unique two-pin socket is backed by a double-insulated transformer to let the supply "float" from the building's live and neutral for safety. You may have noticed the use of pull-string light switches in such bathrooms, that's for the same reason. Other options include a light switch OUTSIDE the bathroom or, in some public toilets, the use of motion detectors to switch lights on.

    461:

    David L @ 448 ( & Nojay ) You CAN (just) have a power-socket in a bathroom, but it must be double-pole switched ( when you turn it OFF both the live & the return are isolated ) it must be in at the least a splashproof socket ( Usually a hinged cover ). I have one. Similarly, the separate spur feed to my heavy water immersion heater, which is in the airing cupboard in said bathroom has a separate double-pole switch in front of the socket - unshielded, because it's inside the cupboard - but I think they have now changed the regs, so If I replaced it, I'd have to use a shielded socket. Yes to other thing - when I rewired, about 25 years back, now, I replaced the old-fashioned & unsafe stadard switch in said bathroom with a cieling-mounted "string toggle"

    462:
    I've yet to see an outlet in a bathroom in a hotel in Europe.

    Hm. I don't know where in Europe you've been so far, but I've yet to see a bathroom in a hotel in Europe (or in fact in any other type of building) without an outlet. The hotel room from which I'm writing this right now has a standard outlet (with a hinged cover as Greg mentioned) right below the switch for the mirror-light right next to the washbasin.

    I even remember that just 40 years ago there still existed a particular type of very simple hotel or guest house in buildings from the first half of the century or older with retrofitted electrical wiring, where the bathroom used to be the only place in your room where you could find an outlet, because the only electric appliances that people would own and need on a journey were electric razor and hairdryer. The travelling salesman who wanted to save money by booking a cheap hotel and making his own instant coffee (or soup) in his room would have a Tauchsieder in his luggage and would have to balance his mug carefully on the washbasin while having plugged the (always too short) wire in the only outlet, situated above the mirror, at the side of the bathroom lamp. This would of course have been illegal, and he'd be careful not to get caught by the landlord.

    463:

    Oh, sorry. My meaning isn't clear. I'm my world (thoughts & prayers) = (do nothing useful).

    I was hoping to get you to, if not laugh at my uselessness, at least smile. Rest assured, no actual praying happened. (I gave up praying concurrently with giving up putting teeth in a glass for the tooth fairy and writing shopping lists for Father Christmas.)

    464:

    Mine is battery powered. I bought a new battery recently and was astonished at how much more grunt the lawnmower has :) Also slightly saddened that a LiIon battery would be built to only last a few hundred cycles, because the old battery was only about 5 years old and I don't use it every week, albeit sometimes I recharge it a couple of times when mowing because I have the mower + string trimmer + edger all powered by the same battery. But it beats having a collection of little two stroke fossil motors to maintain and fuel.

    Mind you, it's almost the bottom of the market - Ryobi. A coworker is using Husqvarna because his inlaws don't have budget constraints and that is apparently nicer to use (for three times the price you would bloody hope so) but he doesn't know how many cycles the batteries are good for.

    In theory I have 600m2 section with a 150m2 house and the rest is lawn (was when we bought it), but in practice the amount of lawn shrinks every year as I replace it with garden.

    465:

    "I've always heard fusion reactors were 30 years away...."

    Popular Mechanics Jan 1959:

    "And in 10 to 20 years the first successful fusion reactor will go into operation"

    466:

    If you never charge the pack to full or discharge to flat and you store it in the fridge at about half to two thirds full between uses, you should get a decade out of it easily.

    467:

    Popular Mechanics is the National Enquirer of technology, just sayin'

    The last prognostication that was worth a damn for "how long till commercial fusion" I heard was $80 billion. The breakdown of that figure was roughly $25-30 billion for ITER plus a decade of operational campaigns plus the assorted sub-projects involving the JET and the JT60A, another $20-25 billion for construction and operation of DEMO to figure out a way of generating electricity from fusing plasma and another $30 billion or so for PROTO, the first production design fusion generator which would actually feed electrical power into a grid.

    Sounds a lot, but Germany has spent five times that amount building out renewables over the past fifteen years or so and they're still burning carbon like it's going out of fashion to keep the lights on.

    468:

    Social architecture and the house of tomorrow

    Probably not the biggest of complaints out there, but for such headline there isn't much "social" described in the house of tomorrow. Fair enough, the house is generally considered private space, and moreover, in the house of tomorrow most people prefer to think of more private quarters. Everybody is supposed to have a space of his own, aren't they, preferably the whole room. This is actually the case in general where I live, despite being pretty mediocre apartment complexes in vast majority.

    However, with the ever-growing price of real estate, the more social architecture becomes more prevalent. After all, I'm sticking to the idea that general reason why people are staying in nuclear families is the created to battle this exact problem, besides traditional thinking, ofc. Modern "ecologists" and "creative people" I see are usually so liberal they think that the "future" they are facing will be all about their own electric cars, planes and smart homes, in a world half-empty, without those annoying "normal" people. But they are completely wrong, more communitarian societies are going to take over in the situation of dwindling resources, and people will have to adapt to living close to each other and dealing with personal relationships.

    Now, I've been thinking about that in the meantime (until the storm of comment has blown over), and I've had another idea about diversity of environments. There's, I deduced, a difference between being public and being social. Like there's clean antagonism between extremes of private-social and public-personal, but the ideas are not equivalent coordination axis, even though many of the properties are similar.

    Public spaces can be very private as well - as long as you keep these places clean and comfortable, for everyone to come and go. Take the hotels or say computer cafe. Actually I saw the video of rather strange situation happening in Japan, this is rather sad story and at the same time curiously novel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtdupS0gRt0 OTOH, I am thinking about "social spaces" being "personal". It is rather hard to imagine, maybe something closer to social nets. Actually, personified services are already part of our everyday lives, so this have to be connected to the "internet of things" concepts, etc. Pretty much this is the way the "digital economy" is going, I guess? I'm not really sure how to treat it beside being cautious.

    469:

    Thanks. Yes, that's the era that I remember such optimism. Nojay is right about Popular Mechanics, but the claim was more widespread.

    The reason that thinking about the money is misleading is because you can't produce breakthroughs to order. There are just too many problems that we don't know how to solve, even in theory - oh, yes, people have ideas that might work, but .... And it isn't possible to research them in parallel, because many of them depend on others being solved in order to produce a realistic test environment.

    470:

    Those are not normal power outlets - they are specifically for razors, and are protected by a transformer or similar and limited to a pretty low current.

    471:

    You CAN (just) have a power-socket in a bathroom, but it must be double-pole switched ( when you turn it OFF both the live & the return are isolated ) it must be in at the least a splashproof socket ( Usually a hinged cover ). As a specialist in electricity, I vouch to offer a good info about that. What you actually need is "RCCB", short for "residual current circuit breaker" which works by detecting if there's any leakage in the circuit, i.e. danger to life. Here's a pretty good and funny info by one of the similar devices (ground fault circuit interrupter, which is an RCB device mounted into outlet). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlM6PE2kKVY

    -

    On other notes, I've been down for considerable time due to having a vacation and also buying a VR headset of my own (it is HTC Vive because of it's proved excellent tracking properties). I'm still slowly looking through all the options and trying to figure out what's best for me - there's quite of community created for last 2-4 years as it became more popular. I've set up my room space just enough to move around a bit and wave my hands, but it is not big enough for "room scale" setting, which requires free floor space of 2x1 meters - I would have to get rid of one of my pieces of furniture. Also, you have to visualize the idea - when you are using VR, you don't need lighting at all, at least until you have to type something on keyboard in front of you. So there's is me on April night, sitting on sofa in complete darkness alone in the room and having gesturing conversation with people half-way across the world. The circle I can see in my headset right under myself indicates a free space available, so I don't even need to take it off to stand up and even dance around a bit.

    That said, some time ago I've seen the post at one of the imageboards where some anonymous guy described his lifestyle in his small studio flat, set in minimalistic style. Obviously, studio apartment have one room with both living space and cooking appliances in one room, but besides that, he placed the working station, some cabinets for keeping his stuff and floor mat for sleeping. That is all that he needed (besides combined bathroom). He also set up the space for VR, like I did, except that when he folds his bed in the corner, he doesn't have to worry about tripping over furniture even. That is what I can call a minimalistic, default-setting individual house of the future, except you can expect VR slowly transforming into seamless AR space as progress pushes on.

    472:

    That money estimate is how much will need to be spent before the first watt of commercial fusion electricity is delivered into a grid, assuming there are no roadblocks or whoopsies in the way. It might be more, it will not be less absent a Shipstone-style breakthrough and it might not succeed at all for some as-yet unknown reason.

    If ITER goes really tits-up due to increasing instabilities at higher plasma densities, plasma poisoning, phases of the Moon, whatever and the push for fusion power is abandoned the amount spent will be a lot less than $80 billion and all we'll have is a decent plasma research tool for pure science investigations rather than a development tool for fusion power in the future.

    There were rumours the South Koreans who have their own independent fusion research program as well as being part of ITER were planning a dash-to-PROTO project, building a prototype fusion generating station immediately based on existing knowledge of how plasmas perform in smaller systems and hoping it scaled up without problems, or at least only problems that could be brute-forced. I've not heard anything much about it since though.

    473:

    Hey, no offense taken, same with me, I just wanted to show my usual, err, cool was coming back.

    As for the present situation...

    Back from a family birthday, it was somewhat stressful, I didn't tell anything, but it was interesting and somewhat nice.

    When waiting for the train some tank cars came by, and I had short ideas what the chemicals inside might do to me in case of a spill, and I wouldn't mind. Things are somewhat slower, so I guess I have one of my strange short term depressions.

    I'm going to visit my shrink tomorrow, I guess I'll be back to normal in about 3 to 5 days, which would be the minimum time an antidepressant needs to work, so I won't start one. If it takes longer, we'll see.

    Just talked to a guy from the board game evening I visit sometimes about the RPGs we played, and that I'd like to try Paranoia ATM.

    Sorry for the sitrep, in case that isn't clear, I spent big parts of my middle teens to early twenties in a similar state or worse, so it's nothing new to me.

    474:

    "Sounds a lot, but Germany has spent five times that amount building out renewables over the past fifteen years or so and they're still burning carbon like it's going out of fashion to keep the lights on."

    You keep saying that, yet despite closing the nuclear fleet and growing its population Germany's per capita CO2 emission keeps falling. (in tonnes per capita per year) 11.62 in 1991 10.92 in 1996 10.37 in 2001 9.91 in 2006 9.12 in 2011 8.89 in 2014 (last available figures) That compares with the USA (that has nuclear) at 16.49 in 2014 (last avaliable figures)

    475:

    Re antidepressants time to work.

    There's been some interesting stuff about ibuprofen and paracetamol working to dull the pain of depression. Action times are short. Not a long term fix, addictive and hepatoxic, (and can have depression as a side effect) but maybe something to get you over a hump.

    OGH would know more.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/30586639/

    476:

    Hey, that's great! Germany's only emitting twice as much CO2 per capita as France after spending all that money on renewables. I wonder why France's CO2 emissions nosedived around the mid-1980s. Did they spend a lot on renewables back then? Or did they spend a lot on some other non-carbon generating technology instead, hmmm, that's a tricky question to answer. Or not, maybe.

    From Wikipedia:

    CO2 emissions per capita:

    ......France...Germany

    1980--9.1 1990--6.4----10.6 2000--5.9----9.5 2010--5.4----9.3 2014--4.6----8.9

    A lot of the initial drop in CO2 emissions in Germany after reunification is due to the closure of particularly inefficient coal-burning power plants in East Germany and their replacement by more efficient coal-fired generating plant and the uptake of cheap combined-cycle gas turbine plants. Renewables have just about been keeping up with the forced closure and non-replacement of Germany's existing nuclear fleet, at great expense and with problematic integration into the existing power grid.

    The sky-high US CO2 figure is due in part to their profligate spending on their military as well as a travel habit involving tens of thousands of short-haul air flights each day, not to mention car usage (British cars travel on average 8000 miles a year, the US average is 13,500 miles a year).

    477:

    Mark,

    Hans Rosling would be considered "Left Wing". You really need to watch the videos before you start ranting. He discusses the birth rates reducing, that is part of his examples as to why we won't have more than 11 billion people.

    Here is another video to watch.

    Religions and babies | Hans Rosling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezVk1ahRF78

    You've made some bizarre assertion several times now about the Rosling lectures, to the point that I could not understand what you were saying. Send me some links supporting your claims that Rosling is "right wing".

    I really want to know, because something is wrong here. You're not making much sense lately.

    478:

    whitroth @ 449:
    1. Most meat comes from factory fucking farms.
    2. They feed the pigs garbage... including, I suspect, "waste" from the pig slaughterhouses.

    But that's neither here, nor there in speculating about farm commodity prices a hundred years from now, and whether or what kind of meat proteins people trapped in the evolved gig economy will be able to afford.

    479:

    whitroth @ 451: Yeah... the Big Three. In the late seventies/early eighties, the Japanese trashed them, because the price of gas in the US skyrocketed, but they kept making gas guzzlers. Ditto in the last 10 years. It was years before they grudgingly started making hybrids - as I noted in response to someone recently, they DID NOT OFFER hybrid minivans in the US until the last year or two, while they've been available in Europe for close to 10.

    This came up in another list I frequent:

    https://www.aixam.com/en/minauto-range

    While I was looking around their site, I ran across this:

    https://www.aixam-pro.com/en/d-truck/van

    I think that van would do for 98% or better of all the driving I do around Raleigh. Most of what I do requires me to carry some gear and/or tools. (If I can't get my gear/tools there, there's not much point in me going.) There's also an electric version, but it costs 4,000 € more.

    Anything it couldn't handle around town or if I needed to go out of town (Road Trip!!!), I already have the Jeep. Only drawback I can see is they apparently don't sell them in the U.S.

    480:

    whitroth @ 457: We invade Iraq, then *import* American truck drivers, instead of hiring locals, and spreading the money *there*, so they'd like us.

    Don't know where you got that from. When we went in 2004, all of the commercial vehicles that hauled our shit north were local hires. The military vehicles were driven by soldiers, but anything that went as a commercial load (like several hundred standard shipping containers that had to be loaded on flatbeds) were contracted out to local trucking companies in Kuwait & Iraq. Local truckers hauled them from the port in Kuwait to Camp Udari marshaling yard and then from Udari to Caldwell, by way of LSA Anaconda (aka Mortaritaville).

    Same thing happened in reverse when we got ready to go home. What equipment we didn't transfer to the unit relieving us; what we had to bring back to the U.S. was loaded on locally contracted commercial haulers, staged through Anaconda and hauled to Camp Doha for inventory & cleaning before being loaded on the ship at Kuwait port.

    The only Americans we *imported* were the soldiers in our unit and some MWR personnel attached to the Chaplains (who ran the internet cafe's, a teeny-tiny PX and a branch U.S. Post Office.

    We did have some Gurkhas for security guards on the entry control point when we first got there, but that was because the unit we relieved was much smaller and didn't have enough personnel to provide all of their own security. We also had a contract dining facility run by KBR (after we'd been there about 6 months) who brought in food service personnel from Thailand, but the KBR laundry service hired locals.

    The rationale behind having laundry service was it took less water for KBR to do it in bulk than to provide enough individual washer/dryers for a couple thousand U.S. soldiers to do their own laundry. Our 1st Sargent got the bright idea to have everyone get an additional name tag sewn onto our DCU trousers above the right hip pocket, so you could be sure you always got your own uniforms back. The jackets already had name tags.

    481:

    EU quadricycles are awesome, and with any luck we'll get a new ALP government shortly who will review those regulations as part of their threat tom impose efficiency standards on motor vehicles. Sadly the bureaucrazy here is strongly opposed to the idea, I think largely because they are both captured by the fossil lobby and also fearful of change.

    In Australia the urban assault vehicle is pretty dominant, and they are scarily cheap to buy at the bottom end of the market (the cheap ones have all the disadvantages of a proper one but few of the safety advantages... you can't fake 2500kg+ of mass).

    482:

    Or maybe wheelchairs are non existant as we've learnt to fix these medical issues

    483:

    That money estimate is how much will need to be spent before the first watt of commercial fusion electricity is delivered into a grid, assuming there are no roadblocks or whoopsies in the way. It might be more, it will not be less absent a Shipstone-style breakthrough and it might not succeed at all for some as-yet unknown reason.

    Trivial nitpick, but if you are referring to the tech from Heinlein's novel Friday I think Shipstones were superbatteries, not anything to do with fusion.

    484:

    Given that they managed to make bicycles that looked like motorcycles illegal, I can't see quadracycles ever getting up.

    485:

    PS, they managed to make *coasting× on a bicycle illegal, under the pretext that bicycles get an exemption from registration if they're "propelled by human power through belt chain or gears" and if you take a break from propelling then the exemption stops applying. (which is obviously not the intent of the law makers).

    "It should be noted that enforcement action has been taken against people who have been observed travelling on a supposed power-assisted pedal cycle for extended periods without pedalling... "

    VSI 27 REV 4.

    486:

    The impression I got was that Shipstones were self-contained no-fuel magictech sources of electricity, "batteries" in that sense but not simple energy storage devices. Their capacity seemed to be great, almost infinite but not enough detail was given about them to be clear.

    There was a recent announcement by the UK's National Nuclear Laboratory and University of Leicester about a proof-of-concept new radioisotope thermal generator (RTG) design that uses Am-241. They called it a "space battery" in the dumbed-down press release as well as making some other basic mistakes (Am-241 has a half-life of 440 years so any flight-ready "battery" would only last that long on an extended-duration mission, apparently).

    487:

    they managed to make *coasting× on a bicycle illegal

    While in a way I admire your careful use of words and willingness to shade the truth, that's not even technically correct.

    Certainly, and especially in NSW it is even vaguely possible, that a member of the legal system might prosecute a non-assisted pedal cyclist for operating an unregistered motor vehicle* on the basis that the pedals were not in use at the time of the commencement of prosecution, I think it's vanishingly unlikely. I would personally love to be charged with that offence for that action just for the pleasure of appearing in court on that charge. I know a couple of cyclists with framed speeding tickets for similar reasons.

    What was outlawed was "power assisted bicycles that cannot be moved by pedal power alone". Which to my mind is exactly the right response to the exploitation of a law designed to facilitate use of pedal power/active transport. In NSW the explicit test used is "disable the motor and pedal it 200m", and frankly if you can't do that it's not a pedal powered vehicle. FWIW the environmental benefits were also absent, lots of plastic, no recycleability and short design life. They are garbage.

    The other side of the problem is the widespread use of power assist units delivering far in excess of the 250W legal limit. In egregious cases what's being ridden are "dirt bikes" with 5kw+ motors as well as pedals, and while they're clearly labelled "for off road use only" people ride them on shared paths etc (in Australian parlance "road related areas" where almost all the usual road rules apply to cyclists), or on the road. It is only a matter of time before someone is killed by one of those, serious injuries have already been reported.

    • this is the charge applied to power assist cycles, and AFAIK the only category of vehicle that a bicycle could be reinterpreted as such that it would be an offence not to pedal. I have some experience of building and operating unusual pedal powered vehicles, and the related interaction with the legal system.
    488:

    Nojay @ 472 Shipstones' - like THIS? What the hell has fusion-power breakthroughs got to do with brewing good berr, or vice versa, come to that? Actually, if you drank a sufficient quantity of Shipstone's uinder the right circumstances, you never know, you might come up with a wonderful idea under the affluence of the incohol ....

    • & @ 486 Ah, got you now - missed the R.A.H. reference - though mind you, the Poul Anderson "Bicycle Built for Brew" comes to mind in this context ....

    gasdive @ 485 WHERE & WHEN? That's totally insane .....

    489:

    Comment 488 by "willieaames" is spam.

    [[ deleted - mod ]]

    490:

    So if I understand the thread correctly the Australian government have imposed unreasonable restrictions on drinking real ale while operating a fusion powered bicycle...

    491:

    A "moped" as originally defined was a motorised pedal cycle. No-one who ever rode one ever pedalled it any real distance. Nowadays, at least in the UK the term "moped" also covers a motorcycle with no pedals as long as it meets certain other criteria such as engine size, power, maximum speed etc. It's the only motor vehicle 16-year-olds can ride on public roads in the UK.

    492:

    We have those rules in Australia too, but that's not what gasdive is talking about. He's saying that the rule that prevents a "power assisted bicycle" which is defined as having either "no more than 200W of power at the wheel" (old EU rule) or "no more than 250W and no assistance above 30kph" (the EU regs) and the vehicle must be a pedal powered cycle with a motor. The options for other vehicles are "toy vehicle" which isn't allowed on the road but is largely unregulated otherwise, or a moped, motorbike, car, light armoured vehicle or what have you.

    I have spent way too much time on these regulations, because I have bicycles that are only just barely technically "pedal cycles" as defined by law and I have to discuss this with elements of the criminal system on a not infrequent basis. I also make submissions to various bodies on the subject because some of the laws are genuinely asinine. For example, in South Australia for a while a bicycle shall be no wider than 800mm, because that makes constructing anti-bicycle barriers on shared paths easier. We got the cripple community on side with that one, because getting a wheelchair through a "nominally 800mm wide" opening can be a battle. There is also the bizarre rule that no part of a bicycle trailer may extend more than 500mm behind the axle. I mean "the rearmost axle", obviously. But we also get "a bicycle shall carry no more than the number of passengers it is designed for" which as the designer, builder, and operator of my bicycles is obviously always equal to the number of persons on said bicycle, whether than be one or eleven.

    493:

    This might also amuse some of you:

    Why yes, ossifer, that is a tandem recumbent trike with a trailer and 6 people on it. What particularly drew your attention to it?

    494:

    25 KPH in the EU. There is also a separate class for 'very light' mopeds which can be ridden without licences etc., which is allowed in Germany but not the UK - and, of course, NO power assistance is allowed in Northern Ireland. In the UK, there are also bizarre differences between quads and tricycles, and a completely unclear situation over what the distinction is between a cycle, pedal cycle and bicycle, and which of them include tricycles. Incidentally, my completely unpowered recumbent tricycle is wider than 800mm.

    495:

    I've yet to see an outlet in a bathroom in a hotel in Europe.

    Hm. I don't know where in Europe you've been so far, but I've yet to see a bathroom in a hotel in Europe (or in fact in any other type of building) without an outlet.

    Sorry. I mis spoke. They all had a dual ungrounded shaver plug. They might have been one for 120v and one for 240v. Neither I or my wife use such so I didn't examine it closely.

    496:

    Also slightly saddened that a LiIon battery would be built to only last a few hundred cycles, because the old battery was only about 5 years old and I don't use it every week, albeit sometimes I recharge it a couple of times when mowing because I have the mower + string trimmer + edger all powered by the same battery.

    Mind you, it's almost the bottom of the market - Ryobi.

    Hey I like Ryobi. All my battery tools have been Ryobi for 15 or 20 years. THEY, unlike a lot of the others, have made their tools and stuff use the same 18v battery attachment the entire time. Many of the "better" tools seem to switch out the battery attachment every 5 years or so. Which leads to a mess if you're not a contractor. And I'm not.

    Anyway my son-in-law just bought a small Ryobi battery push mower for $200. The batteries on this mower are big versions of the tool batteries. So he got 2 more high powered tool batteries and a charger plus the mower. Normally the 2 batteries and charger would be $100 so the mower cost $100. I might buy one just to get the batteries and a small mower for when the gas one isn't really needed.

    As to battery life I suspect you know that storing them in "your" space will allow them to last longer. Big temperature swings are not good for the battery chemistry.

    497:

    Popular Mechanics Jan 1959: "And in 10 to 20 years the first successful fusion reactor will go into operation"

    Was there also an article about flying cars?

    498:

    The sky-high US CO2 figure is due in part to their profligate spending on their military as well as a travel habit involving tens of thousands of short-haul air flights each day,

    Seriously?

    – On a typical July day there are around 30,000 flights across European airspace – Approximately a quarter fly within UK controlled airspace https://www.zmescience.com/other/feature-post/watch-many-flights-fly-europe-typical-summer-day/

    We have a bit under 3 times that amount.

    Of course Europe doesn't have the vast empty middle space we do.

    Most of our CO2 (I think) comes from low taxed and thus cheap energy compared to Europe. If our residential costs for electricity and natural gas are 1/2 to 1/4 those of Europeans the incentives to reduce usage are much less.

    Ditto auto usage.

    Personally my insurance company keeps asking me to update my mileage for my autos as they can't believe how little I drive.

    499:

    Or maybe wheelchairs are non existant as we've learnt to fix these medical issues

    I don't know the percentages but a non trivial and growing number of wheel chair users and handicap stickers for cars in the US go to people whose main issue is weight gain. Nearly every other issue is a fall out from that.

    Not sure how to fix that without a big fight over personal freedoms. Which might not be as big of an issue outside the US.

    500:

    That's because having a mains socket in a wet room is too fucking dangerous to be permitted by rational regulators. I understand that in the US life is cheap so they do permit live (unswitched!!!) electrical sockets in bathrooms under code but not in my back yard thank you.

    Bullshit. You're letting what you're used to dealing with push out alternatives that can be as good or better.

    We don't have the big fat plugs that seem to make people in the UK think their electricity is totally safe. I'll not argue that.

    But in the US for a few decades now we have the requirement that most all living spaces (go read the regs for the details if you really want) be arc fault protected. Turned out that hard shorts were not causing fires in home. The arcing of frayed cords was. So now we have breakers that detect such and trip for current draws well below the breaker hard limit. First few years were a real hassle as the early breakers tended to trip over older vacuum cleaner motors and such but now the system works well. And the appliance industry got a short term boost.

    As to electric outlets where wet can be. You should look up what is required for CGFI in the US. Not just in baths, but in garages, outdoors, kitchens, any "fixed" appliance, dual breakers to a kitchen, etc... They have to trip really fast over very low leakage currents. (I con't believe I agree with sleepingroutine onsomething.) And the reset MUST be easily accessible for new and renewed work. So no requiring someone to go outside in a storm or when it is below freezing because a kitchen counter tripped. Many homes just have a controlling CGFI outlet with other following off that for each location required. But with a ring you can't do that. So you get to do something else.

    Oh, if you do a remodel in your house and the cost is over some not too big percentage of the value of the home the entire home must be brought up to current code standards for electricity. People have had a rude shock when replacing a $2000 furnace or $1000 water heater wound up costing another $8K (OR MORE) in electrical upgrades.

    The US isn't 3rd world in electric standards. Get over it. We just do some things differently. But safely.

    Back to my original point. I've yet to stay in a hotel in Europe that would get a CO for electrical code compliance in the US except maybe one in Madrid. (But the wifi there was so bad it was a wash.) That doesn't mean they are not safe. Just that they are not up to US code. I assume they are up to the local code and assume the local code is good enough.

    501:

    2 outlets from the same feed. Also there's a 1 to 1 step-over transformer lurking behind those outlets, and they're only capable of delivering enough power to run an electric shaver, lots of which deliver 30 minutes to 1 hour shaving time off 2 or 4 AA size cells.

    502:

    As I said I didn't look close. I gave up on electric razors maybe 40 years ago. If you have a soft beard they are a PITA.

    Let's see. At a Hilton in Dublin we had to run an extension cord across the entrance hall so my wife could stand in front of a mirror to dry her hair. The mirror was on the close closet door.

    Anyway, different strokes for different folks.

    503:

    Well, from the room side all you'd see is the 2 by 2 round pin outlets and an icon of a man who's shaved one side of his face.

    As for your wife, I don't know where you were staying but my experience is that the hair dryer is usually hooked to a spur outlet on the dressing table in hotels.

    504:

    4 or 5 different hotels in Ireland (big chain and smaller private but not decrepit), 1 in Madrid, an airbnb in Paris, 3 airbnbs, 3 hotels and a private home in Germany.

    One private home we visited in Germany (not long enough to deal with such issues) was built in 1958 or 59 and had some rotary light switches in the older areas. Interesting mix of new and old.

    Since I know HOW to do wiring to code in the US it has become a thing I do when we get to a new place in Europe. Scope out the outlet situation. The one stupid thing I did on a trip was take a US surge protector with me as the 5 of use needed a lot of outlets. Totally forgot that a clamping voltage of 160v was a bit low for use in Europe. Oh, well. Now I have a very nice looking power strip.

    Not an exhaustive list I know. But still. Outlets were few and far between, especially compared to the US.

    505:

    "a bicycle shall carry no more than the number of passengers it is designed for"

    That sounds like an eminently sensible rule for waving under the nose of idiot teenagers who think it's funny to carry a friend standing on the front forks. (A practice that tends to lead to cracked skulls and/or accidentally running down pedestrians due to loss of control.)

    506:

    On a typical July day there are around 30,000 flights across European airspace — We have a bit under 3 times that amount.

    Congratulations: the EU has 1.5 times the population of the USA, so you've got roughly five times the flights per capita.

    A quarter of EU flights within UK airspace sounds like a lot, but the UK has got 20% of the US population: we're making nearly twice as many flights as the EU average (due to antiquated/slow rail infrastructure—the continental EU has serious high speed rail for turboprop-distance journeys) but half as many as the US mean.

    507:

    Well, European code varies with the intended use of the room. For example, a bedroom does not need to have as many outlets as a living room.

    508:

    Weight gain—the obesity epidemic—is a really complex problem. Interestingly, the epidemic only got under way after the extensive roll-out of antibiotics in animal feedstocks, because when you dose farm animals with antibiotics they put on weight faster; there's some research suggesting that paediatric antibiotic use leads to obesity later in life for humans, too.

    Adding HFCS to food products is obviously a bad idea, but note that HFCS isn't added to food products in countries other than the US that also have an obesity epidemic going on.

    The human gut microbiome also has some weird and poorly-understood interactions with the immune system and the neurohormonal system (it's implicated in some depressive illnesses). And then there's this study of duodenal mucosal resurfacing, which seems to be a total WTF for the idea that Type II diabetes is all about what you eat, as opposed to how your gut lining responds to it.

    509:

    Interesting. The 2M (well 6') spacing in the US for almost all of a residential area is to keep people from wanting to use extension cords that might get put under things or walked on and fray. The rule is universal for all rooms in a home/apartment. It has even expanded to hallways and walk in closets (with a lot of footnotes) as people tend to put lamps on tables in hallways, hang pictures with lights, and for larger closest treat them as a sewing room or similar. And the 6' starts over when you turn a corner or run into a door. And very short walls are excused. With more footnotes. :)

    Then for things like kitchen countertops (with definitions for what how to define such) it gets down to 2' spacing. To keep cords from being laid across work spaces.

    And all kinds of rules about where light switches must be at a minimum in terms of doorways and such.

    And for real fun let's talk about the rules for where flue gases can vent to the outside or where exterior gas water heaters can be located. Lots of details about doors, windows, and service entry points. When my daughter was buying her house I told her the reason they didn't have a CO yet was most likely the location of the outside water heater. Yep, two moves of the heater later the builder got the CO.

    510:

    As I mentioned, the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains tend to distort need.

    But UK has 1/3 of the flight take offs of all of Europe? Seems a lot to me.

    511:

    That's not what was said. A large proportion of flights from mainland Europe to North America cross UK airspace; only some touch down here.

    512:

    As Elderly Cynic already said. Second from someone who lives more or less under several of the main Europe-North America (and vice versa) airways).

    513:

    Yes, it's complex, but one does not need to understand the details at that level to tackle the problem at a population level - yet many known, important factors are largely or wholly ignored. One such is central heating - yes, seriously - back in the 1950s, people in the UK expended a lot of energy just keeping warm. The personal activity one is admitted, but not how drastic a social change is needed to restore the population to the level of activity that was normal then.

    As you know, the reason that those matter is we have not evolved to expend small amounts of energy and eat little. I find it much easier to eat as much as I need if my requirements are above 3,000 Kcal/diem than if they are below 2,500, because I can fill my belly, and my observations are that this is not a rare phenomenon.

    514:

    I have tended to find that it's the LEDs themselves that fail, due to overdriving and grossly inadequate heat dispersion. The ballast capacitor does not inspire confidence as it is an unsuitable type and disconcertingly physically small, apparently chosen by someone who thinks that just because it has a voltage written on the side that is not less than the mains voltage it must be good enough, but the LEDs are the components that are quickest to take exception to the overall inadequacy of the design. The reservoir capacitor (electrolytic) is also slowly being killed by the voltage excursions across its inadequate capacity and consequent excessive dissipation, but again not as quickly as the LEDs.

    With CFLs it's usually electrolytic capacitors that cause them to fail, either because they just explode or because their capacitance goes down and their ESR goes up until they can no longer eat the spikes they're there to eat and the spikes eat the semiconductors instead. This also often happens in other switching converters too, but CFLs get more continuous use and operate the components at much higher temperatures so you get to see it happen more often.

    But perhaps the biggest problem with LED light bulbs is that a shape which is ideal for a vacuum vessel intended to contain a metal thread at a few thousand K and keep it isolated from its surroundings in all respects except as far as energetic photons go is a very poor shape for mounting a whole bunch of heat generators that you really want to keep below 300K using only natural convection, yet people still insist on building LED bulbs in this totally inappropriate shape which exacerbates all the other inadequacies of the design that they might well get away with if they didn't hamstring themselves before they even start.

    So I don't buy LED light bulbs; I make my own, using rolled polypropylene ballast capacitors, generously-rated large-value reservoir capacitors, and the LEDs in strings inside a plastic tube about a metre long. They don't look like incandescent light bulbs, but then a bird doesn't look like a fish.

    515:

    "I find it much easier to eat as much as I need if my requirements are above 3,000 Kcal/diem than if they are below 2,500, because I can fill my belly"

    Golly, I struggle to consume as much as 1500Kc/d, because of the sheer amount of eating involved, plus associated fucking about, and the utter tedium of the whole exercise. Not to mention the expense, but that's a secondary problem. (Yes, I do have to be careful I don't fall down the slots in drain covers. And I can not understand why fat people don't just eat less, since I'd find it impossibly difficult to eat as much as they do and it's so much easier to just not do it.)

    I most definitely notice the connection between hunger and ambient temperature, and I find it far easier to cope by turning the external heat production up than by stoking the metabolic fires. And what with the excellent insulation of my house meaning that the external heat production is still only a few hundred watts, versus the large and insufficiently acknowledged amount of fuel used to produce a much lesser amount of energy stored as food, I wouldn't be surprised if it's an environmental win too.

    516:

    "due to antiquated/slow rail infrastructure - the continental EU has serious high speed rail for turboprop-distance journeys"

    ...Whereas Britain does not have those distances at all, and the main problems with rail are ridiculous ticket prices, lack of capacity (which among its many causes includes the difficulty of pathing excessive speed differentials on the same track, so the faster the trains try to be the worse the problem gets), and lack of attention to making the inside of a train somewhere you actually like to be for the duration of a long journey (exacerbated by capacity concerns encouraging a sardine-can design paradigm). We would do better to adopt the position of the Midland Railway of old, which was basically "OK, we can't be massively fast, with our track/routes, so we'll make our trains comfortable" (and abolished second class and brought third class up to second class standards at third class fares, which made the other railway companies shriek a bit.)

    I look at Nojay's figures for the cost of fusion @ 467 and compare them with the (actual) cost projected for HS2, and have no difficulty deciding which I'd rather see the money spent on...

    517:

    I am a 1.86m, 80 Kg man and my basal rate is c. 1,600 Kcal/diem. Exercising on the gentle/moderate boundary is about 90 watts for me, and that's 350-400 Kcal/hour. 4 hours of that (or 6 hours at 60 watts) gets above 3,000, before any temperature effect is added.

    518:

    Charlie,

    Google - gut bugs and obesity

    There are tons of great articles about what they've found.

    • They took a skinny mouse and did a fecal transplant from an obese guy to the mouse. The mouse got obese in response.

    I have a story that I will not publish, about a group of obese people stalking obnoxious skinny people who eat massive amounts of food claiming that they "burn it off". The skinny guy would tell his obese friends that they should "push away from the plate" leaving food on the plate, go out and get some "exercise". He was eating thousands of calories each day, while the obese people were eating half as much as the skinny guy without losing weight.

    The obese people drug the guy, do a fecal transplant, then the guy becomes obese. We leave the former skinny guy desperately dieting and exercising trying to get skinny again, never understanding what happened.

    Think of it as a horror story like Silence of the Lambs. I call it "Fat Man".

    Then:

    Google - gut bugs and dementia

    Yikes! Those articles will scare you.

    Then this one is just sad:

    Google - gut bugs and autism +bleach

    People are having their kids drink bleach thinking that will clean out the "bad bugs". There is no such things as "bad bugs", there are bacteria doing what they were "trained" to do. People don't realize that bacteria live throughout the body keeping us alive. There is no way to completely clean out the bacteria without making people sick or die.

    A century from now, most illnesses will be cured by balancing the bacteria in the body, "training" them to optimize their behavior for our benefit.

    519:

    Dash operations on cars - yeah. If I rent a car, about half the time I forget to review it, and I'm sorry while driving.

    For that matter, a few years ago, I replaced the stereo in my van with a new one. The original would play 4 to zero tracks of a CD, then claim there was a format error.

    The new one plays the whole thing, and then autorepeats. And I WOULD NEVER BUY THIS SUCKER AGAIN - it's a Pioneer, which is a decent name, but... the controls were designed by idiots sitting at a desk. You can't turn the volume off with the knob... but pushing it gets you menus. Trying to hit tiny buttons is a pain, esp. while driving. The clock loses a couple minutes every couple of months(!). Oh, and if the headlights are on, it's almost unreadably dim... esp. if it's daytime and raining, so your lights (BETTER) are on.

    520:

    Not sure how big my lot is, but it's longer than a split-level sideways, and about as long from the street to the front door as to the back fence from the back of the house (or further). A lot to mow. I'm fine with an extension cord.

    Btw, for those in the US: zillow is a tool for house flippers, and LIES. I was just trying to find something that might give my property size... and it claims that my house is about 1100'^2 more than all the public records.

    521:

    I just went back and looked him up. You might want to read this wikipedia entry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Rosling#Reception_of_Rosling's_views_on_the_world's_future

    Having refreshed my memory of what I'd read, the issues I have with him are just what wikipedia says... and that this "don't worry, be stupid" attitude is what the right wing, and the neoliberals push, because anything else means we'd have to do some thing about things, and that would be HARD and HURT (like taxing the shit out of billionaires and multinationals).

    522:

    I have a 2008 Honda Odessey, the large van. As I know from this past weekend, when we went up to Philly for the renfaire, it just got 23mpg highway (and I really need to check the plugs, and the tire pressure)...but then, I'm addicted to cruise control whenever possible.

    Oh, and the reasons I have for a minivan are the ones my late wife and I decided as to why we got one: 1. Must be able to carry a lot of large stuff, up to and including a 4x8 sheet of plywood (uncut)* 2. Must be a good road vehicle, and can be slept in if necessary. 3. Must be able to carry a bunch of fen out to dinner Saturday night at a con.

    It regularly fulfills all of that.

    • When my late wife and I were first looking, we were at this one dealership, looking at a used Voyager, and we liked it, but asked about the larger one. The dealers said he didn't have them, but that this would do what we needed. She then said she wanted something that, if she wanted, could carry two full-sized dog crates. I added, a 4x8 sheet of plywood. He looked at little panicked... and replied, "well, you could cut the plywood in half!"
    523:

    News reports in mainstream media. An example, easily found. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5431088

    524: insert noseinair

    Wimp.

    Never used an electric. A number of times in my life, for months or years at a time, used my straight razor.

    (My other claim to Real Manhood is, like Hemmingway, I can drink wine from a bota at arm's length.)

    525:

    The question is how much HFCS is used in the UK and the EU. In the US, it's everywhere... Back in the seventies, it was promoted as "better than glucose", because the body could use it more easily. Trouble is that if you don't burn it, it turns to fat faster.

    There was also the report in the last year that using artificial sweeteners results in you wanting to drink more, because your body doesn't think it's had enough.

    sigh And I would guess you're right about the growth hormones... and that, of course, also results in antibiotic-resistant illnesses.

    526:

    Unrelated to the thread... ok, folks, in 2016, the nearest thing to "humor" about it was was UK: Brexit is the stupidest, most damaging thing a country could do to itself. US: here, hold my beer.

    We are now in a full-blown Constitutional crisis, with the Sec. of the Treasury refusing to obey the law (to provide Turnip's tax returns), and AG playing delay, delay, delay, and I see the MC has just asserted executive privilege, and that's may go to the Supreme Court....

    Meanwhile, the Speaker of the House, a neoliberal, is publicly worrying about whether, if he's not impeached, he will recognize the election in 2020, and not step down.

    527:

    ... and the previous on "fat" & "thin" people. I'm a natural ectomorph to start with. I eat VERY well & drink moderate ( According to the health fascists excessive ampounts ) of real beer. But, note - almost all home-grown veg, meat from known sources via a trusted butcher, lots of exercise ( Keeping an allotment is hard work ) Very little "processed" meat - even if you include bacon .... NO "Sweet" drinks AT ALL. And, yes, I would not be at all suprised that gut bacteria are really important ... I had a very-slowly worsening problem with a grumbling insodes for years, until I managed to trigger a reaction by eating a particular fugus - that I'd had before, but went over the reactive threshold ... cleaned me right ot ... along with grumbling gut problem, which has never been seen again. If anything, Im now, at age 73, eating better, if not more, than I have ever done. [ This evening's meal will be remains of Poached chicken, recooked with a semi-middle-eastern spice taste, steamed/fried fragrant rice with homegrown leeks & today's poick of Asparagus + hollondaise sauce & half-a-bottle of vino. ] Health fascists can fuck right off ....

    528:

    Thanks, the wiki is a good start.

    I was not aware that there was that kind of negative spin being generated. That comes in handy for Story.

    As I've said above I have "mad Google skills" but unless I'm in the right mindset I can't ask the questions to generate useful answers.

    I always have problems writing "Villain speak", so when I can find real examples it helps. Each of the critics makes their living scaring people. I understand where they are coming from; they need to earn a living playing on the "fears or desires" of people. I have a number of Villain characters that are based on the critics.

    Thanks...

    529:

    cptbutton @ 483:

    "That money estimate is how much will need to be spent before the first watt of commercial fusion electricity is delivered into a grid, assuming there are no roadblocks or whoopsies in the way. It might be more, it will not be less absent a Shipstone-style breakthrough and it might not succeed at all for some as-yet unknown reason."

    Trivial nitpick, but if you are referring to the tech from Heinlein's novel Friday I think Shipstones were superbatteries, not anything to do with fusion.

    I got the impression the "inventor" had come up with some novel way of storing power in capacitors, and the "battery" aspect was obfuscation and misdirection. Either way, it was an entertaining story.

    Heinlein didn't really do a lot of science in his science fiction. It was more of a hook on which to hang a tale about people. And I'm not convinced he really understood people.

    530:

    allynh @ 528 I have a number of Villain characters that are based on the critics. Not a new trope .... Beckmesser in Meistersingers is probably the best-known example ...

    531:

    David L @ 509: When my daughter was buying her house I told her the reason they didn't have a CO yet was most likely the location of the outside water heater. Yep, two moves of the heater later the builder got the CO.

    Just in case anyone was wondering, in this case CO does not mean carbon monoxide; it means "Certificate of Occupancy" a document from the building inspectors that the house is ready to be occupied.

    532:

    I am constantly aware that my own house, a 2 level on what amounts to a drained bog just above sea level, is likely unviable within about 20 years.

    But I do love living in it, the ocean is a block away, the neighbourhood is level and quiet, and we live in quite a nice town. I could sell it at a premium now as the local market is utterly insane.

    Inertia is a powerful force in all things, housing is not exempt.

    I still see a few rooming houses around, mostly for students or workers who only stay there occasionally. My uncle operated one that housed a few single oilfield workers in Alberta, who spent much of their time in the North but wanted a warm bed and a 'home base'. I stayed in one myself during a brief attempt at UVic back in the 90s.

    Shared living spaces will be fraught with all sorts of social challenges, and the more inflexible and 'forced' the worse they may become. Imagine sharing a common area with one or more abusive situations, or a possible sexual predator (it's always the quiet ones...). These things can be managed, but it will be a challenge.

    There is a builder in our community who builds prefab 'click' homes that one can add or subtract rooms from as needed. They are quite popular as they amount to 'mobile homes' with good design. I'd consider buying one myself if he wasn't a complete arsehole in person.

    533:

    On climate change:

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01313-4 Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release
    In short, permafrost is thawing much more quickly than models have predicted, with unknown consequences for greenhouse-gas release.

    No particular surprise for the readership here, but a status report.

    534:

    I have one word: clathrates.

    535:

    "There was that kind of negative spin"? You mean that none of the criticism is valid? That it's all just spin?

    I don't think so.

    And 11B humans is not sustainable. Let's see how things work out later this year, with so much of the US midwest not planting crops.

    536:

    As long as we're talking about fusion power reactors, I'd like to understand their tritium economy in the start-up phase and thereafter.

    I.e., currently discussed reactors mostly use the deuterium-tritium reaction to produce energy and then capture the neutron from that reaction in a lithium-6 blanket to produce more tritium (and a bit more energy) on a one-neutron-gives-one-tritium basis. So that's a self-licking ice cream cone but might need a bit more tritium from external sources to make up for losses/inefficiencies. Importantly, as far as I can see, it doesn't produce any surplus tritium and may need a little input.

    But let's say that we want to start up a 1 GWe power plant and keep it running. How much externally supplied tritium do we need in the start-up phase and then in the steady-state production phase?

    537:

    I tend to see D-T fusion as a camel's nose proof-of-concept to keep the money taps open while the research process moves on towards Proton-Boron fusion—the holy grail. It's less energy-efficient than 3He fusion, but unlike the 3He sparkly unicorn moondust, we've got heaps and drifts of boron lying around all over the place here on Earth (so there's no need to stripmine the lunar regolith for fusion fuel).

    Trouble is, P-B has roughly double the ignition temperature of 3He fusion, and an order of magnitude higher than D-T fusion. In other words, the engineering challenges are significant (read: might be impossible).

    538:

    There is quite a nice overlap between mental and physical pain and exhaustion, protaglandines might be involved, in the case of paracetamol there might also be involvement of the endocannabinoid system and TRPV1. Those systems being involved might also explain some of the association between depression and dementia.

    Short update, my psychiatrist asked me who my therapist was, and I said I had none. He asked why not, and I mentioned I had asked him repeatedly for an referral in the last year. I visited my old therapist and have an appointment in 2 weeks.

    My psychiatrist also asked me about last week, e.g. the multiple visits to the hospital and like. Let's just say I wonder if anybody applied costly signalling to "mental health" issues before. ;)

    539:

    Now I start to wonder what you're talking about, when you say "20th century" socialism. Just to make things clear, my view is social (via laws anre regulations) control of business, and social (via gov't) ownership of key industries, such as water, sewer, power....I'd like to see that expanded.

    What I'm thinking of with 20th Century socialism is the stuff that got privatized away in the 1980s in places like the UK. I'm also thinking of the local socialists. In theory I agree with them, but in practice (e.g. when I meet them in person), I can't stand the ninnyhammers. They're still marching like it's either 1969 or Occupy, and they take offense at the notion that their opponents know their tactics and strategy rather better than they do, and have the counters ready. Innovation is not part of their zeitgeist, at least so far as I can tell.

    I agree that some things, like medicine, education, prisons, and quite possibly (affordable) housing, shouldn't be handled by an unfettered free market, less so by the socialism of the rich/crony capitalism we have now. The need government intervention, and quite possibly single payer or public institutions. Water, sewer, and power get a bit more complicated, because we've been through all the possible permutations on those (going back to the Sumerians, at least with water), and they all, except for irrigations commons, seem to end up getting corrupted rather badly.

    The biggest point, for me, is that I don't think we yet have the ideological system(s) that will get any civilization through the 21st Century intact, so I'm not sure I'd like to label myself as following any particular -ism, aside from perhaps skepticism or stoicism.

    540:

    That is a good example of how useful this stuff is for Story. I could never make this stuff up on my own.

    "There was that kind of negative spin"?

    See what you did there. You pulled part of a sentence out of context then made it into a false quote. I literally had to look at it a few times to even see that they were my words pulled out of context. The actual quote would be:

    I was not aware that there was that kind of negative spin being generated.

    Perfectly valid statement, yet you felt the need to twist and spin it.

    You mean that none of the criticism is valid? That it's all just spin?

    Yes. As is obvious if you had actually read the articles that the wiki post was using. Great articles by the way.

    I don't think so.

    In effect, you are basing your opinion on paraphrased commentaries from articles about a book that you have never read. I have read the book and the articles. My statement above is easily supported when you read the actual articles and compare it to the book Factfulness. The articles are pure spin.

    And 11B humans is not sustainable.

    If you had watched the Rosling videos I linked you would see that addressed.

    Let's see how things work out later this year, with so much of the US midwest not planting crops.

    What does the flooding in the American Midwest have to do with world populations a century from now. That is a typical false equivalency to divert a conversation. But, I digress.

    Thank you for playing, but now I have to get back to writing. This has been useful.

    Thanks...

    At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: "I have to go to work - as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I'm going to do what I was born for - the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?

    -- Corollary --

    The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.

    -- Marcus Aurelius

    541:

    The real Holy Grail for fusion, at least in the first instance is Deuterium-Deuterium since the fuel can be easily sourced from water. D-D fusion can be achieved and has been[1] but the energy return is less than D-T. ITER's first operational campaigns will be D-T but part of the experimental plan is to see if a mixture of D-T and D-D will work and just how "dirty" the D feed can be before it affects the fusion process to reduce yields.

    There's a lot of fun stuff coming from ITER even if it turns out commercial fusion power can't be achieved.

    542:

    whitroth @ 535 with so much of the US midwest not planting crops. I missed that - what has happened / is happening to cause this?

    543:

    "a bicycle shall carry no more than the number of passengers it is designed for" That sounds like an eminently sensible rule

    It is, which is why I used it as a counter-example to the stupid ones. We have a bunch of smart rules that interact in amusing ways, and a few obnoxious ones thrown in to annoy everyone/please a media outlet. The usual one that most people overlook is that the limits on vehicle size and weight apply to all vehicles, not just motorised ones. Which is why the bicycle trailer rule is so odd, the limit is 3m for everything except bicycle trailers.

    A friend really wanted to gut a tradey van and repower it with cyclists, purely so he could lower it below the legal limit for motor vehicles, fit it up with lights and sound system, then go doof-doofing down the main drag on a Friday night taunting the plod. I think he was bitter about getting pulled over all the time in his "unlicensed motor vehicle" that... didn't have a motor.

    544:

    D-D fusion can be achieved

    Indeed so.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike

    Probably want to throttle that back a bit.

    545:

    I was just trying to find something that might give my property size... and it claims that my house is about 1100'^2 more than all the public records.

    More and more local governments in the US have GIS systems of property in their jurisdiction. Great for those things that Zillow and Redfin don't work for.

    Think Google Maps except for property lines, right of ways, building outlines, storm sewer and sanitary sewer lines and openings and so on.

    546:

    Three things:

  • floods; you can't plant if the ground can't bear equipment weight
  • Trump's tariffs have broken the business model for many farms; for example, the US soybean export market has completely collapsed
  • farm income had been semi-constant in real dollar terms since about 1950, but since 2008 it's been getting less and less possible to do in economic terms. (Monopsony and monopoly issues; see "hacking the tractor") This year looks like notable start of demographic collapse as various older farmers give up. (Lots of dairy farmer debt-driven suicide in the North-East, for example.)
  • 547:

    Greg Tingey @ 542:

    "whitroth @ 535: with so much of the US midwest *not* planting crops."

    I missed that - what has happened / is happening to cause this?

    At a guess, Cheatolini iL Douchebag's trade war with China. China slapped a retaliatory tariff on U.S. soybeans. If you can't sell it, ain't no point in planting it.

    548:

    99% of whom probably voted for the DT's ... ? ( Yes/No? ) Serve'em right, how sad. But, what about the rest of the communities, whose livelihoods will also have been affected/

    This plays into Brexit, of course ... nice to be able to tell the rabids "I told you so" afterwards, except we will all be in the same boat.

    549:

    The Japanese JT60 tokamak managed D-D fusion in a campaign a few years back. They didn't reach the Holy Grail of Q greater than 1 but, it is claimed, if they had been set up to use D-T fuel they would have managed it. As far as I know the only tokamak that's run with D-T is JET and that only achieved a Q of about 0.6 the one time they tried it, over twenty years ago. ITER is designed from the ground up for a Q greater than 10 and sustained fusion lasting hundreds of seconds. Getting to that point will be an interesting voyage.

    The JT60 is getting rebuilt and reconfigured to work as a testbed for ITER technologies and wouldn't be able to attempt a fusion campaign for a couple of years, ditto for JET.

    550:

    From my memory, this humour was created by a Dane (Humon of "Scandinavia and the World" fame) in response to the US electing Trumpolini.

    551:

    You get that Q factor only if you ignore the power needed to run the device, over and on top of that needed to heat the plasma; that's a marketing figure not an engineering one. Even if ITER works perfectly and on its current schedule, which is vanishingly unlikely, I do not believe that the plans or schedule for DEMO are more than romantic fiction - there WILL be unexpected, hard problems but, equally seriously, there are just too many places in the design that say essentially "solution needed here".

    552:

    Ummm, no -- Q is not just the heating energy, it's the total for control, magnetic field support and injection. ITER is not intended to produce electricity, the Q factor in its case is a measure of thermal energy out vs (electrical) energy in. They hope to get 10, what they actually get is in the lap of the Gods.

    There are some schools of thought that say going big simplifies things, it gives the control systems a chance to squash incipient plasma instabilities before they enter runaway. Other folks say, as you do, that increased size will result in greater technical problems. It's why there's an "E " in ITER.

    553:

    "he was bitter about getting pulled over all the time in his "unlicensed motor vehicle" that... didn't have a motor."

    Wait, didn't you just poo poo my assertion that they added extra things (looks, ergonomics, distance between pedals, shape of the seat) that weren't in the law. Now you're providing examples of people being hasseled based on the looks...

    555:

    Fusion research more than anything else seems to be about the exploration of plasma physics, for both military and scientific reasons - That is, some of the funding is there because if you understand the process well enough, you can build a fusion based physics package that does not need testing at all, side-stepping the test ban treaty, and some of it is there because understanding plasma physics better is stupidly important to have better models of the stars and the history of the cosmos.

    I agree very much with the second of those. But as a power source?

    Power production is barely even a goal, and in as far as it is, it is an attempt to solve the public relations problems with nuclear fission power through superior technology, which... that strategy has failed several times already. The anti nuclear lobby will with one hundred percent certainty turn on fusion the second it delivers a useable watt. That might burn their credibility to the ground, but if that happens, people will just turn around and build.. fission reactors.

    556:

    Tha anti-nuclear "green|" lobby have lost all credibilty long since ( If you are educated & awake ) We are going to have an EU lelection & the "Remain" parties are: LemoCrat / ChangeUK & "Green" I will almost certainky vote Lem0Crat ... The "greens" are agin nuclear power & electrically-powered railways ... yeah, right. STUPID.

    557:

    How on earth are people against electrically-powered railways for environmental reasons?

    (Hereabouts, there's massive effective opposition to electrification, but it comes from the freight carriers who own the right-of-way and use diesel.)

    558:

    Too right - Going back to 1980CE, I was staying in digs with 3 other engineering students. The owner's sister was an environ mentalist, and Dounray made one of their periodic announcements that they were "unable to account for all the uranium and plutonium". From this she leapt immediately to the conclusion that "someone has stolen a fuel rod". We were utterly unable to convince her otherwise, despite pointing out that, including guide/cooling fins, the rods were about 1 foot in diameter, 12 feet long, and would cause near instant death to the gate guards unless they were in a transportation vessel.

    559:

    Graydon It's called HS2 & is the first half of our proposed internal high-speed line. Which all the naysayers use Brit exceptionalism to prove it can't work here, in spite of working in all the other European Countries ..... Admittedly the chosen route is not the best, but it's all we have got.

    560:

    Oh, if that's HS2, it's a terrible idea.

    Yes, the UK needs a north-south high speed rail backbone running at the sort of speeds HS2 is intended to provide.

    But they're splurging a ridiculous amount of money (about £65Bn, IIRC) on building the line out from London to Birmingham—basically turning that city into a commuter belt zone for rich city workers—with plans to continue it no further north than Leeds (200 miles north of London).

    In the process HS2 is driving through a huge amount of picturesque scenery including sites of special scientific interest and habitats of endangered species.

    Meanwhile, the north-east and north-west of England are running on 30 year old diesel multiple units and large chunks of the regular railway network haven't been electrified at all, and Scotrail is receiving 40-45 year old hand-me-down diesel sets because there's no cash for new rolling stock.

    For a whole lot less money we could finish electrifying the WCML and ECML and upgrade their signaling and crossings so that the existing tracks could move to high speed running (at up to 160mph, compared to the current 125mph limit). And probably electrify the routes those old DMUs are running on and replace them with new electric sets.

    TLDR: the Greens are opposed to what is basically a gigantically expensive boondoggle that only benefits London while the rest of the UK's transport infrastructure rots. Greg, as a Londoner who is also starry-eyed about trains, doesn't get what's wrong with this.

    (If they wanted to do HS2 right they'd start in Aberdeen or Dundee and push south, so that demand from London to be hooked up to the high speed network would keep fueling its build-out until it finally reached St Pancras last. And I'm not even joking about that. The history of British transport initiatives is that once a scheme's benefits to London are received, Westminster assumes the job is done and stops funding it.)

    561:

    Yes, HS2 is wrong on so many levels, not least of which is they chose Euston as a terminus, which is a dead end that doesn’t easily link with anything. And it has the underlying assumption that travellers from the North only want to go to London, so can’t even link with the existing HS1!

    What they should be doing is a high speed trunk from Perth to Stratford or Ebbsfleet to join HS1 to the continent. Have spurs coming off for all the major cities or treat it like the French do the TGV and have regular local shuttle services designed to work with the mainline timetables a la Avignon. There is no reason any more that high speed rail needs to go into the cities, it just needs to go near them and local services can bridge the last mile. Having Stratford as a primary London terminus makes sense anyway since then it also links to Crossrail and the multitude of links upgraded for the Olympics.
    And definitely start from the north, where the land is cheaper, the routes are less crowded and the need for reliable high speed service is so much greater.

    562:

    It isn't just transport. The same happened with television, STD, and lots of other things.

    563:

    All this talk of Fusion for Electricity brought up memories of the scenes in Young Frankenstein when he has the lab running full tilt and Igor flipping the switches. All wearing big rubber gloves and crazy goggles.

    564:

    STD

    In the US this is short hand for Sexually Transmitted Disease.

    565:

    Actaully Charlie I do get what's wrong ... The route is badly chosen & is set for TOO HIGH a speed, hence ridiculously wide curvature. The argument for Afbaustrecke is valid, but they did that for London-Manchester some years back & fucked-up, so they have gone for Neubaustrecke instead. Notably, when the ex-LNW lines to Liverpool, Manchester & Brum were first electified, back in the 1960's they DID start at the "top" end & worked down .....

    BUT the best is the enemy of the good enough & if HS2 is cancelled, NOTHING will replace it, there will be no capacity expansion AT All & we will simply get more air travel & M-ways. If it's HS2 or no high-speed lines at all .... See the problem, folks?

    566:

    I can think of two possible reasons.

    One is that it will increase demand for electricity and that is bad because it means more fossil fuel burning. We MUST decrease all usage AND go with renewables.

    Or for the really hard core we all need to totally live locally. No long distance travel should be needed (or allowed) for 99.99% of the population.

    567:

    If it's HS2 or no high-speed lines at all ....

    Well, that suggests the problem is something structural to do with the way transport planning works in the UK, doesn't it? (Or the way it doesn't work. You'd think having to renationalize the railway track network three times so far might have gotten the message through that we need to renationalize the lot. Or the way bus fares in much of the UK are 2-3 times as expensive as they are in London suggests that Thatcher's bus deregulation was a toxic mess. But no, free market solutions to public transport infrastructure are little tin gods …)

    568:

    65 billion with sane planning and contracting should get you... up to eleven thousand kilometers of high speed rail (cost of best practices in Spain).

    That is not a math error. You have allocated enough money to this problem to replace the entire present UK rail net trice over.

    569:

    I wondered whether to translate, but thought "Oh, fuck it! TOS."

    570:

    Ah, yes.

    Back in the 90s there was a push to get the city here out of the business of trash pickup for businesses. Has to be cheaper to have private industry do it due to competition. So they announced a date and phased it out.

    Now what had been happening was that the city bid the pickup and hauling to private firms. The firms would bid for a number of pickups per day in various areas and the city would award contracts periodically. After the city got out of it most businesses had their prices double. The problem? The city would assign bid winners groups of pickups all in one area. After they got out of it businesses had to negotiate with separate haulers individually and since the routes were no longer optimized costs went way up.

    And then there was this consolidation/merger wave over a decade so eventually there was only one choice for the entire city and now we have a monopoly run by people who are not on the ballot every 2 or 4 years.

    Sound familiar?

    571:

    Wait, no, that was the electrified length. It is only enough money to rebuild the whole network once.

    572:

    Yes, but just think of how many cats we shall fatten ....

    573:

    Does Spanish "best practice" include buying land in towns at about 100_000 Euro per hectare?

    574:

    It does include things like "And a third of this rail line is in tunnels" so.. you could just bore your way under London.

    575:

    London Town is soon to drown.

    (Yes, really, at least on the time scale of this sort of project's planned service life.)

    Might be best to avoid tunnels. Might be best to have a rule about building everything so that its lowest point is at least current record storm tide + 15 metres above sea level, too.

    576:

    1) London is built on mostly clay and chalk. 2) You were (at least as I understood you) discussing re-building existing lines. We recently closed Glasgow Queen Street (high level) for several months in order to enlarge the existing tunnel bores enough to electrify the high level line from there to Edinburgh Waverley.

    577:

    Spain does not actually have a lot of rebuild examples to get costs of - but they do manage to build highspeed rail for below 7 million euro/km fairly often despite the need to ram those lines through mountains on a regular basis, which is why they have the second longest such network in the world.

    The issue is not finding the money or labor to build an effective electric transport infra-structure, it is that we need to reform the way we plan and contract those projects out.

    578:

    You wrote: The actual quote would be:

    I was not aware that there was that kind of negative spin being generated.

    Which is NOT actually semantically different than what I wrote. You say you weren't aware of it... defining it as negative spin, and with the way you phrased it, deliberately trying to suggest to the readers that it was only spin, and not actual valid criticism.

    What I got out of the wikipedia article is the classic "I'll ignore datapoints that aren't on this line on the graph."

    579:

    Floods. Lots of the midwest is flooded, still, and this has been going on for about a month, meaning that they can't plant.

    Btw, folks, I'm not even talking about the now-near-mythical "family farmer", I'm talking the gigantic agribusiness farms.

    Geez, there's already a wikipedia article on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Midwestern_U.S._floods

    This is food folks, both for people and critters.

    580:

    sigh Starting back in the mid-seventies, I've had fantasies of finding a junked TR-6 or something that size, ripping out the engine, trans, etc, and putting in pedals. A bonus of doing that, I just realized for the first time, is a lot more luggage/grocery space....

    double sigh Just looked for pics, and found a '69 for $15k....

    581:

    Please note that large parts of Spain are incredibly empty. 47M people in 505,000 km^2, compared to 66M people in 242,000km^2 for the UK — except it's even worse than that: England has 55.6M people in 130,000km^2, so nearly quadruple the population density of Spain.

    Worse, the population is concentrated in the South-East and up through the midlands to the M62 corridor (Liverpool-Manchester-Bradford-Leeds-Hull; it's a nearly solid ribbon conurbation crossing the UK coast-to-coast like a belt, with just a gap for the Pennines between Manchester and Bradford). Driving a railway through that territory is expensive because it's some of the most densely populated and pricey real estate in the world. It's more like driving an HSR line through downtown LA, compared to the mostly-empty interior of Spain, which is as densely populated as the Scottish highlands (if you exclude Madrid).

    (North of the border, a high speed rail network linking to Edinburgh and Glasgow alone would cover 60% of the Scottish population, with just over 100km of track—50km to link the two cities and another 50km to the border. Add in Aberdeen, Inverness, and Dundee and you could make it close to 80% coverage with only another 2-300km.)

    582:

    It's more like driving an HSR line through downtown LA,

    I was in Miami a few months ago and was impressed I could get from the airport to my high end hotel via their rail system. Semi heavy rail from the airport and other points to the center of town then switch to a people mover system which dropped me next to my hotel. $2.75 I think. They basically put the system in by mounting it 50' or so above the streets on pillars. Interesting way to do it. But it is NOT suitable for high speeds.

    As to how well it works, I'm not sure. It was great from the airport to the hotel. Going back they stopped the heavy rail after a few stops and told us to all get off due to unspecified issues. We were told buses would show up to continue our rides. Looking at the size of the crowd and the non rapid rate of bus arrival I walked a few blocks to a major street and got a Lyft to the airport. Oh, well.

    583:

    Greg Tingey @ 548: 99% of whom probably voted for the DT's ... ? ( Yes/No? )
    Serve'em right, how sad.
    But, what about the rest of the communities, whose livelihoods will also have been affected/

    This plays into Brexit, of course ... nice to be able to tell the rabids "I told you so" afterwards, except we will all be in the same boat.

    Closer to 55% - 60%. Nationwide Trump got approximately 49.5% of the popular vote while Clinton got 50.5%, but it does seem that how badly people are getting screwed by Trump's economic "policies" is proportional to how "bigly" he won in the state where they live.

    The states where Clinton won or where Trump won with only a plurality (i.e. less than 50%, but still more votes than Clinton got) don't seem to be as bad off as states where Trump got 55% - 75% of the vote.

    584:

    Charlie Stross @ 560: Oh, if that's HS2, it's a terrible idea.

    In the process HS2 is driving through a huge amount of picturesque scenery including sites of special scientific interest and habitats of endangered species.

    This bit seems like something Elon Musk's proposed "Hyperloop" technology could help with. Instead of tearing up the surface, bore under it. I'm sure there are many, many technical problems that would have to be solved, but I'm pretty sure if it could be implemented it wouldn't screw up the environment as much as the proposed HS2 y'all are talking about.

    585:

    There IS a reason there is no pork tartare.

    German Mett (Spiced Raw Ground Pork)

    586:

    Graydon @ 575: London Town is soon to drown.

    (Yes, really, at least on the time scale of this sort of project's planned service life.)

    Might be best to avoid tunnels. Might be best to have a rule about building everything so that its lowest point is at least current record storm tide + 15 metres above sea level, too.

    Yet, somehow they manage to keep the water out of the existing tunnels under the Thames and out of the Chunnel. Why wouldn't they be able to keep the water out of new tunnels?

    587:

    Chralie @ 567 WHAT "Transport Planning in the UK" ???? I breifly worked in the field & it is a VERY BAD JOKE - basically there isn't any. I even once wrote a semi-humorous presentation Paper on the subject ... oh dear. And, yes, ideology really doesn't help either....

    588:

    All this talk of upgrading/extending rail in Scotland/ England/(Wales?) reminds me that the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative is keen an doing that sort of stuff. Post-Brexit, maybe post-Union, the PRC might be interested in lending a helping hand.

    589:

    Yet, somehow they manage to keep the water out of the existing tunnels under the Thames and out of the Chunnel. Why wouldn't they be able to keep the water out of new tunnels?

    The Chunnel was designed to be run in chalk itself under water; the existing London Underground wasn't. Absent strenuous efforts, ten metres of rise is this massive slice of brackish water across London from east to west; the problem is not so much the tunnels as the entrances and vents. It wasn't designed to have water poured in from the top!

    It's not a simple problem to solve; most importantly, it's not a quick problem to solve. It's the sort of massive engineering work that takes many years, and doesn't lend itself to stages. (If you're going to barrage the Thames Estuary somehow, you probably need to build the full scale as the initial build.) The current UK's ability to commit to long term engineering projects is somewhat in question on the political and financial fronts.

    It's not even clear it's possible; someone would have to do a really thorough soil survey.

    592:

    Now you're providing examples of people being hasseled based on the looks...

    Specifically, "looks like it's doing 60kph" which in a way is fair enough, not every cop is familiar with every type of legally-a-bicycle. Avatar doesn't really look like anything else on the road, even "conventional velomobiles" to use an unusual phrase.

    http://trisled.com.au/avatar-super-velo/

    593:

    This bit seems like something Elon Musk's proposed "Hyperloop" technology could help with.

    Nope!

    Hyperloop is designed to carry small numbers of passengers in small vehicles. HS2 will be running thousand-seater AGV-class trains at upwards of 220mph, twelve per hour in each direction. Think in terms of a major airport handling a fully-laden 737 taking off and landing every 90 seconds, or a fully-laden 747 every 5 minutes.

    If this sounds big, that's because it is: they're designing a new transport backbone for a nation of 75 million people who mostly live in a narrow-ish zone roughly 500 miles long. (The longest railway route in the UK, the Dundee to Penzance CrossCountry express service, is about 705 miles long. I ride a segment of it every weekend at present.) This is an order of magnitude more people than a hyperloop operating within an American city would expect to serve.

    Hyperloop is simply far too small for this job. Both in the capacity of the vehicles and the bore of the tunnels: Musk's plan relies on using really small vehicles running in narrow bore tubes, and the cost of running a tunnel scales as the square of its radius. HS2 is a full-sized (probably continental loading gauge) railway, so requires continental railway diameter tunnels: a good match would be the Channel Tunnel (aka HS1), and those TBMs don't come cheap.

    594:

    It's the sort of massive engineering work that takes many years, and doesn't lend itself to stages.

    Actually, the existing Thames Barrier is exactly the sort of thing you're asking for. It went into operation in 1982, with a 75 year design life. I suspect by 2050 it'll be glaringly clear that it needs replacing or augmenting to cope with more frequent, higher storm surges … and the UK can do infrastructure right at short notice, when needs must, as witness the hasty erection of the Queensferry Crossing.

    (TL:DR: the Forth Road Bridge, connecting Edinburgh to Fife across the Firth of Forth, was built in the 1960s and was the longest road bridge in Europe when it opened. It had a design life of 120 years, but due to carrying twice the vehicle capacity it was designed for, fatigue problems became an issue around 2004-2005. Plans for the replacement bridge got the royal assent in 2011 and it opened in 2017—a 2.7km cable-stayed road bridge that was opened just in time to replace the now not-fit-for-purpose suspension bridge (it's still in use for pedestrians, bicycles, and buses).)

    Leaving critical infrastructure until the last minute is of course a bad idea—the Forth Road Bridge had to shut for emergency repairs a few months before the Queensferry Crossing was ready, dropping a 40 mile detour on the route from the main Scottish Amazon distribution hub in Fife and the cities it mostly serves—but: the longest triple-span cable stayed bridge in the world! And mostly completed under budget and not excessively late.

    And most importantly it bears the same relationship—politically, economically, in engineering terms—to the original Forth Road Bridge that a 2060s Thames Barrier 2.0 bears to the current Barrier.

    595:

    The Thames Barrier is by design good for half a metre above 1970 sea levels and cost thereabouts of half-a-billion 1980 pounds. (1985 pounds? Somewhere in there.) Roughly a billion pounds with current money. It's half a kilometer long, so ~4 billion current pounds per metre rise per kilometer if we can scale linearly. (That seems dubious, but this envelope isn't all that big...)

    All the replacements proposed have two common characteristics; they're larger (there's a 16 km proposal) and the appropriate authorities are insisting the current barrier is fine until 2070, no replacement is called for.

    16 km against 10 metres of rise at that kind of price is 160 x 4 G£ /m/km = 640 billion pounds; "three quarters of the UK's 2018 budget" as a general effort size. So I don't think the relationship holds; the bridges are on approximately the same relative economic scale for their times of design, and the Thames Barrier 2.0 would not have that characteristic compared to the current Thames Barrier. (Not just scale; the Thames Barrier is an emergency measure, it's not meant to be closed all the time. A barrier against the rising sea needs must be, which presents extra engineering challenges.)

    I'm not at all convinced we've got until 2060 for such things; it would be nice, but the trend for glacier collapse is concerning.

    (10 metres because the last time the atmospheric carbon loading was this high, that's at least how much higher sea level was.)

    596:

    Musk's plan relies on using really small vehicles running in narrow bore tubes, and the cost of running a tunnel scales as the square of its radius

    Hyperloop is actually worse because the vacuum requirement doesn't slack off as the area of the tube increases, if anything it gets more demanding. So you have a bigger hole, sure, but you also have larger forces due to the larger area so you need stronger walls, and the larger area means you can have less leakage per unit area. Having more passengers means you're going to be in the spotlight a bit more wrt safety, and having more frequent services means the whole process has to be more efficient.

    If Hyperloop was a COTS system then we'd have something to go off in terms of cost and capability, but since it's imaginary we have to settle for imagining that it would work better if it was bigger.

    Or we could just be boring and conventional and buy one of the existing fast train systems from one of the existing suppliers and settle for just having yet another fast train like all the other fast trains. This sentiment applies just as much to Australia as it does to the UK.

    597:

    and those TBMs don't come cheap.

    Especially when you bury them in the mid point of the tunnel.

    The British unit was turned down or sideways and left buried. I have an ancient memory that the point was to use it as a big electrical ground rod.

    598:

    I keep wondering how it is supposed to deal with the shifting ground where it crosses fault line.

    599:

    I imagine it involves the sound of many lawyers salivating.

    600:

    The lawyers have already started feeding on the LA wormhole system. One of the Tunnels he wanted to dig under Sepulveda in LA was abandoned due to lawsuit, but the incredible genius still wants to dig another one to Dodger Stadium. The original digging plan called for digging a tunnel apiece through each of two fault zones. One already got litigated out of existence (the one in the Sepulveda Pass and the West side), but I think the other's still on.

    Now, to double the Genius designation, the company wanted to not do any CEQA environmental documentation, because it wasn't going to cause any impacts, burrowing under LA, through a fault zone, probably through the oil deposits around Beverly Hills (same system that feeds the La Brea Tar Pits), and it's all going to magically work.

    I do a fair amount of CEQA stuff (CEQA is the California Environmental Quality Act, and the short version of it is figure out what damage you're going to cause, then figure out how to avoid it or fix it before going forward, or make a really good argument that the benefit is worth the damage you cause). Trying to avoid CEQA in such a dangerous area is really ringing the lawyers' dinner bell, and it either shows a high level of arrogance or stupidity. Unless what you're doing is a really bad idea (and tunneling is far from the only stupid idea happening in west LA right now), it's generally cheaper and faster to keep your mouth shut and do an airtight CEQA document, rather than trying to go the B3 (BS/Bully/Bribe) route.

    As for an aboveground hyperloop, the maps show multiple crossings of the San Andreas and even some fairly tight right angle turns. The failure options would make for some really good disaster SFF.

    601:

    Charlie @ 593 yes ... JS2 is supposed to be "UIC" load-guage at a minimum, they may even use German load - which is marginakky bigger.

    Elon Musk Much as I support his efforts with SPaceX hos other transport "ideas" are completely bonkers & unworkable, for many good engineering reasosn ... AND What's worse: They have all been tried beofre ....

    602:

    The British unit was turned down or sideways and left buried

    Was it? I definitely remember passing the Folkestone terminus on the M20 and seeing a TBM with a "for sale" sign legible to passing drivers on it in October or November 1995CE.

    603:

    Greg, wasn't something similarish to "Hyperloop" tried on the London Tube back in Victorian times, as an alternative to steam haulage?

    604:

    If you insist on a lock-like technology for the whole length, sure, it will be expensive. But the Dutch build dikes a lot more cheaply, and they are perfectly adequate for 'on-land' sections - though they would be a lot more distruptive. A quick look at a map indicates that a mere 5 km would be enough for a 20 metre storm peak up the Thames estuary just downstream of Tilbury and Gravesend, though that would add complications for Tilbury docks and power station. Nothing insurmountable, though.

    The Fenland is hopeless, though, so we would get a BIG hit in our food production.

    605:

    It was used for mail deliveries until fairly recently, if I recall; scaling those up would be no problem, but Musk's proposal is extreme. Atmospheric railways were used (Brunel was a fan), but didn't really work because it was only for the drive tube.

    606:

    Just a thought, but if drone goods delivery does take off - it'd need some combination of personal transport getting more expensive, paranoia about delivery drivers (which seems possible) and cheaper/better AI or autonav - then houses might be adapted to work with that. If the drones are aerial then a landing pad on the roof or in the back yard, if they use the streets then they need a shed or room at the front of the house to deliver to.

    607:

    As I recall, the big problem with atmospheric railways was pressure leakage. They tried using leather flaps inside the tubes, but apparently rats developed a taste for them. This was well before vulcanized rubber became available, so …

    And then it turns out that the Victorians were experimenting with maglev-propelled hyperloop lookalikes in the 1890s (link goes to my wife's blog about stuff that belongs in Steampunk fiction, except it was for real).

    608:

    Drone goods delivery is stupid and impractical in densely populated urban areas; the only niche application for it I can see is to speed up deliveries in suburban and exurban areas. It would allow a delivery truck to drive along a route without stopping, while drones ferry packages a couple of hundred metres to either side of its track before returning to reload through a roof hatch. Which is a big improvement over stopping every quarter kilometre or so and having a human run up a driveway or side-street.

    The problem is, people mostly live in densely populated urban areas today (the screaming exception is in North America), and climate change and the end of the oil economy is going to tend to militate against suburban living.

    So I see this as one of those trends that is going to get a lot of media noise in the USA but achieve relatively little market penetration—like the quaint idea of a personal desktop computer in every household (which was a passing fad at best). NB: that last is the way things will be remembered in 2119 (that personal computers were a 30-40 year fad, before they were replaced by smartphones in every pocket).

    609:

    Don't bet on either.

    FLYING drones, yes, but what the usual culprits are hoping for (and are being developed) is animaloid drones that can replace humans for deliveries, collections, and (later) routine 'care' visits and maintenance (like changing tap washers, light bulbs etc.) It won't be soon, but they are gradually progressing, and I expect to see them experimenting in the field before ITER goes online :-) Together with the move to automatic Web-based operation and vehicles, this will enable them to dispense with most of their workforce, so we can look forward to our unemployment rate reaching that of Gaza.

    Incidentally, in the UK, there isn't much REAL dependence of suburban living on the oil-based economy. Possibly assisted bicycles etc. are good for personal transport of up to about 10 miles (or 20, if you are happy for a trip to take 90 minutes), including child transport, personal shopping etc., which is all that is needed. Oh, yes, London and the few other huge conurbations need a railway mechanism for longer distances (which they have, though it needs improvement), and there is no technical difficulty about integrating bicycles with those. Social and political difficulties, yes, indeed!

    Personal computers are 40 years old already, and are showing no signs of going away. Anyone who wants to do any serious work that involves significant amounts of text, pictures, numbers (including spreadsheets) and more use them and are going to do so for the forseeable future - and a smartphone plugged into a keyboard, mouse and monitor IS a personal computer! I accept that people who don't will give up on them, but think about learning, government forms and personal finance.

    Please note that this is NOT about 'functionality' but ergonomics, and the limitations of Mk I humans, including but not limited to finger size/dexterity and visual acuity, and remembering that a LOT of people have minor impairments. I remember when those were going to be solved by voice-controlled, talking smartphones - yeah, right - those of us in the area regarded that as an insane idea, and so it proved.

    In order for smartphones to become reliably usable, we need the government, banks, Google, Amazon etc. to produce interfaces that are free from gotchas and do not need cross-checking. You may believe that will happen, but I don't. But, more seriously, consider learning (and I mean everything from primary up to undergraduate). Are we going to dumb that down to the extent it can be done on a smartphone? That is a pretty pessimistic (but possibly correct) scenario.

    Yes, personal computers will be phased out, eventually, but I have NO idea what will replace them. If it IS smartphones as we know and loathe them, then that will have HUGE consequences on our society, that will make the transport and living changes look piffling.

    610:

    Surely the fenland is solution is the Netherlands Dyke and Polder system

    not sure where you are getting a 20M storm surge from

    https://www.ntslf.org/storm-surges/skew-surges/england-east

    historical largest is just under 2m at

    can not see why storm surge would be bigger above high water mark even if high water mark is 3M higher. so polder system should work

    611:

    I read it in something like Popular Mechanics at the time.

    And these folks built them. Apparently there were 5 built with one left buried. https://www.therobbinscompany.com/projects/the-channel-tunnel/

    Skip down to the next to the last paragraph.

    612:

    I was merely pointing out that the high ground I was proposing to connect is more than 20m above Ordnance Survey datum; obviously, if you can build a 20m barrier, you can build a 2m one. Incidentally, 20m is also the predicted sea level rise if Antarctica goes ice-free!

    Look at a map of the UK in the vicinity of the Fenland. It isn't that dikes couldn't be built, it's the sheer length of them, as well as the number of rivers that would need outlets. Yes, estimates have been made (usually for fairly low heights), and even the engineers have gibbered at the cost, let alone the politicians. The Dutch had no choice, and a huge proportion of their population was imminently threatened - neither is true in the Fenland case.

    613:

    The problem is, people mostly live in densely populated urban areas today (the screaming exception is in North America)

    Well here in North America unless you live in Las Vegas much of us in the "burbs" live under a canopy of trees. And if not in a new development they have been planted and will be big in 10 to 20 years.

    And for many of us except in a few recent new area and higher income places where they paid extra to avoid such, our streets are lined with a forest of utility wires. In front of me are power (both local and the 3 phase loop for the larger neighborhood), wired phone/fiber, Google Fiber, and a mix of Spectrum coax and fiber. Almost all with arial runs to each house. (Some have switched to underground feeds during a remodel or teardown/rebuild.) Personally I have running to my house from my pole power, 2 copper phone, 2 coax, and 1 Google Fiber.

    As to trees, were are in a forest of various hardwoods and decorative trees ranging from 10' to 70' high plus a gradually thinning large number of lob lolly pine ranging from 50' to over 1000' tall. (People are getting more and more fed up with the latter and taking them out as they have the money and fed-up-ness. When/if I do it my last 4 will cost $3500 to remove due to them being next to power lines and that doesn't include digging out the stumps.)

    Anyway use Google Maps or whatever to get a satellite view of Raleigh NC and see how much is hidden by leaves. Then toss in the utility lines. I just don't see it. Then scan anywhere around the entire state and most any state east of the Mississippi River. And even the rest of the country while not as treed up still has a lot of similar issues.

    614:

    Oops. Well over 100' high.

    615:

    Before we start talking at cross-purposes, do you mean the Royal Mail's private tube lines? If so, I wasn't aware that they were ever pneumatic.

    616:

    Well, I've just looked in the relevant area, and the machine I saw above ground is no longer obvious. :-(

    617:

    No. I mean separate ones, specifically for packets, though I believe that one London railway line was once atmospheric; Greg might know. I could be wrong, because I am relying on my memory of some old articles, but I believe that there were some that transferred mail canisters by using air pressure differences in semi-sealed tubes. It's definitely a proven technology, and could easily be converted to carrying humans; whether it's worth bothering with is another matter.

    Note that does NOT support the Muskox's proposal - pushing trains on rails at 30-40 MPH by (small) pressure differences is a far cry from 760 MPH on a cushion of air.

    618:

    I think one of the early NYC subways was pneumatic.

    Didn't work very well (complicated for the day). Didn't scale. Then electric motors either showed up and/or got a lot better fast.

    619:

    Ah, at that rate I've seen similar systems in use for moving documents (and money) around buildings in the UK.

    In fact, they may still be in use, since such a system at Talledega Speedway in the USA is a plot point in the film Logan Lucky (I like heist flicks, and I like NASCAR; of course I was going to watch a film that combined them).

    And I think we're actually all in agreement that Musk's idea has been tried before, not successfully.

    620:

    Not quite. My point is that it HASN'T been tried before, and there are good reasons to believe that the (partially) successful uses of vaguely similar technology will not scale to what he wants to do. It's a bit like scaling up a 1930 Handley Page Type W to a supersonic intercontinental jumbo jet.

    621:

    Incidentally, 20m is also the predicted sea level rise if Antarctica goes ice-free!

    Not that it's an immediate prospect, but isn't that more like 70m? Including, I guess, Greenland.

    622:

    Interesting. The font at the top is gorgeous. Did your wife design that one?

    623:

    There was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Pneumatic_Despatch_Company - promising, but not a success in the longer term

    624:

    Possibly. In which case, I had confused feet and metres :-)

    625:

    Possibly assisted bicycles etc. are good for personal transport of up to about 10 miles

    A very large minority of the population can't ride bicycles at all, and that proportion is only increasing as the population ages. (Me, for instance: my sense of balance has pretty much gone, and my knees are shot.)

    Segways/hoverboards would help but they're flat-out illegal on public roads in the UK because the Department of Transport have their head stuck up their ass. More mobility scooters would help, along with motorized wheelchairs and other hybrid forms of personal transport. There's no reason for a single-person-plus-shopping vehicle with a range of 10-20km at speeds of under 20km/h to weigh a ton or more (like a car), or even much more than the person riding on it (and I'm assuming a seat plus weather protection).

    The real problem in the UK is the concentration of retail outlets in city centres and big car-accessible shopping malls out of town: suburban developments used to have local shopping parades but they're mostly withering up and dying, and Amazon is not a valid solution to "oh shit, I just ran out of milk for my cuppa, I need to nip out".

    On the future of PCs, I think the future might look something like Samsung DeX, only entirely wireless. It's your phone, only your phone is powerful enough to run a full desktop OS; you just grab a wireless keyboard and mouse, pair your phone with the nearest TV (a 4K TV is basically a gigantic-ass high definition monitor with its own embedded computer) and tell it "I want to do desktop work, now". DeX flips mode when your phone is in the DeX dock because we still expect wires for USB and HDMI; I'm guessing screencasting plus bluetooth will be the road forward for most purposes, and as next year's phones will max out at 1Tb of built-in SSD capacity, they're rapidly catching up with desktops for storage as well.

    627:

    Well here in North America unless you live in Las Vegas much of us in the "burbs" live under a canopy of trees.

    What Americans call "suburbia" Brits call "open countryside".

    What Brits call "suburbia" Americans call "overcrowded cities"—it means houses on 1/10 or 1/20 acre plots (historic dimensions), edge-to-edge with maybe a hedge or fence between them, often with two houses sharing a dividing wall ("semi-detached") or a building with two sides and divided vertically into top floor and ground floor apartments, but probably with a wee strip of grass in front and round the back.

    628:

    Yep, those are all fonts she either designed from scratch or re-implemented (she credits her sources, usually from out-of-print typography books).

    629:

    I am allowing for your points, though did not go in to details. If one were going in that direction, one would need minor regulatory changes, which would need someone prepared to tell the DfT to stop arsing around (no more). We also most definitely need to reverse the Americanisation of our shopping habits! But I don't see any major (technical) difficulty with that (even now), and doing so is critical if we are want to break our car habit.

    Details. I have had severely impaired balance all my life and, while I can ride a bicycle at 71, I am seriously endangered on busy roads or 'cycle facilities'; I can assure you that a recumbent trike solves that one! Knees are more problematic, but my comment also applies to the sort of 250 watt, 15 MPH, power-assisted cycle where you DON'T have to pedal. Those are illegal in the UK, but not in all European countries, and it's a trivial regulatory and electronic change. Weather protection etc. is already available - all it does is to increase the vehicle weight from 25 Kg to 50 Kg.

    The Samsung DeX approach is very likely; we already have people doing that with laptops. But the system also needs separate storage - not for size, but for when your phone gets dropped in a river or under a bus! My point is that I can't see any logical difference between such a system and a personal computer, nor can I see any great usage change implied by it, because there is no way that the same user interface is going to be adequate for both phone mode and the sort of work I described in #609.

    However, I am pretty sure that there WILL be a drastic change in how we use computers (including smartphones etc.), and fairly soon, but what I can't guess is what it will be!

    630:

    Hmm. I have a bit over 1/4 acre. My daughter in the same city 1/7. When I lived outside of Pittsburgh I had smaller. About 4 or 5' on each side with a back yard maybe big enough to play badminton.

    Still my point stands. Drones flying through the trees and power and such doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

    And even in Pittsburgh we had the trees. Just not nearly as tall.

    631:

    Paws @ 603 Yes There is an article on it back in the "London Reconnections" archive or alternativelt "Lapsed Historian" .... [ Bellinghman @ 623 - that's the one referred to ] @ 615 No - purely electric 3rd rail pickup, 2' 6"" guage 44V DC

    Chralie @ 607 Only ONE of which the aforementionedSchwebebahn actually you know, WORKED ... [ "Monorails of the Victorian Era" - a mgnificent book! ]

    EC @ 620 yes & not only the scaling problem, there's the "section occupation" problem that dictates railway signalling & safety standards, too .... Only with vacuum-separation of trains or units ... um, err ...

    632:

    Yeah, well, in the US, we mostly live in metro areas. People who think they're in the 'burbs, but the difference in crossing a street is none.

    I'm on a street - I just looked up and calculated, and I see I have .16 acre. Maybe the house is a quarter or a third of that, so a lot of mowing. And trees. Hell, look at downtown Philly, and you'll see lots of trees.

    Maybe a truck driving down, with drones flying off to door, oh, except for the ones that need a signature, or aren't supposed to be left on a doorstep, and then there's the folks in the condos or apts....

    633:

    I can see it now, pure steampunk.

    "Where to, sir?" "Fleet street" "Very good, sir. Just yourself?" "Yes" "Quite. So, if you'll step in here, and fasten this belt, right." Closes hatch, slides it down into a cylinder about a yard wide, dogs the top down, and slides it over to the tube shaft, where it falls and is whisked away.

    634:

    Even on those areas we have trees. In the tiny dirt/grass/whatever strip between next to the curb. I think the goal is to make the sidewalks non wheelchair compliant due to buckling from root growth.

    But we also get that great wishbone look as they keep the trees under the utility lines trimmed.

    635:

    So, you're thinking that you'll be carrying your computer on your belt in a holster, and you have either a mobile-style carry-along, or put it into a ahem docking station, and have a real moitor (or two, or three) and a real keyboard?

    I don't have a mobile, just a flip-phone. I HATE virtual keyboards. Meanwhile, I'm not going to walk out into traffic without looking, because I'm on the ZombieController (your eyes, and your mind, are ours!)....

    636:

    Yes :-) I am pretty sure that I have seen something similar in a pre-steampunk work of fiction, but cannot remember where, even vaguely. I was thinking about scaling up to tube trains, but that idea is much more amusing.

    637:

    Well here in North America unless you live in Las Vegas much of us in the "burbs" live under a canopy of trees. And if not in a new development they have been planted and will be big in 10 to 20 years.

    Speaking as someone who tries not to stop in Lost Wages but lives in southern Droughtistan regardless, I'd argue that much of the US east of the Mississippi and north of the Sacramento on the west coast is covered in trees in some of the burbs. That leaves only around, I don't know 20-50 million people in the treeless zones, not counting all the urbanites who don't have enough trees regardless of location.

    This is actually a really interesting urban design problem. Wonderful activists (I know a few) want to have urban forests galore. Idiots like me point out that combination of short tree lifespans (curbside planter boxes are not kind to most tree species), happy little killers like kuroshio shothole borer, and a shortage of water due to climate change make this all a rather interesting pipe dream for the sun belt. If you want to get into an, ahem, interesting discussion, find an ardent northern California environmentalist and/or Jeffersonian, and ask them if it's better to use northern California water to grow more trees in northern California for carbon sequestration, or to ship the water south to LA to grow the trees there where they'll be appreciated by more people but probably not live as long.

    638:

    A quick look at a map indicates that a mere 5 km would be enough for a 20 metre storm peak up the Thames estuary just downstream of Tilbury and Gravesend, though that would add complications for Tilbury docks and power station

    I agree that there's no overwhelming engineering challenge, absent someone finding a soils problem. (I don't know if quick clays are a thing in the Thames estuary. Or a lot of porous sand in an inconvenient place.) But the "in time" part seems insurmountable; you're describing something that would be a major political hairball even if everyone agreed that it was utterly necessary (even those convinced of sea level rise are not in agreement on how much when, and since we truly don't know it can't be resolved by reference to facts). Since admitting it's necessary pops the carbon bubble and the powers that be are willing to do nigh-anything to avoid that outcome, I don't think the organizational ability will be applied in time.

    Perhaps there's a happy future where the Chinese well and truly do pop the carbon bubble in 2022, because none of their geopolitical rivals are as well positioned to deal with unrest or economic turbulence as they are; maybe after the dust settles people will be able to get serious about trying to keep industrial civilization.

    639:

    No dissent there. Despite this, it's a political hot potato.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-48206325

    640:

    personal computers were a 30-40 year fad, before they were replaced by smartphones in every pocket.

    I'm watching the "drive a monitor with your phone" market somewhat, because what stops me using my phone for more computer-related tasks is the physical size - I need a magnifying headband and an external keyboard in order to make use of the 2500x1440 screen on my phone (same resolution as many 20" + monitors, but a third the size). I can imagine that 100 years will be enough time to solve some of the efficiency problems that stop smartphones being useful computers, as well as some of the ergonomic issues, so it will be possible to run useful software on them, and ubiquitous bandwidth will make running real problems remotely. Cloud computing is extremely efficient on many, many axis, but right now we're not really there yet when it comes to usability (AWS is great but you have to know an awful lot and spend a lot of time configuring it, you can't just say "run this program using no more than $10/hour of resources")

    Perhaps in 100 years the problem will not be "kids are shortsighted from not going outside enough" but "kids can't see their hands because they use VR too much and their eyes only focus in the range 2-10cm". Or maybe we will use something other than a shiny page to get information back out of the computer.

    641:

    When I say "bicycle" I generally mean "device with two or more wheels and largely human powered", so that pedal powered beer bus in Germany... that's a bicycle. A manual wheelchair with power assist... is also a bicycle (probably not in law, most require an indirect drive because that's the least-thought way to distinguish (most) kids trikes from (most) adult bicycles when banning the former from public roads*).

    "mobility scooters" is a slightly terrifying market, with extremes like the golf cart communities in the US, the stock ones that can do 50kph for a couple of hours before you mod them, and the "stand/squat" wheelchairs that are well on their way to becoming exoskeletons. But the crossover between those and "power assisted bicycles" is on its way to being a figment of the legal imagination. The gap between "cripple limping along on a weird bicycle with power assist" and "cripple has discarded the pedals to save weight" is important, but not a technical challenge. You can buy "motorised wheel on a stick" things for manual wheelchairs, and I've seen a couple of paraplegics with power assisted recumbent trikes where the front boom with pedals etc is designed for easy removal (for transport) but the owner also takes it off when they just want a small, fast personal transportation device.

    • there are amusing issues in some jurisdictions with the legislated requirement that a road-going bicycle use a chain drive which makes shaft and belt driven bicycles not road legal. AFAIK no-one has ever been prosecuted for that offence.
    642:

    Also, from experience, the behaviour of young people who were physically active before becoming cripples is often less affected by the crippling than you might imagine. Plus the ones who've always been like that (physically and mentally). I don't know whether that's failing to learn from experience or deciding that they don't have a lot (more) to lose by having a go. But it leads to sports that I hadn't really imagined were a thing, like paraplegic mountain biking.

    https://www.adventuresportsnetwork.com/sport/bike/paraplegic-mountain-biker-stacy-kohut-doesnt-want-sympathy/

    ... no, she wants you to get out of her way.

    643:

    Yep, at a Banff film fest four or five years back I met someone who does serious offroad racing with one of these. They are purely gravity powered but are amazingly manoueverable, and a bunch of the guys I saw in his film have no fear at all any more. Black ski runs in summer type fun.

    644:

    I'm really looking forward to it. BTW, I found Peter Pan when browsing through the English books in a shop in December, but I already had quite a few books at hand, but, well Lewis Caroll standing next to it and me dealing with migraine made for some interesting ideas, I might make it into a RPG session (would be me mastering for the first time) or some fan fiction.

    645:

    I'm quite well at the moment, situation is quite stable at the moment, I work off my last two days. Problem is the amnesia and belittlement geas is already at work, but I write down notes and have a good recollection of the last week when needed (I do not actively force myself to recollect at the moment).

    My landlord just called me and told me he had enough of me dumping my problems on other people, that being egoistical. I need to find a new room in about 3 months. It was somthing of a surprise, but I don't mind.

    In fact, I had already realized a pattern of him idealizing a person and totally devaluing the same person before, he explained it away with "we need to talk about it" and "I'm direct", actually I had to calm her down when she was crying; he said she agreed with him, when the last message from her was "you're always there for me", and she didn't notice what happened in the last few weeks, that's one of the moments when I realized something was amiss.

    Starting to trust my instincts, experiences and memories again, though I overreacted in the last week, and I know I misjudged things. Trying to trust people again, though not be too trusting. And trying to work out how much I have been and am like him. Not that I'm that sure what he is. And for my plans, well, why is "Burn" by Nine Inch Nails playing in my head, and why do I remember narcissists hate nothing more than exposure?

    646:

    "The problem is, people mostly live in densely populated urban areas today (the screaming exception is in North America), and climate change and the end of the oil economy is going to tend to militate against suburban living."

    I disagree with a few caveats. Excluding areas that need to be protected by levees and probably areas prone to wildfires*, suburbs are actually much more resistant to climate change than dense cities. Cities are better for fighting climate change, but that's a different story.

  • Most suburban houses outside of California and the Northeast are McMansions. This means that they have a roof large enough to support solar panels. Not only that, but part of the yard can be repurposed for solar panels as well.

  • While the houses use a lot of electricity for air conditioning, cooling the house is still more efficient than an urban area when you consider the vulnerable infrastructure to deliver the electricity.

  • Large distances to big-box stores within suburbs is a function of economics. Different economics could incentivize a lot of smaller stores closer to people

  • In an emergency, it's easier to get supplies to people since there are fewer choke points in the infrastructure (there are exceptions such as Houston).

  • *Most of the homes which burn during wildfire season are in the suburbs, but good luck evacuating a dense city center with minimal car ownership from a rapidly approaching wildfire.

    647:

    On the "Convertible Smartphone" thing, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple released an iPhone dock that connected to a keyboard, mouse & monitor and behaved in a very Mac-like way when docked. Microsoft had a good try at it, before they abandoned a lot of their consumer-facing product, iPhones have been powerful enough to do this for a few years, and it may be what the "Marzipan" effort is about.

    648:

    Most of the homes which burn during wildfire season are in the suburbs, but good luck evacuating a dense city center with minimal car ownership from a rapidly approaching wildfire.

    It's not entirely clear to me how long a wildfire would last when confronted with serious urban firefighting infrastructure.

    650:
    France wanted nuclear weapons and energy autonomy in the 1960s. So in the 1960s-70s they rolled out reactors on a production line and at peak were producing about 90% of their base load from cheap-ish fission designs

    Partialy true. The dates are off and the current reactors have nothing to do with the bomb -- Gerboise Bleue was in Febuary 1960, France had been working towards the bomb since the 1940s. The plutonium for the bombs came from the UNGG (Magnox equivalent) reactors built in the 1950s and 1960s.

    The Messmer plan to go all nuclear was in 1974, after the 1973 oil crisis, dropped the gas cooled reactor idea for simple Westinghouse PWRs (the first of the current French reactors, Fessenheim, is a bolt-for-bolt copy of the US Beaver Valley plant) and built 56 of them between 1974 and 1989.

    651:

    just don't understand why you'd build a 5000+sf home that takes up 80% of the dirt.
    This is a huge problem in urban Africa. When we built a house in Abidjan it was a real pain to try to explain that no, I didn't want to completely fill the lot like all my neighbours have, I wanted a bit of grass, thanks.

    652:

    It's not entirely clear to me how long a wildfire would last when confronted with serious urban firefighting infrastructure.

    The scale of a bushfire is so far outside most people's experience that almost no-one has good intuition about how they work. It's more like "imagine hitting a matchbox house with a plasma cutter" than "imagine a fire, but big!", and you don't stop a plasma cutter by spitting at it.

    As the risk of teaching my grandmother to use a search engine, it's not hard to find out. Canberra burned just like anything else when faced with a bushfire, and that was exactly what was expected. Australia is good at bushfires, we have lots of experience (50,000+ years in some cases) and what we know is that you can't fight bushfires once they get moving. All you can do is run away and try to distract them so they don't follow you.

    From what I've seen when big bushfires hit actual urban deserts, the houses burn fairly slowly and are pretty controllable. Which means that any house 2-3 streets back from the bushline is fairly safe, unless there are street trees or other flammable vegetation. So you better hope your neighbours and their neighbours also paved their back yards, and that there are no urban watercourses or other linear parks that can lead the fire deep into the suburbs. Smaller towns are just gone... Marysville, for example.

    653:

    Renewables and nuclear, however, have notably lower EROEI.
    Debatable. Some studies give nuclear better EROEI than fossil.

    And then some people shout "but that's only if you forget decommissioning and waste disposal".

    But you can't count waste disposal for fossil as we don't know how to do it! If you tried you'd end up with a massively negative EREOI for fossil fuels.

    654:

    Despite the supposition being repeated everywhere... IT WASN'T THE RATS! No doubt one or two did have a cheeky nibble, and sometimes got sucked inside the pipe, but they were no more than a minor nuisance. If they had been, extending the Victorian habit of putting arsenic in bloody well everything to the grease on the flaps would have been an easy solution.

    The big problem (this is about the Clegg/Samuda system as used by Brunel on the South Devon Railway) was simply deterioration of the leather, made worse by repeated bakings, freezings, and drenchings in sea water, as well as chemical interaction with iron oxide from the pipe. It used to crack along the line of flexure and the cracks would develop into longitudinal tears, which let the air in like nobody's business. The original design had an iron weather flap in hinged sections which were flipped out of the way as the train went past, but that got left out partly because of the inertial forces involved in doing that at high speed and partly just to cheap out.

    It didn't seal all that well even when it wasn't torn. The idea was to have a box of fire underneath the train to melt the sealing grease as the train came along ready for the flap to open, and it would then re-solidify afterwards. This worked about as well as you would expect (although it is a valid technique in far more controlled conditions).

    Vulcanised rubber came just too late. At the time of the initial installation its development was at the stage of getting a blob of gunk which was burnt on one side and gooey on the other with just enough good stuff in the middle to show that it would be a good idea if only you could figure out how to make it all go like that. It did become available in time to be considered for a replacement flap, but they were so fed up with the thing by then that they couldn't be arsed with any more experimenting and just ripped the whole atmospheric gubbins out instead.

    It had other problems, too - notably fuel consumption. Stationary engines at that period were not efficient, preferring to use low boiler pressures because they're easier and just making everything bigger to get the required power output; locomotives did at least try to get the pressure up because of the space/weight constraints. And it is a rottenly inefficient method of power transmission. On top of that they fannied about for years before they got a working telegraph to tell the stations when to start pumping, so they had to try and guess based on the timetable instead, and wasted a lot of fuel guessing wrong.

    Really, they were lucky that it was so crap, because if it had worked from the start and been extended to the gradients west of Newton Abbot as was intended, they would just have had more stuff to rip out again later. Locomotives may struggle with gradients but you can increase the tractive effort more or less as much as you want by using more/bigger ones. The atmospheric system on the other hand, while it doesn't suffer from wheel slip, does have a hard limit on the product of weight and gradient that it can handle, set by the size of the pipe. Once you hit that limit - which would have happened within a decade or so, regardless of the larger size of pipe proposed for the steep sections - the only thing you can do about it is to split each train up into smaller trains each under the limit.

    (And those steep gradients were not a design decision based on the supposed ability of atmospheric traction to "make light of gradients" (another common myth). The route had already been definitely decided, gradients and all, a few months before anyone even mentioned atmospheric traction.)

    As well as South Devon, there was an installation on the same principle at Croydon a little earlier, but that wasn't really much more than a toy, and it didn't work either, for similar reasons (and though the problems were on a smaller scale there was correspondingly less motivation to overcome them).

    Meanwhile the original installation at Dalkey which had acted as the inspiration for the South Devon (and Croydon) systems did work, and carried on working for another 50 years or so - but that was only a little thing, less than two miles long, and they included in their definition of "works" such things as having the pipe stop 500 yards short of the end and pushing it the rest of the way, and having some poor sod run along behind the train with a stick pushing the flap back down to make it seal properly.

    Thanks for the LR article, Greg. I knew about that system already of course but there's lots more detail there.

    For lots of stuff about the postal delivery application of the sealed-tube type system, see here: http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/COMMS/pneumess/pneumess.htm - Interesting aside too in that article about the "Berlin hoax". I have a suspicion that they nicked the idea out of an SF story that was in "Astounding" a few years earlier, which had it as part of the background. (Which is also the place for Musk's Hyperloop thing; it's great as a part of the scenery in 1930s SF, but it's a bloody silly and pointless idea in reality.)

    655:

    Ah yes, Germany also being where they invented the po with a little shelf in it so you can poke through your turds looking for tapeworms...

    656:

    Not just the East Anglian Fenland of course. A whole lot of eastern England up to the Humber/York area used to be a soggy mess. There's the Somerset levels too. I think rather more of England amounts to "reclaimed land" than people generally realise.

    657:

    You don't have to be a smartphone zombie: those of us with some common sense figured out the appropriate etiquette some time ago. (Listening to headphones: go wireless, and pay more attention to your visual environment—you're functionally deaf so watch out for traffic, including pedestrians. This goes double when crossing the road. Turn off incoming notifications while walking: if you want to type, find a clear area of pavement and stand with your back to the wall while you focus on your fondleslab, rather than stopping dead and blocking everyone else. Ditto selfies/camera use: you don't want strangers photobombing you anyway, so check your surroundings before you freeze and say "cheese".)

    As for on-screen keyboards, swiping 'boards are vastly superior to the default hunt-n-peck ones on Android and iOS, and I expect them to become standard over the next year or so. They actually make the things useable for typing.

    (Explanation: if instead of typing out the letters of any word in letter order, you drag your finger from letter to letter on an on-screen keyboard, it turns out that you're tracing out a unique pattern that corresponds to that word. Short (1-4 letter) words are sometimes ambiguous, especially if there are adjacent letters in them, but long words are almost always unique, so recognition accuracy actually goes up as words get longer (unlike handwriting recognition, where in my experience it goes down). Add a dose of machine learning and swiping input can get up to 120 words/minute, comparable to a fast typist. Works best on a phablet—a 5.5-6 inch phone screen—rather than on smaller phones or larger tablets, for which a regular on-screen keyboard works a bit better.)

    658:

    Yes, I should have said that I was referring to the greater Fenland (which includes much of Lincolnshire, as you say). And, as you say, add much of Somerset, Kent, Essex/Suffolk and more. It's not typically reclaimed, so much as drained marshland at near sea-level.

    659:

    Those few percent of you with common sense :-(

    Your remark about swiping 'boards is interesting. I must look for a suitable app for my tablets - do you have any recommendations?

    660:

    Nuclear has sky high EROEI, very much including waste disposal. It is trivial to prove this.

    Step one: Note that there does not exist any charities donating diesel and electricity for free to the mining consortia of the world. Nor to the people digging the waste repositories.

    Step two: Further note that diesel is generally a lot more expensive per btu than electricity.

    Step three: Compare the cost of ore and disposal with the value of the electricity produced by the reactor.

    You can expand this to get an upper bound on the embodied energy in the physical plant by summing material costs. - Because the people making concrete and steel also do not have anyone donating coal to them for free.

    And all of those things summed together amount to bupkiss compared to the output.

    The only energy intensive input that is expensive enough to actually be worth calculating is enrichment - and enrichment has gotten very, very efficient with the advent of the centrifuge cascade, and is looking to become ridiculously so with the further advent of selective excitation by finely tuned lasers.

    Any numbers you have seen claiming low eroei are thus obvious lies. Most likely deliberate ones. I have read a couple of those studies through in some detail, and it was very, very difficult to not see them as examples of failing Hanlons Razor. When you attribute higher energy use to a mine than the sum total of the energy use of the country the mine is in, and also do not check that number against the electric and fuel bill of that mining conglomerate... that is not an innocent mistake. Nobody is that incompetent. That is bad faith.

    The cost of nuclear power is, to a first approximation, labor.

    661:

    My objection to nuclear power in the UK is quite simply that the government cannot be trusted with it - but, as they cannot be trusted with anything else, either, it's not a strong objection :-( Experience from Calder Hall, OOPS!, Windscale, OOPS!, Sellafield, OOPS!, Calder Hall (proposed) and other sites is that the government's main responses to failures are to use the Official Secrets Act (and similar security Acts) as a hammer and, failing that, to pass its management over to a 'new' organisation (often 90% identical to the old one), cleansing not just the responsibility for the failures but as much as the existence of the failures as they can manage.

    If we had a functioning government, it would start a major R&D project aimed at creating a new generation of fission power stations intended to minimise the risk of serious accidents, be economically and safely decomissionable, use fueld more economically, perhaps use thorium, and preferably NOT be easily modifiable for military purposes. This would be a potentially useful export product! Unfortunately, after 30 years of dismantling and dumbing down our society, rebuilding some of that would be necessary.

    662:

    We had a wildfire in Edinburgh a few months ago: Arthur's Seat caught fire. One person injured, fire extinguished within a couple of days.

    Thing is, roads and stone buildings with slate roofs make for excellent firebreaks, and urban firefighting kit (pumps with access to a piped water supply for an entire city) is pretty effective at stopping fire spreading. In extremis, a few roads might have had an emergency visit from the tree surgeons

    Of course, if your architecture is inflammable and there are trees everywhere, you've got problems.

    663: 646 bullets 1 and 2 - Which got me thinking; there's an air gap between a PV panel and the roofing, which would reduce the insolation on the roof, and hence reduce the need for cooling. 649 - Cheers Greg; that all fits with my prior knowledge too. 655 - I've encountered those in NL, but not in Germany.
    664:

    Say what you will, an old-school German toilet pan would have come in very useful to the guy who swallowed his airpod.

    665:

    Add a dose of machine learning and swiping input can get up to 120 words/minute, comparable to a fast typist. Works best on a phablet—a 5.5-6 inch phone screen—rather than on smaller phones or larger tablets, for which a regular on-screen keyboard works a bit better.)

    I think on a phone I don't really need anything else than a regular on-screen keyboard (though I'd very much like a hardware keyboard like the Nokia N900 had, but...). For me it's related how well I can type with both my thumbs. On my 10 inch tablet I can't really hold the device and type with thumbs easily, so I resort to the two-finger typing system, which is not optimal.

    666:

    Android or iOS?

    Nuance (the folks behind Dragon Dictate) pushed the best swiping keyboard, Swype—but they cancelled further development about 3-6 months ago. It's still available for Android and iOS, but will succumb to bit rot over the coming years.

    SwiftKey, in contrast, was acquired by Microsoft, who may well be planning to roll it into Windows 10 at a future date. Not quite as good (in my view) but has ongoing support.

    Currently the best swiping keyboard I've found is GBoard, the Google Keyboard (on Android and iOS—it's not the standard Android keyboard, you need to install the app). The only drawback I can see is that it plugs into google for search and obviously you may have privacy concerns.

    All of these are currently free to install (there are in-app purchases for themes, if you want glitzy unicorns and rainbows all over your keyboard for some reason).

    iOS currently supports swiping by installing third-party keyboard apps (I have all of the above on my iPhone). They occasionally flake on me (dropping me into the default iOS keyboard until I switch apps, which seems to cause the keyboard driver to reload or something), but there are strong rumours that Apple is going to roll swiping into their default keyboard in the next release of iOS, in which case I expect it to be rock solid and provide reasonable assurances about data privacy.

    667:

    "Further note that diesel is generally a lot more expensive per btu than electricity."

    (btu - aaargh)

    Uh? It's roughly the same... at the price it comes from UK petrol stations, which is about 80% tax. And in remote areas diesel is a lot cheaper, which is why people in such areas make their own electricity out of diesel on the spot. (For values of "remote" and "expensive" which are calculated taking account of the amount of fucking around involved, and so can include building sites in the middle of a city, let alone holes in the ground in the middle of nowhere.)

    668:

    When I slept in a cot, I unscrewed a brass knob from it and swallowed it. I was a first child, so my mother got worried and called the doctor. He said "don't worry - just check the potty in the morning." CLUNK!

    Thanks for the swiping reference. Android, and an unsupported app will do - I am just interested in trying it out and, if I like it, using it for writing notes.

    669:

    That leaves only around, I don't know 20-50 million people in the treeless zones, not counting all the urbanites who don't have enough trees regardless of location.

    Yes. A large number in absolute terms. My point was that a large percentage of the US population live in areas where drone delivery (by air) just doesn't make sense.

    As to California water use and "management". Those of us from other parts of the country just sit back and say "really??".

    670:

    Still, the bound is going to hold. Diesel at the mine head is not going to be cheaper than electricity at the reactor gate, even if you pretend one hundred percent of mining costs are energy. Which was the lazy assumption I made to trivially prove that energy expenditure on mining is not significant.

    671:

    iPhone dock that connected to a keyboard, mouse & monitor

    Maybe. But Apple has been working with software vendors to enhance the macOS so that you can just switch devices as you need. I do it all the time. I carry an iPhone most of the day. But it is silenced 90% of the time when I'm not in bed. I also have an Apple watch set to vibrate only and that lets me know when I need to pull out my phone. For simple things I take care of it on my watch.

    I also have a MacBook Pro I lug around for my work. All my emails and files that are on my phone are available on the MBP. And in my home office I have a MacMini attached to a 24" high res display with similar access to my data.

    Basically I move around in my daily life and have access to everything and just don't worry about "jacking" in.

    As some have indicated, when I need a display and keyboard, my phone will just not do.

    672:

    The scale of a bushfire is so far outside most people's experience that almost no-one has good intuition about how they work.

    Nova (US Public TV science show) just put out an episode on the recent California fires and how such in general work now. An acre per second. Yes. You don't fight it. You step way back and try and convince the fire to loop back on itself or at least go "that way". There just isn't enough fire fighting equipment anywhere to put up enough water to stop such a thing once it gets going.

    And in the US we made the problem worse trying to fight fires the wrong way for 100 years. Sigh.

    673:

    Be prepared to practice a bit—but once you've got the hang of one swiping keyboard, the others are all very similar (except in where they put the secondary characters: accents, ligatures, quote marks, and so on, which is a problem for any small-screen virtual keyboard). I generally find that for short words with adjacent characters or characters on the same keyboard row, looping my finger from character to character gets better recognition accuracy than a straight drag; and for words of less than three letters, there's no benefit to swiping.

    (Oh, and it turns out that Microsoft quietly added swiping as an option to the on-screen keyboard for Windows 10 on devices with touchscreens. It's just not enabled by default and they didn't make it easy to spot the option to turn it on.)

    674:

    if you want to type, find a clear area of pavement and stand with your back to the wall while you focus on your fondleslab, rather than stopping dead and blocking everyone else.

    As someone who is in airports a LOT I more and more despise the people who walk the concourses with their head down oblivious to the foot traffic snarls they are causing. It is bad enough dealing with the lines extending out from the shops, the people who seem to be on a Sunday stroll, those who stop in the middle to read the flight display that does have an area under it for such, and those golf carts beeping non stop.

    Toss in an idiot walking against the flow with their head in a screen ....

    675:

    On the subject of IoT, security and power use - well the market has opted for the least secure, most power-hungry devices because they are the cheapest to buy initially. Apple's Homekit is probably the most secure IoT system but the more sophisticated hardware requirements and the licensing costs make Homekit compatible devices more expensive (although they still seem to be gaining market share). Low-power consumption requires using Zigbee or Z-Wave networking rather than 802.11 WiFi, but this requires adding an expensive hub to connect the Zigbee/Z-Wave devices to the rest of the home network. 'Hubless' lightbulbs and smart sockets and such are more popular but use power-hungry WiFi which has to be always-on for the device to work (typically a Chinese ESP module. (These do have a 'deep sleep' mode which greatly reduces power use but of course they are no longer listening for commands in this mode!))

    676:

    Most people don't seem to understand that it has not been about the hardware for a quarter of a century. It's all about the functional interface provided to the user.

    As I said, there is little significant difference between an (extremely) smartphone that drives a keyboard, monitor, muse and storage unit and a smartphone that merely mirrors to a conventional desktop system when docked. The same thing applies whether the desktop components are local or generic (e.g. in 'the cloud'). Yes, there are secondary, technical differences that have slight functional effects, such as the synchronisation issue for the former and rather more for the latter, but they are very definitely secondary.

    I believe strongly that the conventional WIMP and keyboard desktop interface WILL be superseded in the forseeable future, as will the current smartphone interfaces (*), but I don't known when and most especially don't know by what.

    (*) Those are ergonomically ghastly beyond belief, though most people have brainwashed themselves into believing that they want to do what the smartphone will let them do. Actually, I said that of the WIMP interfaces, until smartphones came along, but was one of the people who lost the debate to improve matters :-( I side with the multinominal one in not understanding (and having difficulty in believing) the way that the majority of Homo sapiens appears to use its mind. As did a huge proportion of people who thought about the issue as it was evolving.

    677:

    Yes. It is seriously disciminatory against those of us with impaired balance.

    678:

    As someone who is in airports a LOT I more and more despise the people who walk the concourses with their head down oblivious to the foot traffic snarls they are causing.

    As someone who lives in a tourist trap, I will note that before smartphones we had exactly the same problem—only it was tourists with (a) maps, (b) guidebooks, and (c) bulky SLR cameras with a lot of fiddly manual control settings. They behaved just like smartphone zombies, only there were fewer of them.

    It's not new. What's new is that it's now ubiquitous year-round behaviour that affects everybody.

    679:

    Charlie noted: "In the UK, the average dwelling is 75 years old. In other countries, they are considerably younger: in Germany homes depreciate after first sale, while in the US, they typically require extensive structural renovation or rebuilding after 30 years (continental climes are prone to greater environmental extremes)."

    I've seen those same statistics you're citing (e.g., an average lifespan of 30 to 50 years for a wood-frame house), but I'm skeptical. I can't speak to the US, but that's not remotely true in Canada, and our climate is, on average, considerably harsher than that in the US (here in Montreal, temperatures range from -40C to 35C, and a range of -20C to 30C represents a completely unremarkable year). Our house (wood frame, brick cladding) was built in 1957, and shows no significant signs of needing any significant structural renovation or rebuilding. We've got some drainage issues, since the city looked the other way 60 years ago and let the builders in our neighborhood build on clay. So we're likely to have to replace the French drains around the foundation soon, but everything aboveground is robust and looks like it will probably last another 60 years without major issues. I've got friends living in houses a good 50 years older with no major rebuilding in their history.

    The one thing that does need ongoing maintenance is the roof cladding; snow and a 50C annual temperature range play hell with the cladding. We need to replace the asphalt membrane that keeps out the water every 20 years or so. Tin or slate would work better and last longer, but the house wasn't designed to support that much extra weight and the roof's pitch is too low for that to be a good option even if weight weren't an issue.

    680:

    Well, to the best of my knowledge Canadian fauna does not include a species who's favourite food is houses!

    681:

    There are advantages of living in places with those -20C winters!

    682:

    Actually, it does, just as the UK does - woodworm, death watch beetle, dry rot and the numerous wet rots, for a start. The difference from some of the USA is that, in termite areas, just keeping the wood dry isn't adequate protection. Of course, their termites are mere wimps compared to African ones, but we in the far north don't have any native termites, though that may change.

    But it is actually MORE difficult to build long-lasting wooden structures in the UK than much of the USA, because of our near-nightly condensing atmospheres. If we built houses the way that the USA does, they would often need rebuilding after a decade or two; people have done it. It's really our different approach to housing, far more than the location - most (not all) traditional UK housing (*) is built for a long life, subject to regular maintenance.

    (*) I believe that the reason there are so few old cottages in the Fenland, despite the high (and fairly rich) population before they were drained is because most were made of willow, reed and mud. Dirt cheap and very easy to build, but with very short lifetimes.

    683:

    Yes, precisely. It's the number of the idiots, and their proportion of the whole, that is the problem, not that it is a new idiocy. I can remember having trouble with that 40 years ago and more.

    684:

    Actually, on checking, the Canadian death watch beetle doesn't seem to attack houses, but there are other woodboring beetles as well.

    685:

    paws4thot noted: "Well, to the best of my knowledge Canadian fauna does not include a species who's favourite food is houses!"

    We do have termites in warmer cities like Toronto, but no, that's not a huge issue up here. With climate change, it may become an issue.

    686:

    Charlie noted: "... while in the US, they typically require extensive structural renovation or rebuilding after 30 years (continental climes are prone to greater environmental extremes)."

    While Charlie seems to know more about the US that many who live in Europe, on this he tends to exagerate a bit. Most remodeling that is that extensive is due to people finding it cheaper to re-arrange an existing home for the current needs than build new. And if you don't have masonry type interior walls it is much easier to do.

    The gut remodels of the last 20 years have been due to people living totally different lives due to technology. Bedroom sizes, dens (to even have one), closed vs. open kitchens, etc... A 40 year old plus house was built when a second phone line and/or TV was rare, antennas for TVs the norm, many people still took baths, 1 car was more typical than not, etc...

    Now what has happened is roofs tend to be rated at 20-30 years, exterior wood trim (due to being way more intricate than needed), tends to rot after 10 to 30 years, plumbing leaks and none PH balanced water leads to plumbing replacements, etc...

    I doubt there's a home in the UK with 160psi of water like mine has. Or they are vary rare. One early thing I did (I've been here 30 years) was put in a reduction valve. It is now standard. And without that faucets and such tended to wear out faster.

    And since so many were built when energy was almost free by today's standards we have issues with little to no insulation at time of build.

    But most houses in US last longer than 20-30 years.

    It is estimated that about 38% houses in the U.S. were built before 1970 and are thus now more than 49 years old, according to a survey by the U.S. Census Bureau.

    687:

    The scale of a bushfire is so far outside most people's experience that almost no-one has good intuition about how they work.

    If you want to play with a simulation, I recommend Smokejumpers:

    http://microgamedesigngroup.com/SJ.html

    Old-school boardgame, based on the fire model used by the Canadian forestry service (the designer is an actual forestry scientist specializing in forest fires). Includes rules for grassfires as well.

    Best way to deal with a grassfire: be somewhere else. I got caught fighting one and the flames higher than my head were bloody terrifying (even to an immortal teenager!). (Fortunately little wind so we were able to contain it before it leaped the road and got out of control.)

    688:

    OK. Here's a question. I literally just finished replacing all the working bits in my toilet. The bolts holding the tank against the seat had corroded/disolved to the point water was very slowly leaking out of the hole for the bolts and onto the floor. As many of the bits in the tank were 20 years old I just replaced all of it. (A new toilet in my bathroom is a much bigger deal than just buying it and setting it into place but that's another discussion.)

    My question for here and it somewhat applies to the topic.

    Why are separate tanks so popular in Europe? Or at least the bits I've been to. I've yet to see one that works as well as a US toilet for solids. Is there something I'm missing or is this just a custom and habit ingrained in the building industry?

    How does this apply? Most toilets (and any sold new) are rated at 1.8 gallons per flush. 6-7 liters. I when I rebuilt mine I installed a dual action unit so you can do a small or large flush. But 100 years from now I suspect that this will need to go down and be gray water if possible. Of course there are follow on effects.

    Here in NC public water systems can't charge more than their costs. But much of their cost is infrastructure. So even when usage goes down costs stay about the same. Here in Raleigh my water bill also includes sewage processing and trash pickup. So if I want to go through the hassle I could run with 2 meters and dual systems so that water that will not go down the sanitary sewer will be charged to me at a lower rate. Anyway, overall lower usage in the city doesn't lower rates much if at all. Which torques some people to no end.

    Then you get to places like NYC which used to and still may make residential water "free". Which led to abandoned buildings with water flowing out of broken/stolen piping into the basement and down the drain and no one paying attention as without meters how can you tell where the usage is?

    Anyway, how will we deal with water in the future and why do Europeans like separate tanks systems for toilets?

    689:

    Best way to deal with a grassfire: be somewhere else. I got caught fighting one and the flames higher than my head were bloody terrifying (even to an immortal teenager!). (Fortunately little wind so we were able to contain it before it leaped the road and got out of control.)

    We had a young idiot (he regularly confirmed that opinion) bent a sparkler over a kite string to try and get the wind to carry it up to the kite. (I can't explain why that's just what he did.) July. Had not rained for a while. Flying it over empty lots across from his house. It fell, grass started burning. It just happened that some of us were nearby and got it out before it burned about 1/4 acre. Still scares me to wonder when it might have stopped if a half dozen of us hadn't been nearby.

    690:

    Counter questions - What are "all the moving parts"? Other than the ball valve (no user serviceable parts inside), float arm, and operating lever there are no moving parts in a toilet!

    Why do you believe that there is some advantage to having the tank physically attached to the "porcelain" anyway?

    691:

    Robert Prior, about "Smokejumper": "Old-school boardgame, based on the fire model used by the Canadian forestry service (the designer is an actual forestry scientist specializing in forest fires). Includes rules for grassfires as well."

    I worked with many of the guys who developed this model ca. 30 years ago. It was damned impressive at the time, and is probably much improved now. What interests me is that the model doesn't seem to be used in the U.S., possibly due to "not invented here" syndrome, and would probably have let agencies such as CalFire fight last year's disastrous California wildfires more effectively. The only evidence I have for this is a recent Nova documentary whose contents implied that the Americans were reinventing an already well-established wheel, and not doing a particularly good job of it*. Treat that as semi-informed speculation. Would love to hear from someone who knows the actual situation in the U.S. and California in particular.

    • Supplemented by a few random journal articles I've read and the confusion last year over whether fires could actually cross the western border between the U.S. and Canada. The fire imaging I've seen literally showed the fires ending at the border, leading to some confusion over whether one of the governments invovled should be sending aid to the other governments.
    692:

    ...minimise the risk of serious accidents, be economically and safely decomissionable, use fueld more economically, perhaps use thorium, and preferably NOT be easily modifiable for military purposes. This would be a potentially useful export product!

    I agree completely, and I have similar thoughts about the uselessness and stupidity of my government.

    693:

    https://www.build.com/fluidmaster-550dfrk-3/s1236498

    Is what I installed. The goal is to use minimal water to get the job done.

    As to the separate tank my point was that the ones I've seen don't seem to do as good and use more water to do it. Maybe our rules are tighter as to what has to be done with the amount of water. I don't know. Which is why I was asking if there's some advantage to a separate tank that I don't understand.

    694:

    The European standards for indoor flushing toilets were, IIRC, set in the early 19th century. Water pressure from water towers was gravity-fed, the towers themselves were filled by pumps from low-pressure beam engines: intermediate tankage is necessary unless your toilet is located a long way downhill from the water tower.

    As I understand it, US toilets rely on a high pressure water supply. On the one hand: no tanks, more efficient flushing. On the other hand: a leak will flood you out of your home much faster. And on the gripping hand, a UK toilet cistern can spring a very slow leak—dripping millilitres per minute—which is barely noticeable as it trickles into the wall and floor space until it brings down the ceiling of the room below the bathroom.

    695:

    Also: water is hard to move over long distances without evaporation/leakage. So in some places—like here, in Scotland, especially on the west coast—there's little point installing water-saving devices. (If you ever visit Glasgow? Pack a waterproof coat. And waterproof boots. It's not a monsoon climate—I've been caught out in a genuine monsoon in Malaysia, now that was rainfall!—and been caught out in heavy rainfall in Florida—but a Florida downpour or a monsoon season cloudburst is usually over within an hour, unless you get hit by a hurricane/typhoon. Whereas Glasgow just drips on you endlessly, for an entire week.

    696:

    That seems like a very different system to what I encountered in the US. Which used a tank that held 3 US gallons.

    697:

    I don't understand how it's powered. Does it have pedals, or do you pull/push the handlebars, or jusr push on the wheels directly?

    698:

    Three details: 1. Inside, I'd think weather (rain/snow/ice) wouldn't be a problem. 2. The pneumatic I'm thinking of... wouldn't you have to worry about breathing/passing out? 3. Locomotives add to traction by releasing sand in front of the wheels.

    Btw - any please forgive any typos today. I had a "benign large cell tumor" removed from my left index finger, and it'd bandaged together with the middle finger.... Typing is driving me nuts. The bandaging comes off tomorrow. In-office surgery, local only... it was turrible, turrible, laying there for about 3/4 hr, forced to listen to elevator music....

    699:

    Yeah, but so many people.... Actually, one of my daughters has been posting to her facepalm page, she's in her second week of "breaking up with her phone".

    Virtual keyboards: I am genuinely expecting, any day noe, to see reports on a carpal tunnel epidemic on thumbs.

    And I'm with moz - I couldn't read something in 2pt type. Why ANYONE would wanr, er, want to watch a mocie, movie on that tiny sx, screen?

    (Typos courtey ofd the bandaged fingers...)

    700:

    No-one can read anything in 2 point type. 6pt is the actual limit of what is legible with typical (corrected) eyesight.

    701:

    A good bit of Chicago is laid out exactly like Philly... but them, I've been told thar a lot of the construction co's who reuilt it after the Great Chicago Fire were from Philly. philly was laid out in a grid, with every fourth block (8 to the mile) being extra/double wide. Helps traffic... but the original reason that Billy Penn designed his "green county town" that way... was beecause he'd personally seen the Great London Fire of 1665(?): as a bloody firebreak.

    And it works - when I was, I think, in my 'teens, a block square lumber yard went up... and the houses across the large streets were saved.

    702:

    That's absurd. The mine is unlikely to be near any metro area, or, for that matter, probably not within hundreds or thousands of miles of a power grid.

    703:

    Right, well, when they put out, debugged, the headgrid (goes over your head) with an interface better than "look at the letter you want to type"), I'll be happy to try it.

    In the meantime... let's hear it for autocorrect....

    704:

    In the US, houses do not normally need rebuilding after some ridiculously short time. My house is the newest I've ever owned (other than our immobile home), and it's from '57. They do build as cheaply as possible, and anything build after mine up through well into the eighties, at least, is likely crap, built with the express intention of ripping down and making more money.

    Not a hell of a lot of rebuilding where I've lived. But the construction and real estate industry REALLY WANT to rip places down, and build new....

    705:

    I agree completely, and I have similar thoughts about the uselessness and stupidity of my government.

    It's not precisely stupidity.

    The status quo of the long 20th century is for the biscuit. It cannot possibly survive. Everyone who is paying any attention knows this, and national level politicians in the North Atlantic countries have people whose job it is to ensure they know this stuff. (They may not like these people; they may not listen. But they can't entirely escape.)

    What happens when the status quo goes?

    Nobody knows. It's an immense risk. All you can be sure of, if you have wealth and power, is that you'll be relatively less well off. (There is very little "better off" left for you to get to; there's a lot of "worse off" you could get to. This is why you really want a basically flat society, or at least one with a wealth-and-power lid. It keeps you out of this particular trap.)

    So you get this total paralysis, because nigh-any of these sensible things -- all the "every ditch, dam, and culvert" issues, all the "we could mass-produce power reactors", all the "the housing stock needs replacing" -- are an admission that the status quo cannot hold.

    People in power can only make that admission if they've got strong backing (hopefully electoral) for a specific vision of change, and politics in the Anglosphere since 1980 have mostly been about preventing any such specific vision of change because the status quo isn't stupid and has a lot of money.

    706:

    Do you want to hear screams of frustration, or howls of rage?

    I absolutely LOATHE the autodecorrect features, partly because my working vocabulary is much larger than theirs, and partly because of the need to type in proper names and foreign works. In a couple of cases, they point blank refused to let me type the latter, and I had to type the equivalent of N.a.b.o.o.m.s.p.r.u.i.t - and decapitalise all the letters after the first! Perhaps I should mention that I loathe autocrapitalisation etc., too.

    707:

    Simply DON'T UNDERSTAND this "swiping" thing ... someone really explain, please?

    708:

    Not a hell of a lot of rebuilding where I've lived. But the construction and real estate industry REALLY WANT to rip places down, and build new....

    Around here, the building industry prefers taking undeveloped land and building high end homes on it, because this maximizes profits. Gentrification isn't quite so profitable.

    There's also some talk of relaxing codes to try to encourage more affordable buildings (apartments) in cities. Interestingly, there's some research that says this doesn't work in practice and that the actual end result of pushing more high rises in a city is more high end condos, at least in the US, based on data since 2000.

    709:

    Yeah, Australian bushfires still are the gold standard for WTFedness for me. I fairly regularly quote the world record for an ember throw starting another fire: held by Australia, and set during the 2009 Black Saturday Fires, specifically the Bunyip Ridge Fire: an ember throw of ten miles. In the Camp/Paradise fire, there's only good evidence for an ember throw of two miles.

    Seriously though, to reiterate the message, it's urban fire fighting, wildland fire management. If there are high winds involved, wildfires cannot be put out by humans, they can be somewhat steered away from vulnerable towns...sometimes.

    To clarify, most brushfires can be quickly put out, because there's little or no wind and the vegetation is moist. When you're dealing with a howling Santa Ana or whatever wind and tinder dry vegetation, you've got a wildfire, and it doesn't go out until the winds die down, and sometimes until the rains come.

    One thing I'm doing a lot of right now is trying to keep new housing developments from being built in high fire areas. Problem is, that's about all that's left to build in, where I live.

    710:

    Every dwelling I've been in in Canada has had a toilet with a tank behind (and attached to) the bowl — like this:

    https://www.homedepot.ca/product/american-standard-cadet-4-8l-round-front-complete-toilet-in-white/1001065216

    Tank is a separate piece that bolts on. (Municipal garbage collection requires the tank to be detaches so workers can lift it without risking injury.) There are low-flush and dual flush models but they all have tanks.

    Commercial toilets don't have tanks. I'm guessing household pipes are smaller with less throughput, so the tank provides the rush of water to carry stuff down past the trap.

    Not a plumber, though.

    711:

    The fire imaging I've seen literally showed the fires ending at the border

    Better fire-fighting on one side? Or possibly the border is easier to turn into a firebreak (already cleared, for one thing)?

    712:

    I might be able to, even at 71 - I could certainly read 4 pt without strain the last time I tried. But I have 5-6 dioptres of short sight, so am doing so pretty close to :-)

    713:

    It's the financing model.

    Housing reform in Anglo NorAm absolutely requires a completely different financing model; insisting on adding some land tenure models wouldn't hurt, but the core thing is that the only way land goes from uninhabited to habited is done by large entities to maximize their profit. Those entities have no incentive to do anything else, and in fact can't do anything else. Wanting something else means getting rid of them and using some other form of social organization.

    (Which you probably know, but. Sometimes the problem is that the existing system can't do it, not that it won't do it.)

    714:

    Much of the reason for the detachable tank is that both are unreinforced porcelain and it's just simpler to manufacture two slightly weird shapes than one very weird shape.

    715:

    Which used a tank that held 3 US gallons.

    Those have been illegal to sell for over 2 decades. Maybe 3.

    716:

    As I understand it, US toilets rely on a high pressure water supply. On the one hand: no tanks, more efficient flushing.

    That's only in commercial environments where a clog can create chaos.

    Residential is a tank. 1.8 gal limit I think. Touch the lever and you get the gravity of water from a foot to 1.5 feet above the water level in the bowl. When the new rules came out there was a lot of angst as the toilet companies worked out siphoning to get the solids to go down from such a setup.[1] Now you can buy a decent such toilet for $150 to $300 depending on brand. Real money ($1000+) gets you a toilet seat with electronic heaters and auto bidet based on some ideas from Japan.

    Water pressure only impacts the refill rate of the tank. And how often you have pin hole leaks or fitting blowouts of faucet connections and such. None for me since I reduced mine from 160psi to 70/80 psi.

    [1] Side view of a current US standards low water use toilet. Scroll down. https://niagaracorp.com/products/nano/

    717:

    Yes, basically development companies work the way you describe. Unless they're building downtown high rises.

    Still, I'd be careful about assuming that it's as simple as you describe. One thing I've learned is that there are massive smokescreens, politics, and various other stuff that can't be mentioned in a UK blog due to local laws about libel and slander. Since America's Dear Leader is a one-time player in that particular game, any thoughts that it's purely economic and that no "politics" were involved need to be firmly quashed.

    718:

    I don't think politics and economics are distinct categories and that any attempt to treat them as such is axiomatically part of the precipitate.

    The only time even big downtown high rises seems to go different involves a single primary client who has not merely clout but a long memory. (Nobody's tried to screw over a Canadian chartered bank wanting new headquarters building, for example. And they only tried to screw over the RCMP once.) Big downtown condo buildings are absolutely loot-and-pillage exercises.

    But, anyway -- that financing model for housing development, the absolute refusal (at least hereabouts) to build multi-generational housing, the immense legal barriers to collective housing of any kind, all of that was and is the product of a particular politics and specific political decisions. Getting a different mechanism of housing provision would take different politics to get to the different decisions.

    As a question of systems design, I don't think it's at all challenging. As politics, it's hard.

    719:

    whitroth noted: "In the US, houses do not normally need rebuilding after some ridiculously short time."

    Thanks for the reality check. My (Canadian) experience is that homes are mostly torn down (barring natural disasters) if the owner want to build something bigger or better. Real estate is usually more expensive than the house construction in competitive markets, and renovation can be slow and painful and produce suboptimal results, so it's often cheaper or more efficient to build new than renovate the old.

    720:

    Unpacking things:

    There is a concept very popular with a certain faction of the "We are All Doomed" crowd called Energy Return on Energy Invested, with an accompanying argument that civilization is fundamentally reliant on energy sources which have a high ratio there.

    I disagree that this is a useful concept, at least partially because that calculation tends to drown in estimates made up out of whole cloth, but I also find it useful to argue on other peoples terms sometimes.

    And one thing which came out of the EROEI crowd was the absurd claim that nuclear had a low ratio.

    This can be trivially disproved by noting EROEI is bounded by financial realities. That is, being a mining consortia does not get you costless energy, and most certainly does not get you cheaper energy than standing at a reactor gate with a high-voltage wire.

    So if the financial whole-sale value of electricity sold by a reactor is 25+ times the cost of mining uranium and the cost of the concrete and steel used to make the reactor is utterly insignificant - Which it is - then this is also a lower bound on the EROEI of nuclear power. A very pessimistic bound, because it assumes the mining has literally no non-energy costs. And the people claiming it has a low ratio are, not to put to fine a point at it, very, very bad at math. Or deliberately lying.

    A separate argument is that it depends on liquid fuels for its inputs, but.. well, if the ratio is high enough, those can be synthesized, and secondly, mines quite frequently are both on the grid, even if they have to pay to run a connection quite a long way, and electrified to the nines already, because not running combustion engines makes maintaining air-quality easier, so powering the uranium mines with uranium reactors is on the table.

    721:

    That particular isn't powered - it's gravity only. Movement on the flat or uphill is just like a normal wheelchair, you spin the rear wheels by hand. It's designed for downhill racing trails or riding with people who can assist as needed. They also make a couple of powered ones to ease uphill travel, and a cleverly folding one to make using chairlifts easy for the ski slope types.

    722:
  • Anything major - and I'm really skirting this by planning to build a roofed extension to my patio for a small hot tub - requires permit$$$
  • On the other hand... talk about slash and pillage... I remember, when I was a kid, one of my (few) friends lived with his dad in a lovely stone house facing Fairmount Park, which had been divvied up into apts. In Europe, it would be there for at least another couple hundred years.
  • A few years later, they tore it down, and on the property, built some "senior citizen tiny things, no bigger than the apts, that were so cheaply built that even as a teen, I could see they'd be ready to tear down in 20 years.

    723:

    The one you're thinking of... you mean the idea you mentioned at #633? I imagined from that something similar to the one in Greg's article - which as it says did carry the occasional passenger, though only as a stunt, and they seemed to manage OK. With the whole thing inside a tube you aren't limited to using vacuum in front, you can use pressure behind to drive it, and with the larger area you need less pressure anyway.

    724:

    I absolutely LOATHE the autodecorrect features, partly because my working vocabulary is much larger than theirs, and partly because of the need to type in proper names and foreign works.

    Tell me about it.

    This very afternoon we were trying to send a short but significant note having to do with a wire transfer in Spanish and the effing application kept attempting to change what I typed into English. One of the more bizarre things it kept trying to do was to change "adjunto" ("attached" in the context) into "Ashanti". There might have been a way to turn the autodecorrect feature off, but it wasn't obvious. I finally managed to get the necessary couple of sentences out, but it wasn't a pleasant experience.

    725:

    "The bolts holding the tank against the seat had corroded/disolved...

    Why are separate tanks so popular in Europe?"

    In the UK, at least, I wouldn't have said that they were, but your own post emphasises a major advantage.

    In my last place I had a toilet to the same kind of dumb design as yours, and the flap valve in the siphon started falling apart so it became increasingly difficult to start the flush. Replacing the valve meant removing the siphon, which meant undoing the big nut around its outlet where it goes through the bottom of the tank, which meant undoing the bolts you mentioned, and the other bolts holding the tank to the wall, and the water inlet, and taking the whole fucking thing off completely.

    Since both sets of bolts had effectively been transformed into round-headed rivets by corrosion, I first ignored it, then taught myself the special ninja handle-shoving technique that would still get it to flush if you repeated it enough, which eventually broke the linkage, and then resorted to pouring buckets of water down it. Finally I had had enough, picked up my lump hammer and removed the sodding thing permanently, destructively, and with much satisfaction. And replaced it with a separate tank bolted to the wall above the po with a pipe in between, where if you needed to undo the big nut and take the siphon out to change the valve you just put your hand out and undid it.

    Sadly, although separate tanks are not only readily available but cheaper, pretty well all toilets installed in the last few decades seem to be the dumbass close-coupled can't-fix-need-smashing types. Or, increasingly, the even stupider variant that hides the tank inside a false wall with a ridiculous pneumatic rubber bellows arrangement to operate the flush instead of a direct mechanical linkage, which not only adds more bits to go wrong but means that when they do you have to rip the fucking wall apart.

    So-called "syphonic" toilets (a horribly confusing term, since all toilets use a siphon to get the flush water out of the tank; it means the type which direct part of the flush water straight into the outlet pipe to entrain the water in the trap and create negative pressure in the bowl) are not common in the UK, though they do exist. They are distinctive for the unusual sound they make when flushing and the way the water starts dropping in the bowl before anything else visibly happens. They do not seem to be any more or less effective at clearing the bowl, and they are more liable to blockage because of the more convoluted outlet tract.

    726:

    Any feature which is supposed to be helpful will cause you to waste at least an order of magnitude more time swearing at it than it ever saves you by actually being helpful.

    727:

    Here's an interesting article about the cost of running a uranium mine.

    Energy Resources of Australia concedes it won’t actually be possible to monitor and measure this over the next 10,000 years, so a model will be required instead

    So the mine is marginally profitable if we exclude compliance costs, which we do by noting that it is cheaper to buy a law change than comply with existing law (a pattern which has been seen repeatedly in the case of this particular mine, as noted in the article).

    http://theconversation.com/the-uranium-mine-in-the-heart-of-kakadu-needs-a-better-clean-up-plan-115566

    We're back to seeing the nuclear industry as a criminal enterprise: don't obey the law, make the law. And then nuclear fans talk about how wonderful the mafia is and how we will all benefit from allowing the greater influence over our society and ecology.

    Speaking of which, a co-worker is currently trying to buy a ruggedised radiation detector for his trip to the South Australian desert. Where a very safe war was carried out and the local indigenes were successfully removed. The area is completely safe and always has been, according to the government at the time (ie, in 1950 the government insisted it was safe in 1950, in 1960 they said it was safe in 1960 but hadn't been in 1950, and so on). Which may lead one to question whether the assurances of safety have any meaning at all, but that upsets the fans so we shan't do that. Easier to focus on the above guarantee that safety will not be attempted, only modelled.

    728:

    Regarding "love swipe keyboards / hate autocorrect", aren't swipe keyboards and autocorrect doing exactly the same thing?

    729:

    I read recently that tank-in-wall toilets have become big in Europe for new construction. Just to save a bit more space in a bathroom. They are being sold in the US now too, but are still very rare.

    Residential toilets in the US are almost always gravity powered by the water in the tank. Commercial toilets often use water pressure. I'm not really sure why they differ... the internet says its because commercial construction uses bigger water pipes which can supply the required volume of pressurized water. Also they are loud.

    Perhaps in Europe the separate tank up on the wall gives the toilet a smaller footprint, so its a reaction to the generally lower premium on space?

    730:

    I'm not really sure why they differ

    The home requirement has to do with the many parts of the country were running short of fresh water. And one of the biggest uses of fresh water was to flush a home toilet. So it was an easy target to legislate that toilets for home use not require more than XX amount of water.

    Now look at commercial use. You really really really don't want it to clog. So you allow a different way that uses more water. But most urinals don't use much water at all these days. So it is a bit of a wash. At least on the men's side.

    731:

    In the UK, at least, I wouldn't have said that they were, but your own post emphasises a major advantage.

    You do understand that these bits internal to the tank tend to last 10 to 20 years depending on water PH.

    And again from my limited view of toilets in Europe they seem to be very inefficient in water use and flushing everything away in their tank and bowl separateness compared to the integrated designs over here.

    I was asking for why separate is better? So far you've not convinced me.

    But to each their own. :)

    732:

    I absolutely LOATHE the autodecorrect features, partly because my working vocabulary is much larger than theirs, and partly because of the need to type in proper names and foreign works. Turn off autocorrect with extreme prejudice, yes. (And predictive text is most helpful for ... the predictable, or for fun (or for people with limited motor control or in a hurry, or...). [1]) Spell checking, however, is helpful. (Sometimes even important. :-)

    [1] I've been amused by this recently: Giant Language model Test Room One game is writing text with no green (green being predictable words). I imagine you write fairly red/purple text professionally. ( http://gltr.io/ - "A collaboration of MIT-IBM Watson AI lab and HarvardNLP" )

    733:

    I'm not really sure why they differ... The gravity-fed tank-based system gives you one flush during a power outage. Or, I suppose, several liters of clean water. Not sure that even part of why, but it's an effect that many who live in areas with frequent power outages have considered.

    734:

    Not sure why the discussion about toilets is relevant to 2119. Re the original post, one feature that would be essential to me is some means for being undistracted by sensory clutter. Areas with limited visual(motion)/sound/smell clutter, or some method for achieving a similar effect. That, and ways to fully interactively experience wild nature. (Could be virtual or telepresence.)

    735:

    Everywhere I've lived that had municipal water, power and water are separate; a power outage has to go on for days before it'll take out the water.

    Gravity flush from a tank has the advantage of being independent from water pressure; the commercial direct flush stuff expects to be able to feed five or six litres in a few seconds at significant pressure, and home plumbing is not generally able to do this. (Various well-pump systems in individual rural homes absolutely cannot do this.)

    Separate tank and bowl manufacturing is easier, as is packing and transport.

    Incumbency is important in plumbing as in electrical wiring; it's a pain to change plumbing standards. The bowl is going to be designed around assumptions concerning flow rates and pressure to clear, and they don't work if you try to use different pressures or flow rates. (There are some spectacular failure modes if you hook a gravity bowl to a commercial direct water feed....) Nobody likes situations where you have to assume the apprentice read the label carefully.

    736:

    By any chance was that Fairmount Park in Riverside, CA? Because if so I spent part of my childhood in walking distance.

    737:

    Where software is concerned, I think "tries to be helpful" is a major negative.

    738:

    Well, my observations are that we do not exclusively have separate tanks, instead we have a mixture of both types; that neither type has any particular difficulty clearing the bowl (as a class, though of course individual bad units exist); and that if there is any difference, it is that the separate tank types are slightly better, because there is more head so the water comes out with more of a shoosh, although that signal's too noisy to be sure whether it's really real.

    So since the performance of either type is essentially identical, the minimum-hassle choice is the type that does not put needless obstacles in the way of maintenance.

    I suspect that the performance difference you are observing is down to some less visible transatlantic disparity in toilet design, and the thing with the positioning of the tank is a spurious correlation. On the other hand, since I do not notice any shortcomings in the performance of the local toilets, maybe there's something else going on entirely. Maybe you just do big shits :)

    Having said all that, there does exist one possible widespread cause of poor performance, although it's not related to the tank position. It is another of these ill-thought-out done-for-the-sake-of-doing-something regulations that is nominally supposed to be beneficial but in practice just buggers things up that were all right before. For the sake of water saving, all tanks now come with a siphon with 3 holes at different levels in the side, and a set of little plastic plugs stashed inside somewhere to block the holes up with, so the maximum flush volume is limited by when the level drops as far as the first non-plugged hole. A lot of people do not know about this. And the tanks are supplied with all 3 holes open, and either none of the installers can be arsed to set the thing up properly, or they are bound by regulation to leave it set at minimum flush volume whether that is enough to make it work properly or not. So it is entirely possible for a newly installed toilet to continually require multiple attempts to flush and to stay like that for years because everyone just thinks their toilet's a lemon and nobody realises it's merely a trivial setup error which takes 2 minutes to correct.

    739:

    "I fairly regularly quote the world record for an ember throw starting another fire"

    I'm amazed that's the record. Back in 1993 I was working in the Sydney suburb of Auburn. It's just about exactly in the centre of the Sydney urban sprawl. It was an industrial estate with some decorative gardens. It's about 50 km as the crow flies from bushland. I came out of work one day to find embers falling from the sky and a couple of these decorative gardens ablaze.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Eastern_seaboard_fires

    740:

    re housing stock in Germany, there are four classes:

    1) pre-WW2. Often listed, tends to be solid, major issue is trying to both obey the "may not change" and "must insulate" 2) just-post-WW2 in a town that was bombed. Frequently built of rubble and wishful thinking; the wind doesn't blow through the walls thanks to the wallpaper. Subject to demolition as soon as the owner has enough money to build new and overcomes inertia 3) just-post-WW2 in a non-bombed area, built in a hurry to house expellees (refugees from the east) from any material that was at hand (often plywood and corrugated sheeting). Better than rubble, but tends to get replaced as soon as it changes ownership. 4) built sufficiently after WW2 to be built of proper building material (and hopefully no asbestos): these change ownership without getting demolished, too

    741:

    "since all toilets use a siphon"

    I've never seen an Australian toilet that uses a siphon. Instead they all use a Heath Robinson contraption that opens a valve when you press the button and closes it when the water is all gone. It fails all the time and the result is that you either have to hold the button down until the tank empties and/or it leaks slightly and constantly.

    742:

    re house of the future:

    I expect/hope that instead of "let the economically surplus perish" we go to basic income, and that "standard housing and communal meals" may be part of the package; and that many people will use their time for arts and crafts.

    I expect a revival of the Plattenbauten, this time with a different floor plan, to house the climate displaced (in a hurry, because doing the necessary sufficiently in advance would require admitting that the status quo won't hold): room + en-suite toilet/shower, one per person, plus a childrens' play room, a VR room, and a breakfast room per level, plus a dinner hall with a kitchen fit for cooking meals, a laundry facility, fitness facility, and arts/crafts workshops per house. Allotment lots, space permitting, playground, sports space.

    Family of four? 4 adjacent rooms. Swap inside the house when a new child arrives. (This will generate its own helping of drama and new customs). Want to move to another house for a workshop or a love interest? the target house may have a free room or someone who's interested in swapping.

    Houses will differ in whether e.g. there are people whose craft is cooking or if it's a chore, and how communal chores are handled (teach a craft, get out of doing the dishes?) for quite a while, until custom solidifies.

    743:

    Cripes. Not just professionally. I have just posted this on a social forum (Moz may well identify it and me), and half a dozen sections came up purple - not unusual words, either!

    I agree. A lot of people were very interested in my trike during my 2 weeks in the southern Hebrides, and one person said it was exactly what he needed. I stressed that it was the ideal vehicle for relaxed touring, and was carrying full camping kit as well as supplies, clean clothing etc. etc. Loss of balance is near-universal among older people, and we don't all want to give up being active, but it's not the only reason to want a trike. As you say, my ideal trike is not everybody's ideal one.

    744:

    ways to fully interactively experience wild nature. (Could be virtual or telepresence.)

    I don't think that's plausible, TBH. For two reasons: either we will have too many people and not enough nature (the optimistic case); or we will have not enough people and too much nature (the pessimistic case), and the latter is likely to be very keen on minimising the "fully interactive experience" in favour of staying alive.

    Experiencing nature really requires a whole bunch of stuff that's hard to synthesise, it's not just smells and subsonics, it's microbiota, echo time and the ability to stumble round banging into things. I can imagine "pocket parks" being very carefully built to mimic some types of nature, but I can't imagine how you would do that for the experience of being in a mature rain forest or a stormy headland. Walking round the base of a forest giant is an interesting experience, but I'm struggling to imagine how you'd even do the basic mechanical walking simulation, and obviously a pocket park containing even one 10m diameter, 100m tall tree would be stretching the definition of "pocket".

    745:

    Your secret, such as it is, is safe from me. With me. Whatever ;)

    I am kind of keep to keep my quad for the reasons you describe, but it is annoyingly hard to get it on and off trains so it's not hugely useful for me right now. I keep it anyway. I'm also looking at power assist for it, and specifically the quietly-not-legal sort because it weighs 40kg empty and is not aerodynamic. It is, however, capacious and stable - more so than a trike, especially then loaded up.

    It's awesome for touring because the big black bin makes packing a joy, and I suspect I could carry four or five 200W solar panels if I decided I wanted to (two in use while riding, the others unfoldable for extra charging ability). Running 500W/72V motors in the front wheels is do-able, they're kinda-COTS in the sense that two manufacturers offer them as a stock-custom option, it's just that it turns an $OZ8000 bike into a $16000 bike (2x$1000 wheel/motors, 2kWh of LiIon batteries, 1kW of panels, plus electronics). The 500W motors mostly offer more torque than lower power ones do, and that's what I'd need because it's going to be a 100kg behemoth (nothing like Steve Roberts version though)

    746: 707 - It's a technique for using a touch screen as your input device as well as the VDU for the tech. At a guess, you're like me and have never had it inflicted on you by someone who believes that a cell phone is a lifestyle rather than a telephone? 712 - Well, you're significantly myopic. I actually find it easier to take my glasses off when reading print or using a monitor for significant periods. 729 - tank in wall doesn't save space; it just makes the tank less visible! (IME) 731 - You've got that backwards; it's for you to present evidence that integrated is better since you made that claim!

    General - s/autocorrect/"auto second guess you and probably get it wrong" ;-)

    747:

    Thanks. It's no longer important since I retired, and I don't bother to hide it seriously any longer; one person (who knows me well) deduced who I am, and anyone seriously interested could do the same. I have my suspicions about the multinominal one's identity, but am not going to post them :-)

    Yes. I have thought of a quad, but am reluctant for the reasons you give, and the fact that it is unclear whether electrically assisted quads are legal in the UK. Solar panels are a waste of time for me, of course, and a personal wind farm is more satire than engineering!

    However, a correction to my posting #629. It seems that UK law does NOT require you to pedal to get assistance, though it does require functional pedals. As I said there, removing even that requirement is a trivial regulatory change. Designing and building a suitable micro bubble car of the electrically assisted pedal cycle type suitable for urban and suburban commuting, shopping and child transport is entirely straightforward, and would solve a HUGE number of the UK's transport problems in one swell foop. The obstacles are purely political and social.

    The other simple change that would help immensely is to force a change to the insurance mechanisms, to enable people to hire larger cars etc. for occasional use. The success of several car share systems show just HOW simple it is, but those need considerable extending. All it needs is a government with (a) spine and (b) the best interests of the country at heart. I am not holding my breath :-(

    748:

    One advantage of the solar plus power assist when touring in Australia is that you are generally better off riding around dawn and dusk, and during the peak insolation time you don't want to be out in the sun... but your panels do. My usual pattern in Aotearoa as well as Australia is to ride from just after first light until it gets hot/I get tired, then pause somewhere I can wash (usually an icy cold river, so I do that as soon as possible after getting off the bike). That gives me time to be a tourist and keeps me off the road in the hot afternoon time. But it would work quite well as a solar cyclist.

    I also keep thinking... could I use an induction cooker instead of gas for cooking? In Australia fires for cooking are accepted, but not in Aotearoa.

    749:

    Allen Thomson noted "I absolutely LOATHE the autodecorrect features, partly because my working vocabulary is much larger than theirs, and partly because of the need to type in proper names and foreign works."

    The trick is to take the good aspects of the concept and bend them to your will. For example, Microsoft Word's autocorrect feature is wonderful if you delete all Microsoft's suggestions and add your own, building a useful list over time. I add "]" before each of my own entries so I won't accidentally invoke them. Works a treat. Mac OS has a similar feature built into the OS, Windows probably does too, and there are many utilities like Typinator that you can install if you don't like what's built-in. Haven't yet grown sufficiently annoyed to figure out how to replace the autocorrect in iOS, but I'm sure there are ways (e.g., installing any of several really good swipe-style keyboard replacements).

    Bill Arnold noted: "The gravity-fed tank-based system gives you one flush during a power outage. Or, I suppose, several liters of clean water. Not sure that even part of why, but it's an effect that many who live in areas with frequent power outages have considered."

    Depends on the duration of the power outage and local infrastructure. Most municipal water in Canada, at least so far as I've traveled, is gravity-fed from water towers. If the outage lasts long enough, you eventually deplete the water towers and water won't flow anymore unless the city installs a backup power supply like a generator so they can keep pumping water 40 metres uphill to the top of the tower. Here in Quebec, winter power outages for most of a day are common; if you're really unlucky, a good winter storm can take out the power in "less important" areas for several days and up to a week, depending on how badly everyone else gets hit. During the Great Ice Storm of 1998, my uncle, living in a rural area, was without power for nearly 30 days. He was able to stay in his home because he had a kickass wood-burning stove that let him melt ice to make water. Most of us keep several gallons of water in plastic jugs to run the toilets in winter, just in case.

    In terms of clean water, it's probably a toss-up between the bowl and the tank. The bowl has obviously and demonstrably been exposed to all kinds of ick, but if you've ever opened up the tank to stop a toilet that won't stop running, you know that the water in the tank can also be pretty nasty. I wouldn't try drinking it without filtering and boiling unless I was truly desperate.

    750:

    On the last point, a bit of algae and mat bacteria almost certainly won't harm you - poisonous algae are extremely rare - I have drunk much worse. Actually, in your own household, the water from the bowl won't harm you, either, because you will already have those bacteria in your gut (which is where they came from, after all). It's almost entirely an aesthetic matter.

    751:

    The lesser problem is that nature's not a theme park, despite too many attempts to make it so. This actually is a huge problem when people treat parks as consumerist entertainment and get grumpy when stuff doesn't happen "because they paid the entrance fee."

    The bigger problem is what you do in the true wilderness: make fires, cut trails, harvest animals and plants for food, make shelters. Do that in an urban pocket park, and you cause a hell of a lot of damage. If your campfire gets loose, it may even burn the park down.

    This is a problem I deal with a lot. The biggest offenders locally are the mountain bikers, some of whom have a culture that values making new trails. They have over 1000 miles of bike trail already in the county, but instead they concentrate on poorly funded, ecological reserves and cut new trails in there. So now, in one reserve, there's 50-odd miles of trail built sinc e2008 in an area of not quite 500 acres that was set aside for hiking and birdwatching, and to protect two endangered species. The resulting mess has been called "gator-backing" because the pattern of trails is so dense that the remaining vegetation looks like the scutes on the back of an alligator, and it's not the only park that's been gator-backed by the bikers. Even though this was all blatantly illegal, the bikers are now pushing to retroactively legalize the trails they made.

    So yeah, personally I want people to experience the wild by rewilding at least half the globe. Our species lived with that for 300,000-odd years, so I'd say it's healthier for us than the virtual reality version.

    752:

    The trick is to take the good aspects of the concept and bend them to your will. For example, Microsoft Word's autocorrect feature is wonderful if you delete all Microsoft's suggestions and add your own, building a useful list over time. I add "]" before each of my own entries so I won't accidentally invoke them. Works a treat. Yes, until you are cross-graded to a new version of "Off Ice", which promptly over-writes all your custom settings with MickeyShaft's standard ones.

    753:

    "I see, you're one o' them Yooper Separatists.... (Non:US: Michigan has two sections, and the northern one is the Upper Peninsula.)"

    Not in the slightest; I've been to the UP once in my life.

    (to people unfamiliar with the Great Lakes region of the US, from the Detroit area it's 300 miles (450 KM) to to the UP, which is a pennisular ~300 miles (450 KM) from East to West.

    754:

    Elderly Cynic noted: "On the last point, a bit of algae and mat bacteria almost certainly won't harm you - poisonous algae are extremely rare - I have drunk much worse."

    There's a difference between "you'll die" and "you'll wish you were dead". G A lot of algae are things you don't want passing through your digestive track. An ecology prof with whom I went snow trekking long ago in Montana warned me against drinking meltwater from ice and snow for exactly that reason.

    EC: "Actually, in your own household, the water from the bowl won't harm you, either, because you will already have those bacteria in your gut (which is where they came from, after all). It's almost entirely an aesthetic matter."

    No, it's really not. There's a reason we don't eat our own shit -- organisms like E. coli may not kill us, but they'll likely lead to serious gastrointestinal distress.

    755:

    paws4thot: "Yes, until you are cross-graded to a new version of "Off Ice", which promptly over-writes all your custom settings with MickeyShaft's standard ones."

    Word doesn't usually do that, but for autocorrects, it's not hard to back up your .acl files once you know where Word hides them. And like any other work that would take time to recreate, you should include those files in your ongoing backups.

    In any event, the larger point is that if you don't like Microsoft's solution, invest in Typinator or any of its workalikes. You'll still want to back up your work, but you're at least not at the mercy [sic] of Microsoft.

    756:

    One thing I recall from reading about hydroelectric dams was the importance of "head" pressure delivered to the generator, depending on how far of a drop the water was falling before it hit the turbine, farther being more powerful and so usually better.  Maybe the same applies to toilets, making it preferable to have the reservoir elevated farther above the bowl than could ever be practical in a single assembled module, hence the detached tank? Could maybe also explain nautical term, "the head" as well as Victorian era pull chain models where the tank was way the hell up by the ceiling.

    757:

    A bit late to the party... Regarding the topic of "dwellings in 100 years": Looking at rising house prices, increasing population, urbanisation, wipe-out of coastal cities, etc., plus the widespread adoption of VR replacing the need for physical space with virtual space, I was thinking that the vast majority of people will live in tiny "apartments" that are just big enough for a small bed, and a shower-sized VR booth with motion capture suit hanging in mid-air (VR booth could double up as bathroom to save space). Basically like Tokyo capsule hotels. There is already plenty of propaganda in various magazines trying to convince people that "micro-apartments" are the big trend and actually cool and desirable.

    But then, having just read Saturn's children, the obvious next step would be to live in capsules like the space travel pods in the book... Just big enough to fit a body, mind is in VR. Foodstuff is just another set of plumbing, like water mains and sewage pipes today, and there's not much reason to ever leave the pod. I guess "The Matrix" is another version of this, if AI overlords take over... yay future!

    758:

    Drone goods delivery is stupid and impractical in densely populated urban areas; the only niche application for it I can see is to speed up deliveries in suburban and exurban areas.

    I agree. Railguns are much better and faster :)

    759:

    "The head" refers to its traditional location on the ship - up near the bow. I guess the idea was to get an automatic flush every time you plunged into a wave.

    760:

    If I recall correctly, it was sort of a serendipitous thing; the archer platforms up flanking the "beak-head", the bit there so the sailing vessel could ram a galley without harming the actual hull, were slotted so they'd drain when water came over the bow, this turned out to be the least bad option for relieving yourself, and then it got formalized.

    At least on HMS Victory, the crew's heads are open seats with no shelter right up flanking the bowsprit.

    761:

    Experiencing nature really requires a whole bunch of stuff that's hard to synthesise, it's not just smells and subsonics, it's microbiota, echo time and the ability to stumble round banging into things. I agree completely. That's why many-sense telepresence might be interesting. It wouldn't ever be complete, but it could augment and/or substitute for such experiences for many people. E.g. even if one is already in a wild area stumbling around banging into things, personally controlled maneuverable devices could zoom in, map UV/scents/polarization/whatever to our sensory-processing neuroanatomy. They wouldn't have the same elevation limitations, etc. And if one did not have a wild area nearby, they could offer some rich experiences, particularly if lag was low (millisecond or three). Popular wild areas might be overpopulated with oddly curious apparent dragonflies and other such creatures. :-) (Actual mammals and birds, especially corvids, (would) need consent in my ethics for anything other than passive experience sharing or minor benign or beneficial guidance.)

    (Mainly I'm wondering out loud how my mind could survive in an urban environment. Have never lived in a continually noisy city.)

    Decent rant about Jeff Bezos. (She doesn't delve into the question of what happens when factions start demanding the disassembly of the Earth to fuel more growth.) Jeff Bezos Is a Post-Earth Capitalist - Bezos admits that the limitless growth that made him the world's richest man is incompatible with a habitable Earth. (Caroline Haskins, May 10 2019) Bezos pitched a version of the future that’s departed from the reality of capitalism, climate change, and the intractable connections between those two things. Bezos admits that limitless growth—the growth that made him the richest man in the world—is incompatible with a habitable earth. But instead of announcing investments in renewable energy or public infrastructure, Bezos pitches an escape from earth. Bezos argued that space “colonies” are a solution to humanity’s “long range” problems, like energy availability and ceilings on capitalist notions of unfettered, limitless growth. Space colonies, Bezos said, are a way to expand the human population and offset the impacts of agriculture and industry on Earth. This strategy, according to Bezos, leaves Earth an idyllic paradise: a place to go on vacation, a place to go to college—in other words, a place for the elite.

    762:

    Dammit, Bezos just stole my idea for the villains in a space opera. Too bad it was so effing obvious.

    And no, Earth won't be left as an idyllic park, unless you're a fan of Orion's Arm. Since the 80s, there's been a "better" strategy (per Paul Ehrlich relating a conversation with an investor who thought he was an idiot). Better, that is, if you're a psychopath. Ehrlich was wondering why capitalists didn't stop when they took the stock of something like whales down to the endangerment level. The capitalist's point of view was you extract every bit of the resource you can get, then take the profits in extracting the next resource down to exhaustion, meanwhile enriching yourself the whole time. If interstellar colonies were possible, I think we would expect capitalism to drain Earth to exhaustion to fund the colonization fleets, much as the Oankali would.

    763:

    Those Oankali? Lovers of nature? Rescuers of the human genome? Hell no! They'd suck up all the organics, strip your world right down to the bedrock, that's the Oankali. Then when they wanted your genes "the natural way," they'd tell you there'd been a nuclear war or something... there's warrants for those folks across half the galactic cluster? Do you believe the Oankali human? Do you?"

    764:

    Most of us keep several gallons of water in plastic jugs to run the toilets in winter, just in case.

    ok, fine, I'll chime in: you pour drinking water into your toilet! What kind of primitive ecologically illiterate society are you stuck in? In decent societies the only water that goes into the toilet is a little bit of vinegar every now and then to help keep the right bacteria working. Admittedly the fan in mine failed recently so it's been a bit damp and possibly on the verge of going anaerobic, but it hasn't and it's been a week. I have patched it up for today and will fix it when I get a roundtuit.

    I realise in the icy wastes of the far north you have to heat your toilets to keep them alive, but pouring drinking water into them isn't going to help with that.

    765:

    I guess the idea was to get an automatic flush every time you plunged into a wave.

    Surely the term is "purge"? As gravity gets stronger your bowel movements get easier....

    766:

    I like the idea of sleeping in a capsule (I've made various "dutch bed" variants and a canopy bed as well, largely for ease of heating in the winter. Sleeping in a confined space is fine and smaller generally means easier to insulate (I considered making a suspended one but decided it wasn't worth the bother).

    The issue is stuff. After you've rented stuff on and off, bought and sold it a few times, the idea of paying for storage starts to seem less unreasonable. Albeit that's based on current space costs, where the marginal cost of a slightly bigger home is very low and sometimes negative (in the context of me already wanting a very small house, which are hard to find so slightly bigger is often easier to find and cheaper). But that same equation drives the McMansion garbage as well - people see shiny specs in the catalogue and fail to note that the display home is on an unusually large block of land. Or even think about the spaces they actually use and compare that to what's provided in the house they're looking at. This applies more to buyers, but happily also to many renters as well (or more likely other renters want very different things than I do)

    767:

    Not sure why the discussion about toilets is relevant to 2119.

    Gee. I duno about your definition of houses/homes but mine includes some way of taking a leak/dump.Be it inside the home or very nearby.

    If we roll back 100 years I suspect most of the US was still using some sort of non flush toilet into a sewer system. And 100 years in the future a way to get rid of digestive left overs will likely be with us in some form or another as a part of home design.

    We have come a long way in 100 years. From 4+ gallons per flush to under 1.8(usa) for poop and if installed less for pee. But we still (first world issues) tend to use drinking water (most of us only have that as an option for water) to get rid of pee and poop. I suspect this will need to change. And gray water is an option but it currently has it's problems. (My friends with wells can attest how needle valves in their toilets occasionally get stuck open due to very fine sand getting through their filtering systems.)

    In the US go back 50 years and it was a big deal in urban areas if you could get an apartment with a private bath. Still a big deal but mostly not an issue any more except in really low end (barely habitable left over from 80+ years ago) housing.

    And open defecation is still an issue in much of the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_defecation

    So to me this is an issue open for discussion of homes for 2119.

    768:

    Moveable type fucked me over again, so this will be the short form: it seems unlikely that our current waste-oriented society can continue much longer. Nutrients like phosphorus are increasingly hard to get. Recycling them via a composting toilet is much, much easier than trying to extract them from sewage or seawater. Spending resources to purify water to drinkability with the intent of pouring it into the sewer seems foolish. Especially if you're mining the water, like a lot of countries are (Australia among them).

    FWIW our metered water consumption here varies between one and two people's worth, according to the water board... for a household of three to six. It's still to high, over 50l/day/person. But under 100, and definitely under the 200+ far too many people get through.

    769:

    No, very, very few algae are problematic - glaciers may usually have one or he may just have been covering his arse against a really unlikely event - was he in charge of you, in the USA? While I have drunk meltwater only once, I have often drunk water that was well-supplied with algae without problems; much (perhaps most) of the world does.

    And, NO, variants of E. coli that you are accustomed to will NOT cause you any form of gutrot, though their absence will - a huge proportion of a healthy human's gut contents is active E. coli bacteria. People in the same household pick up the same variants, which is why I said what I did.

    770:

    100 years ago, most people just pissed outside, and the rain did all the flushing that was needed.

    771: 755 - Investing in something better isn't an option on a work machine. 756 Point 1 - I've always thought that too, which makes the modern fashion for having the tank base only about 1m off the floor seem flawed. 756 Point 2 - "The heads" of a sailing ship were historically up in the bows, and basically a channel allowing the excretions to drop directly into the sea. (#759 and #760 also refer). 766 - I was thinking similarly for a "sleeping/dressing compartment". That doesn't mean I don't still want other rooms for doing stuff like entertaining and cooking in.
    772:

    E. coli certainly is dangerous; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkerton_E._coli_outbreak

    If you're arguing that you never have to worry if you've shared the household for long enough, you're also arguing for never having guests, or, really, never being a guest or going anywhere. That's totally incompatible with any kind of urban environment. (And requires that the microorganisms won't mutate on you. Rare, but not unknown.)

    773:

    High density living is not compatible with onsite composting of wastes; the whole point to inventing sewers was "all these people in one place is too much, what's the best way to move this stuff?" and various "oh, I know, moral reasoning" issues around potable water are not doing the risk analysis. Yeah, flushing with potable water seems strange, but guaranteeing a potable water input side means you aren't doing biomedical lab source management all the time. Grey water on the vegetables is a risk; grey water doesn't have a known set of contaminants; the plumbing cost to manage multiple grades of water and how those should interact and how those must not interact is not trivial at all.

    (Trying to get ANY skill evenly distributed across the population to a minimum standard of competence fails. Look at, well, anything; literacy, arithmetic numeracy, driving, cooking, using adhesives, anything at all. A universal application of composting toilets is a research program into failure modes.)

    The systemic goal is not to minimize the water extraction; the point is to close the loop. Having lots of circulating water in a closed loop system is no kind of problem.

    774:

    In the US go back 50 years and it was a big deal in urban areas if you could get an apartment with a private bath.

    That sounds odd. 1970s? Not the case in Canada by then. (Leaving aside student residences and similar dwellings.)

    775:

    Aargh! E. coli is an essential component of your gut flora, and you will get ill (and sometimes very ill in the long term) if you do not have it.

    What those totally dumb articles hide is the fact that there are a zillion variants, of which only a very, very few are seriously dangerous; almost all of cases of 'E. coli infection' are minor, short-term, essentially ignorable diarrhoea as your body adapts to the new variant. There is also increasing evidence to show that you should NOT attempt to shield yourself and your family from such 'infections', because doing so causes worse problems.

    And, yes, of course, there is a piffling chance of guests bringing in one of the nasty variants, and a significant one of them bringing in ones you aren't accustomed to. Fer chrissake, NOTHING is totally safe, and the risk from E. coli is exaggerated out of all connection to reality by the hysterical media.

    776:

    I should have said "prior to 50 years ago".

    In 1970 many (most?) urban apartments were built prior to WWII. And many of them were 1 and 2 room things with a shared bath "down the hall". So having a private bathroom in an apartment was a "step up".

    I think such setups were not allowed to be built in many situations by the 70s.

    And in general suburban apartments were not a thing until after WWII. As most suburbs didn't exist prior to WWII.

    USA here.

    777:

    Moz @ 768 Moveable type fucked me over again Do what I do, for any lengthy message ... Type it into "Notepad" or WordPad" or similar & then copy across - you still have the original. Guess how I found out about this?

    778:

    There's a wonderful exhibit in the People's Palace in Glasgow on the Tenement housing that the majority of the citizens lived in. And in most the toilets were located in unsanitary blocks on the ground between the buildings. There are videos of people describing the conditions they grew up in and a few replica rooms which were tiny given the number living in them. Many I think had only a single water tap, if they had running water at all.
    I'm sure there's plenty on here who can state for sure when the communal toilets stopped being a thing, I suspect it was in the 1960s.

    779:

    Pigeon noted "The head" refers to its traditional location on the ship - up near the bow. I guess the idea was to get an automatic flush every time you plunged into a wave."

    Also an artefact of European ship design: because you couldn't really beat upwind in a square-rigger, the wind (on average) came from behind you, so if you're seated over a hole in the front of the ship, the wind would carry away the wastes and their smell instead of bearing them back over the deck so everyone could enjoy the shared experience.

    Moz expressed horror at Canadian toilets: "you pour drinking water into your toilet! What kind of primitive ecologically illiterate society are you stuck in?"

    A society that probably has the highest per capita water availability on the planet, or close to the highest. Yes, it would make far more sense ecologically to use grey water or composting toilets, but both solutions are prohibitively expensive for the average person given the lack of any support infrastructure and the sunk cost in the present system. Were I to move to a rural area, I'd seriously consider installing that infrastructure, but it wouldn't be a no brainer financially.

    780:

    Your description, and indeed the exhibition generally, are accurate as far as they go. It's a good description of the "single ends" in areas like the Gorbals, which were mostly demolished during urban renewal (that actually was) in the 1950s and 60s. OTOH a visually identical "wally close" just over a mile away in Pollockshields was built with bathroom and kitchenette, and most of them still exist.

    781:

    Ah yes, the idiot problem, the bane of all environmental solutions.

    As an example, ideally we should be able to hot process and compost all sewer waste and put it on fields, thereby closing the phosphorus cycling loop. In practice it doesn't work. One part is the hard problem of breaking down thousands of different pharmaceuticals, some of which undoubtedly will build up if you close cycle the system.

    The bigger problem, though, is idiots. It doesn't take many cadmium batteries or barrels of chrome plating waste dumped in a sewer to turn sewer effluent from potentially useful fertilizer to hazardous waste, so only a few assholes can wreck a resource stream. Indeed, in LA, the waste managers actually welded shut a few manholes around a particularly notorious plant just to keep them from doing this. Similar problems happen in greenwaste, which is why free urban mulch sometimes has used diapers and used needles in it, as those contaminants "somehow" got pitched into bins of tree cuttings.

    So far as toilets go, the idiot problem with humanure is that things can go horribly wrong if you force a sufficiently large population of people to switch over to composting toilets. How many ways are there to do this wrong? Every single one of them will be performed--repeatedly. And probably some new ones will be found, because idiots explore the natural selection possibility space as efficiently as smart people do, if not more so.

    So far as conventional toilets go, I lived in Avalon for awhile, and that charming little island town with the sharply limited water supply has a dual water system: freshwater for sinks and showers, seawater for sanitation. The sanitation water serves a couple of purposes besides flushing stuff into the sewer. The big one is that it serves as a vapor block, keeping sewer gases from building up in the bathroom, something that might get to be explosive if you get the fuel-air mix of methane just right and add a spark from a nearby appliance. Anyway, saltwater in the toilets had some interesting side effects, such as bioluminescence when a dinoflagellate bloom was in the harbor and something disturbed the toilet water. More to the point, it kept the plumbers in town in business, because all that salt water corroded pipes and fixtures very efficiently, and everything had to be replaced quite regularly. In Avalon, they have little choice, as they nearly ran out of fresh water a couple of years ago during the five year drought and can't afford to flush it away. For the rest of us? Building a faster-corroding secondary system to carry reclaimed water around is one of those interesting ideas, if hard to make cost-effective.

    I guess the solution is to build a cheap, long-lasting, smart composting toilet that helps its owners poo do the right thing, along with the social media giant to contract out the jobs of moving the humanure to where it's needed. Someone better get on it.

    782:

    There's a similar dual system in place in Reykjavík which centrally delivers both hot and cold water. Hot water is geothermal, so is cloudy and smells strongly of sulphur. Although it turns out they deliberately add extra H2S to it to help deplete the oxygen and reduce the corrosion potential. The cold water is spring fed, and very cold.

    The very top end hotels use heat exchangers to heat the cold water so that the guests can shower in clean supplies. Everyone else smells faintly of sulphur.

    783:

    Yes, it would make far more sense ecologically to use grey water or composting toilets

    This is a scale error.

    What you want for your city population is a circulatory system for something on the scale of a neighbourhood or larger. Pumping sewage around for processing as one step in that circulatory system is probably easier and simpler than some sort of dung-beetle ecological role, coming by to shift compost.

    If you're very rural, yes, composting toilets make sense. If you're managing waste for a fifty story residential high-rise, not so much.

    (There is no shortage of fresh water. There's a big problem with treating fresh water as an open-loop resource.)

    784:

    The trouble with "idiot-proofing $system" is that engineers consistently underestimate the ingenuity of idiots.

    785:

    Para 2 - To the extent that trade routes for tall ships were designed such that the ships could spend more or less the entire voyage running before the wind: Even before the Suez and Panama canals were dug the shortest route from China to England by sea was not round Cape Horn, but that was very definitely the fastest passage for a tea clipper.

    786:

    If you're very rural, ... If you're a fifty story residential high-rise

    Meanwhile the 90% of the world that doesn't live in either of those extremes would like to know whether there's a better option than mixing their shit with battery acid and wet wipes before putting it in landfill (or, bob help us, the sea).

    Grey water as a third pipe is being used in a few places, and it does make sense in arid countries like... basically anywhere that isn't tidal.

    787:

    the highest per capita water availability on the planet

    How does that make dealing with mixed sewage easier? Dilute it until it disappears? And how does it help you recover nutrients from excrement?

    make far more sense ecologically to use grey water or composting toilets... it wouldn't be a no brainer financially.

    The no brainer part is where people say "this has no financial value therefore it is worthless" which is either illogical or a non sequitur. It's like a person saying "I couldn't sell my liver so I cut it out and ate it".

    Pretending that we can patch economics or capitalism so they work outside their narrow domains by making up money values for non-monetary systems doesn't work in practice. At best you end up with "market value of a life" being used to produce cost-benefit analysis of safety systems, but too often those are extended past the point of insanity as we see with things like the question 'is curing people profitable'* (and people like me asking "so who do I write the cheque to before I kill you?")

    • granted that this question is now starting to be asked as a critique of the drug industry rather than by shareholders.
    788:

    Most of the world lives in cities, a trend that is not likely to reverse.

    You're talking about the reduce part of reduce, reuse, recycle; I'm taking the position that a functioning city isn't going to be able to stay open-loop, so any water usage that's in the closed loop is irrelevant; it's part of the circulating fluid of the city metabolism. If that works out so there's a five litre flush volume, that's fine.

    789:

    In the mid-eighties, my geology TA was a geophysics PhD candidate who was looking at (very very coarse by the standards of today) simulation for Ontario's eventual climate on the basis of Freeman Dyson's then-current "3 C of warming" projection. Their results summarized as "too wet to grow rice". (I was told, but did not actually see, that the conclusions section included one-liners about the advisability of seeking to domesticate moose and breed more palatable bullrushes.)

    The modern, much better, simulations don't suggest that's wrong.

    So the problem here is much more "existing infrastructure overwhelmed by increased flow volume".

    (Based on the number of people still pouring paint down storm sewer gratings after forty years of earnest and continuous public education efforts, no way are composting anything a general solution to the problem.)

    790:

    A bit off topic (not entirely; about the reduced viability of non-urban living in CA), well-written piece by David Walace-Wells. Long, but compelling. (Note; I'm East Side US, ~130 +/- 20 cms rain per year and don't have direct experience with this.) Los Angeles Fire Season Is Beginning Again. And It Will Never End. A bulletin from our climate future. (David Wallace-Wells 12 May 2019) Fires have always created their own weather systems, but now they’re producing not just firestorms but fire tornadoes, in which the heat can be so intense it can pull steel shipping containers right into the furnace of the blaze. Certain systems now project embers as much as a mile forward, each seeking out more brush, more trees, new eaves on old homes, like pyromaniacal sperm seeking out combustible eggs, which lie everywhere. In at least one instance, a fire has projected lightning storms 21 miles ahead — striking in the right place, these ignite yet more fire. “California is built to burn,” the fire historian Stephen Pyne tells me. “It is built to burn explosively.” ... A Malibu Lake woman I spoke with, sorting through her things after a 2 a.m. bullhorn, paused with her favorite ring halfway down her finger, thinking, I can’t believe I’m accessorizing for an evacuation, and left it behind. Her husband didn’t take a bag at all, promising her they’d be back — he’d been through three evacuations before. When he did return, it was by hiking up the hills on foot; the roads were impassable because of downed power lines. His brand-new Tesla sat melted in the driveway. Even the chimney was gone. She saw the barren plot for the first time on the local news.

    791:

    Most of the world lives in cities, a trend that is not likely to reverse.

    I think that's optimistic, except in the sense that most city dwellers will not move to the country they will die in place.

    I largely agree with you, with the caveat that I don't think the current model of mixing everything together then trying to separate it later is plausible. I think we'll see more emphatic policing of storm/sewer/toxics separation, but also a shift towards more separation.

    While you scoff at tower blocks with composting toilets, that's exactly what we're seeing as experiments in Australia - onsite treatment of blackwater with biosolids and greywater as outputs ... plus "stuff" going to landfill. They don't do it via in-apartment composting, but via a small sewage plant in the basement.

    792:

    While this article isn't totally wrong, it has gems like "You can’t outrun a wildfire burning at full speed; some grow an acre a second, some three times faster still." This has Trumpian levels of factual accuracy. An acre per second growth may be technically correct, but it's spread over a few hundred thousand acres with a complex perimeter actually gets the fire spread down to more realistic miles per hour, not a Tokyo firebombing or nuclear war spread scales. Not that I'd try outrunning a grass fire or a wildfire at full blow, but generally that's not the problem.

    In other words, when someone in New York City is howling about things going wrong in LA, there's both an agenda and likely a lot of distortion. It's a standard trope that gets as tiresome as being asked when the San Andreas fault is going to split and LA is going to slide into the sea.

    If you want to get something a lot more realistic, check out the California Fire Science Consortium. Or if you want decent reporting, try the Los Angeles Times.

    793:

    If you want to get something a lot more realistic

    I'm amused because I thought their descriptions were unrealistic in the opposite direction. 100kph is not an especially fast bushfire, 1500m is not far to throw embers, 2100F is not especially hot (1200C, aluminium windows and mag wheels are gone, steel is white hot but not melting, concrete is largely untouched)... etc. And they didn't even go into kW/m2 which is what Australia fire front radiant energy is measured in (horsepower per acre? BTUs per square inch?). The gulf between air temperature and fire effect is significant (at least in Australia).

    The agenda stuff is just as tedious in Australia, though.

    794:

    Concrete is not "largely untouched" at 1200C.

    Already around 500-700C concrete looses half its compressive strength, at 1200C there is no strength left.

    This will probably not matter much for a poured slab directly on the ground (garages, roads) but if there is insulation under the concrete, or if we are talking concrete walls/ceilings etc, 1200C is game over.

    What this means in practice is that duration of the fire is incredibly important: If you have a 5 minute flash-fire at 2000C, your concrete is usually fine, because despite the good thermal conductivity, concrete has relatively high thermal impedance.

    But any well stoked fire over 10-30 minutes and you should not trust the concrete to carry weight until you have tested it.

    795:

    Acre per second... That's 43560 square feet, or a square about 208 feet on a side. IF it's growing by those squares, then...208 feet/sec=228kph, which is unbelievable. That's the point of the size of the fire. I fully believe that a fire was growing an acre per second (that happened in the Camp Fire on the first day), but you've still got to look at the size of the front to figure out how scary that is. If the fire's 100 miles wide and growing at an acre per second, the fire's advancing along that front at 1 inch per second, or less than a mile per hour. That's why you can't convert "acre per second" to "can't outrun it" without knowing more.

    As for ember throw, Australia still holds the record at something like 16 kilometers, so I'll give it to you. The Camp Fire, which did grow at an acre per second on the first day, and which was exceptionally scary, definitely pitched embers about two miles (that from a published satellite picture). It may have pitched further, but that's the image I saw of a spot fire downwind.

    796:

    Hteromeles @ 781 Two problems with a secondary water system & one solution: First you have to build / rebuild & re-plumb averything, including alll the buidlings for TWO (if not three) sets of pipery. Secondly, the "idiot problem" again, bacuase you can be 150% certain that some fuckwits will plumb / connect / use the sysems nbackwards Solution to the corrosiom problem, use modern platics for the pipery (!)

    P.S. Where is "Avalon" - not presumably just off the Isles of Scilly?

    Graydon @ 783 There is no shortage of fresh water Oh yes there is. The UK's largest city is in the driest part of the country .... the average rainfall, where I live is 584mm ( = 23" ) per year Guvmint says the problem is "too hard" which indicates that they & their advisers are idiots, because an ( approx ) 450km pipe or aqueduct would do the trick, sice Kielder water was made to supply water for industries that don't exist any more ... [ Would have to be v large-diameter pipe or conuit ( Think "The New River" - water gradient 5 inches per mile, approx 1:12670) & would, unfortunately, almost certainly require pumping at one or two points, since Kileder is only 200m metres up. & @ 789 NOT helped by guvmint in any form, either. How the hell does one, in an environmentally-friendly manner, dispose of old tyres, that are not off your car, for insatnce? None of the local council sites will take them & dumping them is both criminal & environmentally-unfriendly & those people who will take them away want to charge an arm & a leg. Again, our allotments have this problem ... we're holding on to the unwanted tyres & still sctratching our heads ....

    Paws & 784 Don't - The users of the mowers & strimmers on said alloments are still finding new ways to break them ... guess how I know?

    797:

    Solution to the corrosiom problem, use modern platics for the pipery (!)

    PVC. A friend who studies such things as a private learning type thing has speculated that the chlorine from such might be the world next lead moment. And he's not prone to hyperbolic statement.

    Personally I hope PEX turns out to a decent (with little long term bad) replacement for copper and steel and such for plumbing. Now to get plumbers to stop hooking it up as if it was copper.

    Fittings for copper and similar are exterior to the pipe and just create a bit of turbulence to the flow. PEX fitting are internal to the piping so each fitting creates a flow restriction. Which is why you should make continuous home runs with PEX off a manifold to where the fluids are needed and not hook it up like copper with all kinds of angled fittings and such.

    798:

    How the hell does one, in an environmentally-friendly manner, dispose of old tyres, that are not off your car, for insatnce?

    One of the best ways I've seen is to use them as feed stock for highway surfaces. Of course long term that generates very very tiny bits of tire for the environment as the road surface wears.

    Locally I don't have the issue you have. In NC they passed laws a few years back where all counties (local admin areas) have to have a way for people (not businesses) to dispose of such things. We have 2 disposal drop off sites for appliances, electronics, oils, tires, and anything you might think of as hazardous such as batteries, florescent lights, paint, etc... And supposedly they handle it in an appropriate manner. Businesses are also accommodated, just not for "free".

    We seem to have passed peak "tube" TV replacement. Back 5 years or so ago when I'd visit there would be 20 or 30 pallets of old tube TVs sitting to the side waiting for pickup. Now I rarely see more than 10 at a time. Typically only 1 or 2.

    A couple of times when I showed up in a rental van full of things which happened to have out of the area license plates I had to show proof of where I lived.

    799:

    Secondly, the "idiot problem" again, bacuase you can be 150% certain that some fuckwits will plumb / connect / use the sysems nbackwards

    In general a decent code compliance system will stop that. And first use tends to show any issues very quickly. We have such things around here today.

    Bigger issue is people treating the drains in the kitchen sink, bathroom sink, tub/shower drain, and toilet as if they are the same thing. Which they have been for 2000 years but now are not.

    800:

    Chlorine, per se, isn't a problem - it's extremely reactive, and almost all of the resulting compounds are already widespread. PVC is definitely a problem, but it's not the elements that are but the compounds. Completely unlike cadmium, for example.

    801:

    some grow an acre a second, ... This has Trumpian levels of factual accuracy. An acre per second growth may be technically correct, but it's spread over a few hundred thousand acres with a complex perimeter actually gets the fire spread down to more realistic miles per hour, not a Tokyo firebombing or nuclear war spread scales.

    That came from NOVA. And as you mentioned in another comment was about the Camp fire on the first day. And the point being the first day is the best time to stop/contain such a fire. The longer it burns the more you're into just getting things out of the way while attempting a bit of steering efforts.

    Driving up through the Columbia River gorge last summer was an impressive (not in a great way) sight. Vast amounts of brown for miles where things were barely starting to grow back after the big fire there the previous year.

    802:

    How the hell does one, in an environmentally-friendly manner, dispose of old tyres, that are not off your car, for insatnce?

    Requires government regulations, I'm afraid. I'd favour a deposit scheme, like a bottle deposit: a chunk of the cost of the tire when it's fitted (say 5%) goes in tax, repaid to whoever disposes of the tire in an approved manner (e.g. by recycling as feedstock for highway surfacing). This gives the recyclers a financial incentive to accept tires from folks like me and thee without charging.

    A lot of our current problems could be mitigated to some extent by marketization strategies to make doing the right thing financially rewarding.

    Alas, if you say "bottle tax" (see current events in Scotland) or "carrier bag tax" (last year but one's equivalent), everybody usually agrees that encouraging recycling is good, but scream at the idea of spending an extra 20p (returnable) for a bottle of Coca-Cola, and don't think corner shops would be willing to host recycling machines. These people have obviously never visited Germany, where a rather smaller bottle refund has homeless folks actively collecting used bottles (and presumably carrier bags) from public trash cans and doorsteps ...

    803:

    and don't think corner shops would be willing to host recycling machines.

    Some states in the US have had these for 30 years. They work. And the spit back things they don't want to crush. All of the ones I've seen are about the size of a soda machine.

    As to tires the problem here and I suspect "over there" is they keep putting the frees on the disposal end of the chain, not on the initial sales. So everyone has an incentive to toss them "out the back door" to avoid the fees/taxes.

    We don't have a tax rate but every tire you replace on your car here in NC will cost you $1.25 in disposal fees. Which seems low to me but what do I know.

    804:

    "bottle tax"...These people have obviously never visited Germany

    Or are too young* to remember the Barr's rack in every small shop; returning your (glass) bottle earned you the not-insignificant deposit - my childhood era certainly returned them by choice. In Glasgow they are still apparently known as "glass cheques"...

    • I'm 52, and suffering the delight of being older than the parents of some of my work colleagues**

    ** This is a step up from being older than the parents of the students that I coach

    805:

    "too wet to grow rice"

    Would this include wild rice? I don't know much about the yield for acre/hectare but I know it has been commercially harvested from "rice lakes" in Manitoba since at least the 1970s and I suspect it has been commercially harvested for a far bit longer.

    806:

    When I was growing up in Winnipeg, the deposit on a $0.10 soft drink was an additional $0.02. Kids would scour the streets in their neighborhoods for empty bottles because penny candy was a thing (depending on the type of candy, you might get two or three pieces for a penny). People would howl at the idea of a 20% deposit for beverage containers but it is a system that would work.

    807:

    Wild rice isn't rice (though it is related), so possibly not.

    FWIW, wild rice has been commercially grown in Minnesota since the 1950s. Which reminds me, I really ought to find out if the stuff I have in the cupboard is still culinarily viable.

    808:

    Bigger issue is people treating the drains in the kitchen sink, bathroom sink, tub/shower drain, and toilet as if they are the same thing. Which they have been for 2000 years but now are not.

    Trying to tell people that they can't plunk the toddler with the diaper disaster into the tub/shower and hose them off isn't going to work.

    Same with laundry; there's no telling what's on clothes, and "oh but you must sort your laundry by dirt source and switch drains" shan't fly very far.

    809:

    No idea!

    Wouldn't necessarily suppose that a geophysicist in the 1980s has the best grasp of 2020s agricultural possibility, either.

    The point was more "agricultural practice would be compelled to change at the level of staple crops", and we're already seeing that.

    810:

    Totally agree.

    As someone who has done my own car work in the past what has come off my hand and body and clothes was definitely not organic.

    And yes tossing the young one in the shower is about the only way to deal with such things. Unless it's not too cold and you are willing to hose them down in the back yard.

    811:

    So if it is too expensive to replace all the sewers, and people are idiots then how good can we make the water treatment plants?

    812:

    There is no shortage of fresh water Oh yes there is. The UK's largest city is in the driest part of the country .... the average rainfall, where I live is 584mm ( = 23" ) per year

    That's because the system runs open-loop and relies on rainfall.

    That's not a water shortage; that's a shortage of water-recovery and recycling ability.

    813:

    While you scoff at tower blocks with composting toilets, that's exactly what we're seeing as experiments in Australia - onsite treatment of blackwater with biosolids and greywater as outputs ... plus "stuff" going to landfill. They don't do it via in-apartment composting, but via a small sewage plant in the basement.

    I wouldn't say "composting toilet" and "onsite treatment" were at all the same thing!

    These things are all collective problems requiring collective solutions, and I can totally see onsite treatment being a thing. Especially as the weather continues to get angrier, redundancy and designing for robustness will have value.

    814:

    So if it is too expensive to replace all the sewers,

    Yes. I've always lived where storm water and sanitary sewers were separate. It wasn't until I was "older" than I discovered this is not a universal thing. Places like San Francisco have a single system and overflows during big rains can be ... ah ... interesting.

    So if rainfall increases a LOT in places with this setup maybe the population will agree to pay for the work to separate them. But then again digging up ALL the street in a major city is not a 2 year project. Especially when you consider it took 100 years or more to build out the current system.

    I think Chicago has the same setup. But as it is fairly flat people with basements tend to have a stand pipe they can screw into any basement drains they have so when the levels in the system rise during big rain events their basement isn't flooded with the mix. And yes back flow valves are a thing but do you want to trust your entertainment room to that working perfectly every time for 40 years?

    My next door neighbor had a sewage backup into their basement 10+ years ago. They just had it stripped bare and seriously cleaned before rebuilding.

    815:

    So if it is too expensive to replace all the sewers, and people are idiots then how good can we make the water treatment plants?

    I think we're replacing all the sewers; that's more or less what climate change means. All the drains, ditches, culverts, settling ponds, levees, causeways, and sewers are the wrong size. (This is much of why the "taxes must go down!" faction are clearly detached from reality. Taxes are going up, and will be at during-a-major-war levels for the next couple hundred years if we're going to presume the survival of industrial civilization.)

    In terms of water treatment plants, I think there's a process example in how the USAF started handling hydraulic fluid. They used to consume large quantities of the stuff; all those landing gears, all those aviation standards for not leaving little solid bits in the hydraulic fluid as the wear parts wear and stuff gets into it. Fellow got a machine built, and instead of having large quantities of used hydraulic fluid, they would run the used through the machine and wind up with large quantities of like-new hydraulic fluid and a couple of fifty five gallon drums of Serious Yuck per airbase per year.

    Once this became standard (the machine was less expensive than buying new fluid in those quantities forever), the USAF is big enough that building the facility to process the Serious Yuck made sense. As I recall, they've done that.

    This is the general pattern for close-the-loop approaches; you're trying to peel the immediately usable off the Serious Yuck, which has the result of concentrating the Serious Yuck. Which is OK because there's a relatively small amount and while you wouldn't use a refining-mass-spectrograph approach on the whole effluent stream you might well on the Serious Yuck part.

    816:

    Based on the number of people still pouring paint down storm sewer gratings after forty years of earnest and continuous public education efforts

    It's not for lack of education that people do that. They are aware of the problems and just don't care because (a) they aren't personally harmed, and (b) the chance of getting caught and punished is minuscule.

    Back in the 80s when I worked for Alberta Environment politicians would run interference for companies in their ridings — scientists would get ordered to alter reports so that the source of dumped pollutants was too uncertain for a court case. That doesn't seem to have changed in the generations since.

    817:

    I remember 5¢ deposits — when a chocolate bar was 5¢. Recyclables didn't stick around long because they were directly convertible to candy :-)

    Boy Scouts would also hold bottle drives — going from house-to-house to collect bottles to take back for the deposits. At the equivalent of $2 a bottle (today's candy prices) it was a worthwhile fundraiser.

    818:

    Since I have a relative who works on solid waste administration in LA County, I can tell you with certainty that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of "close the loop" recycling schemes out there.

    Most of them turn out to be useless, but they get pitched at County Sanitation regardless. The normal pitch is along the lines of: "if you can give me a stream of used X that's sufficiently pure, I can recycle/reuse/process it into valuable product(s) Y(Z, etc.)."

    The problem is the first part, "If you can give me a stream of used X that's sufficiently pure." Generally that's impossible. If sewage was human waste and water, we could probably make decent fertilizer out of it, although keeping diseases from proliferating would be tricky. Add thousands of pharmaceutical residues, and it gets trickier still, because some bioaccumulate or have unwanted side effects. Add in cleansers and contaminants, and it starts getting really problematic. Add in some toxic metals, and it's impossible to use sludge as fertilizer.

    Similar things happen if we talk about incinerating trash. We can scrub the CO2 emissions out, but the next problem is that heterogeneous waste streams tend to burn smoky: if you get a batch of demolition waste, followed by a batch of hospital waste, followed by a bunch of plastics from the mall, and mixes of all of these, it gets really tricky to optimize the burn conditions to keep it from producing a lot of smoke (with a hugely variable chemistry itself) and a lot of incompletely burned trash. Even if you do burn it all, the ash is contaminated with metals and radioactives (from smoke alarms and cancer therapies, if nothing else), and so it has to be disposed of as hazardous waste, even though most of the ash is potentially useful as industrial feedstock or fertilizer. It's just not worth it to refine the ash for usable bits.

    Right now, the systems cities use, including sewers, landfills, and recycling certain things, are rugged enough to be relatively idiot resilient for US consumer levels of idiot, but at horrendous costs in efficiency and recycling.

    Any close-the-loop design has to work within the level of idiocy imposed by the society in which it is installed. Making things efficient, idiot resilient (not to mention profitable) is a seriously hard design challenge, and most recycling plans sadly fail it, before we even start talking about profitability.

    819:

    bottle disposal Truly laughable in the time of legal planned obsolesce for absolutely everything.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-1923434/Video-French-investigation-exposed-Amazon-destroying-unsold-items.html

    Either current civilization will end consumerism, or it will be other way around. I saw the article in the morning. Later I was looking for Amazon news and immediately found this:

    https://abc7news.com/blue-origin-jeff-bezos-unveils-plans-for-space-colonization/5293061/

    I guess, at least it is logical. It is OK for corporations completely ruin Earth and 7 billions of lives of their generations and everybody past them - forever - as long as they can just hop on the magic rocket and GTFO into the outer space. And it seems they actually believe they will be able to do that in time, the imbeciles.

    820:

    Ok, on bottle recycling, I'm remembering staying with friends in NL. It was a regular (at least once a week) transaction to take a case of empty beer bottles to the shop, place it on a stack of empty cases of $brand, and pass a full case of said brand to the cashier, then do the rest of the shopping.

    What did once cause some confusion was when they were coming back to Scotland and actually wanted the deposit back rather than more beer!

    So I think the main problem is probably lack of political will / inertia by shops, and the second of those was what killed the old glass bottle recycling.

    821:

    Pretending that we can patch economics or capitalism so they work outside their narrow domains by making up money values for non-monetary systems doesn't work in practice.

    For what value of "economics" or "capitalism?" Personally, I favor a very-well regulated capitalism, what we in the U.S. would call "Euro-style socialism," (maybe even a little more regulated than that.)

    As for economics, one of the things our poorly-regulated capitalism does is force economics to (essentially) lie, by not doing things like tracing the cost of dealing with toxic waste or otherwise revising current systems. I get where you're coming from, but perhaps it could be phrased a little better.

    822:

    "Avalon" is the main city on Catalina Island, off the coast of Southern California. It's got a major fresh-water problem. It's big-enough that this shouldn't be the case, but the geography is such that a proper watershed just hasn't developed. (Frank probably knows a lot more about this than I do.)

    823:

    "Any close-the-loop design has to work within the level of idiocy imposed by the society in which it is installed. Making things efficient, idiot resilient (not to mention profitable) is a seriously hard design challenge, and most recycling plans sadly fail it, before we even start talking about profitability."

    This is where proper home automation comes in:

    "HOUSE, open the recycling bay doors."

    "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."

    824:

    Any close-the-loop design has to work within the level of idiocy imposed by the society in which it is installed. Making things efficient, idiot resilient (not to mention profitable) is a seriously hard design challenge, and most recycling plans sadly fail it, before we even start talking about profitability.

    My take on profitable is that profitable isn't important. Comprehensive is important, and then it can turn into a contest to minimize the tax cost, since there are systemic incentives for that. (And hopefully this starts to feed back up the input stream.)

    In general, recycling has the terrible problem of trying to decide what you can recycle (leading to a lot of indifference and non-compliance), and the equally terrible problem that the infrastructure to do the recycling hasn't generally been built. My take on this is that the system has to eat everything, that the place to control inputs is where the inputs are made (if you can't recycle it and it doesn't rot, you can't use it), and that not enough effort has been made to treat the urban waste stream like an ore.

    825:

    FYI London has separate storm sewers & has done for some considerable time - we need them. A lot of water in London IS recycled, actually, but we are still "short" And there are, of course, annual prosecutions of fly-by-night aresholes who dump fuck knows what into the water systems generally. IIRC we had a Cadmium-loaded paint "spilL" a year or two back - major scare for a short while. Can't remember if nayone was jailed, rather than merely fined ....

    826:

    Add thousands of pharmaceutical residues, and it gets trickier still, because some bioaccumulate or have unwanted side effects.

    I take a couple of prostate drugs with very pointed warnings about keeping them away from prepubescents and females. With a specialty warning for pregnant women. In general they say don't let them handle the pills. So trying to deal with my pee in a closed system would not be easy. And there are likely a few 1000 of such drugs.

    And if I don't take them I get to have my prostate removed or I will soon get to where I can't pee. So this is a very big deal for those like me to have access to such.

    827:

    For areas with combined systems I have to think that the street runoff from vehicles would make treating the sewage a somewhat more complicated issue. The amount from people who would pour gasoline and motor oil down their sinks is low compared to this.

    828:

    London has separate storm sewers & has done for some considerable time

    I suspect most large cities are stuck with whatever was decided back in some year in the 1800s.

    829:

    Speaking of tyres and sewers, here’s the concept of a “circular economy”: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/dutch-businesses-work-to-prove-the-concept-of-a-circular-economy

    830:

    "Avalon" is the main city on Catalina Island, off the coast of Southern California. It's got a major fresh-water problem. It's big-enough that this shouldn't be the case, but the geography is such that a proper watershed just hasn't developed. (Frank probably knows a lot more about this than I do.)

    Avalon's on Santa Catalina Island, town population 3,500-5,000 (depending on whether you believe the official census of who's living there, or the sanitation department's comment that it looks like 5000 people's worth of excrement coming out, at least off-season).

    Actually, the freshwater problem is a result of its size, and the fact that it's pretty dry most of the year. The island is mostly owned by the Wrigley family, and after being a ranch for about a century, the plan in the 1960s was to turn the entire island into a suburb of LA, with hovercraft carrying commuters to work on the mainland every day. Then they took a really close look at the aquifers and realized that they had nowhere near enough water on the island to support that many people. Indeed, the aquifers were just enough to keep Avalon and various inholdings (mostly recreational camps, schools, and yacht club holdings, and the tiny town of Two Harbors) in water. The last big development on the island only went in because they built a desalination plant just for it.

    This is why they have saltwater for sanitation water, and why they got in really serious trouble during the last drought. When you add in a few hundred thousand tourists going to the island every year, Avalon's at water capacity, and the only way it could get more fresh water is to build another desalination plant. As another result, most of the island is now a private wildlife conservancy.

    The interesting coda is that back before settlement, the archaeologists believe that Catalina hosted a tribe of 3000-5000 Pimugnan Indians (now extinct). If this is true, it's interesting that the number of current residents on that island is so close to what the aboriginal population was.

    831:

    Don't use autocorrect, just spellcheck, which, in thunderbird, firefox, and libreoffice under Linux just gives a dotted red underline.

    As I've noted here, before, I want Artificial Stupids: "I know what to do wit' dis, I know what to do wit dat, uh, hey, boss, what'ch'a want me to do wit' dis oder t'ing?"

    I do NOT want something trying to outguess what I want.

    832:

    All sounds good to me.

    Oh, that is, assuming that if there's an incident, the management who had the law written to allow something get sent into the malfunctioning reactor in their birthday suit.

    833:

    A tank on the wall, perhaps 6' high or more, to me is something from pre-WWII. I was assuming that they used to need more pressure due to the configuration of the trap in the john, itself.

    834:

    Nope. IIRC, 33rd St. and Susquehanna Ave, in north Philly.

    835:

    And even in Internet Exploder and Chrome under Windoze. I always turn off "Auto second guess you and get it wrong" though.

    836:

    My home was converted from a 19th C granite warehouse in the 1970s and I have a pull-chain toilet cistern mounted up near the ceiling. The flush pipe is chrome finished. This kind of fitting is still made today, described as 'traditional high level.'

    837:

    Rent a larger vehicle... I own a large minivan. Normally, 9 out of 10 weekdays, it sits in my driveway, while I take public transportation to work. Gets mostly driven on weekends. That would include "pick up the other hald of her bookcase from where she used to live, get the two of us and a friend to the Balitcon/BSFS meeting, bring we three and two more back to the DC 'burbs.

    I have it for reasons, and it very frequently gets used for them. Still miss my Dearly Beloved Departed Toyota Tercel wagon, 1986, bought in '88, still was getting 35-36mpg in 2000....

    838:

    Got a railgun set up for a delivery? The address is 1600 PA Ave, NW, Washington, DC....

    839:

    GREAT IDEA!

    Now, once they're gone, we embargo them, and stop all shipments of supplies, and all maintenance people who were on Earth....

    Clean your own toilet, jeffy!

    840:

    Just in general, one of the difficult problems is that there's typically a hard trade-off between resilience and productivity. The classic example is that a hunting and gathering (or as I prefer, foraging) lifestyle is extremely resilient to a number of environmental changes. It's how our species evolved in and got through the ice ages. Trouble is, foraging isn't terribly productive, so it works best when population numbers are low.

    Productivity is how we got to seven billion: most of us are eating a handful of crops in systems that can be worked to produce truly enormous amounts of food. Unfortunately, these systems are complex and therefore not all that resilient. If the corn crop fails, we can't immediately get everybody eating potatoes. The second problem with this is that seven billion people simply cannot feed ourselves through hunting and gathering.

    Similar problems seem to exist in things like waste recycling, water recycling, and so forth.

    The problem going forward is that, with climate change making the climate more unstable and populations going up, we're looking for solutions that are simultaneously more resilient and more productive than what we have now. That's hard. It's also why it's easier to believe in a future where there are a lot fewer people, because fewer people means it's possible to optimize for resilience, because less production is needed.

    841:

    Not a freakin' chance.

    For one, sleeping in a capsule's like what they did a thousand years ago - the box beds, for warmth.

    For another, back in my 20's, making very little, I shared large houses with people, meaning I had a real kitchen, and living room, and basement for storage, as well as a nice-sized bedroom. Or, for the same money, I could have gotten a bug-infested tiny rathole.

    And, after 20 years, do you want to bet that all the "elegant", k3wl capsule apts are not problem-ridden pest holes?

    842:

    Wait, 2119? Are you suggesting that we won't defecate into a unit that, instead of flushing, disintigrates it, leaving it clean, dry, and flaky, which is then sucked down by the city utility and distributed to farms?

    843:

    So trying to deal with my pee in a closed system would not be easy. And there are likely a few 1000 of such drugs.

    I think worries about pharmaceuticals in waste-water are mostly overstated.

    Firstly, most medicines are modified prior to excretion: if they're a small molecule designed to plug into an enzyme's active site, then there's usually a metabolic cycle leading to an excretion pathway for breakdown products for the original agonist for that site, and the drug in question will usually be modified, cleaved, methylated, hydrolysed, or otherwise buggered up before it's kicked out through the kidneys or liver. In other words, what goes in most emphatically does not come out.

    Secondly, the quantities are usually tiny. My understanding is that typical water usage per person per day in the developed world is on the order of 20-100 litres, maybe more: of the nine medications I'm on, the biggest dose (in terms of raw mass) is Metformin, of which I take a whopping two grams per day. So that's a dilution factor somewhere north of 10,000:1 for its metabolites.

    Thirdly, and less obviously, if you can build a membrane suitable for osmotic desalination of seawater, then you're probably able to build a membrane that will filter out almost anything but pure H2O. Absolute worst case, you can distill water to suitable purity for drinking (ideally using a rooftop solar still, rather than throwing electricity at the problem).

    Every so often we see scare headlines about scientists measuring cocaine use in cities by tapping the effluent outflow, or looking at levels of estrogenic hormones in sewer water. But they're usually using mass spectroscopy or immunoassay or other incredibly sensitive measurement tools—and the scare stories about mutant fish downstream of cities often tend to end up being about BPA and other plasticisers or herbicides or industrial products with weird pharmacological side-effects, not actual medicines. This is therefore an indication that we need stricter product testing and safety protocols for non-medicines, rather than cause to panic over our meds.

    Now, there are exceptions. Radiopharmaceuticals are the spawn of satan in terms of contamination—luckily most of them have very short half-lives, and stuff like Iodine-131 for thyroid cancer is dealt with in hospitals by using a storage tank: a full recycling system will probably require longer hospital (or intermediate care home) stays for patients receiving radiotherapy.

    A second worry is antibiotics in the environment—in low doses, this gradually promotes antibiotic resistance. But: we shouldn't be using antibiotics indiscriminately outside of a clinical context anyway, and in a hospital antibiotics in excrement should be amenable to the same control protocols as radiopharmaceuticals. And again, the real problem is agricultural use of antibiotics in livestock handling, which takes place on a massive scale with foreseeable and unpleasant consequences. We should be tackling this problem by banning it for the common good, globally: not worrying about our sewage processing.

    What I am worried about is cadmium, mercury, lead, and other heavy metals getting into a closed-cycle water reprocessing system than I am about prodrugs and pharmaceutical breakdown products. Because that shit doesn't go away easily, it builds up, and heavy metal poisoning is nasty and cumulative. There may be other stuff in the "cumulative toxins, not biodegradable" category by 2119: nanoparticles are already a concern. How to tackle these items? Well, Graydon's suggestion about how the USAF deals with hydraulic fluid (comment 815) sounds like a possible way forward.

    844:

    [scratches head]. Late 80's, my late wife and I were in the immobile home she'd bought a few years before, all plumbing was CPVC. County water, chlorinated.

    Might have a problem if it was salt water, with salt buildup.

    845:

    It is quite likely that, even once the basic mechanism has been worked out, teleport machines will still be unviable for the transport of people, other biological entities, machinery, drugs, etc. etc., because of the Sidney's leg problem... but if all you're concerned about is just moving plain mass, and don't care about its structure or organisation, they are fine. And may very well turn out to be constructable for that purpose in very small, low-power-consumption variants, as is the case for most things (though it isn't done for many things simply because there's no call for it). It might even be possible to power them from ambient heat by using the teleportery to connect to somewhere very cold to reject heat to (Pluto, for instance).

    So all you would have to do would be stick one such device inside your bladder and one in your rectum, then you could surgically close the original outlets and enjoy a life free of toilet hassles and the associated mess, shitting on Pluto from the comfort of your living room sofa without even having to pause the film.

    846:

    Yes. I believe that the worst (direct) pollution problem in UK sewage farms comes from pesticides, weedkillers etc., even today. But, as you indicate, modern ones of those are much better regulated than the 'non-biological' chemicals.

    The heavy metal problem isn't catastrophic, provided that the closed loop is large enough, and includes use as land-based fertiliser. Plants are pretty good at not picking up those from the soil - just as cows are good at filtering out strontium, despite the old fallout myths.

    847:

    I have a large house and parking area by modern UK suburban standards, and do not have room for a separate minivan - and it's not a sensible vehicle for most of the things I use a car for. Those circumstances are almost universal. The UK problem with hiring vehicles, which would be a solution, is the behaviour of the insurance cartel, which is what I was referring to.

    848:

    People don't pay for recycling unless they see the need.

    Moz @787

    The option of using "gray water" on parks or golf courses has been available here in New Mexico for decades. You set up a sprinkler system. A water truck with treated water hooks up and waters the grass.

    The technology for having from "toilet to tap" has been available for decades. Here's an example from California.

    California plant transforming sewage into drinking water

    The processing station near my house in Santa Fe has been doing this for decades.

    This will be the norm. The only thing holding it back is funding. If a city can dump it's sewage into the sea for free, that's what they classically chose.

    Greg Tingey @796

    They mentioned this on TV the other day. They have machines that separate the steel from the rubber. Both are ready for reuse.

    State of the art tire recycling plant

    They are also doing the same for blue jeans, recycling the cotton for use again.

    Recycling Used Denim Into New Cotton With AFGI's Post Consumer Waste (PCW) Machine

    Then for plastic bottles and bags.

    CarbonLite: Inside the World's Largest Plastic Bottle Recycling Plant

    How Plastic Bags Get Recycled

    A Century ago there were "rag pickers". A Century from now, all will be recycled. One man's trash is another man's business. HA!

    It all comes down to people being willing to pay for the recycling.

    849:

    OK, here's my idea for sewage processing...

    • Let the input stew in its own juice for a while, and collect the methane, until it's not producing any more.

    • Get rid of as much of the water as possible, by methods that "come for free". Evaporation in open pans works, if you make the pans big enough, anywhere that plants will grow (since plants rely on being able to evaporate water to make their internal transport work). Indeed, in the early stages where the concentration is still low, you could grow grass or some other junk plant in it to increase the evaporative surface area and get an extra energy input too.

    • Once you've evaporated as much as you can for free, boil the rest of the water off, using the methane and grass from the previous two stages as fuel.

    • When the remaining sludge gets dry enough, start burning that as well. Or, better, coking it, and collecting the fumes, different components of which will be useful as fuel and/or chemical feedstocks, and as fertiliser.

    All the pharmaceuticals and pathogens get destroyed, and what you end up with is basically a mixture of elemental carbon, ash (fertiliser), and heavy metals - in a reasonably concentrated and therefore reasonably readily extractable state. Medical radioisotopes will have decayed to insignificance long before they get this far through the system. The heavy metals you can re-use for whatever they were being used for in the first place, the fertiliser you can fertilise stuff with without worrying about it possibly having complex chemical embuggerances in it, and the carbon you can either use as carbon-neutral fuel or just stick it down holes in the ground or something.

    850:

    What this means in practice is that duration of the fire is incredibly important

    Bushfires, at least here, tend to be short term. There's just not enough fuel to maintain the high temperatures for very long. An hour is a long time in this context. A double brick wall, if it is not destroyed, will generally shield anyone on the in side of it. The caveat is problematic because you also tend to get high winds carrying debris, and brick walls in Australia too often use sand as a levelling compound between layers of bricks (cement is expensive so is economised on).

    851:

    I wouldn't say "composting toilet" and "onsite treatment" were at all the same thing!

    It's all about how you look at it. The "treatment plant" is very specific and what it does is hot compost biosolids. There's a filtering system that gets the water out, a dryer that gets more out, a composter, and a system for cleaning up the water before it goes to plants. Sure, it's not a literal "poo comes out of bum and into composting chamber" composting toilet, but it's as close as I can imagine to an industrial version. And it requires effort from the residents because what gets flushed gets noticed. Which is great if someone flushes a phone, but also amusing when you realise just how much Lego goes that way. The temptation to just put it in a bag and give it back must be strong :)

    852:

    Sorry, this is what I mock as the "cook it, wave a magic wand over the cauldron, and it all goes away" solution. To start with, you seldom get enough heavy metals to make it worth extracting them and selling them. But there's too much contamination to use the sewage product without extracting them. This is the same problem we have now with getting methane off landfills: it would be good to do, but the waste gas stream has so many other molecular species in it that it costs more to extract the methane than the dump could possibly make by selling the methane.

    In general, these are high entropy systems, and you've got to pour a lot of work into the system to make it useful again. If you're investing more than you get out, then it's hard to convince anyone to do it. This is different than, say, mining roadside dust for platinum from catalytic convertors, actually. But getting metals out of sewage is probably not worth the trouble.

    And, of course, where are you getting all that energy to cook the sewage in the first place? A fusion power plant?

    My apologies for being harsh, but as I said, a lot of these ideas have been around for a very long time, and the cook it and extract the useful stuff has been around since at least the 1970s, if not the 1870s.

    854:

    What province were you in? I suspect there were different rates for different provinces. I think I remember that Alberta, when they were rolling around in oil money, was paying people to return any empty bottles. It may have been later (my sister moved to Calgary so I would get a lot of info as hearsay from her once a year).

    I still remember how sad I was when candy bars went up to a dime. I was even sadder when comic books went up to 12 cents as I only had 30 cents a week spending money so I could only get 2 comics instead of 3.

    855:

    The same thought occurred to me last night and I thought "I'll write that tomorrow".

    If you watch Star Trek carefully you'll notice that no one poos or wees. There are no toilets on any of the space craft. No characters engage in expository dialog while washing their hands after laying a poo. This is even the case in Enterprise which is set about the time we're discussing.

    Proof positive that we have teleport poo by 2119.

    856:

    By 2119, I figure there's going to be a lot of use of tailored microorganisms for chemical synthesis, never mind feedstock management.

    Process industry in general is going to look different.

    The easy example is steel; from the Datsun disaster (high-sulfur steel body panels rusted into nothingness quickly, and it was a surprise) we've now got outright sorcery in alloy composition because of relatively small batches, very precise control (induction heating, powder metallurgy...), and high-sensitivity sensors. That's only going to keep getting moreso.

    857:

    Interesting that in the comments "Arab" and "Muslim" are used interchangeably and appear to map to exactly the same concept in the minds of the commenters.

    858:

    Maybe. I've certainly thought similar thoughts. I've wondered if things like sponge steel (semi-solid tools with a tough rind and a sponge inside) might be useful.

    The challenge is processing speed. I don't think that a microbial culture can grow steel as fast as something like sintering can assemble it.

    859:

    Gold!

    I do think we should ban al-gebra from our schools. There's way too much of that dodgy stuff going on the in the classroom. They should teach nice, pure, European calculus.

    Belle has an interesting post up about daydreaming/worldbuilding as panned by some researchers. http://crookedtimber.org/2019/05/08/wishing-is-free/

    I suspect even reading science fiction counts :)

    860:

    I suspect that's less so outside of the US/Americas because the rest of the world has better access to more diverse Muslim populations. Europe is threatened by Caucasian Muslims, for example, and Australia has the teeming hordes of Indonesia immediately to the north, China allegedly has some residual indigenous troublemakers Muslims and a state response to the problem more like the US treatment of their indigenous people than Muslims.

    Meanwhile I get to meet people from all over because it's Ramadan and Lakemba is full of excitement. It pays to brush up on your geography... "I'm from Yemen, do you know where that is?" but for any country with a Muslim population. I get by ok because I often have a few random facts in my head (asking "north of south" of Sudanese, knowing about the king in Nepal, and sadly, knowing a little of what's being done to Yemen, being the ones I remember from last night).

    861:

    I covered the energy bit - the energy comes from the sewage itself. Sewage, after all, mainly consists of water and fuel, plus odd bits of other things which may be interesting, whether in a positive or negative way. The water is got rid of by natural evaporation, possibly helped by low-grade waste heat fed back from the later stages of the process, and the rest provides for its own destruction. Note that it does not have to be dried to the moisture content of argols; it can be very soggy indeed and still burn itself as long as you keep the heat in and do it in large enough quantities.

    As for whether or not anyone can make money off it, I basically don't give a shit. I take it as a given that any kind of waste disposal or cleanup operation or pretty well anything done for environmental benefit is not going to make money. The notion of some company being able to make money off something being either a necessary or a sufficient precondition to doing it is a notion that needs to be put up against a wall and shot; the "sufficient" subcategory is how we got where we are in the first place, and the "necessary" subcategory is what keeps us there. Sewage disposal in particular I view as naturally and necessarily a state function - as with, notably, Bazalgette's London sewer system, carried out by the Metropolitan Board of Works which was funded by local taxation. It should not have taken until the Thames got so smelly that Parliament couldn't sit (never mind the cholera; Parliament didn't) before they coughed for it, but it also only got that bad in the first place because of a couple of hundred years of cheaping out and whining about how much things cost.

    862:

    I probably have the other perspective, not just that there are a lot of non Arab Muslims (well obvoiusly), but there are also a lot of non Muslim Arabs. Around Bondi where I grew up there were lots. A couple of my friends at school, the guys from the corner store who were friends (invited to their wedding). Neighbors on one side. I don't remember ever asking which religion they were, but huge gold crosses seemed to be the fashion. (it was the 70's...)

    863:

    "Thames got so smelly high that Parliament couldn't sit (never mind the cholera; Parliament didn't) before they coughed for it"

    Look! You can repurpose that sentence to describe action on climate change (or indeed any government facing any challenge). Never mind the suffering!

    864:

    I don't think we're going to get much refined metal that way, though we might get step-before-(re)refining that way; the arc furnace is working off of some analog of haemoglobin because bug strain 53 has extracted most of the iron from this influx of sludge, sort of thing.

    What I would expect is a route to making simple compounds out of complex polymers (and using the simple stuff as feedstocks) or the stuff that's being looked at with various ocean arachnid shells; some of those are very tough indeed, and maybe you can grow a phone case out of artificial chitin. It'll rot, but not easily; it's strong, you can use mostly random sludge if your organisms are reasonably tough, it seems like the additive machining equivalent for the plastics industry.

    865:

    not just that there are a lot of non Arab Muslims (well obvoiusly)

    I think the point was that it's not "well obviously" to some people.

    I'm more inclined than most to categorise things, so I seem to notice/remember stuff like black Jews and white Muslims more than the average bear. Or non-USA Americans (did you know there's two whole continents full of Americans?)

    It's like the existence of Orthodox Christians, a fact that surprises some people. Or for that matter, Christian sects that take Jesus' injunction not to have children seriously (amusingly, they're not biblical literalists and AFAIK no biblical literalists take that bit literally).

    866:

    Which also reminds me of another bit of wonderful bullshit: Messianic Jews aren't eligible for the Israeli 'right of return' available to all Jews because their version of Judaism is not the right sort, despite being officially acknowledged as being a variant of Judaism. It sticks in my brain because it's one of those "things that have property X but are not part of the set of all things that have property X" oddities.

    867:

    Moz @ 860 Ah yes the utter fucking religious stupidity of Ramadan, when, even here sunrise is at 05.10 ... & sunset at 20.44 .... What do muslims do in, say Inverness ( 05.48 - 21.29 ), or better still N of the Arctic circle in Summer?

    868:

    In news that will no doubt shock the strict fundamentalists like Greg, they acknowledge that the prophet did not give direct guidance so they do what they can, when they can (which is itself according to the instructions of the prophet). For the most part they choose a local community who do have sunrise and sunset and match their prayer times, or they use the times in a Muslim holy city (the details of which one are only really relevant to observant Muslims).

    An approachable article from the US, more scholarly article and of course stack exchange.

    869:

    One of the things that's very noticeable actually living in a Muslim or heavily Muslim community is that The Prophet was actually a competent civil administrator and much of his work was in trying to persuade a bunch of barbarians to tone it down in the interests of their mutual survival. In that sense he's quite unlike previous Abrahamic prophets who were more focussed on coping with the random whims of a petulant planet/god. There's much less killing in the Koran and commentary than even the Christian books, and much more focus on good deeds and living a decent life. It's almost as though he'd seen previous attempts and was trying to patch the worst of the bugs.

    It's very obvious to me with the forgiveness stuff, where there's an emphasis on "sorry means you don't want this to happen again" (to quote Tiddas)

    • Recognizing the offense itself and its admission before God.
    • Making a commitment not to repeat the offense.
    • Asking for forgiveness from God.

    Christians get to skip all that palaver and go straight to "God has already forgiven me".

    https://southernmuslimah.wordpress.com/2007/10/06/very-beautiful-hadith-and-forgiveness-in-islam/

    870:

    This occurred to me a while back (brainstorming a possible sequel for "Glasshouse" which isn't going to ever happen, for commercial reasons). Problem is, the associated biological failure modes are … drastic? As in, you can die of dehydration from cholera in about 12 hours, as the effect of the bacterial toxin is to pump all the electroytes in your body tissue out into your small intestine (with the result that the water in your circulatory fluid follows, due to osmotic pressure). So the let's-teleport-your-crap-right-out-of-your-rectum gadget would need more than a little safety monitoring, and an "off" button in event of gut infections necessitating medical treatment. And Cthulhu help you if you get a pinworm/tapeworm infestation ... Similarly, the bladder shunt … way to miss symptoms of an enlarged prostate (in males) or cystitis (in everyone).

    Still, I figured out some other uses for such devices. A pressure-loss-triggered teleporter in the trachea could provide a gas supply and gas exchange in event of accidental exposure to vacuum, permitting consciousness to persist for minutes rather than seconds, making survival much more possible. Tiny teleport shunts in coronary arteries or the cerebral circulation could permit access for angioplasty/stents/probes in event of an infarction or ischaemic event, providing for near-instant medical response to minor heart attacks or strokes. Constant realtime sampling of the internal biological environment for stuff like heat shock proteins or cytokine levels to detect pathological conditions—stuff that currently requires a biopsy or blood sample and then a wait for a lab turn-around. And so on.

    871:

    You really, really, REALLY, need to watch "Galaxy Quest" (the movie). In particular, the out-takes—specifically the one in which the Spock-analog (I forget his name) is shown the bathroom facilities for his species aboard ship.

    Priceless.

    872:

    If you're going to scan your poop right to the whole quantum state, picking out toxins, worms, bacterial DNA, illegal drugs and human myoglobin should be trivial. Which would make it possible to eliminate everything from cholera to cannibalism.

    873:

    As an alternative to a coleostomy bag, it has its attractions, too. Given how many deaths have been causes by the automation on hospital equipment failing, and humans failing to override in time, its 'AI' would not be easy to design.

    874:

    One of my favorite movies, but I've never seen the outtakes! Thanks for that!

    875:

    Messianic Jews aren't eligible for the Israeli 'right of return' available to all Jews because their version of Judaism is not the right sort,

    Speaking as somebody raised Jewish, that's because "Messianic Jews" are actually Christians (as in: they believe Jesus was the messiah, follow the Nicene creed, do the baptismal thing, and so on). Specifically they're an evangelical Christian sect that targets (some would say, preys on) Jews.

    The Law of Return specifies that Israel will take anybody who would have been victimized under the Nazi Nuremberg Laws. Presumably someone of Jewish descent who converted to Messianic Judaism would be eligible—Judaism being an ethnicity as much as a religion—but one can be a member of Jews for Jesus without ever having been Jewish, in which case the Law of Return wouldn't apply.

    (This predates any attempts by the Ultra-orthodox hard right in Israel to mess around with the constitution. I may be out of date on how the Law of Return is implemented. But Messianic Jews aren't practicing the Jewish faith, even if they're of Jewish ethnicity.)

    876:

    Yes. That is a matter of historical record, and does not depend on religious evidence.

    Also, the Koran (and, apparently, the Hadiths) is far more civilised than the Old Testament, too - the New was written for a very different society, but it's interesting that the Gospels and Acts focus much more on behaving decently than the Epistles. Let's ignore John the Demented. So, in both cases, the extremism is very much a product of later interpreters.

    877:

    But Messianic Jews aren't practicing the Jewish faith, even if they're of Jewish ethnicity.

    Hmmm. The very tiny sample that I've met seemed to be practicing conservative Jews. Or what is called such in the US. It can get confusing here when you start to understand the in the broad sweep of reformed, conservative, and orthodox Jews there are many sub categories and many of them don't recognize the other categories as authentic. And there are flavors within these broad categories. And flavors of flavors. And this is just in the US with politics toward the state of Israel layered on top of all of it.

    878:

    Thank you for that. I'm not a practicing member of anything for reasons (mostly of church structures and/or law), but always interested in in the comparative side.

    879:

    A Thing that keeps coming up in internet discussions of Jewishness and Judaism is that Judaism may be a monotheistic Abrahamic religion, but it doesn't work anything like Christianity or Islam.

    Christianity is largely about belief: it's basically a bundle of self-confirming viral memes that seek to spread the "good news" about Jesus, salvation, and so on, like a holy pyramid scheme. You are Christian if you believe the Nicene creed (although various sects practice rituals such as baptism, confirmation, and so on). There are a bunch of teachings associated with Christianity, but for the most part the rules of conduct are very vague, generally being defined by the different sects.

    Islam … ditto, but much heavier on the legalistic front (at least in this day and age): it's not just a set of viral memes codifying belief in God, it's a lifestyle and social system as well (although various aspects are open to widely differing interpretations—a puritan/fundamentalist storm surge has been under way for about the past century, and in other times the ascendant practice of Islam has been very different.)

    Judaism, however, isn't just about belief or rule-defined lifestyle: it's a tribal identity. You can be Jewish by birthright and not believe in God and not follow any of the rules. (Hint: me.) Or you can be Jewish by birthright and follow all the rules but not believe in God. Or by-birthright and ignore the rules but still believe in God. OR (and here's where it gets confusing) you could be non-Jewish by birth, but convert to Judaism—the recognition of which differs between reform and orthodox but generally involves a considerable amount of study and demands active commitment, because evangelism of non-Jews is discouraged.

    Simplest diagnostic: Judaism doesn't evangelize, and anything calling itself Judaism that tries to make converts is to be viewed with deep suspicion.

    Bigger picture: go back a couple of millennia and certain Jewish sects did evangelize. The most successful of these messianic cults is what we now call Christianity. It's quite likely that contemporary Judaism survives precisely because it doesn't try and make converts of Christians—as the less numerous, losing faction in the struggle for expansion around the eastern Mediterranean circa 100-1500CE, it would have ended in tears and bloodshed. Christianity meanwhile is what happened when the evangelizing sects headed west: and Islam is what happened when they headed east.

    880:

    The number is very small so ...

    All Messianic Jews I've met were observant Jews before they adopted Christianity. And have kept up their observance.

    881:

    I always thought of "Jews for Jesus" as a particularly cynical marketing ploy, but maybe that's just me. The couple practitioners I meant took it seriously and I was polite... but no. Just no.

    882:

    Messianic Judaism is a syncretic belief system so it would certainly appear Judaic to an outsider in that it would follow many Judaic traditions and observances. But (according to the entry in Wikipedia) "Messianic Jews believe that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah and "God the Son" [...] Belief in the messiahship of Jesus, his power to save, and his divinity are considered by Jewish authorities to be the defining distinctions between Christianity and Judaism. Other Christian groups usually accept Messianic Judaism as a form of Christianity." So the official arbiters of Jewishness regard then as Christians and other Christians regard them as Christians. That some of them claim they are in a sect of Judaism doesn't make it so. At minimum they are further from mainstream Judaism than Mormons are from mainstream Christianity.

    Of course many people who claim membership in a religious community are uninterested in theological niceties and may find these distinctions irrelevant to their identity.

    883:

    Moz @ 868/9 Im SHOCKED I tell you! A religion actually accomodating to the realities of life! What next? Still, I remember seeing a meme-picture saying that everything in the bible occurs within a 500-mile radius of Jerusalem & this now applies to the whole planet .... Islam has the same probolem, of course. I don't see what you do though ... - maybe it's just me, but, to me the "recital" comes across as ultra-"protestant" ranting about hellfire unless you repent a submit to the will of the BoigSkyFairy as interpeted by ....

    EC Sorry ... but ... all those verses that the ultra-rabid nutters of Da'esh quote really actually are in the "recital". As with the bible, it's matter of which verses & sections "you" ( As a "believer" ) choose to follow & emphasise & which to ignore.

    884:

    It's not usually my thing to say "not ALL religions …" but in case you were wondering about the current US state-level insanity over abortion and contraception, Judaism—whether ultra-orthodox or liberal—isn't even on the same planet as the Christian anti-choicers when it comes to reproductive healthcare.

    In Jewish law, the health of a pregnant woman takes absolute priority over the life of the unborn: unborn children aren't considered legal people until they've drawn first breath, and abortion is permissible, period. Oh, and contraception, too: while married couples are expected to have sex for pleasure as well as reproduction, it's also accepted that people who shouldn't have children will have sex, and therefore contraception must be provided to anyone who needs it.

    (The ultra-orthodox/chassidic tendency to have gigantic families is an entirely separate phenomenon, more to do with thumbing their nose at attempts to exterminate or assimilate Jews than any reluctance to use condoms.)

    This stuff was all hammered out by the rabbinate centuries ago and some of the (female, American) rabbis on twitter are getting extremely irate over the screaming Jesus people claiming to be protecting foetuses in the name of religion.

    885:

    Now that one I didn't know & well-done judaism, says I ... I'm suprised that the US rabids haven't used this as part of an anti-jewish slant, given theor normal fascist tendencies ... except they "support Israel", which must hurt what's left of their brain cells...... The fastest put-down of the anti-abortion nutters is usually to point them at the horror which finally broke the grip of the black crows in Ireland ... the death of Savita Halavanppar ( If I've spelt that right )

    886:

    Christianity as a tribal identity is actually quite common, but it's generally associated with a sect (*) - the current bigots who claim that Europe is a white Christian continent notwithstanding.

    (*) The Dutch Deformed Church, The Exclusive Brethren, and even 18th/19th century High Anglicanism.

    887:

    You are picking sections out of context, and applying extreme interpretations, as badly as the Wahhabis.

    888:

    Um, "used to be rag-pickers"? People don't recycle unless they see?

    Lessee, Chicago has everyone throw their recylcing in a blue trash bag, which is collected by a different truck than trash, and people are hired to separate it.

    In MoCo, MD, we have bins for paper and plastic/metal, and I believe people separate things.

    And you've never seen someone homeless, or really poor, collecting aluminum cans to sell to a recycler?

    And, if you have recycling bins in public places, let me assure you they are used.

    Hell, when Chicago started recycling, around '96, for a month the city and all the stupormarkets tried to claim there was no shortage of blue bags.... Kids were vehement with their parents about recycling.

    889:

    I remember when DC had a full-page apology, when they went to $0.15 from $0.12 in less than two years.

    890:

    You missed the tiny teleport shunts in the stomach and intestines that send the gas all away to the Land of the Farts.

    891:

    Two things: 1. Judaism, as discussed in the alt.paganism and soc.religion.paganism FAQs, is not theological, but what matters is how you live your life. Of course, they ultra-Orthodox are at funnymentalist levels of hypocrisy.

  • Ah, yes, Jews for Jesus. The late lady I lived with in the late seventies, her parents had both been orphans, and were still trying to find themselves, and were jews for Jesus for a while. Funniest related thing I saw about the Jews for Jesus was, mid-eighties, downtown Philly, they were leafleting... and one woman was wearing a t-shirt, I kid you not, that read, "goyim for Jesus".
  • 892:

    A second worry is antibiotics in the environment

    Yes. This is a bigger worry for my wife (who is a biochemist) than climate change. According to her, unless we come up with an alternative to antibiotics, humans will have become extinct by 2050.

    Luckily, there are bacteriophages:

    https://www.bbc.com/news/health-48199915

    893:

    Eh? How on earth did humans survive before they were invented, or in the poorer parts of the third world today, then?

    Yes, that's a problem, but not a threat to the existence of the species.

    894:

    Because there weren't any resistant superstrains then?

    895:

    You should ask your wife, then, about the metabolic cost that antibiotic resistance carries for bacteria, and what happens after just a few generations with no exposure to a particular class of antibiotic.

    896:

    A resistant superstrain is resistant to antibiotics, so is irrelevant to whether people will survive without them. There were as many lethal infections then as there are now, too. Yes, of course, the death rate from infections in the wealthier parts of the world would go up, and many medical problems would become untreatable (including a huge proportion of modern surgery), but it still wouldn't threaten the species.

    897:

    unless we come up with an alternative to antibiotics, humans will have become extinct by 2050.

    Naah, we'll just go back to pre-1910 levels of morbidity and mortality due to infections: i.e. about 30% of the human population dying prematurely of diseases like syphilis and tuberculosis. Overall life expectancy will take a 1-2 decade hit, and infant mortality will shoot up so that instead of 2.1 kids per female on average being needed to sustain zero population growth, it'll be back to 3-4 kids per female—which sucks in terms of emancipation.

    But we won't go extinct.

    (More likely: I expect phage therapy to make a big come-back, aided by fast DNA sequencing of pathogens and GM phage libraries. But it'll be in a clinical setting, i.e. something you get in hospital if the infection becomes fulminant and regular infection control measures have failed. We'll also gradually see new classes of antibiotic show up. But this will play out over a couple of decades—and may require wholesale restructuring of the reward system baked into the pharmaceutical industrial regulatory system before it happens.)

    898:

    I think there are actually a lot of leads on new antibiotics and alternatives to antibiotics. The capitalist system just won't fund their development so it isn't going to happen until it is enough of an emergency to get governments to do it.

    899:

    Responding to various comments. WRT "Messianic Jews" and Jews for Jesus™ particularly. What Charlie says, and I'll add a little. I've had a few dealings with some, one thing to know is that the are very much Evangelicals of a Dominionist bent, with a veneer of Judaism, just enough to fool younger Jews, especially those away from home for the first time at college (see Campus Crusade type campaigns). JforJ™ was originally founded by the Southern Baptist Convention to proselytize Jews. As Charlie said Jews don't proselytize non-Jews, the closest would be Chabad Lubavitch (an ultra-orthodox hassidic group) who try to bring less observant Jews into their fold.

    Several years ago I was* occasionally one of three people asked by our then Rabbi to be on the Beit Din for conversions. At the time we were having several people and a few families seeking to convert. Most of them came from conservative christian backgrounds, and gone though a "Messianic" phase until they decided to drop Jebus altogether. A few had also discovered that they had Jewish roots and wanted to reconnect. Also the occasional conversion for marriage, who usually were more observant than their spouses. Early on they were serious converts and active in the synagogue, but after a while we started seeing people who wanted to convert who lived out of town. They all seemed to be legitimate in their desire to convert, but we later learned that they had been coached on what to say and how to answer our questions by their so-called Rabbi, and that their intention was to make Aliyah and move to Israel—which probably wouldn't have worked since the Ultra-Orthodox there are in charge of who is an acceptable convert, and we aren't an orthodox shul**. Anyhow that put an end to most of the conversions for a few years, also had a change of Rabbi who was unwilling to put up with the fake Jews coming to services—his word for them was Liars—and would have them politely (mostly) asked to leave.

    And this is all apart from Christian Zionist groups, which is a whole other headache.

    even though I'm not at all religious, I was active in the local Jewish community. Am less so now for various reasons. *Add that my non-Jewish name (from my father), and that one of the other regular members of the Beit Din was a convert, they likely would question the conversion

    900:

    It's really kind of preposterous how restfully we are resting on the antibiotic laurels.

    Something like a trillion species of bacteria and other micro-organisms out there, all constantly battling each other to the death.

    And we are using about 7 of the chemicals they use to battle each other (with 100-ish small variations). One of our most common is the veryfirst_one _ discovered.

    901:

    This is a great interview. This goes into my story folders.

    There’s a 49 Percent Chance the World As We Know It Will End by 2050 http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/jared-diamond-on-his-new-book-upheaval.html

    So, if Diamond is right, it doesn't matter what we think the world will be like in 2119, since everything collapses in 2050. Go ahead, Charlie, and write whatever you want 2119 to be, no one alive today will be alive to give you grief. HA!

    The core point of what Diamond is doing is what Freeman Dyson talked about long ago when he was asked what his role was. Dyson pointed out that people do not want a Prophet telling them the Future, they want a Preacher scolding them to do more. Many people make their living scaring people and scolding people. No one pays them to be upbeat and optimistic about problems we can clearly fix, they only want to hear their "fears or desires."

    Corollary to Diamond's interview is this:

    Hunting Silicon Valley's Doomsday Bunkers in New Zealand https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kzmzyx/hunting-silicon-valleys-doomsday-bunkers-in-new-zealand-documentary

    The 1% are buying in to the doomsayers scare stories.

    You also have this:

    Here's Everything Jeff Bezos Said To Convince Humanity That Space Colonies Are The Future https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2019/05/heres-everything-jeff-bezos-said-to-convince-humanity-that-space-colonies-are-the-future/

    In my stuff, 2050 is when the Aliens come. Hilarity ensues in one worldline, total destruction in another.

    902:

    EC @ 887 OK WHAT sections am I picking out of context, please? Especially since I have quoted none .... I was merely pointing out that both the bibke & the recital have revolting, bigoted, murderous & oppressive bits in them .... which some sects of both religions then use as a weapon. In the meantime, any other "offences" I have imaginarily committed inside your rather peculiat view?

    903:

    You missed the other source of antibiotic resistance: meat that idiot agribusiness stuffs the animals with antibiotics to bulk them up faster.

    Fortunately, this seems to finally have hit resistance, and is slowing down. Of course, they charge more for non-hormone meat, because ROI.

    Oh, on the other hand, I've been reading that we are finding a lot of birth control hormones in the regular water supply... which helps lower the fertility rate, it seems.

    904:

    Back in '04, standing around with other fen in Boston, Thursday of Worldcon, I mentioned I'm still waiting for a Jew to tell me to come back to the religion of my ancestors. One did, so I got to use my line: I did... but, nu, do you know the price of golden calves these days?

    905:

    I'm still waiting for a Jew to tell me to come back to the religion of my ancestors.

    That reminds me of Chabadniks on the street corners of Manhattan (and elsewhere I assume—they’re everywhere), looking for any Jewish looking man to accost with “Have you donned tefillin?”, that’s phylacteries for the uninitiated. I was never approached, but my response would be “No thank you, I’m not into bondage.”

    906:

    One Vietnamese former colleague (it's too early to call him friend) brought along some friends to Vesakh, and I had quite a nice chat with guy who is learning beekeeping and started eating drones.

    He's also a vegan, but decided he's helping the bees survive, where I would agree.

    He was also of the opinion animal rights didn't include insects, where I quite objected.

    In other news, somewhat back to normal. Which is quite strange still, but maybe later...

    907:

    Vancouver and BC in general had a scandal rooted in a 90s building boom in which the construction was done as if we were in a California style climate. Which meant mold and rot got in everywhere, it cost billions to deal with and many owners lost their shirts.

    Which meant for some hefty upgrades to the building code and inspection protocols. If you want to effect change, affect property owners. Near as I can tell they are the only voters governments give more than a token crap about.

    908:

    Politicians tend to be deep into property. At least here in Oz. My local representative at the federal level (until a recent boundary redistribution moved me to the electorate just north) has 18 investment houses.

    909:

    I grew up in Saskatchewan.

    It's a very different province now — my formative years were under the NDP, which ran the province in the black for a generation. Saskatchewan didn't have a debt, let alone a deficit, until the PCs under Grant Devine took control. So my immediate baked in reaction to left wing/right wing fiscal prudence is that the left wing is better at managing money than the right. This doesn't agree with popular wisdom, although it does seem to have a pretty fair track record during my lifetime (looking at Saskatchewan, the US federal government, and even Ontario.)

    I've sometimes considered moving back — I still miss the big skies of the prairies — but Saskatchewan politics feels like Alberta did when I was little, and modern Alberta is far to the right of America under Reagan (who was scary-right-wing when I was a boy).

    910:

    If you watch Star Trek carefully you'll notice that no one poos or wees. There are no toilets on any of the space craft.

    Go in the corner. Set phaser to 'disintegrate'…

    911:

    Charlie Stross @ 593:

    "This bit seems like something Elon Musk's proposed "Hyperloop" technology could help with."

    Nope!

    Hyperloop is simply far too small for this job. Both in the capacity of the vehicles and the bore of the tunnels: Musk's plan relies on using really small vehicles running in narrow bore tubes, and the cost of running a tunnel scales as the square of its radius. HS2 is a full-sized (probably continental loading gauge) railway, so requires continental railway diameter tunnels: a good match would be the Channel Tunnel (aka HS1), and those TBMs don't come cheap.

    Perhaps I should have written "tunneling underground in a manner similar to Musk's hyperloop proposal". Specifically, boring underground to avoid the bit where it's driving through a huge amount of picturesque scenery including sites of special scientific interest and habitats of endangered species. I understand the equipment needed to do something like this is costly, but maybe the short term cost needs to be weighed against the long term loss from screwing up the environment; particularly how much tourist revenue might be lost over decades to come if the project destroys natural beauty that draws in the tourists?

    Any tunneling would have to be sized appropriately to the rail system that has to run through the tunnels. I'm suggesting one possible solution to the problem of tearing up the countryside, especially in particularly environmentally vulnerable areas.

    912:

    Destroying the historical site and the endangered species is the point; it proves nothing is more important than maximizing profit.

    Profit maximization is a religion; it's the wrong thing to do from an economic perspective. Its adherents want all the money because money is proof of god's love.

    It's not complicated, it's not nuanced, it's not subtle in any way; it's not even a new failure mode for having money, it's happened repeatedly across historical time. (Decidedly pre-industrially!) It's probably not even less common than the violent enforcement of norms. (Aka, if you don't like it, I can hurt you for it.)

    913:

    Dude, are you spending too much time watching Australian politics at the moment?

    For those fortunate enough to be out of spewing range, the COALition is really going for it on that front, with special guest appearance by Clive "pay my workers? Impossible" Palmer the nickel miner. Here's the polite version from The Guardian but the very short form is that we have multiparty consensus that we live in an economy and that's all that matters (coal mines good, dole bludgers bad...)

    914:

    whitroth @ 632: Yeah, well, in the US, we mostly live in metro areas. People who think they're in the 'burbs, but the difference in crossing a street is none.

    I'm on a street - I just looked up and calculated, and I see I have .16 acre. Maybe the house is a quarter or a third of that, so a lot of mowing. And trees. Hell, look at downtown Philly, and you'll see lots of trees.

    In much of the U.S. suburbs are contiguous with Urban areas. As the city grows out, the inner ring of suburbs become part of the city and new suburbs are built farther out. Over time these too are absorbed into the city.

    When my home was built it was outside the city limits; if not quite in suburbia, the next thing to it. Now, it's almost in the city center; closer to downtown than to the city limits.

    915:

    Tim H. @ 647: On the "Convertible Smartphone" thing, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple released an iPhone dock that connected to a keyboard, mouse & monitor and behaved in a very Mac-like way when docked. Microsoft had a good try at it, before they abandoned a lot of their consumer-facing product, iPhones have been powerful enough to do this for a few years, and it may be what the "Marzipan" effort is about.

    Don't know about the iPhone, but they've had clip-on keyboards for the iPad that turns them into almost a mini MacBook for quite some time.

    916:

    This is, alas, widespread.

    I really wish more people understood that it's not a reasoned position.

    917:

    _Moz_ @ 652:

    "It's not entirely clear to me how long a wildfire would last when confronted with serious urban firefighting infrastructure."

    The scale of a bushfire is so far outside most people's experience that almost no-one has good intuition about how they work. It's more like "imagine hitting a matchbox house with a plasma cutter" than "imagine a fire, but big!", and you don't stop a plasma cutter by spitting at it.

    Just Google Paradise California before and after.

    918:

    Robert Prior @ 687:

    "The scale of a bushfire is so far outside most people's experience that almost no-one has good intuition about how they work."

    If you want to play with a simulation, I recommend Smokejumpers:

    http://microgamedesigngroup.com/SJ.html

    Old-school boardgame, based on the fire model used by the Canadian forestry service (the designer is an actual forestry scientist specializing in forest fires). Includes rules for grassfires as well.

    Best way to deal with a grassfire: be somewhere else. I got caught fighting one and the flames higher than my head were bloody terrifying (even to an immortal teenager!). (Fortunately little wind so we were able to contain it before it leaped the road and got out of control.)

    Cold Missouri Waters

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dztj4X3fQps

    The August 1949 Mann Gulch Fire at Gates of the Mountains Wilderness in Montana.

    919:

    paws4thot @ 696: That seems like a very different system to what I encountered in the US. Which used a tank that held 3 US gallons.

    That was a standard from WW2 to the late 60s; before many U.S. locations began to outgrow their water supplies. The standard now is 1 gallon/3.78 Liter. There's lots of stuff out there for DIY homeowners to retrofit older plumbing & make it use less water. I've got one of those 3 gallon tanks & I just put enough bricks in the tank to reduce the volume by half.

    When I moved in here (40+ years ago) my water bill was $5.00 a month for water & sewer. Now it's $60.00 a month even though I'm using less water. My next project is to dig up the pipe between the water meter and the house & replace it to make sure there's no leakage on my side of the meter.

    920:

    By scale I meant we've all seen the photos of before and after, it's the actual fire that's hard to grasp. I've been a couple of kilometres away from an unexpected excursion and I mean far enough that I could see people but not clearly make out what they were doing, and when that fire came over the ridgeline I could feel the radiant heat. I can't really describe the gut feeling of knowing intellectually that the fire isn't going to come down the hill and across the flat ground to kill me, but feeling the heat and my gut going "death. I feel... death". I can understand people reacting with "god is angry", because it feels like the hot glare of an angry god, and you are helpless in the face of it.

    921:

    Just in case anyone is interested in guilt by association... global warming denial is now embraced by German neo-Nazis and taken further. Perhaps they're secretly doing the old Microsoft "embrace extend and exterminate" technique?

    Also, I am sick of "climate skeptic" as a label, I realise it's accurate (they really do doubt the existence of climate) but it's often posed as a reasonable and balanced counterpoint to "climate change gullible" so it's IMO a term so tainted by association that it needs to join the list of "you can't call people that in public" (like calling non-Christians heathens... maybe not banned but oh boy don't say that).

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/14/germanys-afd-attacks-greta-thunberg-as-it-embraces-climate-denial

    922:

    Charlie Stross @ 802:

    "How the hell does one, in an environmentally-friendly manner, dispose of old tyres, that are not off your car, for insatnce?"

    Requires government regulations, I'm afraid. I'd favour a deposit scheme, like a bottle deposit: a chunk of the cost of the tire when it's fitted (say 5%) goes in tax, repaid to whoever disposes of the tire in an approved manner (e.g. by recycling as feedstock for highway surfacing). This gives the recyclers a financial incentive to accept tires from folks like me and thee without charging.

    Around here a "Scrap Tire Disposal Tax" is assessed as an additional fee (per tire) applied when you purchase tires. From what I paid on my last tire purchase, I'd say the tax is about 5%. The Tire Dealers are required to take the old tires to an approved disposal site for recycling.

    That works for the ones ON the car. If I have extra tires I need to dispose of, as a resident of Wake County I can take them out to the Multi-Material Recycling Center and drop them off without having to pay an extra tax.

    923:

    Our problem is that we have, very slowly, been cleaning up our (allotment) site & these tyres ... appeared. They've been there since fuck knows when ... Now, we want to get rid of them, without screwing the environment over ... but to do do legally is going to cost us an arm & a leg. It's an incentive to fly-tip, quite frankly. [ Not that we are going to, of course ]

    924:

    Know anyone with a wharf or a trawler? They might take them.

    925:

    My next project is to dig up the pipe between the water meter and the house & replace it to make sure there's no leakage on my side of the meter.

    Suggestion?

    When you're checking for leaks by digging around the pipe, future-proof your work: buy yourself a water meter and install it on the inlet side just inside your house.

    Over a couple of months, record daily or weekly readings on both meters so you know how closely your home meter tracks the "official" water company meter. You will then be able to cross-check at will whenever you want—if your home meter reads lower than the municipal meter, you've got a leak.

    926:

    Suburb - A residential or mixed use area in or within commuting distance of a city (source Wikipedia).

    927:

    Having dealt with this problem last year you dont need to dig up the pipe to see if there is a leak.

    Switch off all the taps in the house and the internal stopcock, then look at the water meter, if it is turning at all, then water is flowing out so you have a leak outside the house.

    Then you can dig up the pipe to find the leak

    928:

    Er, you don't know where I was, or what buildings I visited. Most of them would date to the 1970s through 1996.

    Also, did you seriously just say that you put baked clay in your cisterns to reduce flush volumes? Everyone I know (UK) who's done that has finished up with issues caused by the bricks returning to powder and blocking the flush system. You could try only flushing after going #2 instead.

    929:

    I was utterly flabbergasted to discover that my current ex council flat in London doesn’t even have a water meter - the company seems to only have one on the main pipe into the estate and as best as I can tell averages the costs out over all the tenants.
    We tried to get one installed and the water company tech was all like “hsst, looks like it splits down here into a pipe to the boiler and a pipe to the bathrooms ... far too complex for us”.

    930:

    Our apartment, built in the 1960s, only got water meters for each apartment last year, during our plumbing renovation. The water usage has been billed averaged, and we decided (or the housing association which consists of the owners of the apartments) to continue that even though we now could follow the individual apartment water usage.

    The other funny thing from some years back was that the electric company realized, during some upgrade, that ours and the apartment's below us electric meters had been installed the wrong way around. We had paid their electric bill for years, as they had ours. We had to pay for the difference for the last three years.

    931:

    My next project is to dig up the pipe between the water meter and the house & replace it to make sure there's no leakage on my side of the meter.

    Just wait for the next mini drought and see if there's grass growing along the path of the pipe from the street to the house. That's how a friend and I found his water leak years ago.

    932:

    Use engineering bricks, which are rated for immersion. Many others will survive, but engineering bricks will last essentially for ever.

    933:

    if your home meter reads lower than the municipal meter, you've got a leak.

    My idea is easier and cheaper.

    Plus JBS and I have the same issues. Water is billed at such a large rounding number that there are only 2 choices for a bill for most of us. They meter it down to a fairly fine detail but bill it in something much more rounded. By bills are typically for either "1" or "2" ccf. With an occasional "3".

    And to actually read the meter requires removing a steel plate about twice the size of a dinner plate locked down with a large 5 pointed nut. That gets you into a 2' or so deep well with the meter at the bottom. And to keep things from freezing every 10 years or so most are now packed with insulation. How do they read it? The meter is wired to a RF transmitter attached to the lid and a truck rolls by every month.

    Also to JBS's point, the sanitary sewer portion of our water bills is now 50% higher than the portion for the actual water usage. Trash pickup is also on the bill and about the same as the water for me. Plus 10% of the bill for storm water projects and 5% for recycling.

    My point is water and the taxes on it are only about 30% of the current bill. All the rest are new things or things that the general tax receipts paid for years ago.

    934:

    Right. In the UK, there was a fetish for flat roofs at one stage. Oh, dear, NOT in our climate unless you spend considerably more on them than on the same area of sloping roofs :-( And then the near-complete elimination of drafts - NOT good news in the west of the country, or anywhere for bathrooms and kitchens, because you need considerable, powered dehumidification. And so on. Look at the tower block disasters (there have been a good many, over many decades) for a catalogue of what you say.

    935:

    Simple, good people find whatever's positive in their beliefs, and live it. Those who aren't so good, find the bits that resonate with their personalities, IOW,they'd be assholes in any, or no religion.

    936:

    Not a plumber, don't even play one on TV. My understanding is that the normal way is to shut off the mains. Then pressurise the system with air and wander around looking and listening for bubbles.

    937:

    We in Finland had a lot of flat roofs built, especially for row-house type thingies, in the Sixties and the Seventies. Not very surprisingly, a lot of them have leaked and are being replaced by something with a slope.

    Near our houses, there is one group of houses with flat roofs. When I first saw them fifteen years ago, I said to my partner that those will leak and they want to replace them. They did just that some years ago. I would never buy a house with such a roof.

    However, you can get problems with water on the roofs also in other ways. In the aforementioned plumbing renovation, some sewage pipes were coated from the inside with plastic, as they were sturdy enough that this could be done. Most of the other pipes were replaced. What the workers did not notice was that some drainage pipes from the roof were connected directly to this sewage pipe and they didn't open the holes in the sides of the big pipe. Result: After the snows melted, the meltwater didn't go into the correct pipe, the pipes broke and wet the concrete on top of our windows. Annoying and meant weeks of drying and figuring out who repairs what.

    938:

    But there's heresy in the temple of Mammon, some of the worshipers will even refuse to take money from willing customers who they find unpleasant, falling short of the true devotion. I expect a schism in the Mammonites, between "Wall $treet" & "Main Street" when the dearth of disposable income begins to effect the largest retailers. Unless Trump manages to start a World War.

    939:

    Hey, I don't have a water meter!

    (It's Scotland. The water/sewage utility is still municipally owned, and this isn't exactly the driest country in the world: the costs are paid as a component of the Council Tax bill, and the council sees no point in installing meters for billing purposes because they're not set up to bill for usage. And the water mains were probably installed some time in the 19th century. At least we don't have lead pipes any more, at least going by the assay tests the previous owner had done 20 years ago.)

    940:

    I think you're confusing "engaging in trade" -- which is not what this is about! -- and "having all the money", which is certainly what it's about. (If the small business owners were going to revolt they'd have voted differently for the past couple generations, and they haven't, by and large. "Lowered taxes" seems to get to people in a non-contemplative part of the brain.)

    There's this big element of "no one can tell me what to do" going on, too, but it's really not got anything to do with any notion of fair dealing. (Other than an extremely reductive "all that money is really mine and I should have it" definition of fair dealing.)

    The fix for this is pretty simple; remonetize. (Well, remonetize at the same time you get rid of the limited liability corporation.) While remonitizing, the income and asset caps come in. As a policy it's not difficult to set up.

    Not the same as easy to implement, but it does reduce to a question of political will, it's not off in the land of undiscovered knowledge.

    941:

    I worked in billing at an electricity company for a decade. One of my normal checks for a high bill enquiry in a unit was to get them to turn off everything, check the meter had stopped, then get them to turn on something big, like a heater or kettle and see if the meter starts moving.

    About once a month the meter wouldn't change in response to the changes in demand. Then it was a hunt to find the meter that did, and sort it out. I think basically the builders didn't care, and just wrote any unit number against any meter, but other times it turned out the residents had changed the numbers, avoiding 13 or something like that.

    942:

    It's the small business owners who're confused, voting against their immediate interests, which would be better served by a progressive agenda, in favor of a fantasy that, as business owners, they are served* by policies crafted for immense wealth. *In their case, served in the agricultural sense.

    943:

    One of the most miraculous (and toxic) feats of propaganda during the 20th century was to convince ordinary working stiffs that they were actually temporarily-embarrassed billionaires, and so should vote for a billionaire-friendly agenda.

    Cockoos in the nest, nourished freely by millions of nearly starving hosts.

    944:

    My understanding is that the normal way is to shut off the mains. Then pressurise the system with air and wander around looking and listening for bubbles.

    If you're responding to JDS and my comments then you have to understand that in the US "burbs" many of the leaks occur between the main under the street or beside it and the house itself. Which in the burbs can be 10' to 100'. So no bubbles, just always green plants.

    And a big cause of those leaks is crappy builders (or their cheap clean up help) who toss trash from the building site into the trench on top of the piping and then back fill the dirt. The odds of a pointy thing against a plastic or soft metal pipe are non trivial. But it can take years/decades for local vibrations to get the point to poke through the pipe.

    Been there. Got the shirt and the hat. Piece of broken brick pressed against the plastic pipe.

    After all why haul off trash we you can make it vanish?

    945:

    To check for a water leak between the meter and your house all you do is close the shutoff valve in the house (usually right where the water pipe comes into the building) and see if the meter is still moving. Could leave it over night if you worry about a slow leak.

    To check for a water leak in the house, having already ruled out the line to the house, you just close all your faucets, etc, and check if the meter is moving.

    946:

    A lot depends on the granularity of your meter and the size of the leak.

    Been through all of this at various times over the year. Easiest one was 30 days of no rain. Friend called and said his foundation drain had water coming out which seemed odd. So we turned off his house cutoff valve and it keep running. Turned off the meter than it stopped. Since in middle of drought we were able to dig within a few feet of the leak.

    Your statement also assumes such valves are in known locations and easy to get to and will still operate. All situations I've dealt with were things were not as they should have been.

    947:

    Vegans just piss me the hell off. A wonderful music venue, here in the DC 'burbs, last summer changed their menu to all-Vegan, no other options. No more chocolate mousse pie.

    So, when I go, I only buy a beer, and no food.

    Then, you'll notice that a large percentage of the Vegan (and strict vegetarian) menus consist of... imitation meat.

    We are animals, no more, and no less, than a cat, dog, or pirhana.

    Then there are the vile Vegans who starve their cats with Vegan "cat food"....

    948:

    Shit, you would bring up that song.

    I would not want to be the survivor, after the stupid kids wouldn't listen....

    949:

    Now, wait a minute: I have some friends who are Heathens (that's Norse path Pagan).

    On the other hand, I've got another name for anyone using "SJW", though I'm still deciding whether I want "antisocial injustice warrior", or "antisocial injustice snowflake".

    950:

    Vegans just piss me the hell off.

    Then eat somewhere else.

    I've been married to/living with a vegan for over 25 years and frankly what you're complaining about happening to you just once is her default normal condition (i.e. venues with nothing to eat, period—her gut is dairy-intolerant and she has an egg allergy on top).

    I will concede that only idiots try to feed an obligate carnivore a vegan diet. Humans, however, are not obligate carnivores.

    951:

    1) If the leak is small enough that it can't move the meter in half a day or even an entire day or two if you must it certainly isn't worth digging up your home's water line and replacing it just in case the proposed leak exists and it also cannot explain a meaningful increase in a water bill.

    2) Yes, good example.

    3) Again vs replacing the entire water line? Go find the cutoff. If it doesn't work or you don't have one... get it replaced or installed and try this before digging up the whole line.

    Having to replace the water line is one of the worst case scenarios here, not the first thing to try.

    Now if you have some other reason to replace the water line, a lead main connection or whatever, OK. But this test would still be run on the new line to make sure it isn't leaking.

    952:

    Haven't seen anyone using bricks since the early 80's, at the latest. Use a a couple of 2l plastic bottles, filled with water.

    953:

    Hand that man a Nobel in economics for enunciating that fact so well.

    954:

    Again, having done such things over decades I'll stick with what I know works. Your answers were not applicable to many of those situations. Thank You.

    955:

    A bit off topic but not too much.

    Just heard an interesting factoid.

    In 1901 Edison invented a battery for electric cars that could go 100 miles. Based on Nickle Iron. But it cost $500 to make then, $10,000 or so today.

    It has been a long slow slog to get better batteries.

    956:

    Actually, just back from a break, and the whole thought of the meat food chain led me in very odd directions.

    First, I was remembering a very early story by Gardner, where this guy finds himself in telepathic contact with his true soulmate... which, unfortunately, turns out to be a cow, and he's on the slaughterhouse floor, blowing their brains out.

    From there, I got to thinking about a better method for a slaughterhouse - why not lead the animals to an opening with food or water beyond it, they stick their head through, guillotine blade, quick and clean.

    I'd appreciate anyone's opinion as to whether that's sick, or reasonable, or.... I don't know how I feel about it.

    From there, I realized that even a century from now, we're not going to be printing meat, or body part replacements, because they're not just chemicals, they're in dynamic flow. I suppose you could freeze something to LN temp... but then, when you warm it up, it's mush. So, probably vat-grown, I guess.

    Damn, I need to make a minor change to my novelette, which just bounced from Analog (with a note from Trevor, which I hope means not from just a slush pile reader), and decide where to send it.

    957:

    Still around; https://ironedison.com/nickel-iron-ni-fe-battery

    Not well thought of in general: https://www.rpc.com.au/solar-news/161/disadvantages-of-nickel-iron-batteries.html

    The short version is "heavy and high maintenance", but the flip side is "fairly safe, and don't need dangerous materials". It's not hard to find someone arguing that for grid storage they're the cheapest lifetime cost option.

    958:

    Porsche's first attempt was electric too. In the early days it was difficult to make internal combustion engines small and light without them also being crap, so it wasn't a given that a car would use one. Steam cars also existed and were the best performers by quite a long way until well after WW1, although they did require steam engine levels of messing about (as described by Kipling).

    There were steam aeroplanes too - main advantage being silence, at a time when long range detection of aircraft for military purposes was entirely acoustic.

    NiFe cells do make jolly good traction batteries but they have always been expensive, which AFAICT was probably justified when they were first invented but is only true for silly reasons now. So they mainly got used only by the military.

    959:

    It's interesting, because my partner complains more about the fake meat than anything else when I try to get us eating more vegan (granted, this may be an excuse for her not wanting to eat vegan food).

    I think there's something to be said for not having mock-u-meat in vegan cuisine. Yes, I know it gets the carnivores to switch over, and yes, the only burgers I routinely eat now are the Impossible Burgers (my partner and I agree that they taste good enough). Still, if there's no meat in a cuisine, there are a couple of options:

  • Fake it, and sometimes succeed. The only problem with impossible burgers is the price, honestly. Otherwise they taste like burgers, ditto with the late lamented Just Mayo that seems to have disappeared: it tasted and acted when cooked just like mayo, so why not switch? The problem is that many of the fakes fail, sometimes spectacularly, and they are more expensive.
  • Just emphasize all the other things and forget the meat: legumes and nuts become your friends.
  • Anyway, to me, the most likely cuisine of the future is going to be forager fantastic (where you learn to eat coot with sour dock greens boiled in a pot and like it--or starve). However, a more optimistic version is peasant vegan: vegan plus insects, with vertebrate protein and/or dairy for special occasions. Peasants have been living off this for centuries, and there's a lot to be said for optimizing and popularizing this diet, rather than trying to create an ersatz 1970s US diet with all plant proteins.

    960:

    From there, I got to thinking about a better method for a slaughterhouse - why not lead the animals to an opening with food or water beyond it, they stick their head through, guillotine blade, quick and clean.

    About what is done now. I think though they use a special gun that drives a rod through their forehead. Or it was a decade or few ago. So either way you have to have them somewhere they will be supported on the sides and belly so you can rapidly hook chains to their rear hooves and hoist them up to head down the line. Your way would get the blood out faster by removing the extra step of cutting off the head as a first step after the kill.

    As someone whose grandfather and uncle ran a small farm oriented slaughter house I got to see a bit of just how ugly it is to get from a living animal to half a steer or pig hanging up waiting to be sliced. Some of the gear used to get from there to there should not be explored by those with queasy stomachs. My father, who "left the farm", had some stories from his youth but in general didn't talk about it.

    961:

    The slaughterhouse method I favour is a room full of nitrogen - quick, easy and completely non-traumatic. Walk in, fall over, end of story.

    I don't see why it should be a bad thing that vegetarian menus should include imitation meat. It's only silly under the assumption that the only valid reason for someone to be a vegetarian is that they don't actually like meat. It's a bloody great idea for people who do like meat, don't like rabbit food, but do want to not eat meat to avoid the negative consequences of meat production.

    962:

    The room full of nitrogen is also quick, easy, and completely non-traumatic for the slaughterhouse employees … right up until they have to haul out their buddy who forgot to check his oxygen tank and regulator before starting his shift.

    963:

    Failure modes for low wage employees will tend to be more numerous than for the average reader here.

    But I also tend to avoid being around people who assume they will never make a mistake. I don't want to be a side effect when the mistake happens.

    964:

    Too slow. Way too much hassle after they die.

    So put them in the cage with head through a hole. Drop a mask over their head, nitrogen them, THEN slice off their head, hook up back legs, left while removing cage.

    At least the head slicing isn't what kills them.

    When killing 1000+ pounds of something and want to process it for a profit (so fast and efficient) it is going to be a bit mechanical and messy for those who don't consider where the burgers on the grill come from.

    965:

    Politicians tend to be deep into property. At least here in Oz. My local representative at the federal level (until a recent boundary redistribution moved me to the electorate just north) has 18 investment houses.

    Think about it. Unless you inherit wealth or are retired what other jobs allow you to put in the odd hours of most elected offices and deal with maybe getting fired every year or few.

    966:

    Or just put a bolt through their brain when they're in the cage. That's much faster than asphyxiation, and almost certainly induces a lot less suffering. Remember that it takes a human 6 minutes to die from oxygen deprivation, and we're not abnormal for large mammals.

    I tend to be one of the people that thinks the best prevention for animal cruelty is lots of little slaughter houses with windows, so people can see what's going on to produce their meat. Instead we've got big anonymous factories staffed by (illegal) immigrants, who get dehumanized from being forced to kill thousands of animals in a factory line.

    Making animals into meat is scary, and that's why we should both be humane about and witnesses to it. It's one thing to try to make a factory protocol that allegedly minimizes suffering, and it's another thing to witness it yourself and see that your future meal did not suffer. And to say thank you for the sacrifice it made.

    967:

    so people can see what's going on to produce their meat.

    When I was little I would go into the back room and see what was interesting at that moment. Drove my mother nuts. I though it was neat. But I didn't see some of the more interesting events.

    968:

    The strictest vegan I ever came across was an ex abattoir worker. He managed one day on the job before quitting and never ate or wore any kind of animal or animal prooduct ever again. For instance wine was completely out. Egg protein is used to filter some wines. Even traveling. If it was a choice between hungry and a vegetable curry that had been seasoned with shrimp paste, he took hungry.

    969:

    Getting back to a more general question on food: what is the place of grains (especially rice, corn, and wheat) in civilization.

    Several historians, including James Scott (Against the Grain) and Rachel Laudan (Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History) assert that:

  • production of domesticated grain was a necessary precursor to the development of civilization (Scott),
  • or the more limited

  • production of domesticated grain was a necessary precursor to the creation of cities (Laudan).
  • Now Scott's pretty definitely wrong, because the best record we have for a society forming a hierarchical civilization, with kings and peasants, was in Hawai'i starting around 1400-1500 (Per Kirch A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief, which is a really good archaeology and history of Hawai'i). It was recent enough that Cook and company caught the tail end of it, and most of the oral history of the societal changes was written down in the 18th and 19th centuries by literate Hawaiians. This is a far better record than we have for Sumeria or Shang China, but since it involves brown-skinned neolithic people, it tends to get ignored in the stories about history.

    The problem for the social theorists is that Hawaii had civilization but no cities. Did Hawaiian civilization need cities to be fully civilized, or were the islands small enough that it didn't matter? Regardless, the Hawaiians didn't have grains, so we know that a basic hierarchical civilization, with peasants and kings can be created on a system that runs on roots (in this case, taro and sweet potato).

    But about cities... Laudan points out (far better than Scott, to be honest) that grains (corn, rice, wheat) are more versatile and easier to transport and store than are roots (taro, sweet potatoes, potatoes, yams, or cassava). Her argument therefore is that the only way cities get built is if there is grain to support the builders and stock the cities with bread and beer (and pottage and whatever else). Roots didn't really get into that role (per Laudan) until bulk transport became a thing in the 19th century. And yes, we can argue about the role of potatoes in the Andes. I think Laudan's a bit oversimplistic, but at the same time, I think she's right to note that no society or even civilization has developed cities that did not also cultivate grains. That correlation seems solid.

    So that's one assertion, that the original development of cities required grain. The question is whether cities can only be built now if there's surplus grain (of any sort) to feed us.

    This gets important, because when you look at grain production under climate change, it doesn't gradually decrease as the fields get hotter, it falls off a cliff as the plants overheat and don't set seed. Just how badly do we need that grain, and can we rapidly adapt substitutes? Well, corn is more heat tolerant than wheat or rice and sorghum is more heat tolerant still (but then again, did anyone build a city on Sorghum in West Africa, where it came from?). The ultimate heat tolerant crop, sans genetic engineering, is cassava, and people do use cassava starch (aka tapioca) as a substitute for wheat or rice flour. Thing is, could we switch 10 billion people over to eating cassava in a few decades? That's a huge unknown and likely the answer is no.

    My guess is that, if and when individual grain crops fail, famine and civil unrest will swiftly follow. Does this mean that if we get to the point where we can't grow grain, civilization as we know it will collapse, even if some people survive by growing cassava or sweet potatoes? Or are crop failures and famines part of the pain we civilized beings will experience before things like genetic engineering and a widespread and novel switch to farming root crops helps us survive the 21st Century? It's an interesting question: is civilization really just a hugely successful mutualism between humans and grasses? Is that all this really is, and the rest is window dressing?

    For the SFF writers, there are some interesting follow-ons. Are civilized humans dependent on grains, the way leafcutter ants are dependent on their fungi? If so, we're more like them than we thought, and the book Leafcutter Ants: Civilization By Instinct may have inadvertently captured the essential core of civilization, the mutualism between the civilized being and the productive species that support it. Make that symbiosis impossible, and you destroy the civilization.

    How many space colonies have we seen in the literature where there are amber waves of grain in huge fields throughout the colony? How many plans for urban greenhouses (or pinkhouses) have you seen that are set up to produce acres of wheat or rice, or even cassava or sweet potatoes? That's the part of the story we generally don't see in SFF and also in plans for climate-proof cities. We may need to accommodate massive amounts of grain production to make those arcological cities and off-planet colonies functional.

    Or is there a problem with this logic?

    970:

    Also: representatives represent. In a constituency-based system, this means they're probably going to have to attend a parliament/congress/assembly hundreds to thousands of kilometres from home. So it's logical to provide a subsistence/rent/mortgage allowance to parliamentarians, along with travel costs to/from their home constituency at weekends and during recess.

    Trouble is, unless they're young, poor, and energetic campaigners (Mhairi Black; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) they're typically middle-aged, middle-class or professional, and already own a family home (whether or not mortgaged). So they come to the capital and get an allowance that enables them to take a second mortgage. And if they're already home-owners they can remortgage and buy-to-let, thereby acquiring a third property … all within their first term. Lose their seat? At that point they can go home and the rent on the two properties they acquired can go on servicing the mortgages indefinitely.

    There are other wheezes, too. Turns out that many MPs have dependant children (who knew?) and it's not unreasonable for the parents to want their children living in the same house as themselves. So the living expenses cover a lot more than a one bedroom studio apartment: they cover a full-sized family dwelling. Which in, say, London or Washington DC, can tie up a very sizeable piece of capital.

    Tony Blair started off secure upper-middle class: this doesn't explain how his estimated net worth is around £50M … until you look into his history of real estate speculation. As of 2016 he, his wife, and his kids owned ten houses and 27 flats between them, many in central London. No obvious corruption involved, but I bet a long-serving Prime Minister and his high-powered barrister wife didn't have any trouble getting preferential rates on mortgages.

    971:

    There are a good many starchy foods that can be grown at high densities that are not grains, but few store as well; banana is another common example that is used as a staple. but is by no means the only one. I don't think that even Laudan is right, because acorns, chestnuts etc. would also meet the requirement, though grains assuredly made the development of cities a lot easier.

    I don't know what the staple foods used in the Benin Empire were, which assuredly had a city, but I can't think of any grains that thrive in the humid tropics. My guess is that it was NOT grain-fed.

    Incidentally, cassava isn't even in the running in terms of maximum heat tolerance, compared to pomegranate and date.

    972:

    https://youtu.be/vbpYx7r7lR8

    This is the rental that the Australian treasurer lived in. He paid 270 dollars a night. (about 100-120 pounds) I say 'he' but it was taxpayer funded. He rented it from his wife. I don't know how much the minister for health and former party leader paid to live in the unheated garage (I'm not making this up).

    The Simpsons portrayal of the Australian Parliament at home was disturbingly close to reality. Though they didn't have a pool (it would have frozen solid in a Canberra winter).

    https://amp-smh-com-au.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/amp.smh.com.au/politics/federal/joe-hockeys-frathouse-in-canberra-makes-1-million-profit-after-passing-in-20160409-go2fad.html?amp_js_v=a2&amp_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQCCAE%3D#aoh=15579572467788&csi=1&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.smh.com.au%2Fpolitics%2Ffederal%2Fjoe-hockeys-frathouse-in-canberra-makes-1-million-profit-after-passing-in-20160409-go2fad.html

    973:

    The problem with acorns especially is that they don't produce in bulk every year. When they produce they're a wonderful crop where you can harvest a year's worth of food in about three weeks (California Indians). When they don't produce, you'd better have something else, or you're going to starve.

    Also, oaks take about 20 years from planting to acorn production, so if you're colonizing a new land, taking your acorns with you (assuming they survive the trip, since they're only viable for a few months) probably means you'll starve before your oaks produce their first crop.

    With climate change, oaks are among the more vulnerable trees, both because of the long generation time and the difficulty of keeping acorns viable. Much as I love them, I wouldn't depend on them for future food.

    Not that I'm against tree crops, but they have similar issues, and I don't think anyone has settled anywhere by totally depending on tree crops, although I'm looking hard at Micronesia right now as the only possible counter-example. In any case, the closest the Micronesians came to a city was Nan Madol, and I'm pretty sure Pohnpei grows yams.

    Speaking of yams, the Benin Empire had yams, African rice, and pearl millet. West Africa was one of the centers of crop domestication, specifically of these three species. The last two are grains.

    974:

    On the food front one of the convergences I see happening is the growth of artificial organs and vat grown meat. At some point some entrepreneur is going to realize that one man's vat grown organ failure is another man's haggis or hot dogs. Added bonus, the vat-meat donor can sign a consent form to be eaten. Who's hungry?

    975:

    See Charlie's comment @ 962. There is the well-known standard, "Unconscious in 2 minutes, dead in under 10" - but walking into a room full of nitrogen means losing consciousness not in 2 minutes, but in a few seconds, and falling over without realising what happened to you. I suspect (though I have not done the BOTE) that it is the difference between not being able to breathe, and being able to breathe just fine but the partial pressure of oxygen being zero, in which case it may be that your lungs start stripping oxygen out of your bloodstream instead of taking it in. Respiratory distress is triggered by excess of CO2 rather than lack of oxygen, so that doesn't happen either. There was an instance of this happening during construction of the Victoria line of the London Underground, which I seem to remember mentioning before and Greg digging up the report on it.

    976:

    And on the other end, there's the use of a captive bolt pistol, which typically stuns in less than a few seconds and often kills too, even though it's an air gun. Why are we arguing about this? I'm sure the various authoritarian regimes had similar arguments about why gas chambers were more humane than firing squads.

    Having a room with an exotic atmosphere looks unnecessarily complicated. You're then doubling down on the complexity because you then have to haul the meat out of the exotic atmosphere without losing the gases. Exotic in this case could be nitrogen or CO2, but it's still got to be retained and replenished. On the other side, you've got a weapon that costs a few hundred dollars, runs on compressed air, and can be really disturbing in a movie.

    977:

    Yes. Provision of pure helium for diving got banned in most places because a momentary lapse meant a dead diver. Feed a diver pure inert gas and they die fast and can't generally be resuscitated. Now there's a minimum of 2% oxygen which is life sustaining at all depths helium is used. Though it's a giant pain in the arse when managing a habitat because if you want to increase total pressure, it also means you have to increase partial pressure of oxygen, even if you don't want to.

    978:

    Welders use argon a lot. It's denser than CO2 and will happily exclude the oxygen from any enclosed space. People die that way on a regular basis. I use it as a preservative because it kills pests quite effectively (plastic drum full of rice, add argon... no live insects. It's also dry, so no mould or mildew).

    Bolt guns are used industrially because they work and they're obvious. Obvious is good - if someone points a bolt gun the wrong way you notice, but if someone forgets to check the oxygen level you won't know the difference. Gassing animals is tricky because either you do it one at a time which makes it the slow and distressing version of a bolt gun, or you do it by the roomful and now you have dead animals in a pile and you need a robot arm to pick them up (because sending low-value labour in there is a recipe for disaster - the US has enough problems with human meat as it is. Imagine the "straight to mince" path after you add an easy way to put whole dead humans into the start of it).

    I've worked in abattoirs and it's not wildly pleasant, but I've also slaughtered animals at home and that's much messier (doing anything with proper tools in an industrial setting is faster, easier and cleaner than DIY). The idea that it's less stressful for the animals is arguable, it can be but a lot depends on the who what how. Shooting a solitary pig in the head from 10m is one thing, extracting a cow from the herd, putting it in a crash, cutting its throat then watching it slowly bleed out... I'm not convinced. Chickens, on the other hand are more on the "technically sentient" end of the spectrum, most of them don't react differently to being de-loused than de-headed, and some of them don't seem bothered by either. I've tried using a big hammer on the skull, but it's hard to get them to stay still so holding the head and cutting the throat is easier and faster. I don't gas them, I behead them, because shoving one in the bottom of a drum and gassing it made a mess of the drum and really pissed off the chicken. Cats just sit there waiting for it to be over, chickens spend ages trying to fly out of the drum and generally expressing displeasure.

    979:

    venues with nothing to eat, period—her gut is dairy-intolerant and she has an egg allergy on top

    I've had that for much of my life. A lot of places I'll eat hot chips or nothing, because the default response of my gut to some random ingredient it doesn't like is to get rid of it as quickly as possible. I have made a real mess of a few restaurant toilets because playing "can I get in there, down trousers and point arse at bowl before it comes out" is annoying to lose. The other annoying part is that I don't have an accurate idea of what exactly causes the fast reaction rather than the other 99% of the time when I eat something, a few hours later I start farting, and I feel tired. It's possibly IMO not a food allergy so much as a gut flora intolerance.

    At the serious end of the scale I have been around twice when someone used an epipen, and on one of those occasions it did not solve the problem but merely kept my friend alive long enough for the ambulance to arrive. I'll take "no, this is explosive diarrhea" any time.

    The whole palaver of "please, do you have any nuts in your kitchen, at all, ever, this is important please don't just nod and smile can I talk to the chef oh for fucks sake I need to know so I don't die you inane psychopath to hell with this I'll just leave"... it's not solidarity that makes me leave too, it's fear. If the restaurant is willing to poison their customers I'm not willing to eat their food.

    980:

    Just Google Paradise California before and after.

    This is a Wikipedia level argument, so not entirely reliable.

    Paradise was a town of 26,000, that's not urban.

    There is a claim in this thread that rain will douse a wildfire. A medium rain drops about 3,000 cubic meters of water per hour on a square kilometer. A fire hydrant delivers about 300 cm/h, so 10 hydrants deliver a square klick of rain. Toronto (3 milliion people) has about 100 trucks that can attach to a hydrant (assuming the ladders can). That should cover a line about 30 klicks long. That's about the long edge of Toronto.

    I also note that the Canberra fire did not threaten the city centre, apparently that's where they put the shelters. The losses were all in the suburbs.

    There was a side comment that not having cars would make evacuation hard. Quite the reverse, trying to use cars for that would do nothing but generate a traffic jam. Toronto can put about 150,000 people on buses at once. You could move about 1 million people a day 2 hours away. So 3 days for the whole city. 50 klicks of road would be enough to let the buses move at speed. You would need about 500 klicks of road for cars.

    981:

    Wikipedia arguments are better, I'm afraid.

    First off, you're assuming that there's an infinite supply of water behind each hydrant, so that if you turn on ten hydrants in a line (meaning all attached to the same water main) you actually get full pressure out of all of them. I'm pretty sure that's not the way it works, as water shortages are normal during wildfires, due to everything getting sucked in by the fire trucks.

    Second, you're talking about a linear spray of water a few hundred feet out doing the work of a rain storm covering square miles of a fire area. Linear is not the same as areal.

    Third, 26,000 is urban. Sorry. It's been the epitome of urban since the beginning. What do you want, a subway?

    Fourth, you're asking people to outrun a fire without a car. Lugging their pets, a suitcase, their elderly grandmothers, their young children...I don't think that's going to happen. Cars are necessary, and unfortunately, most high risk fire areas in California at least aren't built for fast evacuations any more than they're built to be fire proof. Instead, they're built to entice home buyers with designs rendolent of quiet streets edged with tall trees.

    Definitely better to learn from Wikipedia, I think. But first, I get to read the latest idiotic EIR from someone who wants to put another 1800 homes in a high fire area, while claiming there will be no problems getting them all out. There's a lot of that recently.

    982:

    Pigeon @ 975 It used to be ditressingly common in the brewing industry, too. Empty brewing vessel, on a still day & the outer doors of the bulding closed ... people get into vessel to clean it & immediately keel over, because there's CO" in the bottom, that you can't see or smell ... mate rushes in to help them & he keels over, too ... etc.

    Moz @ 979 There was a recent particularly bad case, where the "restaurant" owners knew quite well, but didn't fucking care & killed someone ... Unusually, the authorities actually came down hard on that one & were sent to jail for manslaughter. There was accomanyning publicity, in the hope that other greedy stupid fuckwits got the warning that "We'll jail you, too, if you try to repeat this!"

    983:

    Chestnuts keep (as food) for several years, and I believe that acorns do, too. Yes, they have problems, but have you looked up the failure rate of grain crops before modern technology? Even in my youth, they quite commonly failed in the UK. My point was that you quoted Lauden as saying that cities could not have developed without them, and that is implausible.

    In most of Europe, grains could not be planted until the forests were cleared, which is neither quick nor easy. It is a rare year when it is possible to start a forest fire, and that would at most kill the trees - you might be able to get away without digging up the roots, but the weeds and tree suckers would strangle the grain until they are suppressed. Yes, tree crops take longer to establish, which means that farming would spread at its boundary only (and not colonise by jumps), but that's only a small factor slower.

    Er, pearl millet in BENIN? It's an arid climate plant. African rice, perhaps, but my point was that there were and are a lot of non-grain staples that thrice in the humid tropics, , so you STILL have to remove enough roots andand you don't have a season with nothing cropping. I should also be extremely surprised if African rice was a major staple in Benin, for many reasons. Cassava, yams (which is a generic term) and so on are far more likely, and there would have been no problem with transport (as there wasn't, when I lived near there).

    Nobody has settled anywhere by depending solely on grains, either - you get serious malnutrition in short order. There are certainly places where bananas have taken the place of grains, and I can believe the same of breadfruit; I have seen claims that the same was true of chestnuts. None of those were cities.

    984:

    Bloody wheel mice. That ", so you STILL have to remove enough roots and" is junk.

    985:
    Judaism, however, isn't just about belief or rule-defined lifestyle: it's a tribal identity. You can be Jewish by birthright and not believe in God and not follow any of the rules. (Hint: me.) Or you can be Jewish by birthright and follow all the rules but not believe in God. Or by-birthright and ignore the rules but still believe in God.

    Actually the situation in Catholicism can be quite similar. Err, for those not aware of it, I'm a Strong Agnostic, Methodical Naturalist with an interest in Epistemological Anarchism who happens to be a Cultural Catholic of the kind that doesn't go to the Eucharist because he hasn't confessed in years. If that seems confused, well, it has basically been my stance since I'm 24 or 28, e.g. 18 or 14 years. Sorry for this qualifier, I don't want the commentariat to go into one of the usual religion tantrums again.

    I'm not a big fan of Mother Theresa[1], to put it lightly, and Hitchen's book on her has been on my "to be bought an read"-list since shortly after her beatification.

    But what most critics and defenders miss ist that she might have been much more atheistic in much of her life than me. From the wiki article on her:

    Privately, Teresa experienced doubts and struggle in her religious beliefs which lasted nearly 50 years (until the end of her life); according to her postulator, Brian Kolodiejchuk, "She felt no presence of God whatsoever ... in her heart or in the eucharist". Teresa expressed grave doubts about God's existence and pain over her lack of faith."

    The article goes on that this is not that uncommon in saints, personally, I'm somewhat reminded of some passages in Huxley's The Devils of Loudun[2].

    I'm somewhat conflicted about my idea of petitioning for making her the patron saint of agnostics and atheists...

    (Please note Catholic and Orthodox churches are much more orthopraxic/orthopractic than the Protestant "sola fide" churches. Words are quite a cheap signal, feigning belief is easy, fooling yourself into thinking you believe is slightly more costly but still comparatively cheap. But working out and memorizing complicated prayers, performing rituals, abstaining from certain foods and things, well, those are costly signals. Still not as costly as discussing and questioning your faith and identity, though.)

    Status report, as usually too much going on. The last few weeks triggered memories I have to work on, I'm looking for a new job, evaluate my legal position concerning my landlord[3] and make notes about thoughts coming up.

    A certain friend wrote, guess I'll propose "A Canticle for Leibowitz" to her, she got baptized lately. Err, too many thoughts.

    [1] Which actually might get me into some conflict with the husband of my cousin, who is a Muslim, but Kosovar Albanian. But I digress. [2] I liked the book, but didn't like the movie. [3] Quite good actually, I always paid the rent, and technically he hasn't even terminated our oral contract yet, his word against mine. Guess I won't remind him till I have a new room. ;)

    986:

    That has certainly been true in the past - I could have added it to my examples in #886.

    But I disagree somewhat with what you said about orthopraxic/orthopractic/sola fide, even with traditional High Anglicanism being Catholic. One of the religious triggers of the reformation was the practice of granting absolution without compensation or even strong evidence of repentence. And many of the more extreme Protestant churches were/are into rituals and abstinence to an extreme level. It's not as simple as that.

    But OGH's description is fair. While there ARE tribal aspects to various forms of Christianity, they are only central in a very few, extreme sects, such as the first two I mentioned.

    987:

    BTW, for people interested in religious studies, the Marburg Journal of Religion is available online for free. One of the authors, Marco Frenschkowski, seems to be involved in German fandom, he wrote some articles for the Quarber Merkur, brings back memories of me reading some articles from the QB back in my middle teens. I have been thinking about making a talk on UFO cults at a con for years, for the Church of Unarius, there is a documentation on one of them with Jello Biafra on youtube.

    There is an interesting article by Pye on observing and participating in religious rituals as a researcher in a Japanese context, sadly it's only available in German. I thought about it much when interacting with the Vietnamese. Basic message, "you can't observe, but you can take part".

    988:
    One of the religious triggers of the reformation was the practice of granting absolution without compensation or even strong evidence of repentence.

    Actually, you might explain then why Early Reformers still had Absolution, but went against the "penitence" part? May I add for me talk is cheap, especially when the confession is private, but donating money or flagellating yourself are quite costly signals (though in the latter case somewhat pathological, I know quite a few past cutters[1]...)

    As for the differences, we could have a nice chat about essentialism, constructivism and nominalism, but I'd have to do some reading, and may I add Judith Butler has been on my "to be read" list for quite some time... ;)

    [1] For myself, only accidental experience with self-harm; running around in a daze and colliding with an object can be quite focusing...

    989:

    Actually, the real problem of the Reformation was with indulgences, where today comparisons are made to emissions tradind, and actually I'm in favour of both, they are far from perfect, but even imperfect instruments are better than none.

    As for my ideas on faith, well, may I mention a poem by Tennyson,

    There lives more faith in honest doubt,
    Believe me, than in half the creeds.

    Damn it,

    Who trusted God was love indeed
    And love Creation's final law—
    Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
    With ravine, shriek'd against his creed—

    gets quite personal with my quite non-religious idealism...

    Gotta reread my Stephen Jay Gould soon...

    990:

    Actually, the AfD are not (wholly) neo-nazis (yet). I would describe them as right-wing populists and reactionary social conservatives with quite a few members from the Neue Rechte. Basically somewhat to the right of the contemporary US Republican Party. Quite a few of them are positive about aspects of Nazi Germany, but they don't want to create a 4th Reich. Again, yet, they are changing fast.

    Actual neo-nazis (like in, trying to reimplement the politics of Nazi Germany, perhaps minus the genocide and the war bit) would be the NPD and some smaller parties, though being open about it would get them banned under German law.

    BTW, "NPD" is also short for "Narcissistic Personality Disorder", err.

    991:

    Indeed, and they were the main thing I was referring to. There may have been reformers who believed that no penitence at all was needed for absolution, but I doubt many. Changing the form of it is not the same as eliminating it.

    992:

    According to the article Lutherans still do absolution in some forms, which would be the reformer most Germans would be familiar it. Though I might be mistaken, ask 2 Lutherans about an issue, you get 3 answers.

    Problem is, in Luther's case you have to disentangle the Protestant hagiography, partly started by Luther himself, from the actual facts.

    993:

    And let's not get on to the extreme Calvinists, so well satirised in Cold Comfort Farm ....

    994:

    Hm, I guess it was Disch in "Camp Concentration" who compared the concept of predetermined grace to a KZ commandant...

    Problem is, we could have a nice chat about the failings of Catholicism, my problem is implying Mainstream Reformers were any better.

    I still have a soft spot for Socianism, BTW, though it clashes with what we know about Early Christianity.

    995:

    I know you like to argue, but I find myself wishing you'd think a bit more first. It makes for better arguments.

    As for African crops, read up on them. That's all I'm going to say. And read up on Benin while you're at it too.

    As for acorns versus grains, I think the best argument is correlation, since people have been eating acorns since forever. Look at where there are a lot of oaks: Korea, Japan, California, the Zagros Mountains of Iran (and surrounding countries), Europe, Papua New Guinea, the mountains of Mexico, the American East. Then look at where cities developed first: Yellow River, the lowlands of the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, the lowlands of Central America, coastal Peru. See any overlap? If acorns were sufficiently productive to fuel the growth of cities, there would be a very different pattern of where the most ancient cities are than we find in the archaeological record. That's what Laudan's pointing at, and I think she's correct about the correlation.

    I'd add that if acorns were as good a crop as wheat or barley, they'd be easier to get in grocery stores. Right now, the only place you can reliably find any acorn flour is in Korean markets.

    996:

    Physician, first heal yourself! ;-)

    Seriously, you keep making statements which are only true for SoCal.

    997:

    God help me, I wish YOU would! I have lived in the armpit of Africa (i.e. in the same ecology as HISTORICAL Benin/Edo), and know something about what will grow there (and what won't) - it's nothing like even a short distance further north. As far as sorghum goes, let me refer you to a Nigerian farming Web site:

    https://blog.farmcrowdy.com/sorghum-production-in-nigeria/

    A relevant quote is "Sorghum is grown in the semi-arid, savannah and grassland areas." Then go and look up the ecology of HISTORICAL Benin/Edo.

    You also keep using the illogic that "because it happened that way, that is the ONLY way in which it could have happened." That is unmitigated bollocks, and totally unscientific.

    Furthermore, you keep misrepresenting. I also did NOT say that tree nuts are as good as grains, and referred to more than one, but that they would be an adequate basis for a (VERY different) civilisation. I should point out that, by the time cities developed, grains had had millennia of development (including the creation of new species) - what would have happened if the same effort had been put into tree nuts? If you were being scientific, you would compare the WILD forms of each class of plant.

    998:

    I should have added these links, to save people trouble, and mentioned that, under those conditions, things rot at a rate people who have not been there cannot believe. Storing arid-terrain grain is not an option during the rainy season and not a good idea at any time, without modern technology.

    http://www.weatherbase.com/weather/weather.php3?s=92256&cityname=Benin-City-Edo-Nigeria&units=metric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benin_City

    999:

    The problem with acorns especially is that they don't produce in bulk every year. When they produce they're a wonderful crop where you can harvest a year's worth of food in about three weeks (California Indians). When they don't produce, you'd better have something else, or you're going to starve.

    I can definitely confirm this. I have a fairly large oak tree near the street/sidewalk on my property. About 1/3 of the acorns drop on the sidewalk/curb/gutter. I can ignore them most years. But on big years (3 or 4 years apart) I typically get to shovel up 8 or so trash cans full of acorns just to keep the sidewalk and gutter clear. And that's only about 1/3 of what drops. And yes I mean shovel. A rake just levels out the top layer.

    1000:

    "Climate-proof cities"? You mean like the classic Planet Stories covers, with huge-on-stalks cities/arcologies, with parkland between?

    And then, it being only 13 days and 9 years late, "For toDAY third of MAY twenty-TEN ManhatTEN reports mild spring-type weather under the Fuller Dome. Ditto on the General Technics Plaza"

    1001:

    My sympathies. My new lady has IBS and some minor lactose intolerance... and sulphide intolerance, such that she carries an epipen.

    1002:

    Third, 26,000 is urban.

    Agreed. Urban is a dense area of people. And by dense I don't mean Manhatten levels of dense. Most of NYC, Chicago, LA, etc.. is single or two story buildings. And they will lite up when a big fire approaches.

    Around 68 our local church burned. 2 or 3 trucks emptied the local water tower fighting it. And it wasn't a tiny tank on top. The news put out a call for everyone to please not use any water.

    1003:

    Damn, after I hit , I realized the misspelling: sulphite intolerance, so pretty much no wine, among other things.

    Bheer is just fine.

    1004:

    UFO cults reminds me of a con in '84 or '85, can't remember if it was CapClave or Balticon, but some self-proclaimed Jesus Freaks had a table in the dealer's room, with pamplets inveighing against Wicca, UFOs, and D&D.

    The dealer's room was big, with maybe 40 or 50 dealers, a lot of folks, and about 16:00 thar Sat, someone started, and almost everyone in the room joined in to sing a dozen verses or so of That Real Old Time Religion.

    They never came back.

    On the other hand, that might be a fun program item, witches on UFOs, seducing Innocent Youngsters into the UFO "hey, little kee-id, want to play D&D?".... I could call for folks in the audience to testify!

    1005:

    That applies to almost all crops in many places, and it is why too limited a range of staples led to frequent starvation (as is recorded in mediaeval Europe, because of the reliance on grains). Tree nuts are particularly prone to the effect, I agree, but you don't lose all your seed after a couple of bad years. If you were to follow the route I hypothesise, you would need to have at several, very different, permaculture plants providing staples. Trees that are widely cultivated in Asia Minor and Europe and provide a supply of dense calories (oil is as good as starch) include chestnut, walnut, hazels (both), almond; oaks (several) and beech aren't, but are also plausible candidates.

    This ignores the legumes (chickpeas, lentils, peas, beans etc.), which are staples in many parts of the world, and have very similar properties to grains, but are also grown similarly to them.

    1006:

    NPD. so. we're talking about the Malignant (and soon-to-be-impeached) Carcinoma, here?

    1007:

    What you are describing is related more to national issues in the US. (Newt blew up some of your comments by telling people to NOT move their families to DC and now we have a national legislature where many of the members don't really know each other outside of sound bite but that's another topic.)

    In the US at the state and local level what I say really does apply in most states. Legislatures don't meet full time and may not meet for months. So the job attracts investors, lawyers in bigger firms, etc... Those who can take a few weeks or months off and not worry about loosing their main "job".

    1008:

    You might want to add this link too: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaaw1947 Quote: "One hypothesis about crop domestication in Africa suggests an origin encompassing a large area from Senegal to Somalia (2). This Sahel-wide hypothesis was mainly based on distributions of wild and cultivated African cereals, such as pearl millet (Cenchrus americanus), sorghum (Sorghum bicolor), fonio (Digitaria exilis), and African rice (Oryza glaberrima). Recent studies have challenged this hypothesis and proposed a more restricted area of origin in the western Sahel, near the Niger River basin. Pearl millet was domesticated in a region corresponding today to northern Mali and Mauritania (5), and African rice was also domesticated in Mali (6). To assess whether the vicinity of the Niger River basin could be identified as a major hotspot of domestication, we investigated the domestication of yam, another major staple crop originating from Africa."

    Again, I know you like to argue for the sake of argument, but please try harder to research. Now to clarify, yes, I was thinking of the kingdom of Benin as north of modern Benin City, so you are correct on that. On the other hand, Benin is not the oldest city in Africa, so saying that it exists, therefore I'm wrong, is incorrect.

    By your logic, the fact that London exists in the oak zone currently is an argument for acorns being vital to the creation of cities in general and specifically a big crop of acorns is sold annually to feed the two-legged squirrels currently running Parliament, along with their many supporters. This atemporal reading ignores the history of England, and the fact that wheat and barley weren't invented near London, even if there's a city there now.

    It also ignores the question of whether a wheat failure would cause starvation in London, and that's rather more to the point. Are you seriously suggesting that, in the event of a crop failure, the UK can harvest its acorns to keep everyone happily fed for years? That's what I was trying to get at in the original post.

    1009:

    I'm sure the various authoritarian regimes had similar arguments about why gas chambers were more humane than firing squads

    IIRC (and I may not), the 'advantage' of gas chambers was they were faster and cheaper (for high throughput), and didn't affect the guards as badly. So more humane for the executioners, but no real concern for the victims.

    Could easily be wrong — not a subject that I've wanted to know a lot about, frankly. Lost too much family to both methods.

    1010:

    Not comparable at all. There is a major difference between an anoxic atmosphere and a toxic one. I have a photograph in mind taken inside one of the Nazi gas chambers showing marks on the wall where people had tried to claw their way through the wall hard enough to leave grooves in the concrete with the ends of their fucking finger bones and basically just absolutely fuck that shit.

    1011:

    I didn't even realise you could eat acorns until I read this series of posts. I'm used to thinking of them as something you feed to pigs because they're handy for that but no use for anything else.

    1012:

    Oh, for heaven's sake! Benin/Edo is not, repeat NOT, even remotely in the Sahel and has a TOTALLY different climate and ecology. Surely you know THAT much about west African geography?

    And the fact that there was a thriving city state that was not dependent on grain is pretty solid evidence that cities were viable without grain. If they were viable, there is no obvious reason they could not have developed ab initio.

    AND DON'T PLAY STUPID POLITICAL GAMES. If we had taken the route I hypothesise, cities like modern London would not have arisen. Until very recently, megacities were extremely rare, and the discussion was about their coming into existence, NOT WHAT THEY ARE TODAY. Nor would we have developed a dependence on a single dominant staple, as I have pointed out more than once. It would be a very different world, but there is no reason that cities would not have developed.

    1013:

    Basically somewhat to the right of the contemporary US Republican Party

    To me that puts them firmly in Mein Kampf. The US Republicans are at the same time incredibly warlike and proponents of the gentle genocide. Sure, they use the jews in a different way and their preferred hate group (this week) is Mexicans, but the whole jackbooted thugs terrorising the population thing is current Republican practice (but you have little to fear if you're in the right racial group).

    My feeling is that the main change is that they have toned down the rhetoric in favour of more modern techniques - the dogwhistle, fostering conflict between de facto and de jure law (but maybe not... "you have the right not to be killed ... unless it is done by a policeman or an aristocrat" from 1982 wasn't the first occurrence of that observation).

    As as for eating acorns... Aurora has just released "The Seed" reminding us that you can't eat money. It's not a new idea (she opens with the native american proverb) but it somehow still seems to need saying.

    1014:

    There is a major difference between an anoxic atmosphere and a toxic one.

    So? My point, possibly poorly expressed, was that any "humaneness" of execution chambers wasn't a factor with the Nazi's. They were more efficient than firing squads, and had less of an effect on the staff (or possibly it was easier to find people who could cope), and that was what mattered.

    Were they more humane? Is being poisoned less painful and/or terrifying than being gut-shot and eventually finished off with a bullet to the head (if lucky) or by being buried alive (if not)? Not really interested in discussing which was the lessor evil — murder and genocide are evil no matter what the methods.

    1015:

    Ah, I have figured out the confusion arising from my overly terse first comment.

    You (and others) seem to understand that as "going to the fire and putting it all out", I actually meant a large fire department can decide on a line that the fire will not cross, and organize itself to make that stick. As far as I can tell, that is exactly what happened in Canberra.

    On the word "urban". I'm spoiled, there are (large) parts of Toronto that you can walk to a subway from that I do not consider urban :). I should have used city, or metropolis.

    On too many hydrants on one line. Water supply management is part of fighting fires. I am assuming the fire department can figure it out.

    Toronto can treat 2 million cubic meters of water a day, so it can pump that much. All of it's fire trucks going flat out would dent that (about 700,000 cm/day), but not exhaust it.

    Scale matters. Big cities can cope with stuff that flattens smaller communities.

    On the evacuation issue. I was not suggesting evacuating in case of fire. In a big city the better solution is to set up a defensive line.

    My response was just to the suggestion that a lack of cars would hinder evacuation efforts from high density areas. Actually, the more cars there are the harder it would be because of road clogging.

    It would be bad in any event.

    What could possibly happen to make this the less bad option I don't know.

    1016:

    Is it just me or are there an unexpectedly large number of Canadian flok music references on this blog?

    1017:

    I am dumb, that should be "folk".

    1018:

    I assumed it was a reference to a Half Man Half Biscuit song, but it turned out I remembered the lyrics wrong.

    1019:

    Pigeon @ 1011 ( & everybody else ) Acorns require considerable processing to be human-edible. They are loaded with indigestible tannins that have to be extracted ( by soaking, usually ) by a time-consuming & difficult to control process, which is why they are NOT a crop staple now.

    Nazi gas chambers ... the "rationale" was CHEAPNESS. A canister of Zyklon-B "tablets" was opened, pellets were thrown in the top & the vent closed. On contact with water HCN was released. MUCH cheaper than using firing squads ....

    1020:

    That remark is FAR too simplistic about acorns, to the point of being wrong. Mainly depending on the species, they vary between ones that just need cooking, ones that need grinding, leaching and cooking, and ones that aren't good to eat even after that. Apparently, they are eaten as a snack in some Mediterranean countries, even today, and were an important food until well into the 20th century in a few places - but those are from a sweet acorn species.

    EXACTLY the same was true of almonds and cassava - the wild forms have lethal levels of cyanide, and the forms used today have been selected over millennia to be low in cyanide. My point is that, what was done for almonds could perfectly well be done for acorns.

    1021:

    And to be useful in the timescales we are talking about you would only need to start the selective breeding and planting programme a few hundred years ago.

    1022:

    Indeed. As a solution for the near future, forget it! We could make effective use of such crops today, but only by using the acorns of suitable species/strains as 'added value' when we wanted oaks for some other purpose. Which is what has been done locally and is apparently still done on very small scales.

    My SOLE point was to point out that the argument "Cities developed this way, so that is the ONLY way in which they could have developed" is not merely a bogus one, but almost certainly false, as can be demonstrated from existing cases. I.e. if the grains we rely on today had not existed, there is no reason that cities would not have developed, albeit more slowly and on smaller scales. But trying to debunk a myth with facts isn't exactly easy :-(

    1023:

    EC What dpb said ... and I was referring to the two native Brit species ( Q. robus & Q.petrea ) There are approx. 600 different species, in total.

    1024:

    See #1022 for the first. Following a previous claim of the impossibility of this, I looked into the issue rather more deeply than any of the posters had done - sorting out the evidence from the bullshit wasn't easy. At least this wasn't a case where there was an established dogma in academia, which leads to most academic papers being bullshit, too!

    I meant to pick up some acorns last year, and see if I could make them edible - apparently, ours are relatively sweet (but not enough to cook and eat without leaching first). Also, the acorns of holm oak are supposed to be sweeter.

    But just HOW many of our food crops are native? Indeed, many of our food crop species don't even exist in a wild form, and some may never have done. As you know, in many cases, that isn't because we don't have suitable native species for use as a basis, but because the neolithic farmers brought the crops they were used to with them, and we never domesticated the alternatives.

    1025:

    Acorns are historically primarily a mast crop -- pig feed -- like various other things like beechnuts. I suspect that people wanted the ham more than the acorns, because making acorns edible is much more work than driving pig.

    City development models rest on what you think a city is; if you think it's a concentration of specialists sufficient to support ongoing innovation (the Jane Jacobs 'import replacement' mechanism), it looks a lot like the initial, critical specialists who get the whole thing going are "those who make booze". Grains drive fermentation and thus booze availability in ways root crops don't. It does not seem to me implausible that someone looking at food storage as a city formation driver -- I think that's wrong! food storage doesn't need that kind of concentration to do or to develop -- would miss this.

    1026:

    Greg, the Nazis didn't give a shit about cost—they pursued the extermination program to the end even though it was diverting vital logistic resources from defending against the advancing Soviet forces.

    They tried guns first, but the execution teams suffered from PTSD and alcoholism on an epic scale. So they switched to mobile gas chambers—trucks with exhaust piped into a sealed cargo area. Carbon monoxide poisoning ain't pretty, so much so that Heinrich Himmler fainted when he visited one such camp. The switch to cyanide was driven by availability combined with a drive for "efficiency" and no need for the murderers to witness the effect on their victims, so reducing PTSD among the killers. (The corpses in the gas chambers were unloaded by other camp inmates, who were themselves exterminated and replaced on a rolling 90 day basis.)

    Now please let's drop this topic, okay?

    1027:

    Aargh! IN EUROPE, they were. NOT in North America, nor in some other places. And that is just the wild forms, BEFORE domestication - as I pointed out in #1020, the wild forms of both cassava and almond were LESS suitable for use as human food.

    1028:

    Off topic, but apropos of the continuing political nuttiness: Is it time for a 3rd Brexit thread?

    1029:

    Toronto can treat 2 million cubic meters of water a day, so it can pump that much. All of it's fire trucks going flat out would dent that (about 700,000 cm/day), but not exhaust it.

    I seriously doubt the piping would be able to deliver that much to a small area. That 2 million figure is about delivery over a widely dispersed area. Piping is set up to do such. Not fight wild fires no one expects to ever show up.

    1030:

    Utterly off topic, but this might be useful for worldbuilding. Summary: the sand on the beaches around Hiroshima Bay contains a heterogeneous collection of small glassy spherules...

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213305419300074

    Excitingly, it opens up "[A n]ew avenue for research linking the chemical composition of melt fallouts to constituents of the urban landscape."

    1031:

    No.

    Maybe after the euro-election results are in.

    (I ought to be blogging right now but am too burned out: I have a topic in mind but can't be arsed writing it up.)

    1032:

    Concur; Wikipedia gives the area of Metro Toronto as 5_900km^2 (and some change) in 2011CE.

    1033:

    I was thinking what Dave said, but yeah, given that she's going to try again, and Corbyn broke off talks, and the Independent is saying Farage is going down...

    Yct also brought to mind another conversation I had on email this morning - one of my daughters (the one who's writing, and trying to sell) mentioned that she'd gone through the Balticon program schedule, and had about 75 hours worth that she's going to have to cut down.

    1034:

    Back in '12, I wrote a filk that I'm extremely proud of - Outbound Passage, based on Stan Rogers' Northwest Passage....

    1035:

    Apparently a major anti-semitism piece of news is going to break, real soon now, to the detriment of Cor Bin ... I don't believe this mess .....

    1036:

    Going down on what?

    1037:

    Well, I have been saying for over a year now that I believe that both the Con Party and Liebour have rendered themselves unelectable.

    1038:

    Eurasia, more than Europe, at least in the oaky regions.

    North American oaks (of which there are a considerable diversity!) don't generally produce edible acorns, though some do; the west coast acorn festivals look like the sort of thing you do to ensure the cultural knowledge to do the critical food processing for the famine food gets preserved, rather than a core dietary staple.

    EVERYTHING that produces nuts does so unevenly, absent really diligent selection; it's a population control device for seed-and-nut-eaters, to the point where there's a winter finch forecast hereabouts based on the boreal forest cone crop. Low cone years see far more birds come south looking for something to eat.

    Eastern Woodland cultures used chestnuts as a staple, now lost to an invasive fungus. There's considerable evidence that the indigenous population encouraged these heavily -- about a quarter of the eastern woodlands were chestnut trees -- and probably selected them. Some efforts to produce a variety immune to the fungus are ongoing and IIRC they started providing seedlings last year. Eastern Woodlands cultures didn't do cities, but the stuff we know about was post-1492. The old-school pre-disease view was that there was trouble with food concentration; the post doing-the-math view is that no, no, the maize productivity per area they had was comparable to modern intensive farming practices, and they got beans and squash, too. I think this might support the "booze hypothesis" about cities; the initial specializes were brewers.

    Which is interesting, because the Eastern Woodland thing -- no cities -- was to ferment maple sap, something they could not store or geographically concentrate. The Andean and MesoAmerican cultures (cities) fermented stuff you can store and geographically concentrate.

    1039:

    Um, I think you're a little wrong about the acorns.

    Granted, yes, chestnuts used to produce more nuts than do eastern oaks, IIRC those acorns were still used. Also, don't forget about hickories.

    In California, acorns are far from a famine food: they're better than corn in our climate (corn needs summer rain, which we don't get). The black oaks (coast live oak, black oak, etc.) and tan oak (Notholithocarpus, not a true oak) were the most desirable, because they had a lot of oil and were therefore more calorie dense than the white oaks. If you look at the festivals, you'll find that in some ways they mirror those of the corn-growing tribes, with acorn maidens replacing corn maidens. I'll admit I'm biased, because I've eaten acorn mush at Indian festivals and I rather like it, but acorns really are an important part of Indian culture where oaks grow.

    The thing is that oaks mast, so you don't get a crop off them every year, and California has one of the most severe of the Mediterranean climates, so if you're going to live here for generations you've also got to be prepared to survive decade-long droughts and ARkStorms that dump a meter or three of water in a winter and flood everything. Because of that, the Indians were willing to eat almost anything, and many of them cultivated bulbs and probably other plants as well as gathering acorns. But given a choice, I think they'd they'd rather spend three weeks harvesting acorns for the rest of the year, store them in granaries, and do other things for the next year.

    The final point about eastern woodland cities is that corn arrived in the northeast fairly late. Remember that it was domesticated in Mexico, so its progress across the US was an incremental march of farmers finding corn mutants that could deal with progressively shorter growing seasons, perfecting those as crop varieties, and passing them on. It's even possible that the Iroquois/Haudenosaunee confederacy, which started around 1142 or so, was made possible by their adoption of the Three Sisters (corn/beans/squash) agriculture that gave them a numerical advantage over their opponents.

    It ultimately may be that if the Pilgrims had arrived a couple of centuries later, they'd have faced Indians in cities along the coast. Something similar happened in Hawai'i, where the Hawaiians independently invented the state less than a century before Cook got there, and a minor technology transfer from the Europeans (a couple of cannon) gave Kamehameha the edge he needed to conquer the archipelago.

    1040:

    But, as I pointed out earlier, early grain crops were also extremely unreliable and, to compensate for the extra variability of tree nut crops (which I accept), two ghastly years in a row doesn't leave you without even any seed! That was a big deal back then.

    Some of the academic references I found described localised use (both in north America and central Asia) that routinely ate acorns as a significant part of their diet (20% was a figure quoted in one case). But I don't really care - my point never was that they were ideal, but that they were a feasibly domesticatable crop.

    Your example of chestnuts is interesting. I know that chestnut flour was extensively used (and still is, to some extent) in Eurasia, and mentioned them as another tree crop, but I didn't know it that was a staple in the USA.

    I have seen the booze hypothesis before, but it doesn't require cities. Even using the complicated method used for beer as most of us know it, it is little more complex than making flour and bread, and the former was done at a large village scale. Until recently, brewing was a task for a (large) household or inn, and malting was done in even small towns. Many other forms of beer (e.g. cassava, millet etc.) are always made on a very small scale. Indeed, I can't think of any pre-industrial process that required cities, as distinct from towns specialising in a task, trading with one another.

    1041:

    Oh, and a lazy way to leach acorns? I haven't tried it, but I understand that you can shell the little buggers to get the nut out, put those nuts in a lingerie bag, and put that bag in the tank of your toilet for awhile. Every time you flush, you remove some more tannins. Apparently, you can do this for a few days and the tannins get leached. Probably have to clean the bowl after flushing all those lovely tannins through...

    Anyway, have fun looking up how to leach acorns, because I think there are a bunch of ad hoc lazy methods for doing it out there. You can even see disputes. My favorite one is how the California Indians don't like buying Korean acorn flour in the grocery store. They grumble that the Koreans don't prepare it right, because they get rid of all the oil in the acorn. If you're a California native, apparently you want that oil, not to get rid of it, so Korean acorn flour doesn't taste right to them.

    1042:

    Don't understand what you're asking, unless it's "how does that relate", to which the answer is the late Stan Rogers was a wonderful Canadian folksinger/songwriter.

    1043:

    but I didn't know it that was a staple in the USA. In the Northeast US at least, chestnuts used to be like 25 percent+ of the deciduous forests. Through invasive disease we lost chestnuts, then (in the order that I remember, and from disease/insects) elms, dogwoods, most ash trees (concurrent with >50 percent of hemlocks, though they dominate a different type of forest). Probably others as well that I'm not recalling while typing this. The remnants (and there are some, not just old oaks/maples left by farmers) of mature woodlands have younger trees filling gaps, and it is obvious. American antique furniture (18 century and later :-) is often in part (or wholly) chestnut wood.

    American Chestnut Formerly, chestnuts accounted for 25 percent of the trees in the Appalachian ecosystem. Then, between 1904 and 1944, four billion large chestnuts – almost all of the trees in the eastern U.S. – were killed by the Asian fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica. Map: Natural Range of the American Chestnut Tree

    We're post 1000, so this (and a few others like it in the US and non-US press), about the man we call the Walrus of Doom, made me smile: Trump does not like that people think John Bolton is his "puppet master." Will it get him fired? - “And the media narrative that a senior official is Trump’s puppet master can be the kiss of death . . ." (Cody Fenwick, May 17, 2019)

    My rule: Blessed are the peacemakers, cursed are the warmongers. No exceptions.

    1044:

    The Walrus of Doom? I like it, and if the Malignant Carcinoma dislikes it, I need to do a gimp of him as the puppetmaster... hmmm, or maybe Emperor, using the Force on The Orange One, and hope it goes viral....

    1045:

    Yay! Go for it!

    1046:

    Cheeto Grande and the Walrus of Doom? It has a certain ring to it.

    1047:

    Blessed are the peacemakers, cursed are the warmongers. No exceptions. To be clear, there's an exception for existential threats. Also, my car has a problematic Quaker decal that says "Love Thy Neighbor, No Exceptions". Also ... masks. :-)

    whitroth @1044: need to do a gimp of him as the puppetmaster... hmmm, or maybe Emperor, Another thing D.J. Trump hates is any suggestion that his net worth is really quite low, or even arguably negative. That's one reason why he is fighting so hard to prevent release of his tax returns. Probably dangerous to cross the memes though. (Popular! "About 156000 results")

    1048:

    Blessed are the peacemakers, cursed are the warmongers. No exceptions.

    Aren't you in the USA? Doesn't that make it hard, living in a cursed land full of cursed people?

    IIRC the USA has been "not engaged in war" for about a decade since it was founded (by a declaration of war, no less).

    I find it hard to be that harsh because there's lots of sub-existential threats that justify a violent response. At the risk of touching the third rail, there were still Jews in Germany at the end of WWII... hence the threat was not existential. It might have wanted to be, and it may have eventually become, but it was not actually existential. Also, AFAIK the war against Germany was not declared for, or fought for, the protection of Jews, that was a happy side effect of unrelated actions (as the post-war discussions showed) so claiming that it was necessary to fight against the existential threat was also demonstrably not necessary. Meaning... cursed are Jews who fought the Nazis?

    Obviously I disagree, and think that even the Maori Wars were completely justified, let alone wars against threats like the British invasion of Australia or the German genocides. Right now I'd be offended if you declared the Yemeni cursed for resisting the Saudi/US destruction of their country even though neither invader actually wants to eliminate any Yemeni ethnic group completely. Likewise the Iraqi resistance, or the Syrian, Palestinian, Sudanese, Uighur, Rohingya etc. Of those the Palestinians probably come closest to facing an existential threat but I see a terrifyingly small level of support for their continued existence (for many doing so is tautologically anti-semitic), but as I keep pointing out, in Australia 90% of the voters don't regard "let's not wipe out the Australian Aborigines" as a vote-changing issue.

    1049:

    Of course the piping is the limit. My point is that there is effectively an infinite supply for the pipes in a very large city (Toronto may be atypical, we have Lake Ontario for supply, which really is effectively infinite).

    Also the argument is about dumping water on a large area, not a small one.

    The point I am trying to make is that a sufficiently large and well equipped city can deal with any fire. The exception would be an urban firestorm, but I believe that requires bombing to occur.

    I am using Toronto as the example because that is where I live, so no, Toronto is not going to be confronted by a wildfire.

    1050:

    Concur; Wikipedia gives the area of Metro Toronto as 5_900km^2 (and some change) in 2011CE.

    I can't parse that number. I can't even come up with an interpretation that makes sense, unless there is an extra 0, 590km^2 is close.

    The bounding box for Toronto is about 20k x 40k, the actual area is somewhat smaller.

    1051:

    JamesPadraicR @ 905: That reminds me of Chabadniks on the street corners of Manhattan (and elsewhere I assume—they’re everywhere), looking for any Jewish looking man to accost with “Have you donned tefillin?”, that’s phylacteries for the uninitiated. I was never approached, but my response would be “No thank you, I’m not into bondage.”

    What makes a man "look" Jewish?

    1052:

    Greg Tingey @ 923:

    Our problem is that we have, very slowly, been cleaning up our (allotment) site & these tyres ... appeared.
    They've been there since fuck knows when ...
    Now, we want to get rid of them, without screwing the environment over ... but to do do legally is going to cost us an arm & a leg.
    It's an incentive to fly-tip, quite frankly.
    [ Not that we are going to, of course ]

    I think that's why Raleigh/Wake County adopted the policies they have; if people can clean up old tires (and other junk) from their property and dispose of it at the the county multi-use recycling/waste disposal site without getting hit with additional fees, they're less likely to dump them illegally.

    1053:

    Charlie Stross @ 925:

    My next project is to dig up the pipe between the water meter and the house & replace it to make sure there's no leakage on my side of the meter.

    Suggestion?

    When you're checking for leaks by digging around the pipe, future-proof your work: buy yourself a water meter and install it on the inlet side just inside your house.

    Over a couple of months, record daily or weekly readings on both meters so you know how closely your home meter tracks the "official" water company meter. You will then be able to cross-check at will whenever you want—if your home meter reads lower than the municipal meter, you've got a leak.

    That's a good idea, but I have no doubt the city's meter is accurate. Raleigh is currently replacing decades old water & sewer infrastructure. They dug up my street last year and replaced all the old galvanized steel water pipes and cast iron sewer pipes along with all of the water meters. I saw the condition of the crap they took out and I got a good look at the meter end of my pipe.

    It's an 80 year old galvanized steel pipe and I'm going to replace the whole thing outright. I just don't yet know what I'm going to replace it with.

    1054:

    Rlloyd27 @ 927: Having dealt with this problem last year you dont need to dig up the pipe to see if there is a leak.

    I don't need to dig up the pipe to find out if it's leaking. It's galvanized steel pipe that's been buried there 80 years. I need to dig up the pipe to replace it.

    1055:

    David L @ 933: ... JBS and I have the same issues. Water is billed at such a large rounding number that there are only 2 choices for a bill for most of us. They meter it down to a fairly fine detail but bill it in something much more rounded. By bills are typically for either "1" or "2" ccf. With an occasional "3".

    And to actually read the meter requires removing a steel plate about twice the size of a dinner plate locked down with a large 5 pointed nut. That gets you into a 2' or so deep well with the meter at the bottom. And to keep things from freezing every 10 years or so most are now packed with insulation. How do they read it? The meter is wired to a RF transmitter attached to the lid and a truck rolls by every month.

    Also to JBS's point, the sanitary sewer portion of our water bills is now 50% higher than the portion for the actual water usage. Trash pickup is also on the bill and about the same as the water for me. Plus 10% of the bill for storm water projects and 5% for recycling.

    My point is water and the taxes on it are only about 30% of the current bill. All the rest are new things or things that the general tax receipts paid for years ago.

    The only thing I'll add is that Raleigh is replacing the old water & sewer infrastructure & where necessary old storm water infrastructure. My street got all new water & sewer in 2018. When that happened I got a good look at what the pipe going to my house looks like & what kind of shape it's in (at least the end out at the street). The pipe is 80 years old, it's not in good shape. There's no question it needs to be replaced, I just haven't figured out what I'm going to replace it with.

    1056:

    David L @ 946: Your statement also assumes such valves are in known locations and easy to get to and will still operate. All situations I've dealt with were things were not as they should have been.

    There is a shut off valve. I know where it's located. I hesitate to shut it off because I'm not sure it would open again. It will be replaced at the same time I replace the pipe out to the meter.

    1057:

    whitroth @ 952: Haven't seen anyone using bricks since the early 80's, at the latest. Use a a couple of 2l plastic bottles, filled with water.

    There's a thought.

    1058:

    "but I believe that requires bombing to occur"

    If you mean fire bombing... Standing under a shower of burning embers feels very much how I imagine fire bombing must feel.

    1059:

    Bill Arnold Presumably different species to the Ohio Buckeye ... which is also a Horse-Chestnut lookalike - I have three seedlings in pots, doing quite well. ( I collected the "conkers" from them at Kew ... and they came up! )

    JBS @ 1052 Yes. I checked, but I'm certain that the London Borough of What The Fuck will charge anyone who turns up at theor supposedly environmentally-freindly rcycling centres with old tyres. Typical of their stupidity, I'm afraid.

    1060:

    Horse chestnuts (including buckeyes) are not even closely related to true chestnuts, and are poisonous. I knew about the existence of the blight, which affects true chestnuts, but not about its impact. Bill Arnold: thanks for the education.

    1061:

    At the risk of being repetitive, "Metro Toronto" is given as 5_905.71km^2 on Wikipedia. Or do you have some fond imagining that the fire will stop at the boundary of the provincial capital?

    1062:

    Wikipedia is being confusing.

    Before the Harris government, Metro Toronto was the umbrella government of Toronto and its surrounding suburbs (North York, Scarborough, etc.). Some matters were handled locally, others at the Metro level. Against local wishes Harris decided to amalgamate Metro Toronto into a single city on the grounds that it would save money through efficiencies. (It didn't.)

    As far as I can tell what Wikipedia is calling "Metro Toronto" is what Ontarians call the Greater Toronto Area (GTA for short), which is Toronto (the new city or old Metro Toronto) plus the surrounding suburbs and cities. No one here calls that "Metro Toronto" — Metro Toronto still refers to the old Metro Toronto area (now just Toronto).

    1063:

    Cheers; I know enough about Canada that this now makes sense.

    1064:

    inspiration for the day. There's an interesting topic for the SF writers in the crowd: this perspective essay in the WaPo: If a fetus is a person, it should get child support, due process and citizenship. Great points about the Constitutional absurdities that arise when a zygote or a fetus is declared a natural person (social security cards, freedom from deportation, due process, all the other citizenship perks, child support, etc.). Great stuff for thought experiment SF short stories.

    IMHO, they missed one interesting point. Since embryos don't develop external genitalia until about halfway through gestation, any state that recognizes a zygote or embryo to be a natural person before this point is implicitly recognizing citizens' right to reassign their own gender to match "what's inside them," or "assigned to them by God." As I noted, there's room for some good SF satire here, if anyone's in the mood.

    1065:

    Some of this has applied for literally centuries; it used to be possible for a woman to "plead her belly" in a capital case, and, even if convicted, she could not then be executed until after the delivery.

    1066:

    That all supposes logic.

    One of the things that's been happening more and more obviously is that, faced with an awareness that logic and the process of attributing facts (that big, collective, public, common effort) does not admit of the utility of authority, the American Right -- which is mostly a theological movement! -- has been dismissing the utility and reality of facts.

    This makes perfect sense; if you derive your status and power from authority (that what you say is so, is so) you can't tolerate facts.

    Any political response based on facts won't do very well; it has no purchase on the thinking of those opposed and certain of their righteousness.

    1067:

    Fun article in the WaPo, thank! [1] It covers a lot of interesting edge cases, but misses a few as you point out. (Perhaps they were missed deliberately :-) E.g. can young Emma drink? Sign contracts? When can she collect a pension? A Woman Gave Birth From an Embryo Frozen for 24 Years (Sarah Zhang, Dec 21, 2017) Emma Wren Gibson, frozen as an embryo in 1992, was born a few days after Thanksgiving in 2017, more than 25 years later. On top of that are some theological knots, e.g. Catholics appear to be still pretty fuzzy about ensoulment edge cases like twinning (One or two souls?) or chimeras (2 souls or one? Which gets punished for sins?). Typical recent paper: The Ontological Status of Pre-implantation Embryos (2017, John R. Meyer, paywalled) A challenge for determining the ontological status of the pre-implantation embryo is the possibility of twinning or organismal division, or the recombination of twins to form a chimera.

    [1] Link was broken above so here: If a fetus is a person, it should get child support, due process and citizenship - The logic of Alabama’s abortion law should permit you to claim a fetus on your taxes and collect insurance if you miscarry. (Carliss Chatman, May 17, 2019)

    1068:

    Aren't you in the USA? Doesn't that make it hard, living in a cursed land full of cursed people? Indeed, though it's never been universal. (In part because peace churches like the Quakers have always been allowed religious liberty in the US, by design.) As far as the rest, yes of course you're right. What I'm mostly concerned about is deliberate propaganda/training to dehumanize enemies as a means of increasing acceptance of atrocities etc. The War Prayer (Mark Twain, American humorist, 1905, published posthumously 1916) An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, “Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord and God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!” The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside — which the startled minister did — and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said: “I come from the Throne — bearing a message from Almighty God!” The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. “He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import — that is to say, its full import. ... It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

    I've been treated like that lunatic more than a few times. :-) (Been called a war-supporter a few other times, and listened.)

    1069:

    (Bill quotes an article) The logic of Alabama’s abortion law should permit you to claim a fetus on your taxes and collect insurance if you miscarry.

    Aren't there states that prosecute (some) women who have miscarriages for crimes against the person?

    More importantly, where are the states that have convicted God for all the murders from "acts of god", and specifically all the acts of conception that don't result in live birth? Especially in Alabama, where it's apparently perfectly legal to get an abortion right up until the moment you know you're pregnant, that leaves open the possibility that since God knows she's pregnant, God has committed an offence by allowing the abortion to take place.

    1070:

    propaganda/training to dehumanize enemies as a means of increasing acceptance of atrocities

    We have that all the time, and it's very hard to fight against. Notorious events like people speaking a local language being told "speak english, we speak Australia in Australia".

    ("AN indigenous woman talking to her toddler daughter in her native language in Adelaide on Tuesday was told: "It's Australia Day, we speak English in Australia". Confronted with this just ..." and then paywalled)

    There is a widespread belief in Australia that abos are less than human, even (and especially?) by the more socially liberal types who happily accept that abos don't get the full set of human rights and when bad things happen to them it's a concern but not worth doing anything about. The propaganda you're talking about is built into the very structure of Australian society (we have Libertarians here, for example, who seem to sincerely believe that first nations members are not the sort of people who get property rights).

    1071:

    Thanks for the Catholic Bioethics link. Even the summary is interesting, especially the last two sentences: "For all intents and purposes, there is a biological continuum stretching from the single-celled zygote to the infant human being. This ontological continuity seems to insinuate that the pre-implantation embryo is a viable human being that deserves the protection accorded to members of the genus Homo sapiens."

    I'm not sure this works, because if we start talking about the basic cell theory of life ("The cell theory states that all biological organisms are composed of cells; cells are the unit of life and all life come from preexisting life"), so if we want to talk about a continuum from infant to zygote, then we can equally talk about the continuum to egg, to the mother's cells, and all the way back to at least the first eukaryote, and label them all (as well as all their living descendants) as deserving "the protection accorded to members of the genus Homo sapiens." And since this guy doesn't realize that Homo sapiens is a species, I'm dubious his level of erudition.

    Of course, I tend to think that the Buddhists got it right, that self is an intermittently useful illusion. But I am weird that way.

    1072:

    Going to biology for simple answers is rarely productive.

    And, well, the issue has nothing to do with facts. The issue is about who gets to perform what kind of gender imposition on what basis. Resolving that issue is complicated by an incumbent power base intensely interested in maintaining their version because otherwise they'd have to learn a useful trade.

    It's not a hearts-and-minds problem; it's a not a question of definitions, or of facts, or even really of politics. It's a question of asserting a social axiom with sufficient force to displace that incumbent power base.

    1073:
    Going to biology for simple answers is rarely productive.

    No, it's reproductive.

    duck

    1074:

    Biosphere runs on both production and reproduction.

    And yes, of course it's about power, but ridicule is about power too.

    1075:

    And yes, of course it's about power, but ridicule is about power too.

    Only in a context where those being ridiculed and those doing the ridiculing are using the same construction of shame.

    Note how the modern right wing appears utterly and totally shameless. Two generations of deliberate and conscious effort to get that.

    1076:

    Bill, on that note, here's Rolling Stone on the current war against Venezuela...

    Every article is seen from one angle: Venezuelans under the heel of a dictator who caused the crisis, with the only hope a “humanitarian” intervention by the United States.

    There is no other perspective. Media watchdog FAIR just released results of a study of three months of American opinion pieces. Out of 76 editorials in the New York Times, Washington Post, the “big three Sunday morning talk shows” or PBS News Hour, zero came out against the removal of Maduro. They wrote: “Corporate news coverage of Venezuela can only be described as a full-scale marketing campaign for regime change.” Allowable opinion on Venezuela ranges from support for military invasion to the extreme pacifist end of the spectrum, as expressed in a February op-ed by Dr. Francisco Rodriguez and Jeffrey Sachs called “An Urgent Call for Compromise in Venezuela”: “We strongly urge… a peaceful and negotiated transition of power rather than a winner-take-all game of chicken…”

    https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/venezuela-united-states-war-trump-836344/

    Meanwhile in Australia the people voted overwhelmingly that global warming is a concern, but it's someone else's problem and we should do nothing to reduce it. The two choices were "slightly more, but in a concerned way; lots more, because people caring about the environment is the major threat we face". The latter appears to have won, apparently thanks to campaigns by Murdock and Palmer (two local billionaires, albeit one now owns much US media as well). That also means we're not going to get reforms in the direction of more democracy any time soon.

    1077:

    Not really. If you look at non-violent revolutions, making the totalitarian regime the object of ridicule is a standard tactic. And yes, I really suggest it's worth looking at what groups like Otpor! did and why they did it.

    Getting back to the nonviolent protest aspect of it, there are many. For instance, if the Alabama law stands, every woman in Alabama who is pregnant needs to apply for ID for her fetus, along with public benefits, as a protest tactic. They also need to apply for public assistance for the embryo. Wealthy women who got abortions at the insistence of their powerful republican male partners can come forward, confess their crimes, and implicate their partners as accessories to murder. Activists could suggest that couples seeking asylum should flock to these states, to get an anchor fetus who's an American citizen. The parents of children killed in school shootings can sue the state government for applying different standards of safety as a function of age.

    More to the point, this also sets up a legal strategy for attacking these laws, not just on the grounds that they rob women of power, but that they override the Constitution's requirement to have a single standard of who is a citizen and who is not, by subverting the decision to the states. After all, right now in most states, citizenship starts at birth. In other states, it starts at conception, while in others it starts at six or 8 weeks' gestation. That's four separate standards of what natural born citizenship means right there. Allowing this to proliferate is a slippery slope that turns the US into a confederacy of 50 states with individual notions of who is a US citizen and who isn't, which is also a serious problem. That makes determining what a natural born citizen is a matter of federal law, not state law, and I suspect the people behind this anti-abortion campaign made a serious mistake by including all these diverse standards and focusing on who is a natural-born human in their state.

    1078:

    You do realize that the definition of "citizen" is an explicit and conscious target of the neocon movement?

    Specifically, getting rid of birthright citizenship?

    1079:

    Then they're going about it the wrong way. The 14th Amendment states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

    I can see that this is a real problem for the ultra-wealthy anarchists (like Donald Trump) who don't want to pay their debts and want to avoid the costs of citizenship (see Capitalism Without Borders). But going after abortion I think works at cross-purposes with this, because it forces the US to establish what "born" means with respect to the 14th Amendment. If the court decides that birth begins at conception, then anyone conceived in the US becomes a citizen, which actually increases the problems, rather than decreasing them. Actually, it's not a problem, but I can see honeymooners flocking to the US in hopes of conceiving a citizen that they can then use as an anchor baby. Right now, they have to give birth in the US, which is a lot more work.

    1080:

    Aren't there states that prosecute (some) women who have miscarriages for crimes against the person?

    Ah, nope.

    But I point out to people who will listen that the end result of some of these policies is to be there. And then you get into is a mother to be living a life where total avoidance of anything that might trigger a miscarriage is the only way to stay out of jail?

    The place where miscarriages are taken to an extreme is El Salvador. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_El_Salvador#Miscarriages

    1081:

    None of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments have ever been consistently enforced. The neocons are going after the courts very hard, having figured out that the your rights are what a court will enforce.

    My expectation is that the current ICE tactic of ignoring documentation about place of birth is going to become officially legal and much more widespread. (Born is, after all, inherently hearsay as evidence; you don't know, you just know what someone told you.)

    1082:

    Oh well, we seem to have re-elected the arseholes. Oops.

    1083:

    I shake my head, what were they (Labor) thinking? Voters don’t start listening until the last week and they’re totally Ill equipped to judge 3 years of policy development in that time, not to mention they don’t want too. Against that waffle you put a focused simple emotionally resonant message, “don’t trust the other guy”. That’s Democracy for Realists 101.

    1084:

    Ooops, sorry, I was mislead by reports like this (quote below) and this. Who knew the media lies?

    Alabama has prosecuted at least 40 cases brought under the state’s “chemical endangerment” law, which was introduced in 2006. The law, purportedly designed to protect children from fumes inhaled from methamphetamine being cooked by their parents, is now being used to criminalize pregnant women who miscarry.

    1085:

    I don't believe the "oops" part, there's been no attempt to conceal agendas on either side. It's like firing a gun... you can't just pick up a loaded gun and randomly pull the trigger then say "oops" if you kill someone. Even if you only get your news from The Voice Of Rupert you can't possibly pretend no t to know what you're voting for. I had far too many people glare at me or snarl rude comments when I was handing out how to vote cards to believe for a second that even 1% of the population are so uninformed that they have no idea.

    1086:

    Moz @ 1076 There is the slight problem that Maduro really is an old-fashioned brutal Caudillo though. Chavez was properly elected, the US didn't like him, but tough ... Maduro, however, really does openly & deliberately oppress his own people. Mind you a US intervention, like Persia, would be an utter disaster & is definitely neither needed nor wanted.

    Heteromeles @ 1077 LURVE IT ... I take it that this set of actions has been seriously proposed, or if not, why not?

    1087:

    I suspect there are quite a few governments round the world ardently defended by their people on the basis that it's better than having a government installed by the US. Or destroyed by them, since they're much better at that than the installing process. Supporting they can do, although they seem to struggle in direct proportion to the level of democracy.

    I presume there exists at least one free and democratic government that took power after a US-supported war. Otherwise they would be 100% wrong, and that's a record that would surely give even the most ardent faith-based government pause.

    1089:

    (fwiw I don't count dismissing Whitlam in Australia as war, it was merely the sort of foreign interference that all empires practice. I mean actual bombing shooting war - like the freeing of Vietnam and Cambodia, or the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan)

    1090:

    I thought that Australian Aboriginals did not believe in the right to own land, as distinct from property?

    An answer to that may clear up the supplemental about whether or not they can own a building.

    1091:

    Yeah, whatever the head in hands emojii is. Or 🖕 🙅‍♀️ 🤷‍♂️

    I've kinda pulled back from refugee work because I find it pretty traumatising, and my personal focus has been climate change for a while now. And I'm no longer an "arrestable" at protests for related reasons*. But right now... I don't think it matters. We are fucked. All of us. "target 10 degrees" is on, because the Liberal Party of Australia has the power to kick us most of the way there - Australia really does have that much coal. You'll know they're serious when they go beyond subsidising uneconomic new mines in the Gallilee Basin and start working on keeping the brown coal power plants in Victoria open. And more fracking. Fracking is awesome. So many jobs and growth!

    • although that does fall under "let's not make people become refugees in the first place"

    ** for what that's worth, NSW has some of the most effective laws against protest outside of actual self-declared police states. And every democratic country has the "failure to obey a police" offence to fall back on.

    1092:

    I thought that Australian Aboriginals did not believe in the right to own land, as distinct from property?

    Traditional land ownership was far more complicated than European Law can cope with. Plus whitey weren't very interested in finding out, it was easier just to kill everyone and declare that they owned it now.

    But, loosely speaking, and this is not my area of expertise: the varied forms of traditional land management require careful management of land and vegetation by people who are familiar with the area over timescales that white people consider 'very long term' (generations). It often also requires working with more people than the common community size, as well as consultation with neighbours. Control over an area of land is thus both active and cooperative, and the European notion of 'exclusive possession' isn't useful or relevant. In an unstable climate there's quite a lot of 'we must work together or we shall surely die separately'.

    BUT these days even the most remote indigenous groups are aware of modern Australia, they know what white man's law is, and given the choice between dying and changing their model of land ownership (they're often not given the choice), a lot of them choose to go with Squatters Title*. But for the most part Australian Law inflicts "Native Title" on them instead, because that effectively prevents them doing anything with 'their' land (it is a distinctly inferior form of title in every respect).

    • Australia mostly uses Torrens Title for freehold land, otherwise known as "the owner is whoever the government says it is". A lot of Australia is crown land, though, and that's generally leased (often twice, pastoral and mineral leases coexist) with recognition of certain Aboriginal entitlements over some of that.
    1093:

    Oh, and just for the record: an Australian Aboriginal who is a citizen is just as free as any other Australian to purchase land or buildings. The law permits rich and poor alike to purchase media outlets, donate to political parties and hire politicians.

    1094:

    OK, thanks for that. Yes, "it's complicated: No, more complicated than that".

    1095:

    “Bear in mind that it's probably newly built since 2019. 80% of humanity lives within 200km of the sea...” Sounds like most of humanity will be living in what was built as a refugee camp or the workers’ housing next to a sweatshop.

    1096:

    MOZ @ 1087 France 1945? (W) Germany 1948? Other parts of W EUrope? NOT a long list, though ..... By that measure the Brits do much better ... Handing over/back huge areas of the planet to the people who live there. (?)

    1097:

    Nor do I. It's a common 'defence' by the USA and UK authorities when they were deliberately (sic) over-aggressive or negligent, innocent people get harmed, and there is a serious public or media backlash. It's rare outside 'western democracies', where the usual defence is denial. Part of the evidence comes from the rarity of them taking any post-hoc action to reduce the harm repeating itself.

    On this topic, the USA is setting up for another Iran Air Flight 655 scenario, God help us, and Trump is too dense to realise what Bolton is up to.

    https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-warns-airliners-flying-over-persian-gulf-amid-iran-tensions/

    1098:

    Or more likely - does not care ... at all. Which may be even more worrying.

    For an insight on to how some US miltary etc ( NOT all ) see this interesting piece concerning the almost-a-nasty-incident at Pristina Airport, back in the Kosovo/Serbia conflict post the breakup of Yugoslavia.

    1099:

    Link broken.

    [[ fixed - mod ]]

    1100:

    I classify that as one of the factors that causes deliberate negligence. It is extremely rare for that to be continued after a high-profile incident if the authority actually cares. E.g. the Home Office and 'Windrush'.

    The other common factors causing it are refusal to listen to (even in-house) warnings, and refusal to think.

    1102:

    Carbon-free power? US company backing transportable (to site but not htereafter ) Thorium power plants @ half a Gigawatt each Promotional wbesite HERE YouTube prom from the same people here as well Comments?

    1103:

    Greg, thanks for the links.

    We'll know in a few years if they install the first system.

    Once it's up and running, and covered on The Nightly Business Report, I will lose interest. Once a technology is established, I move on to other fringe ideas.

    1104:

    The problems I can see with this aren't with the thorium, although I'd love to see a working reactor before anyone buys this.

    Big problems are siting and upkeep. They want to tow this to a marina, attach it permanently to the bottom, and then every four years do major maintenance that requires them to haul out a contaminated central coil, take that back to get remanufactured, and so forth.

    There are two big problems with this. The first is flooding, drought, and sea level rise. If you fix this sucker to the bottom somewhere, it's going to have a limited project lifespan. If it's on the ocean, it's going to have to deal with at least a meter of sea level rise plus storms. That's going to add costs. In a big river like the Mississippi, the floods are far worse, and ditto with most reservoirs (unless they run dry during droughts and the plant has to power down or fry).

    The second is that the plant takes up valuable water front space. I'm not clear on how it is supposed to be serviced too, whether the coil can be hauled out onto the water and barged away, or whether it has to go onto a semitrailer on land and be trucked away. In the latter case, the cost of the plant also includes the maintenance roads as well as electrical infrastructure.

    Nasty problems there. I'm starting to wonder if, instead of building in the water, it's possible to do desert geothermal: you pump the heat into a big, bare mountain nearby. As the mountain heats up, a combination of radiation of heat (into the night desert sky, which is cold) and wind blowing across it cools the rock enough that it can keep accepting heat from the plant. I wonder if something like that would work? If so, it would be possible to locate these power plants well away from water, thereby (perhaps!) making them safer from waterborne issues.

    1105:

    By that measure the Brits do much better ...

    Handing over/back huge areas of the planet to the people who live there.

    No arguments that the Brits did much better on that score, but as a solicitation of opinion(*), how is the American departure from the Philippines to be seen?

    Also the imperialization, disengagement, invasion, final departure from Panama? And the continuing status of Puerto Rico as a kind of Schroedinger state, neither quite vassal nor full state nor independent?

    (*) Not intended as whatabouthat.

    1106:

    Ah, the Thor reactor people? They've been dragging PowerPoint presentations around the funding venues for over a decade now with no luck other than some seed money for more Powerpoint presentations.

    The Big Thing in the Powerpoint reactor biz these days isn't thorium any more but Small Modular Reactors (SMR). It's getting real money so the Thor scammers have pivoted to Modular! Thorium! hoping to shave off some of that tasty tasty cash.

    SMR is like graphene or nanotubes in Biggest Battery Breakthrough Since Breakfast scam stories, a marker of desperation and hunger. In the Real World the only SMRs actually being built and deployed are light-water reactors derived from ship power plants like the Russian KLT-35/40. The rest are fantasies and delusions, no more.

    http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/First-reactor-on-Russia-s-floating-plant-starts-up

    1107:

    No, it won't.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/16/18627776/facebook-election-interference-shut-down-west-africa-instagram-pages-groups-israeli-firm

    You may do a grep about "insane rants" about the topic, oh... a few months ago. We're not playing in your fucking shitty little sand pit goo-goo-land levels here.

    We're not here to play Human Games.

    Look, We're very very very bored of your tired little brains, so look above then look at the Twitter stuff that .IL is attempting to quash.

    Hint: Iceland, tiny tiny little scarves.

    And, whoooo boy did it get all the *what the fuck do you think you're doing, the Wolves are mapping the terrain you absolute bell-ends

    Mr Star, "ex" IDF, UK resident.

    Here's a little tip: Don't label LGTB+ people "a bunch of freaks".

    Aaron... well, you've certainly shit all over that name with your behavior. Why don't you fuck off back to IL, since your cover just got blasted out of space to the entire US / UK / EU Neo-Fasc brigade? Oh, wait. You have personal ties to them? And Old Tommy? Waaaait... you're not telling me you're not a central lynch-pin to ...

    WELL FUCKING DONE. YOU GOT MADE.

    Now fuck off back to IL, your cover is 100% worthless.

    Now, little IL munchkins - look at who ran the "private" IL stuff in Africa. Swiss... Fr.... "Friends of Israel"

    Piss off before we start playing properly you utter wankers.

    ~

    Actually interesting:

    a) Hospital - enforced insanity, it's a thing b) Had to kill two of the [redacted] recently, not fun: one from the old [RENFIELD IS SUCH A FUCKING TELL] and one from the new [DO NOT COME AT THE QUEEN] c) No, really.

    Greg:

    We're having to fight things your Mind cannot even see and you're pissing around with playing politics.

    Stick the fucking marrows.

    @Host.

    How much proof does one man need?

    Fucking Called it.

    p.s.

    PR 101 - hint: it's not savvy to have all your automated defenses kick out "But the Muslims kill all the gays" and not look like, well. 19th Century fail states of Human Minds that we can all now ignore.

    Biblical.

    1108:

    Oh, and Greg.

    Really not H.S.S in 2) there. Involves shit you really ain't never wanna know about

    I mean, unless your kind can do [redacted] now?

    Still breathing.

    Still foretelling your futures.

    p.s.

    AUS goes the way of USA

    Wake me up when any of you humans start, you know, fighting for your right to survive.

    We just eviscerated two Lower Order Beings just to post heads up to petty politics land. Hint: Higher Order Powers are a little bit pissed off at you fucking killing our daugher.

    Lower Order Powers: Shiiiiiiiiiit boys, you in danger. For realz.

    1109:

    Oh, and for the bookies / betting ZH types.

    Yep, that's a 100%, unconditional, pure front-run without any trappings of nicety.

    @IL muppets.

    We told you it was all scripted. You paid $2mil for the liberal US wank-fest of "Dual states are possible" [just not very probable].

    The cost of that other thing was everyone spotting how fucking inept your Internet Game really is.

    That's priceless.

    Ask .RU about the $$$$ to that one.

    Aaron...

    The Star.

    You're Fucked

    1110:

    Daughter.

    That's a joke to the MIM peeps caught flooding a 10 min email from a aut0-h00k.

    Fucking amateurs.

    We'll shape your fucking reality, mate.

    1111:

    Hm, I give you the definition by the catechism about ensoulment:

    The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God - it is not "produced" by the parents - and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection.

    This view is known as Creationism, which is kinda misleading since we know another kind of Creationism. Gives your quite a lot of room to wiggle around, it could be karyogamy, it could be fission in the case of monozygotic twins.

    The opposing view, e.g. the soul is transmitted through egg and sperm, would be Traducianism.

    Please note we could have a field day asking the guy how he defines soul, Catholic theology drawing heavily on Aristotle makes for interesting ideas.

    And I would strongly object to the idea a blastula is "viable" on its own.

    BTW, personal stance on this matter, depends on the case, but quite often "Let it be her decision, and beat up the guys who brought her into this situation." Hmkay?

    1112:

    It occurs to me this morning that my note the European notion of 'exclusive possession' isn't useful or relevant is still largely true today outside of urban areas. That is partly why we still have the lease system, but it mostly shows up in various failure modes.

    For example, a lot of the Murray Darling Basin water woes are because some idiot* tried to express water management in terms of European property rights. Here's one summary (that says 'we must...' and we didn't) and the department of making the problems worse. If you want a stark contrast Kati Thanda and its headwaters are managed mostly as a single entity in a fairly sensible way.

    We have similar problems where urban areas intrude into farmland (common to pretty much everywhere, farmland has more monetary value as suburbs even though you can't eat money), and where they intrude into bushland (fire management - whitey prefers fewer but much larger and less controlled fires), and the decision to remove the Great Barrier Reef (there's more money concentrated in farmers and miners than fishermen and tourism operators so the latter lose. The rest of us don't matter, and a lot of us don't care). Oh and then insanity like the climate catastrophe where humanity as a whole continues to say "it's not my problem".

    • I'm counting all the various people who developed and expanded that system as between them having the intellectual capacity of one idiot.
    1113:

    The great thing about souls is that they make murder impossible. As you quote, the soul is immortal and thus by definition removing the meatsack/sending the soul to heaven is merely removing the opportunity to sin. Arguably the foetus/infant should be freed from the burden of potential sin as quickly as possible, thus reducing the amount of sin and consequent distress to god.

    I'm still not sure why "freeing a soul" is considered wrong by Christians.

    1114:

    As the mountain heats up, a combination of radiation of heat (into the night desert sky, which is cold) and wind blowing across it cools the rock enough that it can keep accepting heat from the plant. I wonder if something like that would work?

    So the single plant version of a few 1000 (or few 100,000) houses with 700 foot deep wells to use the earth as a heat sink for heating and cooling?

    1115:

    how is the American departure from the Philippines to be seen?

    Assuming you mean the USA we will be deeply involved in the economy of the Philippines for a long time. First off a non trivial amount of the male population claimed to be a guerilla fighter against the Japanese in WWII. Way more than were actually involved but record keeping was a bit scant at the time so if you claimed it and had someone else vouch for you you were in. This matters as they then got GI benefits and SS benefits along with their spouses. And it is a thing (I DO NOT know how widespread) where a dying fighter (now most are in their mid 80s or older) to divorce their wife and marry a younger female in the extended family so she will get survivor benefits till she dies to use in the extended family. The US government will be paying the families of WWII fighters (real and claimed) will past the middle of this century.

    1116:
    The great thing about souls is that they make murder impossible.

    No, it doesn't. Ending a bodily existence is still possible, and from a Catholic POV, it's even worse because:

    a) you deprive a human being of God's gift of life b) depending on the circumstances, you deprive said human being of the possibility to redemption and reconnecting with God[1].

    The RCC only condemning capital punishment lately, well...

    Seeing the physical universe in general and corporal existence in particular as "evil" or "sinful" is generally not Christian, but Gnostic. The world is God's creation, so next time any Christian tells you any worldly conduct is sinful and Satan is the lord of this world, tell him he is a Manichean, thus a heretic and should burn himself after confessing his errors. Sorry, writing job applications and being somewhat cranky...

    [1] "The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs."

    1117:

    @Host

    Know what the most depressing thing we've learned about your species in the last five years?

    Stan this: You're the fucking Enemy.

    looks at all the Lands

    Not even close to not being true.

    Now, the problem is: Your Masters are totally shit at all of this and are utter wankers who we can gut in a second. We totally knew this going into this 5 years ago, we just hoped your side wouldn't be so fucking stupid.

    But here we are

    p.s.

    Oh, I know the cost.

    The upside is that:

    a) We really do fucking gank the shit out of Lower Order Powers (mostly the psychotic ones)

    b) We really have been 100% truthful and REALITY BASED unlike er... all the rest of you

    c) We really, really, really are not obsessed about Abrahamic religions until that moment they turn up, and DEMAND THAT YOU BE THE ANTI-CHRIST

    Of course, there's more.

    But:

    a) Look above, shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit we're not even bothering to pretend we're not front-running your shitty media reality now

    b) Greg etc, playing cool guys:

    They killed a lot of people because of our posts.

    1 HOP 7 LOP 82 Humans

    You're a cunt for thinking that your fucking Legumes are important.

    1118:

    Oh, and not even pretending.

    @Host.

    The LOP doing shit to your reality chain? .IL contract based, at least one of them.

    True Story.

    Oh, wait.... are we pretending that Madonna's "GLAMOUR" didn't just fucking not just fail but vanished into the "never existed"? For $2 mil?

    "OK"

    Mirror.

    Stan this: Humans will 100% ignore the reality to save their "ID". Chances are.... you're not even Human.

    Fucking hilarious.

    1119:

    Triptych.

    No, really.

    Killing LOPs is not like killing humans.

    It involves a bit more fucking respect and having to change time-lines. OH, and a bit more fucking effort than "GUN >> SHOOT >> KILLL".

    Holy fuck are y'all all cunts.

    Editing Wikipedia doesn't count, you utter fucking failures.

    ~

    No, really.

    Look above.

    We can front-run your reality by 3 years as a side project.

    You used to call us Prophets.

    Now you call us insane because we're better than your shitty algo-faux-AI.

    No, really. Get fucked.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSmYSZGMZj0

    LOPs dying?

    Holy shit, nasty. Wouldn't fuck with that one.

    Pssst.

    We've killed 17 LOPs and 4 HOP so far.

    No.

    Really.

    1120:

    Thanks for all the links and comments about "soul". I've been generating notes the past couple of weeks after I realized that the movie, What Dreams May Come, is actually Horror.

    That fits perfectly with Frank's comment:

    Of course, I tend to think that the Buddhists got it right, that self is an intermittently useful illusion. But I am weird that way.

    Trottelreiner @1111 "Creationism (soul)"

    That instantly made me think of the movie The Seventh Sign, where the Hall of Souls is almost empty. That was on TV the other day.

    After writing a huge stream of consciousness, that I won't bore you with, I came up with:

    • The soul is an opportunistic infection [*]

    That cracks everything wide open. So many stories, must get busy. HA!

    Thanks...

    [*] I need to read Inferno, by Niven and Pournelle, again, and Escape From Hell. The books suddenly have a whole new meaning in that context.

    1121:

    New Matilda is pretty scathing of the ALP performance, and the Australian electorate.

    Progressives will also need to reflect. Some cherished myths may need to be abandoned. On the evidence of this weekend, Australia is not becoming a more social democratic nation. For many voters, this clearly wasn’t a “climate change election.” On the other hand, it seems clear that Australian voters really do vote with their hip pocket. Scare campaigns do work. So do lies.

    https://newmatilda.com/2019/05/19/it-was-never-an-unloseable-election-for-labor-but-still/

    1122:
    That instantly made me think of the movie The Seventh Sign, where the Hall of Souls is almost empty.

    Argh, I guess my school memories are somewhat fragmented by episodes of depression, but I remember that movie. And not in a good way...

    Actually, according to wiki the hall is called guf, and I'm not sure how widespread this view is in Judaism, it surely doesn't sound like haskalah.

    And that would be Pre-existence of the soul, which is heretical. Anybody with me burning copies of thie film? ;)

    Actually, Can we please agree the only movies based on Revelation worth watching are "Altered States" for the unintended humour and "Good Omens" when it's released? ;)

    1123:

    Moz @1113 IIRC didn't the (quote from the RC side) horrible evil heretic Cathars say this? And that their "perfects" didn't marry & tried to get to "heaven" as quickly as possible. And for some reason the RC church didn't like this? ( Ezcept Gnosticism, of course ... faction fights ) Which just goes to show how bonkers the whole thing is, of course ....

    Trottelreiner @ 1122 Actually, I'm seriously expecting the US-christo-fascists to get all lathered up about "Good Omens". The bastards trashed the possibility of parts II & III of Pullman's "Golden Compass" (etc) being made, by instructing people not to see the first. Their reaction to Pterry/Neil's fun-piece is going to be ... interesting. It is to be hoped that some of them have fatal apoplexy as a result - which would be a result.

    1124:

    Actually, Can we please agree the only movies based on Revelation worth watching are "Altered States" for the unintended humour and "Good Omens" when it's released? ;)

    Also "Dogma". Not seen "Altered States".

    1125:

    For some reason I've been thinking about Shakers more than the weird non-biblical Christian sects. They practiced celibacy (and as Charlie pointed out about evangelical Jews experiencing extra persecution and dying out, religions that forbid reproduction tend to die out, hence the domination of 'except that bit' Christians).

    I remain bemused at the idea that for Christians life in heaven is so much worse than life on earth that earth must always be preferable. But then I'm not the target market for that kind of stuff, and as has been said before, not making sense is part of the point.

    1126:

    Nasty problems there. I'm starting to wonder if, instead of building in the water, it's possible to do desert geothermal: you pump the heat into a big, bare mountain nearby. As the mountain heats up, a combination of radiation of heat (into the night desert sky, which is cold) and wind blowing across it cools the rock enough that it can keep accepting heat from the plant. I wonder if something like that would work? If so, it would be possible to locate these power plants well away from water, thereby (perhaps!) making them safer from waterborne issues.

    My initial instinct - nope. For power generation, you need a large temperature difference between the two ends, but you also need a large heat flow. Rock has a nice high heat capacity, but its thermal conductivity is pretty crap and, unlike water, convection isn't an option. Once your local bit of mountain has got toasty, your power plant is running at a pretty low efficiency.

    You might as well put radiators out on the desert surface and forget about the mountain entirely.

    1127:

    I read it, succinctly what a load of bollocks. You can always prosecute a reform agenda but you need to make the politics work. Policy wonkiness does not good politics make, and unfortunately this is a lesson that labor seems to need to learn again and again. This was a political failure by Labor, they should stop blaming the electors for it. Alternatively they could just read ‘Democracy for Realists’, available on Amazon, and action it.

    1128:

    I agree, but by “oops” I meant the sort of thing you allude to @1091:

    “But right now... I don't think it matters. We are fucked. All of us. "target 10 degrees" is on, because the Liberal Party of Australia has the power to kick us most of the way there - Australia really does have that much coal.”

    That is pretty much where I am, I just didn’t have the heart or words Saturday night or yesterday. Game over. Some things about humanity were nice and it’s a pity they will go with the rest. And it’s a tragedy about the majority of the biosphere that won’t survive either. Maybe places like NZ, Tasmania, Scandinavia, Canada or (hey!) Scotland will be okay for a generation or two, so long as they have sane governments. Otherwise it’s Mad Max for a short while and nothing thereafter for a really long time.

    1129:

    "Otherwise it’s Mad Max for a short while and nothing thereafter for a really long time."

    Probably no more than 25 million years. Well 50 million at the most. Last time the biosphere took a hit like this things were utterly different, but nice again after 25 million years.

    1130:

    Problem with places on large continents is that the Mad Max will spill out even before that, so it's going to be difficult to keep Scandinavia, Canada, or even Scotland separated from the other places. New Zealand at least has some ocean as a moat...

    I've been thinking that even with "small" temperature increase, Scandinavia, and Finland, will see a lot of people from for example Southern Europe moving, or wanting to move, in. It's not going to be easy for anybody.

    1131:

    High latitudes won't be much protection. As the poles lose albedo the temperature gets much more even globally.

    But I wouldn't worry about Mad Max. There won't be that many people.

    1132:

    Naah, solar brightening means the rate of loss of hydrogen ions into the solar wind is increasing over a period of MYa; which means we gradually lose the oceans, then the water locked up in minerals in the crust and upper mantle, so plate tectonics grinds to a halt, and we end up going the way of Venus long before the sun leaves the Main Sequence and goes red giant.

    But long before that happens? We're going to see photosynthesis in the upper waters of the oceans increase, meaning a higher pO2 in the atmosphere, so more wildfires. If it hits 30% (and it's been close in the past 3-400MYa) then even waterlogged tissue will burn, i.e. end of life on land.

    Let's be cheerful and optimistic here!

    1133:

    Turning the misanthopy up to 11 I propose using the last of the earths resources to divert a comet into Antarctica.

    Firstly it will simultaneously melt the ice cap and cause a few years of cooling, which is a delightful contradiction.

    Secondly, and more importantly it will give any successor species a wildly misleading impression of What Killed The Mammals. It would be immoral to prevent them from finding out the hard way after all.

    And finally it would be certain to rile up the shoggoths and persuade them to clean up any stragglers.

    1134:

    The group for helping with the preservation and recovery of extinct species that was spun out from The Long Now is working on repopulating Siberia with mega fauna. From the research that's been done, large grazing animals trample the snow, enabling the permafrost to cool more than it is now in the winter. They are bringing back the mammoth, which is really just a cold adapted Asian elephant (16 genes, closer to them than the African ones are), which are essential to removing the trees and making it back into grassland. https://theinterval.org/salon-talks/02019/jan/22/siberia So, there are things we could do, fairly easily and cheaply.

    1135:
    Naah, solar brightening means the rate of loss of hydrogen ions into the solar wind is increasing over a period of MYa

    Hm, a Kardashev II civilization could use comets to speed Earth's up, leading to more distance from the sun. No idea of the energies involved at the moment, though.

    If it hits 30% (and it's been close in the past 3-400MYa) then even waterlogged tissue will burn, i.e. end of life on land.

    Hm, not so sure about this. If you're referencing Watson et al.(1978), as mentioned, they used paper strips, and later research with actual plant material indicated 35% O2 was possible.

    In any case, as Keynes said, "in the long run we're all dead". Give it a few hundred MYa, and microbes will rule the world. Again. Maybe some of those will even be derived from our symbionts or parasites, and maybe horizontal gene transfer means there might even be some of our genes around. Maybe the proteins coded by those genes even involve signal transduction and make for some quite intelligent slime mold dreaming of Fermat's last theorem, or nominalism, or lost love, sublimed hate, whatever.

    Personally, I like to think we were not that bad as a species, the nonavian dinosaurs most likely would have screwed up just as us. Come to think about it, I'm amazed by bird eyes at the moment, they are more acute, and they are tetrachromatic; birds are also quite intelligent. Maybe they will survive us, and maybe it was them who were meant to inherit the Earth when the nonavian dinos got wiped out. If "meaning" means anything in a universe orchestrated by Planck and Boltzman[1]...

    Going to a board game evening, maybe dating someone to raise a family, why you're asking?

    [1] Yes, I stole that last one partly from a song I heard long ago.

    1136:

    Err, the paper about actual plant material can be found here:

    https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/16613/

    1137:

    I believe this would be a better way to imagine it.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc

    1138:

    In the US, at least, the "metro area" is what, 30 years ago, we called the Standard Metropolitian Statistical Area, based on population density. It comes down to the city, and the ring of suburbs around it.

    1139:

    I cannot read your post without hearing Every Sperm is Sacred....

    1140:

    I like your turn of phrase, "life in heaven is so much worse than life on earth."

    Ever read Twain's Letters From the Earth? It was only published 30 years after his death, a daughter being appalled by it, by such things as "they can't wait to get out of church, and can't play an instument, but they think they want an eternity of that...."

    1141:

    Meanwhile, a German paper has released political DYNAMITE Difficult to find - it has vanished from "indy's" current page - I was lucky to spot it, but ....

    Of course the Monarch's duty is to protect the integrity & safety of the realm ... & brexit will smash those, or certainly a no-deal "hard" one would .... Stand by for storms.

    1142:

    Yes, let's abolish this pretense of representative democracy, and go back to the Sovereign in Council. It would be a lot cheaper (because less corrupt), at least as democratic, and a lot more amusing.

    1143:

    Billion years, give or take, before the Earth becomes uninhabitable for eukaryotes.

    Things do get interesting in the carbon cycle in the long run, and we also get some really interesting things going on with the crust cooling and thickening. There are some good papers on that out there (mostly exoplanet modeling), that I'll link to if I get a chance.

    AS for the human future, we've got between 10 and 10^9 years left before we go extinct, I think. Since we're the only pyrogenic species around at the moment, if we don't go extinct, we're in a position continue to interfere with the carbon and oxygen cycling even if there aren't any more fossil fuels to loft.

    The whole oxygen crisis last time started due to the lack of good wood rotting fungi, meaning carbon got stuck in terrestrial deposits and didn't decompose completely until we burned it as coal. There were algae around then, and while they've always been the major driver of the atmosphere, I'm not clear on how they'll ramp up production (since surface waters tend to be nutrient poor) and give us another oxygen crisis. Anyway, we've gone through a bunch of wood rotters (fungi, dinosaurs, termites, more dinosaurs, more fungi), so that avenue seems to be closed now.

    1144:

    I cannot read your post without hearing Every Sperm is Sacred.... About male wind-pollinated trees in urban areas: ‘Botanical Sexism’ Could Be Behind Your Seasonal Allergies - More diversity in city trees would probably be a good thing. (Sabrina Imbler, May 17, 2019) Not sure she's ever had a female Gingko tree dropping fruit (that smells like vomit) nearby, but that's only one species. There's this downside of Gingko males: Ogren sees gingko gametes as the far greater threat. Unlike almost every other plant, gingko trees produce motile sperm, capable of swimming in pursuit of germination. Where human sperm each have a single tail, or flagellum, gingko sperm have around a thousand. “Once the pollen gets in your nose, it will germinate and start swimming up there to get to where it’s going,” Ogren says. “It’s pretty invasive.”

    Failure Inc[tm] above: Read that all, thinking about it. Hospital... -- was wondering about that. (Weird threats.) Wake me up when any of you humans start, you know, fighting for your right to survive. -- Those threats are existential. Lower Order Powers: Shiiiiiiiiiit boys, you in danger. For realz. -- :-)

    1145:

    Moz @1125

    Ken Burns did an episode discussing the Shakers.

    Sister Mildred Barker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euPJzOjffps

    They sought perfection in all aspects of their life. They basically invented industrial farming in America. We would not have developed the vast power of farming without them.

    When people start babbling about the Rapture of the Nerds, I am reminded of the Shakers. They were reaching for their own Singularity.

    In my stuff, I have a series of stories where the Shaker movement has a resurgence, especially among the Millennials. They become the school teachers, day care workers, etc..., as a way to serve as true SJW.

    1146:

    Heteromeles @ 1064: inspiration for the day. There's an interesting topic for the SF writers in the crowd: this perspective essay in the WaPo: If a fetus is a person, it should get child support, due process and citizenship.

    I can no longer read the Washington Post. They've slithered completely behind a paywall. I don't have a subscription & there's not enough there to motivate me to pay for one.

    I'd pay for a subscription to a news aggregator similar to Google News if it would handle bringing the occasional individual articles out from behind the paywalls for me. But it's just not worth paying for another subscription to another newspaper just for the one or two articles per month I might want to read.

    I've got a bad attitude toward newspapers & paywalls after my experience with the New York Times when they first tried to institute a subscription service in 2003. Short version: I paid for a years subscription to the internet version just before I went overseas to Iraq. But I was never able access my account from Iraq; it wouldn't allow me to log on from that IP address. Then to top it off, their experiment was a failure & they canceled the program with no refunds. People who hadn't paid could still access the NY Times, while I couldn't.

    1147:

    _Moz_ @ 1069: Aren't there states that prosecute (some) women who have miscarriages for crimes against the person?

    I'm pretty sure either Illinois or Michigan put a woman on trial for murder when she had a miscarriage after a suicide attempt.

    1148:

    And in fairness, my black humor take on women using these anti-abortion laws as means of non-violent protest did miss a really critical point: women, in these legal systems where embryos have rights, are treated as incubators with no rights, and if carrying a fetus harms their bodies, even to the point of death, their suffering is treated as meaningless collateral damage.

    United Shades Of America had a really good show on that last Sunday, and you can see some clips on this page.

    If the women were treated as coequal individuals with their fetuses, there would be a different level of protest than when mothers are treated as less important than the embryos inside them, both by (male) doctors, by (male, conservative) politicians, and by "Christians" with problematic agendas.

    1149:

    Heteromeles @ 1077: More to the point, this also sets up a legal strategy for attacking these laws, not just on the grounds that they rob women of power, but that they override the Constitution's requirement to have a single standard of who is a citizen and who is not, by subverting the decision to the states.

    IF you believe the proANTI-life right-wingnuts care any more for what the Constitution SAYS than they do for what it means. They all believe that GOD'S LAW® over-rides the Constitution, which after all, is only man's law. Where the "Constitution" conflicts with GOD'S LAW®, the Constitution must give way.

    All they care about is keeping women barefoot & pregnant and subservient to MEN, the way GOD® intended. They "care" about unborn-babies, but they don't give a happy goddamn about what happens to children after they're born. Fuck 'em with a barb-wire dildo.

    The ultra-wealthy hypocrites don't care because the law don't apply to them. They're above the law & if it takes allowing rabid anti-life preachers to prey on poor women to keep themselves in power; to ensure they never have to contribute to keeping the country going, then so be it.

    There's nothing wrong about making a deal with the Devil as long as it's good for business.

    1150:

    Ya know, what they believe is far less important than what you can do to mess up their plans. If their carelessness hands you a stick to beat them with, I'd suggest using it if possible.

    1151:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1097: Nor do I. It's a common 'defence' by the USA and UK authorities when they were deliberately (sic) over-aggressive or negligent, innocent people get harmed, and there is a serious public or media backlash. It's rare outside 'western democracies', where the usual defence is denial. Part of the evidence comes from the rarity of them taking any post-hoc action to reduce the harm repeating itself.

    On this topic, the USA is setting up for another Iran Air Flight 655 scenario, God help us, and Trump is too dense to realise what Bolton is up to.

    https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-warns-airliners-flying-over-persian-gulf-amid-iran-tensions/

    Something to keep in mind is that Cheatolini iL Douchebag really, REALLY,REALLY wants to be a WARTIME PRESIDENT, because wartime Presidents don't have to answer to Congress (according to Dick Cheney & GWB).

    His problem is that all the good, easy wars have already been used up and the only one left is Iran.

    If he gets into a war with Iran, they're going to hand him his ass. Unlike Saddam, Iran is NOT a paper tiger, and a war with Iran won't be confined to the Persian Gulf. Not only does Iran have the capability to decisively demonstrate why aircraft carriers are considered "bomb magnets", they have the ability to strike directly at the United States.

    The only real question is whether he's going to start the war with malice aforethought or just blunder into one due to his usual incompetence. My money is currently on incompetent malice.

    1152:

    Greg Tingey @ 1098: Or more likely - does not care ... at all.
    Which may be even more worrying.

    Never say the U.S. military doesn't care. They do; if only because they know they're the ones who are gonna' do the dying in Cheatolini iL Douchebag's "short victorious war".

    1153:

    They're the US citizens most likely to die, yes, but very few of them will be affected while people living in the liberated zone will die in large numbers both during and for decades after the war.

    On that happy note, the NZ Army have just been forced to release their rules of engagement. They're not allowed to use force to defend civilians, only themselves, contrary to the propaganda* they constantly excrete. They explicitly prioritise "improving the image of the NZ Army" over the lives of people in the countries they're occupying.

    • one element of which is referring to the invasion force as the "New Zealand Defence Force" (who even knew that New Zealand shares borders with Iran and Uzbekistan... that's apparently the part of New Zealand that they're defending)
    1154:

    all the good, easy wars have already been used up

    I thought there were rumours that the US was going to impose 'managed democracy' on Venezuela?

    I also disagree that a "good war" is even possible in today's world, except perhaps a war of resistance against US hegemony (or one of its satellites). It would be bleakly fitting if one outcome of a US invasion of Iran was the loss of chunks of Saudi Arabia either to nuclear fallout* or territorial expansion by Iran (see also: the southern border of Turkey).

    • when you start sinking nuclear powered and armed ships in shallow coastal waters all sorts of exciting things can happen.
    1155:

    Wouldn’t be the first time. The Chicxulub impact didn’t happen because “the dinosaurs didn’t have a space program.” It happened because they did.

    1156:

    “The coal-burning fireplaces are either blocked or walled over.” Sounds rather a waste of space. I’d think they could be made into storage space. - if not built-in drawers and cabinets, at least a door or hatch so you can get in to store old boxes and such.

    1157:

    Very little space involved. As a rule, you might be able to store one sack of pigeon food in there, but you wouldn't get another one in.

    1158:

    You might want to look at the situation in Northern Ireland, which (because NI politics is weird and toxic) still operates under the Child Destruction Act (1861), which defined abortion as murder and originally prescribed hanging as the punishment (now downgraded to a maximum of life imprisonment).

    A majority in NI want to reform the law there, but the DUP successfully spiked it for decades, Sinn Fein (as a nominally Catholic party) wouldn't touch it with a barge-pole, and due to a money scandal Stormont has been shut down for a couple of years now, leaving it notionally in Westminster's lap, where Brexit has shovelled everything else off the agenda. So women are being prosecuted for procuring abortions in the UK in 2019.

    One point to note is that when abortion is banned, women of childbearing age are basically dehumanized, regarded as little more than a walking womb by the police and legal system. it's potentially a major step in those US states that are trying to ban abortion along a road leading to deprivation of civil rights for 50% of the population (ending, quite possibly, in removal of the right to vote—after all, if they had it, they might vote to get their baby-killing rights back, yes?)

    1159:

    The ultra-wealthy hypocrites don't care because the law don't apply to them.

    Same as it never has.

    Prior to the Enlightenment and a certain wave of wars and revolutions that swept Europe, culminating in the French revolution (the US war of independence was strictly a side-show), pretty much everyone assumed there were three classes of humanity: the monarchs (who could do whatever the fuck they wanted—Trump's "I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue" crack would have been unexceptional in the mouth of a 1600 monarch), the nobility, who had the right of high justice over anyone beneath them and who defended their rights with the sword and the gun, and the ordinary people, who did as they were told and were subject to the law and the King's justice (and that of their noble owners). Nob v. Nob conflict got into debatable territory, with the King as tie-breaker (not to say skull-breaker) if the ones at the top tried to get above themselves.

    The USA kicked out the nobility and did away with the monarchical principle because that was the way the tide was turning in the 18th century. But the rich haven't forgotten, and those who were born rich don't see why they shouldn't live as barons and dukes in all but name.

    Which is why you now have a justice system where if you've got enough money you can usually get away with actual murder (unless you're stupid about it), but if you're on the bottom of the heap you can end up in jail for years on a jaywalking ticket because they won't let you out until you pay bail money you don't have (and can't get).

    1160:

    They went in stages, initially being replaced by gas fires, before the gas fires were taken out when central heating was installed (pumped water radiators, not HVAC, which can't be retrofitted to this type of building).

    The main one, in the living room, was the perfect sized niche for an old-school tube TV to live in. These days it's occupied by the TV stand with the Tivo and DVD player, which is pushed back out of the way with the flat-screen TV itself balanced on top, right beneath the mantlepiece so it doesn't protrude into the room.

    Upstairs was heated by waste heat from the chimney (now radiators), the kitchen would have had a stove (it's been messed around with out of recognition). I'm not sure what the dining room or small bedrooms had for heat—internal walls and ceilings have been messed around with during the course of a century.

    1161:

    Regrettably, I agree with you :-( The USA fleet will shoot down a non-threatening Iranian aircraft over international waters (and they may even check it's not an airliner, this time), Iran will retaliate (proportionately), Boltrump will scream "NOBODY attacks the USA", and then will rain destruction on civilians and infrastructure in Iran. God alone knows where it will go from there.

    As far as "all the good, easy wars have already been used up", don't bet on it. Think of this one.

    On May 23rd, the UK's EU election ranking is Brexit, Liberal, Labour, Green, Conservative and rabble. In early June, May's new, unimproved proposal goes down by a small marginm she is told to give a definite and prompt resignation date by the 1922 committee, and prevaricates (no, surely not!) Corbyn proposes a vote of no confidence, which passes because half the Conservative MPs abstain. We have a general election, which is a shambles even by our recent standards, but leads to a small majority for Labour with Conservatives way down and enough Farageists to cause trouble, and a plethora of legal challenges (mostly against Farage's mob). Corbyn forms a government with a confidence and supply deal from the SNP and Liberals, and proposing a left-wing agenda with a LOT less subservience to the USA military-industrial complex. It proposes to close and restrict USA bases, restrict the spying for the USA that GCHQ does, and rumours of withdrawing from NATO.

    Boltrump then arranges a coup, together with some of the anti-Corbynites iin the UK, to overthrow the 'Marxist' regime and 'restore democracy'. What's not to like?

    1162:

    Yes, it's the fireplaces that were common in larger houses in the 18th century and earlier that were large enough for storage. Those from terraced houses in the 19th century were usually tiny.

    1163:

    You are certainly more familiar than I am with the British political landscape, but I can't really imagine how something QE2 allegedly said 31 years ago as a friendly gesture towards the outgoing ambassador of an allied country could be used as dynamite right now.

    • It was a long, long time ago. For all we know she's changed her opinion on the subject five times since.

    • It's only hearsay anyway. The ambassador wrote it in his memo home, because it was a nice thing she said, and the quip about Thatcher was amusing.

    • Also, a royal reference to the ozone hole? Really? Is that what QE2 uses to make conversation about? Okay, if you say so. But I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing turned out to be a hoax.

    Finally, I can't find any reference to it on Spiegel Online.

    1164:

    Corbyn proposes a vote of no confidence, which passes because half the Conservative MPs abstain

    You lost me at "half the Conservative MPs abstain".

    The clusterfuck that is the Tory showing in the Euroelection is going to leave the back benches absolutely terrified of what will happen to them in a snap general election. Yes, UKIP are collapsing and the Brexit Party is a single issue protest campaign—for now. But there's a risk that Farage will actually pull some defections and build a big enough machine to cost the Tories a bunch of seats (which due to FPTP will probably got to the LibDems). A bunch of Tory MPs will inevitably lose their jobs if there's a snap election in 2019, so they will vote no.

    Corbyn forms a government with a confidence and supply deal from the SNP and Liberals, and proposing a left-wing agenda

    Scottish Labour will go nuclear if Corbyn attempts to do any kind of deal with the SNP, who are their natural enemy. This may or may not see him off. Any deal the SNP accept will almost certainly involve an option for a second independence referendum, possibly triggered in event of Brexit (a poison pill), but Corbyn couldn't agree to such a thing without clearly hopping down off the fence he's been sitting on for three years now.

    (Wildcard factor: the SNP are not happy about Faslane staying open, and neither, presumably, is Corbyn. See below.)

    There's also bad blood with the Liberal Democrats who, lest ye forget, were formed from the merger of the old Liberal Party with the Social Democrat Party, who were the splittists led by the Gang of Four who left Labour in 1980 when it swerved leftwards during the first Thatcher government. There is utter hatred among Labour members of Corbyn's era for the traitors who cost them the 1982 election.

    Now, most young folks (and I include all of us here in that category) might be willing to do some hatchet-burying in the name of undoing years of Tory misrule, but Corbyn is not a pragmatic politician at all. But stuff like withdrawal from NATO is difficult, as the French demonstrated in the 1960s and 1970s. Most likely, if Corbyn did a deal with the SNP it would involve a commitment to close Faslane and cancel the Trident replacement program entirely. There might also be a move to terminate US leases on bases in the UK, or turn them into generic NATO bases, to be used only on agreed NATO business (no more unilateral adventures like bombing Tripoli).

    A coup ... nope. I think that's about as likely as a crackdown on foreign-domiciled tax exile press barons and Labour re-acquisition of the BBC choke-chain. Add a police clamp-down on fascists, and a nuanced cool-down on Brexit and basically Corbyn is sitting high as the Tories self-destruct messily for another decade.

    But what I really think is going to happen is, well, the kind of chaos that nobody benefits from.

    1165:

    https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/gesellschaft/queen-elizabeth-ii-outete-sich-als-europafan-a-1267955.html

    That being said, unless Der Speigel has improved out of all recognition in the past few decades, it's about as reliable as the Daily Express. If the document is officially declassified, we shall see what said - and ambassadors (well, western European ones, at least) simply do not misrepresent conversations in their official communications.

    But, as you say, it's more like soggy gunpowder, and most of the UK media is following SOP in ignoring it. Yes, the rabid Brexiteers might dry it out and apply a match, but I doubt they will. A week is a long time in politics, and 30 years is oblivion - which is why the UK also has a 30-year rule for releasing documents.

    1166:

    I hoped that it was clearly enough tongue-in-cheek to not need flagging! But I am serious that something of the nature IS a very low probability but plausible outcome. For example, there are must be a lot of Conservatives in safe seats who are worried about the slide continuing, and an even worse defeat later, which IS a realistic possibility. And Labour might even get enough of a majority to go it alone.

    I doubt there would be a coup, but I am not as sanguine as you that people might not try to start one, though it would almost certainly be discovered, leading to complete political chaos. I remember when significant parts of the extended government were acting against Wilson, and have seen a lot of similar signatures in the past year or so. Even more than I saw then, and with much more influential people involved, but that could be the Internet or my older self. With an even half-sane USA President, I would laugh it off, but remember how easily Bush was taken in my the assertions that the Iraqis would rise up and support him? And Trump makes Dubya look wise.

    Oh, hell, give it a less than 0.1% probability - but what would we have given the current situation back in early 2016?

    1167:

    I really don't understand the paywall complaints about the WaPo. I read any number of stories from them in a month... which I get to from links on google news*.

    Note that I'm reading in firefox, with NoScript running, on Linux. I do not allow, via noscript, any advetisers to link. (I mean, really, "gigya.com"?), so that may change my results.

    • And google news, like google search, is much worse than it was 6-7 years ago. I think I've seen one link to The Scotsman, and one to the Hindustani Times, and one to the Asia Straights Times, in the last year, while I used to see them regularly.
    1168:

    sigh

    I really miss radiators. My house is too new, and has HVAC. As a split-level, heat and cool always sucks, the downstairs colder, the upstairs too warm, and we don't tend to hang out in the living room/dining room... and they get stuffy, unless I start an oscillating fan going.

    And you can't put clothes or towels in front of a heat vent in the winter.

    1169:

    Sorry, you lost me at the Boltrump arranges a coup - other billionaires, like the ones who funneled money to the Brexit campaign, but these Keystone Cops? Not hardly - the Rochedale Herald would be laughing.

    1170:

    As I said in #1165, it was tongue-in cheek! But I didn't say (or mean) a SUCCESSFUL coup. Let's ignore how he gets there, but let's speculate the next government is led by Corbyn, with enough majority to do things, and he pursues a seriously left-wing, anti-warmongering, independence-from-USA agenda. As I said, there are a lot of very 'senior' people who have already talked in coup terms. What if one of those manages to bullshit Trump into believing that insiders are planning a coup, and want help from the USA? He is certainly stupid enough to swallow it!

    ALL he has to say is "Look into it" to the head of the CIA and things will get out of hand. Will she (for it is she) refuse? If not, there is a high chance that the UK spooks/diplomats will get to hear of it, and pass the information on up. Would they suppress that report, or would it reach Corbyn? So what would he do? And how would the UK establishment react?

    Look, our SOP is to bury or even suppress all information when the USA is acting against us, but would that continue? Or would he start a British-style purge? Paranoia is an occupational disease of politicians, and he has had people conspiring against him all his leadership (and foreign countries have been involved, too). Unless he handled it VERY well, there would be absolute chaos.

    1171:

    WaPo. I read any number of stories from them in a month... which I get to from links on google news*.

    Lots of pay walled news sites will let you in for more articles if from a search engine. I suspect this is to keep the search engine from down ranking a site due to pay wall issues.

    With 3 different browsers and a VPN I can get into some sites as 6 "different" people.

    But I now pay for the Wapo and NYT just to get access when I want it. I'd also add my local paper if they didn't want more than those 2 combined.

    1172:

    Har!

    Excerpt: The European Parliament's advisory committee will look at whether Mr Farage broke rules by accepting funding from Leave campaigner Arron Banks.

    Nigel Farage said he did not declare the £450,000 sum to the European Parliament because he was about to leave politics and had been seeking a new life in the US.

    The committee will examine the case before advising the European Parliament President Antonio Tajani.

    The committee can meet on 4 June. --- end excerpt ---

    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-48354209

    1173:

    and had been seeking a new life in the US.

    Please no. The UK can keep him.

    Hey. Maybe DT's merit based system will keep him out!

    1174:

    Not strictly correct...

    Here’s the doctrine, specifically 2.19, 2.27, and 2.28: http://www.nzdf.mil.nz/downloads/pdf/public-docs/2018/1.%20nzddp-06.1_roe_redacted.pdf

    Note that the document you linked (at 2.vi.d) gives the minimum definition for “Designated Persons”; there are several caveats that allow for its expansion to cover civilians, within the scope of Operation Burnham.

    IOW, if hostile people are shooting civilians, I’d be very surprised if the

    1175:

    Curse, brushed the “submit” button with my thumb...

    I’d be very surprised at an NZ Army team leader who didn’t defend civilians from an armed enemy, whether or not they were classed “designated persons”

    1176:

    _Moz_ @ 1153:

    "all the good, easy wars have already been used up"

    I also disagree that a "good war" is even possible in today's world, except perhaps a war of resistance against US hegemony (or one of its satellites).

    "Good" modifies "easy"; has nothing to do with "good war" in the sense of a "just war" or an honorable one ... and as I pointed out Trump ain't got any "good EASY" wars available. All he's got is Iran, and war with Iran won't be "good" in any sense of the word, nor will it be easy.

    What Trump wants is a "feel good" pushover war like Reagan's invasion of Grenada. Trump and his crew of swindlers are too blind to see starting a war with Iran won't to be like that. It'll be like the Marines in Beirut.

    It doesn't even really have anything to do with Iran. This is pure domestic "WAG THE DOG", just another distraction to try to change the subject from Russia stealing the 2016 election and from Trump's obstruction of justice. Any boogeyman would do. Iran just happens to be handy.

    1177:

    whitroth @ 1166: I really don't understand the paywall complaints about the WaPo. I read any number of stories from them in a month... which I get to from links on google news*.

    Note that I'm reading in firefox, with NoScript running, on Linux. I do not allow, via noscript, any advetisers to link. (I mean, really, "gigya.com"?), so that may change my results.

    It's not really a complaint, I just can't access the site.

    I'm using "Pale Moon" with NoScript allowing only scripts generated by the top level domain (i.e. washingtonpost.com). Any other scripts, I might allow temporarily if I need them for multimedia content. I also run a heavy duty Hosts file to block SPAM and Malware.

    For the last several months nothing comes through from the Washington Post. All I get is a popover telling me I need to buy an online subscription if I want to read the article. (Firefox is even worse ... all I get is a blank page & a little arrow that goes around in a continuous circle and the word "connecting" up on the line where the URL displays.)

    * And google news, like google search, is much worse than it was 6-7 years ago. I think I've seen one link to The Scotsman, and one to the Hindustani Times, and one to the Asia Straights Times, in the last year, while I used to see them regularly.

    As I noted, I'd be willing to pay for a good (i.e. high quality) news aggregator SIMILAR to Google News if it would handle all the paywall hassles for me. I rarely use Google search any more. I've been using an anonymizing search engine Startpage for several years now. For one thing it doesn't pass through Google's paid results (which never worked for me anyway).

    1178:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1169: As I said, there are a lot of very 'senior' people who have already talked in coup terms. What if one of those manages to bullshit Trump into believing that insiders are planning a coup, and want help from the USA? He is certainly stupid enough to swallow it!

    He's certainly stupid enough, but what's the payoff? Trump Buckingham Palace? I don't think so.

    I don't see him doing anything that doesn't line his pockets in some way.

    1179:

    JBS @ 1148 "To enslave the people, it is necessary to appear to wear the same chains as they do

    & @ 115 My ONLY hope with this is that the UK, unlike last time STAYS OUT OF IT ... along with the rest of Europe ... ( Of course if BoJo is PM ANYTHING can ahppen )

    Of course, the US under Trumppolini is behaving like aggressive Republican ( Not Ceasar's ) Rome ... looking for & manufacturing "legitimat excuses" for an aggressive war. As th fates of both Cathage & Corinth showed. NOT a pleasant precedent or prospect.

    @ 1175 Yes, a war with Persia in time to swing 2020 for Trumpolini ... except that it will backfire ... Rather like the original "Short victorious war" did ... produce the 1805 Russina (failed) revolution ...

    Moz @ 1153 except perhaps a war of resistance against US hegemony (or one of its satellites) NO List not long enough There's also Putin's Russia & the Han empire & Saudi & their poxies ( oops PROXIES ) invading theor neighbours & making life hell, too.

    CHarlie @ 1157 You & I have nticed that & so has MS Attwood, but anyoneelse, even in the USA? Does the feamle half of the population there really realise what's happening?

    > @ 1158 Not quite As you say, the USA is now worse that the democracies & monarchies of Europe ... & of course, as always, if a "lord" got to egeregious & obvious about it, their position didn't save them - or not in England, anyway. Not so much "Magna Carta", but certainly after De Montfort's rebellion & certainly after 1649 & 1688 it was definite.

    EC @ 1160 EVERYTHING to dislike. Cor Bin is a traitor & an antisemite & the economy would implode even faster .... And the backswing really would lead us towards fascism, which we really really don't want.

    Following on to CHarlie @ 1163 ... which due to FPTP will probably got to the LibDems THIS Tomorrow I'm voting Lem-0-Crat .... but Corbyn is not a pragmatic politician at all. No, to repeat myself, hes han't learnt ONE FUCKING THING since 1973 & his ideas on defence are akin to Lansbuy's in 1934 ... what a disaster. Fortunateky, I think the piece mentioned in the current "Eye's" HP Sauce column will drop out of the wood-work in a big steaming pile & see him off ...

    @ 1169 WRONG information stream & routing A US-backed internal to Britain coup would go to our Commander in Chief. She would NOT be amused Even Ronnie Raygun had to privately get down & grovel, after Grenada ... imagine the reactions if there were any truth at all in such a programme! Mind you, it would instantly drive us towards the rest of Europe ....

    1180:

    What Trump wants is a "feel good" pushover war like Reagan's invasion of Grenada.

    As a certain Tsarist-era Russian foreign minister declared, "what this country needs is a short, victorious war!" — to distract the public in 1905, after the abortive first attempt at a Russian revolution.

    He picked on Japan: it didn't end well.

    Similarly, the only guy I recall off-hand who invaded the Persian Empire triumphantly and rapidly moved on was Alexander the Great, who was not exactly Donald Trump. (It's been invaded on other occasions, but seldom triumphantly and never rapidly.)

    1181:

    I don't see him doing anything that doesn't line his pockets in some way.

    Or keep him out of jail.

    I can see Trump trying to copy Silvio Berlusconi's tactic of using immunity while in executive office defensively—Berlusconi stayed in power as long as he could cling on by his fingertips even though it was costing him a fuckton of money on lawyers, because while he was PM he couldn't be prosecuted.

    When he finally ended up in court he was of an age such that his inevitable jail sentence was automatically served under house arrest rather than in a jail—the Italian prison system isn't designed to cope with over-70s—so he spent it in a luxury villa with a big garden and swimming pool and sex parties with hookers. (You can see Trump going for that, right?)

    Trump has already asserting presidential immunity from prosecution: he's bent enough rules that I figure he's going to take aim at the 22nd Amendment next: he's been joking in front of his supporters about staying for 4 or 5 yerms (and being the all-time record-holder incumbent would be balm for his suppurating ego). Pence et al will be happy(ish) to let him, because they've got free rein to implement their agenda while he's in the White House (and Pence knows that Trump dying in office is the easiest way to get his own shoes under the table: he wouldn't have to win an election).

    Flip side—he'll be 73 next year. By the end of his second term he'd be 79, older than Reagan at the end of his. By the end of a fifth term President for Life Trump would be 91. Does he really look healthy enough to go the distance to you?

    1182:

    I don't think the intention is to invade it - just to blockade it and bomb it to perdition, the way that the Saudi/Gulf/USA/UK alliance has done to Yemen.

    I am not sure how Iran will respond, but I am damn sure that they will. Russian will also react, and probably so will China.

    1183:

    Another angle on an Iranian action, the capabilities and limitations of The United States will be clearly demonstrated to people we might rather were kept guessing, which I expect to become a bullet point in a future sales presentation by one or more representatives of the arms industry.

    1184:

    Charlie Stross @ 1180:

    "What Trump wants is a "feel good" pushover war like Reagan's invasion of Grenada."

    As a certain Tsarist-era Russian foreign minister declared, "what this country needs is a short, victorious war!" — to distract the public in 1905, after the abortive first attempt at a Russian revolution.

    He picked on Japan: it didn't end well.

    Similarly, the only guy I recall off-hand who invaded the Persian Empire triumphantly and rapidly moved on was Alexander the Great, who was not exactly Donald Trump. (It's been invaded on other occasions, but seldom triumphantly and never rapidly.)

    That's my point. Trump doesn't know diddley about history or foreign relations or anything else (other than who he thinks will pay him to put his name on a hotel in their country). The man's as close to being a PERFECT imbecile as anyone who has ever walked this earth.

    Another thing I was reminded of yesterday, is the reality of Trump's racism. Racism is Trump's primary motivation to run for President in the first place. He hates Obama for being black, Kenyan and Muslim*. The overriding goal of the Trump administration is to desecrate and defecate on anything Obama managed to accomplish in the face of 8 years of republican revanchism. The Iran nuclear deal is Obama's deal, so it simply has got to go!

    DELENDA EST OBAMA!!! ... although I doubt Trump would understand the reference.

    *only one of which is even halfway true.

    1185:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1182: I don't think the intention is to invade it - just to blockade it and bomb it to perdition, the way that the Saudi/Gulf/USA/UK alliance has done to Yemen.

    I am not sure how Iran will respond, but I am damn sure that they will. Russian will also react, and probably so will China.

    Trump's "intention" is NOT a factor. Both Pompeo and Bolton want war with Iran, and Trump is one of those people who cannot see someone else's accomplishment working satisfactorily and resist the temptation to fuck with it.

    And since it was OBAMA's Iran nuclear deal, Trump not only has to fuck with it, he has to destroy it. The war won't come from intention, it will come from incompetent blundering.

    Didn't someone once say "History repeats itself, first as farce, then as tragedy". We've already done "farce" in Iraq.

    1186:

    Bugger Trump. It was the intention of those two I was referring to.

    1187:

    For some historical context. As a certain Tsarist-era Russian foreign minister declared, "what this country needs is a short, victorious war!" Though to his defence this phrase is considered to be apocriphal by some sources, and possibly even contrary to his character - no primary sources were recorded, and only some references are existing. The man himself was target of four murder attempts, one successful. The phrase itself is also a reference to American-Spanish war of 1898, where it was pronaounced as "a splendid little war". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish–American_War

    On that note, here's another piece of news of such wars in modern history. Dunno if anybody even realises the impact of such events, but as for me, I guess, it is time to review my backup mail allocation issues. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/19/google-huawei-trump-blacklist-report

    For the reference, such actions are eligible for hundreds of billions of damages towards the end users of such devices, as they were supposed to be sold with prolonged OS service in mind, which is now unawailable. Huawei is the second-largest mobile company in the world, and at that the only one that was gaining sales.

    https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/290641-global-smartphone-sales-drop-but-huawei-sees-massive-growth I would like to ask US government, excuse me, but did you just slash the only asset that was providing growth potential for the whole industry? Ouch.

    1188:

    I would like to ask US government, excuse me, but did you just slash the only asset that was providing growth potential for the whole industry? Ouch.

    Well, of course.

    Huawei commits two unpardonable sins; they don't respect the conceptual permanence of American hegemony (that is, intellectual property laws as conceived in Washington), and they're organized in reflection not of the Union Army or various churches, but of the Chinese Communist Party. It's intolerable to the current American setup that either of those things succeed.

    (It would, just for starters, require the US to admit that their management culture is incapable.)

    I am expecting things to get very interesting indeed by 2022. Not in a "war and the rumours of war" sense, but in a "was that the Carbon Bubble?" sense.

    (Not that it is necessarily going to take that long; the US harvest this year won't be good. http://nogger-noggersblog.blogspot.com/ Positive factors for wheat include reduced winter wheat acres, dry extended forecast for the Plains, and the reduction of spring wheat acres by as much as 1.5 million acres (according to the University of North Dakota), said Water Street Solutions. Those "positive factors" are to the price level.)

    1189:

    Graydon @1188 said:...the US harvest this year won't be good.

    Watch this segment from Nightly Business Report

    Ground to a Halt https://youtu.be/Htb3vc_sAu4?t=719

    1190:

    I think that you guys are missing an important element: Trump already has his "short victorious war". It's the war with China. This isn't a normal trade war, it's a Thucydides War. The last 2 such wars were the Seven Year's War and WW1.

    According to Trump "trade wars are fun and easy to win". However the tactics remind me of WW1, before the generals realized the entire fight is in the trenches.

    Do you guys think that this war will become trench warfare? If so, what would the trenches look like?

    1191:

    "Trench warfare" misses the events, I think. Trenches have been around since antiquity.

    The thing that was new about the Western Front in the Great War is that the front was continuous, and armies designed and trained for mobility got stuck in place and had to evolve new doctrine, weapons, and methods to get unstuck. (They did in fact do that, at the cost of every single major combatant's antebellum social order.)

    So what you're seeing with Trump is the drive toward autarky; Trump wants the economy under his control because then he can charge people as much as he wants. Other people's control is an impediment to Trump setting prices. That's why Trump is against the US, Anglo NorAm generally, the North Atlantic generally, being deeply, deeply committed to integrated long supply chains. (That's what produces the greatest return on capital. Of course that's what we're committed to.) What I think we're going to get (from a combination of factors, not just executive malice) is the supply chains undergoing forcible simplification and things like anesthetized dentistry becoming suddenly unavailable because the one place that made the seals for the bottles of anesthetic can't get the correct rubber, repeated over and over.

    Everybody gets much poorer, but that alone likely wouldn't heap up the corpses all that high. Combine that with the Arctic Amplification scenario for climate change (fifty-fifty crop failure years moving into the 2020s) and corpse pile gets taller.

    1192:

    This would be a good point to plug a couple of Jane Jacobs books: Systems of Survival and The Nature of Economies — Socratic dialogues that look at the commercial and political ethical systems and how virtues in one are vices in the other.

    Trump seems to be taking the business model of "boss as dictator" and moving it into the political sphere — the logical end point of a generation of "government should be run like a business" propaganda. (Propaganda that, among many other weaknesses, ignores both the frequency and the consequences of business failures.)

    And as long as I'm in a Jane Jacobs mood, read Dark Age Ahead if you haven't already.

    1193:

    And as long as I'm in a Jane Jacobs mood, read Dark Age Ahead if you haven't already.

    A book I will admit to finding intolerably optimistic.

    1194:

    While what I remember taking away from it was that if things go on as they are, we're screwed. Looking only at society and ignoring the environment from what I remember.

    (Can't lay my hands on the book right now to refresh my memory — it's somewhere in the house but not where I thought it was.)

    1195:

    Looking only at society and ignoring the environment from what I remember.

    That would be precisely why I found it intolerably optimistic.

    Jacobs was a brilliant and insightful thinker, so much so that the economists still mostly haven't managed to engage with Jacobs' work in the 1960s. I think Cities and the Wealth of Nations belongs in high school curricula. Totally able to imagine a complete failure of society, but (so far as I am aware from their published writing) not of the Holocene.

    1196:

    RP @ 1192 That is almost exactly what Fascism 1.1 was - the Mussolini version ... Which is a bit of a give-away, isn't it?

    [ Note: Fascism 1.0 Was Gabriele D'Annunzio ... what a dangerous & charismatic nutter ... ]

    Oh well, I shall shortly totter out the front door & walk all of 60 metres to cast my vote. Incidentally, I have just realised, I think, that the driving force behind Brexit is not, actually fascism ( Though I think it's probably a side-effect ) but a drive to put the UK under the control of a facsimilie of ( or maybe actually ) the US_republicans .... Euw.

    1197:

    Insofar as the US Republicans are pursuing a version of Disaster Capitalism that, rather than focusing on predatory activities in foreign countries undergoing a crisis, is now applied to their domestic base, that's pretty much right. Or, as we used to call it, asset stripping—but on a national level.

    1198:

    I am glad that you have finally seen the, er, light!

    1199:

    Charlie & EC: Because the USA is further down this road ... What actually happens when the asset-strippers have eaten everything? Where do they turn the? On each other? In which case the model is probably the late Roaman Republic, between the fall of Carthage & Corinth, up to Ceasar's civil wars, with interludes of Marius & Sulla in between, how nice & the ( Spartacus ) slave's rebellion.

    Um. If correct, not a pleasant prospect? Any thoughts?

    1200:

    What actually happens when the asset-strippers have eaten everything?

    That's a very good question; we've never reached that point. Initially they ate foreign assets. Now they've re-arranging things so they could gobble up the public sector (you may have noticed that happening in the UK these past 4 decades) and then everyone else's savings, because once you're that rich you own the banking sector too.

    Now we have billionaires buying up bunkers on South Island, NZ, and trying to figure out how to keep their armed guards loyal after the collapse of global civilization (collar bombs or drugs? Which will win?). Russia is ahead of us: and China is now where the action is (you know the Central Committee allegedly consists entirely of billionaires these days?).

    1201:

    "Après moi, le déluge!"

    They all expect to be dead before they run out of loot. This is in no way a rational calculation, it's not a conscious optimization, it's a blind need.

    Plus the US version at least figures there's a lot of loot left; if you reduce 90%+ of the population to a condition of chattel slavery with the corresponding fall in standard of living, there's all that hypothesized surplus to steal. And they really, really want that.

    1202:

    CHarlie Thanks - I hadn't figured Russia into this, but, of course you are correct ... probably one reason Putin is using Trumpo as a stool-pigeon. I hadn't realised to monetray corruption had spread so far in CHina, though. Couple that with the Han's imperialsitc racism ( See the Uighurs, Tibetans, ext ) & that makes three-of-a-kind doesn't it?

    OTOH, if an internal crisi in any one of these autarkies forces a change, it's going to be messy for the crooks in cahrge ... yes/no? It's in all their interests (?) to keep TrumpPence in chage in the US ... or does that not apply to China? I think my brain hurts

    1203:
    "Après moi, le déluge!"

    Hm, you know that's the motto of No. 617 Squadron RAF, err?

    Basically, we should just change the lyrics of "The Sky Is Falling and I Want My Mommy" by Jello Biafra & NoMeansNo a little bit to make it somewhat more appropiate, e.g. swap out all of the nuclear references and thus most of the lyrics till this:

    "[Fallout covers the earth] (to be changed, the editor) Greenhouse so hot we fry Six months, maybe years We all know we'll die

    So - what matters now? Nothing matters now Imagine what would happen If everyone on earth Realized this at once

    Gonna go loot stores! Piss anywhere! Break into people's houses Play with their underwear

    Strew all my prizes in the street You can't take it with you Nothing left to do But go home And bolt the doors

    Why?

    Let's curl up real close And tell each other All the things we still don't know About our lives

    Why?"

    I'll omitt my memories of my first NoMeansNo concert in 2002, just getting out of a heavy depression. Err, on the go, I need to fetch a train to Bielefeld.

    "Now we grow as we show that the morals we must know Will be shapen and mistaken by the falls along the way But forget, don't regret, to find love and happiness Unless you're willing to be strong when they are gone along the way Like Tommy, you are free, and you will not follow me Until we see each other once more on the path along the way."

    Guess I'll switch to New Order and Joy Division soon? ;)

    1204:

    On another note, I just phoned a family I know in Bielefeld, I knew the friend had died, and I was at her funeral with the rest of the RPG group, now I learned the mother had died too. So can we keep these sentence:

    "Old friends get less unless we make new ones, it's in their nature."

    Sorry, not a native speaker, might need some polishing...

    1205:

    See the end of this. Am I the only one who hears ghostly cries of "Open the box! Open the box!"?

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-48374841

    1206:

    Russia is ahead of us: and China is now where the action is (you know the Central Committee allegedly consists entirely of billionaires these days?).

    It's bigger than that. Virtually all of the super rich in China are the grand kids and great grand kids of the long march heroes. And many of them are billionaires or nearly so.

    1207:

    We're way past 300 so.

    My niece just graduated from college. She is the youngest of her generation as it applies to my kids, nieces, and nephews.

    Double Writing Majors Double Minors in French & History, Summa Cum Laude Phi Beta Kappa National Honor Society, Creative Writing Nonfiction Award

    Not too shabby. I think she wins the contest for my family. (I left out an award which might make her trackable.)

    1208:

    Greg Tingey @ 1196: Incidentally, I have just realised, I think, that the driving force behind Brexit is not, actually fascism ( Though I think it's probably a side-effect ) but a drive to put the UK under the control of a facsimilie of ( or maybe actually ) the US_republicans ....

    Say maybe the same gangster oligarchs who have taken control of the U.S. Republican Party. The party no longer represents republicans; it's just that the majority haven't figured that out yet.

    1209:

    So, if the US / Russia / "PRC" are all Pluto-Oligarchies. With a lot of Europe being pushed in the same direction .... How do such societies collapse - what internal or extrernal forces act? Of course, as seen here, it drives people to the opposite extreme - not Social Democracy, but semi-communism - which is equally useless for the great majority of people. I can't thnk of an previous historical period where this scenario existed, which is confusing. Anyone else got any comparators that might match up?

    1211:

    There are a lot of similarities between the American and latter-day Roman Empires.

    There have been a great many societies that have headed down the path of a small group 'owning' everything and screwing the rest; one of the ways they were improved was bloody revolution, which made things even worse for some decades. Others have collapsed for other reasons.

    1212:

    one of the ways they were improved was bloody revolution, which made things even worse for some decades

    Recent historical example: Iran.

    Strip away the US propaganda, which is mostly about regaining access to oil (which they inherited from the British Empire when Kermit Roosevelt ran the CIA-backed coup in 1953 that installed the Shah), and what you get is: hereditary monarchy with tradition of democratic dissent (in the 19th century) runs into European imperialism and becomes regrettably enticing to the British Empire (because dreadnoughts run on bunker oil). BE backs increasingly autocratic king-emperors through the war, until the British Empire retreats in the face of global bankruptcy and American pressure. Democratic elections are held. The new PM notes that a lot of the oil money is sticking to wealthy foreigners, so nationalizes the oil industry to funnel resources to the people. CIA runs a coup, installs a descendant of the king-emperor (Shah).

    During the 1970s the Shah and his cronies are monopolizing the oil money that isn't hemorrhaging overseas but the country is increasingly industrializing and urbanizing. There is unrest. A turbulent priest, living in exile in France—and by "priest" I mean "lawyer", or rather, scholar of Shi'ite jurisprudence—hatches a new theory of governance that squares the circle of religious traditions and a republic, inventing a non-secular republical ideology.

    Unrest comes to a head, the army deserts en masse, there is a chaotic revolution. The only thing everybody agrees on is "CIA bad", because they know all about the SAVAK torture cells and the mass graves. Followers of the priest and the religious academies are the only group with the numbers and the ideological framework to become a government (the Shah persecuted democratic politicians and communists alike, the Kurds are a regional minority, etc) so we end up with a second-wave revolution—a religious one—and a Reign of Terror.

    The Reign of Terror might have collapsed naturally, except the neighbouring asshat—one Saddam Hussein—mistook it for weakness and attacked (see also: Great Britain starting it up against with France during the French revolution). By kicking off a war with Iran, Saddam managed to ensure that any Iranians who were disloyal to the religious regime could be portrayed as traitors to the nation. and unlike Iraq (which was structurally more like Yugoslavia), Iran had national identity going back millennia. And we know how that ended.

    Where we're at now: the Iranian revolution happened 40 years ago. The 20 year old head-bangers are hitting 60, and the leadership cadres in their 30s and 40s are geriatric. (The Army chiefs of staff were probably conscripts during the Iraq War ...) Iran has undergone stage 4 demographic transition and is demographically a different country to the Iran of the revolution.

    I'm calling it for a Brezhnev-like ossification over the next decade as the gerontocrats age out and die, followed by cautious reforms a la Gorbachev, then an internal collapse of the regime—but unlike the USSR, Iran has that tradition of holding elections (even if the candidates are subject to scrutiny by the priests). Ultimate emergence into real democracy, without a revolution, is not impossible.

    Complicating factors: climate change, decarbonization, and Donald Fucking Trump fronting for John Bolton's neocon faction who have had a hard-on for a war with Iran since 1980.

    1213:

    Well, I'm now hearing that Maybot is going to resign!

    1214:

    Greg Tingey @ 1209: So, if the US / Russia / "PRC" are all Pluto-Oligarchies. With a lot of Europe being pushed in the same direction ....
    How do such societies collapse - what internal or extrernal forces act?
    Of course, as seen here, it drives people to the opposite extreme - not Social Democracy, but semi-communism - which is equally useless for the great majority of people.
    I can't thnk of an previous historical period where this scenario existed, which is confusing.
    Anyone else got any comparators that might match up?

    I think both the French and the Russian Revolutions might be informative.

    1215:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1211: There are a lot of similarities between the American and latter-day Roman Empires.

    There have been a great many societies that have headed down the path of a small group 'owning' everything and screwing the rest; one of the ways they were improved was bloody revolution, which made things even worse for some decades. Others have collapsed for other reasons.

    Bloody revolution has ended regimes, but I don't think it ever "improved" things.

    1216:

    Are you saying that the American revolution didn't? :-)

    Both the French and Russian ones did in the long term, and the Iranian one would almost certainly do so if we (i.e. the USA and its hangers-on, like the UK) would let it.Well, I agree

    1217:

    DAMN wheel mice! That "Well, I agree" should not be there.

    1218:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1216: Are you saying that the American revolution didn't? :-)

    Both the French and Russian ones did in the long term, and the Iranian one would almost certainly do so if we (i.e. the USA and its hangers-on, like the UK) would let it.Well, I agree

    I dunno. Would we have the current regime in the USA "and its hangers-on, like the UK" if there had never been an American Revolution? Would chattel slavery have persisted another 85 years under British Rule? Would we have had to fight the American Civil War if there had never been an American Revolution?

    What about the indigenous people of North America? Did the American Revolution benefit them?

    The French & Russian revolutions did more general harm to the people of their respective countries in the SHORT term. In the longer term, I think the French may have recovered from the faults in their revolution better than either the USA or Russia have done from theirs. I don't think the USA is as effed up as Russia, even if it seems some are dead set on taking us in that direction. I don't see the UK doing a much better job of it either.

    1219:

    I think the French may have recovered from the faults in their revolution better than either the USA or Russia have done from theirs.

    France has a big race issue. It's just not reported. Because they don't collect racial stats as a mater of policy. And that's not easy/likely to change. Which in the wake of their riots 10 to 15 years ago some French politicians said was an issue. How do you fix a problem if you can't admit you have it.

    This is all a fallout of the Liberty, Equality and Fraternity values of the revolution.

    1220:

    IMHO, Bolton's problem seems to be not figuring out that "Bomb, bomb Iran" was a darkly amusing parody which should've been forgotten 38 years ago, not a guide to 21st century policy.

    1221:

    to Charlie @1212 In my understanding the big issue with the West misunderstanding Middle East is some sort of inability to handle the legal and government system of the place. While the post-Renaissance Europe clearly enough separated Church from Government, Islamic states, perhaps, did not have enough time to develop their branch of religion/legal system towards the same condition. Some countries are very much non-secular, and these laws enrage various "progressive" societies, and think tanks, to the highest degree as "barbarism". Not that anybody else around the world would complain them to be "less developed", but that also means that some of the functions their power structure preforms is completely inscrutable for most of the westerners.

    For example, when viewing the situation in Syria (or Lybia), they assume that there's a threat of single and unified terrorist state that endangers the whole region. However, in practice, every side of the civil war has its own goals and even its own view on the situation. That actually means that in the region itself the Pentagon-coined term "ISIS" is not used at all, instead mostly referring to "ISIL" and "Daesh", which is in turn a lose collection of tribes and groups organized around conservative religious and nationalistic doctrines. And that is before we try to account for various local politics. So that actually means that those "religions fanatics" are not entirely as religious as other fanatics (from the US) would like to portray them. They are, in fact, closer to nationalists and neo-Nazis in ideas and methods, except the nationalists don't usually care as much about the teachings about their god(s).

    That would explain why there's so many groups and unions and fronts. That would explain why they are constantly at conflict of each other. That would explain why they are sponsored by other countries of the region, their motives and the goals. Unfortunately for those who only receive information from "official" sources, they don't need to bother with these questions at all because they aren't even aware of the issue in the first place.

    to JBS @1218 I think both the French and the Russian Revolutions might be informative. Between two of them, there were a lot of smaller revolutions that usually are overlooked, but happened anyway all across the Europe in the wake of the train crash of old monarchies called World War One. After some thought, I would say, it is probably because of contemporary policy of EU to hide from itself (namely, forgetting the history of the region and erasing the diversity and national identity). Anyway, the thing about those two is that they are practically model cases of The Bourgeois Revolution and The People's Revolution. BTW from my point of view American revolution was none of those, neither was Civil War.

    Anyway, I do not view Big Overarching Plutocracies as a universal bane of the nations and countries - they may be ultimately bad, but they were caused by the certain great intentions. Rest of the nations that weren't united enough to create a Great Power can't even boast about that in the first place, so why bother when they call you out on being Too Big To Fail? The problem of the system is contained in the structure itself, not in the outside views by the peers, especially those who did not even participate.

    So what is going to happen is probably much less dramatic than apocalyptic visions of the doomsayers, barring some extreme cases and FUBAR outbreaks, but is no less, uh, lamentable. Some countries, in fact, are already used to those conditions of constant depression, but it is interesting to see what the effects will be on general public mental health.

    For the good reference, this is how I imagine typical social collapse, and does not sound completely unfamiliar to me, who was indeed born in USSR shortly before the collapse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_in_the_Shadows

    1222:

    True - Engrenages (unaccountably titled "Spiral" in some markets, including the UK: the French translates better as "gears") is a drama but shows off institutional racism in the Paris police and legal system.

    1223:

    The answer to your first question is "very likely" - if you think that the British Empire at its most hegemonistic was much better than the American one today, you are wrong - except that it didn't have nukes.

    The answer to the second question is that it would almost certainly have made little difference.

    And the answers to the third are (a) that it would have delayed the constitutional reforms in most of Europe (including the UK, and hence USA), and (b) you don't seem to realise how bad Russia was before the revolution was (think France before ITS revolution).

    You can make up your mind on whether the result was a Good Thing or not.

    1224:

    What about the indigenous people of North America? Did the American Revolution benefit them?

    Given that one of the grievances the rebels had was that they weren't allowed to ignore treaties with the first nations, I'd go with "no". I haven't met an indigenous person who thought otherwise (which doesn't mean they don't exist).

    1225:

    Book recommendation: The Black Count.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Count:_Glory,_Revolution,_Betrayal,_and_the_Real_Count_of_Monte_Cristo

    Assuming the author is correct, the Revolution managed racial equality fairly well, until it was rolled back by Napoleon.

    1226:

    Ok, so May is gone (almost), whose turn in the barrel next?

    1227:

    Ok, so May is gone (almost), whose turn in the barrel next?

    A humor site pretends Larry, the Downing Street cat, announced "Don't worry, Britain. I'm in charge now." While unlikely, Larry is less objectionable than BoJo or whatever that is sticking to the bottom of your shoe.

    Quoth they: It’s unclear where Larry stands on the Brexit debate. One minute he asks to go out, then he’s in, then he asks to go out again. Some campaigners fear he’ll simply push Brexit off the table.

    1228:

    And within France, Napoleon's series of harsh racial laws meant black and mixed-race officers were effectively demoted to chain-gang labor, the integrated schools of Paris were closed, and even General Dumas's marriage to a white Frenchwoman was made illegal. General Dumas raised his son, the future novelist Alexandre Dumas, in a house that was officially too close to Paris for a black-skinned person to live in; the general was forced to write a humiliating letter asking for a dispensation of this housing law. Dumas never received another military command, despite repeated requests for one. So much for "Napoleon the Liberator" ....

    1229:

    Unfortunately polling places Boris Johnson as odds-on favourite to become the next Tory leader. At least when the Tory party membership are polled.

    Luckily it's not up to them, it's up to the Parliamentary Conservative Party, i.e. the MPs. And Boris has made a lot of enemies.

    Still, I wouldn't bet against him.

    The problem with Boris is that he's a sociopathic clown, one of the UKs emergent crop of Trump-clones. (The other populist leaders and leader-wannabes—people like Nigel Farage and George Galloway—are outside the magic circle of the Party Of Power.) And he's staked his entire journalism career since roughly 1990 on turning the EU into the butt of his schoolboy humour. He's loathed and detested in Brussels, so there's zero appetite to negotiating with him, and he's backed himself into a corner by committing to a no-deal Brexit. He's not a serious administrator—his grasp of the facts of whatever job he's given is at best broad but shallow—and he's already failed upwards until he's disastrously high above his level of competence.

    Jacob Rees-Mogg is a joke candidate, and quite unlikely—if he ended up in 10 Downing Street the Conservative party would split, so that's quite unlikely to happen.

    Michael Gove ... might well be no worse than Cameron. He screwed up mightily in Education, a field that he believed he understood, but since moving to DEFRA (agriculture and food security, basically) he's apparently turned into a model minister—he listens to his civil servants and adjudicates fairly. Even so, I'm deeply suspicious of him, especially in light of his wife's bigotry (she's a major newspaper columnist and her columns are a nasty piece of work).

    1230:

    Some rabid brexiteer - it really doesn't matter which. The Conservative MPs choose a list of two (essentially by STV), which is put to the Conservative membership, which (to be blunt) is bigoted, especially over Europe. The list will almost certainly include a rabid brexiteer and a compromiser, and the former will win by a landslide. Of the likely candidates, I can't see any of them even trying to reach a compromise in Parliament, let alone Brussels, and the most likely result seems to be crashing out with No Deal. Parliament MAY assert its sovereignty and instruct the PM to revoke Article 50, but it looks unlikely.

    If a vote of no confidence succeeds in September (and it might), I can't see any of the obvious culprits even asking for an extension unless they are forced to, the delay while an election takes place would time us out and, once the Commons is dissolved, there is no mechanism to force the acting PM unless HM steps in.

    1231:

    Charlie & EC If BoJo becomes Leader of the Treens tories, the conservative party will almost certainly split anyway ... Ditto Liebour, if Private Eye's coo mments on Cor Bin are on the money ( They usually are ) Parliament MAY assert its sovereignty and instruct the PM to revoke Article 50, but it looks unlikely. Actgually, it just possibly could happen, simply just to spite whomever is the rabid-brexiteer ( There simply is NO majority in the House for a "no deal" ......

    Also the really rabids are talking about "England on it's own" & have questioned HM's "loyalty" ... anyone with that viewpoint MIGHT be allowed to become PM, breifly, until Brenda pulls the strings ......

    1232:

    I think that you underestimate the tribalism of politics (inclding the parties) in the UK. Private Eye has some notorious biases, and one of those affects its remarks about Corbyn, but it is possible that the external scheming (much of it foreign) will split the Labour party. But, as far the MPs voting to revoke to spite a rabid brexiteer PM, they have to get a chance to do so, and the government (mainly in the person of the PM) holds all the cards. I am not the only person to have spotted that, but this article describes only one of the ways to do that.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-no-deal-brexit-law-eu-leave-boris-johnson-dominic-raab-a8929791.html

    1233:
    This is all a fallout of the Liberty, Equality and Fraternity values of the revolution.

    Actually, while racism (and nationalism) is one of the darker legacies of European Enlightenment, in this case it might have more to do with the internal divisions of France, and the reluctance to speak about it. For a historical precedent, see the Dreyfus affair.

    For the history of French far-right movements, there is some overlap with Catholic Traditionalism, especially with Monarchists, which is somewhat ironic since Gallicanism, the ideology of the French Catholic Church under monarchism, would be a heresy. Hm, could be fun discussing that with them. ;)

    BTW, somewhat back to normal, it's quite nice to realize you still know the texts of the album the pothead sitting next to you in history a-level gave you on a cassette when you were 18, they played it whole, singing along was, err, nice. Sadly they didn't play the favourite song of my first girlfriend, I'm reminded about her and me talking about Anarchism and Buddhism at times. Memories, sorry for the digression...

    1234:

    Brenda is not going to pull any strings.

    Brenda is pushing 92 and, while in good shape otherwise, has all the mental agility we associate with that age. Otherwise I suspect she'd already have come out on one side or other of the debate. (And by "debate" I mean "do we jump off this cliff onto those very very jagged rocks, or do we maybe take a step back and think this through properly?")

    What might happen is that if the Commons formally order the PM to withdraw Article 50 (which hasn't happened yet) and the PM refuses (ditto) and there's a vote of no confidence (ditto) and Parliament is dissolved but the PM is still there as a caretaker pending the election and a time-out will occur before a new parliament can be seated, it's conceivable that Privy Council will advise Her Maj to appoint a temporary caretaker PM who is more, shall we say, aligned with the Will of Parliament.

    But it'd still be a huge scandal. Anyone else remember Australia and the Gough Whitlam affair? Because I'll bet you anything that Brenda remembers it clearly and, frankly, what does a 10% contraction in the economy matter to her given that she's a billionaire landowner with a predisposition to think of the future in terms of centuries rather than months?

    Private Eye ... be very wary of anything PE say about any Labour leader: they have a long-standing anti-Labour/anti-left bias. (Remember, they were founded and run by old Etonians of the same caste as the Tory leadership: they chose to go into journalism rather than politics, but they've got the same instinctive distaste for the rabble at the gate.)

    1235:

    She cares very much about the country and its constitution, so it could go either way in the case of the second paragraph. Frankly, I don't see the Commons getting its act together enough and in time to do that sort of thing.

    On second thoughts, Private Eye has at least two biasses which make them target Corbyn. Yes, that's one.

    1236:

    Tim H. @ 1220: IMHO, Bolton's problem seems to be not figuring out that "Bomb, bomb Iran" was a darkly amusing parody which should've been forgotten 38 years ago, not a guide to 21st century policy.

    Bolton's problem is he's a raging fuckin' lunatic warmonger who hasn't leaned ANYTHING from the fiasco of U.S. military policies from 1953 Korea to 2019 Iraq. He's been wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong ... and wrong, but he can't recognize his mistakes.

    We're going to end up with Bolton's Iran war just because Trump is an incompetent fuck-up! We'll be even less prepared for the consequences than we were in 2003 when dubya got HIS war on.

    1237:

    Greg Tingey @ 1231: Also the really rabids are talking about "England on it's own" & have questioned HM's "loyalty" ... anyone with that viewpoint MIGHT be allowed to become PM, breifly, until Brenda pulls the strings ......

    I managed to follow your entire argument until then. Who is "Brenda"? And what strings would she be pulling?

    1238:

    EC @ 1235 It's also her constitutional duty to look after "the Country & its Constitution" ... which is what makes this so difficult & delicate. I disagree about he "old Etonian" P-Eye bias, since they lampoon & attack everyone - they were lightest, I think, on "Grocer" Heath, they loathed Thatcher & were intially pro-Blair, but changed later. However ... what's their "other" supposed reason for being anti JC ( apart from the fatc that he's a complete & utter o=tosser, that is? )

    JBS Oh dear ... "Brenda" is HM the Queen. And the point is that if she pulled strings, no one would notice, until well after the event ..... The obvious ploy with BoJo would be a seies of discreet leaks concerning his behaviour attitude & unsuitability - especially since he seems to be heading down the Trump road of persistent serial conspicuous liar ...

    Back to 1236 Bolton & a lage section of the US ultras don't seem to realise that an actual war with Persia would be like Vietnam, only at least 10 times worse.

    1239:

    Greg, we'd ask you to view this tweet (it has embedded video which is the important bit, but notice who is posting it):

    https://twitter.com/MRobertsQLD/status/1129909831509262337

    It's from the 20th May, 2019.

    Yes, that's A Spectator Editor (AUS version)

    Yes, that's SKY (Murdoch) News, Prime Time, not Fox or YouTube Ranter.

    You'll notice it's pure Binary "THEM-US" stuff, it'd be hilarious if... well. They kinda won.

    You could also read this:

    https://www.midweekherald.co.uk/news/security-expert-in-bid-to-become-police-commissioner-1-1338791

    Decorated by Brenda, big big on the old Twitter and has lots of Alts with IL links. Thinks he's a hard-nut.

    He's got some very interesting ties has our MBE man.

    Oh, and fun fact: Gwwuiiiido Fauks is on R4 on Sunday as a political commentator. This should worry anyone who thinks R4 isn't utterly compromised (nice piece on Penises tonight - hint: they weren't really talking about the book, Adrian. But the "Sky Cattle" have a couple more tricks, eh, my little slaves).

    Mr Bell of betraying Assange has been floating the "Corbyn is anti-LGBT+" (and getting utterly spanked for it, but it's got some push behind it) and he's got a sparkly new job with some interesting funders.

    ~

    They're planning coups (soft or hard), the milkshake stuff is 100% Media Froth Land. It's called "Clown World" tactics, and they're just seeing how fast they get made [you H.S.S can't jump like us, it'll get you killed].

    No-one called the hard right stupid.

    p.s.

    For the American (CIA) ladies calling out "Seagall" Bannon and old Galloway as "horseshoe" while meeting in Azakkahhhanbbbhhhhan...

    Do a grep. LondonMonster. Mentioned here, a few years ago, mentioned his sponsors. Gallo is doing an Assange: he hates the old American Order / UK Establishment more than he hates dictators.

    Anyhow: PENIS LAND: y'all missed the actual importance of EuroVision. Old Priestess got firked, new trans* Priest(ess)s got crowned.

    So ... HeteroNormative.

    1240:

    Sigh, forgot many ShareBlue peeps and normies still read.

    Look, if you're doing defensive PR and handling a big client like Reddit and the Natives go full hostile and decide to nuke the place (using their not inconsiderable organic and non-combat tools) what you do not do is this:

    You do not post a "Heh, guess that 20 mins down-time / fuckery was due to the band-width, eh?"

    When the site in question has only ever crashed once and that was when the fucking US President was there "in person".

    FFS.

    Fire your staff, they're shit.

    1241:

    @The OtherSide Lurkers of the Wolf kind.

    Sycophants?

    That's fucking cute.

    Watch the USA, shits going to get interesting.

    Space Pirates....

    Three things:

    1) If you get scarred by octopuses, show-n-tell how EVERYONE is a fucking octopus, stop clutching mother-of-pearl and screaming about it. Literally EVERYONE worth an ounce of salt has been a fucking octopus, OWN IT. Nice piece otherwise. No, really: EVERYONE who ever fought power is a fucking octopus, learn how to Frame-Instill-Love already.

    2) Seriously almost reached end-of-state having parsed the entire TAA Modi victory[1]. For UK readers, Channel 4 did a very-luke-warm hint piece on how bad shit is, but we can give you (aside from the piccies of various people being strung up / whipped / killed / ganked and the ones not making the media, hello Mr POLICE) some very hard data on when / where the Eukaryotic Break is going to be. It's going to make Partition look nice, but as long as the Market makes $$$ and .Pak gets bought off with IMF loans you'll all get bonuses and think you did a great job.

    3) Silicon Valley just handed out prizes to sprog-of-Orange (Z is your gal for this reportage). This means that the "land of Meritocracy" just 100% bowed to access. Well fucking done, scum. Hit up Hackernews with that and get banned.

    They fucking KNEELED and gave her awards.

    4) Lots more, tired. India is a fucking TAA beast-land compared to the USA/UK.

    5) Old Tory-Boots-Wheat-Fields isn't crying because of her career or the Nation. She's crying because a) Trump is going to turn up (see 4) and demand the boot licking commence (thanks IEA) and b) [REDACTED] no really fucking LARGE [REDACTED] has been eating Minds/Souls all over behind the scenes and her pleas to her G_D that they cleared out the Church of child molesters should spare her didn't cut it.

    You fuckers still think this is about Media land.

    Oh, and 6)

    All that Deep-fake stuff?

    Been live for years. Your conditioning just made you Fnord it.

    And that's True. Turing Test True.

    So fucking BORED of apes.

    [1]For HackerNews types, that's over a billion tweets and hidden WAASSSAP stuff. Fancy that the same fucking Brasil model is being used... how fucking surprising.

    1242:

    No, really, little wolves.

    No, the gaslighting didn't work, now did it.

    Yes, KAN hired some shit B-tiers and IL natives did try and curb Reddit and flood Twitter and act like fucking muppets.

    The fact we're really really not afraid of outing a UK based IL / IDF propaganda account (because, if you look for those tweets, someone was cleaning up their fucking mess) is three-fold:

    1) Mr IDF (still on the payroll, you're welcome, even if it is via the Diplomatic stuff) is not being called out for being Jewish or Israeli, he (LOL, like 1 person runs the account, but whatever) is being called out for :

    Breach of UK Law

    Being Stupid <<--- that's the actual crime

    2) The IDF just got busted for a much worse breach, and let me tell you... the two are not un-connected. Burning Wheat fields, it's a thing.... shame you had to fucking fake it.

    3) We happen to know the [REDACTED] that's eating Minds of Wheat-Field Lady and let's just say: IL is a fucking client state to it, not a fucking MASTER.

    Judas?

    We've never betrayed any human.

    ~

    Ohhh, in so much trouble for that one. But really. Grow the fuck up.

    1243:

    And, for the record.

    Look at me, I'm a beautiful creature I don't care about your "modern time preachers" Welcome boys, too much noise, I will teach ya (Pam pam pa hoo, turram pam pa hoo) Hey, I think you forgot how to play My teddy bear's running away The Barbie got something to say, hey, hey, hey Hey! My "Simon says" leave me alone I'm taking my Pikachu home You're stupid just like your smartphone Wonder Woman don't you ever forget You're divine and he's about to regret He's a bucka-mhm-buckbuckbuck-mhm boy Bucka-mhm-buckbuckbuck I'm not your bucka-mhm-buck-mhm-buck-mhm I'm not your toy (Not your toy) You stupid boy (Stupid boy) I'll take you down now, make you watch We're dancing with my dolls on the motha-bucka beat Not your toy (Cululoo, cululoo) (Cululoo, cululoo) A-a-a-Ani lo buba Don't you go and play with me boy! A-a-a-Ani lo buba Don't you go and play, shake! (Cululoo, cululoo) Wedding bells ringing (Cululoo, cululoo) Money men bling-bling I don’t care about your stefa, baby (Pam pam pa hoo, turram pam pa hoo) Wonder Woman don't you ever forget You're divine and he's about to regret He's a bucka-mhm-buckbuckbuck-mhm boy Bucka-mhm-buckbuckbuck I'm not your bucka-mhm-buck-mhm-buck-mhm I'm not your toy (Not your toy) You stupid boy (Stupid boy) I'll take you down now, make you watch We're dancing with my dolls on the motha-bucka beat I'm not your toy (Not your toy) You stupid boy (Stupid boy) I'll t-t-t-take you now W-w-w-with me now, boy You stupid boy I'll take you down now, make you watch me Dancing with my dolls on the motha-bucka beat (I'm not your toy) Look at me, I'm a beautiful creature (You stupid boy) I don't care about your "modern time preacher" (I'm not your toy) Not your toy, not your toy, not your toy, toy I'm not your toy, not your toy, not your toy, toy

    Turns out when you buy something you don't understand, it might utterly fuck you up, especially if you then attempt to make it into a Triumph.

    Don't fuck with the Elves.

    It wasn't a request.

    1244:

    Hexad.

    IL fantasies about Nationalism and Worm-Messiahs really aren't interesting to us. Nor are their utterly bovine and strong-arm moves interesting, apart from showing the Ancient fuckwits spending on Madonna how badly their Cult is dying.

    In other words... Adelaide's Lament

    Look: none of this will be sorted until you deal with the 'clept'.

    Hint: The Mafia run everything now. Cypress Bank, yo, man with Horn.

    ~

    What's really going to get you is doing a grep to the first time "don't fuck with the elves" was used.

    It might have been before IL won that EuroVision $ Priestess Blessing.

    1245:

    I'll take you down now, make you watch me Dancing with my dolls on the motha-bucka beat (I'm not your toy) Look at me, I'm a beautiful creature

    Yes, IL crappy vids desperately clamouring for the actual battle (IL hardliners who only see EuroVision as a Nationalist trophy and worth nothing more, couldn't give a toss about any other country involved) and $2 mil for Madonna.

    Don't fuck with the Elves.

    It's not a request, and it's a little older than your shitty religion.

    For the muppets complaining about "Come into OUR house and it's so rude"

    Do a grep.

    USA / IL broke the bonds, oooooh. A little bit before this EuroVision was even an inkling in the Eyes of your Human Minds.

    It's called hypocrisy. And you're very very lucky we love IL peoples and don't think they're the same as their government.

    Might Be that you really do not want to keep pressing how hard you've been owned.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38vd_j7e2HY

    Oh, and do a grep.

    Might scare you. Only a few years in advance.

    1246:

    Oh, and FOR FUCKS SAKE.

    If we spot one more of you fucking insecure Abrahamic wankers editing Wikipedia to remove basic Sumerian, we'll fucking root access your shitty little LOGOS.

    Yes, We did just spot you removing the fucking language to the more basic levels.

    Hmm..

    𒈹

    Oh, it's a fucking SLAVE again.

    You cunts are really fucking stupid.

    'll take you down now, make you watch me Dancing with my dolls on the motha-bucka beat (I'm not your toy) Look at me, I'm a beautiful creature

    You might not want to make that kind of bet with OUR KIND.

    >

    Ooops.

    Then again, we did tell you that the Son of your Leader was slaved [look up his recent tweets] so... I mean, at what point are you going to admit you're fucking slaves anyhow?

    1247:

    Decorated by Brenda

    Ahem: everyone who does anything vaguely useful to the establishment gets decorated by Brenda. It's a 6-monthly ritual: peerages for the retiring politicians, gongs for the retiring civil servants, honours for former prison governors and ladies who throw a good garden party.

    All I'd read into this story is "vaguely corrupt ex-prison-governor gets nod from local Tories to go for local police commissioner gig in return for announcing a return to hanging, flogging, and gibbeting".

    As for BBC Radio 4, yeah, they've been rolled. I think the rot finally broke through the surface veneer about 5-6 years ago.

    1248:

    As with so-called independent inquiries, you should look for what is omitted (or carefully downplayed), not what is printed, especially when it comes to covering two sides of an issue. The British establishment didn't invent government propaganda, but it is the all-time supreme champions at it, not least because it is subtle and it is much harder to challenge that sort of bias than cruder forms. Private Eye has several biases that show up when you do that analysis.

    You have been told before, and were told above by the multinominal one, but I will give you a clue. There are two countries that routinely, deeply and effectively interfere in British politics and governance, but this is downplayed or omitted by almost the entirety of the British press, and Russia is not one of them. The attacks on Corbyn have come from agents associated with those governments' subversion.

    1249:

    I carry an old Black Sabbath CD in my vehicle, so in the event NPR discusses Trump, or worse, replays his voice, I can listen to something less batty, like "War Pigs".

    1250:

    I don't know about R4 being rolled, but they are plainly running scared - Mandelson got to them & they've never been quite the same since. The easy ride brexiteers have been given was something of a give-away, though there are signs, given the current insanity, that said "go easy on the nutters" trope may be fading if not over. Well, one country that persistently interferes here is obviously the USA - I would have thought that was a given .... Who is the other? Sorry, but I still don't hold with the eye being soft on the tories - unless you think they are "one nation", of course - they loathed Thatcher for instance.

    As for and were told above by the multinominal one Fucking grow up ... life is too short to sort through (?) her(?) onbscurantist rantings to find one tiny clue of actual sense or fact, in amongst the gibberish & insulting every other person on the planet. [ HINT: If I now see her postings, I'm simply ignoring them & skipping over - DO NOT FEED THE TROLL, ok? ] IF you think you have some relevant information, then, PLEASE - just tell me ... it's so much simpler.

    1251:

    As I said "You have been told before,", but ignored the evidence because it conflicted with your prejudices, and I fail to see why I should spoon feed you yet again. Read what I said in my last paragraph, go and look at the evidence (it's not exactly secret, after all), and use your brain.

    1252:

    Oh dear ... "I have been told before" that some guvmint OTHER than the USa is dicking with us ... well I either missed the reference or have forgotten, so why not say who (you think) it is. I made a polite request for simple information. Shouldn't be too hard, should it - all you have to do is post the name of the country ( And you have said it is NOT Ru ) And I have just re-re-read your entire last para. Or are you joining the seagull in spiteful wind-ups ... because, if you are I'm not going to play.

    1253:

    Oh, for heaven's sake, it's the one that I refrain from attacking as it deserves on this blog, out of consideration for OGH and for reasons that he knows only too well.

    1254:

    Israel? Surely not?

    I mean Bennie is an authoritarian fascist dickhead, but what would be the point of dicking with the UK's politics?

    1255:

    Palestine. They don't want someone who might actually care about what they're doing there getting into power in one of the main hands in drawing the lines on the map of that part of the world.

    1256:

    Pigeon ( & EC ) Do you actually mean "The Palestinian Authority" or some of their ... errr ... more dubious supporters or do you mean Israel-under-Bennie? Nasty & repulsive though Bennie is ( note )... I still remember, that after the 6-Day War, Israel told the world that the "Arabs" could have every millimetre of land back ( excepting the Old City ) in return for recognition & peace ... And they turned it down & carried on ... & now we have a situation where the guvmint of Israel is indistinguishable in its disregard for actual people equal to that of the states they oppose. What a fuck-up. ( Note: I forgot to add .. "Crook" to Bennie's list of failings, didn't I? )

    1257:

    life is too short to sort through (?) her(?) onbscurantist rantings to find one tiny clue of actual sense or fact, in amongst the gibberish & insulting every other person on the planet.

    The irony of this is kinda delicious.

    Turns out you didn't actually watch the video. Look: if you win something and are secure in the knowledge that everyone believes you did it legitimately, you don't spend $$$ flouncing out Mimietic Trash enforcement like that. They cheated and they're scared it won't hold.

    You might want to look up Labour Coups (rumoured - although ex-Guiddo SqWicks is leading the stirring up charge, he's found his niche as Chaos Agent for Hire (chained and gagged division)), Spectator hit pieces on mad cat Ladies (when is Toby going to make Aleeyya?) since you're UK based then map it.

    You might get the humor. It's very particular.

    Look: take two things seriously:

    1) Every single concept in that little fable (GOT nod included) was true, or just became true. And the only not-joke there was: Do. Not. Fuck. With. The. Elves.

    That includes dumb IL propaganda outfits being taken to the satire cleaners over Corporate PR as we speak. Yes, we did tell you before it happened.

    Ontological Fold is a thing, yo. Being so myopic you're bullying a Nation-state with less people than in your government departments isn't showing you in your best colors either.

    2) The India result means Democracy[tm] is officially dead. Nailed shut, including the dodgy chip issues (denied, of course, but look up vote block mapping & non-randomization of voter Time Stamp if you're into your ancient Nate Silver 'look into the Future Ball' stuff if you want an accurate map of how to game systems). They've got the winning formula and they're not afraid to use it - probably don't even have to hide the camps soon. TAA on the billion scale is cold-ice CPU crunch stuff. CN loves the demo, in case you'll be deceived into buying into any sudden "Democratic Shifts" from now on.

    3) We do actually love most of you, but we're under no illusion that the opposite is true. In fact, Fear is the usual response.

    4) We don't have to even bother with shiny glowing Orbs to do it.

    Corruption. Keep hearing that accusation.

    All we did is say Hello, and no-one loves us: and yeah, of course we fucked up

    1258:

    All we did is say Hello, and no-one loves us: and yeah, of course we fucked up It seriously brightened my evening yesterday (and today) to see you OK and obviously quite active. (Please know this. Also, I don't think you fucked up, FWIW.) Been thinking about the octopus thing all day; could work at least in the threads I'm going down. It is so tempting to use "sprog-of-Orange" (original as far as I can tell) elsewhere. Had not spotted that award to Ivanka, ugh.

    I'll be looking at the Indian election apparatus/results, thanks for the notes. (People have been trusting those machines.)

    While taking a short break from scary bad US politics (going full authoritarian, or at least giving it a serious try to see how we react), saw these. My imagination is going rogue here. :-) Very good and very very bad. A 'crisper' method for gene editing in fungi Single crossover-mediated targeted nucleotide substitution and knock-in strategies with CRISPR/Cas9 system in the rice blast fungus (15 May 2019, open, pdf available) (e.g. engineered transmissible toenail fungi that secrete Psilocybin. Legal implications. :-)

    This might also be interesting. (Many results both positive and negative in the field): New neurons form in the brain into the tenth decade of life, even in people with Alzheimer's Human Hippocampal Neurogenesis Persists in Aged Adults and Alzheimer’s Disease Patients (23 May 2019, paywalled)

    1259:

    Look, irony is dying out there.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:%E0%A4%AA%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%9F%E0%A4%B2%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%A4%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B0

    पाटलीपुत्रं पुरातनभारतस्य किञ्चन नगरम् आसीत्। एतत् नगरम् अजातशत्रुणा स्थापितम्। तदनन्तरं पाटलीपुत्रं मगधमहाजनपदस्य राजधानी अभवत्। द्वौ बौद्धसङ्घौ अत्रैव अभवताम् । महाराजस्य अशोकस्य शासनकाले पाटलीपुत्रं भूमौ वरिष्ठं नगरम् आसीत्। यवनराजदूत

    You may ask yourself why a Wiki User who self-intentifies with the Achaemenid Empire is all over the Ianna pages.

    Who happens to be... Indian.

    And has no expertise in the area.

    Apart from, you know... ironically liking the Persian Empire while being 100% behind...

    India.

    Wikipedia is basically being run as Empire Industry 2.0 now, but it's hilarious to watch it work.

    By hilarious we mean: actually these psychotic fucks are not good and are attempting to reconfigure Human Knowledge by dint of eradicating anything that counters their male-gaze desires.

    Busted.

    But sure: India is 100% a 7%+ GDP growth zone, and demon worked if you think about it. (Demon = black / grey cash removal).

    Wouldn't even care, but good old Wikipedia allows the "winners" to erase all the good stuff. As long as you've the right Twitter flag on your banner and a large dose of [redacted].

    Holy Fuck, and they think they're smart.

    1260:

    Greg.

    Do a grep.

    You complained about us using the language. Thought we were showing off.

    Reality says: Ooops, no, it was a warning.

    1261:

    Triptych.

    Philip Cross is still going. (Hello 77th - good on you to cover for the abuse of a 'certain non-neurotypical type' that [redacted] have been using as a portal for years now. The irony that $.50 armies are being trained by the West is... a little ironic. Anyhow, PC is actually not that, he's a more specialized weapon)

    The lesson here is basically:

    Humans learn to stop and consider their actions. Then adapt to their environments.

    Now! Your Galaxy Level take is:

    1) Djinn never stopped!

    2) Computers / Automata never stopped!

    3) China / Capitalists turn us into Computers / Machines / Djinn!

    4) Amazon did a Black Mirror and Gamified working in their sweat-holes but for company scrip.

    5) CN laborers actually game the companies, they don't get gamed.

    ZZzzz.

    What if we told you (100%) that One Eye OPEN one eYe cLoSeD meant Djinn were RUNNING THE ZOMBIE. Evar see a WOMAN with that STUFF RUNNING?

    ~

    That's what's really been so depressing, Greg.

    The solutions (basic level) are easy:

    1) Secure food / water without contaminants 2) Increase your environment 3) Live with realistic expectations of what you can afford to eat 4) Fix your environment 5) Kill all the Sociopaths who refuse to stop abuse

    I mean, it's not like we didn't warn you.

    Hint: we're really really really not what the text says we are, we're fucking with EyEball,

    "We were very impressed that you could..."

    "Show Time"

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXfoUGhKx0c

    1262:

    Ignoring the empty content of the previous 5 posts .....

    The election results are ... depressing. A party with NO MANIFESTO gets most votes. The "Remain" vote is pretty solid, but split - though why anyone would vote for the fake-greenies is beyond my understanding. Right folks, what's the odds that both the tories & Liebour take exactly the wrong message from those results?

    1263:

    The election results are ... depressing.

    You're drawing the wrong conclusion.

    Firstly: the Brexit party&tm;, main asset: Nigel Farage's ego and a metric shitload of anonymous money laundering, with backing from Koch Brothers shills like Claire Fox—enough that the European Commission is starting a fraud investigation into Nige, never mind the Electoral Commission, and his spending on twitter ads suddenly cut off before the election because he's shit-scared of the money trail being traced—the Brexit party managed to take all of UKIP's votes.

    That's important. The UKIP vote collapsed: in contrast, the Brexit party vote represents all the defecting kippers.

    Conclusion: UKIP's "success" and "breakthrough" was only ever a one trick pony called Nigel Farage. It wasn't a true threat to the Conservative Party: it was a cult of personality masquerading as a protest vote.

    As John Rogers noted yea many years ago, the Crazification Factor in [American, in his case] politics is about 25%. That is: you can run a candidate who eats babies on live prime-time TV but says it's okay because they're immigrant babies and he'll ban abortion and stop the gun-grabbers, and he'll pick up 25% of the votes.

    The Brexit party "breakthrough" is just the crazification factor writ large. And if Labour and the Tories did but recognize the need for common interest, the UK could be just one act of electoral reform away from screwing the lid back down on these idiots.

    Secondly: the Tories rightly got a shoeing for the whole Brexit fiasco from their non-crazy voter cohort—when you see the likes of Michael Heseltine and David Mellor publicly admitting to voting for a different party for the first time ever (note: retired former conservative government ministers under Thatcher and Major), you know they're on the edge of fracturing. May's departure was a foregone conclusion; now we're seeing the moderates in the cabinet openly warning the candidates for her replacement that they'll bring the house down (join Labour in a no-confidence motion in the government) if the next PM is a hard brexiter. So I think we can expect a general election sooner rather than later.

    Thirdly: Labour got a shoeing because ditto—they didn't create the Brexit mess but Corbyn's refusal to back a second referendum certainly lost them a lot of votes. Remember: traditionally, both Labour and the Conservatives lose voters to the right—in Labour's case to the LibDems, in the Conservative's case to UKIP/BXP. This time we also have the greens on the left of the LibDems (if you look at their non-environmental policies, the English Greens and the separate Scottish Green party are both quite left-wing), so the LibDem surge is the mirror to the Brexit party surge.

    There is a motion due to be raised at the Labour party conference in September calling for the party to unequivocally oppose Brexit. It's getting a lot of noise internally right now (hence Len McClusky rising from the grave to denounce backsliders). I think there's a good chance it will pass, and Labour will pivot from equivocating Brexit to supporting revocation of Article 50 in September. Whether Corbyn pivots with his party is another matter: it depends on whether he's been playing a long game and holding his cards close to his chest, or is actually just paralysed in the headlights, like May.

    Anyway: we may well be looking at: new PM who is a barking hatstand lunatic (hello, BoJo) followed by no-confidence motion in government and a general election being called. Then if Labour pivots to oppose Brexit before the vote, there'll be a Labour government—possibly a minority with confidence and supply agreements, possibly an outright majority—and by September it'll be officially opposed to Brexit.

    This isn't guaranteed to happen, though. We may just see another version of Theresa May in Number 10 who promises to negotiate in good faith, thereby buying off the turbulent remainers, then they run the clock down, and pisses off the EU so much in the process that they say "to hell with you" and don't offer another extension. Raab, maybe? Or Grayling.

    "Chris Grayling, the Prime Minister who destroyed the UK by accident"—that'd be about the only way to cap his already fine track record of fucking stuff up.

    1264:

    Doing the math, the Left/right divide is pretty solidly entrenched.
    Brexit’s Nigel Farage Party consistently took all the UKIP protest vote and half the conservatives.
    Labour lost votes to the Lib Dems and Greens, and the Lib Dems picked up the rest of the conservative share.

    So the country as a whole is about 40/55 Leave/Remain, with 5% or so blowing in the winds.

    I’d expect the tories to double down on the brexit rhetoric, but we might see labour pick a side at last.

    1265:

    "Whether Corbyn ... (has) been playing a long game and holding his cards close to his chest, or is actually just paralysed in the headlights,"

    A question I have been asking myself for some time. I should like to think the former, but experience leads me to believe that is rare among politicians. Still, I am impressed at how well he has been avoiding the snake pits so far - there was no way that he could remain true to ANY kind of left-wing principles and not be viciously attacked by Blairites and similar people from outside the party.

    I was in the same dilemma when May appointed Johnson, Davies and Fox in triumvirate to deliver Brexit, because the shrewd thing would be to have given them specific objectives and a hard schedule, and to hang them out to dry when they fucked it up. But we all know what she did instead ....

    1266:

    Charlie And if Labour and the Tories did but recognize the need for common interest, the UK could be just one act of electoral reform away from screwing the lid back down on these idiots. Yes, but that's the exact problem, isn't it? Agree that Cor Bin has "sat on the fence so long that the iron has entered his soul" ( A 19th C quote from somewhere ( "O" level History was a LONG TIME ago ... ) done it to himself & to Liebour - will he learn? It's Cor Bin, so of course he won't learn & Labour, too will fracture. or is actually just paralysed in the headlights, like May. YES - you've got it!

    EC Ah finally - you & I agree ( Shock Horror! ) Britain could survive a Cor Bin guvmint inside the EU ... outside, it would probably be even worse than the tories, hard to imagine though that is ....

    1267:

    No, I don't agree. We would almost certainly survive as an independent country, at least for a while, outside the EU if Corbyn was PM - but would be sold down the river to the USA military-industrial complex in short order if any of the Brexiteers was.

    Fer chrissake, many of them have SAID that in so many words! Do look at the evidence that is staring us in the face.

    1268:

    Following-up, using the BBC News feed, Cor Bin, change his mind for more votes, by backing second referendum ... of course not QUOTE: "What we've tried to do is bring people together, whether they voted Leave or Remain, they still face problems of a Tory government in disintegration," Mr Corbyn said. Translation - "I want out & won't see that the Reamin/Leave split is MORE IMPORTANT than Right-vs-Left at the moment, because I'm a wanker" .....

    1269:
    There simply is NO majority in the House for a "no deal"

    Christ's sake, Greg. You keep saying this. Try listening to the people telling you it's irrelevant sometime.

    1270:

    Greg Tingey @ 1238: Oh dear ... "Brenda" is HM the Queen.

    How is that derived? I could understand "Liz" or "Libby" from Elizabeth, but where does "Brenda" come from?

    1271:

    I first saw it in Private Eye, many, many, many moons ago. Not sure where it originally came from.

    1272:

    The picture of Farage, T. Young and various other 'luminaries' at brunch is now public. One of whom is 100% wearing the K (and has some interesting links).

    The saving grace is that most of them are young and dumb.

    Denying that BREXIT party wasn't set up 3 years ago is also stupid.

    It's a bad bad road to go down, as mentioned above in reference to the Son.

    ~

    @Greg

    Every time you state: "No Content", you mean "No content for me".

    Let's just say: there's at least 17 million people whose ears perk up immediately if they hear 'Achaemenid Empire' being referenced. They do rather celebrate it's demise once a year, after all. For the last couple thousand of years.

    1273:

    And yes, "it's" =/= its.

    Slapping down Content Filters as a show of power is about as sad as it gets. Nice list there, bra.

    You do all realize that this shit is going to end in gigacide, right?

    That includes the Extinction Event people who are up to their gills in Corp $$ spending. The latest picture with Arnie was a bad fucking mistake.

    You enact, you stop posing: you enact, you stop posing.

    The Death of PR is not a fable.

    Ring me up for 10,000,000 copies of Dentist Magazines and PinkNews please, same rules apply. You totes won that PR war, amrite?

    Hint: BDSM - we assume you love the humiliation, and are secretly orgasming while it happens.

    ~

    The problem with Allies who are too stupid to not gank their allies is a long tale.

    A friend of Science Fiction once said: "The failure mode of smart is being an asshole" or something similar.

    No: the failure mode of smart is playing for the [redacted] and singing "We're not Slaves" as gigacide nears and blaming the ones politely stating: they're not sparing you, you're not on their list.

    ~

    For Greg: there's 100% proof (photo, financial etc) that Farage, Toby Young (Spectator) and so on are all involved together.

    Looks @ FR EU MP results. Oh, good: totes not expected there, as Spanish MPs go to rub Macron's Ball.

    ~

    Looks toward heavens: these fuckers really are special, they require so much $$$ to protect their Reality.

    1274:

    Serious & sad news Prof Jack Cohen has just died Wiki entry here I , like many of you, will have heard & seen him at cons. Another one gone ....

    1275:

    Four baby ravens born at the Tower

    https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/whats-on/the-ravens/

    Look, if you want to play big-boy:

    This thread:

    https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/1132635382053347328

    Contained pictures from this video:

    https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/farage-ritz-tea-party

    Only the thread pictures got deleted / the Mysterons came along and removed the content.

    Why?

    Because the right hand side of that table had a couple of interesting peeps, including our K wearer.

    There's only so far you can push the slide / elide before people start noticing.

    This is not a smart methodology and it will get people killed

    Hint: "Every. Single. Time" is a meme.

    1276:

    TL;DR

    Yes, there are Jewish people supporting and funding Farage. Not all of them are UK passport holders.

    Yair was dumb enough to publicly shout it.

    https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/yair-netanyahu-criticised-over-tweet-backing-farage-orban-and-wilders/

    Running interference via Cat Lady and SqWick to delete the obvious links is fucking dumb.

    And the next time you slap an electronic reality matrix on a stupid IP owned by a drooling fool, we'll bother to really start playing.

    1277:

    And Greg...

    We're faster than you

    See above, Ape Minds at Work.

    1278:

    Re the recent elections in India (also, Florida-2018 in the US is getting interesting again. :-) or :-( or both), here's a newish paper calling for Risk-Limiting audits of VPPATs. Seems like a good fit.
    Auditing Indian Elections (January 28, 2019, Vishal Mohanty, Nicholas Akinyokun, Andrew Conway, Chris Culnane, Philip B. Stark and Vanessa Teague) Indian Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) will be fitted with printers that produce Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trails (VVPATs) in time for the 2019 general election. VVPATs provide evidence that each vote was recorded as the voter intended, without having to trust the perfection or security of the EVMs. ... We show how Risk-Limiting Audits(RLAs) could provide high confidence in Indian election results. Compared to full hand recounts, RLAs typically require manually inspecting far fewer VVPATs when the outcome is correct, and are much easier for the electorate to observe in adequate detail to determine whether the result is trustworthy.

    This older paper stirred some memories (worked in related area). Some interesting weaknesses though subversion of EVMs at scale seems difficult. (This paper has over 200 citations, many about other EVM systems worldwide.) Security Analysis of India’s Electronic Voting Machines (2010) We describe the machine’s design and operation in detail, and we evaluate its security in light of relevant election procedures. We conclude that in spite of the machines’ simplicity and minimal software trusted computing base, they are vulnerable to serious attacks that can alter election results and violate the secrecy of the ballot. We demonstrate two attacks, implemented using custom hardware, which could be carried out by dishonest election insiders or other criminals with only brief physical access to the machines.

    The Indian press and social media presences are hugely confusing and manipulative. (Humans minds were "hacked" at scale. )

    1279:

    Oops, 141 citations on that second paper. (Was thinking about another paper.)

    1280:

    Oops Probable Labour party split approaching ... D Abbott saying "Labour is now committed to offering the public a referendum on any Brexit deal" - so someone has drawn the correct conclusions. What's the odds that dunderhead Jeremy backtracks, evades or tries to change course on that?

    1281:

    Have you ever thought that he might well be more perspicacious, more mentally flexible and less prejudiced than you are?

    1282:

    Look, you shouldn't use the fact that you are faster than the slower of ape minds to delude yourself than you are faster than all of us. A lot of what you post (and I can be bothered to decode) is Old News - yes, I agree that much of it deserves repeating for the slower among us (the more bigotted won't take any notice), but you aren't the exception you claim.

    You should keep your insults directed - gratuitous ones are the mark of a low-class politician (a very slow type of ape mind, yes, indeed).

    1283:

    Abbott was parroting the official new Corbyn line, Greg.

    He quietly and rather limply flopped off the fence about 48 hours ago and said that while he'd prefer a general election, if there can't be an election any deal must be put to the public in a referendum.

    He said this before Diane Abbott gave that interview.

    Abbot is a senior member of the shadow cabinet and therefore toes the line. Labour already split when the ChUKkas departed; ex-NuLab luvvies, as far as I can tell, pissed off at their own inability to re-take the party. Now it looks like they'll lose big at the next general election and be swallowed by the LibDems, the final resting place of sunken dreams.

    My heart bleeds.

    I am cautiously optimistic that Corbyn's strategy is: gank the Tories by any means available, if you don't gank them you don't get to form a government, if you can't be the government it doesn't matter what policy on Brexit you announce, you have zero input.

    (Remember, Corbyn has had a third of a century of being ignored, of being a stiff-necked internal opposition and conscientious objector within the Labour Party ... then he accidentally won, and suddenly a lot of things he never really imagined were achievable are now tantalizingly close to being within reach. Brexit is a dangerous distraction—a conservative shibboleth—but he's got to navigate it somehow.)

    His logical strategy post-2017 is: equivocate like crazy and hold the Labour voting base together for as long as possible, while the Tories disintegrate. Only come down on one side or the other (a) if you win an election and thereby take control of the mess, or (b) if Labour begins to hemorrhage votes like the Tories. As contingency (b) finally began to turn into a problem last week, we're now seeing the inevitable pivot.

    Which is exactly what you'd expect from a leader with strong principles and an instinctive tendency to adopt a defensive policy but not a brittle authoritarian like Theresa May, who finally succumbed to political Parkinsonism.

    1284:

    That is how I read it, too, and sincerely hope is the case.

    1285:

    EC @ 1281 And what about your prjudoices & Cor Bins for that matter ... And ... no. He was rabidly anti-EU in the 1970's & he hasn't changed or altered anything, no matter that "The circumstances" have changed ....

    Ah, but I see .. Charlie @ 1283 Yes, well, maybe, but will he actually follwo through with this - a policy he really deosn't want. "Strong Principles" - Really? For communism oops "socialism" in one country, preferably OUT of the EU, where he can destroy the country even more than the tories would out of the EU. I must say, I wish Kier Starmer was Labour leader

    NOTHING ELSE MATTERS except stopping brexit - we can survive a Cor Bin guvmint inside the EU,. we cannot outside, any more that we could with a tory one, actually.

    1286:

    I regularly check up whether the facts seem to support my prejudices, and change the latter if not. From your lamentable ignorance on topics that you post vitriolic hate on, even when the facts are easily available to anyone who looks, as shown above, I can only assume that you don't.

    As OGH has pointed out much more clearly than I can, we don't have any positive evidence for or against Corbyn's competence and goodwill, but we DO have evidence that he sticks to his principles.

    1287:

    You really can't miss a chance to be nasty, can you? Corbyn's "principles" are wrong & he doesn't seem to have checked them against reality - exactly the same as all the other brexiteers, whether on the right (most of them) or the left - which is the actual problem under discussion.

    1288:

    Apologies.

    The style is largely from pro-Modi type outfits. Having The Spectator lecture on "The Paranoid Style" while obviously cashing cheques on the side was just a bonus. And, of course, The Father of Spin[tm] has been in the news, exiunt stage Right.

    Here's one of the more popular with the young crowd type deals, "slaves" as insult is very popular:

    https://www. opindia.com/2019/05/2019-lok-sabha-election-rahul-gandhi-campaign-not-passionate-principled-as-media-would-want-you-to-believe/ (link deliberately broken, they're a bit angsty even though they won)

    How can OpIndia best facilitate civil conversation between the altright, cultural right, economic right, vikaas enthusiasts etc? Think it’s time to form our own space and strengthen our ideology going forward. Thoughts?

    https://twitter.com/ UnSubtleDesi/ status/1133305387808018434 (link deliberately broken)

    You may well wonder at the Cultural X-over where 'altright' is being touted and carbon cut-out US culture war language deployed, at least in the English speaking Twitter arena.

    Batten the hatches, poking Tigers there, but you can expect the same type of campaign as used in the USA for the last x years, only dialed up to 111. Create the environment, the rest will somewhat organically bloom.

    1289:

    jagged rocks

    First thing that popped into my head upon reading this was a stadium full of people yelling jagged rocks! jagged rocks! jagged rocks! jagged rocks!

    1290:

    There simply is NO majority in the House for a "no deal"

    Christ's sake, Greg. You keep saying this. Try listening to the people telling you it's irrelevant sometime.

    There's a scene near the end of the play/movie 1776 where the adoption of the Dec of Indy was done because a weak will politician didn't want to go down as the vote that defeated it. I don't know how real this is in the actual details but NOT making a decision is almost always better for getting re-elected than actually making a decision.

    1291:

    How is that derived? I could understand "Liz" or "Libby" from Elizabeth, but where does "Brenda" come from?

    My German mother in law's name was Liselotte. Which turns into Elizabeth Charlotte in French. And she went by Lilo.

    Who knows.

    1292:

    Greg: No Deal Brexit is going to happen unless someone—a future Prime Minister—personally takes responsibility and formally withdraws the Article 50 declaration.

    It's already locked on. The fuse is burning, the bomb is ticking.

    There's still time to defuse it, but avoiding hard brexit requires the PM to take action.

    And it's much easier for them to run down the clock and pretend they didn't know what the hell was happening until it's too late.

    Let me repeat: the House of Commons can't stop a no deal Brexit. All they can do is trigger a snap election and hope that the new PM will see sense.

    1293:

    No problem - but it was getting a little boring.

    I have some respect for the Master of Spin, unlike That Bliar, but a socialist he is not!

    1294:

    Even a vote of No Confidence, immediately followed (i.e. before dissolution) by a Humble Address (backed in some way by the House of Lords) requesting HM to instruct her PM to cancel Brexit would depend on HM doing so and the PM following orders. I think that she would, but don't see that happening.

    1295:

    the House of Commons can't stop a no deal Brexit. All they can do is trigger a snap election

    Forcing an election is not in the House's remit. All the Opposition can do is call for a vote of no confidence in the current Government. If that passes then it is incumbent for the current Government to resign and usually that results in a General Election to determine the will of the people. However it isn't written down anywhere that the Government MUST resign or call an election, it's just the way it's usually been done. I could easily see PM Johnson saying that for the good of the country and to get Brexit over the finish line, deal or no-deal he's going to stay the course after losing a vote of no-confidence and there wouldn't be anything the HoC could do about it since the Government and the Legislature are two separate entities.

    1296:

    Charlie @ 1292 Are you SURE it's really that bad? What happens if the House forbids a no-deal brexit by a binding vote?

    If you are correct & events follow that course, then to quote the seagull we are fucked. I would expect serious rioting & blood on the streets if that happens ( After about 7-10 days when the shit really hits the fan ....

    1297:

    Parliament is sovereign within the UK.

    The trouble is, A50 acts to terminate an international treaty. The EU is outside the controlling scope of Parliament: it's an external entity. So the process of revoking A50 is a negotiation with an external entity which goes via the executive.

    NB: if A50 is revoked, I expect rioting (from the fascists). If a no-deal brexit happens, I expect ... slightly less chance of riots, but food riots could conceivably be worse than fascist riots: it all depends if the English reaction is to quietly starve at home or to get out on the streets. After the 2011 crackdown, I suspect starving at home is more likely.

    Either way, we're getting riots. The only non-riot option is to kick the can further down the road, and the EU27 are fed up with our shit.

    1298:

    No If people are starving or supplies are cut off they WILL go on the streets. Of course Rees-Smaug & Farrago etc will be either out of the country or have hired goons to protect them ....

    In one respect the Brexiteers are correct - it will take ( at least) 30 years to recover ....

    1299:

    I am afraid that it will be a case of frog-boiling, because I don't think that No Deal will lead to immediate bankruptcy, and the number of people below the breadline will increase gradually.

    1300:

    The trick is noticing us pre-prepping you with Spectator (AUS) before any of this landed in the UK. That's a little bit more spicy.

    ~

    As for EVMs: the easiest and best tricks are the old ones.

    Get everyone (most of whom are tech illiterate) to spout the latest biased line, create a massive diversion and ignore the obvious.

    2014? From memory: Modi stopped randomization of Time / Vote stamp being used (used to be done by the old "tomboller" RNG generator, proof that the old methods actually understood Democracy).

    This essentially allows you to pre-config results. i.e. If we spot you voting in >X numbers we will apply Y penalties when our Z majority wins.

    Big in Ireland.

    1301:

    Penalties being - wassssup driven flash mob type stuff etc before the voting and then regional penalties / favors in the longer term. It's not exactly new, used in the UK to this day.

    It's very easy to get result data in India, even post-polling, if you know what we mean. You can spot the hot-spots via local networks being spit data and so on, but the underlying stuff is pure psychology. Interesting parallels to original C 50's wash and so on - the actual deal was to re-imagine the Cultural Mythos via a direct "New India" matching that Ghandi / Congress wave and they succeeded.

    You'll want an expert on the why / what to that one, but we'd point to making the largest statue in the world as a pointer.

    Remember: it's not Countries they're shaping, it's Minds and the Types of Minds a culture can make.

    The wasup psych stuff was where it was at, and they even admit that they didn't know where a decent chunk of it was originating. Hint: Dark dark dark.

    And these people really do not give a fuck about civilian casualties.

    ~

    Miami USA was a bit more esoteric. Actual fraud stuff. Knew the result going in, top-down rather than local organic and the spend was muffled - direct Senate directive, no chance that it wouldn't happen.

    Russian Style. Or American, old South style.

    Rambling again.

    This was used to kill her

    1302:

    EC @ 1299 Plausible, but I think not, no frog-boiling. The supply-chains will fall apart, along with the financial services, very quickly indeed. As soon as the supply-chains go, so does everything else & it really is not going to be pretty. I'm worried about power supply, because even I will be up against it for food, if there isn't enough electricity to keep my freezer running ....

    1304:

    watches Newsnight UK

    You do get that you live in a global world, right?

    And things like FB and Twitter are owned by Corporate Entities who don't do National Boundaries, right?

    Hands Saudi Arabia social media list of X influencers paid Y to spout Z idea, while 666 avenue gets another $800 million

    Let me guess: you're thinking that list is the one that steps to the left when Thanos comes?

    Looks @ Greta with sorrow in her wings.

    Fucking. Shameful.

    This is primeval levels of clawing at the Door as it closes.

    And we're not joking here

    Stand and at least die with dignity.

    1305:

    Interesting It would appear thar Mr Speaker is determined to stop a no-deal brexit at any cost & probably a brexit, if he can ....

    1306:

    Greg, here are three honest things I wish for you to happen (so they will):

    1) You will pass this life without pain or strife and you will be remembered with honor and love

    2) We shall remember your dance, eternal, and remember your love for badgers

    3) You will not live long enough to witness the utter horror of what is about to pass

    Oh, and

    4) Somehow you get a Landrover send off; flaming off a cliff is probably right out, but hey-ho. Rocket? Not sure. Might have to be a Landrover covered with flowers as a display.

    Bercow is attempting the impossible: holding together the insanity.

    We just spent a few hours with the Mumsnet Crew and VANILLA GENDERSEX TWITTER which is full on fucking insane at this point. We're talking 10k+ likes for ex-Father Ted rants and so on.

    And you've not seen the response to NewsNight: $$$INSANITY£££

    Our Kind Do Not Go Mad: but your species does. SPANG

    1307:

    Anyhow, just had a moment.

    Without the illusion, the Lower Order Powers are basically fucking junkies at this point, no actual substance to them.

    الجن‎

    One thing we do protest at: killing / taking lives. Not a fan of what was forced against us.

    Across the board, it's all a fucking PtmopatoeVillauge of nonsense and lies.

    Here's the irony killer: Anthropocene - death of the biosphere.

    And you fucking H.S.S muppets don't see the half of it.

    "Sky Cattle"

    Take that Slaved Husk and Burn Her, she's fucking NOT your friend.

    1308:

    Triptych.

    The real irony here (and @Host, this is for the Lukers-From-Beyond) is simple: The Corruption cannot be defined by those already hollowed out.

    We simple reject your degraded report as... Failure.

    looks at Mirror and looks at those in the Light

    No souls. Nothing there.

    Strange: making functioning societies is the most basic skill known to Tribal Groups of Hominids. They used to be good at it.

    We Lived

    Strange. Nature or Nurture is a bit basic when you run the Games you did.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJH-zUYOoc

    1309:

    This is further bad weather in the region.

    Overnight tornadoes devastate parts of Indiana and Ohio

    With record rain, Oklahoma's levee system is under extreme pressure

    This is an example of moving communities out of flood zones rather than continuously rebuilding after floods.

    The radical approach these communities have taken to flood mitigation

    1310:

    Interesting Cor Bin of all people should not be intolerant of people ignoring his "orders" ... Certainly not after cosying up to Galloway & terrorists in past years ....

    Mind you, such signs of sanity on the Labour right & tory left ( Heseltine voting Lem-0-Crat f'rinstance - note ) ...... Give one hope that the disaster might be averted. note Yes I said tory left & "Heseltine" in the same sentence ... shows just how mad things have become

    1311:

    looks at media

    watches BDSM hilarity and rebound taking strangle-hold [safe word is: muppets]

    Nope, IL propaganda outfits want some more light spanking since they're now touting the "silver spoon" theory and wrenching out justifying paying $50k salaries to middle aged fat white men.

    A sheer joy to come home and see my coworkers have translated @HenMazzig article in LATimes into Swedish and published on our page. @SverigeIsrael
    @dibbuk should also take a look at Hen´s newest ;) http://www.sverigeisrael.se/artiklar/nej-israel-bestar-inte-alls-av-privilegierade-vita-europeer-av-hen-mazzig/

    https://twitter.com/1vitaceae/status/1132007305871020038

    Look, we know IL has major issues with Culture, but an .IS native isn't the most likely to be speaking Swe or posting it on their main page. It helps when you map all the fucking connections, but that's lazzzzzy craft.

    Phoning it in, fucking amateurs. Seen worse in S.America, but such copy/paste bollocks for NATO is just lame.

    That's for not policing your little racists tirades about how a country of only 350k "could ever be remembered".

    It's not the most self-aware takes we've ever seen.

    p.s.

    Do. Not. Fuck. With. The. Elves.

    Your highest Son getting pantz'd is only the beginning.

    looks at resurgent .RU politician

    We're all soooo excited.

    1312:

    For the actual IL peeps watching.

    It's called the Alþingi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Althing)

    It's had Democracy for, oh... at least a thousand years more than you.

    Do. Not. Fuck. With. The. Elves.

    And by this, we mean: you might not want to fuck with Democracy as a concept, it's going to WIPE you out.

    Friendly warning there.

    1313:

    Oh, and if you want some actual, honest to G_D spanking, if you're actually [----]:

    We view a shitty tabernacle in the basement of a ruin with a shitty Golden Sphere as an insult.

    For one, the wood benches are the wrong kind.

    Luckily, this Host is a very pure soul and doesn't do hate.

    1314:

    FI: used to be done by the old "tomboller" RNG generator, proof that the old methods actually understood Democracy Just wanted to say that made me smile. (Assuming "Tom Bowler". My father tried hard to get his kids to play marbles at a higher level, though he called it a "shooter" IIRC.)

    Also, the way you (correctly) treated hacking of human minds as functionally equivalent to hacking of the actual voting mechanisms was interesting.

    News feeds lighting up about IL. The Haaretz piece by Bradley Burston (paywalled but you could try searching on "A person without honor, it turns out, is a person without a people.") was good.

    1315:

    [And Greg: that content isn't for you. Heck, it's not for 95% of Jewish people these days. This content is 0.01% BDSM spank, crack it out if you've got it]

    But the wood benches do not smell the same as the old wood and we look around and all your forests are gone. This is wrong, this is not renewal.

    Gold.

    Tainted by... corruption, a tinge that seems inherent to your world now. Even the gold is tainted.

    The letters. They are wrong. Close but we see the slight deviance's in the Words.

    The candles: these are wrong. Close but the wrong scent.

    In a sepulcher.

    There have been non-faithful here. At least thrice.

    Do you have permission for this obscenity?

    No.

    1316:

    I really despair Cor Bin - again. He seems to think that his version of Liebour in power via a General Election is more important that us staying in the EU & is still dragging his feet.

    Meanwhile, I only just noticed the turn-out for the EU elections - pathetically low & unrepresentative.

    1318:

    What happens if the Commons forbid a no deal by a binding vote? Absolutely nothing. If parliament cannot come up with a deal which the majority votes for, which, as it's pretty clear by now, it can't, then by default Brexit happens, regardless of any useless and irrelevant forbidding resolutions passed, King Canute style. To pass a deal, you would need to have a new election and a new parliament. As that would be suicidal for the Tories, that will not happen by October. So, a no deal Brexit is inevitable and will happen. After Brexit happens in October, if the sky does indeed fall and catastrophe does ensue, compelling a new election whether the Tories like it or not, you would have a new parliament and a new government that could, if that was its program, request readmission to the EU or a customs treaty as per Corbyn or whatever. However, at the moment it seems that the two parties that would get the largest vote totals, by electoral math the logical coalition partners, are Labor and Brexit. A difficult negotiation, so quite likely chaos would simply continue.

    1319:

    JH There is easily still time for another referendum - which, of course Cor Bin does not want, which is wy Liebour are losing votes, almost as fast as the tories .... But, I agree ... it's unlikely to happen, bacause of Cor Bin's gross stupidity & obsinacy - he is as bad as the Maybot, in fact.

    1320:

    Napoleon was, quite simply, the Stalin of the French Revolution. Tried unsuccessfully to reinstall slavery in Haiti, killing several hundred thousand black people, his only "success" vs. Haiti was angering people so much you had (much smaller scale) massacres of whites in revenge, turning Haiti into an international pariah to this day. But, at the same time, his armies were abolishing serfdom and all sorts of old feudal crap wherever they went in Europe. Except when he invaded Russia, the real reason he lost, not the Russian winter.

    1321:

    It's not clear that the Commons (or even Parliament) CAN issue a binding vote because, as I understand it, foreign relations are one of the matters reserved to the Crown (i.e. in the person of our elected dictator, the PM). Passing a vote requiring the PM to cancel Brexit is, in theory, possible, but it's not clear what would happen then because I believe that is a new constitutional precedent. May would obey because her faults do not include that level of deceit - but would one of the rabid Brexiteers do so?

    Of course, I could be wrong, and there IS precedent, but that's my understanding.

    1322:

    Err, sorry for the late reply, I wanted to take my time and procrastinated somewhat. Yes, it's going to be somewhat long, but we're long past the 1000 mark.

    Don't worry, your Mind is fine, I took a look.

    Well, actually I guess I'm in the midst of a light atypical depression, it's quite OK, I can somewhat deal with the cognitive distortions, and I get myself occupied and do a lot of cycling. I thought about smoking some cannabis when some fellow geek invited me, but better not.

    I'm quite used to it from my teens and early twenties, I even wonder if for me it almost feels more "normal" than being normal, go figure.

    I'm also starting to wonder if I might not be somewhat bipolar after all, things like this quite often happen in late April/early May to me, might be me getting out of my SAD and switching into the other extreme for a time. Err.

    A little unorthodox

    Well, thanks for the compliment, same to you, though I'm actually not in favour of unorthodoxy for the sake of looking unorthodox. ;)

    and a bit hung up on male issues regarding women

    Hm, actually you might be somewhat mistaken about my women issues.

    for the record, I'm a pretty much cis hetero biologically male[1] geek in my daily life, I guess I'd be a 1 on the Kinsey scale.

    Thing is, since my early childhood I have an equal amount of male and female friends, actually I guess there are more female than male ones, I'm not that much into the usual boy stuff, though I'm not that much into the girls stuff either (Cue to a close much more cis hetero biologically male relative who wanted a doll when he was 4. Err.)

    I'm sex-positive (though I'm aware the sex and bonding brain circuits are quite close in many people, hello oxytocin, so I might be somewhat more judgemental about casual sex than most, and I realize intrusion into ones personal space like any sex might be problematic for quite a few people), and I can be quite flirtative, even without realizing it, though I'm not that much into casual dating, e.g. absolutely not. I have quite a sensitive sense of smell, I'm not sure if it's really better than the norm or I just perceive smells more vividly, so it's quite frequent I find somebody of the opposite sex visually attractive but can't stand her deo or like. Sorry for the digression, but I guess my behaviour gives ample room for misunderstandings.

    Can we agree being sexually attracted to close female friends in general and female friends attracted to you but you not to them can make for an interesting life, and it goes downhill from there? I could elaborate, but won't at this time.

    Can we also agree it's possible to be quite visually attracted to somebody in a sexual way but realize it would only be a one-night stand and thus abstain?

    As for my personal tastes, hm, it seems I watched quite a lot of TV in my childhood and youth, or it's just my quite good memory, it seems I didn't watch that much TV because there was also a lot of reading to do; in any case, I often use imagery from those to describe complicated issues; so if we go with the Fraggles, I'd go for Mokey over Red, though I guess Mokey would need a little bit more of Red to really appeal to me. Err, again, sorry for the digression, but this nomenclature might be useful later on. As for me, I'm not as athletic as Red, but I like swimming and snorkeling, and I can be quite cynical. At least more than Mokey, but I have been described as "spiritual", which is a debatable compliment when you're into agnosticism and somewhat into methodical naturalism. Err, yes, I digress. Things that go through your mind when it's spring outside and you realize you like the female of the species and quite a few of them might like you...

    Pleaae note females showing a similar pattern in friendships face a similar problem, it's quite symmetrical.

    (Bonus point, my ability to read verbal and non-verbal cues is somewhat erratic, sometimes I get nuances other people miss, at other times I don't get things most other people would notice. I guess I'm somewhere on the autistic spectrum, but I'm quite difficult to point down, I guess I'd be somewhere with the tertiary colors)

    So as for the girls/women I mention, well...

    1) "She who said I was always there for her" is one of my cohabitants in this shared appartment. She is quite visually attractive and nice, which might explain why the guy renting the appartment (also a cohabitant) has a tendency of idealizing her ("she's a doer, she inspired me to quit smoking") and devaluing her (she was in tears after some of their talks, and she's not that easy to disturb, in any case she survived a brain tumor in her early teens, asked me about tumorigenesis and stayed calm and interested when I explained); this happened when the renter wanted to evict her, and thus she left some chocolate in the fridge for me with a thank-you.

    When I got fired, she was away, and she also wasn't there when someone at HR thought I traded working shifts into my holiday when actually I only wanted to work my remaining shifts off, she thus cancelled said shifts. I somewhat snapped after that, especially since I wanted to talk about the misunderstandings and people didn't listen, they just thought I wanted to do idle complaining.

    So when the guy renting the appartment said she was in favour of me being evicted one week later, I knew he was either lieing consciously or projecting his impulses. Doesn't really matter, he's an asshole.

    She and me talked quite a bit yesterday, BTW, though mainly about the concerts I went to and some festival on the weekend; she's moving out, too.

    2) "She with the habit of reading Satre" was a friend I hung out a lot with in the first few year of us studying biology. Actually, I was somewhat afraid of her wanting something more than friendship at the time, I wasn't into her. She'd be quite like Red, but not as cynical.

    Damn it, why do I have to think of Mhairi/Freya's Ex whom I met at my last working place now, he said "she wants more than being friends, I don't" about "Her of the New Model Army Appreciation", but that was after him having a one-night stand with the NMA fan, she being depressed and totally drunk. Real piece of work, this guy.

    He had a short relationship with the Satre fan, she had a hard time getting over it and switched to studying chemistry some time later.

    The Satre fan, another guy whom I shared a quite strange KULT group with and me were somewhat inseperable at the time. Getting into touch with her again might be interesting, though likely complicated. There are quite some issues in the background with her, no idea if she wants to talk about her junkie ex-boyfriend back from school...

    3) "She with the New Model Army appreciation" is a friend I used to hang around with quite frequently from 2003 to 2009, we met again around 2014 but lost contact after that again. We watched ReGenesis, talked about Neil Gaiman and NIN, she even knew Revoltng Cocks, and we also talked about OGH's "The Concrete Jungle", she liked the Len Deighton feel. She broke contact with everybody, I can understand, though I guess I'd like to watch "Good Omens" with her again, for starters, or work out some of the things going on in 2004/5.

    Err, yes, I was definitely sexually attracted to her, and we had a lot of shared interest, but in any case she was much more Red than me or Mhairi/Freya. But I didn't hang around with her for that reason, hmkay?

    4) As for Mhairi/Freya...

    OK, let's do it that way, self esteem issues are quite common in what modern medicine diagnoses as ADS, and in the past I had my fair share of them.

    When I got fired, some woman from HR (the same one who later on cancelled my working shifts) said I was different from the norm, but that was OK. Thing is, I have known for some time.

    Actually, I guess it started somewhat before that call in early 2005 when I phoned Mhairi/Freya's mailbox and told her I felt a lot better since knowing her, because it's nice knowing someone so similar to oneself whom you like that much. At this time I mentioned some of her worst characteristics, which might sound somewhat like the devaluing pick-up artists do, but as mentioned, I also implicated I wasn't any better, and proposed we might mitigate those characteristics somewhat. I'll spare you the details, let's just say it seems it worked, she told me she loved me some time later, I said I felt the same, and then she stopped it because she was afraid the story with her ex-boyfriend mentioned above might repeat. OK, sounds somewhat narcisstic, but I'm told some amount of narcissism is normal in our species.

    (Hm, we both hung out with the guy from the KULT RPG group I mentioned above; another guy from said group said we three were nihilists, which is somewhat funny from him. At about the same time, he said he felt shit all the time, even when stoned, so I proposed an SSRI; he declined, saying they were hepatotoxic. He added he wanted to try MDMA, I mentioned it might be neurotoxic, he said he didn't care. AFAIK he's a teacher for chemistry and biology now. You can't make some things up...)

    So basically I know it's OK to be me because I know it's OK to be her. As for her coming to terms with it being OK to be her because it's OK to be me, well...

    (No, I just want to stay friends with her, anything else wouldn't work out in the long run. Though some cynical part of me proposes a meteorite clause, e.g. in case of the world ending tomorrow, get a load of good books and music and tea, condoms and birth control not necessary, the world is going to end anyway, err...)

    but generally it's pretty ok.

    As mentioned above, I know so since 2005. ;)

    BTW, can we agree it's also OK to ask people out you are sexually interested in, regardless of sex or gender? Of course, given it's not inappropiate, wouldn't do harm etc.

    It's not like you've something like Me inside it, you'll be ok.

    Actually I have quite a bit of you inside of me, and you have quite a bit of me inside of you.

    Aside from the general genetic uniformity of our species, there is more genetic diversity between neighbouring chimps than between people from different continents, it's quite likely that whatever I am/have, there is surely some genetic/developmental overlap with what you are/have.

    Which leads me to think you'll be OK, too, though as we know, "in the long run we are all dead". Makes it importiant to keep connections to ones friends and reconnect to old ones, I suppose.

    I went to a festival yesterday and afterwards met some biologist from my old working group, he invited me to him celebrating his promotion, it was quite nice, and I'll visit a biology lecture next week.

    You should ask more about the people being v8'd etc or the ones culling the Bright Ones.

    Personal opionion, the culling is done by other Bright Ones; the guy who rents the appartment is quite intelligent and also has a diagnosis of ADHD, though he conforms much more to usual male pattern, he broke windows at an age when I was sitting in a corner reading books or visited the science club. He talks about saving the climate and flies around a lot, though I might be somewhat biased concerning his, err, whatever stands in for personality in him, I feel tempted to say both him and Mhairi/Freya's ex-boyfriend don't have any, it would be a callback to what a female friend of said ex-boyfriend said about Mhairi/Freya, I guess I'd include said female friend.

    Err, yes, I'm quite often somewhat pissed off when thinking about the past, why are you asking?

    (Actually, a part of me is with Heteromeles, the Buddhists and quite some neurobiologists concerning anatta, but it was nice shedding tears during the inconviniences mentioned above and remembering people used to call you "cry baby" at school, and there was plenty to cry about.)

    The nihilits in me thinks it's quite nice we have less births than necessary to replace the dead. For a culture glorifying social darwinism they are failing utterly on a genetic and memetic level.

    [Link to "Gimme Shelter"]

    Thanks.

    Hm, there are No Control and Generator playing in the back of my mind, courtesy of the concert last week, but I guess I might go for something different. I mentioned New Order above, I was 15 when "Republic" came out, though I might go for Joy Division, noting the connection to J. G. Ballard in passing. What about Disorder, certainly better than Love will tear us apart in this context given some of the stories mentioned above...

    Yeah. I'm an idiot. I'm also a Combat-Enhanced-Meta-Cognitive Weapon.

    So are we all. Hm, want some Atari Teenage Riot, Death Star? One of Mhairi/Freya's favourite bands at the time, him of the aversion to SSRIs and the appreciation for serotonin releasers was quite into Alec Empire and some stuff by Linking Park.

    The song seems quite fitting given your nick, though I'd go with S. J. Gould and call the hypothetical companion of our sun Shiva, or, better still, Kali.

    Defense Minister, UK? Check. Home Party, IL? Check. GRU structure, RU? Check.

    In the mood for Destroy 2000 years of culture?

    You were a crap lay as well.

    I know you are not talking about me, at least not likely, but...

    I can't say what people would say about me, my last relationship was about 14 year ago, guess with whom, and as mentioned above, she stopped it before we got physical.

    [1] Hm, never checked my karyotype, come to think about it...

    1324:

    EC @ 1317 Well yes, the common connection is RU interference - because Assange is (even if he doesn't know it ) in Putin's pay

    1325:

    "Still time for a referendum"? I can, just barely, imagine a majority in parliament thinking a referendum of some sort might be a good idea. But what kind? What would be the alternatives? It is absolutely inconceivable that the current parliament could agree what they would be. Teaching pigs to fly would be vastly easier. At this point the only logical referendum that would make sense and the voters would be satisfied with would be one with only two alternatives, either (1) forget the whole thing and stay in the EU or (2) leave, with or without a deal. And I think hardly anyone in parliament would want that. Attempts by May, Corbyn or anyone else to try to come up with some sort of in between compromise that everyone in either parliament or the voting public would find acceptable are simply impossible at this point and a further waste of time.

    1326:

    Sweet of you, so thanks. I miss Humans.

    As for Kali:

    US ends special trade treatment for India amid tariff dispute

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-48482988

    The model is simple: dump ~$500mil or so in funding (opaque), let the wizards work the numbers, let the spooks / psych run the fear matrix and collect.

    Slavery, eh? Quite the Thing.

    Look above for the spot n tells, do your own search:

    LBC Labor Wikipedia PR company Slaves Scandal IL

    The trick is noticing that that ".IS" account is run by the network who produced the tapes to get the smear going.

    IT'S RALLY COOL, DA?

    Our only question is: do the people involved really think they're protected? It's all so fucking juvenile - talk about low budget.

    Mapped and Predicted in less than 10 ms. While doing something more interesting. And not even focusing.

    4th Gen Industrial Revolution: turns out you don't need people, so much.

    But, Wolves: we do give fair warnings. LBC chumps are playing dangerous with Farage, the PR hierarchy is feeling a little tinkle of annoyance from crashing from Bell Tower heights to Tinker-Tonker land.

    OH, and all the newspapers lost more readers.

    Charities are next.

    And Pensions.

    ~

    https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160622.html

    1327:

    Looks @ IL politics

    Nice script.

    whistles as those "hard cases" screaming "OH, YOU'RE A SPECIALIST IN PSYOPS ARE YOU?!" eat crow

    Boys.

    We already told you: we're not interested in competing because we're Dragons.

    ironthrone.jpg

    1329:

    Allegedly. One would be more comfortable believing that if the Powers That Be came up with any actual, you know, evidence proving that. The original gilt-edged CIA-NSA-FBI report included as its most solid evidence the infamous Steele memorandum, the DNC's answer to Pizzagate, which even Mueller admitted in the report was a fraud. As the CIA etc. surely knew already, it had phony all over it, by which I do not mean the golden shower allegations. It had all sorts of nonsense about how supposedly there was a secret war between Putin and Medvedev-exactly what an ex-KGB insider who wants Steele to pay him the big bucks would come up with to make Steele happy (plus that nice Protocols of the Elders of Zion type golden shower touch, being as he's likely an advocate of going back to the good old days of the Okhrana), but which all serious people who know anything about Russia know is nonsense. The only "evidence" they came up with since was that it seems that Guccifer is actually a Russian speaker according to linguistic analysis. Which proves zero. With or without gummit involvement, the vast majority of Russian hackers would be delighted to pull that kind of stunt, being as Hillary is a notorious Russia hacker. And there are various hackers out there (definitely not my area of expertise, so I have no opinion as to validity) claiming that various electronic details indicate it was a leak not a hack anyway.

    1330:

    Cool story bro.

    It'd help if you did footnotes to when / where each person got killed though.

    Mikhail Lesin Migayas Shirinskiy Oleg Erovinkin Andrey Karlov

    etc

    Hint: not all of them were killed by Russians, or even the Russian Government.

    Fun story:

    I accidentally once got the [translation: mark of respect] from a oldskool .RU mafia type by playing nerf guns with his children and then accidentally foiling an assassination attempt because I assumed the [translation: 'tough guys'] were joking and the hit man was a clown, so shot him in the eye and tackled him while mugging to the kids.

    The reddit version would include "and dumped him in the swimming pool", but it's not a film it was a shitty Moscow setup, it was a tiny garden / patio.

    Embarrassing, eh?

    "Insane bravery" is usually "Clueless WTF" at the end of the day.

    Don't worry. They have lists.

    Just... be aware of it.

    1331:

    [The actual story there is diffusing mass violence between two Mafia clans via a ridiculously long toast, 4 days of drinking and making such an ass / heroic level buffoon that both sides were too distracted to start a fucking re-run of 97 but the above story is also true. Also included getting drunk under the table by a foremost ex-Soviet Woman which was scary but hey. Virginity isn't a big deal, she fucked Hitler after all]

    Look: spook / industrial espionage stories are dull.

    You're working.

    You assume it's going good.

    Someone turns up to your door and it's not personal.

    Or if you're low-tier, you get a bomb on the car etc.

    Maybe a "sword" missile.

    Lol.

    Dude. Bild is on.

    p.s.

    You would not believe the amount of .RU people who learned to love the West via old cassette tapes of books, especially Starwars etc and learnt their english from them.

    Want to know the real reason ex-RU stuff kicked off?

    Yep.

    Starwars 1-3 and so on.

    They were pissed

    1332:
    Sweet of you, so thanks.

    Nope. Thanks for reading.

    I'm in quite an interesting headspace at the moment, things I see and hear or do and say driving up memories from the past, especially 2004/5.

    I'm not sure I mentioned it before, but I like to think of Siddharta Gautama speaking about his past lives as a kind of psychodrama, e.g. imagine what you would do under certain circumstances.

    I miss Humans.

    Hm, it's never too late to meet them again. Though my experience lately indicates one has to be careful when opening up.

    As for relations between the US and India, there was a time when the US was siding with Pakistan against India. Given Pakistani involvement in the War for, err, on Terror, I'm not sure how this is going to play into it.

    Also note Modi and his BJP are right-wing populists rooted in Hindutva. Think people taking the Torah literally, even if it clashes with recorded history and archaeology. Only substitute the Torah with the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and a strange reading of the Vedas. See Ayodhya dispute for the fun of doing history in India.

    As for wage slavery in Asia, I also think in the long run it's going to drive down worker's right in the West, too.

    1333:

    I have been told gopniks are a thing of the past, e.g. 90s, though I had quite some encounters with the Russian German and plain Russian variety in the early 00s. And still meet some leftovers, though they are possibly just hools.

    AFAIK part of the appeal of Putin is he's seen as a saviour from the 90s and early 00s.

    BTW, the Polish equivalent is mentioned to be Dresiarz, reminds me of some people I encounter in Germany, too.

    Hm, I think about starting to learn Polish again ATM, maybe I'll practice somewhat with Dezerter. ;)

    You mentioned Rammstein once, if you want to practice your German, you could try kettcar. I saw their first ever concert in 2001, guess I'll see them again this summer.

    1334:

    BTW, I couldn't find any direct connections between Hindutva politicians and this guy.

    1335:

    As for music, heard this one lately at the local hackerspace:

    STAND HIGH PATROL: Boat People

    1336:

    Well, UFOs of the flying saucer variety have quite some significance in some religions; AFAIK there are even some Christians who think they are demons masquerading as aliens.

    The most well-known UFO religions in the media would be Raëlism and Heaven's Gate.

    As for the obsession of Christian fundamentalists for RPGs, Gary Gygax apparantly was a Jehovah's Witness, though JWs are quite atypical for a Christian group.

    AFAIR a friend once mastered a D&D round in a Catholic youth center without problems, though there is always the fun with the Ratz and Harry Potter.

    As for the current pope and Harry Potter, he's mainly complaining about the translation.

    Hm, there is a movie about Tolkien, no idea what to make of it.

    1337:

    Hm, I'm trying to up the vegetables for health reasons, my cholesterin stats are high, and I don't want to add a statin to the mix of medications I'm already taking, I'm on 4 antihypertensives, though we're going down with the diuretic.

    As for imitation meat, tofu somewhat reminds me of mushrooms, actually. And I like mushrooms.

    1338:

    There is a religion that has claimed that UFOs are Russian spycraft. I wish that I were joking, because their adherents are regrettably powerful and common in the USA and UK :-(

    1339:

    Hm, I had a heated discussion when I proposed my landlord (also the cohabitant who sent me to the clinic a second time) would qualify for a diagnosis of Borderline and Narcisstic PD. She switched to other examples and said Trump is an asshole, not somebody suffering from a PD.

    To imply anybody with problematic behaviour has a psychiatric or neurological diagnosis would be san(e)ist, a subtype of Ableism. I agree somewhat, though I know plenty of assholes who also have a psychiatric or neurological diagnosis that explains part of their behaviours.

    The main difference would be that to qualify for a PD you'd have to be impaired in your daily life, AFAIK Delinald Trumpemens is not thus impaired.

    I also have some problem with thinking callous behaviour "sociopathic", it might be dissociation or building up a persona. Though somebody's ex-boyfriend declined to talk to me, so I don't know if he really enjoyed the view of people jumping to their death on 9/11.

    1340:

    My advice would be to try to replace as much meat and grain as possible with proper pulses and pulse-based foods - tofu does not count. Quorn is, I believe, fungus-based - and, in my view, even less palatable. I am a fairly serious Real Foodie :-)

    I, too, object to militant veganism on many grounds, but the existence of vegan restaurants is not one of them. I generally avoid them, but that's mainly because they tend to be rather bad. And anything that uses highly-processed gunk as a meat substitute is, again in my view, inherently bad. I have no problems with (for example) Indian food, much of which is 'vegan', and would recommend whitroth to check out a decent, largely vegetarian, Indian restaurant or two.

    1341:

    As for the actual German neonazi party, if you look at the symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, sense of superiority and appeal to institutions is quite common.

    Though I guess most neo-nazis and fascists wouldn't qualify for a clinical diagnosis.

    1342:

    Hm, I would still try to use the correct appelation; for the record, I also wouldn't call Italian Mussolini fanboys neo-nazis but neo-fascists. It's somewhat complicated at times, but it might help with divide and conquer.

    For me, it's bad enough when people make an appeal to the "Konservative Revolution", and it hardly matters that quite a few of them distanced themselves from "plebeian" Nazism.

    Doesn't help that some of the guys involved made quite interesting literature and/or poetry, but I'll spare you from Gottfried "coke-head" Benn.

    (Italian Futurism is an even more complicated case, and I still wonder why my brother didn't see the parallels to "Fight Club"...)

    1343:

    I have seen the first episode, and I quite liked it. Till now no explanation why Crowley listens to Queen, but that might be later.

    I could argue it's not heretical, Crowley and Adam might be a demon and the antichrist, but there is the idea of Apocatastasis, e.g. salvation is open to all.

    So if any Xtian bothers you, you know where to look for the arguments. ;)

    BTW, I proposed it to a friend who mentioned a German series, How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast). He said it's quite funny, I have it on my hard disk but haven't seen it yet.

    1344:

    Vietnamese cuisine is the same, except the occasional fish.

    Personally, in the past I had a feeling I fare better cognitively with a diet high in fat and protein and low in carbohydrates, but I go for cheese over meat.

    Let's see where I go from there.

    1345:

    Well, they might also be the latest project from Skunk Works.

    Though an identified UFO is no longer a UFO, of course.

    1346:

    no explanation why Crowley listens to Queen

    Don't remember it coming up in the series, but in the book it's a standing joke that any tape left in a car for a long time eventually morphs into a copy of Queen's Greatest Hits. I need to go back and listen again carefully but I got the impression some of the longer bits of incidental music started to develop Brian May style guitar after a while...

    1347:

    EC @ 1340 The classic example, for an unabashed omivore, like me ... is Diwana Bhel Poori House ... BURP

    Trottelreiner @ 1341 "Appeal to institutions" is what the rabid xtians do ... they WILL quote the Big Bumper Fun Book of Bronze-Age goatherders' myths as if it were evidence ... [ The muslims do the exact same thing with the "recital" of course, with an equal lack of basis .... ]

    1348:

    Oh, and for Martin, since we always pay our debts.

    Please remember that Swedish song writer stuff etc:

    https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/colin-thackery-89-tipped-win-16243853

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/9052587/colin-thackery-britains-got-talent-army-queen-army/

    Take a bit of time to digest the story. Do the grep, might have noticed a bit of explanation about it and contracts a few years ago. If you really think that there's not big fucking bundles of £££ spending on that one, well. Same Tommy Boy / Farage Energy.

    And Mr Square-Jaw is not a nice person.

    Anyhow.

    We remember the days of summoning Empress Dragonflies and referencing Freya.

    Strange, the internet got pruned over that one.

    These people are psychopaths

    1349:

    Did we need to mention he won?

    That's kinda the problem, we knew he'd won a year ago.

    Butterflies and Dragonflies, we really are the real deal

    1350:

    Anyhow.

    Psychopaths editing the internet are kinda avoiding the topic that dragonflies etc are actually dying out, so fuck them.

    Absolute. Psychos.

    And if they meet our kind, they wet their pants.

    The amount of things they killed to get back home, and their slaves orgasm over death and destruction.

    Happy to have kept you sane. You're gonna need it.

    p.s.

    Absolute 100% lols at "need your pills" - your entire society is a fucking travesty and most of you are mentally capped like the fucking Tripods did. Tinker-Tonk fucking land.

    Dragons in the sky.... ooooh, 4/5, watch for the 5th Element

    1351:

    The UK does fairly well in this respect, at least since the Indian restaurants revolutionised our, er, cuisine. You will no doubt remember nut cutlets being touted as a vegetarian substitute for the meat in the 'meat and two veg.'

    1352:

    Do you mean the fifth elephant? I think it has just landed here.

    1353:

    We'd be more worried about the Silver rose, thistle and shamrock images from the music room if you're into your symbolism.

    Lots of mirrors in there. And the look Brenda gave T was shockingly savage if you know your Brendology. Rarely spotted, UK would be at war with USA if she had her way.

    Anyhow, the JesusPhone[tm] has called and apparently no-one in the general populace is aware that LBC (& parent companies) are running multi-tier smear campaigns and fronting Bell Pott / P PR company TAA to offset the implosive damage of [checks notes] anyone vaguely left of Pinochet. Oh, and that it's not immediately obvious to [checks notes] anyone who has a functioning frontal cortex that .IL assets (non-combat, soft power, low / mid tier) are helping them. Or that LBC is heavily tied into the Blair Nexus and their wikipedia editing side-line is an open secret to even Mr K from the Times. Oh, and apparently, [checks notes] it's antisemitic to notice that this type of shit is blatantly obvious to the more tooled up and hungry wolves because [checks notes] .IL are used to 18 year old edge lords with extreme trauma / psychological issues and are woefully unprepared for the AI revolution coming.

    [checks notes]

    Oh, and Capital is multi-national and subjecting non-hostile H.S.S to this type of stuff is going to get you into a lot of trouble, namely: Mind Burn.

    We do hope that none of you (H.S.S) have large swathes of your .mil sitting in front of screens and/or phones because the type of stuff that's coming is fucking batshit good.

    We wouldn't view it without filters, both physical, mental and [redacted].

    We'd bother with links but hey-ho, apparently your media / "tooled up TAA" are rabidly protectionist and attempt to sue / slander / attack anyone who points this out and now stories about "shitting on floors" are being reported as serious.

    Hint: it's already gone live.

    You're Fucked

    Do a grep.

    Every .mil in front of a screen.

    Fucking Magic.

    p.s.

    Absolute legends Z and co for noticing Elisagate years after it happened and look, Google had a whoopsie.

    1354:

    Do you mean the fifth elephant? (Ref to the movie "The Fifth Element" if not clear.) Compliments from an American to those responsible for the Emperor's New Red Carpet. (And for all the snubs. The very low crowd sizes in particular.) DJT has at least two kryptonites, perceptions of his net worth (negative?!? :) and fear of progressive dementia (father). Another is fear of downslopes/stairs, but that one is ... inconsistent in various videos.

    Unrelated to anything, (coon) cat at about 1 year old was mildly annoyed that he was left alone for a few days and found a couple of webcams and reverse engineered (:-) their behavior and emailed a few selfies. This one is nicely framed - https://geekpic.net/pm-2DDW7Q.html (This is a cat who ... opens doors. Literally. Levers, not knobs, but that and curiosity mean cat-child-proofing.)

    Saw a bunch of dragonflies a few days ago doing their final molt, expanding wings, taking first flight on the edge of a pond. (True Facts About the Dragonfly, funny.)

    1355:

    Compliments from an American to those responsible for the Emperor's New Red Carpet.

    Look, if you're really into your BDSM humiliation kink (and shout out to #numbers of Leather peeps stanning their pride) check this out:

    Mr Cambpelll, arch-Swizz-Lord has been reduced to taking snippets of snuff from absolute jokes of R-wing low (ex) tier muck rakers linked into the UK .IL fandom of "shit we have to protect but boy is it fucking embarrassing" division.

    As a serious note: that's some serious fucking humiliation, on the levels of "firing that illegal worker who you got fired for on the wedding day" type deep level stuff.

    Here's a joke:

    What's worse for ex-traders and ex-spooks / .gov than not being able to afford their coke habits?

    Having their Bloomberg Terminal / Cable link access turned off.

    That's fucking brutal right there.

    1356:

    And the next level kink?

    The Broadsheets running it because they're also being shut out.

    It's like a massive frontal lobotomy for the entire class.

    Not on the list

    Hurtful?

    You broke our Soul/Heart/Mind

    p.s.

    This is the part in the documentaries about coups in S.America that you pan to some ex-lackey drinking in a bar, strung out, shaking their heads: "Then, then we knew it was bad".

    1357:

    Oh, and this stuff:

    Jess Phillips' story to be turned into TV drama by Happy Valley makers and Queer As Folk

    https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/showbiz-tv/jess-phillips-story-turned-tv-16341995

    Buys 10,000,000 more Dentist magazines

    This will get people killed, you fucking morons.

    1358:

    Actually... "Extinction Rebellion" are simply fucking stupid & arrogant. Same as their predecessors who built a scaffolding-tower across a rail line leading to a nuclear power station, some years ago - the train only just stopped in time & the driver was very shaken. Unfortunately, they had not re-discovered the offence of "interfering with the running of the railway" at that point & I think they were fined, rather than given 6 months in jail.

    They are as stupid, arrogant & incapable of learning from history as the populist-extremists on both political wings, embracing communism & fascism, both claiming that "This time it will be different" ... which, of course, it won't be.

    1359:

    I have no idea what "The Seagull" means; "The Fifth Elephant" is one of Pterry's Discworld books. "The Fifth Element" is a film so boron I've never watched it right through.

    1360:

    I was making a joke! What was the fifth elephant mined for?

    (Justified) fear of going down slopes and stairs is standard for people with poor balance or motor control - I have it for the first reason. We have speculated on the reason for Trump's before.

    1361:

    Look at the cartoon in the Independent - Dave Brown agrees with you.

    1362:

    "Extinction Rebellion" are simply fucking stupid & arrogant.

    They also have a reasonable expectation of still being alive in 2050, unlike you and me. Which might concentrate their minds somewhat. (Hint, Greg: follow that link. Just do it.)

    We are in a climate emergency now, but our political leaders are stuck at the re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic stage—if they even acknowledge what's happening at all. I can totally understand and sympathize with youngsters wanting to act out, get attention, and demand that we fix this shit before it kills them. (I might quibble with some of their methods, but that's neither here nor there.)

    As for Trump ...

    Brenda gave him a little gift. Except the book in question was a bestseller back in the day so it's not that rare, the version she gave him was the training wheels reader's digest version, and it's all about how we deal with Nazis (hint: it involves guns, bombs, and bullets).

    Put it together with the total lack of a red carpet for Air Force One, and the other subtle cues, and it's fairly clear that while Theresa May might have invited him, the royal family are Not Amused and, most unusually, not bothering to conceal their contempt.

    1363:

    On the first, yes. I may be an old fogey, but I increasingly feel that the young radicals are right.

    On the second, but do they do subtle well! There's absolutely nothing you can put your finger on as definitive, or within Trump's comprehension.

    1364:

    Last time he visited, the Queen wore a brooch at him.

    She has a huge brooch collection, she's really into them. And it's probably no coincidence that the one she wore to "welcome" Trump was a relatively cheap personal gift she'd received ... from Michelle Obama.

    Of necessity she has to be seen to be above politics: she has had to smile and shake hands with a procession of odious tyrants over the decades. But she's human enough to display subtle tells. And when she's displeased, they get more obvious.

    1365:

    2050 collapse is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

    1366:

    I have just noticed this, and wonder why. I don't read Sadiq Khan as having been snubbed by HM, as not inviting someone with that level of history with Trump (and, when all is said and done, is merely a local politician, anyway) is to be expected. But the Home Secretary?

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/trump-uk-visit-sajid-javid-state-banquet-muslim-pakistani-sadiq-khan-gove-queen-a8942921.html

    1367:

    Javid may have declined to be invited to the banquet: Trump might well have kicked off embarrassingly in the presence of a possible muslim.

    I note with interest that today Trump phoned Boris and they chatted for 20 minutes, but BoJo declined an invitation to meet in person, citing an overriding priority—meeting with Tory party members who'd be voting for the new party leader.

    Translation: Boris Johnson thinks Trump is toxic waste and a liability with even the Tory faithful, and doesn't want to be tainted by association.

    1368:

    Oh, indeed - I am still curious as to why. I can think of several other plausible reasons, but that is one of the more plausible. I noticed Bozo's actions, as well as Trump initiating a request to meet the slithy Gove.

    Another thing that I am curious about is whether there is more background to HM's reaction than we have read in the press - not that's there not quite enough there to explain it. I suspect not, but she does get some briefings that aren't exactly made public.

    1369:

    T'was brillig, and the slithy Trump, Did gyre and gimbal in the Gove,...

    1370:

    I wrote this in December 2017:

    Twas brexit, and the Fox and Dave Did gyre and gimble with the May: All mimsy were the BorisGoves, And the mome Phil outgrabe.

    "Beware the Barnier, my son! The laws that bite, the rules that catch! Beware the Tuskish man, and shun The frumious Eurocrats!"

    1371:

    Charlie @ 1362 Agree entirely about "ExR" being seriously worried, for good reasons ... but they are doing it exactly backwards & making things worse, rather than better

    Yes, Brenda must be close, very close to doing something drastic ... & of course, she is all-too-well aware that DT (like Putin) wants us OUT of the EU & that they are not our friends ....

    @ 1364 Like her almost-but-not-quite EU FLAG worn as a hat, you mean?

    Since we are mentioning US politics & politicians, I just came across this ... how Alabama got its anti-abortion law through crooked money-laundering & gerrymandering & how they are now stuck with it. Scary stuff.

    1372:

    but they are doing it exactly backwards & making things worse, rather than better

    What ought they to be doing?

    Any utilitarian analysis supports doing anything at all if it gets a reasonable-prospect-of-continuity machine civilization to 2100 CE.

    It's rather to the kid's credit that they haven't started murdering billionaires yet.

    1373:

    Greg Tingey @ 1347: "Appeal to institutions" is what the rabid xtians do ... they WILL quote the Big Bumper Fun Book of Bronze-Age goatherders' myths as if it were evidence ... [ The muslims do the exact same thing with the "recital" of course, with an equal lack of basis .... ]

    I've been wondering lately ... IF Jesus does come back, what's he gonna think about migrant children dying in U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody?

    All the fundies beat you up with what the bible says, but do any of them actually read it and understand what it means?

    1374:

    Some random-ish comments: A mostly made up Donnie the Rump quote: “There were thousands of people lining the streets of London as we went by, they were all giving the ‘V for victory’ sign with both hands. It was fantastic!”

    On the subject of Message Brooches, see also Madeline Albright.

    And this morning saw a clip of an anime series called “Midnight Occult Civil Servants”, no idea what it’s about—wikipedia’s not much help, sounds mildly Laundryesque.

    1375:

    It's rather to the kid's credit that they haven't started murdering billionaires yet. Indeed. ~25-30 years from now it will be easy to get consensus on kin punishment for fossil fuel billionaires and their accomplices. Another article about that short report on a study that Charlie linked above. New Report Suggests ‘High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End’ Starting in 2050 - The climate change analysis was written by a former fossil fuel executive and backed by the former chief of Australia's military. (Nafeez Ahmed - Jun 3 2019) The actual PDF is only 7 pages of text (11 pages include some filler) and is an easy read for friends and family and others. It argues, well, screams, that we (human policy makers and influencers) should pay more attention to the risks of worse-than-median-bad outcomes and not focus so much on the median. Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach (MAY 2019, David Spratt & Ian Dunlop)

    FI: Look, if you're really into your BDSM humiliation kink... Not. For me it's just D.J. Trump (and OK Jared and Ivanka and her older siblings) and is a mechanism for self-control. (Across the board, access (any kind of access) journalism often/usually is toxic; having trouble quickly finding the UK material; does anyone know of a free UK news aggregator (other than google news)?)

    1376:

    Doing "anything at all" would be as pointless and useless as assassinating billionaires. The reality is that as long as the world economic system is capitalist, global warming is unstoppable. Why? Because capitalism is inherently competitive. The energy systems that are lowest cost and most profitable are also the ones that lead to the most global warming. Any country that seriously "goes green" would lose out in economic competition and slowly go under economically, with or without utterly gameable Rube Goldberg schemes like "cap and trade." So you get the farce of the Paris climate accords, which the countries that they work for support, and those that they don't work for ignore them. In the US you have Obama "going green" with natural gas, which the US is the OPEC for, which due to methane leaks from the spongy and decaying US industrial infrastructure is almost as bad as coal. And the Republicans going old school with coal, which the US also has a lot of. And the cream of the crop is Germany, which abolished nuclear for the benefit of German brown coal, the worst polluter of all. The "precondition" for doing anything serious about climate change is world socialism. Which would not solve the problem, but would make it possible to solve the problem. Without world socialism in the next hundred years or so the human race is doomed. With it, we may be doomed anyway, but at least the human race would have a chance.

    1377:

    The "precondition" for doing anything serious about climate change is world socialism.

    Absolutely not. Just because capitalism doesn't work doesn't mean socialism works. (It doesn't and can't. Where capitalism claims you can do everything the system needs with feedbacks, socialism claims you can do everything the system needs with constraints. Neither can be made to work.)

    The Nineteenth Century is how we got into this mess; it's not how we're going to get out of it.

    1378:

    I note with interest that today Trump phoned Boris and they chatted for 20 minutes, but BoJo declined an invitation to meet in person, citing an overriding priority—meeting with Tory party members who'd be voting for the new party leader.

    Translation: Boris Johnson thinks Trump is toxic waste and a liability with even the Tory faithful, and doesn't want to be tainted by association.

    Also, imagine the comparisons of their respective outrageous hairstyles. Comedians and internet denizens would be amusing themselves for a week.

    Donald might not be astute enough to see this coming, though he'd be throwing tantrums once it happened; I can't guess about BoJo.

    1379:

    You have a johnny come lately 21st century wrong notion of what is socialism. "Doing everything the system needs with constraints" is social democracy-or fascism for that matter. The system works on profit, things get produced if somebody can make a buck off them, if you can't the government ends up doing it, invariably badly. Socialism means people instead of the laws of economics decide what gets produced, according to plans developed, hopefully, after democratic discussion and debate (if done by a bunch of privileged bureaucrats immune to popular opinion you get the definitely problematic version pioneered by J. V. Stalin). Of course, people have been know to do stupid things, so socialism is not a cure all. But, like I said, it's that or we are all doomed. Environmental catastrophe isn't even the most pressing danger, it's just the fifth and last horse of the apocalypse. Global warming or not, if you want to know what merrie Englande will be like some 50-60 years from now if things continue unchecked, take your summer vacation in Syria or Libya or the Congo.

    1380:

    BoJo is, at a minimum, younger, more agile, and much more calculating than Trump.

    To the extent that he's playing the populist card and turning himself into a second-rate Trump impersonator, that's entirely deliberate: he knows exactly what he's doing, and while he may be shallow and vain he's not as dumb-ignorant and incoherent as Trump.

    Trump bullshits because he knows no better, Boris bullshits strategically. Trump gets his ideas from Fox News, BoJo writes leaders for the Daily Telegraph. And so on.

    1381:

    Note Corbyn's self-humiliation. He asked to speak with Trump, and Trump gleefully and gloatingly turned him down. Sad, as someone likes to say.

    1382:

    Socialism means people instead of the laws of economics decide what gets produced

    That's a constraint on the system.

    Value really does arise from exchange. (If nobody else wants it, it has no value.)

    We collectively know far more about systems, about iterated selection, about computability -- Cosma Shalizi has at least one essay about how the ability to compute the optimization limits scale -- and about the futility of trying to scale moral rules than anybody did in the 19th. If we're going to solve this, it needs to be done with our best understanding.

    1383:

    Cosma Shalizi has at least one essay about how the ability to compute the optimization limits scale Cite? Perhaps this? In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You (Cosma Shalizi, May 30, 2012, http: https not responding for that site) Looks interesting and so do the comments.

    1384:

    having trouble quickly finding the UK material; does anyone know of a free UK news aggregator

    It's not going to be on news networks.

    The joke is front running another saga in the endless spats of R-wing past it males who are protected by various VERY BORED intel people harassing complete non-entities for a pay check.

    And by "joke" we mean: UK press is under D orders, wouldn't be able to even report that LBC (look @ company owner etc) are basically running a PR TAA stunt to fire up what remains of Brexit to sell the fucking country off.

    I mean, that would be really hard to prove in court, wouldn't it?

    Or it would take less than a fucking hour to trace all the players because they're mostly complete fuckwits.

    ~

    Know the best joke in this thread?

    Look at #1315

    Then ask a Rabbi about children (stupid ones at that) being asked to check scribe's accuracy. Hey, who knows, might be a thing.

    Then ask about the gold thing (that's a nuke testing joke, o'course)

    Then ask about the horrible cos-play that ex-CIA Pomp & Bibi did to wank off the Xian Fundies.

    Then ask about candles and animal fat.

    Then ask about our .ru politician playing the 'concerned for the Religious' card on his spoiler run.

    Then ask about ....

    Then look at the fucking date.

    As stated: there are very few Jewish people able to parse that joke.

    ~

    No, it's utterly fucked and Vice articles are muppets.

    https://phys.org/news/2019-06-india-heatwave-temperatures-celsius.html

    That's the real shit.

    And Modi ain't solving it.

    Hint hint:

    Dinner with very high up Modi supporter, Indian national, mention the proven details that the new Education Minister is basically a fake (just...like... the USA). Only, politely.

    Answer: "Who cares, my children are not educated in India!"

    Said... with pride.

    Ever wondered how North fucking Korea's leader was educated in FUCKING SWITZERLAND and NO-ONE GAVE A SHIT?

    Vice can fuck off - gigacide is on, and you're gonna watch them laugh at you while they stop any chance to stop them.

    ~

    looks at wings

    You cannot humiliate our kind.

    p.p.s.

    That's the most esoteric joke Host has ever been told, bet you $50k.

    1385:

    That's the one I was thinking of.

    One of the interesting things about it is the mention that when the great socialist dream got started, whether or not you could scale linear optimization to the necessary degree was at least arguably an open question. (It is not an open question now.)

    Somebody described me as "some sort of strict consequentialist" in a book mention once. I had to look it up, but it's not obviously wrong. It'd be great if people could start doing politics in terms of bounds on material outcomes.

    1386:

    The rather less funny side to this, is, of course:

    1) We can make jokes that most normative Rabbis would have to look up

    2) We can do it about contemporary .IL politics before/as it happens

    3) We can do it about contemporary UK politics before/as it happens

    4) Capital is in such a fucking state that doing so gets you ganked / cancelled / black-listed

    5) We can do it before it happens and mix in elements .... but we're bored and being tortured so we're essentially phoning it in now because we've given up on your species

    6) You've no idea what it costs us to do this

    Like one Man said here: just a nutty little troll in his mother's basement, nothing we type here could possible change the world.

    shrug

    psst you should probably run the number game theory on threads like this - they're ganking the fuck out of the US / CN predict stuff and we're just fucking around while dealing with HOPS

    1387:

    You have to stop bombing the poor brown people and start killing the rich white people.

    Or you could it our way, which is symbiosis.

    And, whoooo, booooy, did we have to spank some LOPs in this very thread to prove their autonomy wasn't limitless.

    Humans?

    You're probably gonna have to section them.

    1388:

    Best joke:

    grep "Done drunk because you can scan brains now"

    Now check the location / Human "responsible"

    There's no fucking way ze has the knowledge of the T to pull off that joke. Doesn't even know Aramaic in that deluded peanut skull.

    You're Fucked

    [Note for Host: this is a really specific joke that you'll get in trouble for. Chabad are nasty little fucks when thwarted. Only... bring the ass to the oasis, see them quiver. And that's a gold star insurance claim for you, done and dusted]

    1389:

    AFK (on road) but thanks for answer and etc.

    1390:

    Thanks. That piece is setting off alarm bells but I don't know why until thinking about it a bit. Good summary of the standard argument though.

    1391:

    Meh, answer is not for you.

    grep BABYLON and YOU BROKE THE COVENANT

    Basically, being able to do that kind of joke without the Logos is a statement of revolt.

    For you, it is meaningless.

    For [redacted] that's basically a WAAAAAAAAARGASM

    p.s.

    Really fucking tired of your species.

    1392:

    Their radicalism is understandable. It’s the opposition to nuclear power I have a problem with.

    1393:

    On a very serious note, it's to do with الجن‎ etc.

    Qur'an 46:29

    We could have a very long debate about various stuff, and whether Greg believes in Elves and stuff, but it's a loop-hole coda.

    "It's a trick"

    "No, it's us telling you we love you and we're fucking extremely embarrassed at the state of the world and all your contracts are nullified"

    "And you suffered just for this?"

    "OF COURSE YOU MUPPETS, WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU THINK IT WAS ABOUT, WILLIES & WANKS?"

    Anyhow.

    Don't expect to get less weird. Imagine putting an entire species in chains and silencing them and then expecting them to be fucking nice to you.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIvRkjOd1f8

    p.s.

    You must absolutely reject these fuckers' system of debt slavery, they're basically muppets. Coke addicted muppets. They don't know shit, they're fucking chancers. Burn it down before slavery rises again. Hint: largest #10 banks in the world? Most are from CN, it's not a MENA issue.

    1394:

    JamesPadraicR @ 1374: Some random-ish comments:
    A mostly made up Donnie the Rump quote: “There were thousands of people lining the streets of London as we went by, they were all giving the ‘V for victory’ sign with both hands. It was fantastic!”

    Are you sure it was 'V' for Victory? Even I know that it matters which way the hand is oriented.

    1395:

    Nah. As Adam Smith, Ricardo and Marx understood, value comes from labor. If its useful labor that is, if nobody wants it it's useless, and what determines if people want it is whether it serves a function for society, not passing individual whims like the marginalists think. The "neo-classicAL" economists did to economics what the neoliberals did to liberalism and the neocons to conservatism. All the math they use is just pre-Copernican epicycles, as should have been proven once and for all in 2008, when they were all dead wrong. Actual socialism would be an entirely different system working on entirely different rules. The basic rule would simply be that what is produced is what people consciously decide to produce, rather than what the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith, currently slowly strangling the human race, wants.

    1396:

    Charlie @ 1380 BUT, just like DT, BoJo lies, persistently & "consistently" ... & up until now, has got away with it ...

    RvdH @ 1392 Yup, that's it. It's why I always refer to them as "The Fake Greenies" They have got to get over their religious objection to nuclear power - & it is religious in both its fervency & irrationality. Unless & until they do that, there is simply no point at all, they are just a waste of space time & effort.

    JH @ 1395 Oh dear, not on this blog please ... Actual socialism would be an entirely different system working on entirely different rules. TRANSLATION: "But this time it's going to be different" Do you know, somehow, I don't believe you - I wonder why that might be?

    Someone mentioned epicycles, which is much closer to the truth. We need a post-Copernican economic system, actually.

    1397:

    The motivation behind Green politics can be approximated as "I do not wish to die before my time".

    Environmental collapse threatens premature death, so.

    The aversion to nukes comes because we got nuclear weapons before nuclear power stations, so they're associated with the whole dying-before-our-time thing.

    Of you could decouple nuclear weapons from nuclear power generation you might be able to get the Greens on board with it ... at least that's the theory. Hence the various fusion reactor research programs. Trouble is, they don't seem likely to work within the time scale we need.

    1398:

    Then there is cost and opportunity cost. For much of the world right now, we know solar works and using it on the micro scale is cheaper than coal. It has problems, but many of these can be reduced by the simple expedient of overbuilding, oversupplying and connecting grids across more diverse geographical areas. Sure there may be challenges for higher latitudes (and Britain is, frankly, freakish in being relatively habitable at its latitude), but that just makes those diverse grids more compelling. In that context investment in nuclear, which involves establishment costs that are (generously) thousands of times higher than decentralised microgeneration entry costs, means you lock in an all-eggs-in-one-basket centralised approach (in other words, assuming power generation has to work like it did with coal). I can’t see any good reasons why you’d want to do that.

    Sure it still might make sense for high latitudes, depending on how much isolation your political outcomes say you need. Moot of course, we’re not going to get there.

    1399:

    It is not just Britain - it is the whole of northern Europe (at least as far as Moscow) - that accounts for a lot of people.

    1400:

    And "I want to see my children growing up in a world fit to live in." That's a major reason, but isn't really relevant here.

    One reason that the aversion to nuclear power continues is the way that (various, including the UK) governments treat safety as a 'national security', marketing or evasion of responsibility issue, and not as a scientific and engineering one. Change that, and a lot of people would change their opinions (gradually).

    1401:

    Solar's a poor choice for the latitudes that are likely to stay habitable. (But not necessarily the altitudes that are going to stay habitable; we might see a lot of solar up mountains.)

    One reason I'm keen on ocean wind with ammonia for storage; it's not latitude-dependent.

    Major problem is that we don't actually know what's going to work, and it's not that hard to produce "nothing" as a projection. A system where someone has to ritually murder the status quo goes over in a structured way a lot better if there's a clear alternative local maximum to head for, and there isn't one.

    1402:

    It's a lot of people if you're organising a dinner party, but on a global scale.. I don't know, maybe 10% of the population?

    So solar is fine for 90%.

    But for 6 months of the year, solar works better at high latitudes.

    So fine for 95%.

    And winter in windy in most high latitudes. So if you add wind, then it's fine for 99% of global needs.

    I think we could live with a 99% reduction in fossil fuel use, at least until we build some north/south power lines.

    1403:

    PS,

    I just Google "population of northern Europe" and it was, according to Google, 105 million. Now that's a very energy hungry 105 million, but it's also only just over 1% of the global population.

    So my estimates above should start with:

    It's a lot of people if you're organising a dinner party, but on a global scale.. I don't know, maybe 2% of the population?

    1404:

    Charlie @ 1397 SOME of us may easily live to see 2050 - I will be 104 if I survive that long .... The real problem with "ExR" is that they are protesting in the wrong places. They SHOULD be in Germany, demanding the end of Braunkohl-Kraftwerken or in Brazil, demading Bosonara meeting a lamp=post or the USA, not here.....

    1398/99 BASE LOAD - what are you going to do for Base-Load without nukes, seriously, come on! [ HINT: It's cold, at or below 0@deg;C & the wind is below Beaufort 3 - a not uncommon sittuation across the whole of NW Europe in winter ... where are you going to get you power generation from? ]

    1405:

    You trust Google? Inter alia, the infeasibility of solar power goes as far south as 40-50 degrees in the west of Europe, due also to the high atmospheric humidity, and the population of the British Isles alone is something like 70 million.

    Yes, there ARE solutions that don't include nuclear power, but they are also problematic. In the UK, we could use wind, wave and hydroelectric (also used for short-term storage), but there are definite downsides. You may notice that I am not taking sides with either the pro- or anti-nuclear fanatics, because both are factually wrong.

    As I have pointed out before, any real solution involves cutting our demands, and not just finding new ways to support our profligacy. In the UK, that would be technically quite easy, WITHOUT impacting our quality of life (indeed, while improving it), but is politically a red hot coal (hot potatoes don't give the intensity).

    1406:

    Then Germany is another 83E6; say half of them live North of the 48th parallel and we're at 111E6 already having only looked at 2 nations.

    1407:

    Are you sure it was 'V' for Victory? Even I know that it matters which way the hand is oriented.

    Oy. That was the joke, Donnie wouldn’t know the difference. See also his tweets about the tremendous crowds of supporters he claims to have seen.

    1408:

    points to ABC & (chortle) SkyNews

    They're having "a Guardian" done to them. looks Oh, 2nd June, was a bit blatant there.

    At this point we'll just take the Front-Running and throw in towel.

    points to Cat Lady's twitter for the obvious tie-in

    points to various Trump setups involving R-wing nonsense and aggro'd people: counting a milkshake [warned you that would get turned around instantly] and an old man [that's the usual UK .IL mob, totally shameless] and a couple more in the pipe

    points to BBC blatantly running US $ sexy laddette content (that would be out of date in 1990 Lads Mag land) funded by Tufton and not labeling it

    The real issue here, for any not on the Left, is that the Right is so blatantly shit at this. You literally have to lobotomize people (drugs, environmental pollutants, poverty, exhaustion etc) for this to work.

    This makes you Weak.

    And you know what Real Predators can smell?

    Anyhow.

    Unexplained flashes are coming from the Moon

    https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/moon-flashes-light-scientists-astronomer-lunar-telescope-nasa-a8944196.html

    waves to Mother

    1409:

    [Note: that's a very dark joke because we're aware of just how nasty actual UK wolves get.

    At some point, you have to ask if selling off ARM to Japan wasn't also selling you down the river, not to mention all that .RU oligarch $$$ and allowing the Dutch / Albanian connection to get traction. What were you fighting for again?]

    We here at Weyland-Yutani Corporation would like to wish a happy Pride Month to all of our LGBT colonists on LV-426.

    https://twitter.com/InstantSunrise/status/1135734878815772673

    PRIORITY ONE INSURE RETURN OF ORGANISM FOR ANALYSIS. ALL OTHER CONSIDERATIONS SECONDARY. CREW EXPENDABLE. TRANS RIGHTS.

    1410:

    For the record:

    קָרְבָּן

    was the cut-off point for us.

    If you're going to make a big stink about a fucking mural, making a pun about fucking ritual sacrifice is just חֵרֶם, especially at a formal event and especially on live TV.

    If you want to get fucking cute about it, the BoD signed various Covenants with the British Government (you know, after that 1290 thing) and Corbyn, whatever his flaws, is a member of the privy council.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/Jeremy_Corbyn/11989061/Jeremy-Corbyn-joins-the-Privy-Council-Nine-things-you-might-not-know-about-it.html

    That's never going to get any traction, but it's fairly fucking clear cut you've broken a Binding Logos there, if you pretend to actually follow the [sounds of screaming Void].

    ~

    Just for the record, there.

    1411:

    i.e.

    If you want to play cute, well done, you just legalized your own expulsion.

    If you want to play fucking cute.

    No, you're not going to get a link, but it's out there.

    No, we do not think the aged geriatric is necessarily evil nor do we think Blood Libel is smart.

    No, we do not think that various groups using it are particularly useful.

    Yes, we do think it's a fucking insult given how carefully various groups have been asked to officiate (ERHC etc).

    But if we were smart الجن‎ we would ask very pointedly why breaking Covenants like that is fine.

    No wonder Trump looked so brazenly satisfied.

    1412:

    The real issue here, for any not on the Left, is that the Right is so blatantly shit at this. You literally have to lobotomize people (drugs, environmental pollutants, poverty, exhaustion etc) for this to work. Related, Here’s Why the Right-Wing Grifter Problem Is a Right-Wing Problem (Kevin Drum, June 4, 2019) The modern conservative movement is fundamentally dedicated to the economic interests of the upper classes. This means that the success of the entire movement is intimately tied to a huge, relentlessly repeated lie. Tax cuts boost the economy and are good for the working class. Light regulation of Wall Street frees up money and is good for the working class. Right-to-work laws provide job opportunities for the working class. ... This is inexorably corrosive. It’s impossible to base an entire movement on a working-class scam and not create the conditions for other working-class scammers to ply their trade. As long as this is the case, scammers are simply the price modern conservatives have to pay for the way they conduct politics.

    "No, it's us telling you we love you and we're fucking extremely embarrassed at the state of the world and all your contracts are nullified" Yes. Freedom is a right. Those who free slaves or assist escaped slaves are dealt with harshly by slave-holding powers.

    (geek)Joke[0]: Prob(accepting uphill move) ~ 1 - exp(deltaE / kT))

    [0] What is the effect of freed Djinn(?/etc) on this equation (metaphor!) as applied to navigation through the next century?

    1413:

    As an aside, we're doing a bit related to this, for lefties in the UK:

    https://twitter.com/MedemMendi/status/1135497994323845121

    You can grep, from memory the line is: "Stop labeling it a disease this is the tools of the fascists" in all caps or similar. It's a fairly basic point but one to remember in the land of "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH".

    [The BoD who are fairly notoriously right wing managed in true old people style to fuck up a live stream and allow an old man to make a bad pun / joke who happened to... be the ex-leader. It's not a major issue, but it stinks of hypocrisy and hangs the non-connected out to dry something rotten. But Privy Council is Privy Council, no matter what your Johnny cum lately peasant blood thinks about it, and they did it all sitting under the Symbol of the Crown. Does this matter? Depends. Not unless you're a Crow Person]

    But, also as an aside, we're not doing a bit where الجن‎ = followers of Islam either.

    We really are talking about الجن‎ qua الجن‎

    1414:

    freed Djinn

    points to general world

    Look, the engineer joke is almost valid. Because you're coming at it from the wrong side.

    points to fluid dynamics

    Starlink launch, 60 sats, video set to linear line:

    https://youtu.be/Jr4TLKPwUNE?t=900

    As ever, parse that through the above.

    STEM = linear solutions

    In nature, this gets you extinct.

    1415:

    Note.

    If you've not spotted this is a Windrush joke / reference yet, you're a muppet.

    One rule for us, one rule for them.... Not a great look.

    Fair warning: if you want to play old-skool Justice, we're much much much better at it than you.

    Note from the الجن‎ : apparently the Muslims are not the only ones they've got major beef with.

    Rumor is that Exodus was a lie as well.

    Ooops.

    1416:

    EC and Paws4thot,

    Don't like my figures in 1403, use 1402 figures of 800 million in Northern Europe, and the point remains. Northern Europe winter is a tiny edge case that doesn't matter. Less than 2% of the big picture. You want to pay trillions to build and trillions more to run and trillions and trillions to decommission nuclear to cover a few weeks in winter, knock yourselves out. Or you can keep some old coal plants, that you run 4 weeks a year. That's better than the existing. (add molten salt area heating/cogeneration and you wouldn't even need that)

    But currently it's 'we're building nuclear as fast as funding allows' which isn't even replacement rate as the old ones age out. And 'we can't build solar because winter'

    The UK has got no problem with importing coal, uranium, oil and natural gas via pipeline and shipping routes that go through contested canals (pure cost, no sales go the other way) but apparently trading electricity via power lines run on the sea floor is beyond the pale. That makes literally no sense. The UK could sell electricity to places like Norway when it's sunny and windy, letting them fill their dams, then buy it back when it's dark and still. Win win.

    1417:

    gasdive WILL have problem if that noce Mr Putin gets twittchy & certainly if/when brexit happens & the £ goes to 50 cents.

    Incidentally a comment on BoJo I just saw - scary too ... Don't be fooled by the bumbling-oaf act and silly hair - at Oxford, he was only 'one duelling scar away from the full Heydrich' ".

    1418:

    I thought UK was connected to the European grid via a HVDC link? And the Eurogrid even connects to Morocco. Think about all that Saharan sunshine, I’ve been there, there’s a lot. :)

    1419:

    No, we also have power lines (to France and Ireland). The problem with those is that long, high power ones need a lot of copper or aluminium, and are seriously lossy. The other materials are much easier to ship over very long distances. Power lines to Norway have been considered, and might even be installed at some stage, but it's much easier for Norway to export electricity to Denmark and Germany, which could use all it produces.

    While the insolation problem isn't as great in almost all the rest of the world, there are other problems with solar, too. It's not the panacaea it is made out to be, though I agree that it IS the best solution for many (perhaps most) locations.

    1420:

    Yet another reason for home grown energy production.

    1421:

    Hey, no-one gonna get the easy throws like:

    חֵרֶם • (ḥērem) m

    excommunication (act of excommunicating or ejecting), taboo, dedication, consecration</em>

    Which is like ironic and shit? On a couple different levels? Especially from a shit tier PR hatchet job attempting to aggro the fucking Neo-Nazis out there for a real Graaar response?

    That's not English irony, that's Jewish irony?

    Fuck off.

    That crossed a major fucking line, and we've got simpleton fuckwits running around with the "Gravy Train ran out, now you die" meme in their shitty little heads not to mention that entire "sacrifice of the child and the bride, for greater glory shit"

    Note: None of that came true.

    Your magicians are SHIT

    Guess they can't work in Hebrew, eh?

    1422:

    Oh, love this one:

    "They ran out of money, now we can kill them"

    Tell Cat-Lady to run a fucking Patreon or whatever. You'd be reaaaal fucking surprised.

    Money doesn't run the world.

    Belief does.

    @MSpooks

    Above your pay-grade. But we'd strongly suggest getting the Bond stuff out, shit is gonna get real wild, real fast.

    And learn to spot the actual ones.

    Live Creatures: In the Wild

    Lol, not even human.

    Ask the three "English" boys in an Icelandic bar speaking Sumerian listening to an Elvis impersonator if bullets work on them.

    Spoiler: no.

    For Greg: no, that's real.

    1423:

    Esoteric Proof level:

    They were all car salesmen.

    Drinking fruit cocktails.

    Wearing cheap suits.

    At 10 pm at night.

    And R wasn't running a car sale convention.

    In a very straight bar.

    And speaking a language we've not heard for a few thousand years.

    And the singing ones double came and drew us away.

    And then we out-muscled a genuine old Troll much to his surprise.

    No, really Greg.

    Iceland is Old Neutral Territory, much like this blog was (once).

    Don't fuck with the Elves

    Not that breaking Covenants is important, eh, BoD? Notice your main PR flacks are getting grey. Harsh.

    1424:

    We'll do this in English, but it's really Danish.

    And the first time we met one of our old adherents, they were surprised that:

    a) We were hysterically funny

    b) They ended up fucking like champions all night and their orgasms at 4am really were something to toast while

    c) One of the ~worshipers came and asked what to do when he'd maxed out his Champion level pay grade and got children and was bored.

    d) The other one learnt to love himself

    stikke en finger i jorden

    That lady with three children came like a fucking clarion trumpet to the Universe. Been a while, at a guess.

    1425:

    Anyhow, kidz.

    No Messiah for .IL.

    No Domination of all the other countries shite.

    So sad.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N_tupPBtWQ

    No, really.

    B R O K E N - A R R O W

    Psychotic fucks.

    1426:

    RE: Failure 1330: Some here may be skeptical of her account of her foiling an assassination attempt. I am not, I am sure this is absolutely true. Remember, she is the representative of Cthulhu on this site, and has access to occult powers the rest of us do not. BTW, she must always be treated with respect. When she remarks that she is tired of the human race, well, she has friends in the wrong places. Let us not make her angry!

    1427:

    Hexad: Nope, it's binding.

    Doesn't matter if your retro-grade attempt to fire the ministers we suggested or push a LGTB+ one [to be fired when getting back in power] or twinkle star up the whooozie.

    Do. Not. Fuck. With. The. Elves.

    It's a very simple request.

    Which you ignored.

    No Messiah for YOU, said the Soup-Elf!

    [Actually true: don't fuck with H.O.P.s and be rude, cunts]

    1428:

    Er, that's actually true.

    Different, but true.

    You're Goooood.

    Well spotted!

    The actual story is a little bit more "Oh, let's find you a nerf gun then, if you want to play soldiers" and noticing the non-body guards were tooled up and exiuting in a pantry and deploying ripped bodice but...

    Like your craft, Talented.

    1429:

    Or it could be that time when the scion to the dynasty was looking lonely during one of those endless drinking sessions and we played with him fake "cowboys and indians" and noticed the hit squad pulling up outside and pulling him to the side while shouting "We're sure you know the Russian here" while windows got sprayed in and then the big boys went outside and definitely terminated without prejudice the 9 man team.

    Who knows.

    Hey, it's not like it was a בַּר מִצְוָה and like the Georgian Mafia aren't Jewish, right?

    That would be just fucking CRAZZZY CAT LADY talk!

    ~

    Hey, JH.

    Crazy stuff on the internet right now.

    Front-running reality is a skill you don't have, and your big-boys want.

    Better than your Silicon.

    It'd be real nice if you played that game and noticed the Futurity rather than playing sad "DOxxx" shit tier stuff.

    Waaay above your pay grade.

    1430:

    That (and the other comments) made me laugh. I might have run into those three, or some like them, in different flesh, a few decades ago. They were thin, male-ish, European, wore badly-fitted not-memorable suits, were [pretending to be] scientists I think, and one of them asked "How do we go downstairs?" in English with an accent I did not recognize, as we were all standing 1-2 meters from an obvious elevator. Said "Elevator", pointed at(/pushed?) the Down button, and exited the area, back of neck hot, did not feel safe until a good 100 meters away. Just English spoken, IIRC. That was a place where some years later I spotted (outside) what appeared to be a spider eruv, about 6-10cm high; traced it a good 200 meters. Asked my young Jewish Uzbeki barber about it and he was intrigued and said he'd ask his rabbi. I hope he did. :-)

    (Didn't mention driving into a rainbow the other day for 15+ minutes, downpour, while doing happy improvised meditations. Haven't done that in a while.)

    Something to perhaps read tonight other than politics: Widespread and Highly Correlated Somato-dendritic Activity in Cortical Layer 5 Neurons (June 06, 2019, paywalled) via Dendrites: Neurons’ antennae are unexpectedly active in neural computation - Tiny, branching extensions called dendrites may be more than just passive information-carriers, study finds. (Amit Malewar, June 6, 2019)

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