I was just thinking that the one thing the race to the bottom has not yet replaced with a cheaper, enshittified version is death. Love, friendship, food, urbanization, yes.

From Forbes:

Quoting directly from Schrödinger’s diaries, Moore revealed that the physicist justified his attraction to girls by considering that, being a genius (which he believed no woman ever could be), he was naturally entitled. “It seems to be the usual thing that men of strong, genuine intellectuality are immensely attracted only by women who, forming the very beginning of the intellectual series, are as nearly connected to the preferred springs of nature as they themselves. Nothing intermediate will do, since no woman will ever approach nearer to genius by intellectual education than some unintellectuals do by birth so to speak.”

TIL. Ugh.

One of my favorite arcs.

Generally seems like the right message, but there are plenty of third factors that might be a more direct cause — amount of drugs, microplastics, pesticides, etc in the environment / food.

Russia has done very well, though! Higher prices for oil that people were shying away from, and a possible diversion of arms away from Ukraine.

Yeah, I wish git blame could highlight the lines written by Claude/Codex. Usually when I ask my colleagues ‘so did you use AI much for this one’ they will say yes. But it makes code review that much harder, especially when they then take my PR comments and feed them to the LLM, so I’m coding by playing telephone with a bot.

This may be referencing a chart from CNN’s report on Small Arms Survey data, which includes many other statistics making the same point. Here’s another:

I mostly use:

• square knot (generl tying a rope around something; learned it earlier than memory)
• bowline hitch (loop at the end of a knot that won’t close up, like I need a handle or want to attach the end of a rope to something; learned it in boy scouts maybe)
• taut line hitch (clothesline, tent to stake, something that I can tie loose and then cinch up for tension; learned it from a cousin while camping)

Sounds like there are some other ones I could learn too! But as many folks have said, learn a coupe and use them frequently.

Nice!

I hadn’t heard about the local employment aspect:

New Bedford is home to the Marine Commerce Terminal, a $150 million specialized staging port for offshore wind. All of the massive turbine components for Vineyard Wind were stored and partially assembled there before being loaded on boats and sent to sea. The project has employed about 3,500 people, many of whom are union workers.

I see you, too, enjoy a good Beth Mole article.

If only we could limit the damage to people who deserve it.

Messing with the jet stream is terrifying.

means you get a lot of extremes next to each other,” Maue said. Storm fronts coming from the Pacific hit that high pressure heat dome in the Southwest and are pushed north to climb that mountainous jet stream peak, “grab access to that cold air reservoir up there” and bring it back down south down the other side of the hill, he said.

Numerous studies have connected unusual jet stream and polar vortex activity to shrinking Arctic sea ice and human-caused climate change.

The article doesn’t talk about impact on this year’s crops, but I can’t imagine this is good for agriculture.

Genocidal military drops charges against genocidal rapist soldiers doing the genocide they ordered it to do?!

Yeah, he has a billion dollar army out there committing hate crimes, there’s no “may” about it.

Don’t be safe! It costs so much more than continuing to expand the bubble!

A while back I needed to widen a doorway that had been built undersized and prevented moving our broken-at-the-time washing machine. It took months until a carpenter was on site and could do it as a side project, since I couldn’t find the precise sizes of wood to match the remaining trim.

Since then I purchased a table saw, and now being able to rip boards to arbitrary widths I look back on that project and see why the carpenter said it was easy.

All to say, eventually there’s a critical mass of tools/materials that begins to make jobs faster.

Fossil fuels & red meat!

In the “hire someone” vein, setting an artificial deadline can sometimes help. “If I don’t build the X by Y myself, then we just go buy it.”

As with anything, momentum builds too. If it’s not something that has a lot of constraints, just looking for one little step is easier to accept than Starting The Project. Like, I’m not necessarily going to frame the new opening today, just cut a hole in the wall in the back of the closet. May depend on housemates’ tolerance. But often just getting into the workshop is enough to overcome activation energy for me.

Great information on how London shut down fascism in the 70s, with lots of practical stories about resistance that worked! Also available on Nebula. Thanks for posting!

Data is beautiful, humanity has a real horrifying underbelly.