I don’t know, there is a certain nostalgia to it. Yes, it was a pain in the ass to use, but there was also the aspect where limitations breed creativity. If your time online is competing with one of the home’s primary means of communication, the landline phone, the internet becomes a limited resource. It wasn’t as easy to just rot on the internet as it is today. You had to be more deliberate with your time, even if that was just being more deliberate in the types of fun sites you were going to visit.

How finely do you cut your steak at a restaurant? I’m imagining you cutting very fine slices and savoring them one by one.

Every now and then I think paragliding would be an interesting thing to try but I have to tell myself another expensive hobby is hard to justify when I’d like to actually own a place to live some day.

What do you mean? You will simply live in your paraglider! You’ll be like one of those birds that stays aloft for months at a time. There you will be, a child of the sky. No need for land. No need for rent. Just a literal leaf on the wind.

You can’t take the sky from me…

That’s why you steal someone else’s kidneys!

Of course, then you’ll need to develop a collection of surgical gear, and likewise you would want to improve that with time…after all, why not take pride in your work?

Current building codes allow the construction of wood frame buildings up to 18 stories tall. You need to expand your knowledge of wood construction beyond what you learned reading The Three Little Pigs.

I agree. Wood is clearly the superior material.

The key difference between all previous civilizational collapses and the one we potentially face is that most people in the past were farmers. Even in the grandest empires like Rome, less than 10% of the population actually lived in cities. Most people lived in the countryside working the land. The city of Rome lost something like 95% of its population. But those people didn’t just crawl in a hole and die. They abandoned the city and joined the vast majority of the population that was living in the countryside. Many in the countryside actually saw their quality of life improve substantially. Many who had been slaves found the old legal system enforcing their slavery no longer existed. Rome collapsing just meant the end of the grand cities; political and economic systems could fragment, and people would just live more locally.

But today? Less than 5% of the population actually works on a farm. The vast majority of the population lives in cities. If the political and economic system collapses, the countryside can’t just absorb all those extra people. Hell, the farms can’t even operate without the equipment, fuels, and chemicals produced by the larger economic system.

Historically, when civilizations collapsed, the common folk just left the cities, abandoned the corrupt elites to their madness, and returned to small villages and rural life. But now there is simply nowhere for people to retreat to.

It’s not even about needing to exceed the speed of light. Once you cross the event horizon, spacetime around you is so warped that “out” doesn’t exist anymore. Point your ship in any direction and fire up your FTL engine; it doesn’t matter. No matter which way you try and fly your ship, you’ll be getting closer to the center. Once you cross the event horizon, there is literally no way out.

These devices exist as aftermarket ad-ons and are frequently added by used car dealerships.

You mean in how magnificent they are?

The problem for OpenAI and their ilk is that the actual legitimate uses of LLMs are so few and niche that they cannot hope to pay for the immense cost of developing and running these systems. Like, cool. Sure I can use copilot to generate derivative meme images, but what’s that actually worth to me monetarily? I’m not going to subscribe to a monthly service just to access a tool for shit posting.

Only left it twice!

Oh, and the fun kind!

I mean, you could inject say, 6 mg of estradiol enanthate weekly. That would produce dry climax for most people. Though, there may be some…undesirable side effects, depending on your perspective…

I mean you could take a 6 mg injection of estradiol enanthate weekly. That would produce the effects you want. Though…it…may also have some other effects…but anything’s work it for a dry climax, right? 😈 😆

/s for the dense.

500 cigarettes.

We’ll build the homes in the flood zone, but only let beavers live there.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/26/blackstone-group-accused-global-housing-crisis-un

https://pestakeholder.org/reports/helter-shelter-how-blackstone-contributes-to-and-profits-from-californias-broken-housing-system/

https://fox5sandiego.com/news/local-news/almost-a-crime-report-finds-blackstone-hiked-rent-nearly-double-market-rate/

https://prospect.org/education/2023-02-28-university-california-blackstone-housing/

https://www.archpaper.com/2025/01/blackstone-cushman-wakefield-landlords-justice-department/

While I don’t support mass shootings in general, if someone is so far off the deep end that they’re going to throw their life away in an act of random violence, I at least hope they choose targets like Blackstone instead of a random elementary school. At least they’re smiting someone who deserves it, for once. The country would be a lot better off if we had several hundred corporate shootings and zero school shootings each year. No shooting period would be better. But if you’re going to go on a rampage, at least go after evil people first.

Do we really think that a beaver dam is the same level of safety/long term investment as a $1.2 million dam?

I mean, the dam is self-repairing.

Frankly, the answer should be for every site to just cut the UK off entirely. Let them have their own little North Korean style micronet. Maybe when the people of the UK can’t visit anything but a bunch of miserable English websites, they will get off their asses and elect competent leaders. If not, well maybe they’re just not the sort of people we should allow access to the global communications network. Let the barbarians stew in their own barbarism.

Get the audiobooks. Listen to it in the car. But yeah, one of the plot points is basically exactly this, where people can effectively have a “save point” in life. I won’t spoil it, but it’s great.