Yes. Most people don’t have the awareness of a lot of what’s been said in the comments or they suspend it in their daily lives. They do what they feel is right and since most were socialised in a similar way the signal-response expectations match. Then a certain rapport can be formed by the empty interactions borne out of the semi-conscious feeling that it’s “right” or “nice” to initiate a small talk and respond to it in kind. In this way indeed most of us are like 15 yo girls, just somewhat more serious and self-controlled.

If I were in a condescensing mood I’d say humans generally are bots following Pavlov’s reaction patterns imprinted during upbringing. But this would be a severe oversimplification and a little a-hole talking through me.

Oh I know, but I wanted to make sure no one has any grounds to accuse me of prophecies or something worse. Also the precise date doesn’t matter.

How about the same but about the world? If I gathered together all the places I visited, all documentaries I watched and all conversations I had it adds up to a mere glance at a myriad of different worlds. Every single small region in the world has more history and social and natural structures than any fantasy book. Living is like pulling individual pixels from a 4000000000000…000k photo which then changes every second.

My brain explodes sometimes, but the idea of fractals helps. There is still immense value in perceiving this small collection of pixels as they build up to more and more connected structures.

To people who say it’s oVeRbLoWn CoNsPiRaCy

Every viral disease may leave long term consequences, including the common flu. So can COVID. But we as a society got quite good at handling common flu. Also most people don’t contract it that often and if they do it’s a cause for medical attention. Meanwhile people are getting infected with COVID 3-4 times within 4 years and no one bats an eye besides “yeah, you’re not lucky”. So we were forced into pretending that going through a potentially heavily debilitating disease every 1-2 years is a perfectly normal thing and those who eventually “find out” are either just unfortunate or straight up lying.

Sadly facts don’t care about our feelings and social setups. The endgame (that is max percentage of affected people) is at the level of 50% of the entire population with long covid at all times because the damage from subsequent infections accumulates. I just don’t remember if the timescale for this was 10 or 20 years of unmitigated spread of the virus (that is: what we have now)

Meanwhile the new mutations are not really less severe. Only vaccinations make it so we’re not seeing death rates of 2020 until today. And sooner or later one or another mutated form will evade all immunity, wheteher it emerges tomorrow or in 5 years.

Fun times ahead and, oh, remind me how well are health care systems faring right now when “the pandemic has ended”? Yeah, thought so. And these people are first in line to be affected so it won’t be getting better. If anythong COVID is the one topic where doomerism is perfectly justified as we don’t even try to pretend we’re doing something like we are with climate.

Icelandic lichen liquor. Tastes like forest.

Eh, 2022-3 wars are just as horrifying, they just happen on a smaller scale. Look up what was going on in the Bucha town, what are living conditions in Gaza, how many people were forced to leave homes in African and Asian civil wars… The scale of minefields in Ukraine, etc.

Head of a fox

The technology of loan risk assessment? Yes, it exists worldwide, all banks are doing it. But there is a wide chasm between

“when I show up asking for a loan bank will xray all my previous financial history and craft its offer from that” in Europe (at least my country) and

“credit score is a houshold term, people employ lifehacks to improve it and you’re screwed if it’s bad because half of everything runs on credit”.

We will not. If anything COVID taught me people will actively fight against anything that minimally hurts their comfort and entrenched vision of reality.

This time we were taken by surprise and governments were surprisingly quick to act and impose things and we were lucky to have a 90%ready tech developed precisely for this kind of event (mRNA vaccines were in late stage of development in 2020, they just speeded up finishing touches, trials and roll-out).

In 2023 the general vibe is " we know that lockdowns, mask mandates, travel bans were the right thing to do, but we also know we won’t let them happen again". So it’s better to stay quiet, do nothing and act surprised when the next pandemic hits. Except this time those in power will know that mitigation won’t float and societies will happily sacrifice the old and the weak on the altar of economy.

On an unrelated note, “climate mitigation” will probably never happen.

I’d prefer them to converge from Baldur’s Gate 3 direction. Cast more or less established voice actors and give them the hype and marketing space usually found among movie/tv stars. “films and games converge” yea, when we treat a 200hour computer game the way we treat a long tv series and acknowledge the actors’ contribution on the same level.

And between Egypt and Ethiopia due to the latter building a dam on Nile

Two men eat their lunch at Edgewater Park Cleveland, Ohio is no stranger to harsh winters, but the city faces little risk from drought, wildfires, and hurricanes—natural disasters exp…Read More PHOTO BY ANGELO MERENDINO, CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES ENVIRONMENT Which cities will still be livable in a world altered by climate change? These northern U.S. communities may not be completely immune to a warming world, but they are well-placed to meet the needs of an influx of climate migrants.

Before September 2017, Dianiz Roman and Wilfredo Gonzalez had never given a moment’s thought to leaving Aguadilla, the couple’s hometown in western Puerto Rico. But after Hurricane Maria struck that month, everything changed.

Both of their workplaces, a funeral home and a gas station, were destroyed in a storm that killed around 3,000 people and upended life on the island.

“We were struggling; trying to get supplies, water, and food,” Gonzalez recalls of the months following the hurricane. There was nothing left to do, they say, than to try their luck thousands of miles north in Buffalo, New York, where Gonzalez’s sister had moved a year earlier.

Roman and Gonzalez weren’t alone. In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, several thousand people have fled the Caribbean island for western New York state, already home to a large Puerto Rican community.

Immigrants tend to migrate to neighborhoods that meet their cultural and linguistic needs, but the exodus of climate migrants to Buffalo wasn’t solely due to that established community. Months before Maria struck, the city’s mayor declared Buffalo a “climate refuge city,” noting that Buffalo has, “… a tremendous opportunity as our climate changes.”

Since then, the city has launched a relocation guide advertising the advantages to living in Buffalo, including how its average July temperature is a comfortable 71˚F. Anticipating a possible population uptick, the city revised zoning codes in 2017 to encourage development in existing city corridors and began upgrading its dated sewage infrastructure.

And Buffalo isn’t alone. Planners in cities such as Cleveland, Ohio; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Duluth, Minnesota; and elsewhere are beginning to map out what a future with thousands more residents could—and should—look like.

What makes a city safe from climate change? The question of ‘climate havens’—places where extreme weather events are rare and which tend to be located in the northern regions of the U.S. close to bodies of freshwater—has gained currency in recent years, as deadly wildfires, record heat, and damaging hurricanes increasingly affect day-to-day life in the southern and western parts of the country.

(This summer’s extreme weather is a sign of things to come. Read more here.)

Last year, 675,000 people in the U.S. were displaced from their homes by disasters, second only to Colombia among all 35 countries in the Americas, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center.

One academic has gone as far as labeling Buffalo and Duluth “climate proof” communities.

Many of these communities were once economically dependent on manufacturing, and are potentially well-placed to meet the needs of an influx of climate migrants: When factories started closed in the 1970s and residents moved elsewhere in search of work, they left behind homes and city spaces that today can be repurposed.

Cleveland, on the southern shore of Lake Erie, has around 30,000 vacant lots. Detroit, which has lost nearly two-thirds of its population since its industrial heyday in the 1950s, has more than 30 square miles of empty land inside its city limits. Duluth already has the infrastructure to accommodate tens of thousands more residents.

“We need to model various land use and development scenarios for population growth at the neighborhood, city-wide, county-wide, and regional scales,” says Terry Schwarz, director of the Cleveland Urban Design Initiative. “But at this point, we’re only getting started.”

While available land may be an advantage for some, other cities are examining how to modernize existing housing stock by fortifying them against cold in winter and heat in summer.

“Thinking through ways of reinvigorating the urban core is going to be central to having a more climate-resilient region,” says Nicholas Rajkovich of the University at Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning.

A true haven from a changing climate? While many Great Lakes cities boast a temperate climate and plenty of space, some believe that doesn’t necessarily translate into climate haven status in the short-term.

Puerto Rican hurricane survivors migrating to Buffalo aside, there’s little evidence to show that U.S. climate migrants are already moving north on a mass scale. The populations of Cleveland, Duluth, and Buffalo have largely remained stagnant over the past decade.

“We learned from our research that community resilience is just as important as infrastructure or natural resources in predicting how well a city can adapt to climate change or increased migration levels,” says Monica Haynes, director of Duluth’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

Moreover, these communities are not immune to climate change. “We’ve had many days this summer with very poor air quality due to Canadian wildfires. So, the idea that Duluth is ‘climate proof’ is not accurate,” adds Haynes. “Our city, like everywhere else, will experience negative effects from climate change.”

Still, the seemingly relentless cycle of climate change-fueled tragedies continues to call into question what parts of the world will be livable in the decades to come.

(Learn more about how climate change is affecting mental health.)

Scientists say that more intense, longer-lasting hurricanes and rising sea levels—around 13 million people in the southeastern U.S. potentially displaced by the end of the century—are likely to change life in Florida and beyond. Some researchers believe tornadoes are moving east into more densely populated regions of the South, possibly due to changing climate patterns. Wildfires are becoming a part of life in the West, and the recent devastation wrought on the Hawaii island of Maui illustrates the unpredictable nature of a changing climate.

Last September another devastating storm, Hurricane Fiona, ripped through Puerto Rico, killing more than two dozen people, cutting off power for millions and destroying crops.

But this time, Dianiz Roman and Wilfredo Gonzalez were nearly 2,000 miles north of the storm’s destruction.

After overcoming the initial shock of the Buffalo winter, they say they have settled well into their new lives. Both work in the local school system and are part of a thriving Puerto Rican community concentrated on Buffalo’s westside.

“When you go into a store you hear people speaking in Spanish, saying ‘hi’ to you. It is nice,” says Roman.

“You don’t get the extreme heat here that you get in Puerto Rico,” says Gonzalez.“It took a while, but I got to like the snow.”

Amazon

Okay now I’m stretching the OPs idea a little bit, but America is big.

How people live in South America never needing to learn other language than Spanish and plausibly never interacting with a foreign language outside movies. I spent some time in Chile, the place I lived in had a nice janitor. He did not speak English, I only knew a few loose words in Spanish so communication was… peculiar. Only after 2 months of awkward interactions he realised, that I probably am not Spanish native speaker and it hit me.

When your entire life in a continent where everyone speaks flavours of Spanish or Portugese, you can have successful, international career only in Spanish, participate in all kinds of rich culture only in Spanish and all signs and labels are only in Spanish, huge majority of tourists speak Spanish… it is not immediately obvious, that people may not speak Spanish.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not dunking on “dumb spanish speakers”. There are ton of places in Europe where people disregard English, where it’s famously hard to communicate in anything other than the local language, but the fact, that other languages exist is apparent to everyone once they learn to read. Awareness that people actually speak these languages is the most natural knowledge from ground school as we learn that “Germany speaks German. Italy speaks Italian” etc. A perspective which does not involve being in constant proximity to numerous foreign languages felt like something that made no sense to me in the past until I actually came into contact with it.

funny that you say that, not all Europeans are stuck in the same nationality for 10 or 30 generations back, maybe not even majority.

My great-grandmother was German, never learned the language of what is now my nationality. My grandmother and her child (my parent) didn’t speak German and have never subscribed to German nationality, neither do I (but I speak a little bit German though becouse of school not because of family). Maybe it’s because the identity of the place I live in is as strong as Germany’s so it’s a simple choice. But for a country, whose entire schtick is “'Murica fokk yea” I am sometimes baffled how much this ancestral identity matters among people who are supposed to benefit from the whole thing (white middle/upper classes).

My experience is from Canada, but Canada is in America so it should count:

• insane amounts of empty space. It’s one thing to know that in America several hours drive doesn’t count as “far away”, another to experience it.
• guns. Not like in “them americans only shoot themselves”, but like in “any hardware store carries full gamut of weapon-adjacent accessories and it’s normal” wtf mates, you can’t keep your murder machines confined to murder machine shops? We manage to do it with porn and sex toys in Europe (at least my part of it), sure you can too with guns?
• malls. We do have malls in Europe. I still don’t get them, but it is a choice to go there. Where I lived in Canada it was the only shopping option. Why not corner shops? These suburbs waste a ton of space, no one has ever thought in a capitalist brain “hey let’s put a shop closer to the people and charge them more because they burn less fuel and waste less time to get here”?
• And a very specific nitpick: calling places “european” like a point of pride while in fact they are rather not. Quebec City and Montreal I think both pride themselves on being “the most europe-like cities in north america” and… they’re not europe-like? Like, ok, the old town is nice, but that’s it.

One which you won’t be able to unlearn: “Kid” as a word for a child derives from a word “kid” which meant young goat. We’re literally calling human children “goat children” and it’s not even mocking.

The same thing happened in Swedish, the common word meaning “boy” or “guy” - “kille” is a shortened “killing” - young goat.

“Poultry” though

I believe it was written in advance and already filming when S1 premiered.

Oh true, the mineral salts from supplements (and broader salts of necessary metals) should count! Thanks for a long answer!