From 2/26/2009, 9:41:08 AM till now, @lifeisstillgood has achieved 18207 Karma Points with the contribution count of 7485.
Recent @lifeisstillgood Activity
As more people joined the internet, the content reverted to the mean of humanity. What surprised us is just how low down that mean is.
Twitter : We hoped for listening in on The Algonquin Round Table we got listening to the last round at Al's bar.
Facebook We hoped for pleasent updates from our friends lives, we got content moderators with PTSD
Instagram: we hoped for pictures of our friends lives - we got told our friends aren't as good as other peoples friends.
Beef travelled by both - the railway cars were also refrigerated (I believe the last wooden style ice cars were decommissioned post WWII!)
But transport by water is roughly two orders of magnitude cheaper than (pre railway) land transport - see also acoup.blog on Land Trains and game of thrones for a interesting segue.
I love these little nuggets of history, but as any glance at any alternative history (video) essay tells you, there is never just one causal link and usually dozens of factors.
The 1860s were probably the high water mark for British power in the world, but as for weird things that chnaged all that try this one:
- Frederick Tudor created the ice industry (think what the hero from Frozen did), allowing storage of buffalo and cattle beef in trains and ice houses in chicago
- which travelled by boat through the great lakes and over the recently dug Eerie canal and out New York and across the Atlantic to cause world wide economic depression as agricultural societies collapsed due to the competition
- which meant traditional MPs and rural power was upended
- and new industrialists coukd afford to pay their politicians while the landed gentry found there was a massive rural depression
There are so many fascinating threads through history.
I think the best use case for self driving car tech is not self driving but teaching the humans how to drive better "You should slow down approaching that junction two seconds earlier because the last ten times i noticed a car approaching from left that you were not seeing"
I heard someone describe geo-engineering as "science of showing how bad the other options are, that reducing CO2 output seems the best option"
You start with the imagination, then you do the research, then you choose the least bad option (politics notwithstanding)
I am not saying "chuck iron filings in the sea now" I am saying "research it now, so we have globally understood trade offs and impacts for when things get bad"
But we have already taken the hubristic step of shoving stuff into the atmosphere for years. This is firstly studying the effects as best we can as carefully as we can - there are many options - from space based to atmospheric to oceanic- and yes they may all have downsides and concerns - but this is a trade off - we know what the impacts of climate change will be (very bad) and we need to have experimental based options in our pockets in a few years.
Is this something to rush into - no. Is this something to be researched by worlds scientists to find the least worst option - yes.
The cheap, green, low-tech solution for the world’s megacities
2 points • 0 comments
I meant Ottawa (cold place, somewhere up there waves hand) - basically just any capital of any of G20/50/100/192
Doing something like Geo-Engineering may be an important and vital stop-gap to mitigate the worst effects of climate chnage. But it is also dramatic and potentially causes other side effects from crop failures to god knows what.
So when things get so bad that humanity says "yeah let's block out the sun for a bit" we really really want to have studied it hard and have as many countries in the world to have signed up to pieces of paper that say "we tried this crazy thing with our best scientists and it seemed ok, so we trust that it's not a deliberate way to F%%k us over"
The UN might have better wording.
>>> combat as a dynamic balance of mutual dread
enough said ...
Actions like this, (or sprinkling iron fillings in the ocean to breed carbon-fixing cyanobacteria or aluminium dust in the atmosphere to reflect back sunlight) are all valid geo-engineering and all can look like aggressive military / eco-system attacks even if you are only mildly paranoid.
The issue is not having MIT do it, but the Russians and chinese and indians and Jakarta and Alberta and ...
The UN would be a good place to put a geo-engineering shared facility where all these ideas are experimentally tested, with scientists from dozens of countries so they can go home with accurate models and say "yeah nah, that's not an attack".
And while we are at it we can set up panels on reducing car use, better routing of airplanes to avoid contrails (see recent podcast from freakonomics).
We have the answers - but there is no single solution - just intelligent long term society wide changes that are not sexy or populist and won't pay off for decades. We might struggle to find politicians
And so if you want to control (regulate / protest) pornography start with the Mastercard AGM.
It is interesting to note that Mastercard and other "reluctant content moderators" are starting the slow process of identifying the minimum globally acceptable standards. What is legal in one place may be illegal elsewhere but some global common level / trade off is being sought.
Tens of thousands of men risk needing breast reduction surgery due to steroid
6 points • 1 comments
I get the "yeah nah dodgy" concerns about it. But humans have gone through several stages of civilisation that can be defined as "the number of people physically near enough me to be a threat" - from tribes that could go years without meeting others to football stadiums full of thousands.
Each of the above civilisations went through a population / density transition - and did so within a few hundred years - and came out with some surprisingly similar religious / cultural rules that were a) different to what had gone before b) similar in some respects to each other
I am certainly not arguing there was some shared kernel of religion, just that there was a new economic/ social pressure and the "solution" to it was a new form of religion / social contract.
In short - as human economics and civilisation changes, so does the way we govern ourselves (religion is a governing force). It seems reasonable to argue that as different civilisations go through the same pinch points they will find similar solutions.
We also should assume we are going through such as pinch point today (either the long term industrial revolution or the near term internet revolution).
And yes - systemising minds need to be aware of their own proclivities- a hard won lesson
So I am intrigued by the idea of the Axial Age transition - roughly 500BC and worlds big population centres (India China Persia) hit some kind of population tipping point, developed massive abusive slavery and wars and then developed much more restrictive religions as a means to control the larger populations.
The argument is tenuous but it reminds me a lot of the Shakespeare / Lope de Vega transition- sometimes population is dense enough to chnage something.
Had to go check the domain was not some troll - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNN_Bloomberg
Twelve Propositions on the State of the World
3 points • 2 comments
This is the end of an era for Londoners of a certain age, but is also somewhat emblematic of not just print vs digital but entrepreneurs vs entrenched interests (Time Out most famously fought years long battle to print TV schedule listings in 1970s when this was legally a BBC monopoly- and they won, but it cost them a fortune and the legal outcome was anyone could publish - and Time Out had no price advantage).
Anyway - great iconic masthead, this kind of means something but not sure what.
As far as I know. But if I am going to go down in posterity for it I want a rewrite for pith
> The solution to the tyranny of Kings cannot be a King with better people skills.
I do think this is actually a viable option. Possibly inevitable. And would necessitate actual discussion internally. More so than happens today at even the most "open• companies
site design / logo © 2022 Box Piper