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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • It’s actually really fascinating - cats seem to rapidly learn culture while they’re weaning

    Cats in Japan are very friendly and trusting of humans, cats in America are more cautious and wary

    Japan has folklore about multiple variations of cat yokai that range from fickle trickers to malevolent supernatural ones. Cats are considered good luck, killing them invites bad luck. They have euphemisms like being in no position to refuse even a cats help, and their presence being a good omen

    America has folklore about cats being bad luck, and tied to witchery. We still use euphemisms about skinning cats, letting them out of bags, swinging them, etc. Killing cats wasn’t abnormal behavior even a century ago

    And apparently, if you bring a female Japanese cat to America, it’ll take several generations for the descendents to localize to the culture. They even meow differently






  • That’s basically what I’m saying - the US massively overproduces food. There’s many problems with how it’s done and how it’s used, but the Americas aren’t likely to starve. So long as the US stands, starvation isn’t likely - we literally burn crops to keep production at a level where we could feed much of the world

    Climate refugees aren’t murderhobos - they’re people. People that will mostly without a job, often living out of their cars, and largely desperate. They need just as much to survive, but desperate people do desperate things. The ones that aren’t desperate will integrate, the ones who are will be a burden on the system

    Let’s say Florida or Texas start bleeding population. Almost nowhere is equipped to handle 5 million more people in a short time frame - it would wreak havoc on the job market, strain supply chains, and lead to a massive increase in crime. Desperate people do desperate things

    Yes, it’s our current problems magnified. There is enough to go around, but not like we do it today. We have to restructure the world - will we do it today, while we have breathing room, will we do it in a decade, when our systems fall apart around us, or will we do it decades from now, when the choice is between sacrifice and death

    Climate change is here - it’s a right now problem. If we give it time, it could collapse everything - if the US collapses entirely, a famine in Toronto is a possiblity. Every city could starve. I don’t think we’ll get to that point, but there will be death. There is already death. The sooner we start to address reality, the less suffering our species will undergo

    I don’t think humanity could die out unless Earth becomes another Venus. We’re too adaptable, too widespread for that. And if we’ve already lost, who cares. It’s a pointless line of thinking. We could be screwed, but I don’t think​ we are…I think the Earth trends towards a stability humans can live with. I think we have more systems balancing us, if we go down that road it’ll be a slow and painful one we won’t live to see

    This is a problem that will affect you, it will affect everyone. We can minimize it - many will die no matter what we do. But most could survive, but only if we change the systems at play - I think we’ll get there, but the question is how much suffering we endure before then


  • I’ve used expo, which is really just react native with some helpful tooling around it. It was my first real project with react as well, and all and all I’d recommend it.

    React native is pretty great, but there’s a steep learning curve. Expo has some bugs, and once you get off the beaten path you might have some issues. You always have the option of ejecting to react native or native code, but the expo app is incredible - you can do live updates remotely, the app will just reload with the changes without rebuilding everything

    I’ll probably use it for most apps moving forward



  • We could. It’s a totally solvable problem - until it isn’t. If an aquifer is dry and you’re already rationing the water, what can you do? Presumably ship in enough water to keep people alive, if not to sustain commercial needs too

    Which is going to drain water from somewhere else, and what if they’re having the same issue? Take it from further. Salt lake City was looking into the idea of building a pipeline from the Mississippi, and I’m sure someone is looking into building a fleet of water tankers and checking if there’s profit to be had

    Now, where’s the part in all this where we take back water rights? Where’s the part where we start to fix the problem?


  • You know how we had SARS, and bird flu, and swine flu, and MERS? And every time scientists rang the alarm bell, but it turned out to not be a big deal? It’s because they knew COVID was inevitable - they knew the sketchy meat markets were a huge vector for a coronavirus to cross the species barrier.

    COVID could’ve been much worse, but it certainly affected everyone. It also probably could have been prevented, or at least delayed

    These smaller, regional problems are warning signs. A lot of people are dying from them already, but if we don’t take them seriously they’re just going to get big enough to have global effects. Not in the next century, in the next decade

    Are we going to go extinct from climate change? I don’t think so. Are you going to die from climate change? Probably not. Will someone you know die from it? Possibly. Will it negatively impact your life? Absolutely, it already has, and it will keep doing so in interestingly obvious ways



  • That’s not the effects I’m talking about - what we were talking about specifically was water shortages, across the US we’ve drained aquifers that will need centuries to build back up. Another fun side effect is crazy sinkholes

    Droughts and lack of snowpack obviously play into it, but across the Western states it’s already a critical problem - and we’ve done very little to address it. We don’t have a plan, and the problem isn’t going to fix itself - wild ideas like water pipelines across multiple states have been proposed, we could provide drinking water in tankers temporarily, but ultimately this just buys a bit more time. This is a right now problem - we’ve been rationing and talking about this future problem since I was a child, but water needs have only gone up

    As for other similar issues happening right now - wildfires across the continent, massive floods everywhere, massive crop failures in China and India, Spain turning into a desert, algae blooms killing already depleted fisheries, deadly heatwaves, polar vortexes, bigger and slower hurricanes hitting places unprepared for them - the list goes on

    It’s a right now problem. It affects the vulnerable first, but it’s already touched all of us in one way or another. But what happens when the sinks in salt lake City run dry? What happens when someone’s house is burned down in a wildfire, twice? What happens when the power grid of Texas keeps going down every heat wave or cold snap?

    People who can move will move. People who can’t will die in place or become climate refugees when things get bad enough. It will be just inconveniences and news of distant tragedies until somewhere hits a tipping point - hopefully you’re not in the wrong place at the wrong time, but even then you’ll feel the aftershocks





  • NASA doesn’t have effective control of their budget anymore. Congress holds the purse strings and uses them like a harness

    NASA gets funding to do something - like go to the moon, or track CO2 emissions. But it comes with strings - sometimes you have to build a certain component in a certain congressional district, sometimes Congress chooses the design you have to use

    It’s a problem of politics and corruption. When the public supports NASA, they have more autonomy. When NASA gets a blank check, they do more with it - reusable rockets aren’t a new idea, and when they cancelled the shuttle program NASA had brain drain. Some of those people founded spaceX - Elon didn’t start it, he came in when they were getting off the ground, just like with Tesla


  • That’s not what arbitration is. This doesn’t stop valve from reaching a settlement, it stops them from using fake privately funded bench trials

    Binding arbitration means the results are legally binding, non-binding arbitration means a judge needs to approve the arbitration results before it’s final. Sometimes it’s with an off duty judge, sometimes anyone can be the arbiter

    Regardless, on one side you have a repeat customer, on the other you have someone who will probably never be back - there’s a built in conflict of interest