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YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

Besides, there were no "hundreds of thousands of dead civilians in Ukraine" after his defection; estimates suggest there probably STILL aren't. (Unlike in Syria or Tigray.)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualt...

Assuming he made the 2022 invasion inevitable implies nobody else had agency over 8 years.

"The number of civilian and military deaths is impossible to determine with precision.[77][69] The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) considers the number of civilian casualties to be considerably higher than the one the United Nations are able to certify.[78]

Political scientist Neta Crawford estimated 323,000 dead in the war by July 2025, with an average rate of 7,690 killed per month—surpassing the average of 2,826 killed per month in the Gaza war and 772 killed in the War in Afghanistan (2001–2021). According to Crawford, while civilians accounted for 80 percent of the fatalities in the Gaza War and 26 percent in the War in Afghanistan, four percent of those killed in Ukraine were civilians.[79]

Breakdown Casualties Time period Source
Civilians in Ukraine 14,534 killed, 38,472 wounded[d]
(confirmed minimum, thought higher) 24 Feb. 2022 – 31 Oct. 2025 United Nations[80]
Ukrainian civilians 12,000+ killed (confirmed),[e]
16,000+ captive[f] 24 Feb. 2022 – 17 June 2024
24 Feb. 2022 – 16 Dec. 2024 Ukraine"

"By February 2023, Ukrainian chief prosecutor for war crimes Yuriy Belousov claimed that "there could be 100,000 civilians killed across Ukraine, whose bodies will have to be found and identified once occupied territory is liberated."[171] A Project on Defense Alternatives study calculated a "modest" figure of 40,000 Ukrainian civilian dead by April 2023.[172] In May 2023, US officials claimed Ukrainian civilian deaths were at 42,000, twice the then-estimated figure for Ukrainian military losses.[173] According to the Kyiv Independent, Russia does not allow monitoring in territories it controls, where civilian deaths are thought to be highest.[174]

Ukrainian humanitarian NGOs estimate that 7,000–30,000 Ukrainian civilians have been abducted by Russian forces from territories under their control. One group estimated 70,000 civilians were abducted. Many of them are reported to be held in Russian prisons and penal colonies, and some reportedly died (e.g. Victoria Roshchyna)"

November 28, 2025 at 11:51 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

Erm, if you are going off the Lawfare article above, which chooses to uncritically reproduce 2014's WSJ spin, then it's worth noting that even back then, The Atlantic (!) had been deeply skeptical of their narrative.

archive.md/Nr1O7

"But it's impossible not to recognize that Snowden offers a wonderful scapegoat for the intelligence community, simultaneously giving them an out on having blown the assessment and reinforcing their argument that Snowden has done irreparable harm to the United States. As a member of The New York Times editorial board put it on Sunday, even "with this capacity for accumulating limitless data" revealed by the Snowden leaks, "Mr. Putin’s annexation of Crimea had not been anticipated." The failure has prompted a congressional inquiry — as the Daily Beast was quick to note in a follow-up to its erroneous report.
Part of the problem, the Journal suggests, may have been that the intelligence agencies had refocused away from countries like Russia in favor of other areas. "Since the end of the Cold War," the Journal reports, "U.S. spy satellites and other intelligence-gathering assets have been focused less on Russia and more on counterterrorism, the Middle East and Asia, reflecting shifting U.S. priorities." When European agencies asked for more intelligence resources in the region prior to Putin's invasion, the paper cites officials saying that the U.S. "couldn't steer too many resources away from Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran and other hot spots."
There's a broader question that's worth raising, too: What were they going to do anyway? "Even with a clearer understanding of Mr. Putin's plans," the Journal writes, "the Obama administration thought it had few options to stop him. U.S. spy chiefs told President Barack Obama three days before the Crimea operation that Russia could take over the peninsula so fast that Washington might find out only when it was done." That doesn't really sound like Edward Snowden's fault."

November 28, 2025 at 11:23 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

And more data still!

bsky.app/profile/yard...

Two graphs from Statista, which show that the average monthly number of new IOS or Android app releases did not increase after LLMs became widely available.

November 28, 2025 at 10:02 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

Kicking hornets' nest for no reason sounds like a very Dark Triad thing to do. Coincidentally, guess what corresponds with using AI?

pivot-to-ai.com/2025/10/15/a...

"The researchers measured 14 million website visits by 499 students and 455 members of the general public over a 90-day period.

Firstly, nobody used AI very much — 1% of student web-browsing was AI, 0.44% of the general public study. Secondly, the AI users were not very nice people:

The most consistent predictors of AI use across studies were aversive personality traits (e.g., Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy).

...

The first thing the researchers did was not trust the users to self-report. They measured their web browsing by getting 90 days of browser history from Chrome on a desktop — so no mobile or app usage. They did collect the users’ self-reports, which were just incorrect:

we observed that self-reported AI use and actual AI use were only moderately correlated (ρ = 0.329).

If the users went to a chatbot site, that’s obviously AI. For other sites, the researchers picked the Interactive Advertising Bureau category by … running the addresses through a chatbot, GPT-4o. That’s not so great, though they tested GPT-4o against a random 200 of the addresses and it was correct on all but one. So they figured it’d do.

The researchers were surprised how low AI usage actually was...We were genuinely surprised by how infrequent AI use was, even among students who typically serve as early adopters of emerging technologies.

...the prolific AI users — where more than 4% of their browsing was AI sites — came out as the most noxious people:

Students with more AI use in their browsing history tend to be high on extraversion and aversive personality traits like narcissism and psychopathy (Table 1). These individuals also tend to have more positive views of AI, in general…The most consistent finding across Study 1 (students) and Study 2 (general public participants) was the general connection between AI use and aversive personality traits.

For the general public group..the most systematic link between personality and AI use was via Machiavellianism"

November 28, 2025 at 9:42 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

Or perhaps this (first link is the summary of the 2nd).

pivot-to-ai.com/2025/09/09/i...

mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the...

Mike Judge is a software developer. He’s coded for decades. In particular, he’s done a ton of small mobile apps. He also started using AI coding early. He was a fan of it!

Then Mike saw the METR study that showed developers thought AI code completion made them 20% faster, but actually made them 19% slower. He liked that METR put numbers on the question.

So Mike asked: if AI lets any bozo make an app now … where is it all? Where’s the shovelware? Where are the widgets? Where are the crappy little apps that one guy makes at home?

If AI coding is such rocket fuel for development, we should be seeing a flood of little apps being released. And we aren’t. [Substack]

So, numbers time! First, Mike measured his own productivity — he felt like AI made him 25% faster. But he kept track for a few weeks, and it slowed him down 21%.

But what about everyone else? There should be so much software coming out. Mike collected all the numbers he could.

Apple Store app releases have been flat for the past few years. Google Play app releases were flat, then they went down. Steam release rates have gone up steadily since 2023, but there’s no visible surge, from AI or anything else. New GitHub repositories have been flat since 2023.

There’s no surge. There’s no burst from AI or anything else. AI coding is not having any visible effect.

November 28, 2025 at 9:27 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

A very comprehensive and precise spec CommitStrip cartoon from August 2016. The joke is that comprehensive and precise specification needed to write programs is already what code happens to be.

November 28, 2025 at 9:19 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

Funnily enough...the associate editor of the same Liberal Currents which Will has endorsed recently appears fully onboard with that website's economic agenda - at least on international economics.

I received no answer when I chose to ask the below. Take it as you will.

bsky.app/profile/yard...

‪Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li‬ - 11d

"i continue to be on the boat that says the "exorbitant privilege" of a persistent trade deficit isn't actually good for us

the question is just how painful the adjustment to balanced trade would be"

(Link to "interfluidity")

"conversation with waldman over here, including the radical-but-reasonable proposal of an international capital transfer tax"

"Link to 30th episode of Neon Liberalism"

November 28, 2025 at 3:04 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

#filmsky 😬

"Personal life

Besson has been married four times; first, in 1986, to actress Anne Parillaud. They had a daughter, Juliette, born in 1987. Parillaud starred in Besson's La Femme Nikita (1990). They divorced in 1991.[39]

Besson's second wife was actress and director Maïwenn Le Besco, whom he started dating when he was 32 and she was 15 after having met three years earlier.[40] They married in late 1992 when Le Besco, 16, was pregnant with their daughter Shanna, who was born on 3 January 1993.[41][deprecated source] Le Besco later claimed that their relationship inspired Besson's film Léon (1994), where the plot involved the emotional relationship between an adult man and a 12-year-old girl (played by then 12-year-old Natalie Portman).[40] Their union led to aggressive criticism, which deeply hurt Maïwenn.[42] Their marriage ended in 1997, when Besson became involved with actress Milla Jovovich, then 19, during the production of The Fifth Element (1997).[43][44][45] "We sensed the special chemistry between us immediately at the auditions and it just intensified during the filming of the movie," said Jovovich.[45]

He married Jovovich on December 14, 1997, when he was 38 and she was 21. They divorced in 1999.[46][45]

On August 28, 2004, at age 45, Besson married film producer Virginie Silla, 32. They have three children,[47] including the actress Thalia Besson."

November 28, 2025 at 1:36 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

On the other hand, their -2%/yr scenarios would have apparently resulted in about 1-1.1C by now, which actually would have placed us into a good position to stop at 1.5C 🫠

"increase in global-mean temperature of...just above 0.1 °C per decade (Scenario C) and about 0.1 °C per decade (Scenario D);"

"Stabilization of atmospheric concentrations.
Reductions in the human-made emissions of greenhouse gases
required to stabilize concentrations at present day levels:
Carbon Dioxide
>60%
Methane
15—20%
Nitrous Oxide
70—80%
CFC-11
70—75%
CFC-12
75 85%
HCFC-22
40—50%
Note that the stabilization of each of these gases would
have different effects on climate, as explained in the next
section.
(a) continuing global emissions at 1990 levels; (b) halving
of emissions in 1990; (c) reductions in emissions of 2% per
year (pa) from 1990 and (d) a 2% pa increase from 1990-
2010 followed by a 2% pa decrease from 2010"

November 28, 2025 at 1:01 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

So, we actually DID reduce emissions relative to year 1990 expectations...of CFCs and methane, that is. Right now, we effectively have IPCC 1990 BAU levels of CO2, but scenario C levels of methane (1927 ppb) and of CFCs. The IPCC BAU would have higher warming than now (as 1990 was already at ~0.7C)

"Based on current model results, we
predict:

under the I P C C Business-as-Usual (Scenario A )
emissions of greenhouse gases, a rate of increase of
global-mean temperature during the next century of
about 0.3°C per decade (with an uncertainty range of
0.2°C to 0.5°C per decade); this is greater than that
seen over the past 10,000 years. This will result in a
likely increase in global-mean temperature of about
1°C above the present value by 2025 and 3°C before
the end of the next century. The rise will not be steady
because of the influence of other factors;"

The important thing is that in 1990, "present-day value" was at about 0.7C above preindustrial - and thus, their BAU would have meant 1.7C this year.

November 28, 2025 at 12:53 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

My logic was that since stopping at 2C is a much easier goal than stopping at 1.5C, actions done to reach the former probably would not have been enough for the latter anyway.

That said, I checked the original IPCC report from 1990, and it's more complicated. (1/2)

www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/...

The original IPCC graphs from 1990 of the four projected emission scenarios of CO2, methane and CFC11s (ozone layer-destroying gases) between then and 2100. Unlike the modern scenarios, the CO2 continues to increase in all four of those - albeit so gently in the lowest one that it only reaches present-day levels of ~430 ppm around midcentury, and only reaches 450 ppm in 2100. Instead, year 1990 Business-as-Usual scenario seems to match today's CO2 levels pretty well.

On the other hand, that scenario implied a MASSIVE jump in methane - at >2500 ppb, it's >25% as large as the present-day levels, and "scenario B" is also slightly higher; the second-best scenario C seems to match real-world methane trajectory the best. Both BAU and B have massive increases in CFCs, while C and D have the same trend of reductions.

November 28, 2025 at 12:45 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

With all due respect for your work, I don't think you can accuse those climate scientists who endorse degrowth (or "post-growth" - perhaps to exclude the various primitivists) of "ignoring physics". As they note, even the IPCC is now open to exploring the concept!

iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

"However, continuing economic growth along these lines may no longer be a viable strategy. Firstly, under present conditions many mature, affluent economies are faced with secular stagnation (low levels of economic growth over prolonged periods of time and practical limits to growth (Summers 2014, 2016, Storm 2017). This is despite extensive attempts by governments to boost growth (Jackson 2019). Second, intensifying climate shocks, energy, health and food crises, and an aging population may make it increasingly difficult for high-income nations to continue to pursue economic growth and maintain social and ecological stability (Kahn et al 2021, Pollitt 2022, Maestas et al 2023, Kotz et al 2024). Finally, to effectively address ecological degradation and ensure fast and equitable climate mitigation it may be necessary to decrease production and consumption levels in affluent countries (Hickel and Kallis 2019, Otero et al 2020, EEA 2021, Vogel and Hickel 2023). Consequently, IAMs insistence on continued economic growth may facilitate ‘the reproduction of types of economies that are simply not sustainable’ (Asefi-Najafabady et al 2021, p 1179).

Given the immense challenges posed by the climate crisis, modellers have a collective responsibility to evaluate a broader spectrum of future possibilities, including scenarios commonly deemed politically unlikely, or those envisioning radically different economic systems (McCollum et al 2020). Post-growth, which aims to reorient the economy from prioritising economic growth to emphasising ecological sustainability, equality, human well-being and enhanced democracy (Jackson 2017), is one potential alternative approach that has been gaining traction (Hickel et al 2021, Slameršak et al 2023). The case for exploring post-growth futures has been recognised by the IPCC who suggest that ‘sustainability worlds with low growth or even elements of degrowth in developed countries could also be explored.’ (IPCC 2022, p 1875)."

November 27, 2025 at 11:47 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

Interestingly, @bretdevereaux.bsky.social had discussed fictional megacorps - noting that East/West India Companies were the closest counterpart, although even Roman (!) publicani come surprisingly close. Either way, reality adds limitations which make the trope unlikely.

acoup.blog/2021/01/01/f...

"I think it is worth stressing here, even in our age of massive mergers and (at least, before the pandemic) huge corporate profits, just how vast the gap in resources is between large states and the largest companies. The largest company by raw revenue in the world is Walmart; it’s gross revenue (before expenses) is around $525bn. Which sounds like a lot! Except that the tax revenue of its parent country, the United States, was $3.46 trillion (in 2019). Moreover, companies have to go through all sorts of expenses to generate that revenue (states, of course, have to go about collecting taxes, but that’s far cheaper; the IRS’s operating budget is $11.3bn, generating a staggering 300-fold return on investment); Walmart’s net income after the expenses of making that money is ‘only’ $14.88bn. If Walmart focused every last penny of those returns into building a private army then after a few years of build-up, it might be able to retain a military force roughly on par with…the Netherlands ($12.1bn); the military behemoth that is Canada ($22.2bn US) would still be solidly out of reach. And that’s the largest company in the world!

And that data point brings us to our last point – and the one I think is most relevantly applicable for speculative fiction megacorporations – historical megacorporations (by which I mean ‘true’ megacorps that took on major state functions over considerable territory, which is almost always what is meant in speculative fiction) are products of imperialism, produced by imperial states with limited state capacity ‘outsourcing’ key functions of imperial rule to private entities. And that explains why it seems that, historically, megacorporations don’t dominate the states that spawn them: they are almost always products and administrative arms of those states and thus still strongly subordinate to them."

November 27, 2025 at 11:39 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

His textbook discusses that, actually. "Conservative reserve numbers" translate to 20% of energy contained within conservative oil reserves. It translates not into "centuries" but 90 years - assuming no increase from present usage. Hypothetically using nuclear for everything exhausts them in 4 years

"First, we take 0.72% of the 7.6 million tons available to
represent the portion of uranium in the form of 235U. Enrichment (next
section) will not separate all of the 235U, and the reactor can’t burn all of it away before the fuel rod is essentially useless. So optimistically, we burn half of the mined 235U in the reactor. Multiplying the resulting 27,300 tons of usable 235U by the 17 million kcal/g we derived earlier yields a total of 2 × 1021 J. Table 15.10 puts this in context against fossil fuel proven reserves from page 127. We see from this that proven uranium reserves give us only 20% as much energy as our proven oil reserves, and about 5% of our total remaining fossil fuel supply. If we tried to get all 18 TW from this uranium supply, it would last less than 4 years! This does not sound like a salvation.

Proven uranium reserves would last 90 years at the current rate of use,
so really it is in a category fairly similar to that of fossil fuels in terms
of finite supply. To be fair, proven reserves are always a conservative
lower limit on estimated total resource availability. And since fuel cost
is not the limiting factor for nuclear plants, higher uranium prices can
make more available, from more difficult deposits. Still, even a factor of
two more does not transform the story into one of an ample, worry-free
resource."

+ Table 15.10: Proven reserves, in energy
terms.

Fuel (1021 J)

Coal = 20
Oil = 10
Gas = 8
235U = 2

November 27, 2025 at 10:39 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

Oh, really? I found its preprint; which part of it (or the full paper, if it's sufficiently different) says that? This here does not seem to say what you think. In fact, the way they emphasize "substitution" indicates that they think it would not be additive to growth.

arxiv.org/pdf/1810.03836

"The supply-demand analysis has shown that
supplying platinum from space is only economically
viable in a very narrow set of values for price elasticity
and substitution. For realistic price elasticity values, the
mining venture would only be economically feasible
when the quantity of platinum from space would
substitute an equal quantity of terrestrial platinum.
6. Conclusions
In this article we analysed the economic feasibility of
asteroid mining, focusing on supplying water in space
and returning platinum to earth. We find that from a
profitability perspective, the throughput rate and using
smaller but multiple spacecraft per mission are key
technical parameters for reaching breakeven quickly.
Hence, the development of efficient mining processes
and developing small spacecraft that are mass-produced
are key to economic viability. In particular, platinum
mining requires very high throughput rates, which could
be difficult to achieve. Furthermore, for returning
resources from space to Earth, the reaction of the Earth-
based market is critical for economic viability. As in
previous studies, mining volatiles and supplying them to
cis-lunar orbit seems to be economically viable without
the development of mining and refining processes with
very high throughput rates.
For future work, we propose to explore the role of
regulatory instruments for supplying resources from
space to Earth. In addition, the estimation of possible
throughput rates of known mining and refining processes
would merit further investigation."

November 27, 2025 at 10:02 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

Degrowth getting rid of bureaucracy is even funnier; even LC at least argues the opposite - i.e. it can only function as a command economy & That's Bad (with little consideration for why that might be a lesser evil.) A proposal like this is highly bureaucratic!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Paragraph text:

"What the current work does offer are answers to broader questions. To avoid catastrophic ecological collapse, it is clear that drastic and challenging societal transformations must occur at all levels, from the individual to institutional, and from supply through to demand. From an energy-use perspective, the current work suggests that meeting these challenges does not, in theory, preclude extending decent living standards, universally, to a population of ~10 billion. Decent living is of course a subjective concept in public discourse. However, the current work offers a response to the clichéd populist objection that environmentalists are proposing that we return to living in caves. With tongue firmly in cheek, the response roughly goes ‘Yes, perhaps, but these caves have highly-efficient facilities for cooking, storing food and washing clothes; low-energy lighting throughout; 50 L of clean water supplied per day per person, with 15 L heated to a comfortable bathing temperature; they maintain an air temperature of around 20 °C throughout the year, irrespective of geography; have a computer with access to global ICT networks; are linked to extensive transport networks providing ~5000–15,000 km of mobility per person each year via various modes; and are also served by substantially larger caves where universal healthcare is available and others that provide education for everyone between 5 and 19 years old.’ And at the same time, it is possible that the amount of people’s lives that must be spent working would be substantially reduced."

November 27, 2025 at 9:49 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

Yeah, right. Except that both the paper I linked and the OOP's publication note the very founders of modern economic thought held beliefs in line with degrowth - the latter even acknowledged it while ultimately arguing (unconvincingly) against the concept!

www.liberalcurrents.com/degrowth-nei...

"Degrowth currents

“Liberal degrowth” may sound like an oxymoron at first, but degrowth has a rich history in the liberal tradition. John Stuart Mill himself advocated an eventual move toward a “stationary condition of capital and population,” though he envisaged ever progressing improvements in the art of living, culture, and such industry as directly improves the human condition. John Maynard Keynes and John Rawls, both pantheon-stature liberals, likewise advanced versions of degrowth.

Julie Rose, a Dartmouth political philosopher, extends liberal degrowth in the tradition of Mill. For Rose, economic growth is normatively orthogonal to promoting freedom and well-being. While respecting diversity of thought, we should directly foster the freedom and capabilities of individuals—such as health, education, civic equality, safety and environmental quality—without regard to whether economic production or trade are expanding or contracting. Growth may happen by accident, but even in this case we should resist thinking of this as a “happy accident” and simply be agnostic. Expanding human capabilities is what matters."

November 27, 2025 at 9:37 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

"If a more efficient process is invented which creates more and consumes less, that's growth as well." Yes, but there are limits. I.e. in response to this representative example, I recently got suggestions that...we'll genetically engineer low-light vision??
tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu/papers/limit...

"Fig. 2 | Historical lighting progression and
limits. Historical progress in lighting efficiency
can give the mistaken impression that a long
chain of superior substitutes might continue
indefinitely. But we are fast approaching the hard
physical limit. The suggestive line represents a
factor-of-ten improvement per century (2.3%
annually), which intersects the theoretical limit at
the star before the end of this century. Symbols
indicate approximate ranges of use and efficiency
for each technology."

November 27, 2025 at 8:53 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

Once again - what is your answer to this graph? Even if we stick just to the U.S. portion of it, do you think your posts about the economy are sufficient, or perhaps a deeper sort of existential doubt needs to be addressed here?

Moreover, do you think a certain trend could be extrapolated? 1/2

A French poll (from late 2019) surveying people in Italy, France, the UK, the US and Germany on whether they fully agree, mostly agree, mostly disagree or entirely disagree that civilization is going to collapse. Germany is the ONLY country where the majority disagree - 11% agree entirely, and 28% mostly agree. In the U.S. 52% agree (39% mostly and 13% entirely). In the UK, it's 56% (46% mostly and 10% entirely.) In France, 17% agree fully and 48% mostly (total of 65%), and Italy, 19% agree entirely while 52% mostly agree. The U.S. and Germany are the only countries where double-digit percentages disagree entirely that the civilization is going to collapse (14% and 19%, respectively.) In Italy, it's at 5%, and is at 8% and 9% in France and the UK.

November 27, 2025 at 4:24 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

Nah, that's a total case of SF brain. Here's the position of an Associate Director of Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences at University of California, San Diego. The most ravaged Earth is a million times better than Mars.

tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu/energy-text/...

The way most people experience backpacking is similar to how we
go about space exploration: carry on your back all the food, clothing,
shelter, and utility devices that will be needed for a finite trip duration.
Only air and water are acquired in the wild. For space travel, even
the air and water must be launched from Earth. So space travel is
like a glorified and hyper-expensive form of backpacking—albeit
offering breathtaking views!.

Capabilities we have not yet demonstrated in space that would be
important for a space livelihood, including:

1. Growing food used for sustenance;
2. Surviving long periods outside of Earth’s magnetic protection
from cosmic rays;19 19: The ISS (space station) remains within
Earth’s protection. 3. Generating or collecting propulsive fuel away from Earth’s surface;
4. Long-term health of muscles and bones for periods longer than a
year in low gravity environments;
5. Resource extraction for in-situ construction materials;
6. Closed-system sustainable ecosystem maintenance;
7. Anything close to terraforming (see below).

It would be easier to believe in the possibility of space colonization if we
first saw examples of colonization of the ocean floor.Such an environment carries many similar challenges: native environment unbreathable;
large pressure differential; sealed-off self-sustaining environment. But
an ocean dwelling has several major advantages over space, in that food
is scuttling/swimming just outside the habitat; safety/air is a short
distance away (meters); ease of access (swim/scuba vs. rocket); and
all the resources on Earth to facilitate the construction/operation.

Building a habitat on the ocean floor would be vastly easier than trying
to do so in space. It would be even easier on land, of course. But we have
not yet successfully built and operated a closed ecosystem on land! How
can we fantasize about getting it right in the remote hostility of space,
lacking easy access to manufactured resources?"

November 26, 2025 at 11:00 PM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

I think the last time the US had to make comparable forced choices was in the Civil War. The Union artillery achieved consistent range advantage over the slavers' Napoleonic pieces - but they often had deploy Parrott guns which blew themselves up distressingly often.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20-poun...

History
(Most relevant part.)

Union General Quincy Adams Gillmore believed that Parrott rifles were as good as the best artillery despite their "unequal endurance". He wrote that the Parrotts were easy for gun crews to operate. Nevertheless, the 20-pounder Parrott rifles had many critics. Confederate General J. Johnston Pettigrew complained that a battery of four 20-pounder Parrotts proved to be worthless. He wrote that half their shells exploded almost as soon as they left the gun and many of the others wobbled in flight. Finally, one of the guns burst, killing one gunner and injuring two others. Confederate Major John Haskell wanted the 20-pounder Parrotts taken away from the Macon Light Artillery to spare its men possible injury. Union General Hunt protested that the 20-pounder Parrotts were "very unsatisfactory"[38] because the shells were unreliable and dangerous to Federal troops. He noted that two of the guns burst at Antietam and one at Fredericksburg. Hunt tried to suppress the use of the 20-pounders in the Army of the Potomac. One of the guns of Taft's Battery (5th New York) burst at Gettysburg.[39] Parrott rifles were not employed again after the Civil War.[1

November 25, 2025 at 4:37 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

He 162 was literally the thread-starter!

To give it *some* slack - at that point, Heinkel could either provide this wooden jet, or nothing. A bit like the Soviet LaGG-3, made out of plywood layers sandwiched with resin - so that "we could build fighters as long as can hold on to a single grove".

Wikipedia photo of LAGG-3 piston fighter in a museum.

November 25, 2025 at 4:08 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

In fact, it wasn't a fighter either! What made is so special was precisely that a bomber with a load of almost 2 tonnes (just like the medium B-26) flew so fast, none of the Nazi piston fighters could catch it. They even dropped bombs right as Goring was complaining about Luftwaffe's impotence.

"In another example of the daylight precision raids carried out by the Mosquitoes of Nos. 105 and 139 Squadrons, on 30 January 1943, the 10th anniversary of the Nazis' seizure of power, a morning Mosquito attack knocked out the main Berlin broadcasting station while Luftwaffe Chief Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring was speaking, putting his speech off the air. A second sortie in the afternoon inconvenienced another speech, by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.[129] Lecturing a group of German aircraft manufacturers, Göring said:

In 1940 I could at least fly as far as Glasgow in most of my aircraft, but not now! It makes me furious when I see the Mosquito. I turn green and yellow with envy. The British, who can afford aluminium better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory over there is building, and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again. What do you make of that? There is nothing the British do not have. They have the geniuses and we have the nincompoops. After the war is over I'm going to buy a British radio set – then at least I'll own something that has always worked."

November 25, 2025 at 3:25 AM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

This poll says that in the U.S. 13% of the population fully agree with the premise that civilization will collapse, and 39% mostly agree, adding up to 52%. It was published in early 2020, but taken in late 2019. I hope you'll consider how it fits into your theory.
www.jean-jaures.org/publication/...

November 24, 2025 at 6:33 PM

YARDCG

@yardcg.bsky.social

For context, H39 was basically obsolete circa 1943...but in 1940/1941, it was just right. Like on all French tanks, the commander was strained having to observe, aim and reload, but when you are almost immune to most German tanks and Paks (many times more numerous), it doesn't matter so much.

Wikipedia's modern-day photo of a remaining H39 in Latrun. It's possible to appreciate the thickness of its armour over its small contours - and to note it has a 37mm gun that is of small-caliber by modern standards, but of decent length for the time.

November 24, 2025 at 3:35 PM

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