Uriel238 [all pronouns]

Narrator: The problem wasn’t the kids it was the US.

Clarification: venues getting shot up is a specifically elevated problem in the US (exacerbated by availability of guns, but that’s not really the root of the problem). The thing is, the root of the problem (right-wing-leaning low-information constituents – lumpenproletariat in left-wing speak – suffering from precarity sometimes turn to violence) is being visited on European nations where two-party systems have taken root, and neoliberalism has set in. It’s the old King Log vs. King Heron problem. We’re seeing violence and counterviolence in the EU, just with less frequency and fewer guns, but it will catch up to them.

Everything I can is scant little. But some people object to my removing my footprint entirely. While I separate out my recycling from my landfill, perhaps you can explain how I can better encourage multinational corporations to consider sustainability as something other than a marketing tool.

Yes, we have bacteriaphages which serve as treatment for XTR Tuberculosis, but things like this do scant little for people who are infected as autocratic interests work to dismantle the global disease control state. Yes, young people are better learning left-wing politics as our education systems in the US are being systematically dismantled around such efforts.

I am sure you can find small ways things are improving. After all, we are closer to manned Mars expeditions even if they’re decades away. We are closer to fusion power even if it’s still approximately the same thirty years away it was in the early 1990s. There will be a point we can stuff hydrogen into a power plant and get a net energy output by fusing it into hydrogen, but that is a long way away, longer than our time left if our international community doesn’t take immediate action.

But yes, I’m bitter. In the 1980s when I was a student and young worker I was expected to give 110% (despite that is oxymoronic, it was the rhetoric of the time) and since then I learned that our leaders, our representatives, our officials don’t even bother to act like adults while holding office and allegedly conducting their duties.

We are watching the decline and fall of civilization. USSR went, now the US, and the EU and China stages are already destabilizing, and that’s not merely from climate change, but our refusal to distribute political power.

So I can’t be entirely sure, my friend, but it appears from over here, from my (granted, cynical) eye that you are missing the forest for the trees.

The climate crisis is only the first of great filters humankind is imminently careening towards and has yet to show effort towards navigating. We are rapidly turning into the example for future intelligent species of what not to do… assuming they can discover that example from the geological layers, determine how we killed ourselves and then actively choose a reasonable response where we failed to do so.

But I don’t say this as a doomeristic / beatnik approach. I’m saying this as a sober assessment. We’re not going to get to enjoy the benefits of 2020’s era progress for very long, assuming we can hold it as autocrats wreck all we’ve wrought for their own personal gain, and the world literally burns.

We’re running out of water for agriculture. The zoomers may be middle aged, and the alphas, adults, when the climate crisis fully catches up with us. And if the human species is lucky, it’ll happen first in the US or Russia or one of the old-guard powers, and the new order can use their renewable energy surplus to create new desalinization technology.

But current estimates (by those few climatologists willing to say other than it’s going to get very bad. ) estimate the upper limit of the sustainability projections are a global population of about a billion people, if the international community chose to act today on all fronts. (Obviously that’s not happening in the US, or in autocratic regimes, who imagine – falsely – they can create a self-sustaining colony on Mars – we’re a century or more from that).

That is a best case scenario unless we discover some miracle technology.

All other scenarios get worse than that, from a population in the hundreds of millions to human extinction. There is a ray of hope near the bottom, since Homo Erectus had at least one period of tens of thousands of years with a population under 10K before they would populate the world again, until they were out-competed by other hominids (e.g. us. Homo Sapiens). So we might have a tiny society that survives for an eon, but don’t expect any culture (from wet burritos to Beethoven’s Fifth to the 道德經) to survive. And a fuckton of science will have to be rediscovered.

So seriously bad shit for all of Human society is, at this point, for all intents and purposes, inevitable.

Let them scrape. AI as it currently is, is still autocomplete with extra steps, and still prone to hallucination. As it is it will be usable to make cheap, passable content, but not hit those moments of inspiration of human art (yet – there are real AI groups looking to make AGI)

It is a bubble which will pop and AI will be seen as a tool (a resource-costly tool) that requires its own set of experts independent from the experts that use ACAD or write editorial copy or do investigative work. Id est, it’s not the replacement of employees that boards of directors want it to be.

And AGI is centuries from being efficient enough that you can make Rosie the Robot who cleans your house and makes a good upside-down pineapple cake.

Plenty of women – teenage parochial schoolgirls, specifically, get impregnated as virgins when the definition of virgin is not having coital sex or having an intact vaginal corona (hymen). When boys and girls who love each other very much make out and get overly involved, yet their pregnancy concerns (and guilt) keep them from engaging in actual coitus, even a small amount of jizz on her vulva might make their way through the vaginal canal and cause conception.

Plenty of medical doctors have encountered unexpected pregnancy of women who’ve never had sex and who had intact vaginal coronas.

However at the beginning of the common era, virgin was assumed of any unmarried woman unless known otherwise, and was a shift of property value of the woman to the father or husband. Mary who was unmarried, would be a virgin by default as a young woman. Though her pregnancy is evidence that she isn’t a virgin.

Too be fair, in Hellenic culture Zeus raped me was a common excuse when a young woman fooled around without license, and ended up in a family way, and before the era of the Olympian, Poseidon was the one going around having his way with young women. In fact, the classical myths teem with children sired by gods. This isn’t new.