You at least had to think. Let me put a winging here. Let me choose this clipart and drag it over there. This looks alright I think, I'll go with it.
Now people just shut the brain off. Prompt AI. Get thing. Done with task. Ugga gugga.
I mean isn't it a known thing where older people get more senile when they stop intellectually challenging themselves? And now we are doing it for ourself for all these low hanging fruit mental exercises we used to bake into our lives where we did have to, gasp, think for a moment, even if the task was unimportant or stupid.
I mean it isn't wealthy people coming to eat fried chicken on a stick or see the show hogs. Sure its a bad and exploitative deal where you probably are out $25 for that fried chicken on a stick but it doesn't mean the underlying demographics have changed from the "people of the earth" as they've always been. If you have to guess, close your eyes and imagine the sort of people that live in the rural townships 40 minutes outside your nearest major city. That is who you will find at your state or county fair, those people and their teenage kids smuggling in booze in gatorade bottles.
Local farmers market, now thats a dramatically different clientele than the county/state fair. Bread is like $9 a loaf there so you can imagine what sort of individual that selects for.
People of the earth don't seem to care much for ai art or not. What I was trying to say is that fairs aren't places targeting the lower classes trying to sell the cheapest items possible. The lower classes are served by industrialized mass production today: injection molding, factory farming, etc. So I don't see why they want to hate one businessman (the builder of a datacenter) over another (the fair shop owners). I also do not understand how he says these people hate fairs or don't go to fairs in a thread about fair stall owners and small business owners using AI to make their shop logos/posters themselves.
The thing though with deferring to AI slop though is that it signals to me a sort of negative effort now being put in. I mean don't these people also recoil at this stuff? No? They have some screw loose I guess. I don't need to give them my money.
So you can't criticize something without coming up with some fantasy plan that will only exist in whatever corner of social media you left that comment, to make that criticism somehow now valid?
>but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them.
And yet, somehow, up until what maybe 2024, every single small event or business in every local market around the earth managed to figure this out. I guess we've lost that ancestral knowledge of how this was possibly done and afforded in a few dozen months.
Even with the first bomb I wonder if they could have handled it a bit differently. Maybe scuttle a ship with it in the middle of the Tokyo bay, then drop a dud bomb directly onto the imperial palace with a warning painted on it. Seems like immediately after the bombings in hiroshima and nagasaki there was still quite a fog of war going on initially about what even happened. Making the sun appear in the middle of the tokyo bay would have been indisputable however. You'd get the blinding flash, the shockwave, the awe of the cloud, and everyone including everyone in government would not only witness it (anywhere with a window would have gotten the at least the flash), but survive, and do something about having witnessed it.
Of course 1940s thinking of the world was a bit less restrained when it came to the question of wasting a quarter million people in an instant. One wonders if the US felt the bombs were necessary to use with the war already won by that point to have sort of established precedent to use them in future conflicts. The quickness between targets would say as much as well: this is just another bombing run no different than an incendiary run a few days apart from another. After all, that's exactly what MacArthur intended to do in Korea. They were probably desperate to ensure their miracle weapon, one that took so much investment and effort and had so many careers staked in its success, would not end up like chemical weapons where it was verbotten to use even by the nazis.
I think you’ve made reasonable points. I think of it like this: the US was already firebombing Tokyo which was actually much worse than the nukes, they did likely see it as a continuation of the existing firebombing campaign
Yeah I don't think that comes up too much in the defense because it requires admitting the the US was already doing some pretty horrendous things to civilians outside the atomic bombs which is a rough datum to raise when you're defending dropping the atomic bombs. "Well it's good we dropped them because among the alternatives was a continued firebombing campaign." Kind of feeds into the argument that the very least the US weren't the the unambiguous Good Guys just the Better Guys in a lot of ways. (And lets be clear it's not exactly hard to be better than Imperial Japan....)
This threw me into a rabbit hole for a bit. Apparently there is good evidence that a lot of historical earthquakes in california were due in part at least to the oil industry, which early on would not replace pumped out oil with water.
Now a days they claim they replace the oil with water and all is well. However, as anyone who has owned an ancient used car and has switched from conventional to synthetic motor oil would tell you, there's no way that would work. The assumption is that these voids the oil are in are these hermetically sealed vaults such that one can simply pump in more volume of liquid and balance out pressures. That seems like a big assumption to me. Water is obviously not nearly so viscous as crude oil. It will seep in situations where crude will not. It's probably leaking out like a sieve if its really choss all the way down in California. The oil as it is isn't even very well contained given how common tar seeps are.
Agriculture probably also plays a role. Central valley has sunken what is it 20-25 feet now from historic ground levels? Same issue as a void generated by an atomic test or oil extraction, one would imagine. Mining probably also plays a decent role. Really anything involving removal or non like for like replacement of structural substrate from the ground is probably liable to be associated with seismic activity.
Kind of depressing a realization if this is the case, like we've screwed ourselves with not just the air but the ground we stand on too. You can't really get that stability back without all this new potential energy leaving the system in the form of stuff falling down and new quakes and plates breaking loose and budging a bit more.
>like we've screwed ourselves with not just the air but the ground we stand on too
I'm reminded of something Margaret Atwood once said which boiled down to the fact that there is no starting civilization over, ever again, if we fall back into the Dark Ages. the metals for copper tools and iron-making are in forms that require a lot of technology to even re-smelt, and all the easily accessible mines that don't require heavy machinery and engineering are long mined out
we either get it right this time around or it's over for us
it largely depends on the metal but the issue is with quality, not amount. plus, you don't have much in the way of just iron items these days - you have steel which requires temps quite a fair bit above what's possible in a charcoal/coal-based forge to work. early copper metallurgy utilized ores that were 10%+ metals - much softer, more malleable. these days we work with less than a single percent (but from much larger veins). much smarter people have written about this than me: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025GsGe....400323M/abstra...
a better focus would probably be on the fact that there's no longer really easily accessible coal anymore, much less oil. there also are far less trees by which you can make charcoal and firewood (except in certain areas) and that's actually fairly important when it comes to crafting and technology: https://www.postcarbon.org/can-civilization-survive-these-st...
If human society collapses, our cities and landfills will become ores. Strange ores filled with unnatural mixtures of metals, but ores nonetheless.
The sources you've linked discuss mostly the recovery of additional metals on top of what we have already recovered. That's a different and much harder problem. It's worth remembering that historically, the amount of metal obtained was much smaller — the vast majority of the copper that has ever been mined was mined in the last century, even though humans have been using copper for thousands of years. But historically, that copper was mostly used for consumer products, while today it becomes electrical cables, so it's less obvious how much copper we all use. There's surely enough copper in the walls of my apartment for everyone living here to cook in a copper pan, even though we think of copper pans as being too expensive nowadays.
> I'm reminded of something Margaret Atwood once said which boiled down to the fact that there is no starting civilization over, ever again, if we fall back into the Dark Ages. the metals for copper tools and iron-making are in forms that require a lot of technology to even re-smelt, and all the easily accessible mines that don't require heavy machinery and engineering are long mined out
> we either get it right this time around or it's over for us
The materials just in the frame of a typical big box store would be sufficient for any basic blacksmith to make millions of spades (and shovels!) using nothing but basic charcoal and a blower.
And you can make several thousand human operated blowers, forges, and small utility buildings also with the materials in a typical big box store’s frame.
The biggest issue would
be food and day to day energy requirements and fertilizer. A lot of our economy is highly dependent on refined hydrocarbons and derived products like ammonia/nitrates that aren’t locally producible right now.
Nah. Smiths literally came along with travelling war parties all the time.
In Europe, nearly every village had one (it was pretty required), and they operated even during active wartime. Because they had too.
All you really need is a skilled blacksmith, a forge, an anvil, and some hand tools. Well, and some fuel and iron.
All that can be transported by cart with a small team of people. In a village, even in wartime, you don’t need to move it, so it’s really just fuel and a few folks + metal feedstock, which is likely even more available from scavenged weapons and the like.
On the other hand, it's kind of reassuring that if we cock it up bad enough this time around, we won't be given the opportunity to make the same mistakes a second time?
Eh, not really. Any large scale dump will contain riches - in both accessible energy sources, like burnable and melt able plastics and other materials and metals - that it dwarfs whatever was available to any pre-industrial society.
We might have a pretty rough time dealing, but we’ve got a lot of wealth accumulated above ground now, and we’d have plenty of chances to make a go at it.
I wonder if there's an argument to be made that these little earthquakes help release stored potential energy in the crust, preventing it from building into a more severe and dangerous event?
In the Johannesburg area in South Africa, gold mining has produced up to half of all gold ever extracted in the world, with mines reaching depths of 4000m.
This has resulted in frequent seismic events, in the 2.0 to 3.0 range on the Richter scale, occurring on a daily or weekly basis, more occasionally reaching 5.0. This started around 1906 and still continues today. See:
What's a little permanent undermining of unknown scope across wide swaths of developed area if it means a decade or two of profitability over the working life of the well? I mean have you even considered the shareholders interests?
I'm not sure you'd really need a guide. Just use the phone as a phone and pretend like it isn't a smartphone. Suddenly you are teleported back into 2005: physical credit cards, physical transit passes, online banking via a desktop website. It is still up to you what era you decide to live in technologically today.
Now people just shut the brain off. Prompt AI. Get thing. Done with task. Ugga gugga.
I mean isn't it a known thing where older people get more senile when they stop intellectually challenging themselves? And now we are doing it for ourself for all these low hanging fruit mental exercises we used to bake into our lives where we did have to, gasp, think for a moment, even if the task was unimportant or stupid.
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