Environment & Energy

One unfortunate thing with communicating with humans as our media environment has apparently programmed people to do - the left/greens etc were made to adopt this like type of messaging on serious matters that copies what only really works for demagogues and hate mongers. While these greasy The Atlantic and NYT types peddled a fake adulthood. That book IBM and the Nazis comes to mind when I look at institutions like those.

So what happens is that people who see these Nostradamus like predictions (“after this or that date things get dire”), expect everything to just collapse overnight. That’s then used by the Cato and Koch crew to argue that “look these doomers scared you and nothing happened!”
But something did happen. It just was slow attrition not overnight a Melancholia type event. And its sourced to the things the greens/left were warning about.

I mean a nuclear bomb can wipe everything out overnight but that’s not how really bad things typically work-it’s a grinding slow boil to the hell of degraded infrastructure, polluted, miserable, overcrowded and hot hellscapes. Now Trump and Covid are both a bit like a nuclear bomb and I personally had one such event in my life.

But that’s not how on average climate change, all the stuff Trump is doing now, overpopulation, delayed effects of the pandemic/Trump etc operate. It’s this nightmarish slow attrition where your life keeps getting shittier and one day you look back at what you thought was normal a mere decade ago and it’s gone.

I wish I had bookmarked it. Duer Betty Boom who worked in the federal government posted about how people will viscerally feel it in their lives, but not not attribute it to the correct sources as this football match style that is modern politics distracts people. How can they when education is gone and it’s all apps and bs except for the kids of the elite. They’ll be fine, which I hope is enough for all the rest of us.
I do feel warm inside when I think that at least I contribute to gold lining for Andreessen’s diapers he farts into.

The shit Trump is doing now will probably be hard to reverse without concerted effort. but by then it will be the new normal.

It’s the 1984 thing - things were always like this. They were never any different. Resistance is futile. I have a poor memory in some ways. But not in these ways. Possibly because the long memory I have in some ways is taking away from other kinds of memory I need for routine stuff.

I am appalled in 2025 to see all the things I found atrocious a decade, a decade and a half ago peddled as the better stuff. No. I have a long memory in some ways.
What we are witnessing is the path from WallE world to 1984. But on a long enough timescale with a few shocks here and there.

I would really recommend Harry Harrison’s “Make Room! Make Room!” to anyone who has not read it. It’s the future.