What exactly are you hoping for here?

Maybe it’s not a hallucination at all. Maybe the mushroom is actually an anti-hallucinogen. It suppresses the hallucinations that normally prevent us from seeing the tiny people.

What exactly do you think analog signals are?

They’re actually all analog, because they all get processed by your senses, which are analog.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Dems are polling 14% over Republicans right now, and if that holds until November, it’s likely that the November elections will be overwhelming and rig-proof.

Even better, there’s a downside to gerrymandering. It helps you in close elections, but if the election is really against you, you end up losing even more seats than you would have without the gerrymandering. You have to design all your districts assuming a certain vote percentage. So maybe you design it so your side has a bunch of districts that have a reliable 5 point advantage to your side. Well, if your side is running 10 points behind? Now that gerrymander is hurting you.

Clearly humanity is never capable of improving anything on the grand scale.

Roko’s basilisk is going to resurrect me and torture me forever by forcing me to listen to people drone on about Roko’s basilisk for all eternity.

Thankfully you don’t need to hang your hat on fusion. For decades people predicted fusion would bring about a new golden age of cheap abundant power.

Turns out, we actually did get that future, just turns out to be in the form of photovoltaics. Photovoltaics have already made fusion power obsolete. Today, in 2026, it’s cheaper to provide baseload power via solar power and batteries than it is to do so via a fission plant. And solar and batteries are still plummeting in price. While we don’t know what a fusion reactor will cost, it is without any doubt going to be more expensive than a fission plant. Even if we could get it to work, fusion is an obsolete power source. The investment in it is primarily an exercise for STEM folks to indulge in their childhood fusion fantasies.

When I was growing up in the 90s and 2000s, fusion seemed like this magical dream energy source of the future. If we could crack that, all our problems would be solved. I played SimCity 2000! Turns out, we didn’t need a miraculous new energy source. We just needed to put in the hard yeoman’s work of making photovoltaics affordable. Now we have, and fusion has no hope. The only advantage fusion will have is physical compactness, and that’s simply an irrelevant advantage for almost every application. Hell, even in polar regions, it will be cheaper to ship in solar power via long lines from the lower latitudes than it will be to build a fusion reactor.

Fusion is a retro-future energy source. It was the power source of the future for generations, but no longer.

But don’t lament. The dream is not dead forever. In the very very long term, fusion will have a future. When humans get around to expanding out to the Outer Solar System and beyond, fusion will be an invaluable power source. But anywhere closer to the Sun than the asteroid belt? Fusion will never be able to compete with simple solar power.

Turns out it’s cheaper to use the fusion reactor nature provides than to build our own.

No. You don’t. A copy that can be remotely deactivated is not something you own. If you can’t use it if the company were to go bankrupt, then you don’t own it.

Are you a time traveler lost from 1993?

So you can own your game.

I don’t know how to make you understand the value of owning your own things.

Games came on multiple disks back in the day. Why not now?

What do you think the mind is other than a physical thing directly molded by the environment around it?

It’s more about regional populations movements. There is no vast movement of people from the cities to the countryside. Rural areas continue to drop in population just as they have for the last century. The rural areas have a higher cost of living when you include job prospects. People can only afford to bid up the housing costs in cities because the jobs pay better than in the sticks.

I think the bigger issue is actually more on the positive side than the negative. In a social media world, it is hard to gain esteem from realistically achievable effort.

I’ll use my hobby, woodworking, as an example. I’m a hobbiest woodworker. I’m a far better woodworker than all of my family and all except maybe one or two of my friends. But then again, all the others don’t do it as a hobby. They have their own pursuits that I can’t begin to match their skill in. I can show my works to those in my immediate circle and receive genuine admiration and praise for a job well done. My work is legitimately impressive to those around me.

But on social media? Suddenly I’m comparing myself to people who have done this all day everyday for 30 years as their profession. Or I’m comparing myself to people who present a very curated version of their work. I can’t do this full time. I have a day job. I will never be as good at this as someone who spent decades doing this and nothing but this. And if I compare myself to people like that, then it will make my own work feel less valuable.

We weren’t meant to compare ourselves to the most skilled people on Earth at every single activity and craft. We’re meant to produce things and to make things and do things that are legitimately impressive to those around us, but are still achievable with realistic effort. You shouldn’t have to spend decades doing something before you can achieve even a modicum of social esteem. That’s not how humans are evolved to exist. We’re met to live in and seek to impress relatively small groups of people.

Your brain is one of the most artificial things in existence. How many years did you spend in formal education in one form or another? What is education other than a way of shaping a mind to a certain form?

This has nothing to do with the agrarian transition. These depopulating cities were created by the agrarian transition. They were where people went after they left the rural areas.

Two men were standing under a tree when it began to rain. One said to the other, “good thing this tree will keep us dry.”

“But what happens when the treek is soaked, and it can no longer keep us dry?” Asked the second.

“Don’t worry,” said the first, “we’re in a forest. We’ll just run to another tree.”