The worst is those people who bought houses out of town at the top of the real estate market because they believed the propaganda about WFH being permanent. However I never trusted C-level execs or directors not to renege on this, so I didn’t do that.

Yeah and this whole agenda of RTO rolled out worldwide directly after Davos 2023 when a bunch of CEOs were tweeting about it from there. But noticing this makes you a conspiracy theorist.

In the old days people used to have their own servers…

And you can still buy them…

And the cloud really isn’t cheaper…

But whatever, it’s ubiquitous today. Maybe someday people will wake the F up.

God I hate Amazon now. They’re basically Wal-Mart these days with half the results being sponsored (advertisements) - and you see that even if you pay for Prime. There are some things you can only get there, but otherwise, since all e-commerce is converging, I don’t see the point of enabling their bad behavior. But whichever global corporate enterprise you take your business to, they will likely have a similar mindset.

It’s underappreciated how much of a story this is. This is happening in wide swathes of the USA. Big chunks of the West are abandoned, because of wildfires, earthquakes, etc and all along the Gulf Coast as well, including big chunks of Florida (which tons of people have moved to in recent years).

You may be right. I keep assuming that Western politicians are smart people who are playing dumb for the public so that they can keep their grifts going. But they may not be playing in many cases. That might explain the rather sluggish response to what looks like a very serious crisis unfolding over the next 1-3 decades.

What I don’t understand in our current situation is the lying. We’re not attempting to transition to green energy because we have a choice, because it’s better for the environment, or any of this. We’re doing it because there aren’t too many other options now that easily accessible fossil fuel is being burned up. What would be the harm, at this point, of just fessing up? It’s most disconcerting that Western governments have gotten addicted to lying like this, even when they don’t have to.

Wow, and this comes from the horse’s own mouth of corporate publication. We are headed for hard times, and soon, as the Permian depletes. It’s surreal that normies are completely unaware of this when it’s like a freight train of doom bearing down on us.

The insects have gone gangbusters this year in the Upper Midwest. This follows 3 summers ('21-'23) which had abnormally low insect volume owing to severe drought. The drought corrected this year, therefore so did the insects. There are probably local fluctuations like this but as I understand the global situation is pretty dire. A lot of it is from habitat loss, same with other wipeouts of biodiversity, but also ecumenical use of pesticides.

I assume it means something like “discretionary spending” but it’s not clear.

The song was about SoCal in the 1990s but it could equally apply to Florida or Texas circa now.

It has gotten to be dogma that “Malthus was proven wrong” on all sides of the mainstream’s political spectrum. I always found that odd, because he didn’t make any predictions. All of his work was based on historical data and known cases; he was very much a British empiricist. The only prediction in his essay, to the extent he made any, was that the principles wouldn’t change in the future because of some nebulous “progress”.

And they didn’t. What happened instead, as the article rightly notes, is that we temporarily increased carrying capacity. And in so doing we built a trap for ourselves from which we won’t be extricated in the coming decades. No one knows exactly how the trajectory of energy and resource descent will play out, but that it will happen, is happening now, is not in doubt.