rekabis

Somewhere between 1 in 5 to 1 in 3 jobs aren't real.

Those are rookie numbers, suppressed by the lack of ghost jobs in blue-collar industries.

In tech, ghost jobs make up an average of about 60% across all tranches.

That’s just shy of ⅔ of all job postings. And this is a conservative estimate.

I remember having read this one as a child in elementary school. Had to keep the anthology book it was in checked out for several months, as I kept re-reading it trying to grapple with the ethics of the story. It was brutal for a 10yo.

Hardfought, by Greg Bear. Sci-fi set in the far future, spoken with a military patois that is difficult to understand but is meant to highlight the alienness of the forever war that the story takes place in. Themes upon themes fifteen-plus layers deep, even though this is only a novella.

I have something north of 3,000 volumes in my library, and if I was to pick the most influential fiction story of my life, this would be it. I had difficulty reading it as a teenager who was typically reading at a university level while in high school, so it’s going to take serious effort by most to truly benefit from it. But when you finally understand those themes… holy shit.

My wife named her first SUV - a dinky Equinox - “pebbles”, purely because it was a light stone grey.

Her next SUV - a more beefy 4Runner that can actually hold the Gunner dog crate comfortably - is “snowflake”, purely because it was a pristine snow white.

I think I’m seeing a pattern here with my wife.

My wife, right after showing her this image: “I’m socially vegan. I hate meat-ing people”

When you really look at it, only type 1 & 2 plastics are recycled with any real frequency (80+%). And even then, there is a subset of plastics marked with those two types which cannot be easily recycled.

Meanwhile, while types 3 through 7 are “recyclable”, in reality these are actually recycled in the very low single-digit percentages, or not at all. Most of the rest are incinerated or shipped off to third-world countries for “processing”.

As such, most any plastic that are not marked type 1 or 2 should be binned with the trash, especially if said trash is going to be effectively and correctly entombed in a landfill.

Not only does it contain said plastics so they don’t contaminate the wider environment (especially if the landfill is correctly designed with a liner), but it also puts them all in one spot for when technology unlocks effective ways of recycling these types - there are emerging companies that foresee a time when we will “mine” our landfills for resources, and our best current strategy is to contain and concentrate our waste in as convenient a manner as possible.

Honestly, if we’re talking about mostly or completely surface blasts, and not atmospheric detonations, that might be what saves the planet.

Nuclear winter is very much a thing by how the thrown-up dust reflects most incoming light, and with most detonations being in cities, the kicked-up dust would contain plenty of iron… which is the major limiting factor of phytoplankton, the largest single converter of CO2 to O2. All it has to do is fall out of the atmosphere and into the oceans during the spring to summer. So we need a late winter or early spring nuclear war.

I don’t understand how going to bed early is a problem.

My high school started at 0800hrs. I had to be up by 0630hrs to catch the bus at 0715hrs, and it was a 15-minute walk to get to it. I went to bed some time between 2130hrs and 2230hrs almost every night like clockwork.

Did I get 10hrs of sleep? No. But the ≈8hrs I did get was enough to ensure I was awake and coherent in the morning.

If kids are tired in the morning, what’s stopping them from going to bed earlier? I was never forced to do so. I just did, because I was getting tired shortly after 2100hrs. I listened to my body.

It has the handy acronym of ARGH.

Okay, that is hilarious.

I would say 10 of relative comfort, another 5-10 of increasing disasters (political, social, environmental, etc.) that tear apart civilization, and a final 5-10 of complete collapse where only small isolated communities still exist, and every day is a real struggle for survival against exceptionally hostile conditions.

Honestly, most scientific projections of resource exhaustion and environmental degradation point to 2050 as the point beyond which “civilization” really ceases to exist.

And honestly, I would be shocked if humanity still existed as any kind of a high-tech going concern much past that.

We don’t exactly know where the tipping point towards a Venus Scenario is. We just know it’s somewhere past +12℃, and before +16℃.

And the problem isn’t so much that we will reach that temp - we will go extinct long before that point - but rather the warming process - with all of the feedback loops that it kicks off - will push the planet into a Venus Scenario.

So no. The planet is not fine. The “friction” of prior warming events that would slow its “inertia” - the slowly-migrating, slowly-adapting biospheres that continue to draw down CO2e - won’t have that capability this time around. It’s just all happening far too fast for them to migrate or adapt.

We have literally “cut the brakes” with the speed and inertia of the current warming we have created. And one very real consequence may be a dead planet with a superheated atmosphere.

Here, feel free to simultaneously urinate and defecate into your pants:

• https://richardcrim.substack.com/archive?sort=new

All of this is evidence-based. All of this relies on facts.

Yeah, we’re f**king hosed as a species. Our legacy at this point should be in preventing a Venus Scenario, so at least life can continue to go on in some fashion