In terms of formal education, sure, they stopped at eighth grade. On the other hand, they were absolutely reading books, newspapers, magazines, and so on.

This is an assertion, not a fact. More than that, it's an assertion held tightly by liberals with no attempt to ground it in anything. Have you ever looked into it? I have. Lemme show you some stuff.

I'ma start with the common knowledge of the "TED Talks Era:"

I don't know how many bajillions of views that turkey had when it was new. I was one of them. There was no attribution to it anywhere - "what the hell is a Shift Happens?" Turns out it's an August 2006 IT powerpoint for Arapahoe High School from the math teacher to everyone else, basically saying "wake up it's the Internet." A noble goal, a stellar effort, and given the intended audience it's not surprising that it contains howlers like this one:

Estimated by whom? Using what methods? Compared to where in the 18th century? Which, by the way, covers everything from the seed drill through the electric battery. Yet it became a part of the common knowledge - much like it was common knowledge in Korea that sleeping with a fan could kill you, at least until the English language Internet found out about this and started mocking Koreans mercilessly.

So how do you measure "absolutely reading books, newspapers, magazines, and so on?" if you go out on your own and try and find that information you'll discover that the information you can find goes back to 2017 or so. You'll also find a lot of nonsense, like the declining relevance of GoodReads as a false proxy for literacy and the wildly-speculative impact of the printing press. FRED has actual data going back to 1990 which, if we're being honest, is just as likely to be measuring the impact of Harry Potter as it is anything else.

What has gone up gangbusters is literacy, particularly among minorities, and this is not just an American thing. What that tells you is it was the intelligentsia who were reading the Leatherstocking Tales, not the sharecroppers. "Books, newspapers, magazines and so on" presumes a few things that shouldn't be presumed but most of them loop back to the misconception that "if it's in print it's good" to which I refer you back to my buddy The Protocols.

Some anecdata: I used to be ashamed of my paternal grandparents for not going to high school, primarily because my maternal grandparents were kicked out of Harvard and Radcliffe respectively in their last semester (it's a long story). This was before I learned that nobody back then went to high school where I grew up. My maternal grandmother got married at fourteen and popped out two kids before her eighteenth birthday but you know what? She read maybe a dozen Harlequin romances a day. The Harvard crew didn't read shit. So what are we reading, exactly, and why are we using that as a proxy for knowledge? Some more anecdata: I got a buddy who consumes podcasts all day. He can barely read a word because his dyslexia is so severe - IF: between 5% and 20% of Americans have some severity of dyslexia AND: modern technology permits the consumption of information without having to read THEN: is literacy really that great of a proxy for learning and knowledge? And I mean, we haven't even touched on yellow journalism yet. Is watching Fox News better than watching nothing at all? What about reading the New York World?

Conservatism comes from the belief that "things were better before." It's a philosophy of nostalgia. it ignores the simple fact that our memories and our heritage aren't neutral, and it ignores the simple fact that our memories and heritage are endlessly rewritten to support our worldviews of the present. "People are stupider now" helps us make sense of Trump voters, but only if we didn't grow up with Reagan voters. The fact of the matter is, American history is gnarly and, for people who weren't white and male, sucked a lot of the time. This country voted the way it did because nobody feels secure in their jobs, and nobody feels secure in their jobs because the Long Boom is over.

You want good news? let's talk about this fuckin' meme

But first let's talk about this

So eight weeks ago my (inch and a half) water main pinholed under my dining room. Because the dining room used to be a patio, and because it was raining, we assumed it was water in gutters or a french drain (I have fourteen gutters and six french drains). It wasn't until five days later that enough circumstances stacked (such as, enough water had accumulated that scrap wood was bumping against the joists in the current like driftwood at the wharf) that it became clear there was a biblical leak and that the water shutoff didn't shut off all the water.

Subsequent archaeology and OSINT determined that this water main had cut loose in 1986 and 2014. It's worth noting that the house has four crawl spaces, two of which are quite comfy, but the water main bursts about every ten years under the now-dining-room, which is utterly inaccessible. Fortunately this inaccessible area is surrounded on all sides by concrete footings which means any leak is shored up from affecting the rest of the house... at least until the flood travels 45 feet underground to find freedom in the shop. Nonetheless, we're not doing this shit again.

230 sqft of floor and subfloor have been destroyed. Roughly 100sqft of discarded, soaked carpet has been removed, along with assorted other detritus (a 1986 Coca Cola Classic can, for example), not to mention roughly 10 gallons of mixed nut shells and rat shit (and three mummified rats). The pipe had been clearly man-handled with channel locks, which is a good sign that it will cut loose again. The floor cannot easily be made accessible, besides which we're now talking about architectural modifications to support future failures. Instead I ran a fish tape down the pipe and located it in a dead-nuts straight line to the former-bar, future Bond-Villain-Fishtank room (yes there is a Bond Villain Fishtank room). From there it clearly elbows at 20 feet. From there it's 12 feet to a patch of dirt in a crawlspace I can access (albeit with an 18" ceiling), then it's under 25 feet of concrete (half of which is outside), then it's under a legit giant sequoia, then it's under stairs, then it's under driveway, and then 65 feet southwest and 15 feet down it hits the street shutoff. In other words, there's a 4' x 8' patch of dirt that probably contains a water pipe, is under shelter, is accessible, and can be re-routed through a mechanical chase into the mudroom closet (once the mudroom is built, and once it has a closet) such that the water shut-off is in a reasonable place, all plumbing from that point forth is accessible and never again will floors need to be destroyed to remedy broken plumbing.

I needed luck here. I needed the goodwill of the spirits. So I finished emptying my service pit. With no water, by the way, we've been without water since before Thanksgiving. But I emptied out my pit. It's got a drain! Six fuckin' feet under the garage and it's got a drain. And I reinterred Bandit. Yeah I found the jawbone and pelvis of a dog in there. I also scanned four rolls of photos. So I'm pretty sure this is Bandit.

Anyway. I had a little ceremony out by the Hoggson sign and a put Bandit out where he could spiritually bark at everyone walking by and keep the house safe. And I put some daffodils on top of him. And then I asked for all the luck the spirits of the house could give me and went digging.

With a mattock. Prone. On my chest. In the dirt. For five hours. Making a trench 18" deep (pipe should be between 6" and 12" according to code and best practices in 1970) by four feet wide. And failed to find the fucking pipe.

So now we're going to be for realsies and call in a locating service. They're going to run a snake down my pipe and radio waves are going to say exactly where it is. This will cost $400. They locate the pipe, exactly where I thought it was, and say it's between a foot and three feet down. They also determine that the plumber's former worker severed my landscape lights with a backhoe but that's a problem for another day - the plan now is to open up the subfloor, excavate where the elbow is and see where it's going. Because the obvious thing for it to do is head towards the street... but five of those gutters simply go at least six feet straight down and disappear off the earth. So the pipe might just go DOWN fifteen feet and then wing over. We have no idea. Apparently my electrical meter hookup is six feet underground because at some point in the '80s they raised the fucking STREET So it's entirely possible the pipe doesn't get within twelve feet of where I was digging.

So the subfloor is opened and the elbow is under a fucking abandoned patio. The good news is that at "1 to 3 feet down" with the grade two feet under the subfloor that means it's gotta be right at the surface, right? Bust the concrete and away we go?

No. Bust the concrete, dig two feet in any direction, dig two feet down, no fucking pipe.

At this point, my plumber, who is the best plumber I've ever met, is out of fucking ideas. He does not know what to do next. I say "well, at least this isn't the most fucked up house you've ever worked on, right?" To which he says, 'no actually this is far and away the most fucked up job I've ever worked on and granted I've only been doing this for fifteen years so there may be something more fucked up out there, I don't know, but if there is I sure don't want to work on it and i hope I retire before I find out."

Can you imagine how demoralizing that is? You've spent $90k on plumbing and you haven't been able to wash your hands for eight weeks. There's a pipe somewhere but it might be so buried you'll never find it. And your plumber is ready to throw up his hands. Your shoes? Permanently smell like dirt fungus. Your gloves are full of grit; you take them off (even after you've been pruning!) and your hands come out brown.

So you come up with a plan. The locators come back out. Don't know if I'm paying for them this time or not, but they were extremely fucking wrong - they now determine the pipe is two feet closer than they thought. So digging continues. And three feet down and two feet away (the locators are off by two feet) there's a TEE.

Not an elbow. A tee. Water comes in on the right, shoots off left to the inch and a half "lawn hydrant" (my new favorite phrase) used to fill the pool, shoots upward under the living room, under the house, out front, where it elbows in galvanized (big no-no), goes back under the house, pops up in the foyer and rejoins the rest of the house. The tee illustrates why the fucker was hard to find, it's complicated down there. Also, catching where it comes in means eliminating 20 feet of ABS to the tee, 30 feet of galvanized under concrete to the lawn hydrant, 30 feet of extremely ephemeral ABS under the dining room and 20 feet of already-rusting galvanized up front so my plumber? He cuts off that tee and we put a fish tape down it. Twelve feet in, it elbows. Right about where we were digging, really - He starts digging in my trench.

And fails to find the fucking pipe.

So I get mathy with it. The plumber's argument is that inch and a half ABS does not like to bend, so odds are good we're dealing with a straight line, at least to where we think. I get out my lasers and my tape measures and my fish pole and I do my calculations and I determine that where I dug my trench is two feet further than where we think it elbows. So I get back under my bathroom with my mattock and start digging a new trench.

And fail to find the fucking pipe.

So okay. Let's get real. I have all this as a WhatsApp conversation with myself - the most complete way to math it up. "5" from laser to slap. 35" from laser down to pipe. Laser is halfway up the joist, which is 7". Laser is now 17" lower than it was. 35" - 17" = 18" below laser... plus grade. Laser is 11" above ground. Therefore pipe is 7" down, plus however much it dives."

We're already 18" deep.

So okay. Let's confirm that the elbow is an elbow, and let's see if we can figure out which way the elbow turns. I have an endoscope (yes, we're now at lasers and endoscope). I tape it to my fish tape. And I discover that the elbow is not an elbow, it's a UNION and I can push two full feet beyond it.

In other words, both of my trenches should cross the fucking pipe... assuming they're deep enough. But how deep do they need to be? So I get out a level. And I brush away a lot of dirt on the known pipe. And I crawl down in a hole with my level and a tape measure and bending in some truly interesting ways I determine that over 4.85 inches of run I have 0.9 inches of drop which works out to a ten degree down angle but that doesn't matter this is algebra not trig and out where the union is? Assuming the pipe is straight? it's 34 inches down.

So I dig. With a mattock. On my face. And 36" down I hit hard clay. There are spots where I'm definitely digging through disturbed sand and spots where it's really clear nobody has been through that dirt since the glaciers so we'll assume the pipe is in the sand. So we triple-check our locations and there's no. possible. way. This trench WON'T intersect that fucking pipe.

But now we need more luck, and our FRP grates (subject to the most amusing product photos on Amazon have arrived. So we head to metal supermarkets and buy some angle iron. We head to Home Depot and buy two boxes of red heads. And we head to Harbor Freight and buy a drill press, and we spend a couple days turning this

To this

___________________________________________________

Sidebar: With all the information I have on these people I decide to look up his mother, for completeness (she's mentioned in a letter as being unwell, I wanted to see where his parents' deaths fit into the overall narrative). She has almost no presence on the Internet, which is interesting for reasons we'll get into in a minute. Where she does show up is here, as "another Henry descendant." See those extremely politically-incorrect native american statues? I have photos of the 1986 yard renovation (which undoubtedly coincided with this damn water main cutting loose) and uhhhhhhhhhh

So you go "wait what the hell do they mean by "another Henry descendant" and you go "HOLY SHIT THAT HENRY" and you realize that while the guy who built this house was rich AF on his dad's side, he was thunderously wealthy on his mom's side and you're telling this to veen who points out that according to Wikipedia, this guy's great grandfather had a five car garage in Seattle in 1901, and you didn't think there were five cars in Seattle in 1901, and two days later the Seattle Times reports the first traffic count in Seattle as "on this day" and on that day in 1901, the first traffic count in Seattle counted ZERO CARS all day and you realize that this ghost, who built a five car garage, who had a grandfather with a five car garage prior to the advent of cars, had his widow sell his house to a jackass crab fisherman who filled in his service pit with garbage

and his dog

And if you wanted to be haunted? Well that's a damn fine start.

___________________________________________________

So. Service pit. Restored. Dog. Buried. Let's buy a trowel with extra reach, let's get the picnic blanket the radio station gave us for fundraising, let's cross our fingers and start digging.

90 minutes later

I burst into fucking tears.

You'll notice it's at a hell of an angle. For a pipe that don't bend, it's pretty bendy. It was also at 22", not 36", which suggests that trigonometry is a pain in the ass when you're in a hole. But more than that I now have a REAL GOOD INDICATOR where that sucker's gonna be when it hits the footing and lo and behold

Now let's talk about this fucker.

'cuz here's the thing. The whole point of this fucking cartoon is to encourage you to keep trying or some shit. Not sure why these fuckers are wearing dress shirts and ties, probably because anyone needing a business meme is applying this to TPS reports or some shit. And what I will say? Is that once we tore up the floor, once we jackhammered the concrete, once we had locators out twice, once I spent NINE FUCKING HOURS ON MY FACE, that pipe was a scant four inches from where I had been digging. But you know what? We didn't know if it went left or down. We didn't know how down it went. We didn't know what the fuck was going on and no, you shouldn't keep pick-axing in your fucking dress shirt as if holes are somehow fun to dig, you should get out the math and laser beams

AND KNOW WHERE THE FUCKING PIPE IS

Because even with all the math and laser beams, my un-bending pipe was bent at a pretty jaunty angle and a good eighteen inches from where it should have been in X and a good fourteen inches from where it should have been in Y.

And now? Tomorrow? I will have water again. And it will be in a place where no more floors will need to be destroyed to deal with it.

As an added bonus, enough floor has been destroyed that it's just a little more added chaos to take my (REF) kitchen, my (-4.5") dining room and my (-8") garage and build the dining room subfloor at four and a half inches higher. This eliminates two tripping hazards, adds a third step to give me a truly sunken living room, and provides me a single 8" step into my garage. None of which would have been on the docket without eight weeks without water, due to the eruption of a geyser under my dining room.

At least in the past, it was expected of those who considered themselves educated would be expected to know something about the subject they were talking about.

Up until 1940 or so, "educated" meant "through the 8th grade." Meanwhile the argument from authority fallacy, which is misunderstood by most of the Internet, goes back to at least the romans: "I am an excellent general, therefore I shall be an excellent emperor."

The new attitude is much more of a feelings based vibe where the only criterion for taking a given position is that it feels right to them.

For purposes of modern discussion, this "new attitude" goes back to 1951. Prior to modern discussion, of course, it goes back as far as you wanna take it. I think what you're observing is not a lack of evidence, it's a lack of evidence you ascribe to. Bill Gates' 5G microchip vaccines is clearly nonsense if you have a firm grounding in science, but if you have a firm grounding in Joe Rogan, whatever Joe Rogan says is science. I think the mistake most of us armchair intellectuals make is our failure to recognize our own biases while recognizing the biases of others. It was much easier to pretend that everyone is doing their rational best when we were all reading from the same playbook but that doesn't mean our actions were logical. That they happened to be is a tribute to post-war culture and that they are no longer is a condemnation but there's ample evidence that people were mostly pretending to be rational on both sides while actually going with their guts.

But we’re a culture that doesn’t read books, one that will absolutely fall for anything.

say hello to my little friend

The Q phenomena was pretty much a wake up call from inside the house.

Not a week of my childhood passed without USA Today informing me that over 50% of Americans believed that Elvis was alive.

People somehow came to believe that germ theory was fake. Or that Biden wasn’t really in tge White House or something. The threads on numerology of the exact timing of a tweet were insane.

For that matter, the Flat Earth Society went from being a parody run by the Church of the Subgenius to being a real honest-to-god thing. Again, that's not "everyone suddenly got stupider" that's "everyone stopped accepting the same ground truths." I worked with a guy who was an alcoholic until he got clean. In the process of getting clean he decided he needed religion; his method of selecting religion was watching youtube videos for two weeks in search of "evidence of miracles." Surprise, Jesus won! Nominally, that makes him a Christian. Actually, that makes him a feckless rube. The difference here between "christian" and "feckless rube" is that he rejected the authority framework of organized religion. The basic problem we have now is a fractured authority framework, which I would argue goes back to GWB 1 trashing the authority of the "mainstream media" in pursuit of justifications for the invasion of Iraq. The government prosecuting nobody for anything related to the Great Financial Crisis didn't help and once the Tea Party was launched there was a choice between serving the people or the people finding someone who would tell them what they wanted to hear and lo and behold, here we are.

They don’t understand logic, probability, statistics, history, or basic sciences.

Here's what I'm saying. They never did. BUT! They used to be willing to take our word for it. They aren't anymore.

Show me a revolution and I'll show you a bunch of smart people being slaughtered. Russia. Biafra. Cambodia. Chile. Burma. Philippines. The people who don't simply do what they're told are a problem for the people who aren't interested in your arguments. If it were "people were smart, but suddenly they're stupid" there would be far fewer college professors shot. If anything, we're lucky that in the United States, the idiots are saying "ackshully I'm smart" rather than "shoot all the smart people." That's a testament to culture as far as I'm concerned.

People who think demons run Hollywood won’t make good decisions.

One man's demon is another man's Communist, just sayin'

I think the reason people are so into the culture war stuff is that it provides lots of opportunities to create negative imagery that play well on screens, and that it’s easy to generate a hot take on.

This whole article was pretty much about wedge issues

But this level of discourse is happening because the idea of having long conversations based on factual evidence doesn’t work on a society that runs on vibes.

And in conclusion, the vibes were shared, now they aren't, that's the whole problem.

This came out yesterday and I am absolutely using it in a set next week

My primary argument against this line of thinking is that credulity and fascism are nothing new.

Sightings of UFOs went up right as sightings of angels and ghosts went down. Stuff we don't understand is always going to be magic, and the "skeptics" that adhere to a strictly scientific viewpoint have simply substituted one religious following for another. We'd like to believe that rationality is self-derived but for the most part it's just another kind of dogma. Can that dogma be derived from first principles? Sure. Do more than a tenth of the people ascribing to that dogma understand what first principles are, let alone have the capacity to derive their beliefs themselves?

The principle problem is that the two political parties of the United States were formerly aligned over all but economics and are now divided largely by wedge issues. The resolution of this problem is that the parties differed over economics due to economics being the thing citizens care about the most - the two things that got Trump elected were (1) Immigrants are gonna take my job (see: NAFTA) (2) inflation has destroyed me purchasing power. All the Jan6 nazi-ism is a sideshow but it's a sideshow that allows a bunch of unprincipled ideologues to break democracy. Kinda like how they did during the Red Scare.

So I've been using Signal for going on ten years. I don't remember why I started poking around with it; having a job that basically pays you to surf the internet for 50 hours a week masks a lot of origin stories. Either way, when I signed up I had basically one conact that came up "so and so is on Signal!" He messaged me on the app saying "what the hell are you doing here" to which I said "poking around, what the hell are you doing here" to which I got an amusing story about how "Ed" insisted that every piece of production communication related to the movie needed to be on Signal, which was a real pain in the ass considering it couldn't even send MMS at the time. According to "Ed" Signal was the only thing the NSA hadn't cracked.

Granted, that was ten years ago.

I also need a messaging platform that is (A) HIPAA-compliant (B) familiar to everyone who uses it (C) in-network for all the people we need to communicate with which was absolutely WhatsApp. Which, of course, has had Facebook baggage for longer than Signal has existed. Signal, by the way, exists in large part because Brian Acton, WhatsApp founder was extremely ooked out by what Facebook was doing to Whatsapp so he took his billions and built a competitor. So anyway we tiger-teamed WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and iOS (which, incidentally, the WSJ did years later and determined that:

- Telegram is owned by a Russian oligarch, but has cool stickers

- Signal is about as meme-unfriendly as David Brooks

- WhatsApp has the greatest penetration by far and is also owned by Facebook

- iOS is rock-fucking-solid but also based on a proprietary ad-hoc glueball entirely beholden to Apple's moods

So. Wanna start a lynch mob? WhatsApp. Wanna help out Putin? Telegram. Wanna be unable to talk to anyone on Android? iMessage. Wanna be about as boring as Windows 3.11? Signal.

I just don’t understand why anyone was asking the question.

Because in popular culture HG Wells postulated Martians to explain the (non-existent) canals, "little green men" started populating science fiction and the CIA used an "alien crash" at Roswell to provide a cover story for Project Mogul, thereby launching an outsized pop culture trend. Meanwhile, theoretical physics was still so young that Fermi, Teller, York and Konopinski could all be hanging out at UChicago but old enough that the age of the sun could be known at around 5 billion years, the age of the planet at around 3 billion years and the age of the universe at around 14.

So on the one hand, popular culture insisted that everything weird was little green men but on the other hand, those with a grounding in physics or astronomy knew that the little green men had a substantial head start. Considering the rapid technological progress the human race was currently experiencing (cotton gin to nuclear weapons in 150 years), Fermi was having a hard time squaring eleven billion years of technological progress with how thin aliens were on the ground.

If you really get into the ins and outs of theoretical physics down there where the "Theoretical" has a capital T and the "physics" is in italics, you start tripping over weirder shit:

- Quantum entanglement is instantaneous and what keeps it from transmitting communication is the observer effect

- The observer effect is some hand-wavey shit along the same lines as wave particle duality, IE "shit that was made up so that undergrads could move on"

- The theory of relativity says you can't accelerate something TO the speed of light. It also says you can't decelerate something FROM the speed of light. Which means that anything going faster than the speed of light can't be made to go slower and anything going slower than the speed of light can't be made to go faster which means they can never interact. It does NOT forbid either from existing.

The speed of light is just where the asymptote lives. There are asymptotes throughout mathematics. One can, with confidence, say that there are iron-clad laws preventing information or matter from traveling past the speed of light. One cannot, however, point at theoretical physics and say "because all this shit is absolutely rock-solid."

Edwin Hubble turned the Andromeda Nebula into the Andromeda Galaxy barely 100 years ago. Superconductivity was discovered in 1911, but superconductors you could wow your physics class with showed up in VWR Scientific when I was in high school. The age of the universe has gained two decimal points of precision since I started college. Not saying warp drive is right around the corner, saying that "faster than light travel appears to be impossible" is likely a safer thing to say than "faster than light travel is impossible" based simply on scientific progress.

The ideal creator has no distance between themselves and their persona. They have been interpellated by audience metrics; their subjective experience already takes audience reactions into account.

Or more simply, YouTubers are not “Creators” but Creations. Audiences, rationalized by the platform, and the vloggers who upload the videos those audiences consume are not separable either theoretically or empirically.

“I think I'd probably tell you that it's easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.”

RANT ON

Perhaps "fashionable" is the wrong phrase. How about "orthodox?"

The basic issue, as highlighted by this article, is that some ideas are acceptable to papal doctrine and some aren't. Those ideas very much follow the Planck maxim of "science advances one funeral at a time." Scientists capable of creativity tend to tuck their crazier ideas into short stories, which is hella fun. Scientists incapable of creativity tend to tuck their crazier ideas into weird little papers in neglected corners of academia, which is hella tedious. Max Tegmark even has a ratio; in order to keep tenure he does one hare-brained paper per 19 normie ones.

Analog Magazine used to publish speculative fact. It was usually awesome, tooled for a lay audience and written in a conversational tone that was invariably thought-provoking. On the other hand, modern speculative papers are dry AF and couched in all sorts of plausible deniability which means a lack of scientific rigor is easily hidden (see above). So what we're left with is blogs discussing idiots when we used to get Sagan arguing that there wasn't life on earth (based on current scientific methods).

So now we're at "is it vaguely thought-provoking? give it to the crazies" and "does it reinforce doctrine? Make Neil DeGrasse-Tyson talk about it on Good Morning America." Even if it's nutrition - especially if it's nutrition. And the thing of it is? It's the science fiction that pushed the envelope. It's the science fiction that the scientists read. Enrico Fermi wasn't known for his ruminations on little green men and yet the autocomplete on everyone's phone for Fermi isn't "-on" it's "Paradox." But god help you if you try and push a boundary or two. Nobody reads science fiction anymore, it's all Hunger Games ripoffs and Chinese propaganda.

So we don't talk about the black spots in mars rover tracks. And we don't talk about the platinum-iridium wire Avi Loeb dragged up from the ocean. But ZOMFG the UAPs

RANT OFF

I for one have loved watching tachyons go in and out of fashion at least twice in my lifetime

This album is massive. Seven hours. I built an entire DJ set out of it.

Everyone was an undergrad once. The undergrad in question, of course, denies the discussion ever happened.

By the way, I want to stress that I don't endorse Baxter,

MFer you had me at Photino Birds

I think survivorship bias tends to make the past look more sensible than it was. The biggest thing on goddamn television when I was a kid was "the lizard people have come for our water... and our WOMEN"

As far as I'm concerned I'd rather see money spent on Alicuberre drives than fuckin' LLMs. At least magic warp drives have some questions left to answer; The whole of AI is all about "smooth jazz, only nobody had to make it OR listen to it!"

I think everyone in the community has a firm barrier between "things are fun" and "things are real." Many of our working sci fi writers these days are big science nerds who have a firm grasp of reality but explore the impossible corners because they're entertaining to think about. I think if you asked 100 trekkies whether Star Trek represents "a realistic future in space" about 95 of them would aver. They know in their hearts that warp drives and replicators have no more basis in fact than magic wands and ruby slippers but they can go what if and enjoy themselves and that's totally fine.

The problem is our paradigm for "meeting strangers" is generally "after crossing an ocean" so the ocean has to be challenging but not impossible to cross. You're right - from a realistic standpoint there's orders of magnitude more logistics in crossing light years than there is in crossing leagues but this graph or its friends will tell any creative writer that where there's a will there's a way, wave hands get plausible deniability and move on to the fun stuff.

MY beef is that articles like this one are generally written by people without the creativity to write the fiction and without the smarts to write the fact so we end up with wrinkled-forehead prognostications about the Kardashev scale. The Fermi Paradox white papers are often scientists messing about with science fiction but this is... something else. It kinda looks like the author heard about the noosphere while ripping on a bong in his undergrad and never let go.

So funny story. LIGO's number two guy was my best friend's dad, and I was there with them both at Caltech when they were still messing around with their demo gadget, rather than the geographical array. Who shows up but another guy I knew from high school, who I tried real hard not to get recognized by because he's really annoying. He did, of course, but not before expressing his skepticism that LIGO was going to be sensitive enough to detect anything; he ended up not going to Caltech because in his opinion, LIGO was "around six orders of magnitude" too insensitive to detect a neutron star.

The place we retrenched the water main to is under slab.

There's about a six-foot-wide section between that slab and another slab. Then it hits another slab, which is outdoors. Then it goes under a giant Sequoia. Then it goes under the driveway. Then it's at the street.

Or maybe it just goes straight down!

So in preparation for my exploration - trying to find a buried water pipe in the 24" of space underneath a bathroom - I decided to appease the ghosts as much as possible. I finished emptying the service pit. It's marvelous. It's between five and five and a half feet deep, 31 inches wide and thirteen feet long. It's even got a drain. And I reinterred Bandit out under the chainsaw sculpture. I planted some hyacinths and dwarf daffodils with him. Not gonna lie I got choked up. I hope he's happy there.

And then I got out my mattock and started in. The trench is about 3 feet wide right now, and should have caught that pipe. But then it's only eighteen inches deep.

Which means this shit isn't going to be easy, dwarf daffodils or no.

Dude you know the article is un-serious the minute you see the words "Kardashev scale."

There are at least two books that I know of that are nothing but solutions to the Fermi Paradox because the absolute dearth of hard information leads to an absolute cornucopia of theory. It's pretty useless stuff from a scientific standpoint because it's nonsense divided by nonsense raised to the power of nonsense squared. From an anthropological standpoint, though, it's an entertaining mirror to hold up to society.

One of the things that's always amused me about SETI is that it's always focused on the it-girl of whatever our technology is. I remember an article arguing that obviously we should be looking at tight-beam red lasers back in like '89; there was another one claiming we should be looking at x-ray lasers like five years later.

One of the other things that's always amused me is how everyone pooh-poohs spherical decay as if the farm report from Tau Ceti is gonna make it here accidentally with any kind of signal to noise ratio we'd be able to detect. But you need to justify your time on the radiotelescope, right? So we make up some shit.

This whole "let's turn inward" thing is going to become more and more common as more people read The Dawn of Everything, kinda how Spin doesn't get written without Gray Goo being on the tip of everyone's brain. Frankly, both Dyson Spheres and the Kardashev Scale came of age in an era where energy seemed unlimited; if you'd told Freeman Dyson back when he was working on Project Orion that the world was gonna studiously fail to develop fusion power for the next 70 years he'd never have believed you.

Don't apologize, I've come across the subject before but didn't find a satisfactory answer. It's something I'd like to be better read about but haven't found anything satisfactory. I'll bet there's lots of good stuff in Vietnamese, which is more effort than I'm likely to expend.

There's an interesting bit in Kaplan's the Revenge of Geography in which he's sitting down with some Vietnamese general in the '80s and observes that the Vietnamese are much friendlier towards the Americans than he expected they would be, considering the circumstances. The General laughs and points out that they'd fought two wars with the Chinese since then and the Chinese were their biggest trading partner.

There's a lot of history in Southeast Asia that isn't China or Japan. Visiting Ayutthaya and hearing about the wars between Burma and Siam really gave me a taste of just how euro-centric my historical view was and I've strived to change that ever since. I mean, here's a whole history that never touched you and I'll bet most countries have similar.

Related to boat people, related to the war, related to the political climate that led to it? What are you looking for?

I ask because there's a blind spot and because the Vietnamese and Hmong friends I've had (A) don't like talking about it (B) are also disgruntled that no one has told their story. "How Vietnam happened" has best been explained by Barbara Tuchman's March of Folly. The dilemma it has, of course, is it's very much the American perspective, as with everything else related to Vietnam.

The Vietnam War book most people refer to these days is Matterhorn, which is not non-fiction. I made it about halfway through; it's grim and deals far more with racism within the US military than it does with anything else. In that half there were no vietnamese at all.

Superpower Interrupted is useful in that it's a non-American perspective, at least; it paints a portrait of Vietnam as a culture whose principle concern is not running afoul of China. For example, the region has historically been called Nam Viet but the Nguyen Dynasty renamed it Viet Nam to maintain peaceful relations with the Qings.