At that moment, the student was enlightened.

It is so very frustrating when some one elevates their indefensible personal feelings to the level of cosmic law.

Someone read those books thoroughly and decided they are not worth the cost of staying in a damaging situation.

You have not read them and yet you to want to defend stories you don’t think are true, but might have some little pearls of conventional wisdom? And just gloss right over that the religious trauma caused them serious harm they are still recovering from?

Just pointing out that your luke warm defense of your favorite children’s stories in this context comes across as extremely tone deaf.

Oh that is a good video and a good channel overall, thank you.

Yeah I don’t think I need to be an infectious disease expert to see the writing on the wall. We learned from the COVID Experience that a lot of the pain of a pandemic is the social chaos and confusion that make solving the resource choke-points even harder, creating a runaway feedback loop of problems.

This time around we are less prepared, less informed and the woo-woo crowd has had their feelings validated lately so they are feeling extra empowered.

Stocking up on simple essentials in a calm and measured manner is surely not a bad idea. Just some extra toilet paper, hygiene supplies.

And of course, beans.

Well that’s one potential source of new pathogens, but we don’t need new pathogens to create a disaster.

We (meaning the US) are currently dismantling our pandemic management infrastructure and withdrawing critical funding for international prevention efforts, kids are dying of Measles already and bird flu is already everywhere for all we know. And don’t forget that the regular flu can still be a major killer. God knows what Ebola is up to these days.

This isn’t a future doomsday scenario like a John Carpenter movie. We will be facing this as the world turns into autumn 2025 in the northern hemisphere.

We’ve had pandemic, now we get second pandemic, and we are going to have it very soon. But this time we will fight it with denial, a weapon proven to be useless against infectious diseases.

I despair of any insulation of Canada. Too much daily ground traffic across that huge unguarded border. Cancelling flights won’t make much difference there. North America is one giant petri dish sharing disease like a family full of young children.

But I am glad the other nations have begun to strengthen their systems too. Humanity will survive in some form, pandemics can’t wipe us all out.

So the field is ripe for harvest then. :(

I’m trying to prepare myself for things to get really bad really quickly. Pandemics are the Achilles heel of complex global societies that forget the great secret: we are all made of meat.

I am certain I will be the last person to point out that you may feel you are the last one to know what it was like before the public internet, but that your feeling is completely off base and not based on anything from reality.

He said BIRD mounts and he meant it. It is up to us to rise to the level where we too can use bird mounts.

Framework laptops are not great actually. They basically are offloading their qa/qc onto customers. They routinely ship defective units new out of the box and try to make you do all their engineering work for them.

The quality of the components is meh at best. If I were doing it again, I would go the ThinkPad route.

Framework is a bunch of VC funded shills who see the right to repair movement as a resource they can exploit.

This is 100% true.

It is especially clear when you sit down to write out an idea or plan that you think is fully formed in your head. It turns out that you didn’t have it all thought out and the act of writing is where the important details get worked out.

Writing is thinking, diagramming is thinking, making any external expression of an idea is thinking.

Sitting around with a cool universe in your head is not thinking, it is feeling. Put it in a tangible communicable form, then okay you have turned it into thinking.

He’s SUCH a flake!

Exactly! It’s time to circle up and be our own fact checkers to the extent we can.

Everyone knows someone who knows more than they do about something.

I gave it the P2P journalism name mostly to get this discussion going. I figured it would draw in a crowd of the deep geeks who love that stuff.

But really, we can’t trust any information on the internet completely. We need trusted networks of real people in our lives to ground us in lived reality.

I especially like the idea of not just passively being angry or upset at news. Yes I consider too much online venting to be a passive activity, as in ineffective.

Check in with a friend, everyone likes to be asked their opinion and they probably need to be needed right now too.

Scruffy the janitor knows more than you about toilets, boilers and boilng toilets. Think to ask him when the bowl is steaming.

I’m just saying maybe we should all get out more?

So correct. The time to chill out is after we have all talked to each other instead of solving it all on our own.

Way too complex!

Stop stewing.

Seek comfort in the counsel of friends!

Oh that’s the point though. Even people who don’t think they are “well-connected” are just a few hops from Kevin Bacon. Or a person who works at a bank during a banking crisis. Lots of folks know people who work at a bank.

The point is to stop stewing and start asking. Ask anyone who might know even a bit more than you on a particular thing.

Doesn’t that seem healthy?

Peter Funke? The famous anal-rapist?

I experienced it pretty profoundly when taking a plant systematics and identification course. I had always loved plants as a gardener, so the added knowledge of general plant anatomy lit a fire in my brain.

Now when I would learn a new plant, I would notice it everywhere, even out of the corner of my eye while driving at speed on a highway.

I’m still a slut for the thrill of learning a new plant.

This one works if you are an inbox-zero sort of person. Write a script to send yourself an email daily. Have another utility look for your reply. If you go too long without replying, have it trigger whatever other emails/actions you would like to happen.