Current building codes allow the construction of wood frame buildings up to 18 stories tall. You need to expand your knowledge of wood construction beyond what you learned reading The Three Little Pigs.

I agree. Wood is clearly the superior material.

The key difference between all previous civilizational collapses and the one we potentially face is that most people in the past were farmers. Even in the grandest empires like Rome, less than 10% of the population actually lived in cities. Most people lived in the countryside working the land. The city of Rome lost something like 95% of its population. But those people didn’t just crawl in a hole and die. They abandoned the city and joined the vast majority of the population that was living in the countryside. Many in the countryside actually saw their quality of life improve substantially. Many who had been slaves found the old legal system enforcing their slavery no longer existed. Rome collapsing just meant the end of the grand cities; political and economic systems could fragment, and people would just live more locally.

But today? Less than 5% of the population actually works on a farm. The vast majority of the population lives in cities. If the political and economic system collapses, the countryside can’t just absorb all those extra people. Hell, the farms can’t even operate without the equipment, fuels, and chemicals produced by the larger economic system.

Historically, when civilizations collapsed, the common folk just left the cities, abandoned the corrupt elites to their madness, and returned to small villages and rural life. But now there is simply nowhere for people to retreat to.

AAPPOMBUANYNTKTUWTHSITA

Really? I never would have thought Captain Planet would take up that much space on a hard drive. Are you storing fucking Captain Planet as a 4k video? It was a cartoon from the early 90s. I think 480p would be more than enough! Sure there were 114 episodes, but they weren’t that long. How much space can the complete Captain Planet really take up?

We should demand mastercard shut down all payments to everyone, as their very business model clearly falls afoul of the laws of the People’s Republic of North Korea.

500 cigarettes.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/26/blackstone-group-accused-global-housing-crisis-un

https://pestakeholder.org/reports/helter-shelter-how-blackstone-contributes-to-and-profits-from-californias-broken-housing-system/

https://fox5sandiego.com/news/local-news/almost-a-crime-report-finds-blackstone-hiked-rent-nearly-double-market-rate/

https://prospect.org/education/2023-02-28-university-california-blackstone-housing/

https://www.archpaper.com/2025/01/blackstone-cushman-wakefield-landlords-justice-department/

While I don’t support mass shootings in general, if someone is so far off the deep end that they’re going to throw their life away in an act of random violence, I at least hope they choose targets like Blackstone instead of a random elementary school. At least they’re smiting someone who deserves it, for once. The country would be a lot better off if we had several hundred corporate shootings and zero school shootings each year. No shooting period would be better. But if you’re going to go on a rampage, at least go after evil people first.

How are those related? It is possible for some conservatives to want to purge LGBT voices from the internet at the same time other conservatives want to advance crypto. These are not mutually exclusive goals.

“Flight risk criminals and terrorists had their accounts frozen!!!”

Yes, those criminals, for example, LGBT people who conservatives believe are pornographic simply for existing. God forbid LGBT artists want to have a way of earning a living. Crypto is relied on by a lot of marginalized groups. It’s used by artists who make perfectly legal art, but whose content conservatives object to. Crypto is used by many queer content creators as they face being cut off from payment processing systems, as again, conservatives consider queer people pornographic simply for existing. Crypto is used by sex workers, often people with few other employment options. Oh, and crypto is used by trans people to get access to healthcare that is quickly being criminalized.

How insane do you have to be, in 2025 Trump’s America, to fall back on the idea that anything criminal is bad. Republicans are trying to criminalize the existence of entire swathes of the population. And those people face being cut off from the banking system entirely, if folks like you, who blindly consider legality=morality, have their way.

Get the audiobooks. Listen to it in the car. But yeah, one of the plot points is basically exactly this, where people can effectively have a “save point” in life. I won’t spoil it, but it’s great.

Read Peter F Hamilton’s Void saga.

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Every 10 years the Israelis have to all move to Gaza, and the Gazans get to move into Israel. They trade places every ten years.

Let’s leave the border the same. But just to spice things up, we’ll move all the South Koreans to North Korea and all the North Koreans to South Korea. Then they’ll just swap places every ten years. It will so whimsical!

Yeah I recommend. The chief antagonist of the series, Morning Light Mountain, is one of the best examples of a truly “alien” alien that I’ve read in sci fi. It’s about as far from the trope that aliens are just humans with crap glued to their foreheads, or stand-ins for various real-world human cultures, as you can get.

I loved the concept of Peter F Hamilton’s Commonwealth saga. People invent wormhole technology. Interstellar colonization is done by opening wormholes directly to alien worlds. Except the tech isn’t cheap or easy. IIRC they described an interstellar generator as made of half a cubic kilometer of intricate machinery. They’re giant machines that can open portals to distant star systems.

Because of the immense expense, they need to make maximum use of these gateways. The generators operate on regular schedules, connecting to different worlds in the human sphere of colonization. And to make maximum use of the gateways…they run trains through them. You travel to a distant star system by buying a train ticket.

Scene: design board meeting room, car manufacturer

“What if instead of designing the ventilated seats to blow air, we reversed it? What if we used them as the air intake? Turns out if we consider how the ducts are plumbed, rough calculations indicate we could save $5/car!”

Skyscrapers and large office spaces are on paper horrible investments and have an awful time filling enough vacancies to offset their upkeep. The only thing that makes them a “safe” investment is that every company uses them as a way to bank equity. If those same companies pulled the rug from under themselves they would all lose that safe equity piggy bank.

This is just the sunk cost fallacy though. You can inflate the paper value of assets by playing games like this, but the bill always comes due in the end. Yes, companies that do this can juice their books a bit in the short term, but they’re harming themselves in the long term. They retain a bit higher book value for their real estate, but they make whatever goods or services they provide noncompetitive in the marketplace. They have competitors who aren’t bogged down by past bad real estate decisions. Those competitors can outcompete them on price and can attract better talent. Meanwhile, they’re stuck in their ways, fruitlessly trying to inflate their real estate holdings, all while their revenue is plummeting because they can’t attract good people and have to charge higher for their services than their competitors.

It’s just the sunk cost fallacy. You could inflate the book value of real estate by doing all sorts of foolish things. You could create a subsidiary and have that company rent out some of your floor space for absurdly high rates. But you’re ultimately just robbing Peter to pay Paul. Those commercial real estate properties have already lost their value. The value was lost the minute it was proven that work from home was a superior work model.

These companies are going to go bankrupt at a mass scale when the next recession rolls around.

Fuck, these companies might actually be violating the law. Deliberately choosing unproductive business practices just to cook your real estate books is something Enron would do.

Oh, the CEO should also be caned…rectally.