Nyaaah, when will people understand? No one in the rich and powerful and tech circles cares about people. We’re “human resource” and always have been, one more mineral to be strip-mined until exhaustion (cf. South Korea) or obsolence (cf. echbros’ AI wet dreams). Once gone or too hard to mine, the drilling ops move on to another quarry just like with minerals (offshoring).

High fertility in the West is bad because the American and European human mines are capital-intensive while the global South still has billions of units laying bare on the ground. “Pronatalism” is only about the top of pyramid and the narrow slice just below it - white, educated, well-mannered, elegant, artistically minded and creative societe who perpetuate the imaginary, self-proclaimed “western culture”. Shame they are also those who are too worried to have lots of kids in this economy and climate, but oh well.

Direct carbon capture is necessary if we want to have a shot at reasonable survival. Maybe it’s not top priority in late 2023 when we have so many easier and faster things to do and advocate for, but in long- or even mid-term we’re cooked without it even if emissions dropped to 0 today. In an eco-war economy the entire scientific community would be forced to make it work. Look up “warming in the pipeline”, 6 degrees within 100 years would be the result of only the ghg we have emitted to date and we’re not going to stop, like, ever.

Scooter. Not an electric one. I had a thought once “hey I did ride one in childhood, maybe it can be a bit of nostalgic fun from time to time”. Got myself the cheapest Chinese thing I could find, “no point investing too much into a fad”.

Turned out a scooter is absolute peak urban mobility. Short distances become much shorter. Mid-long distances become short. Granted, for a longer trip somehow the time gains diminish, probably because it’s not as efficient as a bike. But a scooter isn’t a long-hauler. It’s there to zip through an empty mall. It’s there to be folded up in a second and brought into a bus or a shop without being a hassle. It’s like 3-4 kg, not too fast for sidewalks but fast enough for bike roads, extremely easy to stop, doubles as a cart when carrying bags of groceries home.

The chinese one broke after 1 season because I was riding it everywhere. Then I got myself one from a better company, I chose it for small weight and portability. It’s technically children’s thing but I’m well below weight tolerance and also smol so it’s easy to handle. It’s already like a 5th year and whenever it’s not raining or too cold I ride it for shopping, errands, leisure walks, to work… Almost daily.

Maybe not yet, but…

• Spez will turn Reddit into a bot farm and sell this as training data
• Musk turns Twitter into a bigoted cesspool and will sell this as training data, which will subsequently be flagged for low quality (also: a botfarm)
• Threads is a corporate ad dashboard (and we already know how easy it is to GPT copy) and Zuck will sell this as training data
• Facebook is either dead or only good for boomers and Poles
• blogs are dead
• Fediverse is out there waiting to be scraped but possibly too small to sustain a big model

We’te getting there, hopefully.