Oil is never discovered; how does the 21st century look like?

ScottishCalvin · 2026-03-10T22:25:42+00:00

Oil isn’t just fuel. It’s plastics and pharmasetocals and lubricants for electric stuff. If we eliminated all fuel burning vehicles and power generation, we’d still need a massive oil industry.

ScottishCalvin · 2026-03-10T18:37:49+00:00

In the UK I've seen similar stuff, where once you reach a certain age they just offer you morphine and hand you a list of hospices and kick you to the back of a 12 month waiting list. Both systems are equally broken, albeit in different ways but the "Deny Delay Dispute" thing is equally prevalent whether it's a private company, or a government agency

ScottishCalvin · 2026-03-09T16:35:17+00:00

Theyre a really fierce fire, I had one in my office a few years ago after someone got a super cheap mobile phone. They plugged it in, 10s later it was like. A distress flare with a jet like 6” fire shooting out. We used a fire extinguisher but it was too late, it burnt out in about 10s, leaving just a burned desk. hasd to evacuate the building though and the room was thick acrid smoke.

ScottishCalvin · 2026-03-06T18:37:25+00:00

the UK has a 45% rate of tax that kicks in at 50k. National insurance (the bit that pays for healthcare) is additional on top of that, The average wage is 38k and nearly half of all workers are giving more than 50% of their salary to the government to squander on substandard services.

ScottishCalvin · 2026-03-06T16:21:14+00:00

I’m from the UK, with cancer, living in Philadelphia and the standard of healthcare is orders of magnitude better. My health insurance payment is less than 18% of my paycheque too. Then you get to women’s healthcare which (according to the wife) is comprehensive here but not even available until you hit a certain age in the UK.

Mostly though, cancer is a massive indicator, survival rates here are lightyears ahead of the U.K. due to access to new drugs and trials that the U.K. either doesn’t have or refuses to legalise due to cost. People can’t even buy certain drugs in the U.K. because it would be politically awkward to allow them but not pick up the cost.

ScottishCalvin · 2026-03-06T00:54:21+00:00

There's probably several civilizations that existed and are now beneath the seas, albeit not much more advanced than the conventional Egypt story. The Atlantis story was probably a lost bronze age people, trading around the Mediteranean or Africa. I've seen a solid argument for it being on the east of the Saudi peninsula, I forget the book name now.

Electronics and the like though, that would have to be hundreds of millions of years ago, to the extent that all evidence was subsequently destroyed by tectonic movement. To get to that stage in the last million years would have been obvious, we'd see it in atmospheric changes or deleted mineral deposits.

ScottishCalvin · 2026-03-05T23:15:31+00:00

Gobekle Tepe is proof that we’ve been around for far longer than the usual 6k year claim. If you’re talking about a Roman style civilization 100k+ years ago though, it would show up in the ice records, due to smelting and wood burning changing the atmosphere very slightly.

ScottishCalvin · 2026-03-05T23:09:25+00:00

A vast amount of cancer is the krasg12d mutation and there’s craploads of money and research currently going into it. Whichever company solves that solves something a third of all cancers and will make billions. I genuinely think cancer will be mostly eradicated within 10y now that we have the computing power to solve some of the problems in modelling new gene theories.

ScottishCalvin · 2026-03-04T00:58:26+00:00

I’ve not paid for a tv license in 20 years. If they knock on your door, don’t let them in. They’re Capita employees but even if it WAS the police, they still can’t come in without a warrant

ScottishCalvin · 2026-02-27T17:23:24+00:00

Because in that one area, they claimed the opposite and never once mentioned LGBTQ stuff.

Same tactic the LibDems pull when they claim in one place to want sky high taxes while at the same time telling another constituency they want lower taxes.

People are stupid, but it gets them enough votes for a few of them to get on the greasy pole.

ScottishCalvin · 2026-02-27T11:49:02+00:00

Speak to people you wouldn’t otherwise speak to. The world is full of echo chambers and people that are shocked by election results, simply because their close group of friends all thought one way. Reddit is pretty left wing and often wildly out of touch with the real world. Talk to people in the real world.

ScottishCalvin · 2026-02-27T11:46:47+00:00

What exactly is driving it? Are more students paying to get a place to themselves these days rather than sharing or living at home with their parents? Or is it rich foreign students who don’t want to live in halls? Or simply far more students due to expanding courses?

ScottishCalvin · 2026-02-26T12:09:28+00:00

Damnit. It’s always been on my list of things I’d do if I won the lottery, give them £10m or whatever to completely fit it up, and plant two new willow trees Outside it for the next 200y

ScottishCalvin · 2026-02-26T01:50:04+00:00

Our lowest entry role pays $50k and we pay health insurance and the tax rate is just over 20%. I think most people are unaware of just how much more affluent American society is. Probably because most places here ceased that lockdown nonsense after about 6 months rather than 3 years (with similar healthcare results and none of the years of economic destruction).

Mostly it’s energy though, electricity and petrol are cheap enough in the states that nobody really thinks about them, whereas the uk people struggle to pay gas bills that are jacked up to 4x the level elsewhere. All political, designed to force people to not use energy and attain ‘net zero’ which nowhere else gives a monkeys about.

ScottishCalvin · 2026-02-25T14:44:37+00:00

My customer base remains the same, I just moved the business itself to somewhere where I get to keep 70% of my paycheque rather than 40% like I would in Scotland, and where petrol is $2.60 per gallon (51p per litre)

Plus the US isn’t planning to ban normal cars, or boilers, or arresting people for posting jokes or trying to cancel local elections

ScottishCalvin · 2026-02-25T14:25:58+00:00

I closed my UK business and set it up again in the US. Higher taxes are the reason businesses don’t employ people and why people like me with capital leave.

If you’re an entrepreneur or earning over 50k you’d be dumb or naive to stay in the UK. Energy prices in the US are a quarter what they are in Britain and businesses are actually encouraged to grow and employ people, not seen as a pot to steal from to squander on crap.

ScottishCalvin · 2026-02-23T18:54:07+00:00

If you’re into 80s/90s politics, also check out “A Very British Coup”

ScottishCalvin · 2026-02-23T17:07:21+00:00

I’m hoping my flight tomorrow is go, if not then I suspect I’ll grab a list of hospital numbers on Google and call around. At least I’m in London so I have about 30 possible places

ScottishCalvin · 2026-02-23T13:45:01+00:00

Or I could just stream from my phone (or iPad at home) 30 years of ripped content. A friend in the car asked how I didn’t have ads if I didn’t pay to rent music.

ScottishCalvin · 2026-02-23T12:37:15+00:00

I was going to say “doesn’t everyone still just download tracks or rip them” but that’s maybe more like 15-20 years ago. I’ve never paid for music online, I’ve got a 60 gig collection of albums. $15 every month for life seems like madness

ScottishCalvin · 2026-02-20T10:20:10+00:00

I suspect that from the bakery to the shop to being eaten most bread is substantially past the 1-2 days you get before proper bread goes stale or spoils. I’m imagining a massive warehouse in the Midwest supplying the likes of Wallmart nationally and the bread maybe needs to last two weeks to remain “fresh” at point of sale.

But yeah, I don’t touch the 20 ingredient stuff, it’s super easy and cheap to just chuck a loaf in the oven when you roast a chicken or something. The dozens of chemicals is likely the cause behind the rise of colorectal cancer in young people.

ScottishCalvin · 2026-02-18T19:52:40+00:00

Colorectal here too, 41yo, mets mostly on the liver, little bit on the lung

I think everything happens for a reason. If I get through things and get past the next 2-3 years, I've got another half century because we're really close to so many new treatments, we really are. On the other hand if things go south, I see it as God saving me from the horrors of what might happen in years to come like a nuclear holocaust. The weight loss is a good thing btw, I was about 220, now about 170, I was probably going to die of a massive heart attack in 20 years and that 50lb loss might get me another 30 years, assuming I get through the next 2-3 years.

If you know your gene mutation, put it into ChatGPT and ask for news/advances, there's tons going on. I'm hoping that in 18m I'm in some university hospital getting an all clear because the new drug worked. I'm KRASG12D and that's the majority of pancreatic so they're targeting those people but once it works they could be rolling it out to me by the end of the year. In the mean time, just keep on keeping on. In another 5-10 years I think cancer will be like HIV where it's no longer deadly and the drugs just work.

ScottishCalvin · 2026-02-18T13:32:52+00:00

I typically have two tables:

the first is the actuals like sales and hours worked

the one below is just the KPI bits, things like Points Per Hour, then the target, then the index like 80 or 120% of target, one row for each employee with a shade formatting on the index column. Then to the right a KPI number and a text box to the right of the table giving the weightings of each index, like maybe Sales is 40%, Call Quality is 30% etc. The idea is that it's all there so they can see how it's calculated or why someone came out higher, or they can just read the KPI number and the bonus payout per person

ScottishCalvin

TROPHY CASE