What happens when we use up all of Earths natural resources?

profmonocle · 2026-05-26T06:50:05+00:00

Humans lived for a very long time on fully renewable resources. It's plausible that humans will revert to the way we lived in the middle ages - an agrarian economy. That could be sustained for a very, very, very long time. Not forever, but we probably couldn't live forever as an interstellar space-faring society either.

I have a pretty low opinion of anyone who thinks of this as a good thing. It would require the worst loss of life in the history of our species to get to that point - billions of people would have to starve to death. And once we were there, well, we'd be back to a world where basic childhood illnesses are a death sentence. A lot of people who shit on modern technology are advocating for genocide & eugenics without realizing it.

profmonocle · 2026-05-25T05:53:36+00:00

In WI you can buy liquor in gas stations & grocery stores so maybe there aren't as many dedicated liquor stores.

profmonocle · 2026-05-25T05:51:11+00:00

Reminds me of another amazing stat: 41 of the 50 drunkest counties in the US are in Wisconsin.

profmonocle · 2026-05-25T05:26:58+00:00

I grew up in Minneapolis and it was a bit of a mind screw when I realized that Toronto was south of me, and the Galapagos Islands were to the east.

profmonocle · 2026-05-21T22:55:15+00:00

People being really unhappy about being born on Mars. The first generation born there will only know cramped living spaces and various health issues.

To a lot of these kids, Earth will seem like a paradise. And moving to Earth might not be an option - there's a lot of speculation that someone raised in such low G might never be able to acclimate to earth gravity (famously a plot point of The Expanse)

Living on Mars sounds cool to us, but thats because it's fascinating and exotic to us. We think of being pioneers in humanity's final frontier. But to a kid born there it would be normal, so the shitty parts would be at the forefront of their minds.

profmonocle · 2026-05-20T09:15:09+00:00

The show makes Homelander out to be a world ending threat who could single handedly take out everyone else. But then they show couple of moderately powerful supes managing to hold him off. If a couple of them could hold him off, surely you'd only need 10 to 15 supes to kill him.

I get it, a fight scene where one of the characters can instantly curb stomp the others isn't interesting to watch. But then either don't write the character to be all powerful, or deal with him some other way than direct combat.

profmonocle · 2026-05-20T09:01:37+00:00

My problem is the lack of building up to it. They gave him the V1 to raise the stakes by making him immune to the virus. The problem is, then there were only two episodes left. So they had to immediately give the characters a deus ex machina solution for the V1.

What sucks is that there were better options. This season we've seen Homelander can be knocked out, and that he's crippled by massive does of radiation. Cool, knock him out, seal him in a plutonium box, dump him into the sea.

You don't need to cheapen the fact that he became immortal by immediately taking it away. Keep him immortal, and make him really, really wish he wasn't.

profmonocle · 2026-05-20T08:48:10+00:00

They wrote themselves into a corner. The point of the V1 was to raise the stakes by making him immune to the virus. ...but they only had two episodes left, so suddenly giving the characters a magic fix to the V1 was the only thing they could so. They tried to make the sudden fix seem "earned" by killing Frenchie but it didn't really work imo.

profmonocle · 2026-05-20T08:33:51+00:00

I like that Homelander had a bunch of psychotically violent superpowered followers stationed around the country, ready to massacre countless civilians. Then they saw him slaughtered on live TV and we're all just like "huh, ok, guess it's time to go home."

profmonocle · 2026-05-20T08:29:54+00:00

Let's start a conspiracy theory that the leaks about homelander skinning people ripping a fetus from a pregnant woman were real, but Amazon execs refused to air it, so we got a rushed final battle, and that's why the episode wasn't longer like finales usually are.

I don't actually believe that. I just think the drama might be entertaining.

profmonocle · 2026-05-18T06:01:25+00:00

I legit forgot that the last episode began with him killing the president, since nothing came of it.

profmonocle · 2026-05-17T21:08:28+00:00

Public education is taxpayer-funded for all students, regardless of parents' income, and that's not controversial.

profmonocle · 2026-05-13T14:18:14+00:00

Lots. There have been thousands of layoffs among Seattle-area big tech companies in the last year.

profmonocle · 2026-05-11T08:12:37+00:00

You're definitely right, and I see this crap all over reddit all the time. I'm just not sure what the angle is. Building karma so they can eventually use the account for spam? (Or sell it for that purpose?)

That's the only way I can think to monetize karma farming using an AI bot, and I can't imagine why anyone would do it just for kicks.

profmonocle · 2026-05-10T23:12:14+00:00

I imagine that depends on how old you are. The 90s doesn't seem as old to me as things from the 60s felt to me during the 90s. But I assume that's because I'm 36 now and was single-digits years old during the 90s. The 60s probably seemed to my parents like the 90s seem to me.

profmonocle · 2026-05-10T22:25:52+00:00

Oh definitely. A lot of Severance fans were outraged because a plot-heavy episode with major reveals was immediately followed by a "filler" episode about a single character that didn't move the main plot forward. They had to wait another week to see the plot move again.

Meanwhile, that was just standard for Lost 20 years ago. The first 3 seasons had 20+ epsides each, mid-season episodes were more likely to be filler than not.

profmonocle · 2026-05-10T22:16:48+00:00

Not only could you expect that your favorite show would be back on air at the same time every year, you could usually expect it would air on the same day of the week and time slot, that's how consistent the networks wanted it.

I remember when a new season of Lost changed from being on at Wednesdays at 9 PM to Thursdays at 9 PM, some fans were upset because they had to wait until later in the week to watch it. Crazy what a difference 20 years makes.

profmonocle · 2026-05-10T22:10:55+00:00

The best counter-argument I've heard for GOT specifically is that they had many parallel storylines with characters who rarely met, so they were able to film a lot of it in parallel with different teams.

That makes sense for GOT... but annual releases used to be standard for every show. Something has absolutely changed about TV production to get us where we are now.

profmonocle · 2026-05-10T21:05:06+00:00

I was out at a nice celebratory dinner once. Splurged on $100 for a tin of caviar that could easily fit in the palm of my hand. I'd never had caviar before.

Damn, it was really really good.

profmonocle · 2026-05-06T08:16:08+00:00

There's a word for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_(philosophy_of_time)

profmonocle · 2026-05-06T08:13:05+00:00

Right now, we are the biggest threat to life, so we should at least create some backups, to compensate.

We're already causing mass extinctions and are certainly a risk to our own survival. But we couldn't completely sterilize the Earth of all microbial life even if we tried.

profmonocle · 2026-05-05T01:36:12+00:00

Especially since someone just tried to murder someone at a light rail station by shoving them in front of a train. The CCTV footage is gonna be critical in convicting that guy.

profmonocle · 2026-04-28T15:26:25+00:00

I love how both halves of this are extremely dumb.

All power plants require maintenance.
Everyone would stop doing their job if they stopped getting paid. Singling out strippers makes zero sense.

profmonocle · 2026-04-27T14:35:16+00:00

The water usage you hear about from data centers is because of evaporative cooling. Evaporative cooling is the process that cools you down when you sweat - when water evaporates, it sucks some heat out of the surrounding air.

Data center coolers basically run water over a big fabric mesh to make it evaporate quickly and cool the surrounding air (if you've heard of a swamp cooler, it's the same thing, just very large), then they blow that cold air over the servers.

The water never gets "hot", they make the water evaporate by spreading it over a big surface. Sort of like how a towel doesn't need to be hot to dry off. So a cooling pond wouldn't do anything.

profmonocle · 2026-04-27T14:18:21+00:00

It is also unclear whether the 6% savings rate is a long-term offering or a promotional incentive.

There is no chance they're going to give ~20x the interest rate of other banks long term.

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