TheVat

Here is an in-depth look at how things like federal flood insurance, zoning laws, abandoned mortgages, out-dated flood zone maps, opportunistic developers, etc are contributing to a massive problem. (and who pays, when FEMA flood insurance is in the red, and they have to keep paying out for destroyed homes? We, the taxpayers.) https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/1-spring/feature/how-climate-change-could-sink-us-real-estate-market

I remember feeling a sad twinge when I learned that the Niven Ring wasn't practical - I think it was from an interview with Larry himself where he mentioned all the engineers who had contacted him over the years, alerting him to Ringworld's inherent instability. Given that the Dyson Shell is also a no-go, that leaves the Dyson Swarm as the most viable of the large-scale builds. I think there's been speculation as to their visibility to large telescopes, and how difficult it might be to spot telltales of such. An unusually bright IR spectral profile might be one indicator. The question of can habitats, for widespread use, might also focus on biosphere engineering problems. Artificial ecosystems might prove really hard to maintain (natural ones are certainly proving to be pretty fragile) and some species might have beliefs that reject them. Or longterm buffers against hard radiation might be impossible in some stellar systems without a planetary magnetic field and thick atmosphere. So many unknowns at present.

https://www.npr.org/2022/03/29/1089174630/housing-shortage-new-home-construction-supply-chain In addition to the labor and supply chain problems, and unfortunate trend to builders only motivated to build luxury units, mentioned in this article, there is also another factor in the US less mentioned, which is the number of people losing their homes in accelerating natural disasters. 3 million Americans were driven from their homes in 2022, some only for a week or few, but half a million couldn't return: their homes were destroyed. That adds yet another burden to municipalities trying to put up affordable housing and apartments in a timely manner. And this climate-driven aspect is worsening, as more people build in warmer, scenic areas where housing is most vulnerable to floods, hurricanes, wildfires, etc. The most threatened bits of land also happen to be the most affordable land, and buyers often encounter sellers who conceal that. Out in the West (here), we have lots of people coming in who want their "own private Idaho," as the B-52s song puts it, and they keep building into spaces that are just insanely prone to wildfire, flashfloods, mudslides, large animal attack, etc.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to derail things. It was Alex's use of the phrase "the right people," in support of a group that advances the Lizard People theory, that triggered my satirical reflex. My serious comment is that I don't think the theory of alien reptiles disguised as humans running our nations is a very good one. And I stand behind my comment on capitalists. Generally I am not wild about any position that is claimed as one pushed by "the right people." Perhaps Krycek was also being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I can't always tell.

In the anonymous fellow's case, it's OAB, not prostate issues. OAB is helped by avoiding acidic drinks (OJ, e.g.), coffee (obv), spices, and yes minimize h2o in evening. Sorry for digression, OP!

Oh that's interesting - I hadn't heard about the elemental rarity aspect in that broader sense. Will look that up. But, as I asked back there, isn't it possible alien genetic code could be strung along something other than a phosphate backbone? Or maybe you just need phosphorus and nothing else will do? Not that they couldn't have other element bottlenecks.

Oh yes, the Invisible College is quite correct, a race of sinister reptilian humanoids that appear like normal people are indeed controlling mankind. They're sometimes called "capitalists," or more specific terms like "hedge fund managers," "CEOs," "PAC managers," "oligarchs," etc. I let my IC membership lapse last year, and now they keep sending me these renewal notices that offer me a free Invisible College tote bag or coffee mug if I go with the Premium membership.

Happily, the cold sweat of scoundrels remains analog. Probably no cuffs, since it's not a violent crime, TFG agreed to come in on Tuesday, and has a Secret Service detail at his side. The SS tends to frown on handcuffing. Weinstein got cuffed, since the charges included rape (and movie moguls don't get SS protection) Trump can stir up his base, but likely that moderate Repubs and Repub-leaning Independents won't vote for a candidate under indictment. So it may help that the trial could be years away, with defense lawyers filing endless motions to delay.

The body has various modes of resting. The principal exception, for certain 67 year old men who shall remain anonymous, is the bladder and the part of the brain monitoring it. You would think the brain monitor could just shut up about it, just reason that the bladder isn't going to explode between 3 and 6 am, that a certain degree of fullness is tolerable, and not run around shaking other brain areas out of sound sleep with outrageous claims of an imminent exploding bladder. But no.

A pessimistic one, for sure. The problem of recovery (stop agri runoff, recycle livestock waste, human "peecycling," corpse recycling, change detergent formulas, etc) seems solvable. And it's possible alien genetic code could be strung along something other than a phosphate backbone, so they would have other element bottlenecks perhaps. It's unfortunate that our main phosphorus source in the States is a state currently being governed by a would-be fascist idiot with a terrible environmental track record. Pretty cool. Stop eutrophication and recover phosphorus. Nice work if you can get it.

I have wondered, re the AFB sightings, what sane ET would approach a planet full of aggressive and xenophobic beings that's bristling with nuclear weapons and say, hey, I know, let's go buzz an Air Force Base!

Excellent. I also was thinking of the Alec Guinness classic, Kind Hearts and Coronets.

I'm confident the mouse will frighten off the elephant. DeSantis is playing by rules that aren't (Jiminy) cricket.

Population reduction seems like a complex issue that is as much about quality of life as about species viability. (And what humans value, as to the quality, would be another thread. If you like lots of wilderness to hike in, then the world probably got too crowded for your taste around 1800. If you like big cities and all they offer, then you might be content with a larger number.) The question here would be what population is sustainable, i.e. doesn't eventually collapse the ecosystems that support us. I would take a WAG at 3 billion.

It's a very peculiar sort of day when I agree with Rand Paul, but this seems to be one. The US congress won't have the guts to legislate much across-the-board limit on data gathering - we are, functionally, a plutocracy. And our personal information has become a huge commodity. I have no social media or google account (and block any record of searches), and use duckduckgo and protonmail for some activity, and keep no cookies, cache, passwords, etc, so surveillance isn't a personal worry. TikTok I've only ever guest-browsed. @John Cuthber posted article seems to give us fair warning. But it's not us who needs that warning, and the demographic that does is likely inclined to ignore such warnings. As it happens, I've heard the "I'm not that interesting" argument from one young TikTok user. Her position is "I don't care if China knows I bought six bottles of cranberry juice from a web store." Many her age don't realize there's the potential to know quite a bit more than just buying habits.

Was going to point this out to Mack, as well as the importance of looking at longer trending from 1980 to now, but I'm getting the message that his knowledge is as complete as he wants it to be on this topic.

Pretty cool - sounds like the Bayesian Belief Network that is used in diagnostic medicine. (except the prior P(A) is much better known in medicine, where e.g. accurate rates of pancreatic cancer are statistically available)

Phosphogeddon! https://books.google.com/books/about/Phosphorus.html?id=nqkPEAAAQBAJ The book is also mentioned in the March 6 issue of The New Yorker. https://www.magzter.com/stories/culture/The-New-Yorker/ELEMENTAL-NEED https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/phosphorus-saved-our-way-of-life-and-now-threatens-to-end-it

While I remain in the open-to-fresh-data camp, I am not sure that each sighting can be necessarily independent of other sightings, when you have the cases of dozens of sightings on one night in a particular area. For example, if you have 19 witnesses report seeing something that looks like a balloon, and at least half were able to distinguish the letters "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" across the side, and you have one who reports seeing a spacecraft with eerie lights and emitting a weird whine, you may have to give particular attention to that witness's visual identification skills and overall mindset, in comparison to the other 19. That's what I feel canvassing is so important, where an impartial investigative team interviews not just the person reporting something bizarre, but others who were outdoors at that time. Unfortunately, the smartphone era has introduced a confounding factor: fewer people are looking up these days. And electronic media has for several decades caused more humans to spend their evenings inside of houses.

@iNow [Florida parent...] I find that arrow coming off the Earth also pretty suggestive. Do we really want innocent Denebian children seeing such filth?

This is turning into an argument with Creationists: deflect one bit of nonsense, they quickly post another. Your graphic is from early March. LoL. No one has predicted an ice free Arctic in March - an absurd cherry pick of data. It is summer sea ice which is shrinking, and year to year comparisons are made in September when it's at its minimum extent. https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/arctic-sea-ice/#:~:text=Summer Arctic sea ice extent,covered in ice) each September. As for prediction, look at the overall. The earth got warmer, as predicted, in a sudden spike that followed the Industrial Revolution and usually takes thousands of years when its part of a natural cycle. You can cherry pick data about ice or temperature fluctuations or whatever the Heartland Institute (or other oil industry sponsored think tanks) is peddling these days, or you can try to learn what changes are happening NOW, and what climatology and atmospheric physics have found to be causative factors. And no, climate science is not some idiot infant of a field. Indeed, its roots go back to Eunice Foote, who did research on the warming effects of CO2 in the mid-1800s, so one could point out that it is an older scientific field than subatomic physics, relativistic theory, genomics, virology, and others that we consider quite respectable.

We need to figure out how a large scale is defined. In the absence of knowledge of such phenomena, we don't know if some are stochastic processes (like beta decay) that pop up randomly in the atmosphere, or directed activity that correlate with terrestrial events, hidden agendas of nations, Plan Nine from outer space, populations breathing more mold spores, etc. No absolutes. Sigma value depends on what sort of measurements are taken, and where the data points fall on a normal distribution (Bell curve). Six might be the gold standard for manufacturing processes, while it might be insufficient for data on a possible new neutrino that's quite weird. If you’re taking a pre election poll the accepted standard is two sigma, which gives a 95 percent confidence level. For the Higgs, because what CERN found was expected in their model, 2.3 sigma was considered meaningful. In social science and medicine it gets really tricky. When you get into data composed of eyewitness reports of "I saw something odd," then you have really fuzzy data with the measurements being a welter of differing perspectives, perceptions, and a vast number of variables that can't all be monitored. It seems like this big stew of sloppy social science, atmospheric science, astronomical events, ephemeral geomagnetic phenomena, military tech testing, recent science fiction blockbuster movie releases, etc. Maybe the best hope is one of these anomalies leaves some physical trace evidence that starts right off with a responsible chain of custody and thorough recording of the specimen in situ.

Well put. Pareidolia also bedeviled all those Mars pics that poured in back in the 90s, when the Mars Global Surveyor was snapping away. While it revealed the Viking I pic of the Face (from the 70s) as just another mesa, it set off a whole new round of "hey, that looks like...." Mars has been the pareidolia capital of the solar system since Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell.

The climate models have been biased towards a more conservative extrapolation, you're quite right. Changes in surface and sea ice and permafrost have actually been happening faster than many of the mainstream models predicted. Feedback mechanisms (like exposed Arctic bog particulate release, Arctic methane and carbon releases, decreased albedo from ice loss, wildfire soot on snowfields, scrublands or grassland replacing forests, etc) keep emerging as accelerants. Thanks for noticing GW is happening more quickly than originally predicted due to feedback loops! Thank goodness alert people like you are really paying attention to the massive current data on these dangerous tipping points!

I see Loeb has another recent paper speculating that Oumuamua could be a fragment of a disintegrated Dyson sphere. One that had had a reflective interior, so that a broken piece would function as a light-sail. Basically, a Dyson tile fell past us. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/acc10d Again, this could be split to an Oumuamua thread. Not exhausted yet. 😀 I like anomalies. In many areas of inquiry, they can introduce new paths of research, point to problems in data collection, suggest hypotheses outside a standard set of models. In SETI, for example, it would only take one anomaly potentially to be world-shaking.