2022: HOLD MY TEA! šŸµ

It suppose it was already evident for many decades, but I think many people just became more aware that fossil fuels are not only bad for the climate and the environment in general, but fossil fuels also contribute greatly to corrupting the world. A significant part of the money made with fossil fuels is used by autocratic regimes of petrostates to buy weapons to opress their populations and threaten or even attack other countries.

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What freaks me out is when the wells really start to dry up. The current domestic food distribution model becomes prohibitively expensive; global scale migration pressure as local regions are unable to supply food demand. Add to that the military powers scrambling to secure the remaining oil reserves… we’ve got ourselves a Mad Max scenario. I don’t expect it’ll be in my lifetime, but it’s starting; that’s why they want Ukraine I’m guessing - the oil.

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ā€œBot holidayā€

Reality check on ā€œfreedomā€ of things.

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Your comment regarding architecture dreams struck a familiar chord with me. In my case it’s not that the structures are necessarily strange, but more the sense of disorientation. Where things do begin to get weird is in the surrounding topography. The old neighbourhood might suddenly have ravines, or maybe a body of water that was never there before. I can’t say that any of this is either pleasurable or disturbing, only that there’s been some serious terraforming going on since I last laid my head down.

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I get this too, also houses from different places morphing together.

Like ā€œthe first house in Y, but I could see the view from X house. And it also had a new roomā€.

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As for snakes, I rarely see them in dreams, but one such dream maybe bears mentioning. I’m looking down a stairway and there’s a big old copperhead stretched out on the landing. (There are no such snakes where I live, but copperheads are among the more recognizable species.) Moments after awakening I reached over, turned the radio on, and the song playing was ā€œCopperhead Roadā€ by Steve Earle. I mean, that song was getting noticeable airplay, but it wasn’t as though they were playing it to death, and it had actually been a while since I’d last heard it.

I don’t ordinarily put much stock in such coincidences, but that one got me going just a bit.

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To be fair, there’s a tremendous difference between unfinished reactors and currently-running reactors. Unfinished reactors probably don’t even have fuel yet. Even assuming they do, it would just be the initial fuel (so Uranium 235/238) but the fission would not have began yet.

Still, I don’t think Russia is trying to blow up any plant.

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I can recall only two dreams where architecture played an important role. In one, I was visiting one of my closest friends in the science fiction community. The location had no resemblance to his home. It was a glass-and-steel highrise in a somewhat shabby neighborhood. (IRL, he lived in a second-floor, walk-up apartment on a city street.) The parking lot had a few scattered cars but no people. The elevator wasn’t working, so I had to climb the stairs to the top floor (about eight or nine stories, I think). When I got to his apartment, the door was open but my friend wasn’t there. I walked back down to my car feeling depressed, and the dream ended. It was all very eerie and unsettling. Several months later I learned that he had died roughly around the time of my dream.

In the other architecture dream, I was at a country resort, a beautiful, white, ranch-style mansion perched on a gentle hill. The drive up ended at a small parking area on the brow of the hill, lined with a wall of slate flagstones. I was alone, and the people at the resort were all strangers. Shortly after my arrival, several cars roared up and we came under attack by terrorists. We fled to a maze of tunnels in the basement and began a cat-and-mouse resistance. Fortunately, some of the people at the resort had guns. The dream ended with no outcome. It was all exceptionally vivid and quite frightening.

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A lot of Greeks didn’t expect the economic crisis bubble to burst in their lifetimes, but it did.
Just saying.
We like to be optimistic and say ā€œnot in my lifetimeā€, but think of how many things happened only just between 2019 and now.

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That’s obvious. It’s still not formally acknowledged as a war here and any outlet that mentions it as a war is getting blocked (and fined it it’s a russian one). Currently the name is ā€œspecial operation in donbassā€

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Also ā€œblocked in russiaā€ is a very vague statement. We have internet censorship here for years already but from the technical standpoint it’s very vague. Basically the government provides all ISPs with lists of ips that need ā€œblockedā€ within 2 days upon receiving the lists. The time they can take to send those lists is anywhere between 2 hours and weeks. However it’s not specified how it should be blocked. Some providers that are in tight collaboration with the government block them on the protocol level. However many more providers are more lax and they get away with blocking just the dns. Which as you guessed can be simply bypassed by using an external dns such as 1.1.1.1. But even the strictest of the blocks are bypassed by a primitive https proxy, which made it possible for the developers to create many solutions for bypassing the censorship. For instance telegram is supposedly blocked, but it has these proxies built in and nowadays it’s one of the most popular messengers to the point of people even doing their HR work entirely though it.
What’s more annoying is the fact that the people managing those block lists are idiots and hacks, so innocent ips get blocked and unblocked regularly. For instance ever since their ā€œwarā€ on telegram wherein telegram simply kept resetting the aws cdn to acquire new ips and they kept blocking the cdn ips (yes I told you they are idiots), some of those ips remain blocked even today, so if you randomly get sent to that node by a completely unrelated website it simply wouldn’t load, but then you refresh it and it’s working again. This is a bigger issue than the blocks themselves. Well, I guess idiots are always in the centre of all the biggest issues.

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I was relatively surprised to see this on the beeb but I guess that’s the way things are these days

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BBC on the ā€œonionā€ browser is somehow very funny, considering what kind of site the onion is. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Talk about random, but hey

btw Southland was cool

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Some people in our local community are hosting Ukranian refugees now (women with their children, as the husband/father stayed in Ukraine to fight).
My wife is also considering to do that.

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Iodine pills seem to be sold out here.

blog.coursera.org/coursera-response-to-the-humanitarian-crisis-in-ukraine/

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Trevor Noah has a way of making things less depressing without sugar coating it too much.

Even though he is ā€œonlyā€ a comedian and obviously biased against conservatives, I feel his show is a better news source than many actual news media, including his coverage of the war in Ukraine:

Russia Punished & Media Shocked by Invasion in ā€œRelatively Civilizedā€ Ukraine | The Daily Show - YouTube

Russia Escalates Its Ukraine Assault as Putin’s Aides Question His Sanity | The Daily Show - YouTube

Ukraine War Is Exposing Racial Disparities in Refugee Treatment | The Daily Show - YouTube

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Sometimes I think I miss youtube.

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