I can easily survive temps in the around 35-37 C with just a fan and ice.

Human and animal safety: High wet-bulb temperatures impair the body’s ability to cool itself, increasing the risk of heatstroke and hyperthermia. A WBT above 35°C (95°F) is considered critical, beyond which even healthy individuals can survive only a few hours without cooling. Recent studies suggest dangerous conditions may occur at lower thresholds, around 31°C (87.8°F) in humid environments

My wife wants the AC

Houstonian here. Let’s just say I’m… moist.

It’s not socialism

Bro, it’s socialism.

Some of it is national socialism, so maybe don’t get too enthusiastic about how the Brits segregate out their health care services or the Germans treat unemployed immigrants or the French handle non-native speakers trying to form a union.

But all of this has socialist economic organizing at its foundation.

I just don’t think that it will result in a total global collapse

I don’t think there’s any difficulty in recognizing the risk of a global economic contraction, given the long history of global market conditions causing recessionary feedback loops. What we want to describe as a “collapse?” Idk. Certainly a global rapid deterioration, as human habitable biomes contract.

As an Aussie I’m sufficiently insulated against european inpieralism

Brother you are a product of European imperialism. And you are heavily reliant on the umbrella of NATO, along with a global financial system that transacts in your preferred currencies. Absent globalized institutions like the Bank of England and the ECB and cornerstone lenders like HSBC, you’re out begging China, India, and Japan for a cup of fungible credit.

I think the Anzac’s would disagree

I can’t imagine why. Aussies were vacuumed up as cannon fodder for the Pacific Theater within the first year of the war.

I mean, broadly speaking, I appreciate that companies can periodically patch and re-balance games. The internet has been amazing for the modding community as well. You’d have never seen Counterstrike or Team Fortress go mainstream without the ability to digitally distribute content like this.

But you do get this impulse to release a product in what is effectively a large-scale beta test and then slap band-aids on it until it’s playable. Or give up support on it if it doesn’t sell well on launch.

Bombshell

:-/

Bring back bootleg street dealing with this one neat trick.

Gamestop Stockholders Hate It!

Bully Madison

Calling the Minecraft Cops

All data should be provided to me in the form of 5-1/2’ floppies.

Sort of the joke of all this. I remember the Good Ole Days of installing a Blizzard game and then getting a gigabyte or more of Day One updates before I could start playing.

Me: “One game please.”

Retail Salesperson: “Here’s a QR code to download the game.”

Me: “If I didn’t want physical media, I could get it without your QR code.”

Retail Salesperson: “How would you manage that?”

Me: 🏴‍☠️

By civilisation I’m more referring to human civilisation not civilisation in a national sense.

A human collapse is going to begin in the most vulnerable countries and spread. It’s not just going to be everyone everywhere failing at once. What we’re seeing is the start of a long term, large scale global change with climate as a primary motivating factor.

These are far away problems for people I don’t associate with it’s not a problem for me

Sure. Until “Putin meddled in my elections! We need to go to war with Russia!” and “The Haitians are sneaking in to vote for socialism! We need mass deportations NOW!” is the rallying cry of your local party. And then you’re bumping elbows with fascism very quickly.

I disagree English has already become the global language of the human race.

The global language of the human race is Latin. Damn shame nobody still speaks it.

The middle east has been a clusterfuck for 3000years

That’s not actually true. It is, if anything, a product of a very recent turn in US foreign policy (and subsequent propaganda). The Middle East enjoyed centuries of (relative) stability under the Ottoman Empire. And it was one of the safer industrial stage regions on Earth to live during both World Wars. For most of that 3000 years, it enjoyed an enormous peace dividend as a center of trade and technological advancement, from which imperial powers positioned themselves securely while branching out across the globe. It was Europe before Europe was Europe.

The post-Cold War wave of conflicts is a novelty of colonization and extractive industry. It is the historical exception, not the rule.

We think we have beaten natural selection

We’ve beaten natural selection with manual selection. The future of the human race will be written by its ancestors’ in a way vanishingly few species can claim.

But this isn’t a reason for fatalism. It’s a recognition that our current trajectory is a collective choice.

The pageantry of the election will continue long after the purpose of the elections is exhausted.

We’re going to have a day when people go to little tablets and poke at them with their fingers and hand over slips of paper listing who they wish were in charge for centuries to come.

Chaos Month is the worst month.

Worst case scenario is Venusification

No current model predicts this with any degree of likelihood. The threat of climate change is largely focused on the current generation of terrestrial inhabitants. The degree to which nitrogen rich fertilizers has improved crop yields over the last century cannot be overstated. And the degree to which a shift in the biome means large scale collapse of crop yields is as terrifying as the boom in crops was uplifting.

But a sudden, globe spanning famine has second and third order consequences, not unlike the collapse of the Mississippi culture on the eve of the Little Ice Age. Or the global famines of the 1930s which starved humans from Ohio to Okinawa. A sharp drop in global food reserves would lead to mass migration and international conflicts. The resulting global wartime conflagration would likely mean a collapse in carbon emissions, as areas of the globe once thought safe from conflict come under the kind of bombardment not seen since the end of the Cold War.

We’re already seeing Iranian drones and ballistic missiles targeting US data centers across the Middle East. We’re seeing airports shut down across Eastern Europe in response to the wars. We’re seeing sea travel choked off from the Suez to Singapore. All of that puts downward pressure on carbon emissions, long long long before Venusification.

Your less-apocalyptic scenario is one where our global economy collapses. If this happens, no area of the earth will be safe.

Plenty of places were safe from the direct conflict of the World Wars during the last century. Refugees flooded into the Middle East and North Africa, precisely because the colonial era wars were forced to end in order to support direct conflict between Empires in central Europe. The great trans-Atlantic migration surged with refugees from the outset of European fascism until the end of the Cold War.

nothing close to civilisation ending

We are already seeing “civilization ending” events happening across the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. To a lesser extent, we’re seeing it in Latin America and the Pacific Rim, as well. But a lot of that resulted from extractive oil industry long before climate change really started kicking in. The mass migrations out of the Persian Gulf region, the ugly turf wars over drilling sites, natural disasters knocking out cities that we are no longer able to rebuild… it’s all accumulating.

But civilizations don’t end overnight. The history books are going to write about this era as a span of decades - even centuries - with the ramp up of the O&G industry dating back to the early 20th century and peaking in the early 21st. We’re going to be talking about The American Empire rather than any individual politician or business leader. And we’re going to be documenting it in Spanish or Mandarin, because the big English-speaking countries will have walled themselves off from the global business community for so long that nobody knows how to communicate with them anymore.

This is bad but not end of civilisation bad.

It really depends on how far away from the imperial core you happen to be. And there will inevitably be events that feel like an end of civilization for a subset of people in a way that eclipses the nation as a whole.

I like to go back to the BP Horizon spill, which fucked up the Gulf Coast for years and still weighs heavily on the regional ecology. Or one of the bigger hurricanes - Katrina or Harvey or Ian - which inflicted property damage that never got repaired and displaced tens of thousands of people indefinitely. I might also point to the Gaza Genocide or the Ukraine/Russia War, which has demolished whole swaths of civilization and killed millions through a combination of active slaughter and social murder. Or the most recent massive earthquake in Caracas, for which relief has been strangled by ongoing sanctions and the threat of military intervention. Or the earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010 and from which the island still hasn’t recovered.

If you live in these areas right now, I don’t know if you can see the edge of civilization anymore. It is the End of Civilization for you. And as the impact of climate change expands and accelerates, you’re going to see more places on the map that suffer similar fates.

except vote for representatives who prioritize climate

The majority of Americans voted for Al Gore, but they weren’t on the SCOTUS so the votes didn’t matter.

Imagine approaching death right as it’s impossible to deny your generation personally fucked up the future of civilization itself.

Point to a decade where someone wasn’t thinking this as they expired.

You don’t have to confine yourself to the 21st century. Or even the 20th. Or even the last 500 years. Literally pick any decade.

Down in Houston, TX my seasons are

• Warm and Wet: 3mo

• Hot and Wet: 3mo

• Wet Bulb: 3mo

• Endless Rain: 2mo

• Warm and Windy: 2mo

• Surprise! Natural Disaster!: ???