Yeah, I realise it’s kinda weird to post this after talking about how familiar a lot of things in Rome were, but in the narrow scope of existential problems the overlap is limited.

Liberal democracies work very differently from autocracies. The weather isn’t a mystery of the gods, it’s self-inflicted. Rome kept it’s population in check through massive natural and to a lesser degree artificial mortality, while we have great medicine but ever-lower fertility rates. Roman peasants may have been vaguely aware of the distant land of Italy, we have information overload conveyed by machines even 20th century people struggle with. When we have a plague, it’s less about escaping it, and more about convincing people they should.

Some problems are timeless - or at least haven’t been dealt with yet - but I feel like putting it in terms of Rome like this is misleading and can be used to justify all kinds of things. When I’ve seen this meme posted before, it’s usually a lead-up to really chuddy comments about immigration or loss of traditional values.

I don’t really buy it. Rome fell for reasons a professional historian of Rome has told me are still unclear, but I don’t really see a lot of parallels in our big problems, which are very new and untested.

I’m talking about solar, EVs and so on. It’s straight-up cheaper to not use fossil fuels now, for most things, and the remaining ones seem like they’re inevitably coming.

Don’t worry, I’m still pretty doomer about it. The planet’s going to get a bit messed up in the meanwhile, and we’d have just kind of boiled ourselves like a frog, if we hadn’t gotten lucky with cheap renewables suddenly appearing.

Yes. I’m not in line to inherit a fuck-you amount, but it’s substantial, and if I move to a poor country and live modestly I should be able to make it last indefinitely.

I’d invest if I was above the poverty line, income-wise, but I’m not. Downward mobility is a bitch.

The thing is, negotiation is always easier than implementation, which is why it comes before.

It’s pretty clear at this point we’re going to stop climate change right around as fast as technology forces us to. I don’t see any other plausible path.

Yeah, exactly! Nothing else comes close. The medieval and early-modern periods are just very different (and non-civilisational, I guess?), and then modern industrial civilisation grows up on top of it before the old is fully gone everywhere. If you want eerie parallels, you do Rome.

The history of unrelated civilisations on other continents seems inaccessible in English, or in the case of the Americas just poorly preserved in general, thanks to said early-modern Europeans.

The tricky thing there is that it’s been way, way higher than today in past eras long before anything breaks. IIRC most of the research shows it just goes up indefinitely, most of the time, and then reverses during times of collapse when the poor are finally able to loot the mansions.

I really hope actual democracies play by different rules, though.

Wow, that’s a hell of a quote. That’s a sentiment that rankles people today.

Second person never has a gender in English. Saying “you” should also be fine, or “thee” if you feel like getting your quaker on.

Special requests notwithstanding - the platinum rule here is just to accommodate whatever you reasonably can.

The Mona Lisa is in the public domain, so no, that’s not really a good analogy for a recently published book.

I get the perception Cali can be prickly too, although I’ve never been there. Maybe orange for them too? And come to think of it, inland Oregon is very Idaho.

There’s assholes born everywhere, I guess.

I’m amazed by how consistently bad the reviews for Indiana are. Even the food is somehow worse than the rest of the Midwest, apparently.

Hawaii: Get the fuck here and hang with us.

_{(Plz, we need money to ship things across half the pacific)}

Yeah, that was actually an awkward wording, sorry. What I meant is that given a non-continuous map from the natural numbers to the reals (or any other two sets with infinite but non-matching cardinality), there’s a way to prove it’s not bijective - often the diagonal argument.

For anyone reading and curious, you take advantage of the fact you can choose an independent modification to the output value of the mapping for each input value. In this case, a common choice is the nth decimal digit of the real number corresponding to the input natural number n. By choosing the unused value for each digit - that is, making a new number that’s different from all the used numbers in that one place, at least - you construct a value that must be unused in the set of possible outputs, which is a contradiction (bijective means it’s a one-to-one pairing between the two ends).

Actually, you can go even stronger, and do this for surjective functions. All bijective maps are surjective functions, but surjective functions are allowed to map two or more inputs to the same output as long as every input and output is still used. At that point, you literally just define “A is a smaller set than B” as meaning that you can’t surject A into B. It’s a definition that works for all finite quantities, so why not?

Sort of? I think this was more of a “see, Americans agree, women are shit”.

True, your policies don’t have to make sense if you win.

That being said, this guy runs a fringe party. They have a whole 3 seats in the Diet’s lower house and none whatsoever in the upper.

It’s the same in Australia. Something about the pacific must make parties switch places.

Pfft, he’s doing an amateur job of intimidating, then. It should have been thumbscrews or something. This way seems self defeating.

Yeah, I’m actually hella curious what the context was here. Why would he want any of that?

Question: what do you mean illegal in Canada? AFAIK the only extra laws here are already covered by rule 4.