Except the Armageddon is real but no-one will rise up to save us when every major city is nothing but glowing embers under an ever gray nuclear sky while the remnants of humanity fight each other with sticks over the last grain silos.

So-called American “revolutionaries” make me sick with their reckless disregard for the unavoidable responsibility their country has with regards to their military. An “accelerated downfall” won’t just affect you bozos. Especially not if the means are “stoking the fire of imperialism”.

If I could press a button to accelerate the US downfall and magically contain the fighting to the lower 48 in a way that leaves whoever is left standing nuke-less, I would, but that’s not an option on the table, so barring that, please vote against the guy who really can’t be trusted with the nuclear briefcase, yeah???

The complete fracturing of children’s education post-war cannot be understated as a society-wide catastrophe.

Ironically stay-at-home mothers were already not the norm pre-war for the poors/minorities. Which participated in generational poverty as those children had a worse access to parenting and education. But the post-war middle class suddenly fell into that pattern as well, with similar results.

On top of that you’ve got the meteoric rise of car-centric urbanism, fracturing communities. It used to take a village to raise a child, now they can’t even walk across their neighborhood unsupervised because the roads aren’t safe for children. Indirectly, parents trust fewer and fewer community members to watch their children, making the task of raising small children unusually difficult and tiring.

Countries with more socialized childcare and better working conditions were better off overall, but the entire western world is facing a natality crisis because it truly is harder to raise a child now than it used to be. Which is absolutely bonkers because the world is also richer and more productive than at any other time in history.

Or it’s the opposite. I refuse to watch shows without giving them my undivided attention, but that kind of pacing begs to be background noise while you do something else.

Sometimes there is nothing significantly plot-relevant happening for entire episodes at a time, both for bad reasons (the incentive structure for children’s show rewards empty filler slop with zero plot value because it’s easy to re-run) and less bad reasons (children like repetition). Both of which are painfully evident throughout the whole experience.

Good for you if that’s your jam, if you find it comforting or like it as background noise or like it because it leads to better paced seasons down the line or whatever, but I refuse to accept that it’s an issue for me to dislike objectively horrendous pacing.

I tried but like most children’s shows I just can’t deal with (at least the early seasons’) pacing. It’s excruciatingly slow, full of obvious filler content, and doesn’t seem to be trying to get anywhere.

Typically those children shows’ pacing tends to get a lot better in the latter seasons as the audience ages out and the showrunners are trusted with bolder story arcs, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are tens of hours of slop to get through before that point is reached.

Wait wait wait wait, where does this idea come from that the German people weren’t to blame for Nazism? They were to blame. They were blamed. Their country was partitioned, their army was dismantled, their families were torn apart, and they endeavored to teach future generations what they did wrong. It did not even remotely make up for their nation’s crimes against humanity, but they were “lambasted”.

Do not weaponize history to justify your own apathy. These lessons were paid in blood. Yet new blood is being shed, and every American who does not fight against the regime is responsible. Yes, it’s an unfair ask; no-one wants to live through troubled times. But you are living in them so stop cowering behind historical wrongs to feel better about your inaction.

“yet”

Just as a thought exercise, can you fathom and put into words a hypothetical breaking point that would wake people up to the madness around them?

Because here’s my prediction: the regime will commit atrocity after atrocity, each one somehow more monstrous than the last, and nothing will happen, because your first paragraph will still be true. They will start wars and nothing will happen because your first paragraph will still be true. Then suddenly WWIII will happen and the regime will be unstoppable. Then, some manner of nuclear exchange, potentially marking the end of human civilization, because all fascist regimes end up destroying themselves – too bad this one has the power to take the entire fucking world down with it.

If you are right that Americans won’t fight for decency now (and I think you are), then all hope is lost. All historical precedent says that we are past the point of no return and you’ve forfeited your - and quite possibly humanity’s - future.

There are ways to do good, approachable, clickable science communication without resorting to lies, ommission, or exaggeration which is futurism.com’s whole schtick. There’s so much happening in science that doesn’t get covered by these low-quality sensationalist outlets because a misleading headline about petri dish cancer or mouse Alzheimer’s gets more clicks and requires far less research than an article about whatever interesting advancements actually happened in science this week.

Except the Trials where that precedent was supposedly established actually allowed a great many people to escape conviction using that exact defense, then the prosecution subsequently gave up on the trials altogether. The Nuremberg trials were a travesty of justice, not because the Allies set up kangaroo courts, but because in an attempt to avoid such accusations and through unbelievable prosecutorial incompetence they let almost every Nazi who was still alive run free.

What I’m getting at is, don’t expect justice to magically administer itself.

Americans loooooooooooooooove pointing out at their population density as a thought-terminating cliché although it’s very rarely relevant to any discussion.

The size of your continent does not influence the size of your metro areas, dipshits. LA isn’t the way it is because Wyoming is empty, LA is the way it is because a bunch of dumbasses decided that local mass transit and terraced housing should be outlawed and bulldozed in order to fuck over African-Americans communities.

Can’t easily prove a negative but here’s an example.

On 19 April 1943, the twentieth transport left Mechelen transit camp carrying 1,631 Jewish men, women, and children

Three young students and members of the Belgian resistance including a Jewish doctor, Youra Livchitz and his two non-Jewish friends Robert Maistriau[a] and Jean Franklemon [fr], armed with one pistol, a lantern, and red paper to create a makeshift red lantern (to use as a danger signal), were able to stop the train on the track Mechelen-Leuven, between the municipalities of Boortmeerbeek and Haacht.[1] The twentieth convoy was guarded by one officer and fifteen men from the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo-SD), who came from Germany. Despite these security measures, Maistriau was able to open one wagon and liberate 17 people.[1]

Other prisoners escaped from the convoy without any connection with the attack. The train driver, Albert Dumon, did all he could to keep the slowest pace between Tienen and Tongeren, stopping whenever it was possible and justifiable, and so allow that more people could jump without killing themselves. In all, 233 people succeeded in escaping from the train.[1] 89 were eventually recaptured and put on later convoys.[1] 26 others were killed, either by shooting or by the fall, and 118 who succeeded in escaping.[1] The youngest, Simon Gronowski, was only 11 years old.[1] Régine Krochmal [fr], an eighteen-year-old nurse with the resistance, also escaped after she cut the wooden bars put in front of the train air inlet with a bread knife and jumped from the train near Haacht. Both survived the war.

Emphasis mine. Albert Dumon “did his job” (the French version of the article goes a bit more in-depth). He didn’t overtly defy the orders given to him under the threat of immediate execution (!). He didn’t quit his job knowing that if he didn’t drive the trains a German train driver would take his place. He followed the regulations to the letter of the law, as incompetently as he could afford. And his malicious compliance saved 118 lives.

Well obviously a thermonuclear war is not good for business. However do not make the grievous mistake of thinking that Trump is a mere pawn in the oligarch’s game who can be relied on to act rationally in their self-interest. He’s done their bidding aplenty, but he’s also doing a lot of stuff that weakens him, his buddies, and his country, just because he’s so fucking dumb and vain. Like invading Greenland, a country he already had full access to for military purposes and that US companies were always welcome to exploit for minerals. His generals are literally using every trick in the book to try to redirect his attention away from Greenland because the US has literally no interest – military, financial, or geopolitical – in it. Literally the only explanation for this fixation of his is that Greenland looks big on a Mercator projection and that makes his tiny dick hard.

M.A.D. only works when all actors:

1. Have reliable information (certainly not always true, see Stanislav Petrov)
2. Can be assumed to be acting in their own self-interest

Number 1 is in doubt with Trump because he and his cult spend a lot of time in a made-up reality. I can totally see some war hawks explaining to him that the UK and France don’t have the nuclear capacity to glass the entire continental US outright, and Trump interpreting it as “we’re untouchable” because he’s not into concepts such as “nuance”. To a degree the same is true of a dictator like Putin or Xi Xinping who are also surrounded by yes men who purposefully feed an enabling narrative (see also: Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine because he thought he could get away with it).

Number 2 is simply completely incorrect. Trump is so unpredictable even his own administration can’t guess his next move – they’re constantly acting on his latest rant and doing a poor job of pretending it was part of the plan all along. I’d love to believe that he can be deterred by the thread of M.A.D, but I’m unfortunately too acutely aware of the news to lie to myself like that. That’s the main difference between him and Putin – I can actually believe that Putin will only act in what he believes to be his self-interest, and he knows a nuclear exchange ain’t it.

Well, yeah, that’s what Scrum is. From the guide which takes maybe 10 minutes to read

Scrum Teams are cross-functional, meaning the members have all the skills necessary to create value each Sprint. They are also self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how.

That’s not a throwaway sentence - it is fundamental to how scrum works and that is reinforced throughout the scrum guide.

Every conversation about Agile and/or Scrum being “the worst”, after some prodding it turns out that their company has refused to read or implement one or several of the fundamental principles, often without even being aware that was an essential requirement. You’re baking a cake and you decided to not use any butter, that’s on you champ, don’t blame the fucking recipe.

The biggest valid criticism of scrum is that the thing that makes it so great - its structural empowerment of individual teams - is also what makes it structurally incompatible with any traditional top-down management style. The company must fundamentally be (re-)organized to have a flat corporate structure within its R&D department - most are simply incapable of mustering the necessary changes, if only because too many middle managers’ jobs are at stake. So they call their middle managers “POs” or “Scrum Masters” and wonder why their version of Scrum sucks.

As someone who lives relatively near a “strategic target” that would be targeted by one to several ICBMs should Trump happen to have a particularly bad (but certainly not unthinkable) outburst one of these days, please know that I am saying this with as much restraint as I can muster:

I do not care what happens to MAGA, they must must stopped at any cost.

None of this shit is about looking good in the history books anymore. Trump is diving head first down a path that leads to WWIII. This is not a joke, this is not hyberbole. He’s literally doing everything that Hitler did but with thousands of nukes at his absolute unchecked disposal. This is about the survival of human civilization, and any action that helps bring about the downfall of the Trump regime is a legitimate one. Unfortunately no-one is willing to admit it until billions die in a nuclear winter because a demented turd couldn’t handle someone telling him no for once in his fucking life.

Here is my favorite video essay of 2025: Fantasies of Nuremberg.

A bit of a heads-up: do not watch this video if you want to retain any hint of a fantasy that such a reckoning even did happen in the first place. Do watch if you want a fantastically well written essay about one of the most mythologized and relevant events in history.

A weak dollar will work great for you when you bring back all those manufacturing jobs from overseas and start exporting the surplus production. Any day know. Any day.

He’s a child of apartheid and, according to his own daughter, was always an awful person in private.

There’s lots of precedent for white supremacists keeping a low(-ish) profile when it suits them. Just look at famous card-holding Nazi and prolific mass-murderer Werner Von Braun and his public perception in the US. If he could cultivate the image of America’s Dearest Scientist, literally anyone could.

Love the technosolutionist mindset, but the parties trying to made that happen lost BIG TIME in the 2024 elections and neither you nor I are in charge of the energy policy. Feel free to found a startup to explore all your big ideas but our problem is neither a lack of ways to decarbonize our energy nor a lack of reasons to go off of fossil fuels.

What I’m not hearing is a solution to the problem that the European far-right is now directly funded and supported by Putin, Musk, Thiel, Zuck, that the parties currently in power have no interest in curbing this obvious foreign interference, and all that is all but guaranteeing that the far right will take full control of the region within the next few years in exchange for a few favors like – among other things – handing out to the oil barrons a blank check. That’s not a technical issue to be engineered out, that’s a political landmine the size of a continent that we’re barreling towards. Well, if we don’t get dragged into WW3 before that, at any rate.

I agree fossil fuels are bad and renewables are good, but electric heat pumps aren’t going to be deployed in every house over the summer no matter how violent the price shock. To go green we need industrial capacity, lots of it, and a ton of political will that the far-right simply does not possess because they’d rather buy Russian gas in exchange for campaign financing.

No-one “needs” anyone but economics aren’t a zero-sum game and both the EU and the US benefited enormously from our economic and military ties, and cutting those ties will be painful and the faster it happens the more painful it will be.

If we employ the economic nukes against the US right now, we will lose most digital payment systems for a few weeks as countries and bunks rush to implement Wero and the digital Euro, and we will face strong gas shortages as we currently rely on the US to make up for Russia’s. Europe and NA would immediately enter into a deep recession.

The payment systems are a hugely understated threat but are being worked on actively. The fossil fuels aren’t understated but we also lack short-term solutions as electrification takes time (but also we aren’t doing nearly enough).

However it is true that the EU is profoundly neoliberal and that ideology is very ill-equipped to deal with a fragmented world order in which free trade is no longer the default. Those assumptions are being challenged, however the far-right seems primed to bring about the populist “solution” of turning Europe into a bunch of mini-Russias.

The game has more breadth than I thought it would, and the systems it does have (exploration, fighting, construction, farming) have wayyy more depth than Minecraft’s it does not feel fair to compare. There’s definitely enjoyment to be had for a while playing if the occasional random lag spike or disconnect is not a deal breaker for you.

But it’s not yet a Minecraft killer. Minecraft still has a much higher gameplay variation. In a couple years though I don’t think there will be much reason to play vanilla Minecraft except nostalgia.