They did in fact build obelisks. Thing about obelisks is that what topples them isn’t shifting soils or wind or water, but humans who are looking to alter the slate of history or remove something they feel opposed to.

The labor to knock down a tower is much less than the labor to flatten a pyramid. This is the main selection pressure that leaves pyramids in place.

Instead of comparing groceries to overall earnings (GDP), they should compare a grocery basket to the median wage.

It’s quite possible that a low-budget vegan diet is still reasonably affordable, for now.

If the GDPpc is about $200 per day (it’s higher than that), <7% translates to below $14 per person per day on food spending.

Most people I know work jobs that are anchored close to minimum wage, and among these I’m still unusual for spending less than $10 a day on food.

We may have to find places with permissive zoning code, and build stuff with less embodied energy that’s intended for higher density.

The cowards didn’t include a by-line.

what if it was a Fuck-It-We-Ball room

That implication isn’t certain. An alternate (charitable?) reading of it is that they’re saying that a revolutionary state dominated by anarchists (or by a broad united front) would have been strong enough to never allow the monarchies to invade, and pre-empt the fascists from taking power at least in Germany.

This begs the question, though. Historically, we don’t see united fronts being all that stable and we don’t see anarchists becoming regional geopolitical heavy hitters. If the recipe for these clearly existed in 1917, why has it not been employed since then?

Anyway, this is why I so firmly take the stance of “history doesn’t prove very much definitively; there simply isn’t the sample size required to be scientific”. There are lots of possible outcomes from any scenario, and no one has the special knowledge to make history proceed only in their preferred way.

Abbreviates you to u and your to ur, but does not abbreviate for to 4 or counter-revolution to ctr-rev or government to gov. This is a sign of someone who’s very inconsistent.

Everything before 1914 is water under the bridge, everything since 1945 is no takebacksies

The banality of evil, personified yet again.

the curse of the black pearl is the petrodollar, and will be broken by dedollarization

Probably on the order of $100 million per year. Definitely not $10B/yr or more.

Like so many other things, the Russians have found and specialized in niches that take advantage of the American approach, for a tiny fraction of the money that America throws at comparable things.

Some things are correlated with learning, some things are correlated with wealth acquisition.

These categories have a small overlap.

actually jeem is for jihad, get it right bb

“horny” has killed more people than all the volcanos on earth combined

the original lyric of the song was “I’ll Be Horney For Christmas” but it it got a typo and bad keming

Why doesn’t anyone use the “he’s never had a real job without government help” line on him?

15 years of mostly being a stormtrooper, interspersed with going to college on the GI Bill, then 2 years after that he’s suddenly a business owner, but not a very successful one, making a large part of his living from “disabled veteran” benefits.

Mamdani, at least, has done more good for the world in ~6 years of being a housing advocate, but he’s the one that gets scrutinized.

cmon dude at least make some yummy tofu

When you’re conducting singers you can also send signals about consonant timing, vowel shapes, and other lyrical aspects that might have more natural representations in hand shapes than baton movements.

If everyone is positioned close together, and they do all their practicing in the same location where they will eventually perform, and they are very well used to each other, and the piece/movement both starts out and ends with just one instrument or voice, and the piece is continuous without any pauses longer than one bar, and there are no fermatas or accelerandos or removedandos, then maybe you can go without a conductor.

Every time you need to start, stop, speed up, slow down, sometimes time change, sometimes volume change, and sometimes for solos, there is a need for coordination.