What took so long? If you think about the history and the talking points of the anti-abortion and anti-contraception movements, this outcome is guaranteed when letting them gain power.

If you believe that a new human, with all associated rights and freedoms, is created at the moment of conception, then this outcome is obvious.

The only way it could have gone any differently would be to declare that conception can only occur as a result of actual sexual intercourse. And that leads to the conclusion that these embryos are not and can never be human.

I think of my username as being like a lock on the door. It’s not going to stop someone who is dedicated to fucking with me, but it keeps the opportunistic fuckery at bay.

I used to get occasional work helping farm kids pick rocks. We don’t seem to have built any fences in Saskatchewan, preferring instead to just pile them up or bury them.

Never underestimate what happens when thousands of individual people do one thing over and over again, rock by rock, step by step, day in and day out, year after year. Whether it’s building fences, depleting resources, or putting waste into the environment, we always manage to more collectively than we can imagine as individuals.

I was not worried about banks at all. Not even a bit. It just seemed too much to hope for that they couldn’t get their collective heads around my 25-year mortgage. That mortgage meant that I had negative net worth, so I was actually hoping they’d screw up. Yes, I knew they had paper copies kicking around, but paper gets lost with frightening frequency.

I was a freelance programmer at the time. My main focus was on making sure that none of my contracts left me on the hook for anything Y2K related that wasn’t explicitly contracted for.

Thanks. Sometimes overviews are the most important things to create. It’s tough to know where to start without a map!

I read the introduction (linked page) in detail and skimmed the next two chapters. That’s not enough to form a concrete opinion, but plenty to judge this worthy of my reading list.

Permafrost, yes, but I don’t know if the land under glaciers had been included even though it might still be permafrost.

When I hear “permafrost”, I think not of land under glaciers, but the underground layer of ground that stays below freezing even when the topsoil thaws in summer.

One problem might be that some people use the word “antibiotics” as a synonym for “prescription medication”. I found that out when trying to find out what problems my mother was dealing with.

There were quite a few of my relatives and her friends who all said the same thing “she’s on 4 antibiotics,” but nobody knew any of the drug names. I finally got the drug names and from the names alone (specifically the suffixes) it was clear that there was one antibiotic and one antiviral. I recognized one of the names as a “blood thinner”, leaving the last as a glaucoma medication (l looked it up: it’s a carbonic anhydrase inhibitor, whatever that is, and diuretic).

They all still refer to all of them as “antibiotics”, telling me that I’m overly pedantic.

I wasn’t clear. My fault. I was referring to power, landline, natural gas, and water networks.

Virtually every developed country has managed to get power and landline service to the vast majority of those who live outside urban centres, including farmers and ranchers. In addition, places like Saskatchewan managed to do likewise with natural gas and, occasionally, with water suitable for inexpensive municipal and even in-home treatment.

I’m not a telecommunications engineer, so I could be way, way off base, but it strikes me that a similar project could get real broadband into every household that is hooked up to the power grid.

It doesn’t have to be wire or fibre to the home. Modern terrestrial wireless technologies can probably get the job done quicker and simpler in many cases. Although I think it’s worth pointing out that SaskTel was laying so much fiber in the 1980s to support its own production facility. If short-sighted government hadn’t killed that project, I’d probably have had fibre a decade ago instead of waiting on appropriate terrestrial wireless technologies that still show no sign of getting here. We don’t have any cell service and we’re actually getting further away in a sense, since every upgrade has reduced range and new towers are not being built to fill the gaps. Instead we’ve been stuck with crap like ExploreNet and now Starlink.

Developing countries and truly remote areas are already leapfrogging physical connections to go direct to wireless.

My cousin has a farm in Saskatchewan that is 5 km from the nearest neighbour, 20 km from the nearest village, 60 km from the nearest town, and 150 km from the nearest city. That farmhouse had power before WW2, telephone by 1950, and natural gas by 1970. They still don’t have proper broadband, despite having had dial-up internet at the same time and for the same price as anyone in our largest cities.

That, too! I’ve taken to using any autotldr as a substitute for a “proper” title and author summary. If the autotldr looks like there might be based on something I find interesting, I’ll go read the article.

Canada’s Plant Hardiness Zone maps are in the process of being updated.

Two interesting points:

• USDA uses only 1 variable, extreme low temperature, while Canada uses 7 (lows, highs, rainfall, snowpack, wind, etc). To make comparisons easier, Canada publishes maps using both methods. The maps using USDA methods look a lot more forgiving than the Canadian ones. Both have 19 zones, although USDA is 0-9b while Canada’s is 0a-9a.
• That website has links to interactive maps, including historical maps. Looking at old versions and current versions makes the northward shift of zones very obvious. Even regional variations in that shift are visible. Maybe I’m not looking closely enough, but it looks like the most dramatic shifts are at longitudes running from Western Alberta through Western Ontario.

The Canadian maps are calculated using 30-year windows with a 10-year overlap. I would be very interested in seeing these maps calculated with an annual 30-year sliding window to show the northward march as an animation. Assuming it’s moving enough to make sense when rendered annually.

I sympathize. I’ve been caught out a couple of times by depending on autotldr as a substitute for reading the actual article. My own casual comparisons between autotldr and source articles suggest that autotldr is probably about 80% faithful to its source, on average.

I don’t know if it’s real or in my own mind, but it also seems to me that autotldr is faithful to the article inversely proportional to the quality of its source material. That is, the better and more complete the article, the more likely it is that autotldr trashes it.

Now that I’ve written it down, it strikes me that that may be an insurmountable problem. If we think of good articles as being “high information” and garbage articles as “low information”, summarizing will always be more likely to cause important “damage” the higher the information content. Thus, hitting 95% on a good article might trash it, while hitting 60% on a trash article is just fine. This might be especially true if you consider that the best articles might already be as compact as is reasonable.

The same people and programs that got every other network to every household?

Thanks for helping me look at things from a different angle!

Never underestimate the power of obsession. I would not be the least bit surprised to learn that right now, as I write this, there is someone out there making their 4327th attempt to engrave “The Lord’s Prayer” into a watermelon seed using a handheld sewing needle. And it’s probably in an illuminated Gothic script.

I understand that point of view as well.

I guess my real issue is my own selfishness. I think the problems will ultimately be solved, but at my age, I doubt I’m likely to see anything other than the “worse” in “things will get worse before they get better,” no matter how aggressively we act.

The pessimism I experience and most frequently encounter has nothing to do with the scientific or even the technical possibility of dealing with the problem, but the social and political.

We’ve known of the need to do something since the mid-1980s and earlier. Before internet! I gave my first presentation on anthropogenic climate change (when it was still known as global warming) to my high school’s science club in 1973.

We know what we need to do. We know the majority of how to do it. And we’ve known the what and how for almost as long as we’ve been aware of the need.

My pessimism arises from the fact that those who are greedy for power, resources, and/or money are also, by definition, selfish assholes who tolerate nothing that affects their agenda and who have the resources to con the general public into following their agenda.

Just be aware that enshittification is under way in this space, too.

I’ve switched back to using the library’s own portal, even when it means forgoing digital media.

I don’t think I’ve ever come across anyone else who thinks that the die was cast before the boomers and certainly by the time they came of age. I never tire of pointing out that Friedman, Reagan, and Thatcher and their cohort and most of their collaborators were not boomers. Nor are Poilievre, Trudeau, Scott Moe and theirs. Boomers are not without blame, but no 20th century generation is.

As a boomer myself, maybe I’m just looking to spread the blame. But in my rural community, it’s the boomers who most reliably argue for environmentalism, debt control, and wealth distribution through public services.

It wouldn’t have hurt my feelings any if you had kept it to 5! :)

You’ve got a couple on there that I wouldn’t have included, but they are also in areas I haven’t examined for impact, so …

There are a couple where I actively disagree with you, but, again, my lack of expertise means I can’t actually mount arguments.

That still leaves nearly a dozen. I’m not convinced that any one of them is sufficient on it’s own, but any 2 or 3 in combination? Sure. I’m a doomer for a reason. :)

One of the reasons my personal focus was on climate change was that I thought properly addressing that would fix most of the rest as a side effect. I now think that pretty much all the disasters awaiting us have the same root cause: selfishness. As long as we are unable to care for anyone or anything other than ourselves, we will never solve any problem worth solving.

People talk about various tipping points for their pet disaster. I think the real tipping point happened in 1980.