Yeah, that’s it: you can get some of that stuff from some fruits, but you’re looking at a lot of avocados!

Bacteria synthesise B12 inside various animals. Even our gut flora synthesise it, but they do it too far down our digestive system to be useful!

You can’t live on fruit alone because you need vitamin B12, which you can only get from animal products or supplements. Fruit is generally also low in carbohydrates, fats and proteins, all of which you need to live!

Heh. Yeah, I can’t really hold up a country backsliding on trans rights as an example of an effective constitutional monarchy.

I think taking a broad view, there are quite a lot of constitutional monarchies that are really great places to live (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, New Zealand, Canada, the Bahamas, Japan, to name a few). There are also quite a lot of republics that can claim the same. So, from a sort of human development POV, I don’t think it really matters very much.

[EDIT: Should’ve added that there are also plenty of republics and monarchies that are disasters, too. My point is that there’s no consistent pattern of one works and the other doesn’t.]

Sure, monarchies are a bit daft but I think ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ is quite a good rule. Especially since spending time on fixing things that ain’t broke is time you could be spending on fixing things that are broke. I live in the UK and we have a lot of major problems that need our attention. It’s better to focus on those than have a big argument about the King when, as we can see from international comparisons, the King isn’t really the issue.

Yes, very useful for subtle distinctions like this!

Yes, it’s metonymy, as people have said. You also get it in similar contexts where people will name a building such as ‘the White House’ or ‘[10] Downing Street’ to refer to the governments of the US or the UK.

Any MBA?

I have this whole system where I alternate between poetry/non-fiction/fiction and contemporary/classic, so I always have about fifty books on my shelf and there’s always an obvious next one to read. Like right now I’m reading some classic prose fiction so my next read is contemporary poetry.

/s indeed, but you did remind me of a cool image, above: the Earth (and the Moon) not only from space, but from the orbit of Mars!

And, below, the Earth as seen from Mars’ surface:

It’s the the tiny white dot, just left and up from centre.

Wind up music boxes. I don’t know why, but regardless of the melody they play, I find them super creepy.

The Marxists Internet Archive has a huge amount of left/communist non-fiction. It’s very broad in its scope, so there’s Stalin and Mao on there alongside William Morris and HG Wells. You could also check out Timothy Snyder and Rebecca Solnit, who both had interesting books about resisting fascism from a more contemporary viewpoint.

In fiction, there’s The Man in the High Castle, by Phillip K. Dick, which has a similar alt history concept as Roth’s The Plot Against America. And of course there’s George Orwell’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction, much of which explores the nature of fascism. I’d also recommend Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, if you like magical realism.

I don’t speak it super well, but I can get by.

Totally understandable. I hate a particular type of architecture because of a job I had in a building of that style.

No. But physical proof is not the standard we use for determining someone’s historical existence.

Right, it’s like when people try to justify colonialism. Would they be okay with their country being conquered and turned into a colony? No? Okay, so we’ve established colonialism is wrong. Everything after that is increasingly ludicrous special pleading. ‘Oh, but country X was more economically developed, so it was okay,’ is only a consistent argument if you actually go on to say ‘… and that’s why it would be a good thing if South Korea conquered Italy.’

There are also specific articles in the universal declaration of human rights that I think are wrong

Do you mind saying which ones?

Normally, to be honest, it’s because they want to hurt someone. Look at the Conservatives in the UK, who are desperate to repeal human rights legislation so that they can send refugees to Rwanda without right of appeal.

Note that those Conservatives still think that they have human rights. Their excuse for depriving refugees of human rights is that some of them have entered the country illegally. Yet, none of them thinks any Conservative MP should be detained arbitrarily or deported, even though they now acknowledge that they, their government and their party have broken the law in various ways. No, they want to strip rights from other people. Their argument doesn’t wash.

A few people here have pointed this out already, but people have thought the End was pretty Nigh for about as long as we’ve been thinking about things.

Other people are countering this point by saying, ‘Ah, but this time it’s real!’ which doesn’t prove anything. People thought it was real all those previous times (the ecological collapse on Easter Island, or the Bronze Age collapse, or the Roman Civil Wars, or the Black Death, or the French Revolution or the Cold War etc.) and not many of them killed themselves or joined suicide cults, so why would people act differently now?

This isn’t to be pollyannaish about things. All the examples I gave above really did kill huge numbers of people and the Cold War in particular really could’ve caused the collapse of modern civilisation (if a nuclear war had broken out). Climate change, war and resurgent fascism are truly huge problems. I just don’t think the particular example of suicide cults is a very likely development.

Lots of good suggestions here, including the difficulty in communicating inherent to being in a car.

I think another important factor is that driving itself is stressful. Surveys of commuters consistently show that people who walk or cycle have the highest satisfaction with their commute, while motorists ranks somewhere from the middle to the bottom (i.e., either ahead of or behind people who use public transport), depending on the study.

When you put people in a stressful situation where it’s difficult to communicate, inevitably some people lose their temper.

What you’re describing here (and in the thread below) sounds a bit like technocracy, so you might be interested in reading about the Technocracy Movement.