cool as a polar bear

Artist: Tim Brierley

Some points of interest:

Corporate profits are soaring. After taxes, they now take 12.3 percent of national output, far above their postwar average of 7.3 percent.

Adjusted for inflation, hourly wages have risen 3 percent since the end of 2019, Ip noted. Corporate profits over the same period have risen 50 percent.

The Economic Policy Institute calculates that since 1979 the productivity of American workers has grown 90 percent while the pay of the typical worker has grown 33 percent. Had wages tracked output, the average worker would earn $16.40 more an hour today.

The profits are concentrated among the largest corporations. Earnings at the 500 biggest US firms rose 28 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, the fastest pace since 2021, and their profit margins reached 14.8 percent. The seven technology giants known as the “Magnificent 7”—Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla—grew their profits 63 percent.

Even as an advertiser (especially as an advertiser), I am convinced that outlawing advertising is the best thing we can do for our world now. More than gun control. More than tackling climate change. More than lowering the price of eggs. Removing these advanced manipulation tools would force everyone—politicians included—to snap back into reality. By outlawing advertising, the machinery of mass delusion would lose its most addictive and toxic fuel.

I started out reading this smugly saying to myself yeah, right.

But by the end I'm sold. Let's ban advertising.

We can start small, maybe with city ordinances. Then roll it out county wide, then at the state level. Once other states see how quiet and sane things can be, they'll adopt the ban too. The ones that don't will remain snarling islands of rage & delusion until the people move away.

I was experimenting with setting one skin for my laptop and a different skin for my phone and ended up with a halfway decent dark mode of my medieval skin by adding that one and my simplified low contrast skin together.

If you haven't already got it, create a site skin for my medieval skin. Instructions are in the ReadMe file.

In the medieval skin code, find ol.index.group, and delete it (line 18 in the github file)

If you haven't already got it, create a site skin for my simplified low contrast dark mode skin

Create a third site skin to combine those first two together

In the CSS box for that third skin, paste this code (it doesn't do anything but you need to have something in that box): li.blurb { background: transparent; }

Scroll down and tap on the button labelled Advanced

Scroll down again and tap on Add Parent Skin

In the text box, stop typing the name you gave to the medieval skin and select it from the drop down

Add Parent Skin again

Type in the name you gave the dark mode and select it from the drop down

Tap on the Submit button to save the third skin.

On the new page, Use the third skin.

Now you've got a dark medieval skin with a simplified interface for AO3.

So the only sensible way to do it is to add taumoeba-seeding probes, similar to the beetles but with an automatic deployment when they reach their destination, to missions that are on their way past other systems. And almost all the missions that will be launched in a post-taumoeba world will be to Erid.

Which means that, in time, the path of travel between Earth and Erid will be marked by a line of notably brighter stars. And if they ever are discovered by another species, eventually the paths between their world and the other two will also be brightened. Whenever a sentient species looks out to the sky, they’ll be able to see the bonds between peoples by looking for the connections of light.