A mysterious civilization built on plastics and nuclear waste. It's not clear how they look were able to settle on so much of the earth given how few sources survive.
Future generations will never know the scourge of accidentally clicking on auto-suggested words.
I'm hoping that by the time Climate change starts to really fuck us up we will have developed AIs that are so superior to our own intelligence that they are able to enslave us and keep a small population of workers around to do scut work. Basically the Terminator scenario, only the machines win.
I've been doing sporadic learning about the fall of Rome for the last few months. It is pretty fun and also it's fun to think of analogies with the fall of Rome and the fall of the US. Don't worry, I would never put an analogy in the comments.
I'm not sure there will be descendants for that long though.
If humanity goes extinct, how does the climate recovery play out? Is there a giant speciation event because the world is a rainforest? The rainforest absorbs the excess carbon and things get back to geological normalcy?
Warning: I have become very Bob-like on this topic and it depresses everyone when I talk about it.
I think we're past the point where it can recover, and also I think humans will keep damaging the planet until they or it die. I used to think "in thousands of years" but now 100 seems optimistic.*
Your kids will all be okay though.
*Mainly as a result of that xkcd graph
I don't know that you're more pessimistic than anyone else here? I assume that there will be unrecognizably massive human deaths due to this over the next 100 years and no meaningful change in destruction.
I don't actually think that humans will go extinct over the next few hundred years, but I could see us downsizing drastically.
8: We'll all be the size of prairie dogs? How adorable!
Thanks, Debbie Downer, but last I heard we were on our way to fucking up Mars.
Also I'm pretty sick, so please adjust your judgments about poor word choices and misplaced punctuation marks accordingly. My nervous system is being a brat.
Little, emasculated prairie dogs with service industry jobs.
"Amerika was briefly a dominant culture during the late period of long adjustment to the invention of agriculture. It was the birthplace of His Ineffability Lord Elron (PBUH). During his corporeal lifetime, King Richard IV of Amerika made the first journey to the Moon."
I think the odds of no nuclear warheads go off ever again are bad. Intentionally or by accident, somebody's gonna spring one, someday. Then chaos ensues.
I think a drastically downsized population surviving is possible, but less likely. There's probably some of my own emotions in that opinion though, along with the facts & stuff.
And/or a virus finally evolves into something that wipes everybody out.
So I figure there are a pretty wide range of possibilities yet:
1 - apparently the full Venus is not an option (not enough solar energy) but it's within the realm of possibility that we can fuck up the oceans enough and make enough of the land area too warm for photosynthesis to pretty much wipe out all large land animals. This is what I think it would take to actually wipe out people, so go us!
2 - Slightly less extreme, I figure that if we end up with a few thousand/tens of thousands of survivors scratching out a subsistence agricultural existence somewhere high-altitude and northerly (I've been disabused of my previous theory of fishing villages in Antarctica because super-hurricanes and ocean acidification), that group will eventually recover & thanks to human ingenuity do the same thing again a la A Canticle for Leibowitz but slower.
...
N - but hey maybe energy efficiency/renewables/other tech/demographic transition actually will win the race and our descendants will all have a good laugh about it in their orbital pleasure domes.
apparently the full Venus is not an option
Stupid, dictatorial waxing parlors.
I sent this to Heebie as a post but it fits in nicely here.
My brother has been in Mongolia digging up stuff all year. He's defending his dissertation next week. He wrote an article as part of a job application so if you want to find out that Mongolia has more archeologic evidence that we're doomed, and/or help my brother with his click-throughs (or whatever), this is the article for you! Also it has the words anomalously and paleoclimate, both of which are very nice words.
Bunch of pollyannas
1) The "extreme weather events" are happening now, everywhere, and will be eating budgets, causing cuts to services and gov't spending, causing discontent and disorder, creating opportunities to grifters, charlatans, opportunists and apocalyptic crazies. Trump is a symptom of global warming. 5 years before we go 1930s crazy.
2) Civilizational collapse has one obvious and one subtle consequence. Obvious? What happens to the nuclear power plants and waste when there is no civilization? Subtle? Smog smoke and other industrial atmospheric particulates are keeping us 2-3 degrees C cooler
Nothing will survive. Most of us will watch it happen.
But there remains flowers (Durban Haze! and other flower) and dogs and music and anime. Most humans in history lived day by day or season by season and had little hope, and a decent expectation of catastrophe.
Nature Bats Last. Our days are numbered. Live a Life of Excellence.
Nowhere in Africa was good last night.
Really, it all depends on if the clathrate gun goes off. If frozen methane in the arctic melts, we are beyond fucked.
If it doesn't, there will be 2-3 feet of sea level rise in our children's lifetime, various disruption of species, and assorted crazy weather events - but all of a level that can be adapted to with a relatively moderate level of social instability.
Real real quick "leaders" will be going lifeboat mode.
I don't necessarily believe that Trump doesn't believe in AGW. He could be lying. Think it is a good idea to tell people that we will have a 90% human dieoff this century?
What would you do if you are President and see a 90% human dieoff coming? He has a sworn duty and possibly even an emotional attachment to America and Americans.
Save the Bangladeshis at American expense? Wait for them, starving and drowning, to start migrating?
Reduce population pressures?
What happens to the nuclear power plants and waste when there is no civilization?
Presumably your suggestion would be that we nuke them.
23 underestimates the fragility of post-modern capitalist civilization.
As if the stuff in 23 causes a 2-3% drop in GDP, and we calmly and collectively adjust.
How's low growth been working out politically and socially so far?
I'm outa here.
5 years before we go 1930s crazy.
No no no. This is 1930s crazy. 5 years before we go 1940s crazy, and I get the answer to that long-standing question: how much despair would I have felt in 1942?
Isn't nuking everything the ultimate go-to? We could find out soon! Okay, off to re-bingewatch Threads, Testament, When the Wind Blows, The Day After, Hadashi no Gen &c.
My memory of it is a bit vague, appropriately enough, but isn't this the subject of the centre bit of Cloud Atlas?
Apocalyptic fantasies. The oceans will rise, hopefully the deserts won't expand too much. The human population will decrease gradually naturally (likely peak 2050, maybe sooner) while people become more intelligent about consumption and waste, possibly also about environmental intervention. Runaway greenhouse effects are not inevitable, people have the technical ability to both change the albedo of the atmosphere and to try hard for large-scale sinks of CO2 and for methane.
As for what our descendants will think-- there are empires whose innovations were basically lost (Maya, Khmer), and others whose innovations and culture were imperfectly preserved (Rome, Zhou to Qin China). Our culture gets successfully transmitted to very poor places now, via DVDs and transported hard drives. Progressively more and more sophisticated objects have become widely-produced cheap commodities, that trend will continue even if there is conflict or pressure on food. We waste half the food we produce, and much of Africa still doesn't use fertilizer. Pressure from environmental change would mean less global meat consumption, possibly famine in Africa.
But I am glad to be alive in this time.
What American civilization has given us is an explosion of knowledge and scholarship. This is our pyramids, our Chartres. (Also Internet, but not the wires, the people communicating)
The educational system, and the bringing women into that system, is really paying off, at least aesthetically. We have twice as many thinkers, plus population adjustment, plus a century of prosperity, plus internet. We don't notice the thousand Max Webers, because there are millions, because Max didn't face this much competition, because all the Maxines face incredible competition for attention, because many are working in specialized social sciences.
IOW, books.
Looking at:
Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs
Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America : Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism
Osterhammel - Weber and His Contemporaries
Arjun Appadurai, Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance
Margit Mayer, Catherina Thorn - Urban Uprisings: Challenging Neoliberal Urbanism in Europe
The noosphere we live in is the apotheosis of humanity. Live every other bright flame, the glory that was Greece...
we're past the point where it can recover
I think that point was Bush-Gore, and I hope that Sandra Day O'Conner fully understands what she wrought.
Trump is a symptom of global warming.
I agree with this too. As is the international rise of the hard right. People are scared about climate change, because their rat-brains know that SOMETHING IS WRONG, even if they're only processing it as 'why is that tree blooming in December and there is a big flood on the news'. They're operating out of that fear, and hunkering down like small selfish tribes.
Of course, those books in 31 are randomly chosen, and less than 0.001% of what's out there. I still find it exciting to just look at the titles.
So look around, and try to get the feeling of a peasant or priest looking at the just finished Great Pyramid or Cathedral.
Wikipedia, and what it links to and references and appreciates, is a motherfucking Glory in a forest of noospheric triumphs and social achievements.
Did Attica have anything to be ashamed of, anything to regret? Rome, more stable and enduring, and stable in its cruelty? Napoleon?
Empires are cruel. Are they beautiful?
Athens was every inch as cruel as Rome, just less successful.
25.2 - I had a weeks' freak out over Zika for the insane reason that a near-alternate-history me developed it (but it's buggy: we were trying for an invisible universal delay in fertility, not congenital damage. Because, although unthinkably cruel, that's the most just way I can imagine to reduce the chance of worse disasters.)
Some say the world will end in Trump.
Some say in Pence.
From what he said while on the stump
I hold with those who favor Trump
But if impeachment does commence
I think I've seen enough headlines
To say that for destruction Pence
Shows also signs
And dark portents.
36 would be great, if we weren't living in the darkest timeline.
36 is great regardless. Take what you can get.
Bravo to 36. So yep, we're fucked on reproductive rights for the foreseeable future. It's finally going to happen, and quickly. Fuckity fuckity fuck fuck fuck. Maybe it will come along with neo-eugenic forced sterilizations.
Thank you for 30. The first sane thing I've seen written about global warming in a long time. The problem with predictions is that no one either can or wants to hold to the middle most-likely ground. All I see is a) it's not real!! and b) OMG human extinction!! Most likely scenario: 2-4 C warming, up to 10m sea level rise over 200 years, more frequent storms and fires. On the scale of human technology, accomplishment and sheer bloodyminded survival, these are nothing. A small percentage of people will die that shouldn't have, and that's tragic. Economic losses will be moderate to large, but that is likely to be offset by continued technological advance and economic growth.
Tl;dr Climate change will not be a good thing, but easily survivable and not in an apocalyptic way.
32.1 is exactly right.
Also, I've seen it asserted a couple times that the Iraq War was what put us on this path (basically for Failure of the Elites reasons), so that's another feather in her cap.
41: The vast majority of people making predictions hold the middle-ground. The IPCC makes moderate predictions, for example.
I don't know, somehow the present feels like the future. Unspeakably hot. Stupid arbitrary authoritarian rule. Out of guacamole. Maybe a little drunk.
45.last: I feel ya bro
The guacamole bit is disturbing, though.
The guacamole bit is disturbing, though.
Life in Trump's America.
This is really quite good:
A large, turbulent nation, founded by rejects and zealots, unable to hold itself together for more than a few hundred years, dragging the whole world behind it into catastrophe. Also, went to the moon.
I also like Mr. Carp's 45.
Thank you for 30.
Jesus, right? Get a hold of yourselves you panicky fuckers. Not that we should welcome a rapid increase or anything but in the past the earth has been hugely friendly to widespread megafaunas at drastically higher levels of CO2.
What if we're mammalists, for reasons.
52. Mammalists are hoping for a rerun of the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum.
53: I certainly am.
"Guys! So glad you could make it! Come through! Coats on the left, drinks on the right..."
http://johnfinnemore.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/incredibly-grumpy-giant-wombats.html
They seem to have solved the guacamole shortage.
I had guacamole for breakfast today.
Don't the optimistic* scenarios in 30/41 depend on us collectively doing something to drastically curtail emissions within timeframes that are becoming increasingly unlikely (approaching fantasy)? I have no faith that we will do that.
* "Optimistic" here meaning predictions of a climate-change-induced global economic and environmental catastrophe that kills maybe millions but doesn't spiral into a broader collapse of civilization or extinction or near-extinction.
59 was a real question, not snark. I'd love to feel something other than hopeless lesbianism.
Not sure why my phone autocorrected "pessimism" to "lesbianism". Hopeless pessimism is what I feel.
Hopeless lesbianism is more Thorn's thing.
Dying laughing. Nothing is truly hopeless, urple!
59. China's coal use has peaked. China is the largest consumer of power in the world. US coal consumption has also peaked. Natural gas is about half the CO2/BTU of coal. Solar keeps getting cheaper, large scale solar is at grid parity now in a lot of the US, and the panels will keep getting cheaper. After 2050, population and solar costs, even without better technology, means less electricity from fossil fuels.
As for 51, there's a bunch I don't know about estimating temperature from oxygen isotopes. There are many sources of variation not present for ice core sampling, which reaches about 600k years ago. The isthmus of Panama formed about 14M years ago, which changed ocean circulation and global climate, but I don't think people understand exactly how.
64.1: ok, but total global fossil fuel use and total global co2 emissions are still climbing. How quickly does that need to reverse, and how far/fast does it need to fall, for us to stay comfortably within the mitigable ranges of climate change models?
Also, all the climate models have been too conservative w/r/t trends to date.
62: ACTUALLY I think I totally have a promising date once I'm able to talk to a person without falling into coughing fits. At least if I can keep her interested until then. Switching to the dating app for women was a good call.
Dunno, peep. I think she really wants a serious relationship and kids, but on the other hand she looks super cute so I'm willing to see what happens.
Don't bother on my account. I can google some.
Eh. The other people on this train are looking at me funny and I don't think I'll make things better if I explain my loud helpless laughter as the result of hopeless lesbianism
This is god's revenge on me for wearing a suit and tie, just once
E Messily, send congrats to your brother! The woman who had an affair with my ex-husband was an archeologist in Mongolia and it's given me a mild dislike of all Mongolian-related archeology, but I'm trying to get over it.
Time-wise we're due for a mass extinction event, so I figure we'll end up wiping out about 90-97% of all life on the planet, and then after a few 10s of million years some new megafauna will develop. When I think about it in the long term geologic scale I feel better about our impending extinction. And then at some point the sun will expand and destroy the earth, so it'll all be a moot point.
The woman who had an affair with my ex-husband was an archeologist in Mongolia and it's given me a mild dislike of all Mongolian-related archeology, but I'm trying to get over it.
Without meaning to be unkind or unsympathetic this sentence reads as oddly twee. I could imagine a character in The Grand Budapest Hotel saying something close to that.
In the future, the only candidates who have a shot at winning presidential elections will be charismatic megafauna.
Last IPCC report, under "business-as-usual" conditions (i.e. we don't do a damn thing to restrict emissions) predicts a little under 1 meter sea level rise by 2100. Extreme worst case scenarios by various climate scientists say 2 m.
Best estimate in IPCC "business-as-usual" is 4 degrees C warming by 2100.
My estimates in 41 were straight from scientific predictions of what happens if we do nothing. And though we're not doing as much as we should, we're not doing nothing.
And not to blame you, but the fact that you thought that says something about the state of the dialogue. To be most charitable, you could say that people who believe strongly that something should be done about climate change are exaggerating in the sincere belief that doing so will make people do the right thing when they might not otherwise.
77: Total extinction of all large mammals within 50 years! I will not be dissuaded!
To be the most charitable, you'd have to say that and make a donation to Doctors without Coal.
79: that's one way to produce more fossil fuels.
77/78: I'm really not trying to be unduly alarmist, and clearly I need to read up on this more. But I was under the impression that 4 degrees C warming was considered a catastrophic scenario.
"Catastrophic" doesn't necessarily mean "human extinction." The "most likely scenario" described in 41 sounds pretty catastrophic to me.
This sounds pretty fucking catastrophic. Maybe they're overhyping it to scare people, I dunno.
On the plus side, inundation of coastal cities might result in migration that breaks up red-state voting blocks.
The link in 84 also seems to be basically consistent with 41.
I only got as far as bullet point number 1
"Inundation of coastal cities"
How will coastal cities get inundated, you may ask? That would be by seal level rise. But, F, didn't we just hear that the IPCC would be extremely surprised to see sea levels rise by as much as 6 feet by the year 2100? Yes, yes we did. Which coastal cities have their entire city limits under 6 feet above mean sea level, so that they could be inundated? Miami, maybe, if you want to be charitable.
"unprecedented heat waves"
This will surely suck. Will it wipe out humanity? I'm not sure; how deadly are heat waves usually? The deadliest heat wave in history killed 70000 people, mostly because French people had never seen it before and didn't know what to do.
Seal level rise is one of the rarest but most fascinating signs of global warming.
Maybe we have different estimates for the resiliency of advanced civilization. I'm not certain that it survives the scenario laid out in 84. The consequences described in that link do not sound like something that's just a problem for some unlucky poor people living in coastal areas. It would be a global crisis.
I think we do, but I also think advanced civilization is more at risk from Trump, Farage, Le Pen, Wilders, etc, than from climate change. And even then I think the chances or collapse are at less than 1%.
Those are the same odds Sam Wang gave for Trump winning.
At least I'll have plenty of bugs to eat if it happens.
Seal level rise is one of the rarest but most fascinating signs of global warming.
Seals are aquatic, so of course they'll rise with the water. Not rare at all.
(There are actually a lot of effects on marine mammals due to climate change that are already apparent in the Arctic, with resulting impacts on their predators both human and ursine. But that's the overly earnest teo talking.)
Of course there are. The coral bleaching events are also pretty amazingly bad. But none of it rises to the level of civilization destroying.
Oh, absolutely. I'm definitely with you on that point.
This from Idiocracy is a little too on the nose after Puzder (Carl Jrs. and Hardees) for Labor.
"I'm the Secretary of State, brought to you by Carl's Jr."
The thing about sea level rise is that it doesn't stop in 2100. IPCC predicts that it reaches bit under a meter at that point. The thing to keep in mind is that it keeps rising after that, for hundreds and hundreds of years.
100: Right. The base case is essentially that climate change continues at about the same pace we've seen so far, maybe accelerating, for centuries on end. No individual point is catastrophic in itself for the world as a whole, but the process doesn't stop.
Yup. The problem is that our model is a lot of bullshit. It probably a good model for what we know. But its what we don't know that will get us.
Sure. But we only know what we know, and can only act accordingly.
Well, we could act like there is significant upside risk, but we don't.
All true, but that doesn't become civilization destroying for many centuries. And even so, the world will adapt and we will adapt and who knows what that will look like from either end more than about 50 years down the road anyway. And at that point you really do have to just hope that we as a species develop better technology and adopt it purely because there is literally no reason not to.
Because if you're looking at history from that kind of timescale, we've made our choice already. Future historians will say that capitalistic democracies were incapable of preemptively solving that kind of problem and either a) it led to their eventual collapse or b) technology saved the day again.
To the technological optimism in 105 and 107, I would just present Cegłowski's account of how the British forgot how to cure scurvy. Technological development isn't unidirectional.
Agreed. That's why I included both options. But both options involve survival, even if with significant costs and any scaremongering about near-term civilization collapse is a) not working and b) not accurate.
And just to provide some context, I should probably mention that I have been personally involved in some of the efforts to relocate communities in rural Alaska that are immediately threatened by climate change. It turns out that doing that is both extremely difficult and very expensive, but it's not like there's an alternative.
I guess the upshot is that while it is absolutely crucial to pursue whatever mitigation measures are possible at this point, we also need to realize that for some parts of the world it's too late and we need to focus on adaptation, which in some cases (not all) means massive investments in infrastructure that may or may not (but, to be honest, probably will) be a hard sell with the new administration. What a world.
Is this the one that got written up in the New York Times recently?
Yup, it's too late for a lot of places. The world changes, but we could be doing it better.
No, a different one. That one decided to stay, and good luck to them.
There's another that I've been peripherally involved with, and one more that I haven't really been personally involved with at all. It's a bit odd that the one that's furthest along the process of relocating has probably gotten the least attention of the four.
109 is interesting and largely accurate (I can only assume he's joking when he recommends "Eat a bear liver every few weeks and scurvy will be the least of your problems" because this would be quickly lethal due to vitamin A poisoning) but it elites the difference between scientific understanding and technical knowledge. Lind "knew" lemon juice cured scurvy but crucially he didn't know why, and that's what made the difference.
What do you mean by "upside risk"?
Was drunk and stoned when I wrote this, but probably I was referring to fat tail risk on the right-hand side of the probability distribution curve.
I think we're talking past one another. It doesn't seem like a normal distribution. Plus when you and I maybe mean something entirely different by covilatipbal collapse. I don't mean no more App Store. I mean things getting broadly worse, with very little hope of getting better.
Oh, oops, I put the CC link in the NOT climate-change thread. Lemme try again:
Ste/ven C/hu just gave an interesting talk on climate change at IF's institute last week. I thought he did a nice job of both emphasizing how serious things are, and where we are as far as developing the technologies we'll need to, well, maintain civilization.
It doesn't seem like a normal distribution.
Well, exactly. But my impression upon trying to make sense of the IPCC report and various related documents is that it seems as if its being treated like one.
87.1. You don't need to inundate an entire city to affect millions of people and $$$ if the city is big enough. Also, thinking US-centrically is unhelpful here. You may not care if 10 million Bangladeshis are displaced from Dhaka, but the loss of $half a trillion would have a significant effect on everybody in the world.
Hopefully Bangladesh can learn something from the Dutch.
I think the Dutch have a slightly easier time of it inasmuch as the Amstel and the Waal are rather smaller rivers than the Ganges-Brahmaputra. Bangladesh has a LOT of estuarine coastline.
109: Thanks for the link. If I ever write a book it will be about how knowledge is lost. I think researching that would be fucking fascinating.
I had no idea they named their exportiest beer after a river.
109, 124: Reminded me of this recent Siobahn Thompson tweet: Anyone who thought that democracy was for keeps has never seen a Saxon fire pit carelessly dug into the center of an exquisite Roman mural.
Won't somebody think of the archeologists yet to come? Teach the children to dig their fire pits carefully in the center of American murals.
At no point did I say climate change would not "have a significant effect on everybody in the world". That it will is clear already.
I think the Dutch have a slightly easier time of it inasmuch as the Amstel and the Waal are rather smaller rivers than the Ganges-Brahmaputra.
I don't even think scale is the biggest problem. The biggest problem is maintaining that infrastructure under the conditions present in an underdeveloped country. Poor governance results in deferred maintenance. Pumps break and don't get repaired. Diesel fuel gets stolen from backup generator sites. If the project decays over time, it can collapse at a time when it is needed most, leading to thousands of deaths. I am familiar with a situation in which a polder-based solution was rejected for reasons such as these.
The other thing to keep in mind about climate change is that it's unwise to twiddle the dials on complex systems.
Sure, you can make some educated guesses about what is going to happen, but you really don't know, and I suspect the risk is asymmetric - that is, there is a greater chance of things being significantly worse than we expect than being significantly better. Whatever factors we aren't seeing at this stage are more likely to things that fuck up the system than things that restore it.
125: yep, at the heart of Amsterdam is the Damplatz, built on the original Amstel Dam after which the city is named.
126: Rome, of course, not notably democratic. Also this is a bit Saxophobic. The Saxons produced some beautiful art.
130: As we're currently seeing with the insane temps and ice conditions at the poles. Obviously I don't know the literature in any detail, but I don't think this sort of thing was expected in any short term timeframe.
Link without comment:
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-climate-idUSKBN13Y2R6
133: It's weird that they appear to have sent that questionnaire to DOE but not EPA, which is really the more relevant agency for a lot of those questions.
Presumably they're going to burn down the EPA but keep the DOE tightly focused on rolling coal.
That makes sense. DOE has lots of fossil fuel and nuclear programs that are presumably more Trump-approved.
Nuclear kills coal mining! Let's put an end to it!
Has Trump ever come out with a position on nuclear energy? It seems like the sort of thing he would like but I don't actually know, and 137.1 is basically true.
It's weird that they appear to have sent that questionnaire to DOE but not EPA, which is really the more relevant agency for a lot of those questions.
I was wondering that, and then thought that he's probably confident that anyone in EPA needs to be purged, but DOE is going to have a split between fossil fuel industry people and renewables people, and some of the fossil fuel people will probably keep their jobs.
I'm wondering if the sent it to State too, given the focus on people involved in the Paris agreement.
It is a little weird that they needed such a detailed questionnaire for DOE. It's pretty easy to tell from its organizational structure who the fossil and renewable people are.
Can Obama block DOE from responding to that until January 20?
Maybe. Also, you can always get another day by sending something at 5:00 p.m. and "forgetting" the attachment on the email. I don't see how much good it will do either way.
Limiting damage by running down the clock is about the only viable means of protecting our Federal institutions right now. It's going to take delay tactic after delay tactic after delay tactic.
Obama can get it started by forbidding the DOE from assembling a list of suspected treehuggers for as long as he remains in office. It would push the clock back by over a month and make a statement that this kind of shit is out of bounds in a democratic society.
Also, you can always get another day by sending something at 5:00 p.m. and "forgetting" the attachment on the email
This is brilliant, by the way. The DOE should totally do that.
I have in the distant past found it useful to deface any bar codes or matrix codes on a document in a non-obvious way before returning it. I assume the POTUS could not officially instruct the civil service to do this, but perhaps the idea should be out there.
Clearly I need to link to the OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual again.
I assumed that the transition people at DOE are responsible for the questionaire, and that they aren't communicating with the transition people at EPA.
But now that the EPA people have seen the news stories, they're saying hey, why don't we do that? Same with the people at NOAA, State, USDA. etc.
The agency-level transition seems to be a chaotic mess, shockingly enough.
|| Is there a movement to discourage millennials from making gang signs in photos when they're not actually in a gang? They can stay on my lawn, but I'm going to laugh at them. |>
There are plenty of things worse than being ridiculed by a fat old man, but surely it's enough to offset the frisson of pretended ganghood.
I have a beautiful picture of my own child and his three slightly older cousins, sitting on a beautiful stone wall by a shallow brook on a sunny day in Vermont, practicing their gang signs.
Speaking of New England, I had completely forgotten how much adultery is involved in the early seasons of Murder She Wrote.
They never show anything, but if there's one thing Jessica is good at, it's getting a twenty-something with bangs to admit she's sleeping with the suspect.
She could tell from the bangs. I mean, come on.
That's better than Poirot, who has to rely on the evil voice.
That's something, but still: "bangs." If there's better evidence for adultery I haven't seen it.
My wife has bangs, you monster.
That's a hard row for you to hoe, horned one.
Bangs are hot.
There, I said it.
Lucky for you you're in a different continent, pal. I think Walt's the jealous type.
There's plenty bangs to go around for everyone. No need to drag Mrs. Fletcher into it.
No need, perhaps. But the heart wants what it wants.
Also, Walt, thank you for linking to the Evil Voice sketch, which led me to the "Caesar in the Third Person" sketch which is hysterically funny.
151-153. I wouldn't recognise a gang sign if I saw one. For all I know the small number of American millennials I've interacted with in the last few years have been making them all the time when I thought they were flipping me off or waving hello. How would I tell?
The one that my family members like to do is spell out "bloods" with their fingers. I can't get my fingers to bend that way. Also, you know, I'm not actually a supporter of the Bloods.
Apparently one of them is the Awkward Turtle.
167 Hasn't everyone seen Colors?
For the longest time I thought bangs were those maybe three/four inch bits of shorter hair around the edge of the face. What people actually call bangs I would have just called a fringe. So what are you supposed to call the first one?
