Lumpy Skin Disease -- man, that sounds like a bad trip.
You down with LSD?
Yeah. No plow paddy.
As usual, difficult to disaggregate how much is climate change and how much is random shit happening. But a year ago weren't there similar food problems in Sri Lanka? (I had been transmitted an incomplete and semi tendentious explainer related to fertilizer.)
Sooner or later, it's going to pass a tipping point and we'll be dealing with millions of refugees from somewhere. Bangladesh is up there in the stands.
The problem for Bangladesh is lack of up.
Bangladesh will be fine (providing certain provisos I will robably never get round to writing up for a post).
SL was a totally different fuckup. Whatever you read about fertilizer was, however tendentious, probably unduly generous to the culprits.
Yes, not saying Sri Lanka had similar issues, but climate change does seem to accelerate everything, make more & more varied shit happen closer together.
Someone was asking me about Iran's political situation and my answer was basically that it hardly matters, because swaths of the country are becoming uninhabitable, and the migration crisis will overwhelm everything else.
India limiting rice exports seems like a bigger story than it's been. But that could be the narrowness of the news I follow. Not a lot of US papers with bureaus outside the US anymore, and I don't check my main outside the US source (the Guardian) as often as I used to.
Shit. I saw those pictures and assumed that it was a volcano.
Bangladesh will be fine (providing certain provisos I will robably never get round to writing up for a post)
On the one hand, I efinitely want you to do this. On the other hand... I might have some kind of prognostication burnout.
9: Just incredibly tragic. Lahaina's a beautiful historic town.
Any time people lose their homes is tragic, but it's just so much more shocking to see a whole town burn to the ground. It's partly that the geography of the mountains and the water makes Hawaiian town very compact, but it's just heartbreaking to lose a whole town all at once.
Lots of damage from another fire upcountry as well, although not on the scale of the Lahaina disaster.
Yes, I live on Oahu, in a nice wet area. My employer's Maui office is near where the upcountry fire started but it moved away, and at least most of our Maui peeps and their houses are OK. Still waiting to hear from/of some, and power and water may be a while coming back for people in Kula.
I just recently figured out you didn't live in Massachusetts. I used to get confused.
Only for a year and a half or so in the mid-80s.
It took a while for me to realize there were two Daves.
There are way more than that. I keep tripping over them, and many of them aren't me.
Also in climate-related issues, I've been following the Scout Jamboree screw-up in South Korea: https://wapo.st/3qmOMf9
The WaPo doesn't say, but I wonder how much of the issue was graft as compared to just incompetent planning.
Yes, two DaveLs, one in Massachusetts and one in Hawaii. They compromised by becoming DaveLMA and DaveLHI.
It took me a long time to parse that as DaveL + MA instead of Dave + LMA.
In case anyone else was curious, it turns out that US girls could attend the doomed jamboree if they were affiliated with BSA (Boy Scouts of America) but not if they were Girl Scouts.
Yeah. Doom is a specialty of the BSA.
I feel like I should go buy some rice but also that might be making it worse. But we buy maybe five pounds of rice at a time, so it probably doesn't move markets.
I think buying American rice is fine. Maybe not Basmati.
Mostly, I eat rice with salt and butter as a side dish.
Sometimes I eat rice with General Tso's chicken, but I don't cook that.
I like bulgogi but Korean restaurants seem to do rice wrong. I'm not sure why.
Beans and rice, that's what I eat. I like black beans but red beans are ok.
In Pittsburgh, General Tso's chicken comes with two pieces of broccoli. Always two.
Speaking of LDS, the FBI killed a Utah man who was threatening to kill Biden and Harris.
I'm not sure that was *the* lesson to learn form 1/6, but at least it's *a* lesson.
I'm assuming they didn't kill him just because of the threats.
The man's middle name was "Deleeuw." I liked it better when it was "Wayne."
Probably not what his parents were hoping for.
5 obviously was me.
and the migration crisis will overwhelm everything else.
The future is here!
"(I had been transmitted an incomplete and semi tendentious explainer related to fertilizer.)"
Here's the last time we discussed Sri Lanka. I vouch neither for its completeness nor its lack of tendention, but it does involve fertiliser.
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2022_04_03.html#017959
the FBI killed a Utah man who was threatening to kill Biden and Harris.
A man in Provo, Utah, which frankly is a bit on the nose. I suppose it's one of those one-industry towns like Bauxite or Magnitogorsk.
Man Eaten By Alligator In Maneatingalligator, FL
47: the FBI killed a Utah man who was threatening to kill Biden and Harris.
And his threatening to kill FBI agents who had already paid him a visit earlier was probably quite salient but I have seen no description of the actual confrontation. Neighbors describe him as old and frail.
I will note that his threat against Alvin Bragg (in March) was extremely vile, graphic and specific. Enough so that *Truth Social* deleted his account.
That's probably a sign you've gone too far.
I feel like we're at the high water mark of the Confederacy.
Oh, wait, now I remember that song. I too was not familiar with the video due to the aforementioned cable/boonies problem.
Wrong thread even. I seem to be doing well this morning.
45: I would be really interested in knowing why there weren't similar huge waves of refugees coming to Europe from Africa in the 1990s and 2000s. It's not like there weren't similarly awful things going on in Africa at that time. Was it materially more difficult to get from Congo or Nigeria or Ethiopia to the coast of the Med back then? Too many dictatorships in the way?
47: I assume they get into fights with people from St. George, UT all the time.
47 I'm not sure it's really the only industry, but that big university there is designed to crank out Mormons en masse.
Looking it up, I was surprised to see Provo is only the 4th largest city in Utah. I'll be impressed if anyone other than someone from the area knows the other two above it other than Salt lake City. Spoiler in next comment.
Was also surprised that St. George is nearly 100K, my image is that of a relatively small city. (And it was in fact 7K in 1970 and 11K in 1980; I am stuck in a geographic past.
57.1: West Jordan and West Valley City both SLC burbs.
And as someone who once knew every city in the US of 25K or more I am shocked at the number of places in Utah above that of which I was either completely or mostly unaware. Hey you kids get off my desert.
For instance:
Clearfield 31K
Draper 51K
Eagle Mountain 43K
Herriman 55K
Kaysville 32K
Layton 81K
Lehi 75K
Millcreek 63K
Pleasant Grove 37K
Riverton 45K
Sandy 96K
South Jordan 77K
Syracuse 32K
Taylorsville 60K
I thought Lucifer Falls was bigger than that.
I think a lot of St George's growth may be from the logistics boom. I've been through there a couple of times in the past five years, going to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon from California via Las Vegas, and it seemed like it might be just close enough to Vegas to be a warehouse/shipment center. My dad used to compete in some senior athletic events located there and in the early 2000s it sounded like it was still a fairly small town.
60: It was about half its current size.
And as someone who once knew every city in the US of 25K or more
Really?! like you set out to accomplish this? I hope there was a mnemonic song, like there is for prepositions.
There's only three prepositions though.
58: Fastest growing state in the nation!
Maybe they should have a class about how not to threaten to meet the FBI with a loaded gun?
You should leave some uncertainty. Like you'll meet them with either a loaded gun or a pie.
62: like you set out to accomplish this?
no, I just sort of picked up from studying maps so assiduously. In particular in the Rand McNally Road Atlas any city over 25,000 was had its city limits shown in color while those smaller than that only got a circular symbol; the details of the symbol varying by population. trust me I spent *a lot* of time looking at those maps. And in the legend for each state they would have a representative town for each different symbol. I would go through state by state finding each of the towns in the legend--the big ones were easy but the smallest were a Where's Waldo type of thing. And the geonerdery ran much deeper than even that, trust me.
When I was a kid, we had a map wall-papered to the wall in our playroom. It was probably 25' by 10' or so. The arctic was on the ceiling because the walls were only 8'. Dad wasn't subtle about things he felt we should learn.
I had a big railway map of the US with railroad logos in the margin on the wall right next to my bed. Thought I could find it online, but so far am not. Disappointing.
It's pretty hard to understand much about how the world works without some understanding of how it fits together.
We had this map by the kitchen table, so I thoroughly learned the geography of something, at least. It has a very long path that snakes throughout, and lots of small writing saying things like "Simple Simon met the Pieman right here."
One of the few things I ever actually asked for was a globe.
I would be really interested in knowing why there weren't similar huge waves of refugees coming to Europe from Africa in the 1990s and 2000s
Likewise. I suspect the biggest answer is raw numbers: population of Africa is up more than 70% from 2000, more than 100% from 1990; and that's total, if you broke down by age cohort I think the changes would be even bigger.
In no particular order:*
-the world getting richer: more money more migrants; more intra-African movement and infrastructure (in some places at least)
-the destruction of Libya
-growing cocaine networks, South America to Europe via West Africa
-fish stock declines pushing fisherman into smuggling (speculative)
-cellphones: vastly more information available to potential migrants on every part of the ecosystem
-cellphones: enabling monetary transfers (maybe formal, maybe more hawala-like) along the way (speculative)
-cellphones: IME Translate and Maps are hugely empowering (speculative)
-thickening social networks throughout whole ecosystem
*Assuming throughout there's no strong connection between refugees and migrants: migrants are those with sufficient resources to attempt the migration. A refugee with nothing but the clothes on their back might be able to walk to the Sahara, but they can't pay someone to take them across.
My team won pub trivia again on Wednesday, helped by 9 out of 10 on lakes/rivers. I'm always surprised how many people have so much trouble with that. The point we lost was what South American country has the headwaters of the Amazon. I think there are three choices, but we had to pick just one.
We didn't do as badly as expected in the hip hop round -- our team is multi-generational, so the thirty-somethings could hold up that part.
My granddaughter thought it was pretty funny that we got 10 out of 10 on the cheese round. 'Your whole life is about cheese, granddad."
This s making me miss my days as a map librarian with an almost unlimited budget to buy some of the rarest print maps in existence.
74.1: I was not sure on that one whether it was Peru or Ecuador, The somewhat arbitrariness of identifying "the" headwaters makes me not care for those questions.
71: I would have loved that. One of my favorite books of all time is this Atlas of Fantasy even though it only came out when I was in my 20s.
As a kid I was constantly drawing maps of imaginary places of all sorts. Sadly, I viewed this as something I had to keep absolutely concealed from my peers as if it was some kind of secret vice. I have a few that I managed to keep
I think I have posted this here before but the Rumsey collection of historical maps is fabulous with a nice user interface.
79 it is a fantastic site. I had some communication with him back in the day and a lot more with his main vendor who also funds map fellowships and symposiums at Stanford.
76 will do when I'm back from the pub.
78: I was lucky that D&D was already a thing, so all of my maps could be background for the games (role-playing games more generally, not just D&D).
76 so when I started at the new national library of Arrakis I had a short list of maps and atlases that any national library worth the name should own. Stuff like the Blaeu Atlas Maior, which I was able to buy for them a first edition (the Latin editon) at auction around 2016. But there were also a bunch of unicorns I never had on my list because I'd never see them. And I ended up buying a herd of unicorns for them. I was told more than once that I was the most expensive person in the library, though that was never reflected in my compensation. I was able to buy a copy of the Cedid Atlas with all the plates (one of only 11 or 12 known, some are missing the celestial plates, and with good provenance), likewise a copy of the Hajji Ahmed map, another one with only about 11 known*. It was a motherfucking high and I wish I could have stayed and done more but management was incredibly abusive and I'm very happy where I've ended up.
*Both of these and others have interesting stories about their acquisitions but this is not the place to tell them.
I should mention some other far less famous though amazing maps, like a map in some kind of Turkish of the Idal-Ural state which lasted briefly before it was overwhelmed by the Red Army, and another Ottoman map of the Russo-Japanese war with the principal leaders and generals/admirals on either border in little vignettes. Many such as these. I begged these bastards to let me blog about them but they were so awfully incompetent that it never went anywhere.
73 is really useful but I question the assumption that there's no connection between refugees and migrants. A wealthy migrant can often be a refugee who was forward thinking enough to leave early, before the camps opened.
84: also if you can't think of a way to persecute people by purely economic means, you lack the imagination to succeed as a tyrant.
One of our teammates had just come back from Ecuador. The answer the game host was looking for was Peru.
Adorable trumps accurate.