As someone who covered climate change a decade ago, I feel like the rest of the world is only just catching up to the following realities:

1. Avoiding truly epic amounts of climate change is technically feasible but economically and politically totally infeasible

2. Accepting that we are going to return our planet's climate to a state not seen in tens of millions of years is important. Because it's the truth. Anyone who wants to tell you differently is trying to sell you their ideology.
3. Knowing the earth is going to undergo multi-degree warming is no excuse not to decarbonize our energy system. We needed to do that anyway. And the less warming, the better.
4. Talking about really serious amounts of adaptation is not accepting defeat, it's grappling with reality. And you'd be surprised how having to actually spend money to deal with the coming warming will help people also accept (3)
5. There are no easy solutions. Geoengineering is extremely problematic. Carbon draw down of any scale is still a fantasy. We are going to have to both adapt and mitigate. Getting serious about it will probably take generational turnover in the power structures of this country.
coda: The insurance industry already understands the dynamics of climate change.

Federal flood insurance and FEMA excepted of course, since that's backed by a government that seems content to subsidize rebuilding in the path of danger.

https://t.co/pIQUQmCt3p

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So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.
First thread of the year because I have time during MCO. As requested, a thread on the gods and spirits of Malay folk religion. Some are indigenous, some are of Indian origin, some have Islamic


Before I begin, it might be worth explaining the Malay conception of the spirit world. At its deepest level, Malay religious belief is animist. All living beings and even certain objects are said to have a soul. Natural phenomena are either controlled by or personified as spirits

Although these beings had to be respected, not all of them were powerful enough to be considered gods. Offerings would be made to the spirits that had greater influence on human life. Spells and incantations would invoke their


Two known examples of such elemental spirits that had god-like status are Raja Angin (king of the wind) and Mambang Tali Arus (spirit of river currents). There were undoubtedly many more which have been lost to time

Contact with ancient India brought the influence of Hinduism and Buddhism to SEA. What we now call Hinduism similarly developed in India out of native animism and the more formal Vedic tradition. This can be seen in the multitude of sacred animals and location-specific Hindu gods