I've managed to pack an absurd amounts of stuff into a sedan over the years (it often looks like the photos of your truck, jammed floor to ceiling) but there have been times when I really wished for an open bed for bulky items. This thing has more cargo space than my four-door and looks smaller overall which is a huge plus in city driving (even my sedan feels too big a lot of the time). Plus it's cheap to buy, cheap to operate, probably cheap to insure because of its low speed. If they are frequently hauling cargo but less than you are, and need to drive and park in tight roads in the city (where it's intended to be used) it seems like a better fit than a car (from someone who uses a car).

It'd be nice if there was another way to learn about other countries

Hi, I've set up a new copy of the doc for ongoing feedback towards the gamebook version, if you're interested. It's got my old comments on where various details and ideas came from which might be useful if I'm really off-base somewhere. I've also added a page to the beginning with links to various locations with content you might be able to make corrections on. I'm obviously happy to get input on anything that'll improve the next version, but I think given your limited time, these might be the best place to start?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1naf9MvD_qJTrIv9K3VmNSpQOIuLq5h0qPwDRSxMrJZE/edit?usp=sharing

I'm also happy to share the gamebook version at some point, though I haven't gotten to these topics/locations yet so we're catching it at a good time. Basically anything we correct on this doc goes into the gamebook eventually. For as much work as I put into this campaign, I think it'll probably see less of an audience than a standalone book will, if only because you don't have to convince 3-6 adults to spend two hours a week on it for a couple months.

Thanks again!

You have to open negotiations with a strong position you can afford to negotiate down from

Between the massive corporate wealth at stake and the millions of people literally addicted to the product, it's hard now to imagine governments being able to ban them (and I lived through it).

Honestly watching people deny that COVID was real as it happened around them in real time kind of drove home to me that there was no way they'd recognize climate change. The longer time scale, and the fact that it's more difficult to link a specific disaster to a specific cause (vs uncle bob coughed on someone, then they went to the hospital and died) I think means climate change will be hard mode.

We get this in my hometown - people see the place, decide they want to live in the forest. They clearcut a chunk of it and build their house. Then when a bear wanders into their new yard (following the same territory it always has) they call the cops.

The temptation to mirror tint my rear windshield goes up every time I drive at night

This isn't the original, but I took the photo and cleaned it up a bit:

I use that thing a lot, but they usually drive close enough to get the side mirrors too, and generally light up the whole cab. So I spend however long they're behind me hunched forward to keep their brights out of my eyes, waiting for a passing zone. I'm not even a slow driver.

Recently I was listening to the podcast Knowledge Fight and heard musk speak for the first time on a twitter conference call thing with Alex Jones. I never knew how bad he is at public speaking

One thing that's probably worth noting is that duckweed appears to be a hyperaccumulator species for a bunch of heavy metals - that actually makes it additionally useful for phytoremediation, just watch where you're getting it from and what inputs it's receiving if you're growing it for food.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B9780128031582000163#%3A%7E%3Atext=Duckweeds+mostly+have+these+traits%2Cincrease+hyperaccumulation+potential+of+duckweeds.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969722030066

Congrats! Sounds like a tricky fix and I'm glad you could get it to work!

Is disagreeing with the point really off topic? perestroika's comment looks well thought out it just doesn't agree. And frankly I'm ... skeptical of the argument that we can't stop a genocide because we'll be just as bad as the perpetrators.

We haven't found the upper limit yet, but with more research funding we can get closer

I guess I'm glad they did it this way. The ants got it way worse

Seems like local industry only wants to focus on ICE vehicles so there's not much to protect

I'm told by formerly-immune relatives that repeated exposures to poison ivy can make you start reacting to it. I'm not sure how that works or if something changed in their bodies as they got older but a few of them were certain it happened (they were older state workers and landscapers so they'd had plenty of contact and know how to identify it).

Like the satellite

Tools! With the exception of a few big power tools like a table saw or miter saw, where the new safety features make it worthwhile, I get everything I can used. I prefer stuff passed down from family with sentimental value, but I get a lot of my tools from Everything is Free, junk stores, yard sales, estate clean outs, swap shops etc.

Older tools tend to be simpler, easier to fix, and remarkably sturdy. I've read that the metallurgy wasn't as good sixty+ years ago so they overbuilt them a bit to compensate, and then decades of use weaned out the weaker ones, so anything left still working is basically survivorship-bias guaranteed. I've got a drill press that's been in the family for four generations and will probably outlast my grandkids.

They're cheaper, sturdier, easier to fix, generally well-documented online (sometimes better than the new stuff), and they don't come with sheaves of unnecessary styrofoam and plastic packaging. And they have history and stories in them, even if I don't always know what those stories are.