For pretty much every company I've known, people near retirement age hold some form of the "it used to be a great company to work for" view. Probably has something to do with the way companies tend to get into "cut the fat" mode as they grow, or how things get automated and outsourced, or how pensions have shrunk and vanished, or some other variation of those themes.

Also down the page:

#eggski

Susumu Yokota is my jam

Hmm, like on a spiritual level? Not so much I guess.

I thought the setting was a fascinating concept, but I don't come from a religious background and the crisis of faith thing was something I just don't get. For that reason it just kinda fell flat for me; it didn't seem like there was anything I could take away from the story

Did this include the Brad Pitt one?

Sweet! I did end up reading the whole book with my group, including Omphalos and the rest.

The story is reminiscent of a Black Mirror episode, "The Entire History of You", at least in subject matter. Might be worth throwing that in there too.

Slick №., by the way.

Nice, my IRL book club has been working on that, and it surprisingly apt with it's handling of how a worldwide pandemic unfolds.

Do it! I'm for sure supportive of anyone that has any spontaneous thoughts or things they want to share using the #scificlub tag.

Also, general question out of curiosity: who's read World War Z?

The point about invasive species is an interesting one, I hadn't really thought of it before as resistance to natural ecological drift.

It's probably really important that we collectively figure out if, and to what extent we should intervene with changing ecosystems. It's not really fit to assume that there will be a gentle rearrangement of species and habitats as climate changes. With the current rapid change in temperature and CO2, we're aligned more with mass extinction rather than mass adaptation. Intervention is going to be bold though. There was the Iron Hypothesis: "Give me a half a tanker of iron and I'll give you the next ice age". I'd be lying if I said I weren't a little curious to see how a long-term iron seeding would change things. Ultimately, I think we will have to think about some kind of technological way of sequestering carbon.

Other than my bass guitar forums

Tangential, but would that be talkbass?

I was tempted to quote the same block of text. Who could have been paying attention the past 4 or 5 years and thought "the way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion"? This shit has been thoroughly warped into the "both sides" fallacy. It turns out people as whole are pretty terrible at assessing the merits of ideas. Or the values of facts. There's been freakin' studies on that.

I got a crown last week and I'm starting to worry that it's not taking well.

Ever have one of those dentists/doctors that just jumps to the worst thing? Like, I get an xray of a chipped tooth and as soon as she walks in and sees it she says root canal. Any pain? No pain? Well then, crown I guess.

But now that I have a temp crown on there, there's pain/pressure/sensitivity that hasn't totally gone away in almost a week. It's a molar that goes almost to the sinus. Allergy pills make the pain go away mostly, so I don't know if I should blame my tooth or sinuses or what.