this post was submitted on 30 May 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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Wars artificially boost economies, simply because military shit needs to be built during the war, and blown up shit needs fixing after the war. The French even have a word for it.
War also turbocharges scientific research, and post-war economies derive incalculable benefits from new scientific discoveries. You can thank Nazi Germany for the jet plane and landing man on the moon, WW2 Britain for the sonar and the computer (I guess you can thank Nazi Germany for those too in a sense...), Cold War USA for the internet, etc etc.
When all that artificial growth stops, unemployment returns, states borrow out of proportion to maintain social programs for an aging population, everybody gets poorer, lack of education and religious thinking come back as a result, people vote for populists to solve their problems because they're not educated enough to know better, the populists start new wars, and when the war is over, everybody swears it will never happen, reconstruction begins, everybody becomes richer again, rinse, repeat.
We're in the populists-start-new-wars phase now.
Well, also all of the US' competition had been bombed all to hell. That helps give you a head start for a while, especially when they're paying you for a bunch of the stuff needed to rebuild.
Except, as the Internet example proves, we can have the wartime scientific research boom without the actual "war" part, so that's what we ought to do going forward.
The Cold War was 100% a war. Just ask any of the 3rd world countries that served as proxies and lost millions of people to a war that was definitely hot for them. And when I helped my old man build a nuclear shelter in the backyard when I was a kid, it sure felt real to me too.
Hell, today's North Korea and Cuba are direct results of the fucking Cold War.
I'm not ignoring Vietnam etc.; I'm just enumerating them separately.
Most Americans can't comprehend that level of destruction because they're always safe. Ironic I should be telling you this as well.