perestroika

Despite this, the article suggests that nearly all of the increase in deadly accidents has come from urban roads.

If the roads are just as poorly designed as before, the increase has to originate elsewhere.

Which doesn't mean that road design shouldn't improve. :)

Here in Estonia, you sometimes wait for a ChaDemo cable to become available.

The operators of charger networks forbid hitting the red button (emergency disconnect) under any conditions unless it's an emergency.

There's a silent agreement among drivers that lack of charging opportunities is an emergency. :D If the other guy is not present and their battery has reached 80% or more (charging has slowed to a trickle and they have enough range to drive), it's considered OK to hit the red button and hijack the cable.

But alas, some cars (guess which, the ones without door handles, specially designed for suicidal drivers) sometimes won't release the cable.

You also frequently call customer support to restart chargers and watch Linux boot messages scroll by, and complain until blue in the face about specific chargers that stop working for some specific cars in cold weather.

In short, it's pretty close to a mess. :o

My take: a reasonably universal method of payment beats barter, because in a barter economy you can get stuck trying to exchange beans for oars, while the oar maker wants wood or carrots, and the wood cutter needs pumpkins or saw blades instead of peas. :)

However, a universal method of payment will create a finacial sector, and to avoid adverse outcomes, activity in the financial sector needs to match certain criteria. Typically there's a state regulating things. In an anarchist economy, regulation would decentralized, but there would have to be regulation.

E.g. if there's a currency, there has to be a mechanism protecting against issuing forged currency. It doesn't have to be goons with guns (recent takes have involved cryptography instead of them), but a mechanism has to exist.

As much as I would like to agree, states have historically been far better at fighting wars than most kinds of anarchist organization. Yes, there have been bumbling fools here and there, states can be miserable at innovation - but their organizational model usually prevails if given some time. :(

The methods of state warfare and non-state insurgency differ a lot. A war is financed by the tax office, an insurgency is mostly financed by donation, theft and loot. A tax office will get a great deal further in raising money than even the most talented partisan, because they are pretty uncontestable and systematically squeeze everyone.

State-like methods will have industries leveraging scaling laws and division of labour to produce faster and cheaper (a trivial example: I can be much more productive and make less mistakes if I produce ailerons for 20 drones in a row, or parachutes for 20 drones in a row). A partisan organization will have difficulty doing that and evading detection.

In war, territory matters - you want to control territory that is safe for your side, and locate production where it cannot be obstructed, so you can make stuff by the ton.

This could somewhat change in the near future, but not massively. The destabilizing factor which might change things is likely low-cost drones in all environments. Attacking a big sitting duck might become, at least for a while, somewhat easier than defending a big sitting duck. Maybe it already has (referring to some incidents of a drone swarm flying out of a truck).

However, I am not convinced if this changes the playing field enough.

This somewhat saddens me. To prevail in military conflict, even an anarchist organization would have to adopt methods considerably resembling a state, and revert to its old shape later - if it can. I guess the old saying "war is healthy for a state" (and almost nobody else) isn't so wrong. :(

Personal perspective: when Ukraine got invaded by Russia, I tried to influence the situation via anarchist organizations first, because that's where I had contacts. At first, they achieved meaningful things. Ukrainian folks equipped their comrades for war, Russian folks torched and derailed various stuff... but as things continue, what counts more and more is ability to mass produce cheap technology. Anarchist methods have a vital place in research and innovation, but if something even remotely seems to get results, state financing and methods from big industry are better employed to quickly replicate a successful tool. So I foresee that if I come up with a successful tool and want it replicated, I would have to cooperate with an organization capable of mass production - and my anarchist comrades currently don't have these. In a different world, maybe they would - as a result of experiences and opinions that point out the value of organizing things on big scale. It's not impossible, anarchists have sometimes organized big stuff.

Wikipedia tries to trace it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_2025_Indonesian_protests

On 25 August 2025, protests began in Indonesia as part of a larger civil unrest that began in early 2025 over economic frustrations and a proposed hike in housing subsidies for members of parliament. The protests, which were largely concentrated around the capital Jakarta,[42][43][44] grew in intensity and spread nationwide following the killing of Affan Kurniawan, a motorcycle taxi driver who was run over by a Brimob police tactical vehicle on 28 August during a larger violent and excessive crackdown on civil dissent.[42]

Protesters initially demanded the House of Representatives reverse its subsidy schemes and penalize its members who made insensitive statements, as well as pass the Confiscation of Assets Act for lawmakers convicted of corruption.[45] Following the death of Kurniawan, student-led protesters expanded their demands to include a complete and thorough reform of the Indonesian National Police and either the resignation or termination of the chief of police, Listyo Sigit Prabowo.[46]

It seems that someone noticed that absorbing CO2 leads to ocean acidity rising (the carbonate ion, CO3, is a negatively charged ion with a nominal charge of -2).

Neutralizing CO3 by providing it something permanent to bind with - for example by forming NaHCO3 - will likely have the desired effect (nobody goes testing with a ship without first testing in a lab)...

...but the scale of the task makes me doubt if this is a feasible / reasonable approach. All that sodium to make soda would have to be produced somehow, without emitting almost any CO2. This, I have doubts about feasibility.

Wright told CNN that he hand-picked the four researchers and one economist who authored the Trump administration report: John Christy and Roy Spencer, both research scientists at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, Steven E. Koonin of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Georgia Tech professor emeritus Judith Curry and Canadian economist Ross McKitrick.

Straight out of joke country. :o

There is nothing to do with the goods that are supposed to be bought, definitely at the price they sell - and the investments are supposed to be made voluntarily by the private sector.

Nobody's going to do it. There's no incentive mechanism and no enforcement mechanism except warm vapour out of politicians' mouths.

Realistically about 30% of this is maybe going to happen.

Also, what "all times in history" are you referring to? I doubt you have an overview of all trade disputes between the US and EU, and their outcomes.

As an EU resident: we promised him that during the next migration of flying unicorns, they would land in the US.

We're not even going to cheat. Unfortunately flying unicorns don't exist.

100% prevention is probably unattainable, but in case of the childrens' camp an early word of competent instruction "get away from rivers and find shelter on high ground" would have probably helped a lot. Even if it would have woken up only 10% of the people, they could have woken up the rest.

As a minimum, a local emergency deparment should have an automatic interface to the nearest weather radar. If a radar scan suggests "ocean falling down", people should be alerted with text messages in the same way they'd be alerted of a wildfire, chemical leak or incoming missile strike.