Particularly liked this quote:

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires” — Ronald Wright, 2004.

Absolutely wonderful, except that I may now not be able to ride my bike mindlessly at all, so full will it be with physics.

Thanks Waxy.

You can say or think oh shut up, what's the big deal, it's just progress and it'll be fine, but there's more to it than that. What if you couldn't buy a plain hammer--only an electronic nail gun? You couldn't buy a kitchen knife, only a Cuisinart? No pencils and pens, only computers?

States and civilizations have collapsed many times in the past. But we’re in an unprecedented situation globally today, with such a vast population so reliant on high-energy resource flows orchestrated by a tightly-organized global network of centralized states increasingly incapable of organizing those flows, whose citizenries are extraordinarily alienated from the material and mental resource base needed to generate local livelihoods.

I think Bumper is onto something here for sure, in that the main reason for big download numbers is to sell advertising, whereas I would just like some sort of measure of whether people find my episodes interesting and whether that is going up or down. If data collection could be automated ...

I'm sure I could make use of at least some of this, in my bumbling, amateur way. I also wish it wasn't a Twitter thread. Need to find time to save the details for myself.