Oh hell yeah! We can call it the Venus and Mars Rock Show :)

Study chaos theory. It's relatively new in that it didn't exist in the time of Galileo or Isaac Newton, but it's the exact model you need to predict what's happening.

Since it's chaotic it's impossible to pin down exact outcomes but the overall behavior is extremely stable and predictable. We know exactly what happens in a chaotic system, we know the exact threshold where periodic events break down and go into chaotic flow, we know specific signposts (such as Period Three Implies Chaos) telling us we're working with a chaotic system, and we know how to map out the extremes of statistically predictable behavior.

We're going to be seeing Cat 6 and probably Cat 7 within our lifetimes, guaranteed (and I know it's an exponential type of function, so I'll put cat 7 as a 'probably' and cat 6 as the 'guaranteed'). These are destructive events that rival anything warring nation-states can do to each other, especially since it's the earth's atmosphere doing it so it's not like you run out of nuclear warheads. The earth will not run out of wind and rain, so it will just keep happening.

These apparent outlier events telegraph the state of the underlying system, including phenomena like how quickly this one grew. Part of the increased energy in the chaotic system gives you things like the potential suddenness of weather events. We're seeing those in phenomena like cloudbursts, not just in cat 5 hurricanes.

Oh, come on, don't tell them that. It'll be hilarious!

A tornado hits peak winds for a relatively short period of time. A slow moving hurricane could maintain peak winds for an hour, or for hours.

I'm sure they're taking it more seriously than Slashdot is (predictable really) but it gets to a point where what CAN they do? Again, it's like telling people to prepare for a direct nuclear blast. Hours of 200 mph winds makes the entire world basically a sort of sandblaster, using flying shrapnel to scour away all traces of civilization. There ain't a lot you can do to prepare when Mother Nature's been chugging too many hydrocarbon espressos and goes into a seizure.

It's not entirely happened yet so this is a fine time to say 'it's not much of a hurricane'. Please wait until all the people have been killed before coming around all 'climate change is a myth and this was no big deal'.

This is no pissing contest, this is called 'hard experimental evidence'.

This is what large scale chaotic systems do when you steadily add energy to them.

Don't believe me? There will be the same headline next year, same 'unprecedented and strongest on record', but next year we're talking cat 6 or 7. Just as Patricia exploded into cat 5 faster than ever seen before, our global climate is exploding into new categories of storm with exactly the same trajectory for the exact same reason.

Understand climate. Study chaos. Learn. There's very little more important than that at this point.

Science knows this would happen. Ever since we started unlocking the secrets of chaotic systems this has been well understood. Climate’s the biggest chaotic system there is.

There is nothing weird about this at all. This is the new direction. Not the new normal because that implies they’re all going to be like this from now on. The reality’s worse.

The new normal is for each new weather disaster to be ‘unprecedented and weird’ and it’s been happening for years already and not slowing down but speeding up.

Alarmist? Fuck yes. Alarms are necessary and this is what they’re for. We are soon going to need to concentrate on clinging to life on this fucking planet, never mind ‘fighting climate change’. Climate’s WAAAAAY bigger than us. We’re pretty smart humans and we’ll succeed in adapting, but it’s gonna look like colonizing Venus and Mars put together, and one hell of a lot of innocent people will die in vast numbers trying to survive this.

Maybe we can string up some Koches at some point to make ourselves feel better, because this was DONE by the decisions of stupid people, much like an avalanche can be kicked off by a person pushing over a snowbank.

Failing that, somebody film this. Media might not want to undermine vested interests, but media can’t help but drool over footage of outrageous unthinkable destruction. Use that. Which is to say: please, dronebros, go and get your wealthy asses famous. It will be awesome footage, guaranteed ;P

No they don't, they really really don't. This following of guidelines has to be done by associates. They can and do gut their labor supply until they're staffed entirely by the most hopeless dead-end cases, and then pressure those people until they're scrambling to keep up, much like Amazon does in fact.

You can't DO produce like that. It bruises, damages and spoils and you get in situations where because everything's a wreck the customers feel no obligation to be decent w.r.t the other customers and it all becomes a complete shitshow.

Health guidelines go out the window. The other part of your statement is sadly (somewhat) true: yes, Walmart puts market pressure on everybody else to be just as much of a shitshow. Either everybody declines to match, or turns to weird things like Aldi where you're sort of picking your way around palettes of cardboard boxes full of counterfeit products that are hopefully shelf-stable for years. Very American, for all that it's a German import.

It only goes so far before people start bucking the trend by finding favorite stores that haven't declined so much, and playing favorites even in the teeth of Walmart price cuts. I realize it's heresy, but price isn't everything.

This is why freemarket capitalism fails so hard at so many things.

If the requirement is that all people have to be intelligent, rational, self-interested actors who will

Sorry, had to stop laughing for a moment there :)

We don't have the TIME or the attention to do all the research. We can't inspect our own meat, or look up the chemical composition of stuff used in our workplaces that is just 'mysterious solvent' to us so that we can determine it's not a safe chemical exposure and seek other employment, thus penalizing the company that's trying to use dangerous solvents.

Even when we CAN get information, we're only human and simply can't investigate every little corner of reality in order to come to personal, self-interested and rational decisions about all things. As Tommy Lee Jones in Men In Black put it, we're dumb panicky animals and you know it. The times that we can think and commmunicate and learn are special times, to be celebrated. On the whole, we need training wheels.

Of course too much choice is stressing us out. Modern culture is predicated upon dumping ALL the choices on us, as an explicit political system.

The opposite extreme is just as lame and nobody wants gray Communist food depots serving government cheese, but it's important to recognize how wacky we've let things become. We could deal with 500 kinds of jam if every detail of our employment, survival, safety etc. wasn't also left up to our so-impressive self-reliance as a sort of econo-religious tenet.

The funny thing is, more and more I'm seeing Youtube 'broadcast quality' decline to shit tier. I'm not sure what the criterion is for being allowed decent transcoding, but I do think it's getting rarer and rarer.

So you end up with all the garbage ever, and even if there's something good somebody made, it's probably being bandwidth throttled to death.

Abandoning YouTube is becoming not much of a loss. I can put on a simple DVD and it's shocking how much better it is. Perhaps this is the fate of all streaming, especially free consumer streaming where the consumer's actually the product for a declining advertiserbase.

That's interesting. Essentially, what you're saying is that under western market capitalism, the Mythbusters can't make a living being the Mythbusters?

Maybe they should get hired by the BBC or some such government-supported public service broadcasting system whose job it is to produce media that's worth seeing.

Nonsense. Just because Kari Byron wasn't Jamie-grade brilliant doesn't make her just a booth babe. She was and presumably is a good builder. She, like Tory, was one of the uncredited and unseen builders for the team, the fact that she got called to be onscreen talent was merely recognition of the supremely obvious.

If you want to think of Mythbusters at their best, think of their Pykrete show. They didn't know what was gonna happen freezing soaked newspaper, quickly worked out they had a material with amazing properties, built a boat that could take a full scale outboard motor, and took it out on the Bay successfully.

I think there was much truth in Adam telling Jamie, "It's a pleasure building strange craft with you sir".

THAT was Mythbusters. If they couldn't maintain it like that for very long, so what? Kudos to them for knowing when to pack it in, even if it took the loss of team members and a ratings-driven decline into pandering to convince 'em. Nobody wants to give up on something good, but good isn't the same thing as permanent.

No, if it was unabashedly they'd still be doing it and well paid for it.

It's because they have a kind of integrity that they're done. They had a good run, but what media needs from them now is just too obnoxious. Plus, Jamie and Adam don't like each other all that much, they just work well together. The more their show is 'media promo stunts bankrolled by movies and TV shows', the less actual work they have to do, and the more fake work and posing they end up doing. They don't like the fake work and posing, particularly having to do lots more of it per show after the build team got axed (presumably because they were demanding money and/or representation) so it's understandable that Jamie and Adam are done.

I strongly suspect they agree on that and are quitting together just as well as they've worked together. It's even a bit like solidarity with Kari, Tory and Grant. Discovery might have wanted to ditch the kids and put the Mythbusters to work being a media phenomenon with great movie/TV tie-in potential, but that myth is clearly busted.

So I guess I'm saying, Jamie and Adam whores? Myth BUSTED. You're wrong, it was their bosses the whole time and they've just quit.

Gosh, I thought it was POOR people who were the homeless problem in the Bay Area. Live and learn, I guess?