The first law of science fiction writing is for it to be an entertaining story. It is not a rigorous essay of a scientific or philosophical subject.

decline happened in the 1980's if you want to get technical. Peak was in the 1970's. Bottomed out in the 2010's and leveled off by 2018.

The Great Depression is the peak era for suicides in the US (up to 22 in 100k)

I consider my posts to be ephemeral and for the moment alone.

If life appeared and didn't make it to a continental shelf then again beat the odds and fall under conditions for fossilization, then there may be no record of the vast majority of times life came about and disappeared. Over the deep ocean, fossilization is not favorable and much of the ocean crust is subducted within 200 My. (and individual plates more like 20-30 My)

If we could trigger life in a lab, or find more instances of it occurring, we could build a statistical model and estimate how many times it occurred. Possibly with some confidence on the lower and upper bounds.

I received a merino wool t-shirt (Unbound Merino) as a gift. Great shirt, but it takes a certain kind of person to buy $95 t-shirts that are recommended to be hand-washed and dried flat.

If law enforcement was interested in catching criminals they could have a full time job without every leaving the police station. Instead they show that they can't deal with the so-called "few bad apples".

A far-left take on what the role of law enforcement is can be summed up as the Role of Police is Protecting Capitalism

we're going to accidentally Andromeda Strain ourselves.

Suicide rates are down overall and down with teens compared to the 80's and 90's. For people who grew up in that period and are in the 40's to 60's, the suicide rate is up.

I get about 10 emails a week about my GitHub projects. AI generated offers to improve my standing, more stars and forks.

Intelligence isn't applied evenly even in humans. A genius at Magic: The Gathering is not necessarily the most adept at social cues like knowing when to wear deodorant.

But Hillary's emails!

In principle, it should be possible to develop a vaccine for certain forms of mental illness. Regrettably, no such thing currently exists and antivaxers are probably too far gone.

I got my first cellphone from a Sprint PCS store, which dates me. After that, I would just but whatever phone I felt like at Fry's or Best Buy or online. Main advantage of doing the store was I was able to pick my phone number from a list she had on the screen. And after all that I didn't keep the number because years later someone was convinced it was their number and would harass me once or twice a month about "stealing" their number. I don't need a telephone number that badly, and if some crazy person loses their shit because of it then they can have it, it means more to them than to me.

about 20% of arsons are cleared. You don't need a camera in the forest to catch someone.

Mostly by the sort of people who typically lack the resources to avoid prison. So I don't see the big deal. They can play stupid games and win stupid prizes.