Hard agree from me. Cars are such an inefficient use of resources its crazy. If I had it my way we would all get around by train, tram, or bike.

Im a Canadian geologist so I obviously dont have any personal stake in this but I do want to share my thoughts.

I think anti-mining sentiment is understandable in most places but not always justifiable. Lithium mining is absolutely required to transition from fossil fuels. Unless the number of cars on the road is greatly reduced, replacing them with BEVs will require significant amounts of lithium or improvements to Na ion batteries. There is not enough lithium available to get by just on recycling.

The question then becomes: where should this lithium come from? If it is not mined in western countries like USA or Canada, it will be mined by China or developing countries. In this comparison, who has better environmental regulations? Which countries have more human rights abuse?

If we decide that we can mine these deposits in the west, there is still a question about where they are mined. Do we extract lithium from basinal brines? My understanding is that these are generally more environmentally risky than extraction from pegmatites (the deposit type in New England).

The final question becomes, which communities will have to accept this mining? In Canada, most of the time it is indigenous communities that suffer most of the negative impacts of mining. There are many benefits to the communities too (usually), but the indigenous communities do not have nearly as much political sway as say rich cottage owners might, so their preferences and desires often get steamrolled by government in the name of “progress”.

The unfortunate reality is that if we want to get rid of fossil fuels, we need to do a lot more mining and extraction or come up with some serious technological and societal innovation. In a globalized economy, saying that you dont want mining near your home means that you want some other people to deal with the potentially negative consequences of it. I am not saying that we need to allow all mining everywhere, but these are important ethical considerations that we have to make when talking about how we want society to progress.

Sorry for the rant.

Oh I see, thats very interesting thank you! Are you an archaeologist, or just someone very interested in stone-age history?

Where do European Neanderthals fit into this story?

I feel this way after finishing grad school and going into industry. Nobody wants to just nerd out

What is the limit of a “community”? I live in a city where it is certainly not practical to grow the food needed to feed the city inside thr city limits. On thr other hand, in my province there is tons of high quality land that would be more than sufficient to grow enough food for the whole province, especially if the food system shifted to a vegetarian-focused one. Thats a lot bigger than my “community” but it is a lot more practical and arguably more sustainable.

One issue i had with typst that was never an issue with LaTeX is dealing with big documents. One of the reports I was putting together had a very big appendix with a lot of images. I run typst locally and it autocompiles as you write, but with more images, it uses more RAM and everything slows down. The problem I had was that the thing would crash every time I tried to write anything. I turned off automobile and do it manually now, but it still cant so the full document with the appendix. My work around was to compile the appendix separately and in ten page increments, then merge the pdfs afterwards. This sort of thing would never be an issue in LaTeX with the added convenience of draft mode for big documents with lots of figures.

In fairness, this behavior is definitely a result of some bug and compiling everything is still significantly faster than LaTeX.

Another thing that kind of bothers me is references. I am a big fan of the natbib way of writing \citet or \citep. In Typst, you normally type “@Doe2026” and it produces a normal citation like \citep, but if you want anything else, you have to use the far more cumbersome #cite command or define a custome function. Its not that big of a deal but still annoying for me.

I’ve used both and while Typst is very impressive and usable, it still has not reached feature parity with LaTeX. That being said, there are some aspects to Typst that are either do not exist in LaTeX or are extremely user unfriendly. Tables for instance, are very easy to import into Typst and can be done directly from a CSV file. I’ve also personally taken advantage of the YAML import feature to automatically generate appendices from notes that could not reasonably fit into a table. I’ve definitely had my fair share of experiences wrestling with Typst to do things that are trivial in LaTeX but overall I have a good experience with it. I use it for some report writing at work (and I use a latex-like report template) and so far prefer it to LaTeX. I suggest you try it out and see if it works for you.

This is wild, Russian history is kind of crazy

What do you mean “turned the military into a democracy”?

Damn, so Russia could have been a Democratic Socialist country if it weren’t for this error?

Im impressed you got to the end with how much shitposting you do! Congrats Dr. Fossilesque!

I’ve never seen sagduction so beautifully illustrated before

Archean eclogites? 🤔

And here I am in southern Ontario, fed up that im surrounded by lousy seds for hundreds of kilometers