The hidden world of Ants

At the borders of those societies, they fight the most destructive within-species conflicts, in terms of individual fatalities, that the planet has ever known.

there are roughly 200,000 times more ants on our planet than the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way.

individuals from the same species or group can be expected to accept and cooperate with each other even when they have never met before.

Human efforts to control ants are regularly described as a war

As our world turns alien, trying to think like an alien will be a better route to finding the imagination and humility needed to keep up with the changes than looking for ways in which other species are like us.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-strange-and-turbulent-global-world-of-ant-geopolitics

without housing first, people will continue to die

‘illness in our patients isn’t just a biological phenomenon. It’s the manifestation of social inequality in people’s bodies.’

Medical textbooks usually don’t discuss fixing your patient’s housing. They seldom include making sure your patient has enough food and some way to get to a clinic. But textbooks miss what my med students don’t: that people die for lack of these basics.

https://kottke.org/24/04/end-stage-poverty-is-killing-people-in-safety-net-free-america

https://kottke.org/24/04/end-stage-poverty-is-killing-people-in-safety-net-free-america

if the Dutch can, then surely we can too

Pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles can all coexist without conflict, but only if they’re all going the same slow speed. This advances the principles of shared streets.

n simple terms, the Downs-Thomson paradox claims that traffic will increase without limit until the option of public transport (or any other form of transport) becomes faster than the equivalent trip by car. It draws the conclusion that people do not care whether they drive, walk, bike, or take the bus to any location — they just want to get from A to B in the fastest and most convenient way possible.

https://kottke.org/24/03/how-the-dutch-solved-street-design

Bikes > Cars

The average modern person, by one calculation, spends more than 1,600 hours a year to pay for their cars, their insurance, fuel and repairs. We go to jobs partly to pay for the cars, and we need the cars mostly to get to jobs. We spend four of our sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering the resources for the car.

Older people here remember when the bicycle was the most popular method for getting from one village to another, and the roads were safer then with so few cars. It’s possible that the schoolchildren of today will see those days again.

Loneliness is…

loneliness is defined as a discrepancy between the social life one has and the social life one would like to have.

the opposite of loneliness is shared agency.

There is a virtuous circle here: we need agency to work with one another, and we need one another to realize our own agency. 

Loneliness is not soporific, like depression; it is depression’s frenetic cousin, goading us to seek some sense of belonging, however ill-conceived or dangerous. 

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/whats-behind-americas-loneliness-crisis