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Cake day: October 9th, 2023

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  • Qin or Qing? Because those two dynasties are separated by about 2000 years. For reference, this is the guy depicted and he was a legalist of the state of Qin. He’s a pretty interesting dude, with the foundational work for Chinese legalism being attributed (at least in part) to him.

    Also he was executed by being torn into pieces, which is pretty metal.


  • I mean, there’s an infrastructure problem that’s worth considering. With low enough population density, it could become no longer feasible or worth it to maintain large-scale, country/globe spanning infrastructure projects such as power grids or undersea fiber optic networks. This infrastructure didn’t matter much a few thousand years ago, but it’s pretty critical now, so the same rules don’t necessarily apply.

    I don’t know how likely I consider this outcome to actually be, as you’d need a very steep decline, but it’s at least worth keeping in mind.



  • Correct me if I’m wrong, but It’s my understanding that no one such burning ever occurred at the library of Alexandria. Instead, it burned in part (though how large these parts were is probably impossible to know, simply that none of them warranted the wholesale closure of the library) on several occasions, with the true death blow seemingly being the simple fact that by the time of the 200s AD, Alexandria was not nearly so important a city as it used to be, and so funding dried up.