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I like what you mean by fundamentally sane, it fits a concept I've been thinking about but couldn't articulate. There are a lot of people who have bizarre ideas about what could be possible visions of the future. I recall an exchange on twitter. Someone like Roko or Alexander Kruel was saying 'oh we could easily fit a trillion people on Earth based on these technical factors' and one of the trad-rightists said something like 'so what, that has nothing to do with the good life, they aren't needed to be squires or knights in the small bands of bodybuilders roaming across the American plains on horseback'.
On the left there are those EcoSophia declining-efficiency of energy production people who think peak oil will eventually result in civilization collapsing down to mid 19th century level forever and that this is a good thing, since it'll reduce human arrogance and get us more in touch with the environment. I particularly dislike the psychoanalytic tone they take, saying that nuclear power and so on is a cope that people clutch to so they can hold onto their preferred incarnation of decadent modernity. The figures don't bear that out.
Now there are all kinds of formidable technical and socio-political problems in achieving our vision of the good life, sovereignty amongst posthumans. I think it's a very long shot, that there are competitive pressures that lead to autocracy or monopoly of a very few. Yet we can't turn back now and play Cowboys and Indians or Trad Farmers. There is no going back, no unilateral disarmament of industry, wealth and power. Much as I might prefer that AI development be paused for many decades so that we can upgrade ourselves steadily and establish a solid political/technical/social foundation, I recognize that it's not practical to hold back, competition won't allow it.
The bodybuilders on horseback would get pummelled by riflemen circa 1870, let alone the drone swarms of 2070. If their vision of the future doesn't include massively more technology than we have now, they're going to get crushed. Likewise with immortality and massive cognitive enhancements. If they're even on offer, we're doing well.
As one of the people who most commonly link to Ecosophia on this site, I don't believe you have an accurate understanding of the claims being made. The first reason is your placing of Ecosophia on the left - where exactly on the left does pro-Trump Burkean conservatism lie? Your post here isn't just counter to what JMG actually believes but I believe it contains a misreading that he was complaining about having to clear up back in 2011, specifically the idea that the collapse will be sudden or immediately noticeable, like a sharp fall off a cliff which leaves us back in the 19th century forever (though I freely admit I may be misinterpreting you here).
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-01-20/onset-catabolic-collapse/
JMG has not been talking about the coming zombie apocalypse where a giant cataclysm completely and dramatically upends the existing order of things - the Long Descent lies outside the "apocalypse/star trek" dichotomy that's so prevalent in modern society. And on the topic of technology, here are some of his actual words on the subject.
https://unherd.com/2022/03/we-are-the-authors-of-our-decline/
Look at what happened to the technology of past civilisations that ended up collapsing. Some Roman architecture still stands to this day, and plenty of the advancements that were made during the Empire were preserved and helped make sure that the dark ages afterwards were a bit more tolerable. The collapse of Rome didn't leave humanity doomed to pre-Roman technology for all time, and the collapse of modern Western civilisation won't do the same either. It's highly likely that bicycles and a lot of the other technology we've developed will be used well into the future, assuming that those skills and ideas are preserved through the decline.
More importantly, the collapse that JMG has been writing about for the last two decades isn't some far-off "eventually" - it is happening now, right outside our windows. In huge swathes of the US you can just look outside and see exactly what he's talking about. To wit:
The collapse of Rome was not evenly and equally distributed - the Byzantines kept on going for quite some time, and it is highly likely that parts of the modern west will do the same. On that note, you've also missed one of the other central points of his hypothesis - that another civilisation will eventually be born on the other side of the dark ages we're headed towards. The fall or collapse of a civilisation is not a permanent end to human history, but another iteration of a process that we have an increasingly accurate understanding of.
I agree with you about what he predicts I think, it's just that it's hard to summarize a quasi-ideology in a single sentence. A lot is riding on the 'eventually' in my sentence. I did read a couple of posts from him where he says 'no the collapse won't be sharp but a steady decline, perhaps accelerating at some points under various competitive pressures'. Also, is he not on the left? I thought the whole 'archdruid' thing and a fairly anti-capitalist tint shone through his work, along with the ecological emphasis. Maybe left-right isn't so clear with these unusual ideologies. Also, since when was he pro-Trump? I never saw anything like that.
This is just bad management of resources and bad politics. If the US decided to criminalize drug dealing as opposed to leaving these festering open-air drug markets... If the US and most of the West wasn't 'investing' in inefficient renewables as opposed to nuclear energy... If the US and West generally didn't decide to send our manufacturing base overseas to China...
Look at the actual predictions he made from the 2011 link:
And then we had the fracking boom! US oil production reached a record high in 2019, contra Greer. Likewise with global oil production. COVID hit and then we had the war in Ukraine which have thrown things out of whack, yet these crises don't stem from energy problems, they stem from human stupidity in geopolitics and biomedical research. The West's leaders have been working around the clock to sabotage the fossil fuel industry, shut down pipelines like Keystone, ban exploration, shut down power plants, impose punitive taxes, engage in lawfare against coal mines.
I said that civilization would collapse down to 19th century standards, I got the sense that he predicted permanent stagnation. Did he not deride all alternate energy sources, including nuclear, as cope? What is left to build back on if there's no fossil fuels, nuclear or anything? Hydro alone seems rather limited. You can definitely maintain civilizations with 19th century tech, use charcoal and so on. Yet technological civilizations like ours need more power IMO.
Anyway, my primary disagreement with him is that we are not short of energy. There's plenty of uranium and thorium if only we bother to use 50-year old, simple technologies like breeder reactors, if only we get rid of all the red tape that slows down construction. The state-sponsored sabotage of nuclear energy is staggering - see https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
Likewise, sulphate aerosols could reverse climate change in a matter of years, if only we chose to deploy them.
Nuclear energy is actually cheaper than coal for electricity in technical terms, it's just that we choose to make it more expensive. More broadly, all the time we're finding new efficiencies, new sources of power, new ways to accelerate development. Fracking is just one example. Peak oil was supposed to come in 1974, 2006, then 2011, it still hasn't come and it won't mean anything more than 'peak whale oil' ever did when it does come, since we'll be onto gas, nuclear fission and fusion, or solar if it ever becomes economically viable. That is, provided our leaders are wise enough to do their jobs correctly, as opposed to flailing around like children. That's what was going on with Rome and Byzantium, their energy sources were stable but their leadership became incompetent.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-21/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-resentment/
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-kek-wars-part-one-aristocracy-and-its-discontents/
I am honestly surprised that you have read his work at all if those are the conclusions you drew from it. His articles about Trump were some of his most popular and he wrote an entire book on the subject (a good read, in my opinion). Yes, he does care about the environment, but that's not really unexpected for Burkean conservatives and was in fact traditional for conservatism for a large portion of history. He quite literally has a Master Conserver certificate, and Conservation and Conservatism both share a root word after all.
"If the US decided" - how exactly is that going to happen? The political deadlock and inability of the state to solve these problems ARE collapse! Yes, the US government could just decide to turn around and fix a lot of the problems that society is facing, but this is like saying alcoholism is easy to fix - after all, one just needs to stop drinking and the problem is gone. There's a galaxy of competing interests and power-politics that get in the way of actually resolving the hard problems that face complex societies, and this gridlock is one of the common features of declining empires.
Allow me to quote the man himself on the topic:
Fracking isn't a new technology - when Greer spoke about and evaluated his predictions, he mentioned that he didn't expect the flurry of financial gimmicks that ended up allowing the fracking boom to take place. That said I don't have a citation for this one, and I can't find the evaluation he did because it is on his older, archived blog.
He did not predict permanent stagnation at all - and in fact he even points out that the ragged curve of decline will include periods of recovery and prosperity as society is forced to reduce energy expenditures. As for deriding nuclear, yes he did... and while I would very much like him to be wrong, I haven't seen any evidence that he is.
https://www.ecosophia.net/beyond-the-peak/
Show me the functioning nuclear power plant that generates energy in a sustainably profitable way (this includes taking waste handling into account) and I'll be overjoyed and freely admit that he was wrong. Oh, and remember that if you are trying to make a proposal for a future plant you can't just instantly vaporise the existing US government and replace them with a squad of enlightened technocrats - if you want to get rid of that regulation you have to explain how you're going to do that from within the confines of the current political system, and all the graft and corruption that entails.
The same renewable energy sources that powered every empire before the age of fossil fuel usage and extraction - the sun, human and animal muscle, hydro, wind and a few others. You're right when you say that technological civilizations like ours need more power - which means that when we no longer have that power, we no longer have the technological civilization like ours. Renewable energy is indeed unable to power an incredibly wasteful and environmentally ruinous society like our current one, but being unable to support modern society doesn't mean they're useless. Of course the problem is that in order to achieve a smooth transition to renewables the date we have to start making the change is, iirc, about 1974 - but while we've missed that boat, renewables will definitely play a part in the future.
I only read a couple of his articles, the ones where he talks about net returns from energy and explains his ideology and predictions. It reads to me more like he's anti-elite than pro-Trump.
I meant permanent stagnation in the end - he said we'd never be going to space. A wavy line heading down, then stagnation.
Firstly, waste is not even a small problem. There's so little of it that it can just be put in boxes, taken to a warehouse in a desert and left there, perhaps with some guards. It's only the very stupid people in the US government who insist on ridiculous nonsense like spending billions inspecting the geology of Cheyenne mountain to establish whether any waste will leak out over 10,000 years (unironically having legal cases about whether 10,000 years was too short a time span), promising to build a permanent waste dump and then not doing it for decades. In the US today, waste is just stored in boxes next to the nuclear plants because there's so little. In a smarter world, it'd be taken to breeder reactors to be used for fuel, yet nobody bothered to develop that technology because uranium is too cheap.
Anyway, the functioning power plants that generate energy in a sustainably profitable way! See link, see the chart of nuclear power plant construction costs by country: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
The nuclear power plants that South Korea has just built for example, cost about $2000 per kilowatt (USD 2010) in capacity. That is to say they'll then produce energy basically for free, because contra Greer, uranium is very cheap because of its insane energy density. 80% of the cost of nuclear energy is building the reactor, nobody even bothered developing breeders because there's no shortage of uranium.
Nuclear power plants in the US were cheap and profitable to produce, then Three Mile Island happened (a massive nothingburger where nobody was hurt, compared to the hundreds of thousands who die from air pollution annually) and the US decided 'let's make it really hard to build nuclear power plants, let's make it take 5-10 years longer, let's refuse to give a single permission for about 30 years so we choke our nuclear industry to death'. See the graph here: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overnight-Construction-Cost-and-Construction-Duration-of-US-Nuclear-Reactors-Color_fig6_292964046
Also, consider this graph: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Historical-Cost-Experience-Curve-of-Coal-Power-compared-with-Cost-Experience-Curves-of_fig12_292964046
Nuclear power is roughly comparable to coal power in the cost of plants (slightly more expensive), when it's not grossly mismanaged. But the cost of a nuclear plant contributes much more to the cost of the electricity than with coal. Coal needs trainloads of fuel after all. Nuclear power is cheap as long as the reactors don't cost 3x more than they should because govt regulators invent insane nonsense to pump up those costs:
This is the kind of nonsense that the US government inflicts on the nuclear industry, along with refusing to grant permits for any new plants after Three Mile Island for decades. Meanwhile in Korea they waited ages before shooting themselves in the foot with the renewables meme and built a fair few cheap nuclear plants.
Decommissioning isn't a major problem either. It's because of an irrational phobia of radiation that people even raise this as a problem. A few thousand tonnes of mildly radioactive steel, who cares? That's about 200 truck loads, peanuts in the grand scheme of things. We could put it in another warehouse in a desert. Civilizations produce waste, the planet is big, mining anything creates huge amounts of toxic, often radioactive, waste. We know how to deal with waste.
Furthermore, the onus is on Greer to explain why nuclear power is inherently unprofitable, (and not merely unprofitable but incapable of sustaining technological civilization) he doesn't even provide a single statistic, just cites a first-in-its-class cargo ship. Revolutionary, innovative tech is often uneconomical.
I can't vaporize the US government but some combination of the PLA and the American people can and will. It's not competitive to have leaders who pursue bad economic/energy policy. The power of competition automatically rewards the wise and punishes the stupid. People are going to realize that renewables don't work, that we can't just build tens of thousands of kilometres more transmission cables, produce more copper than we've produced in the whole of human history in 30 years... People will go back to tech that actually works, coal, gas, oil and nuclear. We can do some more unconventional exploration and unleash the power of the market, end the sabotage campaign. In my country, nuclear power plants are actually illegal! The idiots in government will change their tune very quickly if they face a lynch mob and efficient, energy-rich foreign war machines.
Oh no, not you too with the scary extrapolations. It certainly looks like in the last 30 years we have produced more copper than in the whole of human history, or close to it. (and every thirty years before that too: eyeballing it: 400 million tonnes for 1990-2020, 180 for 1960-1990 , 80 for 1930-1960 and then it decreases at the same pace) .
Remember when we had to scrap our plans to put high capacity telephone/internet wires into every home because we ran out of copper, which previously did the job? Not like we switched to fiber optics, which is better in every way.
When will you learn? We’re not going to run out of anything we need.
I'm sympathetic in general to anti-resource-scarcity arguments, since these resources are fungible in the end. But the whole point of markets is to use cheap resources, not expensive ones. Electric cars, renewable energy and cables all use huge amounts of copper. It makes more sense to use copper where it's most useful and other materials elsewhere. Likewise with batteries. It's possible in principle to dig up a lot more lithium but it is expensive to do so, an uneconomical use of resources. Just build lots of baseload power, then we won't need batteries!
On the broad scale of civilizations, we don't run out of resources because we move from one resource to another, adapting dynamically rather than dogmatically pursuing a chosen energy source. We can locally run out of certain resources and suffer for it if there are manipulations to the market or sudden disruptions. There's not that much coal left in the UK but it's OK because there's North Sea Gas and eventually fracking, plus imports, plus nuclear energy. And once all the uranium is gone we move on to fusion (or well before, depending on prices). Whereas if we just demanded coal production keep rising forever, then there would be problems. Likewise with copper.
Sure. Do you acknowledge my point about the last 30 years of production versus the entirety of the past though? Shows that in resource matters, even informed anti-peakists like you have wrong instincts about how this all really works. It's amazing, really. And it has nothing to do with day-to-day experiences like emptying a bottle, the heuristics are useless .
Sure, those production statistics were really impressive!
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Then you did not read enough of his work to form a worthwhile opinion of it. He has been writing essays for the internet since 2006 - and a lot of his work on peak oil and alternative energy sources is in his old, archived blog which he is now selling (you can read it for free in various archive places, but my old links no longer work).
This is emphatically not what he has said or predicted, apart from the "never going to space" part. The wavy line heading down is modern western industrial civilisation - eventually it will die and another civilisation will take its place, with its own birth, growth, peak and decline. This process will continue and continue for an awfully long time, but eventually the last human will be born and die. There's no stagnation here - just a continuation of the course of history. Ever heard of the Bronze Age collapse?
He has been writing on this subject for close to two decades now, and has had the nuclear energy debate several times. His demand for advocates of nuclear remains the same: demonstrate a nuclear power system that has an EROEI capable of sustaining modern civilisation (i.e. it has to at the very least come close to matching petroleum). "Uneconomical" is actually a death sentence when it comes to energy production in this context.
If you're correct, why hasn't a single nation on Earth produced the kind of nuclear power grid you're talking about? Nuclear power makes a lot of sense for some contexts (does a great job powering military submarines) but I have not seen a single example of nuclear power being used or able to support the kind of energy demands required of a modern industrial society. Nuclear power does not provide the EROEI to sustain modern society - and the kind of nuclear power pipedream you've been describing has been just a few years away in the future for longer than I have been alive. I very much hope and wish that I am wrong in this case and too-cheap-to-meter power is just around the corner, but I just haven't been convinced and neither has JMG.
That said, while I'm more than happy to continue this discussion, I'd prefer it if you went and read more of his work. I enjoy having substantial and weighty discussions on contentious topics like this, but JMG is a better writer than I am and more than capable of explaining himself. You're not getting any value at all from simply having me go "No, that's not what he believes, see this essay.".
But if we're not heading to space, then we must be stuck with pre-industrial tech, right? Notwithstanding individual civilizations rising and falling, we'd be stuck at pre-industrial technology forever, in his model.
France? Their grid primarily runs off nuclear power. French electricity is quite cheap by European standards and remember that they export a fair bit, so their prices are pushed up: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/
The financial disasters were manufactured by the US government that sabotaged nuclear industry, deliberately raising costs. After 1978, the US had plants redesigned while they were being constructed, introduced all kinds of regulatory nonsense, having workers strip out parts and replace them... South Korea has been producing cheap nuclear plants in the last decade. China is doing it. India is doing it. It's not hard, it's just that an increasing number of countries are allergic to doing these things correctly. Nuclear energy is like high speed rail. It is completely possible and perfectly practical if you do it right (France, Japan, China). It is very expensive if you do it wrong (UK, California). It's not 'a few years today' it's being done, it has been done 40 years ago by the French.
Take the Washington Power Company. Did it fail in the 1960s? The early 1970s? No, it failed in the early 1980s just after the US decided to start wrecking the nuclear industry. Greer doesn't explain why the cost of US nuclear power plants suddenly spikes after 1978, why construction times ballooned 5-10 years then specifically (and why this EROEI issue apparently doesn't apply to South Korea, China or India). The laws of physics apply across the entire universe. The woes of nuclear energy are based in human stupidity, not physics.
Yes, nuclear energy needs subsidies. But not for the reasons Greer would have us believe but because it's a big long-term investment that pays off slowly, over decades. Once the plant is built, it can run for fifty years or more at very low fuel costs and very high capacity factor. There's an obvious role for government in subsidizing long-term investments like education, sanitation and so on. Nuclear power is similar. Markets don't like investments that governments might regulate into oblivion or suddenly cancel midway through construction, either.
The reason I don't like Greer is because he doesn't provide a single shred of evidence to back up his arguments and prove causal links. I've spent 10 minutes looking for a more detailed analysis from him about nuclear power than a few unreferenced paragraphs. It isn't there. I've linked papers and statistics that actually discuss in a quantitative and rigorous way what the costs of nuclear energy actually are. Since we know they differ from plant to plant, country to country, we can discuss why this might be based upon reason and logic. Greer just tells a story that has no relation to reality. Compare Greer with this book review: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop. There are numbers! Figures! Graphs! Actual analysis based upon data, as opposed to dogma. Greer is a good writer and is good at telling a story but that story is not true! He combines ignorance with arrogance in a very unattractive way.
No, this is not what his model suggests at all. He wrote an entire book about this and you can just read the blurb to see what he thinks on this topic - https://www.amazon.com.au/Ecotechnic-Future-Envisioning-Post-Peak-World/dp/0865716390
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/06/frances-edf-to-be-fully-nationalised-borne-.html
France's electrical power system is currently about to be nationalised because it has taken on so much debt, and they were forced to import power from other nations during periods of high demand. To argue against the claim that nuclear power generation is unprofitable without government subsidies you have produced a system which is unprofitable, fails to provide adequate power during times of peak demand and is about to receive even more government subsidies in the form of nationalisation. This is evidence FOR Greer's position!
The most concise summation of Greer's position on nuclear I can find is the following paragraph, from the article "Too little, too late."
Again, the answer here is real easy: just provide the commercially successful nuclear plant which pays for itself with power generation (nuclear power plants are worth having around anyway due to their ability to generate useful isotopes for medical/research purposes). Take EROEI into account and demonstrate that the nuclear power plant can produce enough energy to be economically viable - and remember to take the various invisible subsidies petroleum supplies into account as well. So far this hasn't happened, and while again, I'd love to be proved wrong, I just don't see why this hasn't happened. A successful nuclear power plant of the type you're claiming would be so significant that it would have a major impact on global geopolitics, and yet this just hasn't happened (why has regulation managed to stop nuclear power from achieving viability in every single place on earth?).
You've claimed that his arguments are wrong when you do not have even the slightest clue what his position actually is and routinely make absurdly incorrect assertions about his views because you do not have enough familiarity with his work to debate it coherently. If you are going to speak with confidence about someone, you should have more knowledge and understanding of their position than you've demonstrated here. You're accusing him of combining ignorance and arrogance while you look at a vanishingly small section of his work and assume that you know better than he does on the basis of that tiny slice without even being able to accurately identify which wing of politics he belongs to.
You're splitting hairs. There are three possible outcomes. Technological development and energy use keep going up and we become an interstellar civilization. They stagnate and we get stuck somewhere below where we are now. Or we are wiped out. He clearly dismisses 1 and 3. Therefore he agrees with 2. It's as simple as that.
So what? Companies take on excessive debt and are restructured from time to time. French electricity prices are low, France exports electricity every year on net. They undertook various manipulations of prices, forcing EDF to sell at artificially low prices to competitors or other countries, forcing them to buy at higher market prices, imposing price caps in 2022 to protect consumers...
EDF was profitable literally every year but 2022: https://www.statista.com/statistics/279640/consolidated-net-income-of-edf/
And yes, there was corrosion and power outages at reactors because they are old and need replacing (which France simply hasn't done because they too have been drinking the renewables cool aid). You crow at one year of unprofitability but sneer at 15 years of profits?
Right, we're agreed here, this is what he thinks. He does not provide even a single citation or anything at all to back up his point. This guy thinks he knows more about nuclear energy than the actual scientists who write papers about it (with statistics and everything) and doesn't deign to provide any evidence! He's clearly read none of the literature about the reverse learning by doing that plagues US nuclear energy. He doesn't understand the importance of interest rates, regulation, political risks in prices. Even then it's still profitable: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-14/why-nuclear-power-once-cash-cow-now-has-tin-cup-quicktake-q-a#xj4y7vzkg
This article alone torpedoes Greer's entire ideology, it explains how cheap gas has been outcompeting otherwise profitable nuclear energy, even in one of the most hostile environments for nuclear energy, the US. It also helps shed light on the complexities he doesn't understand, how there's a role for subsidizing long-term energy sources that temporarily aren't profitable for when gas prices rise.
Just step back and think about what Greer is saying. Nuclear power plants (all of them, in every country) are commercially unprofitable, not just at some times based on volatile oil prices, macroeconomic conditions or political interference but always and forever! Do you realize how insane this sounds? All these investors just line up to get zero returns? Of course nuclear power is, has and will be profitable, despite the best efforts of a very well organized sabotage campaign.
This is a meaningless and impossible demand. How am I supposed to know what the 'invisible subsidy' of petroleum is? Even Greer admitted that it just comes down to prices at the end of the day. The price of nuclear energy is low. That's why people spend billions building these plants and operating them. I have already linked papers that show that nuclear is as cheap as fossil fuels if the plants are built correctly at $2000, as in Korea.
He's a crank that projects his own ignorance on nuclear 'fanboys', making snide remarks about them and refuses to provide any factual substantiation at all for his claims. There's no need to look at his 'work', which is free from any basis in fact or scholarly convention.
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My mistake, I found his look at fracking: https://www.ecosophia.net/a-sense-of-deja-vu/
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Unironic endorsement of degrowth is something that makes me doubt my own sanity when I read it, because it strikes me as requiring a deeply broken model of the world to not even see how much all of the technology and progress we take for granted is pushed along by an abundance of cheap energy and an ever increasing number of minds who can employ that energy to new tasks.
At least in the case of those who acknowledge the horrors that would result from such activities and then accept them with open eyes, I can see that we simply have fundamental values differences, as much as I think of them irredeemably evil moral mutants from our perspective.
But worse are the OOMs larger number of useful idiots who enable them, the Extinction Rebellion advocates of the world, who think that we can slam the brakes on industry without ruining the QOL of the globe, any hope for a rising tide that raises the boat of the Global South, or even worse, the death of billions from starvation and fighting as the world goes from an iterated positive sum game where, grossly, the average person keeps doing better, to one that's outright negative sum in outlook.
At least the Powers that Be aren't particularly fond of them, for all that they're often bumbling idiots themselves. But you can never rest easy in a democratically run asylum where at any moment the inmates can vote themselves into power.
I wish I could say that the number of people explicitly oriented towards an optimistic vision of the future, like you, me or Kruel, who think that humanity deserves to do better, outnumber the kooks who fervently desire the opposite.
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