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    1. Fate of the Badhak Specifically By the Late Victorian period, the "Badhak" as a cohesive entity had been largely shattered by the earlier anti-Thuggee campaigns (1830s–1850s). Assimilation & Hiding: Survivors had likely assimilated into other related groups like the Bawaria or Sansi to escape the specific "Badhak" bounty hunters. Indentured Labor: Many were funneled into the "coolie" trade, shipped off to plantations in the Caribbean or Fiji, effectively "deporting" the problem. The "Badhak" Legacy: Their specific survival techniques—rapid movement, disguise, and tight information networks—lived on in the groups that absorbed them. The British obsession with "hereditary criminal tribes" was, in part, a paranoid fear that the Badhak thugees had never really gone away, but had just morphed into these famine-resistant bands.
  • The "Late Victorian Holocausts" (c. 1870s–1890s) were a collision of El Niño-induced droughts and British laissez-faire capitalism that killed 30–60 million people. For the "criminal tribes" (a colonial label for itinerant groups like the Badhak, Sansi, Kanjar, and Bawaria), this period was a double apocalypse: they faced mass starvation from the famine while simultaneously being hunted, caged, and criminalized by the newly enacted Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) of 1871. [1] The following details outline their specific survival strategies and the colonial state's mechanisms of control.

    1. The Double Burden: Famine & The Criminal Tribes Act

    While the general peasantry starved due to grain exports and market fundamentalism, groups like the Badhak faced a targeted war on their existence. The CTA labeled them "hereditary criminals," creating a legal framework to forcibly settle them just as the famine made settlement a death sentence. [2]

    • The Trap: Famines historically triggered migration to food-rich areas. The CTA, however, criminalized movement. To leave their prescribed district to find food was a non-bailable offense.
    • Forced Sedentarization: The British "planted out" these tribes into agricultural settlements to "civilize" them. In reality, these were often barren lands where they were expected to farm without skills or water, making them the first to starve when rains failed. [3, 4]

    2. Survival Strategies of the "Criminal" Networks## A. Dietary "Iron Cast" & Forbidden Foods

    While caste Hindus starved rather than break dietary taboos, the "criminal" tribes survived because their traditional diets were broader and more resilient. [1]

    • Scavenging & "Unclean" Meat: Groups like the Sansi and Kanjars were often stigmatized for eating animals that died of natural causes or were considered ritually unclean, such as jackals, lizards, field rats, and porcupines. During the famine, this taboo became a survival advantage.
    • Forest Knowledge: They relied on "famine foods" invisible to the British and settling peasants:
    • Roots & Tubers: Digging for deep-rooted yam varieties and kanta sag (thorny greens) that survived drought.
      • Processing Toxins: They possessed specific knowledge on how to leach toxins out of drought-resistant but poisonous seeds and barks to make them edible. [3]

    B. Strategic Mobility & "Chaotic Oscillation"

    The Badhak and similar groups used their mastery of disguise and movement to evade the "dragnet" of the famine police.

    • Fragmenting the Clan: To avoid detection, large tribal caravans broke into tiny family units. If a whole clan moved, they were arrested; if a single family moved, they might pass as distressed peasants.
    • The "Baghdass" Resistance: In regions like Bengal, groups identified as baghdass (likely a phonetic variation or offshoot of Badhak/Bawaria networks) used stilts to traverse flooded or difficult terrain rapidly, raiding grain stores and vanishing before police could respond.
    • Absconding from Relief Camps: When forced into "famine relief works" (labor camps with Buchenwald-level rations), many tribespeople simply absconded. They preferred the risk of police capture to the certainty of slow starvation in the camps.

    C. Weaponizing Kinship & Gender

    The state tried to break their networks by separating families, but the tribes used their social structures to survive.

    • Marriage as a Passport: Women often negotiated marriages to men in "un-proclaimed" districts. Since the police surveillance was often patrilineal or focused on the male "head," women could sometimes move more freely or use marriage to legally transfer their residence to a safer zone.
    • Refusal to Co-operate: Records show women refusing to join their "husbands" in penal settlements, effectively breaking the state's attempt to concentrate them in one controllable (and starving) location.

    D. "Social Banditry" & The Economy of Desperation

    With their traditional livelihoods (performing, herbal medicine, genealogies) destroyed by the economic collapse, many returned to or intensified "predatory" survival.

    • Grain Riots & Dacoity: British officials reported a spike in "dacoity" (gang robbery) during famines. For the tribes, this wasn't "crime" in the colonial sense; it was a moral economy. They raided grain trains and government storehouses—targets that were hoarding food while the people died.
    • Cattle Lifting: Stealing cattle wasn't just for food; it was a tradeable asset. In a famine, a cow could be traded for sacks of grain if moved to a region where prices were slightly better.

    3. Fate of the Badhak Specifically

    By the Late Victorian period, the "Badhak" as a cohesive entity had been largely shattered by the earlier anti-Thuggee campaigns (1830s–1850s).

    • Assimilation & Hiding: Survivors had likely assimilated into other related groups like the Bawaria or Sansi to escape the specific "Badhak" bounty hunters.
    • Indentured Labor: Many were funneled into the "coolie" trade, shipped off to plantations in the Caribbean or Fiji, effectively "deporting" the problem.
    • The "Badhak" Legacy: Their specific survival techniques—rapid movement, disguise, and tight information networks—lived on in the groups that absorbed them. The British obsession with "hereditary criminal tribes" was, in part, a paranoid fear that the Badhak thugees had never really gone away, but had just morphed into these famine-resistant bands. The "Late Victorian Holocausts" (c. 1870s–1890s) were a collision of El Niño-induced droughts and British laissez-faire capitalism that killed 30–60 million people. For the "criminal tribes" (a colonial label for itinerant groups like the Badhak, Sansi, Kanjar, and Bawaria), this period was a double apocalypse: they faced mass starvation from the famine while simultaneously being hunted, caged, and criminalized by the newly enacted Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) of 1871. [1, 5, 6]

    1. The Double Burden: Famine & The Criminal Tribes Act

    While the general peasantry starved due to grain exports and market fundamentalism, groups like the Badhak faced a targeted war on their existence. The CTA labeled them "hereditary criminals," creating a legal framework to forcibly settle them just as the famine made settlement a death sentence. [2, 4]

    • The Trap: Famines historically triggered migration to food-rich areas. The CTA, however, criminalized movement. To leave their prescribed district to find food was a non-bailable offense.
    • Forced Sedentarization: The British "planted out" these tribes into agricultural settlements to "civilize" them. In reality, these were often barren lands where they were expected to farm without skills or water, making them the first to starve when rains failed.

    2. Survival Strategies of the "Criminal" Networks## A. Dietary "Iron Cast" & Forbidden Foods

    While caste Hindus starved rather than break dietary taboos, the "criminal" tribes survived because their traditional diets were broader and more resilient. [8]

    • Scavenging & "Unclean" Meat: Groups like the Sansi and Kanjars were often stigmatized for eating animals that died of natural causes or were considered ritually unclean, such as jackals, lizards, field rats, and porcupines. During the famine, this taboo became a survival advantage.
    • Forest Knowledge: They relied on "famine foods" invisible to the British and settling peasants:
    • Roots & Tubers: Digging for deep-rooted yam varieties and kanta sag (thorny greens) that survived drought.
      • Processing Toxins: They possessed specific knowledge on how to leach toxins out of drought-resistant but poisonous seeds and barks to make them edible.

    B. Strategic Mobility & "Chaotic Oscillation"

    The Badhak and similar groups used their mastery of disguise and movement to evade the "dragnet" of the famine police.

    • Fragmenting the Clan: To avoid detection, large tribal caravans broke into tiny family units. If a whole clan moved, they were arrested; if a single family moved, they might pass as distressed peasants.
    • The "Baghdass" Resistance: In regions like Bengal, groups identified as baghdass (likely a phonetic variation or offshoot of Badhak/Bawaria networks) used stilts to traverse flooded or difficult terrain rapidly, raiding grain stores and vanishing before police could respond.
    • Absconding from Relief Camps: When forced into "famine relief works" (labor camps with Buchenwald-level rations), many tribespeople simply absconded. They preferred the risk of police capture to the certainty of slow starvation in the camps. [7, 11]

    C. Weaponizing Kinship & Gender

    The state tried to break their networks by separating families, but the tribes used their social structures to survive.

    • Marriage as a Passport: Women often negotiated marriages to men in "un-proclaimed" districts. Since the police surveillance was often patrilineal or focused on the male "head," women could sometimes move more freely or use marriage to legally transfer their residence to a safer zone.
    • Refusal to Co-operate: Records show women refusing to join their "husbands" in penal settlements, effectively breaking the state's attempt to concentrate them in one controllable (and starving) location. [7]

    D. "Social Banditry" & The Economy of Desperation

    With their traditional livelihoods (performing, herbal medicine, genealogies) destroyed by the economic collapse, many returned to or intensified "predatory" survival.

    • Grain Riots & Dacoity: British officials reported a spike in "dacoity" (gang robbery) during famines. For the tribes, this wasn't "crime" in the colonial sense; it was a moral economy. They raided grain trains and government storehouses—targets that were hoarding food while the people died.
    • Cattle Lifting: Stealing cattle wasn't just for food; it was a tradeable asset. In a famine, a cow could be traded for sacks of grain if moved to a region where prices were slightly better. [12]

    1. Fate of the Badhak Specifically By the Late Victorian period, the "Badhak" as a cohesive entity
  • Good book about this is "Late Victorian Holocausts" . An interesting history of survival of the "criminal tribes" during this era in india has some useful lessons.

  • had a long conversation with an nuclear engineer phd yesterday. TLDR usa is going to be powering data centers with gas plants. small modulars are not the types of plants needed for the power requirements . regulatory hurdles wont have new nuclear online in usa for probably 10 years except for restarted old plants. nuclear sub types of reactors need higher enriched fuel than civilian power gets but those are the best for being able to control output to track demand . he seemed quite bearish overall on nuclear in USA but was bullish on research here , particularly molten salt stuff

  • flying drone swarms controlled by AI. the ground robots will only be for people that manage to stay inside and need to be extracted

  • Local lakes serving the corpus christi industrial/ refinery complex are down to only 8% now catastrophic levels . It would probably take two consecutive hurricane direct hits to refill. The industry is major american refinery complex and plastic and steel/aluminum as well that could be shutdown right as this iran shit is all poppin off. Its a large enough output that it can have some global market level effects

    For years the refineries have been sucking down millions gallons per day while fucking over the populace and contaminating the water supply. They tell the citizens to take shorter showers while they get special privileges . They could have done desalination years ago but they didnt want to compromise by dumping the salt in a way that wouldnt murder the entire coastal ecosystem. Now the city has been pumping like 27 emergency wells that are highly contaminated with beta particle activity from naturally occurring radioactive geology, also about to cause major salt water intrusion into the gulf coast aquifer from such rapid pumping.

    its getting pretty serious . Water quality is what i would casually call toxic for the past couple years of this drought as they draw from various bad sources.

  • But for most people, cause and effect ends when they close their eyes.

    I'm mortified by the percent of the adult population that doesn't really understand cause and effect in any meaningful or functional way. It took me way too long to realize its something ,that was assumed implicit to me when internally modeling other people's mental models, actually doesn't even apply to like 60% of the population. it explains a lot of my confusion for my life about peoples behavior.

  • its weird how the brilliance of Jay W. Forrester and the whole systems dynamics thing had a succession problem or something . Nobody took up the reigns afaik . just sort of faded out . donella meadows.... As school of thought or discipline it really just got left abandoned and rudderless. ive been hoping some genius would revive it and bring it back to the public sphere in a meaningful way. at best we got some good stuff like permaculture out of it that got traction but still not the holistic tier that should exist . maybe its too abstract

  • if the manufacture and supply chain of materials of a windmill is substantially fossil fuel based its just a symbolic version of that.

    while i think a lot of the "renewables are made of fossil fuels" arguments are overly reductionist in a pragmatic sense its still true. i do think many of those people think unless the entire supply chain of renewables is renewables its impure or not useful. Its still very useful and steps on a continuum to full renewable self reproduction , even if it does take some nuclear peaker plants or something .

  • the ore grade getting shittier and more contaminated with heavy metals and those metals accumulating in the soils everywhere those fertilizers are used will fuck humanity sooner and already is in many places.

  • collapse @lemmy.zip

    Heat zone comparison map to 2099

    sgi-gardenlibrary.maps.arcgis.com /apps/instant/media/index.html
  • I think hes making a supremely bad call trying to get those people to sell a real asset homestead in a good location just because of debt. in the current situation the only path that can be taken is papering over any crash with money printer. This will end up rapidly devaluing their debt to the point they will basically be getting dirt cheap primo property so long as they can float through the fixed payments long enough. People in weimar era germany that bought tons of assets on debt made out like bandits. Maximizing Debt is a good strategy if you dont hit ruin between now and the blow off of inflation. If they have savings to cover a few years of payments they should be good once the next crash hits

  • collapse @lemmy.zip

    The Threat of Rent Extraction in a Resource-constrained Future

    www.sciencedirect.com /science/article/pii/S0921800919304203
  • Venezuela then iran then cuba.

  • if you dont believe me i dont care. this is for people who know me and know im not full of shit. if you want proof go hangout on the firing range of Ft Hood when they drop the test run bunker busters for all i care.

  • collapse @lemmy.zip

    The Iran thing is about to get way more intense or usa is about to hit another country

  • During the US civil war a bioluminescent fungus that kind worked like penicillin randomly spread after a battle saving a bunch of lives:

    cool!

    Before the antibiotic era there was a dude that survived cholera or other epidemic in trench warfare WWI they found a particular strain of ecoli he harbored and preserved it and there is a company that still sells it .

  • i thought we needed to be closer to 800- 1000 pom

    600ppm is the place where it start affecting human cognition from what i recall. there was a dude in the reddit back in the day called MrVisible that was obsessed with this and had a whole sub about it . i thing it was called r/doomsdaycult or something like that.

    EDIT: i just went to find that old sub and reddit banned it of course . maybe a reddit archive will have it.

  • "First, there is no natural brake. AI capabilities improve, companies need fewer workers, displaced workers spend less, weakened companies invest more in AI to protect margins, and AI capabilities improve further. Each company’s individual response is rational. The collective result is a negative feedback loop that feeds on itself.

    Second, the spending damage is wildly disproportionate to the job losses. The top 20% of earners drive roughly 65% of all US consumer spending. These are the white-collar workers most exposed to AI displacement. A modest percentage decline in white-collar employment translates into a much larger hit to discretionary consumer spending, devastating the businesses that depend on it and triggering further layoffs.

    Third, AI agents will dismantle the vast intermediation layer of the US economy. Over fifty years, we have built trillions of dollars of enterprise value on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, and most people accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Agentic AI eliminates this friction. Software, consulting, financial services, insurance, travel, real estate and payments are all built on monetizing complexity that agents find trivial. As these sectors suffer steep revenue losses, they will shed jobs aggressively and compound the bleeding.

    Fourth, the financial system is one long daisy chain of correlated bets on white-collar productivity growth. Over $2.5 trillion of private credit has been deployed into leveraged buyouts underwritten against revenue assumptions that no longer hold. The $13 trillion mortgage market is built on the assumption that borrowers will remain employed at roughly their current income for thirty years. These aren’t subprime borrowers–they’re 780 FICO scores who put 20% down. The loans were good on day one. The world just changed after they were written.

    Fifth, the government’s fiscal position inverts at the worst possible time. Federal revenue is essentially a tax on human work. As white-collar incomes decline and payrolls shrink, tax receipts dry up just as the need for transfer payments surges. The government will need to send more money to households at precisely the moment it is collecting less from them."

  • collapse @lemmy.zip

    THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS

    www.citriniresearch.com /p/2028gic
  • Wildy higher losses and worse than i would have suspected.

    Maize Under a high-emissions scenario, our projected end-of-century maize yield losses are severe (about −40%) in the grain belt of the USA, Eastern China, Central Asia, Southern Africa and the Middle East (Fig. 2a, Extended Data Fig. 7a and Supplementary Figs. 10 and 11). Losses in South America and Central Africa are more moderate (about −15%), mitigated in part by high levels of precipitation and increasing long-run precipitation (Extended Data Fig. 3b). Impacts in Europe vary with latitude, from +10% gains in the north to −40% losses along the Mediterranean. Gains in theoretical yield potentials occur in many northern regions in which maize is not widely grown (Supplementary Fig. 7).

    Soybean The spatial distribution of soybean yield impacts is similar in structure to maize, although magnitudes are accentuated (Fig. 2b, Extended Data Fig. 7b and Supplementary Figs. 10 and 11); for example, about −50% in the USA and about +20% in wet regions of Brazil under a high-emissions scenario.

    Rice High-emissions rice yield impacts are mixed in India and Southeast Asia, which lead global rice production, with small gains and losses throughout these regions. This regional result is broadly consistent with earlier work1. In the remaining rice-growing regions, central estimates are generally negative, with magnitudes in Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and Central Asia exceeding −50% (Fig. 2c, Extended Data Fig. 7c and Supplementary Figs. 10 and 11).

    Wheat Wheat losses are notably consistent across the main wheat-growing regions, with high-emissions yield losses of −15% to −25% in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Africa and South America and −30% to −40% in China, Russia, the USA and Canada (Fig. 2d, Extended Data Fig. 7d and Supplementary Figs. 10 and 11). There are notable exceptions to these global patterns: wheat-growing regions of Western China exhibit both gains and losses, whereas wheat-growing regions of Northern India exhibit some of the most severe projected losses across the globe.

    Cassava Cassava is projected to have uniformly negative projected impacts in nearly all regions in which it is grown at present, with the largest losses in Sub-Saharan Africa (−40% on average under a high-emissions scenario). Although cassava does not make up a large portion of global agricultural revenues, it is an important subsistence crop in low-income and middle-income countries. Thus, these yield losses may be a substantial future threat to the nutritional intake of the global poor (Fig. 2e, Extended Data Fig. 7e and Supplementary Figs. 10 and 11).

    Sorghum Sorghum losses are widespread in almost all of the main regions in which it is grown at present: North America (−40%), South Asia (including India) (−10%) and Sub-Saharan Africa (−25%). Projected gains emerge in Western Europe (+28%) and Northern China (+3%) (Fig. 2f, Extended Data Fig. 7f and Supplementary Figs. 10 and 11).

  • collapse @lemmy.zip

    Chappe telegraph invented in France in 1792

    en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Chappe_telegraph
  • still funds some coherent stuff.

  • collapse @lemmy.zip

    What Would a Fiscal Crisis Look Like? | Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget

    www.crfb.org /papers/what-would-fiscal-crisis-look
  • collapse @lemmy.zip

    This Is the End of the World

    www.taylorforeman.com /p/this-is-the-end-of-the-world
  • Nice . I was waiting for someone to quantify this type of thing. I wonder what the maximum possible density is.

  • collapse @lemmy.zip

    The Decline of Deviance

    www.experimental-history.com /p/the-decline-of-deviance
  • collapse @lemmy.zip

    2025 THE STATE OF THE NATION’S HOUSING pdf

    www.jchs.harvard.edu /sites/default/files/reports/files/Harvard_JCHS_The_State_of_the_Nations_Housing_2025.pdf
  • collapse @lemmy.zip

    substantial portion of the population is unable to learn from mistakes

    arstechnica.com /science/2025/07/study-sheds-light-on-why-some-people-keep-self-sabotaging/