Bet-hedging strategies in expanding populations

TL; DR: David gives Goliath a run for the money in peanut allergy treatments. May need to hold for a week or two, so no spaghetti hands please.
(Edit: I have also posted this in pennystocks & DueDiligence. Please feel free to comment and share your opinions
DBVT is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical working on treatments for food allergies. The Company is focused on immunotherapy that works through skin absorption. Market cap. is about $600M.
What the galaxy says:
According to a study done by the Centers for Disease Control (adapted from company website):

Approximately 4-6% of children and 1.5% of adults in Europe are affected by food allergies. 3.5 million of these are under the age of 25.
Approximately 8% of children in the US have a food allergy. There was an estimated 50% increase in prevalence of food allergies among children in the US between 1997-2011
Australia saw a 350% increase in hospital admissions that were as a result of food-related allergic reactions, mostly in children below 4 years of age

The pilots of the ship

DBVT was founded in 2002 by Dr. Pierre-Henri Benhamou (Pedriatric Gastroenterology), Engineer Bertrand Dupont (from the Arts et Métiers ParisTech) and Professor Christophe Dupont (head of the Pediatric Gastroenterology Department, Necker Hospital, Paris). Pierre-Henri and Christophe currently sit on the scientific advisory board.
Daniel Tassé, CEO: has a B.Sc. in Biochemistry from Université de Montréal (1982) and 30+ years in pharma & pediatric business development. Previous to this, he was the CEO of Alcresta Therapeutics (where he guided the company in launching its first successful product, RELiZORB. Alcresta is not publicly traded, but had only $20M of funding in 2013 before Daniel joined, compared to $80+M when he left). Previous to that, he was CEO of Ikaria Inc. (where he managed to expand operations to Asia, successfully led the development of the company’s first product, INOMAX, and grew revenues from $160M to over $420M in just 4 years. Ikaria was finally acquired in 2015 by Mallinckrodt Pharma $MNK for $2.3 billion and Daniel worked for MNK briefly as Commercial Senior Vice President, reporting directly to the CEO after the acquisition)
Pharis Mohideen, M.D, Chief Medical Officer**:** holds an M.D., M.S. in human physiology and B.A. in biology from the University of Hawaii, as well as an M.S. in clinical investigation from Vanderbilt University. He has 15+ years’ experience in clinical development. He had various previous roles as director (5yrs at Bristol-Myers Squibb & 6yrs at Novartis), and chief medical officer at Millendo Therapeutics

The flight guidance system
The stock traded between $8 and $10 pre-covid. It is currently trading around support at $4.5. In fact, the last time it traded around these lows was in December 2018 when the company voluntarily withdrew their BLA application for the Viaskin Peanut product due to “insufficient level of detail about the manufacturing and quality controls”. (Keep in mind, the new CEO joined in November 2018 and he is a thorough man). The price fell from $16 to $4 and they were subsequently sued. The hearing is pending in New Jersey. Previous to this, the price dropped from $42 to $28 in October 2017 when the company announced that the Viaskin Peanut clinical trial failed to achieve statistical significance in the lower end of the 95% confidence interval by a small margin (target was 15%, results indicated 12.4%)
Competitor $AIMT (market cap. $1B) benefited from both of these price moves, but lost the gains as swiftly as they came. In fact, they were unlucky that the approval of their oral tablets for allergy treatment was on January 31st, but they didn’t benefit from the price move due to covid. Furthermore, their drug is priced at $890 per month, only shows benefit after 2 years, and is still dogged by side effects like abdominal pain, vomiting, nausea, tingling in the mouth, itching (including in the mouth and ears), cough, runny nose, throat irritation and tightness, hives, wheezing and shortness of breath and anaphylaxis. This drug must still undergo a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS). i.e. it can only be administered in a controlled environment (parents have to take their kids to a certified hospital every 2 weeks) and the administering nurses, doctors and patients all have to register for the REMS.
Wallet situation
In their most recent press release, the company indicated that their cash runway (€262 million) can last through 2021.
The financials are lacklustre. In the past 3 years, revenue has stagnated at around $10M (although they beat estimates). However, since the new CEO was appointed, EPS grew 7% in the first year and 29% in the second year, and they have secured $200M in financing. Not too bad, not too good either, but given the CEO’s strong track record, the good things are yet to come
The rocket fuel
Viaskin technology is currently under review by the FDA. Taget action date for Viaskin Peanut is set for August 5. Viaskin Egg & Viaskin Milk will follow soon after. These products have a US FDA Fast Track designation. You may ask why a French company is developing treatment therapies in the US, and the answer would be that because on average, the process of drug review is 2-3 months faster in the USA than in the EU. If the FDA accepts the test data and gives a way forward on a date for inspection of the manufacturing facilities, then the race for allergy treatments would be blown wide open. It could probably soar back to the $16 range where it was in 2018 before that damned BLA withdrawal, or we can dream about a Saturn landing and aim for $42 where it was in 2017 before the clinical trials failed by the small margin. Nine (9) analysts have given it a short-term price target of $9 and mid-term target of $25, but I like the CEO’s track record and I prefer to dream bigger.
Some other windows to to stargaze

The big boys are in on this one, many since February 2020 and some as recently as June 2020: Baker Brothers (11m shares), Arrowpoint Asset Management (4m), Perceptive Advisors (4M), Boxer Capital (3m), Morgan Stanley (2m), Amundi (1.4m), and Fidelity (574k). Sabby missed this rocket, which makes stargazing all the more beautiful. In total, institutions own 44% of the shares.
There are also also recent acquisitions of stock in (in June 2020) by a number of index funds like FTIHX, IMRFX & JCCIX..
The FDA had questions about the impact of the patch adhesion to its efficacy (remember, no safety issues were reported during the clinical trial). The company has already responded to this query but the FDA has given no further feedback apart from that the data was being reviewed. At this point, it is a coin flip game. High risk, high reward.
The data mentioned in point (iii) above has been published in multiple peer-reviewed scientific publications (this one and this one and this one32155-4/abstract)). All reviews show positive data.
The company recently trimmed down its workforce (something that is notoriously difficult to do in France) and scaled down other clinical programs in order to focus on the Viaskin Peanut product which is coming up for review on August 5th. (This simply indicates that they are very serious about this niche, or that they are prepared for a possible delay of the FDA’s decision)
DBVT is collaborating with Nestlé in a deal worth €100M to develop more product candidates (e.g. Viaskin milk). Nestlé is the largest food company in the world with over 2000 brands and generates $93 billion plus in revenue each year since 2008. However, Nestlé is as notorious as all big companies are, and food allergies have been one of the legal thorns in their flesh for a while. They are personally invested in this peanut allergy product and this collaboration has not been affected by the covid crisis. (Fun fact: Nestle also owns 18% of $AIMT, the competitor company. They are hedging their bets)
Skin patch therapy is potentially more marketable among the market segment that they are targeting (childen & infants) than pills. In addition, they would have potentially less side effects because the active compound gets directly into the bloodstream, and does not get absorbed via the liver.
Consider that it is a French company and the big influence France has in the EU. If they get approved, they might get approval support from the French government too.

$DBVT: DBV Technologies SA

TL; DR: David gives Goliath a run for the money in peanut allergy treatments. May need to hold for a week or two, so no spaghetti hands please.
(Edit: I have also posted this in PennyDD & DueDiligence. Please feel free to comment and share your opinions
DBVT is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical working on treatments for food allergies. The Company is focused on immunotherapy that works through skin absorption. Market cap. is about $600M.
What the galaxy says:
According to a study done by the Centers for Disease Control (adapted from company website):

Approximately 4-6% of children and 1.5% of adults in Europe are affected by food allergies. 3.5 million of these are under the age of 25.
Approximately 8% of children in the US have a food allergy. There was an estimated 50% increase in prevalence of food allergies among children in the US between 1997-2011
Australia saw a 350% increase in hospital admissions that were as a result of food-related allergic reactions, mostly in children below 4 years of age

The pilots of the ship

DBVT was founded in 2002 by Dr. Pierre-Henri Benhamou (Pedriatric Gastroenterology), Engineer Bertrand Dupont (from the Arts et Métiers ParisTech) and Professor Christophe Dupont (head of the Pediatric Gastroenterology Department, Necker Hospital, Paris). Pierre-Henri and Christophe currently sit on the scientific advisory board.
Daniel Tassé, CEO: has a B.Sc. in Biochemistry from Université de Montréal (1982) and 30+ years in pharma & pediatric business development. Previous to this, he was the CEO of Alcresta Therapeutics (where he guided the company in launching its first successful product, RELiZORB. Alcresta is not publicly traded, but had only $20M of funding in 2013 before Daniel joined, compared to $80+M when he left). Previous to that, he was CEO of Ikaria Inc. (where he managed to expand operations to Asia, successfully led the development of the company’s first product, INOMAX, and grew revenues from $160M to over $420M in just 4 years. Ikaria was finally acquired in 2015 by Mallinckrodt Pharma $MNK for $2.3 billion and Daniel worked for MNK briefly as Commercial Senior Vice President, reporting directly to the CEO after the acquisition)
Pharis Mohideen, M.D, Chief Medical Officer**:** holds an M.D., M.S. in human physiology and B.A. in biology from the University of Hawaii, as well as an M.S. in clinical investigation from Vanderbilt University. He has 15+ years’ experience in clinical development. He had various previous roles as director (5yrs at Bristol-Myers Squibb & 6yrs at Novartis), and chief medical officer at Millendo Therapeutics

The big boys are in on this one, many since February 2020 and some as recently as June 2020: Baker Brothers (11m shares), Arrowpoint Asset Management (4m), Perceptive Advisors (4M), Boxer Capital (3m), Morgan Stanley (2m), Amundi (1.4m), and Fidelity (574k). Sabby missed this rocket, which makes stargazing all the more beautiful. In total, institutions own 44% of the shares.
There are also also recent acquisitions of stock in (in June 2020) by a number of index funds like FTIHX, IMRFX & JCCIX..
The FDA had questions about the impact of the patch adhesion to its efficacy (remember, no safety issues were reported during the clinical trial). The company has already responded to this query but the FDA has given no further feedback apart from that the data was being reviewed. At this point, it is a coin flip game. High risk, high reward.
The data mentioned in point (iii) above has been published in multiple peer-reviewed scientific publications (this one and this one and this one32155-4/abstract)). All reviews show positive data.
The company recently trimmed down its workforce (something that is notoriously difficult to do in France) and scaled down other clinical programs in order to focus on the Viaskin Peanut product which is coming up for review on August 5th. (This simply indicates that they are very serious about this niche, or that they are prepared for a possible delay of the FDA’s decision)
DBVT is collaborating with Nestlé in a deal worth €100M to develop more product candidates (e.g. Viaskin milk). Nestlé is the largest food company in the world with over 2000 brands and generates $93 billion plus in revenue each year since 2008. However, Nestlé is as notorious as all big companies are, and food allergies have been one of the legal thorns in their flesh for a while. They are personally invested in this peanut allergy product and this collaboration has not been affected by the covid crisis. (Fun fact: Nestle also owns 18% of $AIMT, the competitor company. They are hedging their bets)
Skin patch therapy is potentially more marketable among the market segment that they are targeting (childen & infants) than pills. In addition, they would have potentially less side effects because the active compound gets directly into the bloodstream, and does not get absorbed via the liver.
Consider that it is a French company and the big influence France has in the EU. If they get approved, they might get approval support from the French government too.

The Featherlight Transmission, Ch. 18

It’s probably not incredibly intelligent to be in my apartment right now, considering there are bad people after me and they know where it is. I did beat the tar out of the last bunch of yeehaws that tried anything, though, so maybe they’ll take a bit of time to regroup and figure out how to kill me better next time.
Voldzet’s right. I’ve been lazy. They’re gonna come back bigger and stronger, so I need to get faster and smarter to match.
Problem is, I have no idea how to get to where I want to go.
I got back home around three in the morning and took something like a nap, then freshened up while checking my various hurts. The Surgeons are infamous for their sneakiness, but they’re famous for their medical skill. The stitches on my arm and belly are so clean and narrow that you can barely tell they’re there. If a scar forms, it’ll be a thin one.
I eat some more of my snacks while staring at my blank computer screen. The nutrients will accelerate the formation of new vitae in my body, which will help me heal faster. In a day or two, I should be back to tip top shape. Being magical is a drag sometimes, but the perks almost make up for it. Anyone else would be laid up for weeks with these injuries. Or uh, dead, probably.
I’ve got two main things on my plate right now, and I’m only gonna be able to fit one in my big fat mouth at a time. Going downstairs and poking around Littlerock’s place will push the case forward, but it could be risky. Getting to the Library will set me on the path to training with magic, but it’ll leave the case to advance without me.
Yeah, alright, this isn’t really much of a choice. If I don’t learn some new magic tricks, or uh… learn how magic actually works at all, I’m probably going to die. I need tools in my sad, cobwebby toolbox. It’ll make everything I do easier. It probably won’t be simple, because magic is terrifying and complicated at the best of times, but it just needs to happen. Whether I want to or not.
I kind of do want to, though. It’s breaking the law in about a thousand different ways, but… the power. With the right education, who knows what I’d be capable of?
My hand reaches up and slaps me across the face without my permission.
That’s the exact mentality that made humanity into food and slaves for thousands of years. That shit is why I’m living in a sewer right now. I can’t afford to think like that. Ever. Especially not now that my brain is behaving weirder than it ever has.
I’m not gonna pretend - I’m hoping that the Library will help me figure out what these dreams mean and what they’re doing to me. Something is going on in my head. And I do not appreciate it.
First things first. I need to find one of the Librarian’s drones. They’re the only ones that know where the Library’s entrance currently is. I think I remember hearing that the door moves every few days, so I need current information, not outdated rumor.
I should probably explain a bit about the Librarian for the 99.4% of people reading this that have zero context. It won’t take long, I only know about as much as everyone else does, which is… not a lot.
Simply put, the Librarian is a heiromancer. A law mage. Before you start conjuring mental images of magical cops or lawyers or whatever, that’s not exactly what this is. A heiromancer doesn’t have to be moralistic or adhere to any of society’s laws at all. They get to write their own rules, and both people and things have to obey them. Breaking a hieromancer’s laws takes either another heiromancer or some kind of entity with powers beyond that of the heiromancer that made them, which is not me. Or basically anyone else currently alive, as far as I know.
This is because heiromancers are big fat cheaters that got access to reality’s source code while the rest of us are stuck dealing with read-only memory. Hydromancers work with water, biomancers work with life. Heiromancers get to manipulate order - and more specifically what order even means within a given system. Their magic takes a while to execute, because they have to prepare and write every single change they make, and they can only exert these changes over a limited area depending on how powerful they are. Given enough time, though, a heiromancer can become indistinguishable from a god, if they keep passing new laws in one particular place. They’ll never be able to leave that place without those favorable laws no longer applying to them, but in their little handwritten demesnes, they’re the closest thing to omnipotent anyone’s been able to find.
It’s a rare gift to be given by the cosmos, and there have only been a few heiromancers named in all the histories we have access to, or so I’ve been told. But the Librarian is one of them. More than that, he’s the only one left, as far as anyone’s aware.
The story goes that he was a slave, about nine hundred years ago. This was back when the elves were in charge of Wellspring City. They went through all the bother of stealing it from the dying dustfolk nations, but didn’t respect it or like it as much as their native forest homes, so it was more of a well-defended trading outpost for their empire than the human metropolis it is today or the dustfolk holy site it was thousands of years ago.
The elves built a good part of their empire on the backs of human slaves. They were of the opinion that we were better off working in bondage than out in the wilderness getting eaten by dragons and whatnot. We had some counterarguments to that assertion, but one elf is faster, stronger, and more magical than about ten men put together, so the debate was settled before it could start. After all, pack beasts don’t get opinions. The Librarian was one of these slaves, I guess, and worked as a scroll boy in the elves’ archives. Fetched books and organized the shelves and whatnot.
And he probably would have done that for the next seventy years, get tossed into an unmarked slave grave, and forgotten, if he hadn’t been selected for the good ol’ magic upgrade. It happened to me, it happened to Em, it’s happened to thousands of people across human history. No one knows why. All we can do is deal with it.
The elves’ strategy for dealing with it was to immediately execute any human observed to have magical powers. Obviously. Can’t have the slaves throwing fireballs and calling tsunamis and all that. The thing about heiromancy, though, is that it’s subtle. Quieter. You can’t really see it, and you probably won’t even know it’s there until reality rips the rug out from under you. And the boy that would go on to be known as the Librarian was smart enough to realize this. So he kept his mouth shut, did his work, and bided his time. He taught himself how to write. And taught himself the laws.
Then, one day about fifteen years later, all the human slaves in the elven settlement disappeared. Vanished, instantly, without a trace. And the elves found that, for some reason, they were unable to enter their library anymore. They could see the building, it was still there, but the door wouldn’t open. The windows wouldn’t break. The walls couldn’t be torn down by even the concentrated effort of an entire battalion of elven magi. It was now illegal for them to enter, in the most literal way possible.
So, they collectively shrugged their pale shoulders and left. They hadn’t liked the place much anyway. They owned a whole half of the known world at the time - why sweat a weird ruin in the middle of the desert?
Time passed. Wind and earth and the Librarian’s continual revisions to his laws made the Library harder and harder to find. The Brotherhood and Wellspring City rose up, and dragged the rest of humanity along with them. Magic died. But the Library is still down there somewhere - one of the only living remnants of the world before human supremacy.
I don’t doubt the Brotherhood knows the Library exists, even if they won’t acknowledge it publicly. Its very existence is a glaring threat to their regime, but they can’t do a damn thing about it. No one can. The Librarian made his house unfindable, and the entrance moves constantly. Even if they did find it, it’s… well. Inviolable, in a word. People who want in and follow the Librarian’s rules are going to get in, no matter what.
The problem is that getting in is tough.
The Librarian technically makes his place accessible, but you have to know how to do it. The only thing I know is that he dispatches magically-powered homunculi throughout the city. They look like people, but they’re actually some kind of golem. And they’re there to give out the location of the Library door, but I don’t know what criteria they operate on. Or where any of them are.
But someone in the Consortium obviously knows. Hmmm. Noon. Em should be at work.
I give her a call. She picks up in the first ring and announces herself.
“Em. It’s me. I need your help with something real quick.”
“Dad told me about what happened. You and I need to have a discussion about-”
“I know, you’re upset with me and I need to try harder. That’s what this is about. I need to know who in the Consortium knows where I can find one of the Librarian’s puppets.”
“... Oh. Well, good. Uh… I don’t know where any of them are, and not many in the group do. It’s dangerous knowledge to have. But I think Berix might keep tabs on them, just in case the Consortium needs a book.”
I sigh. “Of course. Berix the Load-Bearing, bravely holding the Consortium on her shoulders. Do you have her number?”
“Yes. But you need to promise me something before I give it to you.”
“Mm?”
“You already got hurt once, and by rights it probably should have been a lot worse than it was. You’re in deep. Promise me that you’ll be careful, no matter what you end up finding.”
“... I promise. I don’t want to get stuffed in a vat any more than you do.”
“I’ll hold you to it, Baulric. I mean it.”
“So do I.”
She gives me the number and we hang up. I open a lollipop (double melon, sweet and optimistic) and ring up Berix. Her steely voice is in my head before I can really come to terms with what I’m doing and reconsider.
“Municipal Records Office Third Branch, this is Berix Battlesong, how can I help you?”
“Berix. Hi. This is Featherlight. I’ve got a question I need to ask you.”
She hangs up instantly.
I sit there for a second listening to the dial tone in my skull, bewildered. We didn’t get disconnected - I heard her handset hit the receiver. Maybe she hates me even more than I thought.
Just as I’m about to give up and try a different tack, my head rings. An unknown number. I pick up.
“... Yeah?”
“Who gave you that number? It isn’t secure. Never call me at that number again.”
Ah. The sweet, sonorous hiss of the agitated harpy.
“Emaphra gave it to me. I guess she has bad information.”
Berix huffs. “No, she may call my desk number whenever she likes, as she is a property owner with cause to access city documents. You are a mercenary with a sordid reputation who lives in a hole. Even a whiff of you in my phone lines could be enough to stain my record. If you must contact me, use this line instead.”
“... Tough day, Berix? Office life really wearing on you?”
“You are wearing on me. What do you want, Mr. Featherlight? Some of us have jobs to do.”
“Hey, I’ve got a job. Not all of us ride a desk for a living. That’s what this is about. You said this line is secure, right?”
“Yes. But not for long. Spit it out.”
“I need to get into the Library.”
“... Why?”
“Why? You’re not the Librarian’s secretary now, are you? Spill it, I don’t have the luxury of sitting around all day, like some people.”
Totally unnecessary, yes, but I can’t talk to Berix without antagonizing her. It’s a condition. I can hear the storm clouds gathering around her from all the way across the city.
She hisses through gritted teeth, “Our relationship with the Librarian hangs by a thread on the best of days, Featherlight, and I will not allow any curious ape to wander onto his property and gnaw on the millennia-old tomes inside without knowing why. You spill, or we have nothing further to discuss.”
I roll my eyes and sigh. “Fine. My investigation into the killings has led to me being assaulted in the street by Brotherhood mercenaries, and I barely escaped with my life. A Surgeon friend recommended that I do some training before digging any deeper, and I agree with him. The more tricks I learn, the more likely I make it out of this with my voluptuous frame intact.”
“You were attacked? Where? Were you able to identify them?”
“In Sector Seventeen after following a lead. The guy leading the pack was Krint Seagraves. I didn’t know who he was at the time. I was told after getting patched up. The guy nearly fried me, blew out one of my eyes.”
She’s quiet for a minute, processing this. “Shit. The Brotherhood have taken the gloves off, as it were. They’re threatened.”
Berix pauses for a moment, mulling her options. “... Very well then. I often disagree with your methods, Featherlight, but I will not presume to deny you your right to education and self-defense.”
“How very gracious and merciful of you. My savior.”
She ignores me. “You live in Sector Eighteen, yes?”
“That’s what it smells like.”
“Unless it’s moved, the closest homunculus to you is in Sector Sixteen. It waits in a tavern called The Scripted Serpent, on the far eastern edge of the city, by the Wall. This one takes the shape of a middle-aged man with very tan skin, in a dark coat, with a high collar and a wide-brimmed hat. Minds its own business at a table by a window. Provided that none of this has changed recently - I haven’t checked on that one in a few weeks.”
“Hm. Okay. Thanks, Berix. I appreciate it.”
Before I can hang up, she stops me. “What are you bringing for payment?”
“... Payment?”
“Yes. Payment. Access to the Library isn’t free, Featherlight.”Fuck. “Uh… well, money’s a little tight these days, so…”
Somehow, I can hear her rolling her eyes at me. “No. The Librarian doesn’t care about money. He’s beyond such things. He only cares for knowledge. To be granted entrance, you must give the homunculus an item of knowledge that the Librarian doesn’t already have in his collection. A book, or some other form of media. I’ve heard he also accepts works of art. Copies of films and et cetera. Do you have anything?”
I throw my eyes to my extremely barren shelves. “Uh. Well, I’ve got a few books, but I don’t suppose there’s a card catalogue available so I can check whether he already has a copy.”
“No, there isn’t. You’ll just have to bring the ones you deem the rarest and hope. It’s the same for the rest of us. The homunculus will either take your offering or reject you. It’s an irritating guessing game, but we have no choice but to play by his rules.”
I sigh. “Alright. I’ll see what I can scrounge up.”
“Let me know afterward whether you succeeded or failed.”
I can’t help but snort at this. “You’re not in charge of me, Berix. Thanks for the help, and have a great day!”
I hang up on her. There’s few things I dislike more than people that try to exercise made-up authority. If I caught her, I could snap Berix in half like a wet twig, so her commands don’t have any muscle over me. And her policies are dumb and shortsighted and probably going to result in the dissolution of the Consortium, so she doesn’t have the ideological high ground either. She can eat me.
Sigh. Sector Sixteen. Of all the places. That’s just over the sector wall. Noon… do I want to do this today? If I manage to get in, I have no idea how long I’ll be down there.
No. No more procrastinating. There’s too much at stake here for me to keep doing that.
I go over to my sorry bookshelf and examine the wares. I like reading, and what little disposable income I get usually goes toward books. Used, because new ones usually cost an arm and someone else’s leg. Most of what I have is fiction, though. Entertainment. She said the Librarian will take art, but from the sound of it, he’d be more tempted by something factual.
Hmm. Let’s see. I’ve got a copy of The History of Wellspring City, but that one’s shit between two covers - a sanitized account that the Brotherhood had the University eggheads write at the end of a shock baton. Not much more than propaganda. I’ve got a few beaten old textbooks on biology, organic chemistry, internal medicine, physics. Stuff that both interests me and has a chance of lending a hand with understanding my magic better. They’re all really old, though. Several of these were picked out of literal trash heaps being carted away from the University and other places. Those old bastards are in a position where they can take knowledge for granted and throw it away. People like me have to make do with their leavings. Then there’s the soft stuff. A few books on philosophy, because I’m still essentially human and I enjoy a good laugh now and again. A few volumes of collected editorials from some journalists I like. Dangerous stuff there, but still technically legal.
Then there’s the illegal stuff. I know - illegal books? Bet you didn’t know I was such a rebellious seditionist.
Okay, truly, none of this stuff is even enough to get me in serious trouble, it’s just a few things on the Brotherhood’s blacklist that would make me look bad if they ever found them during their routine inspections of my home. I’d probably get a few months in the Sink and a welterweight fine if they were discovered. But I didn’t get to be as alive as I am by taking chances.
I lift up one of my floor’s deck plates, where one of the old pumps used to be. Ordinarily this would give access for mechanics to get down under the pump housing and uh… do whatever mechanics do. I use it to hide stuff. The plate itself is too heavy for a normal person to lift, but underneath it there’s nothing remarkable. All the machinery and ductwork is long gone. All that’s left are a couple of welded brackets for securing loading equipment.
Or that’s what it looks like.
I reach down into the hole on my knees and grab a rusty bracket in each hand. Ordinarily I don’t have to pay a lot of care to good lifting technique, but this is special. I square myself up down in the hole, brace, and lift as hard as I can. Nothing happens at first. It’s dusty down here and it’s gumming up the oil I put on this thing. The veins on my arms stand out like bridge cables and my teeth grit themselves without asking me. But I put a little extra mustard on it, and the steel block slides upward on its tracks and out of its recess.
I carefully lower it down to one side, recover, and huff a few breaths. I’d forgotten how fucking heavy that thing is. But that’s by design - the block is solid steel, about two by five feet, and three deep. It weighs almost nine hundred pounds. Even if you knew it was removable, you’re not lifting it unless you brought a chain hoist or you’re as strong as me. And not many are, baby.
There’s only a shallow space underneath the block’s resting place, but I don’t have much to hide, anyway. It’s just a few books on the extremely long blacklist the Brotherhood managed to worm the Tribunal into accepting.
Right at the top here we’ve got Vicissitudes of the Flesh, by Johelvebard Shrike. If that title makes the book sound kind of sinister, that’s because it kind of is.
Shrike was an… interesting person. He was an old man by the time the Reclamation happened, and he’d seen a lot of the dirty, terrifying, desperate world humanity had to live in back in those days. He traveled most of Almarest and managed to not get killed for it. He spoke with the snow trolls of the high Rim, consulted with dozens of wizards (even though he wasn’t one), and was even granted audiences with the waning dustfolk. They say that even the elves respected him for his uncommon intelligence. They also say that Shrike was able to gain insight enough to become the father of modern medical science because he consorted with demons, but there isn’t really any proof of that.
Vicissitudes was written toward the end of his life, when the Reclamation was getting off the ground. He’d already shared a lot of his knowledge with the newborn Brotherhood, but he didn’t join them, which ended up cheesing them off so bad that hundreds of years later they’re still trying to pretend like Shrike never helped them, or even existed at all. Like his earlier works, there’s some medical stuff in here, and also some… other things, of a more mystical nature. Shrike had some pretty cosmic ideas about life and the universe after spending a lifetime around birth, injury, healing, and death, and this book is where he got it all out, before his inevitable expiration date. A lot of it is very much against the spirit of today’s commonly-accepted and Brotherhood-approved teachings, so it wound up on the burn pile. But there are still some gutter mystics and haze gazers out there that keep the stuff in this book as valuable. Having read it, uh… well, it’s something, that’s for sure, but I’ll be damned if I can even tell what most of it means. Maybe the guy really did talk to demons.
Then there’s the Handyman’s Bible, which is a bit more mean-spirited than it might sound. Most of it is pretty innocuous - very basic and easy-to-understand explanations of how to fix a lot of common household items. Toasters, leaky faucets, simple automotive fixes, that kind of thing. The anonymous writer or writers of the Bible had some pretty broad definitions as far as what kinds of things need to be fixed, however. The back sections of the book get into nastier stuff like lockpicking, gun maintenance, and even how to cook up improvised explosive devices. Really uh… takes a bit of a hard left turn just after teaching you how to lay your own concrete. Author must’ve been a pretty… independent sort. Weird, and potentially dangerous. But undeniably useful. And worth a few years in the Sink if you’re caught with a copy.
Some religious stuff in here, too. Religion isn’t officially outlawed, because even the Brotherhood knows that separating humans from their faith is like pulling a viper’s teeth, but they do discourage any that isn’t theirs, and they especially don’t like it when mages start looking into other dogmas.
I’m not religious. Not really, at least. I was raised Hydrist, but I let it go when I was a teenager. These days… let’s just say I’m hedging my bets. I haven’t seen any real evidence of any kind of deity of any faith, and I’m not convinced that anyone ever has, but… hey, there’s some pretty weird shit in this world sometimes, and while I might pretend like I do, I definitely don’t know everything. So I don’t make a habit of damning other peoples’ beliefs. Just in case there really are some gods out there and it turns out they didn’t appreciate me picking on their people. And I’ve done at least some surface-level reading on a few faiths.
Here’s a copy of The Book of Sea and Sky, the main Hydrist holy volume. Where I started out. Would’ve stuck with it, too, if Mother and Father had been even a third as attentive to me as my actual mom and dad were. Under that is a heavy and many-paged transcript of most of the Ash Scrolls, the primary text of the Akhvallan faith. I’ve heard that Akhvalla has started falling out of favor with his own people in recent years, but he’s just as popular with pyromancers as he’s ever been. Go figure. Then a few collections of the Krathian worldsongs. I’ve read them, and they’re pretty and everything, but damn if the Krathian religion isn’t confusing. Way, way too many spirits for me to try and keep track of. I have no idea how they do it.
That’s about it. Nothing super duper seditious, because I’m not stupid enough to get caught with any books on magic. Or at least I wasn’t, until very recently. I wonder if the Librarian has a reading room. I really do not want to risk bringing any of the hot stuff into my house.
There’s no way the Librarian doesn’t already have these religious texts. He probably has way older and rarer versions than I do. It’s possible he might not have a copy of the Handyman’s Bible or Vicissitudes of the Flesh, but I’m not gonna call it likely. I’ll take them anyway, just in case. And hope I don’t get searched on the street. I take the two out of their resting place, take a few bracing breaths, and complete the taxing process of lowering the huge steel block back into its slot. Goddamn. I should be deadlifting that thing instead of my barbells.
I hop out of the hole and put the deck plate back, then grab the few ancient textbooks I’m praying the Librarian doesn’t have and stuff them in a backpack.
Hm. Magic training. Not something I’ve thought about in a long time.
My eyes go to the panel in the wall where I hide my vitae tanks. They’re something I haven’t thought about in a long time, either. I don’t get a lot of use out of them, because I rarely have enough vitae to store for later. And I don’t make a habit of wearing them outside, because they’re kind of conspicuous and I’m not really ever in a position where I need extra vitae in public. But recent events have indicated that I might be better served with them than without.
Metal that can interact with magic. A way to bottle something that’s supposed to be unbottleable. Hmm. There’s something there. While I’m in the Library, I should see about finding references to these runes Volzet talked about. Something tells me that if the Brotherhood knows about them, they’re probably not using them responsibly.
I take off my coat, strap the tanks to my back, and plug the injectors into my collarbone ports. There’s barely enough in one of them to give me a full body charge, but it could save my life if I get jumped again. Thankfully I’m such a lumpy hulking mess that you can barely notice the shape of them under my coat.
A few more lollipops in my pocket for good luck, and I’m out the door. Forward unto knowledge I go.

[this story has over 30 posts now, which you can find through my reddit profile. hundreds and hundreds of pages of ol' Featherlight. and i update pretty much every week, so you can look forward to more ♥]
[you can read this story on Royal Road too, if that's the kind of thing you're into. reviews would be greatly helpful for a new guy on the scene ♥]
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Flatten the Curve. Part 44. Bill Gates Rumored Doomsday Bunkers. Bill Gates Hoarding. Rockefeller Institute & Unethical Human Experiments. Toxic Dust Storms and Covid-19. It's Hidden in Plain Sight. Wake up.

Part 43 is here
Listen up. Do you have a gnawing feeling that something isn't right? A gut instinct? Is your intuition leaving you in a state of vigilance? Is your spidey sense tingling? Do you feel like the truth is hidden in plain sight, but you can't quite see it?
You're not alone.
So what is the truth and why won't they just tell us? They aren't going to tell us the truth because most of us can't handle the truth. They experiment on live subjects in the past, but suddenly they've seen the light? Suddenly they've found morality and embraced truth and ethical behavior?

The Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study was a controlled study of the effects of malaria on the prisoners of Stateville Penitentiary near Joliet, Illinois, beginning in the 1940s. The study was conducted by the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago in conjunction with the United States Army and the State Department. At the Nuremberg trials, Nazi doctors cited the precedent of the malaria experiments as part of their defense. Link Here

Any day that Nazi Doctors use your experiment as a defense for Nazi medical experiments is not a good day.
Let me show you one other part of the puzzle that you need to read. Let me show you that at some point the money, power, or even the scientific research can detach some individuals from reality.
"A number of years ago, we talked about, 'What if there wasn't clean water? What if there wasn't enough food?" she said on the radio show. "Where might we go? What might we do as a family?' So, I think we should leave those preparations to ourselves." The only thing they did not prepare, however, was the vaccine or a treatment for the virus that would cause a pandemic, though she acknowledged how "lucky" she and her family are to be in a position of privilege when it comes to dealing with COVID-19. "What we mostly talk about now in our home every night is how lucky we are," she continued. "We understand our privilege. When we say our grace at night, what we're thankful for around the table, is that we aren't struggling to put a meal on the table as so many families around the world are." Link Here
Yep. Sure thing Melinda. You guys just sit around the dinner table (like us normal plebs) and talk about how lucky you are to have food. Then you went out and stocked up your basement. Maybe they hoarded all the toilet paper because they're so full of crap they can use TP to wipe their mouths with after they speak. And what a minute, isn’t hoarding food bad? And aren't billionaires just hoarding cash? Different rules for different people, and it makes no difference what they say publicly when it's still just the same crap.
August 7, 2019 | Many of the world's elite, including hedge fund managers, sports stars and tech executives (Bill Gates is rumored to have bunkers at all his properties) have chosen to design their own secret shelters to house their families and staff. Gary Lynch, general manager of Texas-based Rising S Company, says 2016 sales for their custom high-end underground bunkers grew 700% compared to 2015, while overall sales have grown 300% since the November US presidential election alone. Link Here
So which basements were you stocking Bill? I'm betting you stocked all of them. But that article really made it sound like you personally went grocery shopping, didn't it?
And there's that year again, 2015. The same year as the Bird Man plauge doctor video, coronavirus and bats possible pandemic discovered, CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing went mainstream, and the Billy Boy pandemic warnings started with a Ted Talk, then the Doomsday Bunkers elite MKultra wealthy segment jumped by 700%.
That's not a good sign.
It's all connected. All of it. We might not know how. Or who's doing what. Or how bad our current ELE events will become, but we need to at least get an outline of the big picture, before the big picture turns into the Main Event.
As far as I'm concerned, there is no possible way our present unexplained mysteries aren't prognosticators of upcoming calamities.
No. Way. At. All.
Let's throw the spotlight back onto our pandemic. It's all plain and simple when you accept the government's and the medical community's word at Face(book) value. Our leaders tell us to Keep Calm and Carry On. Just take two official narrative pills and wait for the vaccine. It's all good. Honestly. Listen. Trust. Obey.

1913 to 1951: Dr. Leo Stanley, chief surgeon at the San Quentin Prison, performed a wide variety of experiments on hundreds of prisoners at San Quentin. Many of the experiments involved testicular implants, where Stanley would take the testicles out of executed prisoners and surgically implant them into living prisoners. In other experiments, he attempted to implant the testicles of rams, goats, and boars into living prisoners. Stanley also performed various eugenics experiments, and forced sterilizations on San Quentin prisoners.[13] Stanley believed that his experiments would rejuvenate old men, control crime (which he believed had biological causes), and prevent the "unfit" from reproducing.

Whelp, at least you could say that Dr. Stanley had the balls to carry out his experiments.
Tuberculosis. Syphilis. Herpes. Influenza. Malaria. The medical society treated us to a rolodex of experiments.

In 1941, at the University of Michigan, virologists Thomas Francis, Jonas Salk and other researchers deliberately infected patients at several Michigan mental institutions with the influenza virus by spraying the virus into their nasal passages.[24] Francis Peyton Rous, based at the Rockefeller Institute and editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, wrote the following to Francis regarding the experiments:

It may save you much trouble if you publish your paper... elsewhere than in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. The Journal is under constant scrutiny by the anti-vivisectionists who would not hesitate to play up the fact that you used for your tests human beings of a state institution. That the tests were wholly justified goes without saying.

Wholy justified. Goes without saying. But we would never be so reckless with experiments today, no matter how justified, would we?
NY MAG. March 20

On January 13, less than a week after COVID-19 was identified as the virus behind the outbreak in Wuhan, researchers at Cambridge-based biotech company Moderna proposed a vaccine to fight it. A little over two months later, on Monday morning, a pharmacist in Seattle injected Rebecca Sirull with that vaccine, making her the third person to be injected in a 45-person clinical trial, the first human trial in the country. To rush the vaccine to clinical trial, Moderna skipped animal testing, a somewhat extraordinary measure. Sirull, a healthy 25-year-old editorial coordinator at a research institute, will receive a second injection in a month and have her blood drawn regularly for more than a year. Should the test be successful, the more optimistic estimates suggest that a vaccine could be available in 12 to 18 months. Intelligencer spoke with Sirull about her decision to take part.

Oh. Uhm. OK.

Jill Horowitz stood outside the Quaker Ridge Shopping Center in New Rochelle, N.Y.—an early COVID-19 hotspot—in March, stopping shoppers as they walked into the grocery store. She handed them blue pamphlets soliciting volunteers for a Rockefeller University antibody research study. “I would say, ‘Would you like to help us find a cure?’” says Horowitz, executive director of strategic operations at Rockefeller’s Laboratory of Molecular Immunology. “I didn’t even have to mention coronavirus. This neighborhood was completely subsumed.”

Yessiree ladies and gentlemen, step right up, roll up that sleeve, and get a poke to save all the good folks out there from the pandemic. The one that contaminates surfaces, but now doesn't spread through surfaces. The virus that you don’t need a mask for because a mask will make it worse. The virus you might need a mask for because it wouldn't hurt, but it's not airborne. Put on a darn mask because the virus is airborne. Maybe. But air-conditioning makes COVID-19 worse. So only wear a mask inside. The virus that worsens with pollution, but don't worry about putting on the mask outside. Because if you wear a mask you'll stop the second wave. But there might not be a second wave, it might just be one long continuous wave.
Is anyone else getting the impression that they don't have enough information about the virus to be issuing guidelines yet?
But I'm just being paranoid. I'm sure of it. That was then, and this is now.

Then: In a 1946 to 1948 study in Guatemala, U.S. researchers used prostitutes to infect prison inmates, insane asylum patients, and Guatemalan soldiers with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases in order to test the effectiveness of penicillin in treating the STDs. They later tried infecting people with "direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured into the men's penises and on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded . . . or in a few cases through spinal punctures". Approximately 700 people were infected as part of the study (including orphan children). The study was sponsored by the Public Health Service, the National Institutes of Health, the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau (now the World Health Organization's Pan American Health Organization) and the Guatemalan government. The team was led by John Charles Cutler, who later participated in the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. Cutler chose to do the study in Guatemala because he would not have been permitted to do it in the United States. In 2010 when the research was revealed, the U.S. officially apologized to Guatemala for the studies. A lawsuit has been launched against Johns Hopkins University, Bristol-Myers Squibb and the Rockefeller Foundation for alleged involvement in the study.

That is so reassuring as we move forward, isn’t it? And don't give me any that was back then we've changed arguments. We haven't changed at all. Proof? Ok. Let's go.
This is a link to an LA Times article that talks about Bill Gates and his AIDS fight in Africa. You go Bill. Get them vaccines out to the people. You're such a good guy! That's what a New Normal article would say. This isn’t a New Normal article. It's scathing in it's judgment. They may not be dying of AIDS, or just living longer with AIDS, but they are dying due to other factors, which should be easily acquirable with the wealth at Bill's disposal to prevent.
But there was one item that caught my eye. It talked about a Paper Mill that was in a country in Africa, that Bill owned a substantial amount of stock in. This company owned paper mills in North America. Those paper mills were environmentally friendly with little emissions. But not the one in the African Country. Nope. Not at all. That one didn't bother with environmentally friendly processes.
The story goes on to discuss how one of Bill's AIDS treatment recipients lived downwind from this plant and how the fumes we're probably killing him. And what were the fumes?
Hydrogen Sulfide. (Read more at Flatten the Curve) - Part 13
Yes seriously. Treating them for AIDS while downwind from Hydrogen Sulfide. I'm not sure about you, but that sounds like a medical experiment to me. Seriously, the guy that wants to stop climate-change by geo-engineering the planet doesn't use his clout to stop the pollution from a paper plant that he owns stock in. OK. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
Yet actually it might. No, seriously, it really might. I've already stated that the virus seems to be activated with environmental toxins. And here we have an ultimate real life laboratory. And what does this real life laboratory research?
Why maybe it researchers Miasma theory? Huh? Yep. Here we go.

The miasma theory is an obsolete medical theory that held that diseases—such as cholera, chlamydia, or the Black Death—were caused by a miasma, a noxious form of "bad air", also known as night air. The theory held that epidemics were caused by miasma, emanating from rotting organic matter.

Rotting organic matter, like at meat plants?
May 7, 2020: www.wired.com | Why Meatpacking Plants Have Become Covid-19 Hot Spots.
June 23, 2020: https://www.bbc.com | Coronavirus: Why have there been so many outbreaks in meat processing plants?
And do you know what else was associated with Miasma Theory? The Bird Man plauge doctor, just like the 2015 "you're all dead" video.
The word miasma comes from ancient Greek and means "pollution". And then we have Covid-19 and pollution.
The idea also gave rise to the name malaria (literally "bad air") through medieval Italian.
Malaria? What? Crazy? Aren't there debunked studies about Malaria drugs working on COVID-19? Nah. Must be fake news. Right? Or fake facts. Or is it fake news reporting fake facts? I'm just so confused.
Does the strangeness end there? Sadly, it doesn't folks. Not at all. Not in this New Normal.
Because Mr. Bill Gates is trying to eradicate tuberculosis.
And, Hydrogen sulfide stimulates Mycobacterium tuberculosis respiration, growth
Back when I looked for information about the pandemic, I noticed something odd, the mortality rate for Covid-19 fluctuated depending on the region. Now I'm not a doctor, but you don’t have to be to read, do you? So I kept looking at the data for similarities. And they were there. Hypoxic or polluted water like lakes or coastlines. Cities with factory polluting emissions. They all led to outbrakes and higher mortality rates.
And then it changed. I saw ourbreak regions with low mortality rates. It didn't make sense, but there had to be a reason. There's always a reason. And as I kept looking at the similarities of low mortality rates something jumped out, a lot of them were still vaccinated for Mycobacterium Tuberculosis.
Yep.
But this is crazy talk Greek! You're just looking for dots and finding a way to connect them. It's just a coincidence that Bill Gates is funding AIDS prevention, an article exists that points out a therapy participant is close to a source of hydrogen sulfide emissions from a company that Billy has stock investments in, and that Billy also has a program to eradicate tuberculosis. Stop seeing patterns where they don't exist. You're freaking people out.
Crap. Perhaps you're right. Maybe I am freaking people out. But let me show you something else. It's something that I noticed about a month after this pandemic was shutting us down. And it didn't make any sense to me at the time. Ready?
www.pnas.org | BCG vaccine protection from severe coronavirus disease 2019 COVID-19.
BCG? What's that?
www.sciencedaily.com | Preliminary study suggests tuberculosis vaccine may be limiting COVID-19 deaths.
And then the studies started backing it up. Even betteworse, they linked it to Hydrogen Sulfide, endogenous not exogenous, but Hydrogen Sulfide is the same no matter if you breathe it in or produce it biologically.
So, yeah. Let's dig.

Endogenous Hydrogen Sulfide stimulates Mycobacterium Tuberculosis respiration, growth, and pathogenesis.

In mammals, H2S elicits a biphasic, concentration-dependent mitochondrial response14, which can be cytotoxic or cytoprotective. For example, at high concentrations H2S reversibly inhibits cytochrome c oxidase (Complex IV)15–17. In contrast, at low concentrations H2S can serve as bioenergetic fuel to stimulate mitochondrial respiration without uncoupling of respiration. Link here

At high concentrations Hydrogen Sulfide can be cytotoxic and reversibly inhibit cytochrome c oxidase. We've followed the White Rabbit and now we're digging. Can't stop now. Won't stop now.

Defects involving genetic mutations altering cytochrome c oxidase (COX) functionality or structure can result in severe, often fatal metabolic disorders.

Disorders involving dysfunctional COX assembly via gene mutations include Leigh syndrome, cardiomyopathy, leukodystrophy, anemia, and sensorineural deafness**.Link here.

Anemia? Like, the Momento movie? Do I have amnesia now and I have to live my life backwards?
Hold on, don't freak out. You don't have amnesia. Self inflicted amnesia induced systemically via behaviorally manipulated echo chambers introduced systemically through social media electronic pathways? Possibly. But this is anemia, and that's another story.

Current management of COVID-19 is based on the premise that respiratory failure is the leading cause of fatalities (Zhou et al., 2020). Nevertheless, mounting evidence points to drastic systemic events taking place that contribute to accelerated COVID-19 pathogenesis. The “cytokine storm” is a notion that is reportedly hailed as the hallmark of the COVID-19 hyper-inflammatory state (Mehta et al., 2020). Consecutive studies linked COVID-19 related hyper-inflammation to systemic events including hypercoagulability, oxidative stress and altered iron metabolism. Mehta et al., 2020, Phua et al., 2020

Hyperinflammatory and altered iron metabolism. Following? Good.

Coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) has been regarded as an infective-inflammatory disease, which affects mainly lungs. More recently, a multi-organ involvement has been highlighted, with different pathways of injury. A hemoglobinopathy, hypoxia and cell iron overload might have a possible additional role. Scientific literature has pointed out two potential pathophysiological mechanisms: i) severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV- 2) interaction with hemoglobin molecule, through CD147, CD26 and other receptors located on erythrocyte and/or blood cell precursors; ii) hepcidin-mimetic action of a viral spike protein, inducing ferroportin blockage. Link Here.

Hypoxia? Where have I heard that before?

A dangerous symptom of the coronavirus that can cause a patient to fall unconscious or even die is known as hypoxia — when the body’s tissues do not receive enough oxygen. Dr. Richard Levitan, an emergency doctor working in New York City, wrote for the New York Times at the end of April that he has seen COVID-19 patients with “alarmingly low” oxygen levels, but no shortness of breath. He describes this as “silent hypoxia”. These patients had oxygen saturation levels as low as 50 per cent when normal levels are usually at 94 to 100 per cent at sea level, Levitan explained. These patients had oxygen saturation levels as low as 50 per cent when normal levels are usually at 94 to 100 per cent at sea level, Levitan explained.

Low oxygen levels. Dysregulates immune system. Are your They Live sunglasses on? Are plugged into the Matrix or hacking the Matrix?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov | Hydrogen sulfide stimulates Mycobacterium tuberculosis respiration + growth.

Tuberculosis (TB) is responsible for millions of deaths each year and several billion people are latently infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb). Mtb modulates host factors, such as endogenous gaseous signalling molecules, to persist in humans for decades. H2S has diverse biological functions, including modulation of immunity and cellular respiration. However, the role of H2S in TB is unclear. We found that mice deficient in H2S production are more resistant to Mtb infection than WT mice. Upon infection, Mtb increases host H2S, which suppresses central carbon metabolism and increases inflammation. Distribution of H2S-producing enzymes in human TB lungs showed that H2S is produced at the site of infection. These findings identify glycolysis and H2S-producing enzymes as targets for TB host-directed therapies.

Don't Freak Out like LeChic, but I don't think we're in Kansas anymore Dorothy.
Speaking of Kansas, do you remember the dust storm as the tornado blew in and swept Dorthy to Oz?
The “Godzilla” Saharan dust cloud over the US, explained:

Dust clouds originate in the Sahara, the largest desert in the world outside the poles, and the Sahel, just south of the Sahara. Much of the dust originates in the Bodélé Depression in Chad, an ancient dry lake bed at the threshold of the Sahara and the Sahel. There, convective storms in the early summer whip the dry ground and loft particles of silica, iron, and phosphorous as high as 20,000 feet into the sky. Link Here

And then we have this:

Residents wear face masks to protect themselves from the Saharan dust clouds covering Dakar, Senegal. N95 masks and even surgical masks can help protect people from getting sick from the dust. Breathing dust can trigger problems like asthma attacks and worsen conditions like heart disease. But particles from natural sources can pose some unique threats. “Desert soil can also be contaminated with bacteria and fungal spores or with toxic heavy metal,” Achakulwisut said. “For example, in the US Southwest, dust episodes there have been linked to outbreaks of Valley Fever and arsenic poisoning.” Link Here

Contaminated with bacteria. Guaranteed Anaerobic bacteria. And it carries along metallic compounds. Like this:

**A 2001 study in Limnology and Oceanography suggested that the seasonal windfalls of iron-rich Saharan dust become a banquet for red tides, blooms of algae that spill into the ocean like dye, deplete it of oxygen, and release toxins. Dust clouds can also host unwelcome stowaways. Jun 24, 2020 Link Here.

Red tides. Blooms of algae. Or rather perhaps, Cyanobacteria blooms? All in a dust storm. Maybe we should start wearing masks, right? Don't want to breathe in toxic dust, do we?

But Snake Park is no paradise. For decades the residents have lived with the mine, which they say blows clouds of dust into their homes. Now Snake Park, formally known as Doornkop, is in the sub-district with the highest number of Covid-19 infections in Gauteng. Last week, Gauteng Premier David Makhura linked “cluster outbreaks” on mines, and people moving between them and where they live, to the Covid-19 infections in the western part of Soweto. In 2017, the Bench Marks Foundation, a nonprofit that monitors multinational corporations, released the results of a survey of household health in four mine-affected areas in Soweto. Mine tailings contain heavy metals and chemicals and cause various illnesses, including mental health issues and Down’s Syndrome. The report found that more than two thirds of the respondents in Snake Park complained about respiratory problems, including persistent coughs, sinus issues, asthma and tuberculosis. This year, the August dust storms in Snake Park will coincide with the expected peak of Covid-19 infections in Gauteng.

“We can’t breathe well. This mine is very dangerous. It’s toxic,” Phongoma says, adjusting his bright blue mask. Looking at the mine dump, now glistening in the afternoon sun, he adds: “It’s a bomb. It’s a nuclear weapon — and with this Covid-19 thing, it’s going to explode.” Link Here

Stranger and stranger, isn’t it? So strange that I would venture to say, Stranger Things haven't happened. You might want to read Flatten the Curve Part 39, and what I wrote about Turkmenistan and wearing masks for toxic dust. Link Here
So where are we now? Knowwhere or nowhere? Are you a nobody or a knowbody? Is this picture that I'm painting connecting enough dots for everyone? Does anticipating mass riots in protest of the upcoming environmental collapse, and the wars for natural resources along with it, make the centralization of the economy plus the mass surveillance system make more sense? The masks and facial detection AI improvements? Does ID2020, another Billy Boy project make more sense? The upcoming robotic automation of the workforce? The curtailing of civil rights? Heck, what about the Bill Gates endorsement of impossible meats and the sudden push to vegetarianism? Remember the meat plant shutdowns? Rotting organic matter and Hydrogen Sulfide?
Please remember, Hydrogen Sulfide outgassing is pretty consistent across past Extinction Level Events. Does this mean that all hope is lost? Puhlease. Hope flows abundant. We shut Pandora's Box before hope could escape, remember?
Let me leave you with one final thought. Words matter. Look them up. They know what's happening. They know all of this. The words they use hide it in plain sight.
I've written about Bill's fortuitous investment strategy. How he seemed to hit all the right stocks as the pandemic and environmental collapse strikes. It's mostly hidden in shell companies after shell companies, but it has to start somewhere. And it does. He owns Cascade Investment L.L.C. Link Here
Which: Oct. 22, 2014 · A subsidiary of Cascade Investments LLC, which oversees the Gates fortune, is buying thousands of acres of land in north Florida. Link Here
And what does Cascade mean? Let's look?
cascade (n.)

"a fall or flow of water over a cliff, a waterfall," 1640s, from French cascade (17c.), from Italian cascata "waterfall," from cascare "to fall," from Vulgar Latin casicare, frequentative of Latin casum, casus, past participle of cadere "to fall" (from PIE root kad- "to fall"). cascade (n.) a succession of stages or operations or processes or units;

To prepare. To fall. Interesting choice for a name.

Meteor showers occur when the earth bowls through a dense stream of debris left in the wake of a comet, asteroid, or other space-borne object. Depending on where you look, you may encounter fewer meteors, however. Viewers in the Northern Hemisphere will see shooting stars emanate from the shower’s “radiant” point in the southern sky, meaning the best meteors with the longest tails will be most readily visible in the east and west. A much more spectacular meteor shower — among the year’s most prolific — will pepper the skies with a spattering of bright shooting stars and “fireballs” come mid-August. The Perseid meteor shower peaks the night of Tuesday, Aug. 11. Dozens of shooting stars could be visible beneath a clear sky every hour. Perseid meteors zip across the sky at 37 miles per second. Their diaphanous tails can appear white, orange, yellow, pink, turquoise and even violet, lingering in the sky for a few seconds. The rainbow spectrum of colors come from the combustion of magnesium, sodium and iron. Link Here

Pepper the skies with fireballs. Fall from the skies.

Comet 67P's rotten-egg smell comes from hydrogen sulfide, and the horse-stable odor comes from ammonia. These scents are blended with the fainter almond smell of hydrogen cyanide, the vinegarlike odor of sulphur dioxide and the sweet-smelling scent of carbon disulphide, researchers said. Link Here

Hnmm. It definitely sounds like Bill was getting ahead of the curve before we started to Flatten the Curve, by being a good student and getting prepared before the hoarders bought up all the toilet paper for the upcoming SHTF event.
Wouldn't you agree? Are these all coincidence, or should we pay more attention?
They want us to Keep Calm and Carry On. When do people tell you to remain calm? When you start to panic. So do you really think they would tell us the truth and deal with panicking masses? Or do you think they would hide it?
Hide it in plain sight?
Keep your head up and eyes open. Talk soon.

$DBVT: DBV Technologies SA

TL; DR: David gives Goliath a run for the money in peanut allergy treatments. May need to hold for a week or two, so no spaghetti hands please.
(Edit: I have also posted this in pennystocks & PennyDD. Please feel free to comment and share your opinions
DBVT is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical working on treatments for food allergies. The Company is focused on immunotherapy that works through skin absorption. Market cap. is about $600M.
What the galaxy says:
According to a study done by the Centers for Disease Control (adapted from company website):

Approximately 4-6% of children and 1.5% of adults in Europe are affected by food allergies. 3.5 million of these are under the age of 25.
Approximately 8% of children in the US have a food allergy. There was an estimated 50% increase in prevalence of food allergies among children in the US between 1997-2011
Australia saw a 350% increase in hospital admissions that were as a result of food-related allergic reactions, mostly in children below 4 years of age

The pilots of the ship

DBVT was founded in 2002 by Dr. Pierre-Henri Benhamou (Pedriatric Gastroenterology), Engineer Bertrand Dupont (from the Arts et Métiers ParisTech) and Professor Christophe Dupont (head of the Pediatric Gastroenterology Department, Necker Hospital, Paris). Pierre-Henri and Christophe currently sit on the scientific advisory board.
Daniel Tassé, CEO: has a B.Sc. in Biochemistry from Université de Montréal (1982) and 30+ years in pharma & pediatric business development. Previous to this, he was the CEO of Alcresta Therapeutics (where he guided the company in launching its first successful product, RELiZORB. Alcresta is not publicly traded, but had only $20M of funding in 2013 before Daniel joined, compared to $80+M when he left). Previous to that, he was CEO of Ikaria Inc. (where he managed to expand operations to Asia, successfully led the development of the company’s first product, INOMAX, and grew revenues from $160M to over $420M in just 4 years. Ikaria was finally acquired in 2015 by Mallinckrodt Pharma $MNK for $2.3 billion and Daniel worked for MNK briefly as Commercial Senior Vice President, reporting directly to the CEO after the acquisition)
Pharis Mohideen, M.D, Chief Medical Officer**:** holds an M.D., M.S. in human physiology and B.A. in biology from the University of Hawaii, as well as an M.S. in clinical investigation from Vanderbilt University. He has 15+ years’ experience in clinical development. He had various previous roles as director (5yrs at Bristol-Myers Squibb & 6yrs at Novartis), and chief medical officer at Millendo Therapeutics

The big boys are in on this one, many since February 2020 and some as recently as June 2020: Baker Brothers (11m shares), Arrowpoint Asset Management (4m), Perceptive Advisors (4M), Boxer Capital (3m), Morgan Stanley (2m), Amundi (1.4m), and Fidelity (574k). Sabby missed this rocket, which makes stargazing all the more beautiful. In total, institutions own 44% of the shares.
There are also also recent acquisitions of stock in (in June 2020) by a number of index funds like FTIHX, IMRFX & JCCIX..
The FDA had questions about the impact of the patch adhesion to its efficacy (remember, no safety issues were reported during the clinical trial). The company has already responded to this query but the FDA has given no further feedback apart from that the data was being reviewed. At this point, it is a coin flip game. High risk, high reward.
The data mentioned in point (iii) above has been published in multiple peer-reviewed scientific publications (this one and this one and this one32155-4/abstract)). All reviews show positive data.
The company recently trimmed down its workforce (something that is notoriously difficult to do in France) and scaled down other clinical programs in order to focus on the Viaskin Peanut product which is coming up for review on August 5th. (This simply indicates that they are very serious about this niche, or that they are prepared for a possible delay of the FDA’s decision)
DBVT is collaborating with Nestlé in a deal worth €100M to develop more product candidates (e.g. Viaskin milk). Nestlé is the largest food company in the world with over 2000 brands and generates $93 billion plus in revenue each year since 2008. However, Nestlé is as notorious as all big companies are, and food allergies have been one of the legal thorns in their flesh for a while. They are personally invested in this peanut allergy product and this collaboration has not been affected by the covid crisis. (Fun fact: Nestle also owns 18% of $AIMT, the competitor company. They are hedging their bets)
Skin patch therapy is potentially more marketable among the market segment that they are targeting (childen & infants) than pills. In addition, they would have potentially less side effects because the active compound gets directly into the bloodstream, and does not get absorbed via the liver.
Consider that it is a French company and the big influence France has in the EU. If they get approved, they might get approval support from the French government too.

Where’s the best place to live in light of collapse?

Ok we are 323 comments in on the collapse post and 98% didn’t bother to make even a slightly thoughtful answer. So... i guess i will be the change i want to see in the world
First off, If you are the fatalistic nihlistic type you can just go where you think it will be nice to die, maybe that is with friends and family, maybe it is on a beach in mexico, or feeding your body to the last polar bear. For everyone else that still has the instinct and drive for self-preservation….

What are the best places to be leading up to or during collapse?

First let's question the question.

What difference does it make to know "What are the best places to be leading up to or during collapse"?
The answer is dependent upon your own personal situation. Your personal situation has limiting factors.

Imagine you are a goat herder in Somalia during a multi year drought and there is no grass for feeding your animals. You have to sell them for dirt cheap because everyone else is also trying to sell off everything they can to get money thus depressing the goat prices further. Now the price of food is skyrocketing because there is no grass and the farmers crops failed, everyone is trying to buy up a hoard of food because everyone knows it is going to be a hard year. You manage to get the equivalent of $120USD in cash after selling practically everything you own but held onto one breeding pair of your healthiest goats you plan to use to regain a livelihood after the drought is over.
Imagine you are a billionaire with a fueled up superyacht, a helicopter, and a private plane. You have practically unlimited money, friends who are rich and connected in other countries, and a whole slew of passports, visas, and secondary citizenships, all else failing you can buy citizenships in most countries for less than $2million investment and pay a teams of specialists to expedite the process.

Your personal Limiting Factors constrain you usually somewhere between those extremes, everyone has different options.
If we assume you are asking the question "What are the best places to be leading up to or during collapse" because you want to have the best standard of living available for as long as possible or simply survive the incoming population bottleneck, then the practical question becomes ...

"What are the best places to be, leading up to or during collapse, that i can get to, and establish myself in such a way that I can maintain the best standard of living possible for as long as I can or simply increase my probability of surviving the incoming population bottleneck."

It is important to ask this question to constrain the search space to the possible. It makes fuck-all difference if a somali goat herder knows about the ToP SeCret ElitE mULtibiLLioNaIre New ZEaLand sOUth IsLaNd ReDoUbt BuNkeR CoMmUnITy It is not going to help him and should not be in the search space as a survival strategy.
TL:DR Constrain your search space to what is realistically achievable for you.

Start with your baseline probability of survival and increase it.
Don't let a search for "best place" stop you from achieving "good enough place" or "better than where i was previously place".
You are just trying to be an early adopter of increasing your survival probability stats before the non collapse-pilled masses.
Think of surviving bottlenecks like surviving a charging bear attack, you don't need to be able to outrun the bear, you only need to be able to outrun the slowest people in the group up to the point the bear's appetite is satiated.
^Remember ^working ^with ^others ^can ^leverage ^group ^synergies ^and ^massively ^increase ^the ^realistic ^{capabilities,} ^but ^this ^requires ^you ^establish ^social ^cohesion ^with ^sane ^cooperative ^people ^that ^have ^a ^similar ^goal ^orientation. /greencommunes

.............................................................................................................

What are the best places to be, leading up to or during collapse, that i can get to, and establish myself in such a way that I can maintain the best standard of living possible for as long as I can or simply increase my probability of surviving the incoming population bottleneck."

Ok now lets question the new question some more...

In order to answer this we need to untangle some of the subjective and objective elements.
The objective elements of human survival are well known.

Air
Water
Food
Clothing/ShelteTemperature maintenance
Socialization/reproduction

Optimizing location is a series of subjective trade-offs. There is no perfect place, they all have advantages and disadvantages.
So you must decide your personal preference of which goods and bads you most desire and what your scenario expectations are of the future.
Your personal preferences and collapse expectations mean the “best area” is specific to you.
What you can achieve and what do you desire, find the overlap between the two, then do research to find the place that gives you the most goods with the least bads and increases your probability of survival and standard of living.
One of the best strategies is to adapt yourself to your local circumstances to take advantage of the advantages, and plan ahead to mitigate the disadvantages, it is really all most people can do for themselves.
Do you like not living in unbearable heat, maybe moving to greenland is NOT a better option than just buying 400watts of solar panels and attaching it to a small efficient AC that keeps one room of your house cool even during summer electricity blackouts. Most problems have multiple solutions, it is worth it to take time and think about things from an economic perspective and different time horizon perspectives.
Increasing your optionality is better than narrowing it when it comes to survival, rather than the binary thinking, of “go way out into the northern mountains, farm and live in a bunker” versus “be a full time yuppie and ignore collapse issues”. Getting 2 acres you can put a cheap used rv camper on and go do permaculture on during weekends, near enough your place of employment/where you live, is probably a better plan. Indeed the small dacha’s and country gardens helped many people survive the collapse of the USSR. They would spend weekends and haul potatoes/veggies back to the city with them on the bus. Hedge your bets to cover the most scenarios including the most likely scenarios like losing your job or getting in a car accident. Survival and thriving always has and always will involve dynamic adaptation.
Here is a very short list of some of potential trade-offs that you may need to think about and some brief descriptions of how they can affect things. This is NOT meant to be a systematic or exhaustive analysis, this is just me stream-of-conscious flowing on strong coffee to help others start thinking about it for themselves. There are unlimited variables

Hot versus cold
- A lot of people in the forum think they it is somehow optimal for them to move to canada or greenland. Someone in eastern kansas moving to canada is not necessary, remember even in RCP8.5 business as usual scenario kansas by the end of the century still won’t be as hot as texas is currently. If there are already people living in hotter dryer areas now, then it doesn’t make a lot of sense to pack up your shit and move to the arctic, just enjoy the longer summers. At least base it on something scientific like the expectation of when that area will cross the 35C wetbulb survivability threshold, so if you live in Bandar Mahshahr then yes move somewhere else now is time.
Do you have children?
- Moving somewhere may not be needed if you can live out your expected natural lifespan before things get too bad, especially with the climate. If you have children you may want to move to account for the expectations during their future lifetimes.
Wet versus dry
- Wet places usually have more disease and insect loads for people and crops. In dry places it is harder to raise food, net primary productivity is usually lower, except where irrigation is available but there are usually less pests including plant fungal diseases like powdery mildew. There are Europeans living in certain parts of africa whom can only inhabit those areas currently because of antimalarial drugs, pesticides and mosquito nets. The native populations are full of people heterozygous for sickle cell which gives them resistance/immunity to the malaria, just a long view consideration.
Seasonality of rainfall
- if you get all your rainfall in the summer you usually live in a region where the muggy wetbulb temps are higher and will be getting higher. You are more likely to get floods during the growing season. If you get rainfall mainly in the winter like mediteranean climates you will usually have dry summers with low humidity so deadly wetbulb temps should not be a problem but maintaining summer vegetables requires irrigation. If using rainfed agriculture you will have different crop choices, which areas grow the types of food you like?
Sunny versus overcast
- Sunny areas are great for some dark skinned people and needed for vitamin D production in post collapse scenarios unless you have a good dietary source, black people in dim areas get Vitamin D deficiency diseases like rickets and have higher mortality in a hard enough crash. Gecko skinned gingers thrive better in overcast areas. Lots of people currently exist in environments they are biologically maladapted to, they are only able to live there because of modern fortified foods/supplements and medical care. Bright sunlight destroys folate (needed for reproduction) in pale people and causes skin cancer. Some people get S.A.D. and commit suicide in the gloomy winters of the pacific northwest USA. Just because a place is good in lots of other ways, you should not consider it if it will leave suicidal.
Growing season, long versus short
- Long growing season usually means more heat for longer, more times to grow crops but usually less optimal conditions. Short seasons means you have to compress a lot more work in a shorter amount of time. It also means trees grow slower and growing your own fuel supply takes more land footprint while you simultaneously need more heating fuel. Places like iowa have moderate/short growing season but the high lattitude makes for long daylength which increases productivity during the moderate/short growing season. Rainfall is concentrated during the summer and soils highly fertile but it is practically one giant biocide saturated monoculture of death. It doesn’t matter if the you live in a fecund area if your future children die of bluebaby syndrome from the nitrate pollution in the well-water or end up mentally retarded from the chlorpyrifos spray drift bioaccumulating and destroying neural development in utero.
Employment availability
- Let's be real here, most of you need to have employment to live, even as things crumble in a slow crash the vast majority will be dependent on employment and purchasing in the marketplace that which they need for subsistence. Cities are almost always better for employment. Keep in mind recently and historically, even prior to the industrial revolution, people were more often moving to cities to escape collapse scenarios in real life. You can look at africa and the middle east today. The reason is the city with its dense network effects can command food from a diversity of sources and the economics incentivize shipping surplus to cities. In times where the economics don't incentivize it governments usually seize it and send it to the cities. There is lots of historical precedent showing this, despite the general ruralist zeitgiest among collapsniks thinking that they need a homestead in the country. Employment or entitlements has been and will be the primary way people meet subsistence needs even in most collapse scenarios. Even in 3rd world areas that are experiencing famines, war, full infrastructure breakdown and conditions that are equivalent to 1st worlder visions of total collapse, people still wake up, go to work pulling weeds for the local land baron, get paid and then go buy a bowl of millet from the store.
High versus low wages.
- some areas have low wages but this can come with benefits like low cost of living and people being pre-adapted to living through cooperative social behaviors and "ghetto rigging" improvisation. Last time i was in some shithole parts of arkansas i noticed just about every rural person had a decent sized garden, more than any other state i've been to. They feel compelled to share unlike some high-income places where people are clawing for money to pay rents or status seeking in a dog eat dog competitive environment. I have lived in quite a few homeless encampments and one thing that surprises people is how everyone gives away all surplus among each other, this is a paleolithic variance smoothing strategy, it is supernaturally effective and feels natural once you do it. I see it re-evolve over and over in poor people.
Education levels and sociability of the population
Is the area culturally acceptable to you? Are you acceptable to the people of the area?
- There are places that may have all sorts of good qualities but they are filled with ignorant racist meth head bible belt sociopaths who will torment you out of sheer boredom. Some places get full of these people and they reinforce the ignorance and shittiness into a dominant culture that you will be fighting against if you move there. When moving to a place where you are an outsider and the community is hostile to allowing assimilation that can reduce your survival odds. See various historical genocides.
Distance from food sources
- Being close to a food source like right on a farm you grow on is great but if you have crop failure you may have no draw to bring in the food. Distance should be measured multiple ways including the strength and reliability of the transportation networks and the energetic distance for transport in energy descent scenarios. Think of the number of connections in the network you can draw from. In a city there are many stores each store sourcing from thousands of farmers, if a few farmers or stores fail there are still plenty of options. Some small rural towns depopulate once the single local walmart closes. Do you trust the local weather and your own potential self sufficiency more than markets/entitlements and transport resilience? Across what scenarios and time spans?
Legal rights and entitlements availability
- Solid legal rights and strong property law is great if you are part of the ownership class but when you are dispossessed, lack of legal enforcement can give you a higher standard of living because you can build shelter and do side hustles things without having "the man" come slap you down. In a place like western Europe you may have recourse to welfare entitlements and unemployment insurance payments to buy food in financial crashes and slow crash scenarios, in some countries things like this are not available, this is more important than most people think. Indeed most recent famines occur where food is present but people just have no way to buy it because they are brokeAF, you don't see rich people in those areas starving.
Water sources
- Water flows towards money. Just because there is a stream nearby doesn't mean you will be able to take water from it, you may need water rights while government is still able to enforce such edicts. Alternatively you may have impeccable senior water rights but the government enforcement is defunded and someone with zero water rights is upstream from you sucking the entire creek dry during a crash. Rainfall vs irrigation. rainfall allows a form of independence but having reliable irrigation can smooth out catastrophic variance in rain shortfalls. Don’t forget irrigation management was a major factor in the formation of early oppressive states.
Transportation network.
- Even prior to the industrial revolution, in cities that had Sea Ports, the population in those cities had higher survival rates than those living in the countryside during famines. Transportation is critical. More transportation modes plane, train, automobile, bikepaths, all different roads, rails, canals, rivers etc. These transports allow goods to flow, which generally helps satisfy regional shortages. Some people judge the main threat to be people taking what they have, usually it is governments doing the taking in the historical record but many are concerned with mythical hordes. If you subscribe to this paranoia about people robbing your homestead you may enjoy being as minimally connected as possible to the transport system. You must determine based on your own preferences and expectations. Good transport is a double edged sword, it means food/resources can also be shipped out of your area towards money/powerful people, remember ownership norms and enforcement rarely disappear during collapse-like periods, indeed the ownership class still sends supplies to the highest bidder which may not be you, see Irish Gorta Mor for example.
- In places like london way back when they still burned wood as cooking and heating fuel there were estates just outside the city that were highly organized coppice producers that fueled the city. Wood is heavy and only so much could be carried in a cartload considering they relied on animal traction. There was a distance where bringing the wood to london to sell would not make you any money even despite you getting wood for free because the cost of the journey feeding yourself and animal took the entire value of the wood. These effects are worth thinking about across different transport scenarios. Assets become stranded and likewise things can become uneconomical to ship to you when you need things produced in the city. The wood producing estates outside london were well off financially and smaller estate size could provide higher income than the much more distant estates that were an order of magnitude larger. Transport matters, markets and trade continue to exist in practically every collapse and even in supermax prisons, expect to use markets as a survival strategy, it is more likely than you living some isolated mountain man scenario.
Soil fertility
- (the older a soil is geologically X how much rainfall it gets) is what generally determines how fertile it is. The best soils are those that are relatively new and have been subjected to just enough rainfall to match the evapotranspiration rate, this minimizes nutrients leaching out, these are the mollisols/chernozems of the prairies. Because the water is just-enough in those zones they are also right at the edge where they can have major droughts with even slightly less rainfall. Wetter areas generally have less inherent soil fertility because of more leaching of nutrients but have more room for rainfall variability without plants meeting water deficiency.
your social ties family friends locations
- Having a positive social environment with people you love while just getting by, is better than doing well financially and being socially isolated, for most people. Don’t abandon good family and friends if you can avoid it, it is usually not worth it. “Social capital” has always been a key to human flourishing. Many people in the collapse of the USSR survived on “blat”, not by relocating. A real world social network for altruistic reciprocity is a survival tool.
Proximity to imperialist countries with militaries that may want/need your resources for themselves or their people
- Places like ukraine, some of the best farmland in the world, a country may seem optimal in many ways but historically this advantage was noted by outsiders and it has been at the crossroads of empires which means they suffered tremendously in war. The devastation of war and imperialism negated much of the natural benefits of the area when it comes to survival rates. This is something to consider. In parts of africa there is more conflict in abundant zones with more food, outside of famine zones because paramilitaries are supported from the land there and controlling the food supply is used as weapon of political power. Concentration of resources can make areas more dangerous, it makes attacking them economical.
Fuel supply
Pollution
Population density

Most of these maps are of the USA. If you have other maps please post them in the comments and i will edit this post to squeeze them in. From these maps and a little critical thinking you can figure out where is best for YOU. If you need to figure something out go to google images and search for maps it is easier than ever to find what you need. But remember the map is not the territory, there are great spots maps don't have the resolution to show.These are just some random things i pulled up real quick. mapporn is a good source
https://gain.nd.edu/our-work/country-index/
https://ourworldindata.org/charts
https://ucanr.edu/blogs/dirt/blogfiles/37486_original.jpg
https://www.plantmaps.com/
There are a lot of submaps,for example if you click california then it brings first and last frost date maps, heat maps etc…
http://www.bonap.org/
On the left hand side there are lots of links to climate and biogeography maps
https://www.firelab.org/sites/default/files/images/downloads/whp_2018_classified_midsize.jpg
Firehazard map
https://imgur.com/a/drI7nZB middle of nowhere
hdd+cdd= change in energy requirements for climate control https://energyathaas.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/caldeira.png
https://fitzlab.shinyapps.io/cityapp/ Find out what your city will be like in 60 years
human development index https://imgur.com/a/VDmTac7
https://imgur.com/a/XoGw1Ic solar and wind potential combined
https://imgur.com/a/97XEe22 1% of population lives here
https://imgur.com/a/Ki4Zegq land quality
https://imgur.com/a/kYzus5H Fig. 2 Spatial distributions of projected damages. County-level median values for average 2080 to 2099 RCP8.5 impacts. Impacts are changes relative to counterfactual “no additional climate change” trajectories. Color indicates magnitude of impact in median projection; outline color indicates level of agreement across projections (thin white outline, inner 66% of projections disagree in sign; no outline, ≥83% of projections agree in sign; black outline, ≥95% agree in sign; thick white outline, state borders; maps without outlines shown in fig. S2). Negative damages indicate economic gains. (A) Percent change in yields, area-weighted average for maize, wheat, soybeans, and cotton. (B) Change in all-cause mortality rates, across all age groups. (C) Change in electricity demand. (D) Change in labor supply of full-time-equivalent workers for low-risk jobs where workers are minimally exposed to outdoor temperature. (E) Same as (D), except for high-risk jobs where workers are heavily exposed to outdoor temperatures. (F) Change in damages from coastal storms. (G) Change in property-crime rates. (H) Change in violent-crime rates. (I) Median total direct economic damage across all sectors [(A) to (H)].
https://i.redd.it/x9a2x7627vm31.png Nuclear targets
https://i.redd.it/s8stxdk9a6i31.jpg Chernobyl fallout, demonstrates the nonlinear patterns of distribution
https://i.redd.it/al06n7nofwi21.png Reliance on nuclear energy.
https://i.imgur.com/AbcjwaD.jpg
https://imgur.com/6o2XcHD
https://i.redd.it/jvp1e7maxhr01.jpg Global solar potential
https://i.redd.it/zk0hbo2bhf4z.png Renewable electric supply
Power plants http://i.imgur.com/esUA6iN.jpg
https://i.redd.it/6s781fax1cs21.jpg Red and orange have same populations
https://i.redd.it/cbndvblgz0x21.jpg Agricultural suitability
https://i.redd.it/cpkaqv5h11d31.jpg how america uses its land
https://i.redd.it/2w1va9h2w7431.png Life expectancy by congressional district
https://i.redd.it/kgrz9rweksx21.jpg food for humansgreen versus animal feed purple
https://i.imgur.com/TOlZ2SD.gif line that separates wet and dry USA
https://imgur.com/oqJXKsV Is food a human right? See paupericide
https://i.redd.it/xbvng0ul8nz01.jpg food self sufficiency
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315066937/figure/fig2/AS:472189653786625@1489590194560/Worlds-hybrid-PV-Wind-power-plant-cumulative-FLh-map.png combination wind+photovoltaic capacity
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/images/content/95539main_fig1.jpg human appropriated net primary productivity
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/images/content/95543main_fig2.jpg avoid the pink and orange unless your strategy is cannabilism in fast or hard crash.
https://nimaehsani.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/water_scarcity_map.jpg?w=748 water shortage
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Global_malnutrition.png malnutrition
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/354/6309/aaf8957/F5.large.jpg

About ideologies and winning?

So previously a thing was written here, and this ended up arguably too long for a comment, so it's a post, and here we go.
Many years ago me and some friends played a bunch of Container. (I promise this will end up related.) The first game we didn't really know what we were doing or how the different parts fitted together, and it was a bit awful. We'd got attached to what we'd personally shipped to the island, each rejected auction was money leaving the system. Operations started to get tight, someone took out a loan, that removed even more money, and with our restricted options the endgame turned from "who is playing this game best?" instead into "who can do anything?"
In subsequent games we improved at making and accepting offers of goods arriving at the island, which massively adds money into the game system. Liquidity, or something, and the assorted parts just moved better, the economy clicked and whirred with products and margins. But even at the conclusion of the second game, I'd made a conscious change. I would no longer play Container, for Container is a game about maximising personal profit in comparison to your competitors. I would instead play to maximise goods delivered to the island, with my personal profit an explicitly secondary concern. This is a similar & compatible game, a semi-cooperative variant. It's played on the same board with other players who were playing Container, who might not even realise that I'm not. (I didn't tell anyone.) We all ended up individually strictly better off than the first game, myself included, even though I didn't "win at Container". Of course the fictional settlement on the island got more containers (though it's never clear if this means "brocolli", "iPhones", or "AK47s").
It's not an overly common thing to assess our personal behaviour as it relates to the function of the entire system. Indeed, Smith's Invisible Hand is that, under certain assumptions, the systemic benefit follows exactly from aggregated personal decisions. But there are already a couple of contexts where we're used to thinking like this. Jumping to mind is driving a car - "merge like a zip" etc - it's widely recognised that driving decisions that keep all the traffic evenly flowing are the best move. People already do evaluate their personal decisions with respect to their contributions to the overall system. Now we've outlined the behaviour and demonstrated existence, it's a conversation about contexts.
(I'm also aware I'm using "the system" a lot and this might get read as a defense of "the patriarchy". It's not. It's a general discussion of of the arrangement and mechanisms of society, which includes "the patriarchy" as one case, but also generally includes any other configuration that might replace it. It's a wide use of "all systems that might be" rather than "the system we have".)

The feeling was one of: if there is no God, and all we have is this brief time before oblivion, I can understand why someone, if they had the opportunity to take & hold onto the things they wanted, would do that.

Maybe, but there's a couple of things to mention here. The first is that this behaviour tells you about who the person really is. This is how someone behaves when they don't think they're being watched. But it might also be more complicated than that.
It might be that their whole lives have been built separating personally motivated behaviour and socially beneficial behaviour into two different conceptual baskets. That years of thinking in terms of "doing God's work" has reinforced motivations of actions done for God, even in some constructions by God through them. And that if the belief in God is undermined, that entire side of the decision framework could fall away. Perhaps less that they're only good people because God was watching, more that they never practiced making decisions for the benefit of all people because those same decisions got made for God.

The question as a Christian was always: How Now Shall We Live

That one is a weird one, because Heaven, the afterlife, etc, you'd expect a better question to be "how should we prepare for eternity?", but that's a small & tired point, moving on.

There is a part of me that thinks we can't all live so pluralistically, that there must be some common strands that bind us.

Maybe, but not necessarily. We know that monocultures are bad in agriculture, monopolies are bad for a market, and that single points of failure are bad engineering. Similarly I'd vaguely handwave that a monolith of uniform ideology is a bad idea lacking both resiliency and versatility. That there isn't necessarily a worldview "winning" by achieving ubiquity, but instead a continuation of "not losing" as contrasted to unfit worldviews that are shed from the catalogue of viable possibilities. Bye, Flat Earthers. Which is also in line with how science advances progression towards truth, but that's a very handwaved analogy.
I hadn't thought this next point was connected to the Container realisation, but maybe they are the same thing. In the last few years I haven't thought of evolution as a process that acts on individuals trying to maximise the well-being of their genes / offspring. Instead I think of it as an operation of entire population undertaking a distributed search for "utility" across the landscape of selection forces. It doesn't change any of the evidence or mechanisms, it changes where the moral judgements are attached (which isn't really part of the science anyway).
So instead of an evolutionary trait being "good" for an individual, those discoveries of local utility are a "good" thing for the population to explore - in a risk tolerant manner, since there's still a lot of diversity maintained. The population is the principal unit of analysis, as opposed to the individual, things are "good" or "bad" for the population as a whole as explored by some subset of individuals. Which makes a degree of sense for a/ any sexually reproducing species, where a limited gene pool is harmful and an isolated individual is an evolutionary terminus, and b/ for any group that forms larger social & economic structures, the wider population is vital. No man is an island, so I no longer think about evolution as an operation acting on an island, but instead tides around an archipelago (to misuse that metaphor).

But there I go again. Why should my humanism be your humanism?

Maybe it isn't. Maybe it's a better strategy for the population as a whole - both more effective, and more risk averse - to simultaneously pursue a number of different ideologies. If it's not something we're going to figure out for a decade or two, then yeah, hedge those bets and keep all the options open in different parts of of the distributed search. Yeah, we're handwaving from evolution as a distributed process over biological entities to a process over ideological frameworks, but so did Dawkins so it's probably fine. That's what memes are.
There are tangents in here that connect to both Tragedy Of The Commons, and also possibly to the Stakhanovites. In relation to concerns of the later, this isn't about pushing for productivity increases, instead about deciding what to produce for, to where the benefits should be directed. It's also not the case that things are done for "the system" at the expense of the individuals. The system is just the aggregate of individuals, and you're part of that. Capability is a vital component of agency. I didn't come last in Container, even when I wasn't playing Container. I still needed some resource base of my own to pursue my goals, even if those goals weren't the maximisation of that personal stash.

The right to die will bootstrap our "humanity for each other", TMBR

Greetings /TMBR!
I have previously posted about this idea on this sub before [1] and have expanded it into a long FAQ [2] with input from /changemyview, but now I need to fill in the gaps as to how it will begin. I am trying to argue many things in this post, but mainly:
If our "humanity for each other" is expressed:

It will break through many important deep-seated cognitive biases
It is a principle that we can use through the "bottle neck"

However, our "humanity for each other" is not expressing itself very well, and I think the right to die can give it a cold-start.
The theme song for this post is: Ten Years After - I'd Love To Change The World

Introduction

The projections of a negative future does not need repeating here, and we are looking for solutions. The socio/political option of a collective realization is shot down, for reasons including, but not limited to:

We are playing the blame game and cannot agree on who and how to punish
It's not affecting me right now, why should I do anything about it?
We want someone else to change while not inconveniencing ourselves
We cannot win, so it's better to get more for me and my own
We can't do anything about it, but you've got to live your life
I'll be dead by then, so it's not my problem
I'll believe it when I see it, and we'll know what to do when the time comes

Having an 'attention action' horizon of at most a few years is deeply wired into us by evolutionary pressure, because that perspective has so far given us the best chance of survival. The problem is that the extinction of humans is not palpable, while poverty, hunger, police abuse, politicians corruption, among other things, are completely palpable. People feel those day to day, while in contrast to climate change and other similar issues, we may know it's going to get bad, but without knowing how, we have no idea how to react. We do not seem to be able to fix the problems that we created, leading us to draw the conclusion that evolution did not make us smart or ethical enough to solve the problems of our own thinking.
We can see issues of developing countries wanting what the West has [3], so, in my opinion, the lesson is that any change has to come from the top: in other words, the West will have to make the first move. As an example of the trend, here [4] is an instance of Cambodian farmers unable to reliably work the land so must contribute to being part of the problem of making other people being unable to work their lands in order for their own survival today, while having as much children as possible because they need cheap labour and to hedge their bets because they could die of famine/wadisease, which are more likely in the future with climate change.
If we can show that some action P leads to solving overpopulation/overconsumption/overproduction, and that one nation starts the ball rolling, maybe it could lead to other nations doing the same, because the citizens would call for it. I'm trying to show that there is a last hope that can work for P, which could lead us to try new emergent strategies to run society, and that is by bootstrapping our "humanity for each other", just as rugged individualism bootstraps our "survival spirit". What could possibly be used as a bootstrap? I'm arguing that the right to die can.
Nothing short of a global enemy like an alien species can unite the humans. Unfortunately our monkey brain isn't good at equating that things like climate change is the alien invasion. The good news is that I think there is a global enemy that we can choose to implement, and that would also unite us against the common enemy. It's a tricky paradox to unwrap, but I think the right to die can do this, and not because of mass suicide. What it should do is institute a predator, but also give us a balancing scale and a mirror, both of which are tools that we can use to measure the balance and identify the predator. The predator must be instituted for the plan to work though; I don't think it will be enough to have the balancing scale and the mirror.

Stage 2: Bootstrapping our "humanity for each other" with the right to die

It is often stated that a biological species without a natural predator will reproduce unchecked until its resource limits. A predator has the ability to "go in for the kill", and as humans, we seem to be the masters, the apex predators of this world, because of abilities that are sufficiently distinct from other animals. No other species has come close to these abilities, so we have remained on top of the food chain, and thus have great difficulty self-restraining our over-everything habits. If we want balance so that we are sustainable and "live in harmony" with the environment, then the right to die will insert a formidable foe.
This new predator will be like counterbalance, but what's difficult for me to explain is that an efficient/guaranteed/peaceful method of suicide should be allowed legally, but not "supported" socially. Then, there will be forces that are encouraging the suicide; here is an example:

Have you considered the implications of suicide in a for-profit healthcare system like Americas?
If suicide is a legal option, why would my health insurance pay for a lifetime of therapy and mental health medication when they could just lead me to kill myself and save them money?
Even if you want to exclude health insurance or assume there will be some kind of legislation preventing this, depression often comes with the feeling of being an unworthy burden. By legitimizing suicide as an option, wouldn't it be more likely these depressed people kill themselves to save their caretaker from the cost and hassle of dealing with them? I feel like this is already a factor in some peoples decision to commit suicide, but at least now suicide is clearly shunned both legally and socially.

There is a common trope about doing anything to save our loved ones, fight for the family, etc; I've recently heard it said by Rose in one of the Star Wars movies, “We’re going to win this war, not by fighting what we hate, but saving what we love.” Everyone has different things that they love, and if they love it, then they want to save it.
This force that I call our "humanity for each other" is a factor as to why suicide is shunned socially. In the above case, people who "feel like an unworthy burden" will experience others try to save them on a case-by-case basis, as they are currently. The difference (after the right to die) though, is that they must respect their right to die, so if people really had "humanity for each other" and want to save their loved ones, they have to look to the forces that are encouraging the suicide and "fix" those: in our case, going after for-profit healthcare and "feeling of being an unworthy burden". So then by "fixing" the encouraging forces, you won't just be saving this one individual but others as well.
As an analogy, the right to die will erect something like a scale in balance, and we can identify the forces that are encouraging suicide by the forces that are tipping the scale - something we can't do very well today. The forces that are tipping the scale are numerous: on the one hand, there will be forces that are encouraging people to kill themselves; on the other hand, there are forces that motivates people to say things like "the suicidal who survive their attempt usually regret it, so we don't want people to kill themselves" and even this variant I call our "humanity for each other". If "every life is precious", and the right to die is respected, then our "humanity for each other" should be going after the "genocidal murderers" so that no one kills themselves.
But suppose someone doesn't have this "humanity for each other", or has biases like, "I'm doing everything right, they have no reason to come after me", or "if it's not in front of me, then it's not a problem". They may believe that they are an apex predator with an impeccable survival instinct, but, if the right to die is respected, they will also have to contend with the new predator in the environment, so if they want to survive, they will have to face the encouraging "kill yourself" forces, and do something about those.
Now the issue is identifying the predator(s) - are for-profit healthcare and "feeling like an unworthy burden" really the murderers? A suicide opens up a can of worms, and reactions are all over the spectrum. Everyone looks at a suicide differently: some empathize, some accept, some reject, and some can't stand to look at it, and it is this quality that makes a suicide analogous to a reflection from a mirror. A mirror is "agnostic" though, meaning it reflects everything thrown back at it, so it's difficult to predict the end result of reflection. However, we can extract a general trend, and I'll take for-profit healthcare healthcare as an example, but it could be other things.
A common retort of criticisms is the pot calling the kettle black, and one eventually admits that they are part of the problem. For-profit healthcare is something consumed and in demand, and one "must have" it, never calling into question the systemic effects of our individual choice. "We can't do anything else" or "I don't want to be the first" are some justifications for not wanting to inconvenience ourselves of privileges, among others. So, given enough reflection, one is lead to say that we are "choosing" to keep the murderer alive.
What can one do against the predator when they don't want to inconvenience themselves? They can begin to think of removing the right to die, but this removes the scale and the mirror, the tools which we need to identify the predator and keep him in our sights, which would put us back at square one. So if the right to die is respected, one will have to deal with the predator, especially if they have a survival spirit or a semblance of a "humanity for each other". If they don't want to inconvenience themselves, they will have to do whatever it takes to make the predator not a threat. In essence, the mirror shows that we are our own worst enemy, and the predator will hopefully unite us against that common enemy, so that we will learn how to live with ourselves.

Stage 2 (Again): In other words

Wait, what?

How will it work? Once the predator is instituted, other parallel mechanics should also be put into motion, namely the mirror and the balancing scale. All that I expand on below should follow from the dynamics of the above three.
To be clear, it's not mass suicide that I'm arguing for; rather, that no further suicides are necessary because there is already a past history of suicides to reflect on, once our "humanity for each other" is alive and well. The discussion leading to (self-)reflection is the goal, not the act of suicide.
To understand the strength of the predator, you have to imagine it as if there were no lines drawn, so that it can swiftly go in for the kill, and human nature is free to react. If you draw a line at no one, suppose that were removed. Or if you draw a line for the terminally ill, suppose that were removed. Or if you draw a line for the 'curably depressed', suppose that were removed.
Against the predator that will take either you or your loved ones away, what strategies can you employ? Broadly, I categorize them into four: live with; kill; starve; and tame.

Living with the beast

This is what we are currently doing. The predator bootstraps our "survival spirit", so it stays alive and instead defers the consequences of its actions to the environment, as modeled here:

human (passively supports) predator (defers externalities to) environment (leading back to whatever useful life is left, which is) human

With the right to die, the predator will finally have teeth and test between the environment and humans, and see that humans are an easier kill:

human (actively institutes) predator (that goes for easier kill, which is) human

By instituting the predator, it will begin to divert its attention from the environment and make moves into human life. This makes the threat more real than an abstract, future existential one. This turns the predator away from eating the environment to begin directly eating itself, biting the hand that feeds.
Now against the predator that is encouraging you to die, instinctual biological action is either "fight or flight" and if you do not choose flight, then you are left to fight:

Kill the beast

The first instinctual strategy is to fight to kill.
The predator will encourage the fighter to kill themselves, and due to the mirror, the fighter will also encourage the predator to kill themselves. I've already given the example of health care, but there are an innumerable amount of encouraging forces, both direct and indirect, including, but not limited to:

"The elderly and/or sick are a burden and need to kill themselves"
"The 'degenerates' are a drag and need to kill themselves"
"You need to kill yourself for being (part of) the problem"
etc, etc.

The predator is like a creeping evolutionary Red Queen, and due to the mirror, the fighter acts out the roles of both the rabbit and the fox:

"The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for his dinner." -Aesop

Starve the beast

The clever strategy against an indominatable predator if you can't kill it is to starve it.
The fighter is still fighting, whether due to their "survival spirit" or their "humanity for each other". By trying to cut off the predator, they are trying to find out who is sustaining it. Eventually, they come to find that the predator that is coming after them or their loved ones is kept alive because of the individual consumption habits because the fighter depends on the predator for their privileges and conveniences.
The Red Queen continues to exert pressure on everyone, and so the fighter continues their fight because of their "survival spirit" and/or "humanity for each other". As long as the material conveniences are available and still 'chosen', the strategy of starving the beast will leave one in this loop for many repetitive iterations.

Tame the beast

The looping done while attempting to starve the beast will lead the Red Queen to incrementally exert more and more pressure. If we can't kill or starve it, we are lead to tame it before it kills us.
Here we are, caged with and by this juggernaut of a beast, and we seem to be driving it so hard that it seems certain to either crash or break down, and yet nobody really knows why we are driving it so hard at all - where are we trying to get to? However, while we think we have a handle on the predator, it becomes clearer that we are just keeping the predator alive, and it's been argued that we aren't in the driver's seat after all [5]. The predator will see, "oh, is this what the market can bear?" and resist a new normal by asking, "how much more can it bear? It can bear more, right?" because it is just as clever as us because we support it. The Red Queen will want to break through any equilibrium because it has bootstrapped our 'survival spirit'. The situation isn't hopeless though: what I'm arguing that can tame it and give it a counter-balance is our "humanity for each other", but it is expressing itself quite coldly right now.
It may seem that there's no way out of the looping done in the previous starving strategy, but fortunately our "humanity for each other" is also concurrently bootstrapped. Since it might need a cold-start, the bootstrapping will likely be rather unprecedented (just like the rugged individualism of bootstrapping our "survival spirit"), but once expressed, it should hopefully lead everyone to self-reflect and to the realization that "we have seen the enemy, and it is us", leading to the question, "why am I fighting against myself?" Here is a linear representation:

Right to die -> increase in (awareness of (potential)) sucides -> looking for the root cause -> general societal self-reflection -> radical change in consumption/production habits

Nothing unites the human species like a common enemy (take an alien invasion as an example). With the right to die, the predator becomes the common enemy, and with our "humanity for each other" bootstrapped, we are then able to unite against it.

The balancing scale

As a more illustrative example of this tool, the right to die should work as a balancing scale as envy is to this primitive society [6]:
https://aeon.co/essays/why-inequality-bothers-people-more-than-poverty

The mirror

The mirror is a machine that provides the means for reflection and self-reflection. A reflection is difficult to trace, not to mention the innumerable forces that encourage one to kill themselves, but I can offer an example of both types of reflection.
Consider the social norm of "so where's your house and two kids?" For rhetorical purposes, I will call this a "terrorism source". Currently, future parents are psychologically abused into wanting to breed, and no one seems to do anything about it because there doesn't seem to be a power to go against cultural norms. What I'm trying to say is that there is a power that can fight the terrorism: terrorism itself.
Think of this reflected force like this:

terrorism source -> parents

Some people see events in the world and take them as signs that they don't want to bring a new child into the world. What just happened here was self-reflection. Some people aren't like this, and so we arrive at:

terrorism source -> parents -> child

Now with the right to die, you can then add "child -> suicide" for some cases:

terrorism source -> parents -> child -> suicide

If the parents loved their child, they would immediately see the force reflected back:

terrorism source -> parents <- child <- suicide

which they may misinterpret as "blaming the parents"; indeed the terrorism source may also take that stance, but that's not what I'm trying to say. Hopefully, some parents, after self-reflection, may finally deflect and direct that force back:

terrorism source <- parents <- child <- suicide

Stage 3: A new operating system

Wait, so my punishment for my actions is that the others want to kill themselves? Great! More for me and my own!

The tragedy of the commons is frequently brought up as a final barrier. Although I haven't studied in this direction yet, from secondary interpretations [7], it's claimed, by Elinor Ostrom and her work with collective action theory, that people in real life can and do overcome the tragedy of the commons. The way you do it is by creating a system of rules (i.e. "institutions") that punish people for gaming the system. The main problem, though, is that the people in power don't want to give up that power or change their behavior. I'm proposing that the right to die, while not quite a direct punishment due to incorporating self-reflection, should qualify as sufficient as a single instituted rule.
Once our "humanity for each other" is bootstrapped, then we can install a new 'operating system' (to borrow a term from the "Exponential Altruism" proposal [8]) on top of it. But, this raises the obvious question: who will decide what direction? The right to die proposes a natural principle: since we cannot currently decide top-down, we experiment, in an emergent manner, ways to live. Then, if the citizen doesn't like the direction, they can be encouraged to off themselves, but if the experiment still cared, they would do anything to not encourage them to kill themselves. This is the metaphor of the balancing scale. If the people in power did not want to experiment, and still respected the right to die (this is a reason why it has to be instituted!), then if the citizen offed themselves, they would no longer have power over them. This is the metaphor of the predator, imploding itself alive.
If "every life is precious", then what kind of society would not encourage someone to kill themselves? I argue that this is a meaningful question, and I think its answer is along the lines of those espoused in "What must we do to live" [9]:

We have to want a future for someone we’ve never met on the opposite side of the world.

Stage 1: Instituting the right to die

If the predator will do as outlined in Stage 2 and 3, then just one action is sufficient to lead to a cascade of actions. All the questions about overpopulation, overconsumption, overproduction, etc, reduces down to an initial one: how to institute the predator?
There are several barriers that people have against supporting right to die, including the 'survival spirit' and 'humanity for each other'! Along with the other pro-choice arguments, I can offer a few more:

Some people think our civilization is headed in a suicidal path, and don't want to experience the pain of such, so would rather check out. We should give them that option. I model this individual perspective here:

individual consumption (supports) "the corporations"/standard of living (which leads to) unsustainable practices (which leads to) Bad Things™ (which leads to) despaisuicide
To maintain our trajectory, we are gambling by expecting future generations to develop saviour-tech, while the same trajectory is stacking the deck against the future generations all the while. Against accumulating odds because we are unwilling to change our trajectory, future generations should have the option to fold.
Nature has no rights; it's either do or die. It's also been argued that evolution has not made us smart or ethical enough to fix the (abstract) problems of "our" own making. But, if there is nothing wrong with human nature from the perspective of evolution, we should lift this idea of "do or die" into the space of human abstractions, namely rights.

As well as my previous argument that it will affect overpopulation/overconsumption [2]. But in the context of the new predator, why also should one support?

You are selfish and only care about your own? Good! We will need people who can fight to the last, because the predator is formidable.
So you have an optimism bias and believe suicide isn't an option? Good! We will need people who want to save their fellow human.

Lastly, I haven't studied this angle yet, but I think it's relevant to the non-identity problem [10] and could be (part of) a solution to it.

Problems

There are a few initial problems that stand out on first glance:

Anything less than legal and expedient might not work
As previously mentioned, you have to consider this thought experiment as if no lines were drawn. Discussion on suicide methods has a strong taboo, and the taboo has to be lifted for this to work. I think the legal way is the most effective to raise the quality of discussion levels. Another less effective means is to end the War on Drugs, but while the means are "available" this way, the stigma is still there, and the knowledge, rather than being out in the open, will probably continue to be censored and not considered.
The predator might be weakened
Without a guaranteed/peaceful/effective/always available means of suicide, the predator will lack the the teeth it needs to get us out of our comfort zones. We will also lose the vital instruments of the mirror and balancing scale. The predator will need to be maintained so that it is able to affect everyone simultaneously, through the bottle neck and beyond.
Where to draw the line?
This is the main question of the current secular efforts throughout the world today. In the context of this argument, where you draw the line will determine how strong the predator is, and how strong you want the predator is influenced by how much time you allot for us to unite against it as the cause of (percieved) existential threats.
Religion
Related to the above, the religious will want to maintain their stance of drawing a line for no one. I have a few cards to start a discussion with the religious, but it depends on if the secular right to die for all will work or not, so I want to focus on the mechanics first.

Conclusion

We have thought of ourselves as apex predators for far too long; we should learn to fight with a predator that is just as capable as us. The main hurdle is of everyone realizing they are the problem and that we are all in this together, which I believe and have hopefully argued that the right to die can accomplish. Bootstrapping our 'humanity for each other' is not a complete solution, but it provides a base on to which to build a differently run society, one that answers the question: what kind of society would not encourage someone to kill themselves? The stamina for this challenge we already have; we just need the tools.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/TMBcomments/8repwd/the_right_to_die_is_the_best_shot_we_have_at/
[2] /TimeToGo/comments/97wrjq/cmv_the_right_to_die_is_the_best_shot_we_have_at/
[3] /worldnews/comments/9q4fy8/teen_climate_activist_to_crowd_of_thousands_we/e86ub0m/
[4] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-16/how-climate-change-is-trapping-cambodians-into-modern-slavery/10377982
[5] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you-broke-the-future.html
[6] https://aeon.co/essays/why-inequality-bothers-people-more-than-poverty
[7] https://www.reddit.com/collapse/comments/9nk4e5/neoliberalism_has_conned_us_into_fighting_climate/e7nr4ww/?context=1
[8] https://medium.com/exponential-altruism/exponential-altruism-a-strategy-for-a-new-world-e3ad56794434
[9] https://www.the-trouble.com/content/2018/10/14/what-must-we-do-to-live
[10] https://aeon.co/essays/should-we-take-ethical-account-of-people-who-do-not-yet-exist
I use words like "should" to point out weak points for people to chip away at, and for me to find out what I need to defend more. As always, the devil is in the details, and I need help fleshing him out. I don't know much about collective action theory and the non-identity problem, so I'd be especially interested in pursuing these ways of framing the problem. Thanks!

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Where’s the best place to live in light of collapse?

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Ok now lets question the new question some more...

About ideologies and winning?

The right to die will bootstrap our "humanity for each other", TMBR

Introduction

Stage 2: Bootstrapping our "humanity for each other" with the right to die

Stage 2 (Again): In other words

Wait, what?

Living with the beast

Kill the beast

Starve the beast

Tame the beast

The balancing scale

The mirror

Stage 3: A new operating system

Wait, so my punishment for my actions is that the others want to kill themselves? Great! More for me and my own!

Stage 1: Instituting the right to die

Problems

Conclusion

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