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Cake day: March 11th, 2024

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  • Replying to myself with some facts I had to look up.

    Antarctica seems to have about 14.2M sq km of land, almost all of which is permanently covered with ice. The total land area on earth is about 148.9M sq km. That makes Antarctica 9.5% of the land mass. So 40% (a bit round) drylands excluding Antarctica would mean 36% drylands including Antarctica. I’m suspicious of the 40% number, but the Guardian thinks I’ve read too many articles with an ad blocker recently.

    Finding how much land outside of Antarctica is covered with ice is harder. One thing that tips the balance to Antarctica is that there isn’t nearly as much land at the North Pole, although there is a lot of sea ice.

    I found multiple estimates of Greenland ice area here. Seems like about 1.7M sq km may be a reasonable and recent estimate. That alone is 12% of the land mass of Antarctica. There are about 200,000 glaciers of various sizes elsewhere, but the largest seem to be under 10,000 sq km, so it’s a bit daunting to total them up. They’re also often measured by length rather than area, and in sub-polar regions they will change in size throughout the year. Ice caps on islands, meanwhile, may be larger than the land they sit on. So that’s going to make it hard to determine land covered by ice.

    If I try to find out the total amount of land not permanently covered by ice, if there is any inaccuracy or inconsistency at all the subtraction of one large number from another could give a wildly incorrect result.

    Those calculation difficulties may be reason enough to treat Antarctica as special because of convenience, as I mention elsewhere. Is that a valid reason to write 40% instead of 36%? Sure, for lay writing.



  • To understand the gap between how Santa Claus (or Christmas) is understood and how it actually functions in modern capitalist society it is insufficient to see the problem simply as one of subjective ‘misunderstandings’ held by individuals, classes, or whole peoples. One must investigate the political economy which grounds, that is, which reflects that erroneous image of itself. The gap between the actual “capitalist” Santa and the ideological “communist” Santa is objective, it is required by the existing material relations of social production and reproduction. Capitalist ideology must disguise the cut-throat values of bourgeois individualism with the universalist values of Santa’s socialistic humanism.

    -Carlos Garrido