Marius Mason is an activist serving a 22 year sentence after being found guilty of arson at a laboratory and on logging equipment.
Marius was approved for gender affirming care in 2022 when he was moved to FCI Danbury, a male prison. He was then transported to FMC Fort Worth where he was supposed to get gender affirming surgery, but he was informed that the health company contracted by the prison was unwilling to perform a hysterectomy. Marius’ doctor has informed him that there are indications of an early onset of cancer on his uterus, yet the facility is unable to provide the care he deserves.
His support team has drafted a letter that they are asking to print and post to put pressure and show support. Please, read the words below, grab a stamp and print the letter.
Let’s show solidarity to Marius and fight for his health as fearsome as he has fought for our planet.
“Please copy and paste in to your own document, print
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Marius Mason is an activist serving a 22 year sentence after being found guilty of arson at a laboratory and on logging equipment.
Marius was approved for gender affirming care in 2022 when he was moved to FCI Danbury, a male prison. He was then transported to FMC Fort Worth where he was supposed to get gender affirming surgery, but he was informed that the health company contracted by the prison was unwilling to perform a hysterectomy. Marius’ doctor has informed him that there are indications of an early onset of cancer on his uterus, yet the facility is unable to provide the care he deserves.
His support team has drafted a letter that they are asking to print and post to put pressure and show support. Please, read the words below, grab a stamp and print the letter.
Let’s show solidarity to Marius and fight for his health as fearsome as he has fought for our planet.
“Please copy and paste in to your own document, print and send to:
Director Collette Peters Federal Bureau of Prisons 320 First Street, NW Washington, D.C. 20534
Dear Director Peters: Thank you for prioritizing the rehabilitative purpose and programming of the BOP in your role as Director. It was encouraging to see the Transgender Policy Manual posted again, after years of being unavailable on the FBOP site when you came into office. I appreciate the atmosphere of respect, acceptance and safety fostered at the highest level under your administration for all LGBTQIA+ people currently in the carceral system.
I am writing today to call attention to the situation of Marius Mason (née Marie Mason, #04672-061). Mason has been approved by the FBOP for gender-affirming surgery since 2022. He was transferred from FCI Danbury, a male facility, and after living there for two years, he was transported to FMC Fort Worth, where he was to undergo gender affirming surgery. This was the culmination of a 10-year process, beginning in 2013 when Mason asked to be considered for the new transgender medical policy, after a lawsuit created a pathway to medical transition.
However, Mason was informed at a meeting with Dr. Mercado (the Health Services Administrator), Mr. Strickland and Mason’s therapist, Dr. Bartholomew on 5/24/24 that despite having been approved for surgery, the health services contractor that was working for FMC Fort Worth was not willing to provide gender-affirming hysterectomy. It is our understanding that there are in fact local medical professionals who can perform this procedure, without which the other surgeries will be delayed.
Also at this same meeting, Mason was informed that test results from a prior ultrasound had revealed that there was indications of an early onset of cancer in his uterus, and a further test was being ordered to confirm this possible result. If indeed Marius requires a hysterectomy due to uterine cancer, we hope this will be carried out with all possible speed.
I am asking that you please investigate the apparent refusal of a contracted health care to provide care to a trans prisoner, and also to ensure that this denial and delay do not endanger Mason’s health and safety or delay the approved care long enough to prevent it being fulfilled. Thank you for continuing to be an ally to LGBTQIA+ prisoners in the Federal system.
Check out http://KiwiCo.com/NileRed for 50% off your first month of ANY crate!A few years ago I tried making transparent wood and it kind of worked. The piec...
Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be) Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in star
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Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be) Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
Oh look, Elon openly snuggling up to Nazis and "just asking questions". As if I didn't hate this clown enough.
(For anyone out of the loop: the AfD is a far-right political party in Germany and the spiritual successor to the NSDAP. They're praising the SS, advocate for legalization of holocaust denial and historical revisionism, removal of hate crimes from the code of law, and more. They're so openly Nazis that they got kicked out of the EU parliament's far-right ID coalition for being too fucking Nazi. There's no leeway. They're literal card-carrying national socialists.)
I couldn't remember who Chris Langan was, and mobile search gave me "Chris Langham":
Christopher Langham (born 14 April 1949) is an English writer, actor, and comedian.
No mention of philosophy, but this turned up
On 2 August 2007, Langham was found guilty of 15 charges of downloading and possessing level 5 child sexual abuse images and videos.
OK so maybe the correct person?
No it turns out Langan is the person with "the world's highest IQ".
From the podcast transcript
… if people look up Chris Langan on Wikipedia, under his views section, they'll be like, ah, these are some far right views. The CTMU is obviously not about that, but… anything you want to just fill in for people that might be curious about that part of it?
[...]
When people bring up his political views, I often mention that Heidegger was a Nazi, and that doesn't mean his philosophy should just be dismissed outright. I don't think Chris is remotely a Nazi. In
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I couldn't remember who Chris Langan was, and mobile search gave me "Chris Langham":
Christopher Langham (born 14 April 1949) is an English writer, actor, and comedian.
No mention of philosophy, but this turned up
On 2 August 2007, Langham was found guilty of 15 charges of downloading and possessing level 5 child sexual abuse images and videos.
OK so maybe the correct person?
No it turns out Langan is the person with "the world's highest IQ".
From the podcast transcript
… if people look up Chris Langan on Wikipedia, under his views section, they'll be like, ah, these are some far right views. The CTMU is obviously not about that, but… anything you want to just fill in for people that might be curious about that part of it?
[...]
When people bring up his political views, I often mention that Heidegger was a Nazi, and that doesn't mean his philosophy should just be dismissed outright. I don't think Chris is remotely a Nazi. In my personal interaction with him, he's been a wonderful person. He's been kind and generous with me, and I respect him personally.
No doubt Himmler's friends and family thought he was a great guy too.
Wikipedia tells me that Langan says that he can prove the existence of God, the soul and an afterlife, using mathematics ... I feel like there's gonna be some bad Bayes in there somewhere.
@techtakes See also Frank Tipler, "The Physics of Immortality" (or: Astrophysicist goes cray-cray, tries to prove TESCREAL bullshit only takes a left turn into evangelical Christianity by way of the fine structure constant)
I cannot explain why but I feel that this belongs here.
What is shown is some kind of re-interpretation of the "princess and the pea" saga. Instead of showing the princess' over-sensitivity to small things, it displays the princess' love for plants and nature. In this way, sensitivity is interpreted and seen as something positive, which I can appreciate.
The Yippies were a counter-cultural group from the US-Vietnam war era, and were famously prosecuted by the state as part of the Chicago Seven after experiencing a police riot during the protest against the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Catchy manifesto, perhaps, but the Yippies historically (to the extent there even was such a group) were the absolute pinnacle of spectacle for its own sake. They got nothing done, and ultimately served only to hurt the public image of the legitimate countercultural movements in the long term. I think it seriously goes against the more pragmatic and action-oriented outlook of Solarpunk to take cues from these guys.
September 24, 1969, marked the beginning of one of the most infamous trials in U.S. history for eight (later seven) activists linked to the protests that took place in response … Learn More
This is a spin-off discussion from today's ForumWG meeting
At today's ForumWG meeting, @trwnh@mastodon.social mentioned that Announce(Object) is something that Hubzilla and Friendica do, but the proper FEP 1b12 behaviour is to send out Announce(Activity).
I noted that NodeBB actually announces the Note object itself, instead of the activity, and provided some context that Discourse (via @angusmcleod@mastodon.social) originally expected Activities, but now also accepts objects (implicit create) for compatibility with NodeBB. Likewise, NodeBB also added some logic to handle Announce(Create(Note)) for compatibility.
Would Announce(Object) be considered a "variant" of 1b12, implemented within the spirit of the FEP, but not a technically compliant implementation?
This is a spin-off discussion from today's ForumWG meeting
During today's ForumWG meeting an interesting side discussion cropped up regarding what constitutes an Actor, and whether other object types could be considered Actor-like.
ActivityStreams defines an Actor as being one of five types:
Application
Group
Organization
Person
Service
However, a looser definition of an Actor could simply be "if the resolved object contains an inbox and an outbox".
Such a definition opens up the possibility of having lots of things be followable, perhaps without direct user interaction. This was one possibility outlined by @cpmoser@mastodon.social
@trwnh@mastodon.social also mentioned that Mastodon does not consider an object as being an actor unless it is one of those five types.
@dmitri@social.coop noted that this was a topic brought up at a previous AP issue triage meeting. Could you provide a summary?
We've arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces.
relatedly: msft turned semi-good for a couple of years (making tooling more accessible across platforms, actual foss work, etc), and then seems to have an internal about-turn on this, and seem intent on speedrunning being most-hated again. stiff competition too, that's why they're trying so hard
So LLM-based AI is apparently such a dead end as far as non-spam and non-party trick use cases are concerned that they are straight up rolling out anti-features that nobody asked or wanted just to convince shareholders that ground breaking stuff is still going on, and somewhat justify the ocean of money they are diverting that way.
At least it's only supposed to work on PCs that incorporate so-called neural processor units, which if I understand correctly is going to be its own thing under a Windows PC branding.
edit: Yud must love that instead of his very smart and very implementable idea of the government enforcing strict regulations on who gets to own GPUs and bombing non-compliants we seem to instead be trending towards having special deep learning facilitating hardware integrated in every new device, or whatever NPUs actually are, starting with iPhones and so-called Windows PCs.
edit edit: the branding appears to be "Copilot+ PCs" not windows pcs.
Now they take one with an NPU and rebrand it as Copilot+™️®️ PCs
They have market research that says initial sales are going to be soft and they panic because early soft sales create a bad vibe
So, without doing any of the usual build up of exciting the tech press, without hyping trade show buzz, they rush an unfinished, insecure, unwanted product to market in the hope it will be the killer app at last for high-battery life ARM on Windows.
They use lot of AI hype language to capitalize off the hype cycle, even though besides the OCR it seems to be pretty limited in its relationship to anything machine learning at all.
This might be the case, but at least the first I heard about the Copilot+ launch was that it was finally a "Macbook Air" killer - which I suspect would already be a strong selling point (at least if MSFT solved the backwards compatibility issue). Yet right after they announced the Recall stuff, and at least from what I have read it was received very negatively. So now they have the story that if you want the latest fast, efficient windows machine, you need to aloow it to spy on your screen. Not the best marketing imo.
Potatoes are great from an energy input position, but if you were doing this without potatoes and your neighbor was doing just potatoes, I think that might be enough for both.
No, you cannot source all of your food that way. Only the vegetables. You still habe to get grains from a machinally-farmed farm. It says so in the description (4).
Whether this amount of growing space could produce enough calories per year to keep 1 human at "barely alive or better" caloric input.
In my estimate, you would need to devote most of the land to potatoes, and rely on eggs, rabbit meat and likely some wild foraging for the rest. It probably is feasible if you do the above.
Keep in mind, we have to be able to feed 10 billion people. Homesteads like this are of course better than just plain grass, but compared to a farm, the output per area is probably really low. So there's still land being "wasted".
You can’t compare this sort of thing to actual farming though, because that’s not the point of it at all. The point is supplementing from other sources like farms, reducing the need for intensive agriculture, and potentially (with enough people shifting to home gardening) reduce the size of farms needed for veg growing, freeing that space for other things.
It doesn’t have to be as efficient as a big farm to be good for the people consuming it as well as the environment (grass is worthless and veg have to be shipped if not grown locally)
I think the idea is that is an alternative to lawns, patios, driveways etc on already residential land, not a replacement for crops on already agricultural land. In fact, if all farmland was replaced with plots like this I don't think there would be enough people on the planet to live on them!
Homesteads like this are of course better than just plain grass, but compared to a farm, the output per area is probably really low.
I would've thought that as well, but, at least according to some studies referenced by the Edinicity project, small urban farming apparently results in significantly higher yields compared to industrial farming. If the figures referenced are correct, then it would seem small urban farming could be quite viable as a source of food for significant amounts of people.
A recent study suggests that food grown in cities produces more CO2 than conventional farming. Is this really true? Is carbon the whole story? What would it ...
Good linking. The book says it's for a quarter acre, not a tenth. This was on reddit the other day (and it's credited as such). Exact same wording and everything.
I feel like the beekeeping is wasted effort if you’re going for self-sufficience.
It’d be like including a space for a liquor still. Super neat in concept, enormous effort in practice. Hell I’d be more in favor of the still over the beehives honestly, way more utility.
Don't forget that wax is super useful in a self-sufficient setup for prolonging the life of leather and wooden items. I've even used to protect my bike chain!
Growing enough grain to feed yourself takes 400 - 1000 m² depending on soil fertility.
So you can't do that in your backyard. It's also dramatically more efficient to harvest grains with big machinery, so it's wise to put it together with your neighbours and form something like a cooperative.
That's like a 32m x 32m field, not as big as I was expecting. But yes, larger fields are more efficient. I wonder if there is some reasonable setup for farming grains with aquaponics. (Rice doesn't count XD)
Also beware, that grains need direct solar irradiation (they need to collect lots of energy, much more than vegetables), so stacking them on top of each other is not viable.
My home is on a 9k lot. Almost twice the size of this but I can't fit anything near that. I guess majority of my space is take up by the front lawn and driveway.
Right. The whole "you do have space it's just being used by something else"
And while I agree that the use of my lawn and driveway are not a good use of space, it's just not practical to have a homestead like the one shown in our current suburb. Which is what I'm assuming the 1/10th of a lot of land will be in. Because if you're anywhere in a rural area that can have a plot laid out in this style you'll most likely also be working on more than a tenth of an acre.
If you don’t fight it and accept that imperial is designed with base 12 and not base 10, everything makes more sense. Measurements across all of imperial are to be cut into 12, 6, 4, 3, or 2.
Sometime base 12 works really nicely, especially outside of a lab, when you want to be able to have as many options for division easily as possible.
I get that people like to be stubborn about this but there are very real and intuitive reasons that decimals don’t make sense everywhere. Consider how intuitive telling time using “kiloseconds” and decimals might be.
The right tool needs to be used for the right job. I am a scientist. In the lab, metric is fantastic as it allows for precision recording and I don’t care about intuition.
It’s not a point of pride to use one system over another. For example, in America we use both systems in the right contexts. I am happily able to fluidly switch between what’s most appropriate for the situation. I get that context/code switching is generally difficult but I think it’s an overall value add.
Eyeballing looks like the house couldn't be more than 18x30 feet, or ~540 sq ft. Probably less in reality. Tiny home territory. Smaller than most single wide trailer homes. The doors as drawn must be for hobbits. Fun picture just the same. I love the urban homestead explosion and hope it never stops.
There are loads of fantastic personal benefits to living like this, like having choice of fruit and vegetables that aren't possible to find in supermarkets, no plastic residues from packaging on your food (and no plastic waste to dispose of), getting exercise, fresh air and vitamin D from working in the garden, less carrying groceries around, less need for refrigeration (many veg goes straight from garden to kitchen), health benefits of contact with soil and seasonal diet just to list the first ones that come to mind. Also if your children have contact with animals (even hair and dust left behind by animals) they are less likely to developed allergies. And you're also not helping already wealthy shareholders of food corporations to further out-compete working class people in the market.
Especially the "getting some physical exercise, and reconnecting with the soil" seem interesting upsides to me. We would all need some more of that in today's time it seems.
At first I thought that you were talking about growing vertically, but you probably meant something like a green house? Beyond extending the growing season, what else do they do to increase yeilds?
Heat is what everyone thinks of, however that's only part of the equation.
More importantly they maintain higher air moisture level around the leaves close to the saturation point.
This allows the plants to keep their stomatas open longer. This keeps the photosynthetic pathways operating for more time during the day. More time = more carbohydrate = more production.
They are also usually watered by drip irrigation as well. Providing he right amount of water, not too much or too little, greatly increases a plants yield.
A high tunnel is a unheated/cooled greenhouse/nethouse that is popular in every country not stuck in the dark ages with their agriculture. They come in many sizes. For example 100m x 20m ones popular in the middle east and Australia. In southern Spain they built ones that cover 20ha or more. A few in Poland were my favorite. They used split pine rails to build them.
Thanks for the reply. I can see this being a great way to go for a dedicated farm, which this post is proporting to do, but I am not sure I would want a high tunnel in my yard. I am on the wild-yard side of things and have wildflowers planted along one edge of my property, a milkweed garden, etc. I like to be able to see things growing and am not sure how I would feel about the visual block. I guess you could make one with more long-term transparent sides, but that would cost more $$.
As it is, we often have too large of yeilds when our four 4x8 raised beds really get going. Our issue isn't yeilds, it's the narrow width of peek yeild along with a combination of what we grow (not shelf stable) and storage systems (the whole pick early, store so it won't ripen, and ripen on demand system).
AFAIK it not just speeds up plant growth, but also extends vegetation period. It means for example that you can plant/harvest from March-October, instead of May-August.
Depending on the location, they can add 3-4 more months of a growing window. So double cropping or staggered plantings for a longer harvest window becomes viable.
It's common in India to provide a quarter and salary to rural people for help with maintaining such a place. They usually have experience with farming and happy to live without worrying about wages, food and a roof.
I grew Chard one Summer during the pandemic. I had some old garden magazine with a similar sketch, but focusing on the vegetable beds. They described how incredibly space efficient chard is, and how it should be grown in any garden centered on self-sufficiency.
So anyways, I'm all for community gardening now and can not look at another leaf of chard for the next decade. That stuff really knocks the dream of self-sufficiency out of any gardener. It's ridiculous how much Chard just 2 rows of plants can produce with minimal time spend tending to them, but don't believe anyone who says its leaves tastes like spinach and the stems like asparagus. It tastes like green mush and is best chucked in the freezer to die a slow death, maybe to be micro-dosed into some smoothie.
I like to chop it up, fry it with onions, and put it in burritos. Breakfast burritos especially with egg, bacon or sausage, and cheese. It can also substitute for turnip or collard greens in a recipe if you're looking for a place to eat it. Since its more of a bitter plant, you'll want to use it much differently than spinach (whoever told you it tastes like that deserves a stern talking to)
It says there's not enough space for reasonable quantities, similar to 6, so I expected to see 4 on there, too. I see what you mean, though, and it makes sense.
It says there’s not enough space for reasonable quantities, similar to 6, so I expected to see 4 on there, too, but with the caveat. I see what you mean, though, and it makes sense.
8 ft x 4 ft x 8 = 256 sq ft if you bunch all the beds up together
Honestly it's entire lot size is slightly larger than an average USA home family floorplan, but you're not gonna have any privacy and you're not going to feed the people more than once in a blue moon on that amount of homegrown.
And you want to live with BEES in that amount of space? Yeah, have fun.
During one of the much smaller disasters that preceded the really big disaster, I met a lot of my neighbors online. I can’t remember if we set up the WhatsApp group because of the pandemic or the civil disorder or both.
In India's scorching summer heat, the ancient practice of chilling water in terracotta pots is inspiring new trends – from cooling towers to screens for buildings.
And so she turned to a favourite childhood fixture: the matka – a terracotta pot composed of two different types of clay and designed to act as domestic water cooler in the home.
The tiles are arranged like a bird's open beak, the top one casting deep shadows and an overhead sprinkler system, set to go off during the hottest part of the day, ensures evaporative cooling.
Soumen Maity, vice president of development alternatives, a think tank based in Gurugram in northern India, says it's heartening that terracotta constructions are providing rural artisans with a livelihood – but there are some drawbacks.
If terracotta is used more widely as a building material and manufactured to scale in factories, then there could also be another hidden cost: more energy required for transportation, points out Niyati Gupta, a senior associate in New Delhi with the climate programme at the think tank the World Resources Institute.
"Terracotta tiles manufactured in a factory environment tend to be heavier
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
And so she turned to a favourite childhood fixture: the matka – a terracotta pot composed of two different types of clay and designed to act as domestic water cooler in the home.
The tiles are arranged like a bird's open beak, the top one casting deep shadows and an overhead sprinkler system, set to go off during the hottest part of the day, ensures evaporative cooling.
Soumen Maity, vice president of development alternatives, a think tank based in Gurugram in northern India, says it's heartening that terracotta constructions are providing rural artisans with a livelihood – but there are some drawbacks.
If terracotta is used more widely as a building material and manufactured to scale in factories, then there could also be another hidden cost: more energy required for transportation, points out Niyati Gupta, a senior associate in New Delhi with the climate programme at the think tank the World Resources Institute.
"Terracotta tiles manufactured in a factory environment tend to be heavier than the conventional clay bricks that artisans craft by hand, and will consume fertile soil [that could otherwise be used for agriculture]" Gupta says.
To keep terracotta water bottles in good condition, Iyer advises: "Scrub [the clay utensils] well every two to three days with a coir brush and set it outside in the Sun to prevent it from gathering moss."
The original article contains 1,780 words, the summary contains 225 words. Saved 87%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
In India's scorching summer heat, the ancient practice of chilling water in terracotta pots is inspiring new trends – from cooling towers to screens for buildings.
In India's scorching summer heat, the ancient practice of chilling water in terracotta pots is inspiring new trends – from cooling towers to screens for buildings.
In this revelatory work, Ruha Benjamin calls on us to take imagination seriously as a site of struggle and a place of possibility for reshaping the future.
A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Impossible. Work that doesn’t strangle the life out of people? Naive. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly. Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University professor, insists that imagination isn’t a luxury. It is a vital resource and powerful tool for collective liberation. Imagination: A Manifesto is her proclamation that we have the power to use our imaginations to challenge systems of oppression and to create a world in which everyone can thrive. But obstacles abound. We have inherited destructive ideas that trap us inside a dominant imagination. Consider how racism, sexism, and classism make hierarchies, exploitation, and violence seem natural and inevitable—but all emerged from the human imagination. The most effective way to disrupt these deadly systems is to do so collectively.
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In this revelatory work, Ruha Benjamin calls on us to take imagination seriously as a site of struggle and a place of possibility for reshaping the future.
A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Impossible. Work that doesn’t strangle the life out of people? Naive. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly. Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University professor, insists that imagination isn’t a luxury. It is a vital resource and powerful tool for collective liberation. Imagination: A Manifesto is her proclamation that we have the power to use our imaginations to challenge systems of oppression and to create a world in which everyone can thrive. But obstacles abound. We have inherited destructive ideas that trap us inside a dominant imagination. Consider how racism, sexism, and classism make hierarchies, exploitation, and violence seem natural and inevitable—but all emerged from the human imagination. The most effective way to disrupt these deadly systems is to do so collectively. Benjamin highlights the educators, artists, activists, and many others who are refuting powerful narratives that justify the status quo, crafting new stories that reflect our interconnection, and offering creative approaches to seemingly intractable problems. Imagination: A Manifesto offers visionary examples and tactics to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is possible. This book is for anyone who is ready to take to heart Toni Morrison’s instruction: “Dream a little before you think.”
Monthly meetings are held on the first Thursday of each month, at 1700 to 1800 UTC. You can find them listed in the SocialCG Calendar. The next meeting will be held on 6 June 2024.
We will be continuing discussions regarding "Article vs. Note" and "Reconciling FEPs 1b12 and 400e", as well as discussing the usage of as:context among implementors. If you'd like to speak or inquire about a certain topic, comment in the agenda or reply here, the floor is open!
¹ ForumWG is the colloquial shorthand for the full name, which is as follows — *takes deep breath* —Social Web Incubator Community Group Forum and Threaded Discussions Task Force.
June 2024 Agenda Forum and Threaded Discussions Task Force Format Information gathering prior to the meeting will be held asynchronously via the fediverse, with topics posted on one of the following two locations: https://community.nodebb.
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be) Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if
... mehr anzeigen
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be) Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
nsfw, and at a risk of beating a dead horse, but this article, although brief, does a decent job at connecting the dots between "silicon valley pronatalism" and regular ol' nationalism/white supremacy, while debunking some of their EA bullshit too
The Collinses are leading spokespeople for a movement called pronatalism, popular in Silicon Valley. Elon Musk, a father of 11, is one of its leading proponents. “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” Musk tweeted.
Demographers disagree: there is no collapse, and one is not even predicted. Such evidence has not stopped the rise of pronatalism in response to an imagined “population bomb.”
In short, the problem for pronatalism is not declining reproduction, but who is reproducing. Pronatalism is inextricably tied to nationalism alongside race, class and ethnicity.... Here, nationalism tips into ethnonationalism and reproductive debates descend into violent racism.
👽???Support my work on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/DrFatimaReferences: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E6bepja9qI1d6Rl32jBmR0XrxhSN9HU8Nf5VDrSh22E/...
I was having a chat with someone about how they are more "Star trek future rather than Solarpunk future", and I found something off about it but didn't really think about it, but it's this. It's the idea that the key conceit of Star Trek being they are exploring for the hell of it can't really be true, and that exploration in itself is to try and get some dividend off it. Any "Star Trek future" which is not colonial is necessarily a Solarpunk future first.
The vote to elect a new chair of the Pacifica Grid closes in four days, and an auditor thinks there's something suspicious going on. Records of an incident for the lead candidate's past have been destroyed in a cyberattack, and the manager responsible for the files is being mysteriously tight lipped. Keeping power in the right hands requires answers, and it's going to take a few determined problem solvers to get them!
After releasing the core game manual a week ago, we've now released our first playable adventure. It's a concise little one-shot that can be played in 2-4 hours, written specifically as an easy entry point into the game's world and rules.
Like the game itself, it's FREE! So check it out, tell your friends, and if you like this weird little story of hard-science sci-fi intrigue, please leave us a rating and review!
Fully Automated is the game system and world. And "A Demonstration of Power" is a playable story. It's basically a short, interactive story about an auditor trying to find out why someone appears to be trying to keep them from accessing some unremarkable archival sensor data from the date of a blackout five years earlier.
This is perhaps the best thing I've seen today. More of this, please. Let's convert all schools and municipalities and fund education and infrastructure beyond our wildest paltry (at this point) expectations.
I'm sure you may have seen a lot of "how to inoculate yourself against climate disinformation" posts, but we're experiencing a huge amount of content paid for by Fossil Fuel Interest's to put pressure on the internet. And it's been really concentrated for a few months.
The funding is pushing for a cultural shift for people who are undecided in the climate conversation and are possibly more easily swayed. And it's important to remember, fossil fuel interests wouldn't pay for it if they didn't need it.
Most of the disinfo looks like "yeah climate change is real but we can't possibly do anything to fix it" or "these solutions simply don't work." about solutions that are tried and true. They look a lot like nuanced takes, but specifically are trying to motivate inaction.
So if you wake up today and ask "what can I do today that makes a difference?" is honestly post a lot to tip the scales regarding the presentation climate solutions. Silly or serious, for example posting about renewables getting you excited, community food forests that are feeding p
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Text reads:
I'm sure you may have seen a lot of "how to inoculate yourself against climate disinformation" posts, but we're experiencing a huge amount of content paid for by Fossil Fuel Interest's to put pressure on the internet. And it's been really concentrated for a few months.
The funding is pushing for a cultural shift for people who are undecided in the climate conversation and are possibly more easily swayed. And it's important to remember, fossil fuel interests wouldn't pay for it if they didn't need it.
Most of the disinfo looks like "yeah climate change is real but we can't possibly do anything to fix it" or "these solutions simply don't work." about solutions that are tried and true. They look a lot like nuanced takes, but specifically are trying to motivate inaction.
So if you wake up today and ask "what can I do today that makes a difference?" is honestly post a lot to tip the scales regarding the presentation climate solutions. Silly or serious, for example posting about renewables getting you excited, community food forests that are feeding people, cool solutions to targeting methane, etc. Post about a climate book or show you liked, or whatever. Just make sure it's clear to an onlooker that there are people who believe climate change is anthropogenic, it was mostly caused by extractive practices and fossil fuel use, and that we can still demand rapid action to fix it. And all of this is true, because the science supports it.
I'm sure you may have seen a lot of "how to inoculate yourself against climate disinformation" posts, but we're experiencing a huge amount of content paid for by Fossil Fuel Interest's to put pressur…
What is weird to me is that the technical solutions are there. They are known, they are old. And they are opposed.
As an engineer I would like to help, but after being asked to sign a petition against nuclear power, against a solar power plant, against electric vehicles, and hearing environmentalists complain about wind turbines, stating batteries will never be a solution, inventing resources depletion problems (for non-fossil materials there is zero depletion problem) I am really wondering if we do want to solve the problems.
There are many scenarios towards a renewable future that are totally doable. From the "business as usual, just replace fossils with renewable electricity" to an ungrowth scenario, a whole spectrum in between and for all a nuclear option depending on your preferences, it is only a matter of political will.
Yours is just one of many versions of 'why I personally don't do anything': I'm all for change, but the others don't want!
Society will never be fully aligned on the solutions and you cannot expect everyone to agree with you, but you still can work for your preferred solutions in smaller groups?
I do many things but the impact is limited. I switched to heat pump and soon to EV but I can't change my country's electric mix by myself. Indeed, the others don't want. Because it would be easy if they would. I'll continue vote and support people who want to solve this and to be fair, we are getting there, just too slowly.
That's fine: I am working on other changes as an engineer, trying to make AI and robotics veer away from a dystopian timeline. There are other fights where I am more useful
I am working on 2 things: - Professionally (but switched to part time this year) I am helping a typical startup create an AI tool to help medical researchers. We are a lot on that niche but I am frankly afraid at how many companies do not seem to understand how crucial accuracy is in the medical field and just slap together models and vector DBs without understanding what they are doing. I think and hope there is potential to actually have an impact on life expectancy there so I will work on that project for as long as the company pays me for and probably would do something similar in open source if it kills the project.
Half professionally (technically doing it on free time but still getting minimum wage compensation for that) at a non-profit I am assembling and programming an automated fleet of 3 robots to explore the feasibility to automate the assembly of mechanical machines. We are receiving public funding to explore that in the field of "alternate vehicles".
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With pleasure!
I am working on 2 things: - Professionally (but switched to part time this year) I am helping a typical startup create an AI tool to help medical researchers. We are a lot on that niche but I am frankly afraid at how many companies do not seem to understand how crucial accuracy is in the medical field and just slap together models and vector DBs without understanding what they are doing. I think and hope there is potential to actually have an impact on life expectancy there so I will work on that project for as long as the company pays me for and probably would do something similar in open source if it kills the project.
Half professionally (technically doing it on free time but still getting minimum wage compensation for that) at a non-profit I am assembling and programming an automated fleet of 3 robots to explore the feasibility to automate the assembly of mechanical machines. We are receiving public funding to explore that in the field of "alternate vehicles". Here is a post I made on a show event organized by the effort (I recommend trying to translate the post in French if you are interested in the thing, it has more info in it). My goal is to automate small scale production of open hardware projects. There are tons of useful machines publishing their plans out there but few of them are duplicated. It often takes a week of work to make it happen and I aim at lowering that cost. Hopefully eventually all you will have to do is to buy components, put them on a shelf and let the machine assemble the project, only asking for help on very specific actions.
About fights my general philosophy is that one ought to focus on one big subject to fight for but remain an ally (or at least not an obstacle) in all the other fights they deem worthy. It can happen that people who can't devote all the time they would love to a cause rationalize it by belittling the cause (I guess it is a kind of cognitive dissonance. I wish I could help ecologists, feminists, antifa, antiracists, educators, social workers, medical practitioners, worldwide anarchists, but there is only so many time for these things. However when I stumble upon low hanging fruits that can help them or barriers that are easy for me to remove, I'll do. Also remember: giving time to a cause is good, but unless you can devote a good percentage of your free time to it, sending money is usually preferable and even $5 helps.
There are currently no technical solutions. Asserting that there are is the same as saying, "Anthropogenic global warming is easy to solve, if it weren't for all the people." We need holistic solutions that incorporate technical, political, and social approaches.
You are disagreeing with the IPCC then. It provides strategies to fight the climate change using only today's technologies. We have the tech for clean electricity production and alternative for almost every fossil fuel use out there: electricity for most, biofuel for a few remaining ones.
I've seen the trailer for the AR6 Synthesis Report. It includes advocacy for social and political approaches to a green energy transition. They are different from the approaches I would advocate, but that validates rather than contradicts my statement that we need holistic solutions.
It is not the holistic approach that I am criticizing, it is the "there are no technical solution" claim. We have all the tech solutions. We know their efficiency, we know their cost. We know efficiency can only go up, costs can only go down. Governments of the world have these plans on their desks and without GWB's decision to make climate change denial an acceptable political stance, the world would have started implementing it 20 years ago.
Vote for people who care about the environment and you solve the crisis in a decade. No need for new fancy techs for the transition.
The only field where new tech may help is for the repair/rewilding post-transition, but to be honest, I am tired of people saying "Oh you just want to greenwash harmful practices" when I mention CO2 capture research. We will need these eventually, I would probably work on that as an engineer if I had made climate change my personal priority but then, there are so many low-tech-hanging fruits that we are not engaging with that I am not sure we need more solutions when most of the good ones are not being deployed.
I think there's a semantic difference between 'approach' and 'solution' that encourages us to talk past each other. Waving a magic wand that transitions fossil fuel sources to solar power and biofuel while removing accumulated carbon from the atmosphere would be a climate change solution. Passing legislation to transition to some combination of biofuel and solar power over the next decade would be an approach - it is not likely on its own to solve climate change, but could be part of a greater solution.
Bringing more nuclear power plants online, building more solar energy arrays, and covering windy lands and coastlines with turbines will not 'solve' global warming, it will accelerate it. There's an obvious analog to the well-documented paradox of adding more traffic lanes increasing rather than reducing traffic congestion. These approaches apply elemental analysis of static systems to dynamic systems that require holistic analysis. An economist will tell you more energy to the grid will reduce the price of energy, which will increase demand. A political scientist can tell yo
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I think there's a semantic difference between 'approach' and 'solution' that encourages us to talk past each other. Waving a magic wand that transitions fossil fuel sources to solar power and biofuel while removing accumulated carbon from the atmosphere would be a climate change solution. Passing legislation to transition to some combination of biofuel and solar power over the next decade would be an approach - it is not likely on its own to solve climate change, but could be part of a greater solution.
Bringing more nuclear power plants online, building more solar energy arrays, and covering windy lands and coastlines with turbines will not 'solve' global warming, it will accelerate it. There's an obvious analog to the well-documented paradox of adding more traffic lanes increasing rather than reducing traffic congestion. These approaches apply elemental analysis of static systems to dynamic systems that require holistic analysis. An economist will tell you more energy to the grid will reduce the price of energy, which will increase demand. A political scientist can tell you that a capitalist economy will be stimulated to grow until it reaches the limits of its resources, and added economic growth will result in more energy use, not less. We can infer that if at any time renewable energy prices drop to the point they become more economically attractive than fossil fuel, demand for them will rise until the prices are competitive again.
You're symptomatic of the problem when you mention CO2 capture research as an afterthought. There needs to be a significant decrease in energy use and carbon generation, and a significant increase in carbon sequestration. That is currently the primary obstacle we are facing in solving the problem. Carbon sequestration may be amenable to technological approaches, but decreasing energy use and limiting that use to renewable resources is a deeply social and political problem, and has no technological solution.
decreasing energy use and limiting that use to renewable resources is a deeply social and political problem, and has no technological solution.
That's like being blind to the air you are breathing. It is indeed not a technological problem anymore like it was in the 1980 because the technological problems have been solved. And technology has also helped solving the economic problem as well by lowering the cost of these techs. Indeed, there is little more that tech can solve there.
Now the paradox you mention in your first part is called the Jevons paradox, or the rebound effect, and is one of the most misquoted and misunderstood piece of economics in these discussions. It states that if you make a process more efficient, you may increase the total cost of it. Here is what is often misunderstood:
It is not systematic. You can make processes more efficient without increasing the demand for it.
The rebound may be lower than the overall gain. Lighting for instance, when switching from incandescent
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Let's start with the end:
decreasing energy use and limiting that use to renewable resources is a deeply social and political problem, and has no technological solution.
That's like being blind to the air you are breathing. It is indeed not a technological problem anymore like it was in the 1980 because the technological problems have been solved. And technology has also helped solving the economic problem as well by lowering the cost of these techs. Indeed, there is little more that tech can solve there.
Now the paradox you mention in your first part is called the Jevons paradox, or the rebound effect, and is one of the most misquoted and misunderstood piece of economics in these discussions. It states that if you make a process more efficient, you may increase the total cost of it. Here is what is often misunderstood:
It is not systematic. You can make processes more efficient without increasing the demand for it.
The rebound may be lower than the overall gain. Lighting for instance, when switching from incandescent to LED light, has seen an small increase in usage but still a huge decrease in total energy use. Turns out that 10x more efficient lighting, does not make people want 10x more lights.
It is about economic efficiency. A typical market economy does not care about CO2 efficiency. This is usually a problem but in this case, there is no reason that a more carbon-efficient electricity experiences a rebound when priced similarly to a fossil-based electricity.
Bringing more nuclear power plants online, building more solar energy arrays, and covering windy lands and coastlines with turbines will not ‘solve’ global warming, it will accelerate it.
This is false. This is even a lie and you should know better than to spread it. I am tired of ungrowthists shooting down climate solutions and pretending to fight climate change denialists while themselves ignoring the parts of the IPCC reports that they dislike. Renewables and EVs are a crucial part of the transition, and nuclear plays a role, though a smaller one. The easiest way to shut down fossil fuel power plant, by far, when you holistically take into account the economics, the politics, the sociology, the psychology, etc. is to have the ability to switch as painlessly as possible to a renewable mode of production that changes as little habits as possible.
Am I thinking this is the best theoretical way or the most moral one or the most enlightened one? No. But you talk about a holistic approach, this is what it is: the shortest path is the path of lower effort. Waiting for MAGA hats or impoverished people to adopt the enlightened ways of economic growth rejection is as realistic as betting on nuclear fusion to solve all energy problems once and for all. Want a quick transition? Let's them keep their oversized SUVs and meat-heavy diet while making them CO2 neutral. Put the human in the equation, but put the real human in it, not the humans you would like to exist.
EDIT: Preferred to remove an overly aggressive answer about the CO2 capture part, but too tired at the moment to make a polite retort to the frankly offensive assumptions you make about my position.
I don't appreciate your tone. It's typical of STEM people who are rigid structural thinkers, and mistake that for rationality. It's easy to find an engineer who thinks he has a more profound understanding of a specialty he's considered for five minutes than a non-engineer who has studied it her entire life. Despite rapid technological development, both fossil fuel use and renewable energy use has increased apace (except for a brief dip during the pandemic.) All three of your bullet points are also non-sequiturs. This may be due to a language barrier - I appreciate you holding this dialogue in my native language.
In particular, the Jevon's paradox is not about the number of lightbulbs consumed, but efficiency and energy use. Lights are part of a larger system so long as fungible energy is used to power them. The electrica
I don't appreciate your tone. It's typical of STEM people who are rigid structural thinkers, and mistake that for rationality. It's easy to find an engineer who thinks he has a more profound understanding of a specialty he's considered for five minutes than a non-engineer who has studied it her entire life. Despite rapid technological development, both fossil fuel use and renewable energy use has increased apace (except for a brief dip during the pandemic.) All three of your bullet points are also non-sequiturs. This may be due to a language barrier - I appreciate you holding this dialogue in my native language.
In particular, the Jevon's paradox is not about the number of lightbulbs consumed, but efficiency and energy use. Lights are part of a larger system so long as fungible energy is used to power them. The electrical power conserved by LEDs results in lowered energy prices, and increased energy use elsewhere. To escape Jevon's Paradox under capitalism long enough to solve the crisis, you would need everything to suddenly become so efficient that even exponential economic growth would not be fast enough to make up the difference between the transition and the point we reach decarbonization.
People have drastically adjusted their society to meet existential threats before. You assert that the people who tightened their belts and grew victory gardens to defeat the nazis are not real humans. Your assertion that people like me and many of the other members of this server are less real humans than meat-heavy oversized SUV driving MAGA hats is revealing. I consider this cynicism towards human nature alarmingly inconsistent with reality and a form of climate change doomerism.
I encourage to you reflect on what you're implying here. I appreciate that you consider yourself anti-capitalist, and I would advise you to conserve your venom for people to the right of you, rather than lecturing the left on how to be more respectable. Many of us have taken moral stances that prevent us from easily prospering in a capitalist system, but in so doing we've shifted the discourse left enough that your toothless anti-capitalism is considered part of the mainstream, and you face no discrimination in employment. We culture-jam, ride bikes, and occupy so that you can ride your EV to a cushy white-collar job and daydream about "changing the system from the inside" in your copious leisure time.
Maybe take that gift in gratitude, and if you'd like to give us something back, let it not be more half-baked essays on how those on the left are irresponsible, irrational, and inferior to you. If you truly want this exchange to end, you can concede my points. I regret that this discussion has become personal, but I feel your statements about facts deserved a rebuttal.
I usually refrain from answering to personal attacks, I am not here to win internet points or leftist certificates from random people. I prefer to focus the discussion on facts, but between a dozen (hilariously wrong) assumptions about my life and strawman arguments, you don't leave me with a lot of material.
So let's talk about the Jevons effect. Not sure why you mention a post you made 10 days ago, if you are interested I made almost the same argument I did in the previous post 5 months ago and had to discuss it in professional settings more than 10 years ago. That's not a concept I discovered yesterday.
In particular, the Jevon’s paradox is not about the number of lightbulbs consumed, but efficiency and energy use.
Lightbulbs to LED transition is a textbook effect of a small Jevons effect. It totally applies. You can apply this to lighting, where the effect is smaller than the energy gains.
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I usually refrain from answering to personal attacks, I am not here to win internet points or leftist certificates from random people. I prefer to focus the discussion on facts, but between a dozen (hilariously wrong) assumptions about my life and strawman arguments, you don't leave me with a lot of material.
So let's talk about the Jevons effect. Not sure why you mention a post you made 10 days ago, if you are interested I made almost the same argument I did in the previous post 5 months ago and had to discuss it in professional settings more than 10 years ago. That's not a concept I discovered yesterday.
In particular, the Jevon’s paradox is not about the number of lightbulbs consumed, but efficiency and energy use.
Lightbulbs to LED transition is a textbook effect of a small Jevons effect. It totally applies. You can apply this to lighting, where the effect is smaller than the energy gains. You can apply it to the wider system of energy production where yes, indeed, lower energy costs increase total energy demand.
To escape Jevon’s Paradox under capitalism long enough to solve the crisis, you would need everything to suddenly become so efficient that even exponential economic growth would not be fast enough to make up the difference between the transition and the point we reach decarbonization.
You keep using "efficiency" in different meanings there. Jevons paradox is fed by the economic efficiency (USD/kWh) of energy production. We are interested in its carbon efficiency (CO2/kWh). Replacing a coal power plant by a wind farm of the same capacity and same economic efficiency (aka cost) has no reason to cause a rebound yet would cause a huge change in terms of carbon efficiency.
People have drastically adjusted their society to meet existential threats before.
Yes, and I am sure that they could again. I remind you that I am the one arguing that solving the climate crisis is easy and just a matter of will and I therefore consider that this is now out of my department.
You are the one insisting on a "holistic" approach, which, I am arguing would involve not only taking into account a realistic model of the population to understand why, politically, these easy solutions are not implemented or are implemented too slowly. It means not only to consider the mindset of ecologically minded people (which, obviously, I do consider to exist and to be human, I have a hard time you take that strawman you built seriously) but also the mindset of the majority that blocks these solutions. I don't like it and you probably don't like it, but an "holistic" approach would be techno-solutionist: it is harder to make most people change their habits than to make carbon-neutral alternatives to the products they use, so favor that approach if you want a quick transition.
If you would favor a "morally superior" way to lower CO2 emission over a fast and effective pragmatic but "impure" one, it means climate is not your top priority, that you put some ideals over it (which can be fine! Just don't pretend defending climate when you are defending your preferences)
Let's disregard all of the other misapprehensions you've made and focus on one thing. This is the second time you've repeated it:
Jevons paradox is fed by the economic efficiency (USD/kWh) of energy production. We are interested in its carbon efficiency (CO2/kWh). Replacing a coal power plant by a wind farm of the same capacity and same economic efficiency (aka cost) has no reason to cause a rebound yet would cause a huge change in terms of carbon efficiency.
Are coal power plants and wind farms mutually exclusive? Does one existing prevent the other from existing simultaneously? Is it possible to run both at the same time?
Of course it is possible, at least in the simplified model I gave of identical costs. It is also possible that they replace them [like has happened in the US for the past 20 years.
In practice though, renewables only get there because it is actually more cost effective in some areas (areas with more sunlight, more wind=better economic efficiency of renewables). In the case where a tech is cheaper than the other, in a market economy, they are mutually exclusive yes, so the most efficient one is displacing the other.
a) The total amount of fossil fuel used in energy generation is decreasing
b) Coal power plants are being shut down and replaced by wind farms
c) The percentage of the energy generation from Coal has decreased since 2000, and the percentage of energy from renewables has increased, but not as quickly as the energy from natural gas. ~~The graph is scaled based on the total energy generation in the year 2020.~~
Here is the second graph from the source you claimed said that renewables are replacing coal. What information is supported by this graph?
a) The total amount of fossil fuel used in energy generation is decreasing
b) Coal power plants are being shut down and replaced by wind farms
c) The percentage of the energy generation from Coal has decreased since 2000, and the percentage of energy from renewables has increased, but not as quickly as the energy from natural gas. ~~The graph is scaled based on the total energy generation in the year 2020.~~
Here is the second graph from the source you claimed said that renewables are replacing coal. What information is supported by this graph?
a) Coal is being phased out for renewable alternatives
b) There has been a major shakeup in how the United States gets its energy during the last five years
c) Where the United States generates its energy changes over the timescale of months, but from 2019 to 2022 has remained roughly static.
This is text taken from the source you claimed said that renewables are replacing coal. What can be inferred from this text?
a) Coal is being phased out, never to return as a source of energy generation in the United States
b) Desire for clean energy overwhelms market forces when it comes to using coal as fuel
c) Coal use is projected to increase more than it decreases, and will rise to be the second most prevalent energy source behind natural gas in 2021.
So much for not doing personal attacks. Ok, usually when I discuss with someone who does not have the basic graph reading skills I patiently explain their mistakes, but in my experience people who are unable to read data but think they are smart enough to teach it are incurable. Will you be the exception?
a) The total amount of fossil fuel used in energy generation is decreasing
Yes, coal+natural gas has decreased. The fall in coal is bigger than the rise in natural gas. You can check it in the source the article linked.
b) Coal power plants are being shut down and replaced by wind farms
By renewables (which include hydro and solar panels), yes. They are also replaced by natural gas power plant. "Coal plants being replaced by renewables and gas" implies that some coal plants are replaced by renewables.
c) The percentage of the energy generation from Coal has decreased since
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So much for not doing personal attacks. Ok, usually when I discuss with someone who does not have the basic graph reading skills I patiently explain their mistakes, but in my experience people who are unable to read data but think they are smart enough to teach it are incurable. Will you be the exception?
a) The total amount of fossil fuel used in energy generation is decreasing
Yes, coal+natural gas has decreased. The fall in coal is bigger than the rise in natural gas. You can check it in the source the article linked.
b) Coal power plants are being shut down and replaced by wind farms
By renewables (which include hydro and solar panels), yes. They are also replaced by natural gas power plant. "Coal plants being replaced by renewables and gas" implies that some coal plants are replaced by renewables.
c) The percentage of the energy generation from Coal has decreased since 2000, and the percentage of energy from renewables has increased, but not as quickly as the energy from natural gas.
Correct again. So do you understand that some of the decrease in coal was from renewables replacing them or have you an alternate explanation?
The graph is scaled based on the total energy generation in the year 2020.
No. It is clearly labelled in billion kWh. However, the total production in the US has more or less plateaued in the last 20 years so that does not make a big difference on the right hand of the graph.
Here is the second graph from the source you claimed said that renewables are replacing coal. What information is supported by this graph?
I am sure you notice but just to be sure, you saw that this is just over 3 years, right? Including the very unusual covid years.
a) Coal is being phased out for renewable alternatives
It is more visible on the wider graph but indeed you can see the coal slightly decreasing and the renewables slightly increasing. The coal dip in 2020 tells you that when there is a decrease in demand, coal and gas plants are shut down before renewable sources.
b) There has been a major shakeup in how the United States gets its energy during the last five years
This is a 3 years graph of a very unusual time. Please tell me you realized that.
c) Where the United States generates its energy changes over the timescale of months, but from 2019 to 2022 has remained roughly static.
On a month to month basis, coal is sometime the #2 source of energy and sometime #4. That's something that never happened before 2010. And it will happen less and less often as the big trend shows, coal is going to remain #4 more and more often.
This is text taken from the source you claimed said that renewables are replacing coal. What can be inferred from this text?
Please tell me you know what "short term" is. Please tell me you are not trying to infer trends from fast noise. Please tell me you are not taking the covid years as the basis for an extrapolation.
Yes, coal+natural gas has decreased. The fall in coal is bigger than the rise in natural gas. You can check it in the source the article linked.
I'd love it if you could teach me someting, but your strategy of throwing sources at me that don't back up your statements undermines your authority as a media literacy educator. The total fossil fuel use peaks in 2005, but saying the graph conclusively shows a decreasing trend in Fossil Fuel use is evidence of wishful thinking; the slopes are so small that if you drew a line from that peak to the COVID minimum in 2020 and extrapolate from that slope, the zero fossil fuel use point would still be in 2090. There is a local maximum in 2018, and an increase in fossil use at the end of the data set in 2021, suggesting a return to pre-COVID growth. Covid has nothing to do with 2018, and while it explains the increase in fossil fuel use in 2021, it doesn't explain why fossil fuel use increased faster th
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Yes, coal+natural gas has decreased. The fall in coal is bigger than the rise in natural gas. You can check it in the source the article linked.
I'd love it if you could teach me someting, but your strategy of throwing sources at me that don't back up your statements undermines your authority as a media literacy educator. The total fossil fuel use peaks in 2005, but saying the graph conclusively shows a decreasing trend in Fossil Fuel use is evidence of wishful thinking; the slopes are so small that if you drew a line from that peak to the COVID minimum in 2020 and extrapolate from that slope, the zero fossil fuel use point would still be in 2090. There is a local maximum in 2018, and an increase in fossil use at the end of the data set in 2021, suggesting a return to pre-COVID growth. Covid has nothing to do with 2018, and while it explains the increase in fossil fuel use in 2021, it doesn't explain why fossil fuel use increased faster than alternative energy use in the same year. If there was an unambiguous downward trend in fossil fuel use, you would not expect 'noise' large enough to poke holes in that hypothesis.
Some of the decrease in coal was from renewables replacing them or have you an alternate explanation?
The standard explanation I'm aware of is that with the discovery of new fracking techniques, natural gas has become economically cheaper than coal, causing some of the less profitable coal plants to shut down. This is also the simplest explanation from the explosion of natural gas on graph #1. Wikipedia lists ~30 decommissioned US-based coal power plants with +200 still firing.
You can't claim 'coal has been replaced' when a percentage of its total capacity is simply being furlowed for when it becomes competitive with other energy sources again, like your source projected it to in 2021. May I remind you that the alternative name for Jevons Paradox is the 'Bounce-Back' effect?
Furthermore, the hypothesis that manufacturing new alternative energy sources will replace fossil fuel energy use without any need for social or political pressure would predict that with each increase in alternative energy growth, there would be a corresponding decrease in fossil fuel use. This is soundly contradicted by the data you've provided.
Only the year 2010 from 1955-2010 showed negative fossil energy growth from the previous five years, and in that year the amount of energy provided by alternative sources grew much more than the amount that fossil fuel use shrank. This not only contradicts the 'replacement' hypothesis, but also supports my hypothesis, which predicts that without significant political or social resistance, market forces will cause alternative energy to complement fossil fuel rather than replace it. Using both renewable energy and fossil fuel creates lower energy prices than either one individually, and lower energy prices stimulate economic growth. Economic growth results in more demand for energy, and thus more sources of fossil fuel and renewable energy in a 'virtuous' cycle.
The more granular recent data also contradicts the 'replacement' hypothesis.
From 2010-2020, total energy used in the United States has shown little growth and been roughly static. If fossil fuel was being replaced by alternative energy, you would expect to see fossil fuel energy use decrease with each renewable energy increase. That behavior does not appear in the data. Instead it looks like the kind of bouncy data you expect from market behavior between competing goods.
I didn't expect to see the energy use stagnation in the United States from 2010-2020, which was interesting. My guess is that this coincides with a change in US trade patterns where energy-intensive domestic manufacturing was shifted to Asia.
Based on this trade graph, I would predict a boom in both new fossil fuel plants and renewable energy plants in China from 2010 to at least 2017, and similar paired growth in other Asian countries the United States traded with. I suspect the United States' stagnation is due to energy - from coal, renewables, or otherwise - being cheaper abroad than from any domestic source. Once that is no longer the case, I predict the United States will 'bounce-back' and begin producing significantly more fossil-fuel-based energy if there is no significant political or social force to stop it.
If China built no new fossil fuel plants during those years, or if manufacturing returns from abroad to a politically and socially stagnant US and there is a decrease in fossil fuel energy generation, that would be a significant blow to my hypothesis. If I haven't convinced you that the 'replacement' hypothesis is wrong, please tell me what prediction would have to be false in order for you to abandon that hypothesis?
First time I have someone complaining about me giving sources.
You are mostly arguing on things we agree (there needs to be policy efforts, there needs to be some change, the current transition is too slow) and we mostly disagree on what is a data-backed observation: renewables augment while fossils go down. Within fossils, gas displaces coal but fossils in general go down. If you refuse graphs and numbers about good sources about it, I am at a loss.
I've taken the graphs and numbers you've given me in gratitude, and used them to debunk your ideological position. Everyone makes reading comprehension mistakes occasionally, but it unusual for someone to get things this wrong this consistently. I'm reminded of the Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." And this is tragic, because while it may benefit your short term feelings of privilege and stability to trivialize the need for drastic degrowth while engaged in an extremely energy intensive industry, you are also a victim. Your near term future is going to be impacted just like everyone else's by the widespread inability of many people like you to meaningfully grapple with the difficult but necessary steps required to avoid the worst of the climate catastrophe.
it unusual for someone to get things this wrong this consistently.
At least we agree on something.
And once again your assumptions about my situation and my work ethics are hilariously wrong. I am cutting down my income in order to work non-profit on issues I do care about and turn down offers by unethical companies routinely. I am a freelance who changes client pretty often. My income does not depend on the acceptance of an ideology, I made sure of that and that was a reason for becoming independent.
I am sure I am not the first person you are antagonizing through your own projections. You should really be more careful about assuming things about the people who contradict you. Sometimes they just do it because you are wrong. Being more open to that possibility would make your life much better.
My 'assumptions' are that you work in machine learning and AI. We've shared this platform for a while. If you didn't announce it almost as much as you announce your anti-capitalism, I could correctly assume it from the pages of patronizing apologia you've written about it.
And while I'm happy to 'antagonize' you on behalf of all the other people you've belittled and spoken over, I don't think you're the enemy. I appreciate the pushback to my ideas occasional adversarial scholarship provides. I hope your ego eventually softens to appreciate what I'm trying to achieve here.
Your assumptions are far more numerous and offensive than that. From you thinking that I know nothing about discrimination at work or my driving habits, or even assuming that you are more to the left than I am or that I criticize your positions for being leftist rather than being wrong.
The cherry on the top of you laying down a dozen of wrong accusation is you calling my attitude patronizing and belittling.
There's an actual explanation in the original article about some of the wardrobe choices. It's even dumber, and it involves effective altruism.
It is a very cold home. It’s early March, and within 20 minutes of being here the tips of some of my fingers have turned white. This, they explain, is part of living their values: as effective altruists, they give everything they can spare to charity (their charities). “Any pointless indulgence, like heating the house in the winter, we try to avoid if we can find other solutions,” says Malcolm. This explains Simone’s clothing: her normal winterwear is cheap, high-quality snowsuits she buys online from Russia, but she can’t fit into them now, so she’s currently dressing in the clothes pregnant women wore in a time before central heating: a drawstring-necked chemise on top of warm underlayers, a thick black apron, and a modified corset she found on Etsy. She assures me she is not a tradwife. “I’m not dressing trad now because we’re into trad, because before I was dre
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There's an actual explanation in the original article about some of the wardrobe choices. It's even dumber, and it involves effective altruism.
It is a very cold home. It’s early March, and within 20 minutes of being here the tips of some of my fingers have turned white. This, they explain, is part of living their values: as effective altruists, they give everything they can spare to charity (their charities). “Any pointless indulgence, like heating the house in the winter, we try to avoid if we can find other solutions,” says Malcolm. This explains Simone’s clothing: her normal winterwear is cheap, high-quality snowsuits she buys online from Russia, but she can’t fit into them now, so she’s currently dressing in the clothes pregnant women wore in a time before central heating: a drawstring-necked chemise on top of warm underlayers, a thick black apron, and a modified corset she found on Etsy. She assures me she is not a tradwife. “I’m not dressing trad now because we’re into trad, because before I was dressing like a Russian Bond villain. We do what’s practical.”
Yes and that’s obviously lies, as anyone who has grown up with limited income in a cold area can tell them. Cheap, warm clothing is not bought online (in the US) from Russia, and never from Etsy. In the US it’s bought — if you’re buying new at all! — from Target or Kohl’s or some other big chain. You get layers, you get things used when you can, and the cheapest way to dress warmly is the most normie, uninteresting clothes that are mass produced and sold in low end department stores.
Nothing they describe is practical or cheap. It’s cosplay Kinder, Küche, Kirche, and the journalist repeated it verbatim because she’s a chump.
Elon Musk (father of 11) supports their cause. Thousands follow their ideology. Malcolm and Simone Collins are on a mission to make it easier for everyone to have multiple children. But are they really model parents?
The Collinses are atheists; they believe in science and data, studies and research. Their pronatalism is born from the hyper-rational effective altruism movement
This is just gonna be eugenics, isn’t it?
Malcolm describes their politics as “the new right – the iteration of conservative thought that Simone and I represent will come to dominate once Trump is gone.”
What’s that now? Neo-alt-right? You can’t just add another fucking prefix anytime your stupid fascist movement goes off rails.
One of the reasons why I chose to have only have two children is because I couldn’t afford to give more kids a good life; the bigger home, the holidays, the large car and everything else they would need.
Yeah, what about giving them love or a warm relationship, or, you know, time?
And then they wonder why those generations have shitty relationships with their parents when they seriously believe that what they need is a big fucking car
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The Collinses are atheists; they believe in science and data, studies and research. Their pronatalism is born from the hyper-rational effective altruism movement
This is just gonna be eugenics, isn’t it?
Malcolm describes their politics as “the new right – the iteration of conservative thought that Simone and I represent will come to dominate once Trump is gone.”
What’s that now? Neo-alt-right? You can’t just add another fucking prefix anytime your stupid fascist movement goes off rails.
One of the reasons why I chose to have only have two children is because I couldn’t afford to give more kids a good life; the bigger home, the holidays, the large car and everything else they would need.
Yeah, what about giving them love or a warm relationship, or, you know, time?
And then they wonder why those generations have shitty relationships with their parents when they seriously believe that what they need is a big fucking car, as if that’s the variable that was missing in all of this.
Excuse me while I go and hug my daughter. I need to de-rationalize myself after reading this.
I assume it is neoreaction. Not sure if you are a recent poster here, or were aware of sneerclub when it was on reddit but we talked about NRx there every now and then. (Not a fan).
I don't know if the Collins are NRx, what I do know is that neoreactionary podcasters love the Collins. (According to a quick google search). And bonus for David Gerard, Grimes has reached out to the Collins source is the grimezs long post on Grimes her links to all this shit
Ow yeah, it certainly paints them in a very bad light, and I will not argue against others calling them NRx, or neo-nazis, I just like a little bit more proof myself because im a bit pedantic at times, but in practice it doesn't really matter if the 'we worry about great replacement r-strategists(*) racists' are NRx/nazis or not).
*: For those just tuning in. (Turn back! Stop reading! Go away, innocence once lost cannot be regained!) claiming non-white people are r-strategists while white people are K-strategists is a big far right foghorn. (wiki page on the theory) In their bs theory they ignore that this is about differences between species (of course they are also racists so yeah, this isn't hypocritical on their part, just a sign of racism), and r-strats are physically impossible for humans, as we don't have enough nipples + we take too long to mature etc.
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be) Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if
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Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be) Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
Recall uses a bunch of services themed CAP - Core AI Platform. Enabled by default.
It spits constant screenshots (the product brands then “snapshots”, but they’re hooked screenshots) into the current user’s AppData as part of image storage.
The NPU processes them and extracts text, into a database file.
The database is SQLite, and you can access it as the user including programmatically. It 100% does not need physical access and can be stolen.
Recall uses a bunch of services themed CAP - Core AI Platform. Enabled by default.
It spits constant screenshots (the product brands then “snapshots”, but they’re hooked screenshots) into the current user’s AppData as part of image storage.
The NPU processes them and extracts text, into a database file.
The database is SQLite, and you can access it as the user including programmatically. It 100% does not need physical access and can be stolen.
Recall uses a bunch of services themed CAP - Core AI Platform. Enabled by default.
It spits constant screenshots (the product brands then “snapshots”, but they’re hooked screenshots) into the current user’s AppData as part of image storage.
The NPU processes them and extracts text, into a database file.
The database is SQLite, and you can access it as the user including programmatically. It 100% does not need physical access and can be stolen.
I see a *lot* of people spreading misinformation about Microsoft Recall, so let's be clear with what we know so far:
* Recall will ONLY WORK on Copilot+ PCs. This is because they have a Snapdragon CPU, which is very efficient at AI tasks.
As someone who did come to love a lot of microsoft products despite the way I felt about them in the 90’s, their slow slide into whatever they are now makes me hate them more, not less. Microsoft genuinely spent a lot of the oughts making genuinely good general purpose stuff, and they absolutely dominated at accessibility for 20 years. So when people simp for them as they destroy everything I found great about their products, instead of holding them to account, it’s awful.
Guess who bought the dictation software I rely on for everything I do and then basically abandoned the useful consumer product and is now sticking gippity-4 into it? Stick it in GitHub, stick it in Windows, add it to your complete breakfast, wear it on your head.
Groundbreaking Nuance DAX Express is the next milestone in an expanding portfolio of solutions combining OpenAI's GPT-4 with proven workflow-integrated technology to define the future of...
I know that solar panels have to be cleaned pretty regularly to function with high efficiency. My guess would be that the cost and labor to clean the panels would be pretty high.
Quoting from National Geographic:
Winds at speeds of about 100 kilometers per hour (60 miles per hour) sweep through some deserts. With little vegetation to block it, the wind can carry sand and dust across entire continents and even oceans. Windstorms in the Sahara hurl so much material into the air that African dustsometimes crosses the Atlantic Ocean. Sunsets on the Atlantic coast of the U.S. state of Florida, for example, can be tinted yellow.
Last I heard, the estimate of upkeep on solar was about 5% of the cost of fuel for the same amount of power but that was a couple of years ago. Then again, again years ago, I saw a BU prospective business which was automating solar panel cleaning and have seen self-cleaning surfaces for solar panels ideas since.
A desert is a very different environment to "normal". Nievly you would think solar would be better.
Unfortunately:
A lot more sand means a lot more cleaning, one of the few ongoing costs of solar.
Sand is ablative. A sand storm will scratch and erode the surface of the panel. This will reduce its efficiency.
Sandstorms can darken the sky. A lot of direct light can be lost to a sandstorm.
Solar panels don't work well when hot. Deserts are generally quite hot, when the sun is shining.
Solder joints don't like thermal stresses. The panels, ultimately need wiring together. The joints (cell to cell, and cell to wire) don't like thermal stresses. Deserts get cold at night, and hot during the day. A lot more panels than normal will be lost to failed electrical connections.
Wind, on the other hand, does well in a large open area. The only additional effects of sand would be blade ablation, and sand in moving parts. Both of these are easier to counter.
The abrasive properties of sand would apply to all machinery (including oil pumps) but today, we seem to have no problem installing tons of oil pumps in the middle of the desert.
Then, abrasive effects are strongest on moving parts (such as wind mills and oil pumps) but not so strong on solid state devices (such as computer chips or solar panels). Therefore, I don't expect that to be much of a problem.
Occasional shade from sand storms are maybe ~5% losses per year, which is not much. In exchange, the rest of the time, the sky is cloudless.
Does anyone know if there are guidelines for the Follow/Accept flow outside of that prescribed in the AP protocol?
The reason why I ask is because there seems to be a little logical hole that people fall into where a Follow activity is sent, but the relationship then rests in an indeterminate state:
The Follow is pending acceptance
The Follow was already seen and subsequently ignored
Something was wrong with the activity (e.g. signature failure, missing id, etc.) and it was ignored
Receipt of an Accept is asynchronous, so the approach as seen in the wild is to assume a "pending" follow state. The problem is that if the flow doesn't follow that happy path (instant-accept or pending), then you don't know there is a problem.
Furthermore it seems that there are no existing recommendations regarding handling of a Follow to an Actor who believes you are already following them. Do you send back an Accept? Ignore the activity?
I'm writing this because I'm unable to follow @weekinfediverse@mitra.social, but I don't actually know whether it failed or is pending accept.
While I firmly believe any errors would be on my end, the problem is I don't actually know for sure, and this would also potentially provide guidance for new implementors.
>The problem is that if the flow doesn't follow that happy path (instant-accept or pending), then you don't know there is a problem.
In such cases I keep it in pending state forever. But the sender may cancel and re-send the follow request.
>Furthermore it seems that there are no existing recommendations regarding handling of a Follow to an Actor who believes you are already following them. Do you send back an Accept? Ignore the activity?
I send Accept every time, i.e. Follow activity is idempotent
>I'm writing this because I'm unable to follow `@weekinfediverse@mitra.social, but I don't actually know whether it failed or is pending accept.
It was successful, and my server sent Accept, and the response was:
Consider the following: Two ActivityPub Servers Klein and Moebius are trying to federate, but some things don’t work as expected. Currently, the debugging process requires members from both development teams to communicate.
If you haven't yet had a look, check us out now! The book is free as in speech, and free as in beer! And if you like what you see, please rate us, review us, and tell your friends! (or foes!)
It's a tabletop role playing game - like a solarpunk scifi version of DnD (or the TTRPG of your pick). The rulebook and other resources available there enable people to play it. Specifically it helps one individual (the GM) run their own campaigns/games, by giving them a suggested set of rules and a vibrant setting they can use all or some of (or just take inspiration from), and it helps the rest of a group of players to create characters and interact with the setting. Together they do a sort of collective storytelling.
In the broader scope of what it does, hopefully it helps people who aren't super familiar with solarpunk and it's associated philosophies and movements to imagine a better world, other ways we could do things as a society.
Hi everyone! A bit over a month ago I made a survey about Solarpunk and shared it here. Now, I finally present you the findings of the survey! I am adding a few pics here for a preview and if you are interested, go check the link where there is a full description of the findings!!
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That video effected how i think about modern solutions not necessarily how i picture a potantial solarpunk future. So I voted yes to the question.
I agree just slapping trees on buildings is not going to magically fix modern society's much deeper issues. I do still think having roof top gardens is something that could work for a much more advanced civilization with different construction methods and materials.
I dunno i think it has a place in the more imaginative side of solarpunk... a living building (like the ships and buildings from octavia butlers liliths brood series) could definetly support gardens. Or specially grown tree houses. Or hollowed out "mountains" with sunlight vents and an entire forest on the surface. Ooooo or maybe some floating islands where people live inside the verticle garden beds.
Modern concrete and steel based architecture is definetly not ready to have that level of greenery integrated into the building structures. One of the communes I lived at had a rooftop garden, & we had tons of issues with leaks and just the sheer weight of
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That video effected how i think about modern solutions not necessarily how i picture a potantial solarpunk future. So I voted yes to the question.
I agree just slapping trees on buildings is not going to magically fix modern society's much deeper issues. I do still think having roof top gardens is something that could work for a much more advanced civilization with different construction methods and materials.
I dunno i think it has a place in the more imaginative side of solarpunk... a living building (like the ships and buildings from octavia butlers liliths brood series) could definetly support gardens. Or specially grown tree houses. Or hollowed out "mountains" with sunlight vents and an entire forest on the surface. Ooooo or maybe some floating islands where people live inside the verticle garden beds.
Modern concrete and steel based architecture is definetly not ready to have that level of greenery integrated into the building structures. One of the communes I lived at had a rooftop garden, & we had tons of issues with leaks and just the sheer weight of all that dirt and plant material on the structure.
I still love the idea though, lol just not in the modern era.
One of the communes I lived at had a rooftop garden, & we had tons of issues with leaks and just the sheer weight of all that dirt and plant material on the structure.
In Montréal we have several large scale rooftop greenhouses built on top of warehouses. I'm guessing the warehouse construction is probably overbuilt to support the weight, but there haven't been and major issues yet.
It might not be solarpunk, but it's solarpunk wearing a tie at it's day job to find it's dreams. And their tomatoes are fucking delicious.
That sounds super cool! Warehouses especially seem like a good candidate for gardens. They're large, typically flat on top, & are often surrounded by paved parking areas meaning they get full sun. Plus the interiors often have easy access to the ceiling making any repairs very simple.
Lol I will say our leaky roof garden was the product of hippie construction, so it was beautiful and really cool-- but not the most carefully engineered 🤣
I remember a manual for rooftop gardens from Montreal back in the 1970s. There are lighter growing media than soil and, of course, hydroponics and aeroponics.
Years of links to urban and advanced agriculture developments at cityag.blogspot.com Years of links to net zero energy building developments at zeronetenrg.blogspot.com Both are also free listservs
Super useful links, thanks for sharing :) it's so cool to see all the different ways people have approached the questions & all the different solutions they came up with.
Maybe I'm just a sucker for plants on buildings though lol
Idk, I was just thinking flowers or fruit growing from the walls or maybe even furniture/utilities being a part of the building itself in such a way that depending on how you use them the shape changes over time I haven't really thought that far ahead.
The sci-fi/space opera Pandora's Star (and it's follow-up, Judas Unchained) by Peter F Hamilton has humanity developing fast growing coral that they then use to essentially grow houses, over around 5 years, to the specific shape and layout that the inhabitants desire.
The books aren't solarpunk in the truest sense, yet they have a surprising amount of solarpunk compatible ideas involved (including a hefty critique of both capitalism and unchecked industrialization).
Yeah, for me I see stuff like ivy growing on the sides to bring nature into urban spaces, and maybe greenhouses or gardens on the roof. Trees require a lot of soil and junk, and their roots can cause a lot of damage that you wouldn't expect. I'd probably answer yes to the question even though it isn't "trees" exactly I envision, but still green plant growth.
Good point! I'm on the same page of understanding "trees on buildngs" to mean general greenery.
Your comment did get me thinking: It would be cool if we could find a way to direct tree roots. Like how in yards if a tree root breaks into the water lines, they'll fill that space since it is clear and full of nutrients. It's bad for the pipes, but if done purposefully could maybe help mitigate the damage caused by large tree root systems.
I guess solarpunk is more about communism than I thought. I still agree with the ecological aspects, hell I drive an older prius, but I wont label myself as part of the solarpunk group. God I hate tankies infesting everything.
Not all communists are tankies. I understand many people (especially Americans) assume that connection because of the cold war era propaganda. However, many self identified communists have no respect or admiration for authoritarian states like China or the USSR.
& I think solarpunk tends to draw in communists, anarchists, libertarians and other radical views. To create a significant change in how humans relate to the environment around us, we would also likely need a significant change in how we relate to eachother. This means some sort of change to our modern system of profit based sucess (i.e. modern capitalism).
Huh? Where are you meeting tankies in this movement? I’ve found it quite hostile to tankies which is saying something since there’s a lot of them here on Lemmy.
imo it is better to make simple websites that don't use too many animations. Otherwise they don't display properly on some devices. Here's what it looks like to me:
As you can see, the picture doesn't show completely (the borders are cut off), also the photo fades in rather slowly, which is annoying when scrolling through quickly.
I missed this survey. I find the gender demographics intriguing. I'm unsure why this survey was so very male-dominated. That's really something to ponder about. Is it an internet issue, or is it something about the ideology itself? Are women in some way being restricted from solarpunk thought? This is phenomena of note in leftism, as well. I find it very perplexing, especially considering the shared goal of equality in these ideologies. I cannot believe women wouldn't be incredibly attracted to solarpunk, it can quite seriously be summed up with one word: care. If women aren't at least equal in their interest in the ideology, it seems to me something is very wrong. Thanks for doing the survey though. Nice to see what's going on in the community, statistically.
We’re about to begin Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. Set in the year 2454, the Earth of the Terra Ignota quartet has seen several centuries of near-total peace and prosperity.
Show If This Goes On (Don't Panic): Science Fiction, Fantasy & Progressive Politics, Ep Solarpunk: Solarpunk Kids Are Free Range with Navarre Bartz - Apr 22, 2024
cohost.org/roguecache just made a new solarpunk logo; i think it's very well designed and keeps the simplicity while still keeping sun, nature and technology meanings
Is it just me or dose this one looks a bit like the depressed Form of v1 (I love v1 its part of my punk-jacket). The down hanging leafs combined with the darker colors give me a more sad vibe like if the plant needs watering or something.
No idea what v1 looked like, I kind of think it should be flipped horizontally and maybe tilted, since it’s already making an ‘S’ with those two sets of shapes.
At some point that must have been the idea behind this logo. Would be interesting to hear from the original artist why they decided to go in a different direction with it.
This would lend itself to stencils pretty well though (one color, no islands), especially with a touch of spray adhesive on the back. I've done the symbol from one of the more common solarpunk flags, and getting the blank spot inside the gear positioned would be a little finicky if doing graffiti.
You'd want to bridge the corners there, to make it all one piece, if you wanted to be able to put it up quickly. I was just painting a laptop so I had plenty of time to fuss with it.
Looks nice but probably too many details to work at smaller sizes. A single large leaf instead of the whole leafy stem would convey the same visual concept.
Went to a town called Sutton's Bay in Michigan, USA this last weekend. Definitely solar Punk leaning. Solar: a lot of people drive EVs, bike paths throughout the town and connecting other local towns, rain gardens are interspersed throughout the town, some business stops nearby from the local intercity bus network. Punk: residents are encouraged not to mow their lawns until the end of May, the only gas station in town looked pretty closed, their groceries is a mom and pop shop. Obviously, the town has a long way to go (economy is largely tourist/consumerism based, no public ev chargers, housing does not appear affordable, no light rail nearby), but as far as USA cities in the "middle of nowhere" go, it's a speck of hope.
Well, long before that the device would stop working. More important would be improved repairability. My current phone is in year 4 and the hardware is starting to die. But I can't replace the battery or other parts that start breaking. 20 year software support means nothing without that hardware lasting that long.
In that regard I think 7 years is already plenty. If they pair that with easy to replace batteries and screens that would go a long way.
People think Apple is some sort of bastion of longevity because they have software support, but it's completely meaningless when they have almost zero hardware support.
a end to planned obsolescence would be open sourcing the hardware drivers at the end of support, or the government requiring the driver code be released.
Why are we still relying on manufacturers for software updates?
I know there's driver issues, but I'm pretty sure google could engineer android to at least allow direct security updates within the same android version. Google play services still provides updates for android 5. Even Yocto linux has opkg for updates.
It’s all based on Qualcomm drivers if I remember correctly. If Qualcomm doesn’t update the drivers then they can’t update the phones to the newest version. Maybe since Samsung and google make their own processors now they can guarantee longer updates? Also for Linux PCs it all uses x86 so maybe that’s why it can be supported longer without the need for manufacturers’ drivers updates?
How relevant to it is this though? Like never - not once - have I ever heard of someone upgrading their phone because their version of Android was too old.
It's far more likely they'll upgrade due to degraded performance and/or battery life packed into these updates with either new features (or more like, anti-features if we're being cynical). Want to use a smartphone for its lifespan? Don't upgrade software unless you absolutely need to. This actually applies to any computers really.
If anything, thanks to manufacturers like Samsung slowly overwriting android with their bloatware crap most people aren't even aware of what version of android they run because it doesn't even look anything like any other version of android on any other phone, unfortunately brands like Samsung succeeded in creating a soft walled garden for users by obscuring the fact they're using anything but 'A Samsung'.
Ask a non-tech savvy user for a USB-C charger, and they'll not know what you mean, but ask them for a Samsung charger and they'll hand you USB-C.
My phone pushes over the air updates every couple of months. These have included android 13 and 14, and various patches.
Android updates aren't something you have to go and get, they come to you. Having the long term support means your phone will always have the latest user features and security improvements, even for non technical users. People can and do install these all the time.
Yes but that doesn't address the fact that people won't throw away their phone just because it doesn't have an update.
Plus user features for most people will be independent of the Android version since not many android features actually make it to Samsung's touchwiz/oneui/whatever-this-month for example
Eventually apps people care about stop supporting the old OS. I liked Android 4 so much and held to it for very long, but fewer and fewer apps were working with it
This will have an impact on companies issuing Android phones to employees, which may be required to use an actively supported device for security reasons.
Some of my banking apps will refuse to run on older phones as well.
I've worked at companies where security would refuse to let people run the company workspace on an older phone. So if people wanted to work from home, or check the email from the phone, they needed to upgrade.
I do agree, for most people, battery life is more impactful before security runs out. But if you replace the battery, then security becomes the limiting factor
I have. I would probably use my last phone for at least another year if it didn't loose system updates. There's too much important personal data (bank, photos, messages including medical info...) on the phone to risk using it unsupported. At least to me it is not worth it so I try to buy a phone with reasonably long support and buy a new one soon after the old one looses support.
It should be a commitment to complete register level public documentation.
That is the benchmark of true ownership.
Android is a Linux kernel google prepares so that the kernel modules (drivers) for the device hardware can be added at the last possible moment. These kernel modules are added as binaries directly on the device. This is called an orphaned kernel. The source code for these binary modules is not publicly available, and the devices hardware is not publicly documented. This is how they steal ownership of the device.
The alternative is either to merge the original source code into the kernel, which the community can then maintain for decades, or simply make the documentation public and we will write our own kernel modules to support the device.
There is no reason to obfuscate this information except for theft of ownership. There is no security in obscurity, and hiding this information makes the hardware far less safe for the end user.
No one can ever update the Linux kernel for security or their own use case. Without the ability to recompile
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It should be a commitment to complete register level public documentation.
That is the benchmark of true ownership.
Android is a Linux kernel google prepares so that the kernel modules (drivers) for the device hardware can be added at the last possible moment. These kernel modules are added as binaries directly on the device. This is called an orphaned kernel. The source code for these binary modules is not publicly available, and the devices hardware is not publicly documented. This is how they steal ownership of the device.
The alternative is either to merge the original source code into the kernel, which the community can then maintain for decades, or simply make the documentation public and we will write our own kernel modules to support the device.
There is no reason to obfuscate this information except for theft of ownership. There is no security in obscurity, and hiding this information makes the hardware far less safe for the end user.
No one can ever update the Linux kernel for security or their own use case. Without the ability to recompile the kernel modules for the hardware, it is impossible to completely own the device. You can never trust the hardware, because those binaries are not verified.
The modem on the device is the same. There is no documentation. Between the processor and modem, there is no way to determine what or who is connected to your device at any time. Every interface on the device is untrusted.
Fixing all of this is simple; require full register level and API documentation of all digital devices. Anything less than this simple standard is ultimately giving up democracy for neo feudalism and authoritarianism. You have a right to own your tools as a citizen; a right to autonomy. A serf does not have a right of ownership or full autonomy. Citizens are a fundamental requirement for democracy, as serfs are to feudalism. Not caring about this fundamental issue is ultimately selling your autonomy. It is a regression of a thousand years of human sociopolitical progress.
Am curious if Solarpunk music is a thing or not yet? If it is please do share some links to tracks to check out, am very cruious. If it isnt a thing yet, what type of music do you imagined it would be like? I found this on the Tubes, which is very relaxing, ambiance type of music. This is personally the type of music I have in mind when thinking solarpunk.
Oasis Of The Wind II ～ A Story Of Forest And Water ～
風のオアシスII～森と水の物語～
Tracklist:
00:00 森の目覚め (Awakening Of The Forest)
18:10 夏の記憶 (Memory Of Summer)
34:13 遥かなる青い星 (Distant Blue Star)
Rip of the 1993 CD release from Teichiku Records Co.
Provided to YouTube by Lofi RecordsWeightless · KuplaLife Forms℗ 2023 Lofi RecordsReleased on: 2020-07-31Producer: Lauri Aaro Ilmari AchteMusic Publisher: C...
One of the action items that came out was to collate the state of current implementations. Unfortunately, outside of implementations that federate non-textual content (e.g. Pixelfed Stories, Mobilizon Events, etc.), the majority of implementors just use as:Note, which is not surprising given Mastodon's treatment of non-Note objects.
One of the action items that came out was to collate the state of current implementations. Unfortunately, outside of implementations that federate non-textual content (e.g. Pixelfed Stories, Mobilizon Events, etc.), the majority of implementors just use as:Note, which is not surprising given Mastodon's treatment of non-Note objects.
What is less clear is whether there is pent-up demand for use of a different data type for more richly forrmatted content. @mikedev@fediversity.site and @jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu provided some very illuminating history behind previous attempts to use as:Article, but importantly it seems that Mastodon (via @renchap@oisaur.com) may be open to supporting this in some form as well.
While Mastodon has every reason to display as:Note as it sees fit, I'd like to hopefully address the undue influence towards using it especially in instances where as:Article were more appropriate. Mike (upthread) suggested a compromise:
that as:Note be reserved for content with attachments (images or otherwise), perhaps with a limited subset of html
and as:Article be used for content with a richer set of html (e.g. tables), and including the ability to display inline images
I explicitly did not specify that Note was for shorter content and Article for longer, because there exist plenty of examples of the reverse.
Does anybody see potential complications from such an arrangement?
Please see below for minutes from today's Forum and Threaded Discussions Task Force monthly meeting. Apologies in advance if I misrepresented anybody or miss...
There have been some scattered discussions I've seen over the past year that mention that @[url=https://mastodon.social/users/pfefferle]Matthias Pfefferle[/url]'s WordPress ActivityPub plugin federates their blog posts out as an as:Note, and that the only reason this is done is because Mastodon only treats as:Note (and as:Question) as a first-class object and relegates anything else to a fallback handler that takes a short snippet of the content, and shows a link back to the original source, thus losing any in-app benefits (boosts, replies, etc.)
Whether this is actually true or not, I do not know. So that's why I'd like to ask Mattias — or anybody else with some context — here.
For reference:
as:Article: Represents any kind of multi-paragraph written work.
as:Note: Represents a short written work typically less than a single paragraph in length.
as:Page: Represents a Web Page.
I have also noticed that Lemmy, perhaps out of principle, sends out an as:Page for new generated content, and only the replies federate out as as:Note. It has unfortunately led to some assertions that Lemmy's federation is "broken", even though it is arguably not the case.
@[url=https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ap/actor/30d35c07698335c03f2bb89d3a51a02f]nutomic[/url], care to weigh in?
I don't even blame Mattias for opting to send everything out as as:Note.
End of the day right now it doesn't matter how Mattias or Nutomic represent their higher-level collection of data, because Mastodon is the largest implementor and neither they — nor anyone else I know of, for that matter — treat anything that's notas:Note or as:Question specially.
But that ought to change. The question is how, but this WG is not at the point where we start throwing around decrees and making up standards.
What's important to me right now is what the landscape looks like right now, and why that is the case.
N.B. The discussion here will eventually make its way to online real-time discussion at one of the future WG meetings.
This is one I’ve had on my list for months now, and I finally decided to just go ahead and make it. Back when I was researching solar cookers, solar concentrator, and solar furnaces, I ran into a few really interesting ideas around fresnel lenses. Look them up on youtube and you can find all kinds videos of people melting glass or burning skillsaw blades in half, but the ones that kind of showed me how useful a really-concentrated point of heat could be was this 3D printer for sintering sand into glass objects and this solar rig for smelting zinc or aluminum. Both used fresnel lenses, but were limited by the size of their portable builds.
So here’s my take on something bigger and mor
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This is one I’ve had on my list for months now, and I finally decided to just go ahead and make it. Back when I was researching solar cookers, solar concentrator, and solar furnaces, I ran into a few really interesting ideas around fresnel lenses. Look them up on youtube and you can find all kinds videos of people melting glass or burning skillsaw blades in half, but the ones that kind of showed me how useful a really-concentrated point of heat could be was this 3D printer for sintering sand into glass objects and this solar rig for smelting zinc or aluminum. Both used fresnel lenses, but were limited by the size of their portable builds.
So here’s my take on something bigger and more permanent, though hopefully still flexible enough to do multiple jobs using concentrated sunlight. The building’s tower houses an observatory-style dome with an irising shutter around a very large fresnel lens. This lens is meant to gather light, but deliberately doesn’t focus it too much, just directs it to another lens, which aims the light straight down. There, on a motorized rig which allows for some adjustment up and down, is the third lens which actually brings it to a searing focal point.
With that focal point reliable and known, the people at the workshop could move several different tools underneath it as necessary, from a crucible for smelting, to a firepot for solar forging, perhaps a glassblowing oven, a 3D sinterer, or the large CNC plasma cutter-style rig shown in the scene.
A set of computers would be set up with light sensors and control over the rotation of the dome, to allow it to track the sun, and the width of the aperture in the shutters, to allow it to regulate the amount of light. The upper limit on the light would be based on how bright the day is, but if they need anything less than full sun, then the opening and closing of the shutters should help with providing consistency. If it starts around half open in full sun and a cloud moves in front of the dome, it might open all the way, then close partially as the cloud leaves. With many minute adjustments, the overall amount of light could remain very consistent down on the ground.
As for the level of focus, I suspect the kerf while cutting would almost definitely be wider than with a modern plasma cutter, but like I said before, people have cut through skillsaw blades with just a lens from a rear-projection TV. So it's possible a larger lens could concentrate even more heat, allowing it to burn through much faster, with less damage to the surrounding material. The tightness of the point would mostly come down to the quality of the lens, as far as I know.
I’ve tried to include a number of controls, caution markings, and red emergency stop buttons, but the one thing I really don’t like about the design as drawn is that it’s not obviously fail-safe. I think ideally there’d be some kind of hanging weight or other mechanism so that when power is lost (not just to the building, as that probably happens fairly often on a less-reliable grid, but to the system’s control unit) the shutters or another light-blocking mechanism slams into place.
Other notes about the scene, I’ve tried to include a diversity of ways to use the sun, the photovoltaic panels for powering the electronics and perhaps some of the tools, a set of fiberoptic solar daylighting systems, which track the sun and pipe light down to the shop floor, along with the simplest version, large windows. This emphasis on daylight should help avoid the risk of electric lights strobing in sync with moving items (such as on a lathe or milling machine) which can cause them to appear stationary and safe to grab onto, though they likely have two sources of light on each just in case. I’ve also included a water wheel, either for power generation, or for the direct motion, to be connected to certain tools or machinery via axles and belts.
I like it! I think you prefer this style instead of a solar panel + laser installation so I won't bother you with efficiency calculation. On the use of the beam however, the unreliable power of the source is going to make the direct use difficult. I think that most CNC tools (cutter, printer, etc) will prefer to use this source to heat a heatmass and add an electronically controllable way to transfer the heat and PID-control it.
So it’s possible a larger lens could concentrate even more heat
Yes! One square meter of sun gives 1000W at noon in perfect conditions. A 1000W laser cuts through several centimeters of metal. Of course, the challenge is in the focus (and boy will you have trouble there!) but if you achieve a good concentration over a large lens, you can reach pretty high power.
Thanks for the info! Collecting the heat and regulating it for a job like printing makes a lot of sense to me. Similarly, there's a bunch of other tasks that wouldn't require the same kind of precision - smelting metal in a crucible, heating metal to forge it (I'm hoping to try to build a solar forge this summer if I can get a fresnel lense from a rear projection TV), maybe heating a glassblowing furnace. Those just looked kinda small in the big space I'd laid out.
And yeah, I know photovoltaics are more practical for most things since they line up with how we already do things. I mostly include what I think of as weird solar because solarpunk art is already lousy with photovoltaic panels but there are a ton of other ways to directly use solar for thermal and light. I really like the idea of using energy in the form we receive it to minimize conversion losses, and to put less strain on the grid/batteries. Sometimes the art goals scrape up against the other goals a bit.
I would not bother with a small lens from a projector, you can buy an A4 fresnel lens for less than 10 USD in amazon and much cheaper in bigger quantities. That's already going to be a challenge to do something interesting with that size.
You could build a sun powered Dye laser. Dye lasers are capable of absorbing polychromatic light and emitting monochromatic light.
You could split the sunlight up into its various wavelengths with a prism and then run each wavelength through a specific dye to get more of some specific wavelength of light that is optimal for your task. Mostly just because it'd look cool tho.
The energy system we have today does not match the solarpunk future we dream of. If we work towards the right energy system today, we may just have a solarpunk tomorrow
emrikol
Als Antwort auf jeffhykin • • •Unfortunately we still need to add plastic to make it strong.
NileRed has some videos about it:
youtu.be/uUU3jW7Y9Ak?si=3Xjwa0…
Making transparent wood
YouTubeⓝⓞ🅞🅝🅔
Als Antwort auf emrikol • • •