Particularly liked this quote:

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires” — Ronald Wright, 2004.

Absolutely wonderful, except that I may now not be able to ride my bike mindlessly at all, so full will it be with physics.

Thanks Waxy.

You can say or think oh shut up, what's the big deal, it's just progress and it'll be fine, but there's more to it than that. What if you couldn't buy a plain hammer--only an electronic nail gun? You couldn't buy a kitchen knife, only a Cuisinart? No pencils and pens, only computers?

States and civilizations have collapsed many times in the past. But we’re in an unprecedented situation globally today, with such a vast population so reliant on high-energy resource flows orchestrated by a tightly-organized global network of centralized states increasingly incapable of organizing those flows, whose citizenries are extraordinarily alienated from the material and mental resource base needed to generate local livelihoods.

I think Bumper is onto something here for sure, in that the main reason for big download numbers is to sell advertising, whereas I would just like some sort of measure of whether people find my episodes interesting and whether that is going up or down. If data collection could be automated ...

I'm sure I could make use of at least some of this, in my bumbling, amateur way. I also wish it wasn't a Twitter thread. Need to find time to save the details for myself.

Classy dissection.

Very thought provoking and quite apart from reading and thinking about it, I'm feeling the need actually to do something about it.

it's a truism that anyone who wants you to stop thinking isn't your friend but it's equally true that anyone who insists that you think in exactly the way they've deemed proper is also not your friend. 

This is why I contribute my bit to the Internet Archive, when I can.

Very grateful to John Naughton for pointing to this article, which explains the problems and some of the solutions and which seems like an obvious dose of sanity.

 Ultimately, like many discussions around solutions to climate changes, this is a “yes, and” rather than an “or” choice. We can, and should, build more transmission capacity and storage, whilst reforming the market such that the UK’s phenomenal success in deploying wind power can be finessed to more precisely match our energy needs.

I'm sure I don't understand all the details, but I feel as if I understand more than I ever did before.

I'm persuaded; but then, I was already persuaded.

Maggie Appleton has a very persuasive article on the boredom that faces us from generative AI and some ideas to deal with it.

I particularly liked:

Easier said than done, but one of the best ways to prove you're not a predictive language model is to demonstrate critical and sophisticated thinking.

Which ought to go without saying, but of course doesn't. And which ought also to include some sort of distinctive authorial voice.

And:

we can prove we're real humans by showing up IRL with our real human bodies

Bring it on.

Fascinating deep read, prompting deep memories of my father's abiding interest in cryptic crossword puzzles and prodding me to maybe take up my pen (or more likely pencil) again..Maybe in the New Year.

I feel so seen, and this by Someone Who Knows.

Oh my god web results for popular programming questions are terrible. The top hits for every search phrase with python in it lead to pages that technically contain the information I seek, but which clog up the browser window with animated ads, subscription pop-ups, and sliding survey pitches. 

Still not feeling a whole lot of urgency about any alternatives to That Silo. Maybe that just reflects my lousy performance as a self-promoter.

I really, really like this series, and am thankful it comes around each year. (Even though Medium's markup sucks.)

TIL about TATT and MUS.

[C]ould it be possible that health care in a small farm future wouldn’t necessarily be inferior, because we have the wrong image of what health care involves?

More fascinating ideas from Chris Smaje:

Why focus so much on the undeserving poor, rather than on the undeserving rich? Accounts of the undeserving rich do exist in our politics, but they’re not nearly so prominent as their counterpart. The numerous ways that the fortunes of the world’s rich people and rich countries are extracted from the poor ones go too little remarked. Out of wealth comes the power to keep writing the rules in favour of wealth, and thence the need to keep dusting its crumbs from the table in the form of stigmatizing welfare policies.

When a Goebbels or Streicher declares that Jews drink the blood of baptized children, the strategic defense against such is not to join the argument and say, no, actually, they do not, and then drone out an analysis of the Tsarist forgeries in which the claim originates. The solution is to call the lying motherfucker a taintsniffing shitmonger and send his tweet to digital oblivion. Mock, block and roll.

I'd certainly pay $8 to read more of this.

Identifying strongly at the same time as feeling even more isolated.

People sometimes forget that podcasting, like blogging, started out as an egalitarian medium infused with the anti-hierarchical values of the open-source movement in software. If it is to retain a little of that democratic character in the face of rampant corporatization and Hollywoodization, it needs a flourishing middle class of independent makers who have the freedom to focus on their audio work, follow their creative instincts, and choose honesty over fake neutrality. 

Sweetly naive cartoon.

“UK citizens’ feelings about their incomes were a substantially better predictor of pro-Brexit views than their actual incomes.”

Just one of several interesting observations in this piece.

Tim Harford's lukewarm review of William MacAskill's book.

If he is right, how could I justify giving £10 to a food bank today when I could set up a charitable trust, let the money accumulate centuries of compound interest before lavishing the proceeds on future generations? Are we morally obliged to live at subsistence levels to maximise the resources available for investment and research so our great-great-great-great-grandchildren will thrive? Such questions have been discussed and analysed at great depth in the literature on climate change. It is surprising to see them waved away with a few sentences here. 

Is it that surprising, really?

 “We must stop giving breadcrumbs and start building bakeries.”

Nice rhetoric. And then ...?

In the UK at the moment, the average household consumes 3,731 kWh of electricity in a year. That comes to 10.23 kWh per day. So wouldn’t it be smarter — and fairer — to subsidise consumption up to that level, and let households which consume more face the market rate? And pay for the subsidy by a windfall tax on energy companies.

It won’t happen, of course, for the simple reason that it’s ‘unthinkable’.

I wish I understood more deeply, but the more I read about Henry George and Georgism, the more inclined I am to believe it to be correct.

Our modern culture is good at heroic, high-tech mitigation of specific and immediate acute problems. It’s not very good at long-term, low-tech cultural adaptation that mitigates against these specific and immediate acute problems from arising.

Is there time? Best to assume that there is, and start the transition now.

Oh, to be able to travel by Zeppelin. Meanwhile, I think the idea of never flying anywhere for less than a week is a good stop-gap, and more trains when possible.

Many good thoughts and conclusions.

“... (a symptom of the malaise: the spellchecker on my computer is happy with the word ‘urbanization’ but not ‘ruralization’).”

When, I wonder, are we going to get to the art/culture arguments in favour of cities. Those are what have kept me urbanised for the past many years. Irrationally, perhaps, but the result is the same.

George Monbiot illuminates and infuriates in equal measure, although I suspect, after reading Chris Smaje’s review, that I will not be paying much attention in future. I have not read Regenesis, so will say nothing about it myself. Two quotes from Chris (of many others I could have chosen):

“[A]n alternative, perhaps counterintuitive but more plausible argument [is] that low food prices in fact are a fundamental cause of global poverty.”

“[T]here’s no such thing as ‘an inexorable economic logic’, there are just political games with winners and losers – a point the old George Monbiot once understood.”

Yup.

Interesting account of a single piece of civil disobedience and its aftermath.

Splendid piece by a splendid broadcaster. Only one thing to push back against:

Music helps. Sound beds help. Clear simple writing helps.

Clear writing, obviously. But music and sound beds? This is much more culturally determined, in my view, and I don't know how best to cope with it.

“For Monbiot to highlight the complexity of soil but ignore the complexities involved in nutrition doesn’t make his faith in a protein techno-fix convincing.”

“It’s not clear, though, why a shift in attitudes won’t lead us to increase our intake of beans, nuts and lentils instead.”

Thank you Dan Saladino, especially for that final “Nevertheless ...”