“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 ...”

I dunno, maybe an underground garden (blog) isn’t such a bad idea. Maybe, in the scorching heat of social media we need a cooler, darker space for connections and discussion. Where things grow more slowly but still bear fruit 25 years later.

Makes sense to me

Very provocative, although I’m not sure I could cope.

Really interesting essay from Tom Armitage, about getting on his bike and getting on. The thrill of those first long rides takes me right back to my first London to Brighton and the sheer unalloyed joy of whooshing down into the town.

“should you ever find yourself in a similar situation, I would advise finding a different situation”

Useful advice, in any situation.

“White people are Schrodinger’s Race, simultaneously a beautiful, master race of supreme vitality and a weak, declining, impotent force, forever sinking beneath a dusky wave.”

[T]he simplest drop-in replacement for a feed is a “recently updated” list. Instead of a list of posts, have a list of users who have posted recently. This neatly solves both the problem of prolific posters drowning out quiet ones and the problem of decontextualization, while being simple and easy to understand.

Interesting article, raising clearly the point that because a ZK needs time to accumulate enough ideas and connections to be interesting, a lot of the recent enthusiasm has not yet reached that sort of maturity.

Not that it matters to me any more ...

“I have not seen the book and read the whole book. I read the reviews.” The only item on the meeting’s agenda was what to do about Maus, and this board member had not bothered to glance at it.

Sums up the arguments pretty well, but then, I do agree completely.

Physicists are more playful and less hidebound creatures than, say, biologists—partly, no doubt, because they rarely have to contend with religious fundamentalists challenging the laws of physics. They are the poets of the scientific world.

Evolutionary psychologists claim they can explain—as the title of one recent book has it—“why sex is fun.” What they can’t explain is why fun is fun. This could.

Does the value recovered outweigh the cost of investigating these cases? From a simple dollar-for-dollar amount, certainly not. However, the existence of a rigorous investigations team helps deter staff and partner fraud.

I wasn't affected by the somewhat scuzzy email sent out by chumps at Princeton to "research" internet privacy regulations, but I was prompted by Ton's investigation to take a look at Tranco. And blow me if I'm not also in there. One of the compensations of being an old blogger.

Among the many fascinating charts that 538 selected from this year, this is the one I found most informative.

This morning, I had occasion to revisit this post from 2005. Never mind about Google Base, I'm still tickled by Paul Ford's account of his encounter with Business 2.0. Never mind about Business 2.0 too.

I'm still, at heart, both a coward and a pessimist.

Making tentative steps towards implementing an IndieWeb social reader and so reading up what other people have done and how they are using these ideas.

[S]o many people in the world today lack the opportunity, knowledge and skill to provide even the most basic perquisites of daily life, and I believe this is a silent pathology that eats at contemporary society.

Yup.

I'm pretty sure nothing much has changed in the intervening 28 years.

Thomas PM Barnett seems to be building a combination personal search engine and Zettelkasten called InfoSquirrel and plans to sell it as a service. I doubt I will ever be able to afford it, but it does look interesting and I certainly wish him well.

Always readable.

Thought for the Day

The unspeakable depression of lighting the fires every morning with papers of a year ago, and getting glimpses of optimistic headlines as they go up in smoke.

[W]hile it’s feasible to wander around a smallholding with a trug looking for apples to feed two pigs, it probably isn’t feasible to wander around a largeholding with a trug looking for apples to feed two hundred or two thousand pigs. So there are diseconomies of large scale to the ecological efficiency of the farm’s unbidden bounty.

That doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile

Very interesting long essay about what it is to be unseen, unheard and yet vital. But that professional podcast world? Awful.