Criticising the likes of Bill Gates and his infernal foundation shouldn’t be that controversial a move on the left, yet it suddenly feels a bit dangerous, as if it aligns the critic with dumbass right-wing conspiracy theories about vaccine nanobots or suchlike against the supposedly scientific certainties of technocratic governance.

Chris Smaje, on the money. Again.

On this day, 17 years ago, I linked to an article by James Hansen about the urgency of taking climate change seriously. We are still not taking it seriously.

In other words, there’s no sign of an energy transition out of fossils yet.

Just in case you were feeling optimistic because energy from solar increased by 24% last year ...

All very nicely put.

Fascinating and informative article, not so much about Reddit -- which I use sporadically -- as about the reality of life before the State really got going. This kind of content makes the "real" internet so much better for me. thanks to @martymcgui.re for the link.

”But what is the price of letting egomaniacs ruin unique little businesses, destroy trust, mistreat workers, mistreat society, and break apart core democratic values? Or letting them dictate politics in even the slightest way? Or even working for them for free as all users are, but also moderators on Reddit — providing all the valuable content for “their” platforms?”

A real eye-opener, for me.

One of the very best editions of one of the very best newsletters.

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.