Notices tagged with infrastructure, page 6
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 30-Aug-2023 08:17:15 JST 
simsa03
Dharna Noor, "Blow to Biden as offshore wind auction in Gulf of Mexico fails to stir interest" https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/29/us-offshore-wind-lease-sale-gulf-of-mexico
«Several factors may have put a damper on developer interest, the newsletter Heatmap reported last week. Gulf wind speeds are often lower than other coastal areas’, requiring the use of specific turbines for which a robust supply chain must be developed. No Gulf states’ energy policies specifically require the use of offshore wind. And analysts say building out offshore wind in the Gulf will be more expensive than in the north-east, making it harder for wind projects to compete in local energy markets, where existing energy prices are lower.»
#renewables #peakrenewables #infrastructure -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 28-Aug-2023 08:38:18 JST
simsa03
The older I become the less I view #capitalism as a terrifying idea. Wondering why that is so I ponder to acknowledge my becoming reactionary due to age as a factor, and indeed there may be some justification in this. But I guess the main reason why I and my former, younger, self disagree on capitalism's nature and value is that today I see far less its negative impacts than I did when I was younger.
It circles around the old saying that was en vogue the past 50 years that there cannot be infinite growth on a finite planet. I don't want to bring decoupling into play, the suggestion that somehow and magically the old correlation of resource consumption and GDP growth ceases to be valid and instead "the" "world" being the finite place that it presumably is, can stay "finite" whereas the "growth" of GDP can continue all along. There seem to be anecdotal evidence in favour and against this but I am not sure how to judge these.
Rather, I think the question whether there "really is" (or "can be") a decoupling of resource consumption and GDP growth is not the relevant issue. With one exception, though. Given our weak ability to forecast resource needs in future developments, the rise and fall of future trends, as well as the possible progress in health care, environmental care, cultural care, the question really no longer is one of "do resources keep being enough for future GDP progress" but rather (or: at most) "what resources may we need in case we have this or that need, including GDP progress?" That is, even as a species, on a collective level (in contrast to all of us pondering indivdually), I don't think we can manage to have a sense of, an understanding of the finiteness of resources and their correlation to whatever needs we may accrue. That is: Even after all the extraction and exploitation, we do not have any sense or feeling how much is left and how much is already spent.
The idea of earth being a closet or a pantry from which we blindfoldedly take out stuff without knowing what's still left inside is a double-edged sword. It can yield to the panic that all is consumed in the near future and man-ape will starve to death, as to the confidence that whatever the ape does, there'll be still plenty of stuff remaining.
Timelessness is not infinity. These are different concepts, although they share some characteristics. I guess the same holds for our sense of finiteness on a global scale. Like there may be an infinite line of points in time whose infinity is not relevant to the feeling of indefinite timelessness at any given point on the infinite axis, so even a (near) infinte amount of material resources doesn't tell us anything about scarcity and abundance in the availability of these resources at any given point in time. And as much as the talk about the infinity of time doesn't tell us anything about the timelessness at any possibly given moment on that axis, the same seems to hold with regard to amount of material resources and the sense of plenty or starvation. That is: Even if the material resources on the planet are finite, that doesn't say much about their availability in connection with determinate procedures of extraction, processing, and crafting into products to enhance GDP.
This does *not* say that the human ape can produce, pollute, and consume willy-nilly as much as he likes without regard to present and future environments. But it suggests that there is a fuzziness, a blur when it comes to us extracting, producing, pulluting, and consuming stuff. We have no sense, or understanding, when some borders may be reached or crossed. The slogan "no infinite growth on a finite planet" is thus an expression of the cautionary principle, but not much else.
But if we do not have a sense of how much "we already consumed", then the capitalist creed of expanding GDP is not something that is bound (or that we can bind) to material limits but to moral ones. And then some may prefer to extract even more while others don't. But if that is the case, then capitalism loses one of its main negative attributes: that it somehow destroys the foundation on which it is based to prosper. Not because it somehow doesn't do that (we cannot sense that either) but because – above some levels of generalisation – cannot make sense of the alleged finiteness of the world. And if we cannot sense either way, then we cannot determine whether capitalism is indeed that different from anything that nature purportedly does in her circles of exchanges.
It is along those lines that I came to find capitalism less frightening than when I was younger. And the main reason for that (as with regard to #hope) is that coming to age means getting a feeling for (or developing a sense of) the world and one's own fears and delights as being quite different issues. Which means that the world can now not only appear but *be* far larger than my individual fears and delights may have permitted me and her to be.
#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten #resources #infrastructure #energy -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Aug-2023 22:50:26 JST
simsa03
Car traffic expanded in the U.S. cities from the 1920s onwnwards. Before that, the road system and #infrastructure wasn't fit for this mode of #transportation, not to forget the poor safety standard of cars, etc. Cf. https://blogs.loc.gov/maps/2022/08/paving-the-way-traffic-flow-maps-from-the-1920s/
Both, cars and horse-drawn carriages, had their peak at different times. -
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Atlas Obcsura (atlas@libranet.de)'s status on Wednesday, 09-Aug-2023 01:18:11 JST 
Atlas Obcsura
This perplexing abandoned housing development is part ghost town, part fairy tale.#architecture #architecturaloddities #infrastructure #houses #abandoned #castles #fairytales #ghosttowns #podcast #section-Articles
Podcast: Burj Al Babas -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 29-Jul-2023 23:29:31 JST
simsa03
Batteries are prone to ignite and incinerate. Are there any studies on the insurance risks of large scale storage batteries necessary for the back-up of renewable energy? As they so essential for grid stability, can they be insured at all? How does that impact electricity prices?
#energy #infrastructure #renewables #peakrenewables #batteries -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Jul-2023 00:25:56 JST
simsa03
What I wrote 2 years back with regard to environmental crises and the weakening of the Gulf Stream seems to hold true today:
"Due to immutability of infrastructures; complexities of problem cascades; rivalries of antagonistic state-players; lack of time, there's nothing the average person can do.
The underlying problem is: When you can easily spot these issues then it's already way too late.
And when decades ago people pointed to these issues and they weren't easily observable, most didn't believe them. So one couldn't have effectively done something about these issues back then either.
In fact, the last moment we could have averted this outcome was at the beginning of the 1960s (!) — by creating a different #infrastructure. All we do now will not change what will be our common reality for the next 30-50 years." -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 24-Jul-2023 00:13:50 JST
simsa03
Seems like the term "humanities" is somewhat outdated nowadays (without rebuking the general trend). That "media and cultural studies" lead one into unemployment is of no surprise, but civil engineering? That was astonishing to me. Even if the housing market wasn't putting up demand, the maintenance of #infrastructure still would, wouldn't it? But perhaps the U.K. is too deep into economic stagnation to have money left for that. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 14-Jul-2023 00:54:45 JST
simsa03
Talking about "reducing the demand for FF" is ridiculous in at least four ways:
a) It prevents states in Africa to jumpstart their economies to benefit their citizens with cheap energy systems (resources and power plants), and, via surplus value, become capable in the first place to invest in environmental protection. (Not to forget the #ecocolonialism involved in the vast green land grap in Africa.)
b) It ignores the life cycle of #energy systems because even after a new source of energy has been found and disseminated, the older energy sources keep delivering and *increase* their output. It takes roughly 60 years for a new energy source to substitute and leave behind an older one.
c) It ignores how much FF are involved in the production, the spread, and the integration of "renewable" energy systems in a given #infrastructure: From mining and processing of materials, to production and spreading of units, to the hitherto unsolved problems of recycling of these new systems (and thus "loss" of the engery invested in their production).
d) Even in the sub-sector of electricity production, relying on #renewables means relying on fossil fuels (esp. when #nuclear power is abandoned). As demand increases, #peakrenewables is already in play, only sugarcoated by high subsidies. (Germany alone will have 14,000 wind turbine units of its 30,000 onshore units decommissoned after 2026. Germany will be lucky to keep the current electricity output of the wind turbine units; it rather becomes increasingly harder and less likely that more output will be generated in the future -- at least within a market economy.)
The chatter about "reducing the demand" is the result of an individualist consumer approach, which suggests to cut back on holiday flights etc. With regard to infrastructures of whole societies, that is a mistaken approach. -
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Børge (forteller@tutoteket.no)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Jul-2023 05:11:51 JST 
Børge
Great article on the internet working for good, for once!
https://www.cnet.com/deals/amazon-prime-day-deals-for-25-dollars-or-less/
And I'm really proud that the journalist links to my text on how to make it easier for people to get around by walking and biking by improving @openstreetmap 😀
Thanks to @TheWarOnCars for sharing! #BikeTooter #Urbanism #Infrastructure #Carfree #FuckCars #BilfrittByliv
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Emeritus Prof Christopher May (chrismayla6@zirk.us)'s status on Wednesday, 28-Jun-2023 18:25:35 JST 
Emeritus Prof Christopher May
All you need to know about how rentier #capitalism works in one bit of data:
The UK's water firms were privatised without any outstanding debts over thirty years ago.... now, the privatised #infrastructure (regional) #monopolies have around £62bn in debt, but are still failing to deliver an adequate service.
If that debt has not been used to invest sufficiently in the #infrastructure, which the firms now (grudgingly) admit,, you might wonder where has it gone?
I leave that for you to guess!
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NimbleDave (nimbledave@onemorestop.photo)'s status on Friday, 19-May-2023 13:11:23 JST 
NimbleDave
The driver's seat
#train #transportation #photo #blackandwhite #infrastructure #photography #blackandwhitephoto #blackandwhitephotography -
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simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Tuesday, 16-May-2023 23:15:04 JST 
simsa04
It saddens me to see that apparently there hasn't been made any conceptional or programatic progress in the past 40 years. All the mentioned trite proposals in this articvle are revamps of endeavours already widespread and practised in the 1970s and 1980s, with the same clichês (like #indigenous people having been egalitarian, etc.). And foremost: that people and their individual behaviour changes are centrepieces and origins of "change". That attitude led to the #Esalen Ideology of self-centered spiritual self-improvement in the first place.
The most awful impact the #counterculture as well as the various other movements had since the early 1970s is that they never bridged the gap between the life of individual people and their immediate #communities on the one hand and the problems of how to change the foundations of #infrastructure, societies, and industries on the other. Not only did they deprive the #unions of at least two generations of new members (thus enabling #globalisation); as they couldn't come up with suitable proposals for industrialized societies as a whole, they became a lifestyle choice and a fad, presupposing for the viability of their daydreams the full-fledged functioning of an extractive economy and society they were out to critique and to be an alternative to in the first place.
Like decades before, #degrowth and voluntary simplicity are ideals of the young affluent petty bourgeoisie, not of the working poor. -
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simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Tuesday, 25-Apr-2023 11:42:00 JST
simsa04
An interesting booklist on "social infrastructure": https://twitter.com/SimonLennane/status/1650498637368029185
I can't say much on the books but people may find the suggestions valuable.
cc
@band @scribe @dvdmrsdn @woodbark @andrej
#sources #infrastructure -
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simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Monday, 27-Mar-2023 06:22:56 JST
simsa04
Bought this one at a bargain:
Gerold Ambrosius & Christian Henrich-Franke, Integration of Infrastructures in Europe in Historical Comparison (2015) https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-22467-1
« This book compares the cross-border integration of infrastructures in Europe such as post, telecommunication and transportation in the 19th century and the period following the Second World War. In addition to providing a unique perspective on the development of cross-border infrastructures and the international regimes regulating them, it offers the first systematic comparison of a variety of infrastructure sectors, identifies general developmental trends and supplies theoretical explanations. In this regard, integration is defined as international standardization, network building and the establishment of international organizations to regulate cross-border infrastructures. »
I'm not just interested in #infrastructure because we seem to stand at a threshold of changes from old towards new structures (some would rather call it decline and decay) but also because we can "change" "the" "world" only inasmuch as we can change infrastructures, or rather: systems of integrated and mutually depended infrastructures.
It's not (or not merely) "bad bad capitalism" but the tenacity of established infratructures that stand in the way of a fairer and more sustainable distributions of resources and access to goods and services. -
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Tiesa Meskis (tiesa@ceilidh.online)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Feb-2023 02:53:07 JST 
Tiesa Meskis
Ya know, if this #lithium deposit is so important to our #transportation #infrastructure then maybe, just maybe, we should negotiate with the #indigenous peoples that the #land was #stolen from and ask them to mine the lithium in a way that is respectful to their #ancestors
Oh, and they should get the proceeds from the sale of the lithium too.
Can the US stop #stealing stuff from indigenous peoples already?
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bikejourno (bikejourno@mastodon.cloud)'s status on Wednesday, 21-Dec-2022 21:35:39 JST 
bikejourno
Can we have a slow clap for #Japan's government? This is a breathtakingly stupid decision that will eliminate #cycling as a relevant mode of transport.
Making helmets mandatory has been proven repeatedly to lower overall bicycle use. And where there are less cyclists they are more endangered.
Do you want to make cycling safer? Than bloody invest in #infrastructure and don't come up with mandatory helmet laws. And no: that's NOT news.https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20221220/p2a/00m/0na/067000c
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simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Saturday, 17-Dec-2022 08:30:00 JST
simsa04
#infrastructure's "assertiveness" and clout is as relevant as its tenacity towards change and resilience towards attempts to alter its direction.
#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten -
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simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Thursday, 15-Dec-2022 14:01:35 JST
simsa04
I still wonder how #Russia under #Putin, Putin and his circle, and their apologists in the South and West could ever come up with the idea that NATO and "the West" were out to "encircle" and "subdue" Russia. If you want to bring down a country, you don't first engage in economic relationships with it or make yourself dependent on it in crucial areas of #infrastructure and #energy. Assuming Putin to be a rational player – a murderous one, but still – he must have clearly seen that delivery of raw materials to the West was increasing, not decreasing Russia's security. Not even a NATO membership of Ukraine and Georgia could endanger Russia given the scale of Western dependency. Thus, the Greater Russia chimera with the corresponding conspiracy idea of the West wanting to "extinguish" Russia is the fantasy of a drama queen that cannot accept that Russia is a banal and mediocre state with little else to offer than raw materials and conflict. Putin needed to concoct interrelationships of historical, existential, and religous dimensions because he seemingly couldn't accept that after 20 years in power (various positions), his only achievement had been the creation of a mafia-state for his self-enrichment. But the country itself had become a failure, and so, irrespective of his riches, he himself. (Since 2007 I would argue.) And so he started it. A genocidal war on a sovereign neighbouring state, to ease his feelings of inferiority as man and head of state. -
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Miriam Posner (miriamkp@dair-community.social)'s status on Sunday, 04-Dec-2022 00:00:34 JST 
Miriam Posner
Logistics nerds: The Advanced Semiconductor Supply Chain Dataset includes manually compiled, high-level information about the tools, materials, processes, countries, and firms involved in the production of advanced logic chips. ... It uses a wide variety of sources, such as corporate websites and disclosures, specialized market research, and industry group publications. https://eto.tech/dataset-docs/chipexplorer/ #logistics #infrastructure #criticaldata #criticallogistics
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simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Friday, 02-Dec-2022 08:31:23 JST
simsa04
Matt von Hippel, "Crucial Computer Program for Particle Physics at Risk of Obsolescence" https://www.quantamagazine.org/crucial-computer-program-for-particle-physics-at-risk-of-obsolescence-20221201/
« [I]f you want to solve the biggest equations in the world, for 33 years one program has stood out: FORM.
Developed by the Dutch particle physicist Jos Vermaseren, FORM is a key part of the infrastructure of particle physics, necessary for the hardest calculations. However, as with surprisingly many essential pieces of digital infrastructure, FORM’s maintenance rests largely on one person: Vermaseren himself. And at 73, Vermaseren has begun to step back from FORM development. Due to the incentive structure of academia, which prizes published papers, not software tools, no successor has emerged. If the situation does not change, particle physics may be forced to slow down dramatically. »
#infrastructure #maintenance
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