Notices by Jack of all trades (jackofalltrades@mas.to), page 2

"Lin’s mother was informed of her death two days later when CCP officials handed her a bill for the bullet used in Lin’s execution."

Goddamn, that's cruel.

https://alphahistory.com/chineserevolution/lin-zhao/

#China #history #communism

"""
The destruction of the planet isn't a mistake, isn't a misunderstanding, isn't an accident. It's largely a deliberate process driven by economics and the material reality of the society we live in. Everything that we produce and consume in an industrial civilization is dependent upon the destruction of the planet.
"""
-- Max Wilbert

#ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #environmentalism #collapse #ClimateDiary

Amazing that this exists:

https://archive.org/details/MagicTheGathering2010Edition

Abandonware made functional on modern systems by hobbyists and freely available on archive.org.

I remember playing this game a lot in my teens. Installed it a few days ago and I'm hooked again.

#mtg #magicthegathering #videogames

"""
Repressive power forces us to do what we don't want to do. Normalizing power, on the other hand, makes us want to do what we have to do anyway. It turns us into people who automatically, by their own will, do what society wishes them to do.

The need to apply [repressive] power implies a failure. A boss who has to threaten employees is not really in control. A boss who is really in control is obeyed without the need for threats.
"""

https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=keLnKbmrW5g

"There cannot be relations of power unless the subjects are free... If there are relations of power throughout every social field it is because there is freedom everywhere." -- Michel Foucault

https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=tTJNOEvCQFY

#philosophy #Foucault #power

I learned a fascinating fact the other day.

It is estimated that during the Roman Empire 20% to 30% of Italy's population were slaves. For the empire as a whole that share was between 10% and 15%.

In these times, even modest Roman households might expect to own two or three slaves.

1/13

Today our global economy does not depend on slavery (albeit it has not been completely eradicated), but has a different, and more invisible, dependence.

Buckminster Fuller called it "energy slaves", to describe a dependence on mostly fossil energy, expressed in energy equivalent of work done by a human worker.

2/13

Take a look at this photo.

In 1860 it took two strong men to carry the rich lady around.

The smallest cars today have about 70 horsepower engines, which is comparable to 200 (yes, two hundred) athletes pushing the car.

4/13

Here's the surprising part:

In our modern economy every human worker is complemented by about a hundred non-human "energy slaves".

This means that in our modern world the energy slaves do ~99% of the work in our economy.

3/13

Another example: a single round-trip transatlantic flight requires more energy per passenger than the passenger can generate with their own muscles over their *entire* life.

5/13

Tom Murphy calls our industrial civilization "a fireworks show, or a giant party", while fossil fuels and minerals are a "one-time inheritance".

Our energy use is unprecedented in human history. Nothing drives this point home better than this little chart, showing the "carbon pulse".

8/13

Humans always used exogenous energy, i.e. energy from outside of their body. Warming near a campfire or using oxen to pull a plow are all examples of that.

What's different today is that we tapped into ancient sunlight energy in the form of coal, oil and gas.

This energy was captured and condensed over millions of years, and we're burning through it in a span of just a few hundred years.

7/13

We take these energy slaves for granted in our daily lives. They carry us around, heat our meals, pump water to our homes, clothe us, do the cleaning and washing, delivering our messages (including this one), and so on.

6/13

https://mas.to/@jackofalltrades/110305772115183897

😔

@rgarner

"""
Thousands of schools in the Philippines have stopped in-person classes due to unbearable heat. In Indonesia, prolonged dry weather has caused rice prices to soar. In Thailand’s waters, temperatures are so high that scientists fear coral could be destroyed.

In Vietnam, water levels were so low in canals earlier this year that farmers in some areas reportedly struggled to transport their crops.
"""

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/04/schools-close-and-crops-wither-as-historic-heatwave-hits-south-east-asia

#ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateDiary

Some amazing photos of human impact on Earth

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2024/03/29/1241234103/anthropocene-era-photos-earth-human-scars-planet

#anthropocene #photography #oil #PalmOil #Kenya #Nigeria #Texas #Borneo

This line of thinking is not limited to CEOs, mind you. This concerns us all.

The concept of "energy slaves" is very helpful in understanding this: https://mas.to/@jackofalltrades/110425979680740513

Also, mainstream economics will be quite useless in the upcoming collapse. As they say, you can't eat money, and neither you can fuel the machinery with it.

As Steve Keen puts it: "Labor without energy is a corpse. Capital without energy is a sculpture."

With the era of abundance ending it no longer will be easy to substitute or import what we lack. A new economic paradigm will be necessary.

#economics #collapse #scarcity

Wow, look at the scale of this solar park.

"""
According to China’s National Energy Administration (NEA), the country increased its solar capacity by 216.9 GW last year, eclipsing its record of 87.4 GW from the previous year, reported Bloomberg. That’s more than the U.S. total of 175.2 GW, estimates by BloombergNEF said.
"""

https://www.ecowatch.com/china-new-solar-capacity-2023.html

#solar #China

‘Fascinating and troubling’: Australians would rather save a single human life than prevent an entire species from becoming extinct

https://theconversation.com/fascinating-and-troubling-australians-would-rather-save-a-single-human-life-than-prevent-an-entire-species-from-becoming-extinct-222161

#ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Australia