Notices by Betsy. (a muffin). (betsythemuffin@wandering.shop)

@simsa03 I think it depends on how you define the "climate movement." I for example DO consider myself an environmental advocate. When I point out that simplistic models of decarbonization and defossilization are inadequate, or that naive solutions will hurt the already-downtrodden, it is a call to do the harder work of a REAL solution, not a capitulation to the idea that someone has to be screwed over.

One thing I struggle with, with regard to leftist/pop-leftist approaches to environmentalism, is:

Our modern medical supply chain is dependent on fossil fuels to a boggling extent. Single-use sterile items; packaging for same; pharmaceutical precursors; etc. Obviously, defossilization of these supply chains is mandated --

but it's a hard problem. There are no quick or absolute fixes. So when I hear "just shut it down," I hear "my disabled brother is an acceptable casualty."

feel like I'm leveling up as a chemist; starting to develop an instinctive cringe response when I see more than 2 nitrogens in the same molecule

"Predict the major product from reacting ethylene oxide with sodium azide:"

Look, textbook, I know the answer you're looking for is an ethoxide with some bonus nitrogens, but the actual answer is obviously going to involve explosive side reactions, so what if we just didn't.

(For the uninitiated, azides are three nitrogens hangin' out in a little explosive clump; ethylene oxide is stable in isolation but *reactive af.*)

Obsidian user friends:

I'm experimenting with using Obsidian for composition, but am running into trouble on an odd triviality. I am used to using [bracketed placeholders] heavily while drafting, but of course brackets are reserved in markdown. What lightweight typographic conventions do folks use for this purpose?

Legal question:

When Musk nerfed Starlink to aid Russia's invasion of a US ally, did that fall somewhere on the "treason" spectrum?

And if so, where? "Acting as an unregistered foreign agent" or something else?

CDC is likely to only approve fall XBB boosters for the elderly and immunocompromised.

Not the general public. Not even those in other risk groups.

Please leave a public comment encouraging boosters for all. The comment period closes FRIDAY.

https://www.regulations.gov/document/CDC-2023-0060-0001

@inthehands one thing I think about a lot too is…

A lot of folks who love STEM fields love them for their beauty first and their practicality second. And sometimes — certainly in my case — there’s an acute sadness when encountering folks with bad early math educations that fucked them out of seeing beauty in the sciences.

The usual framing of STEM vs humanities misses out on that dynamic, at best, and at worst uncritically adopts a framing that only the humanities have beauty…

@inthehands AFAIK, MBA programs and undergrad-level business majors are doing pretty different things at the classroom level, also.

I may be permanently scarred by the intro-level information systems management textbook that devoted a whole chapter to why you wanted to insist on low-cost technologies that solved business needs, and another chapter to rating various countries' outsourcing potential by relative English proficiency and programmer cost.

@inthehands Thinking of a tweet from a little while ago, something like: "forget humanities vs STEM, let's unite against our common enemy: business majors."

When people hear "tech" they think "the SaaS industry."

This frame narrows the vision of "tech critics." To quote LeGuin, "to oppose something is to maintain it." Why do we keep centering billionaires' fully-automated-class-warfare fantasies?

How does our vision for the future change if we dismiss GPT and crypto as *boring* and think about the (technical) challenges of solar scale-out, of true plastics recycling, of pandemic-control ventilation?