Notices by Jonathan Schofield (urlyman@mastodon.social)

I think I want to watch a serialised drama scripted by @selzero

$298 billion would retrofit all the UK’s homes to a good level of energy efficiency and therefore massively reduce power consumption, which would increase energy security more than building military infrastructure that depends on fossil fuels

https://theconversation.com/replacing-warships-with-drones-is-not-an-upgrade-in-capability-286507

Is it feasible to live without fossil fuel use at scale?

Yes of course. Until about 300 years ago, nearly everyone did, and there are people alive today who live like that.

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Will hundreds of millions of people born this century *have* to do so? Yes. It won’t be optional.

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Is it possible for anything like our current hyper-mobile high consumption culture to work without fossil fuels at scale?

My answer is a near certain “No”.

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Why these questions?

Well… (continues)

“Climate.us launches independent website for trusted climate information.

Built by members of the team behind NOAA’s Climate.gov, the new nonprofit resource is supported in part by more than 2,500 small donations from people who want reliable climate science information to remain accessible.”

https://www.climate.us/news-features/feed/climateus-launches-independent-website-trusted-climate-information

UK Prime Ministerial tenures since Milk-Snatcher Thatcher, approximated as lettuces

Keir Starmer
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Rishi Sunak
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Liz Truss
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Boris Johnson
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Theresa May
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David Cameron
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Gordon Brown
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Tony Blair
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John Major
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My dad, his brother and their generation of the British Empire fought heavily militarised and expansionist fascism.

But the British Empire and its American allies were racist af. Their generation and that of their parents murdered tens of millions of people with darker skins.

They subjugated the descendants of those people and co-opted them into their wars.

And then attempted to rebuild the same social structures afterwards.

We should remember that too as well as the first bit

Just had a chat with a client who was describing how ChatGPT has saved his bacon by enabling him, without technical understanding, to conjure an API-based solution to a time-constrained data transfer issue.

Our dilemma is that the tools obviously have great utility if one is prepared to ignore their costs.

And we live in a culture that is committed to ignoring its costs.

These are the FOMO meets FAFO years of LLMs
https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/112095290545697095

I’m on the fringes of a Claude-adjacent discussion. I’ve been abundantly clear that I want nothing to do with it.

It’s being considered for a thing I’ve put some prior thinking into.

Thing is, even if it works on a superficial level (or deeper), its use is antithetical to the project.

Tech continues to make me want to abandon tech

…“OpenAI alone has been valued at north of $800 bn. Anthropic, yet to produce a single year of profit, commands a valuation in the same stratosphere. These numbers need an addressable market large enough to justify them.

There is only one market that large: the global labor market.

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The financial model requires the elimination of human cost at civilizational scale. If it doesn’t do that, these companies are the most overvalued assets in the history of capitalism.”

https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory

“Last year, over half of new content on the internet was AI-generated. The humans are still there, scrolling, but the thing they’re scrolling through has become a performance staged by machines for an audience that hasn’t yet realized the show isn’t for them.”

https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory

“The researchers took data on reconstructed historical weather – a so-called hindcast – in the Atlantic Ocean over one year and used a computer model to work out optimal routes and speeds.
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On average, the energy consumption of ships taking the optimal routes would be 75% lower than those taking direct routes, the team found. Schwedt presented the results at a recent meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna.”

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2526648-wind-assisted-cargo-ships-could-more-than-halve-shipping-emissions/

The vision of #Eurovision is that genocide is fine if it’s outside European borders and a non-European genocidal nation wants to pay enough to join in

Words are not immutable boxes. We may wish for their boundaries to be protected but they cannot be.

We cannot stop ‘sick’ becoming ‘good’, or ‘oversight’ meaning to oversee and also to miss through inattention.

The job of words is to be understood *in the moment*, in a context. For their intent to be a discernible eddy in a current.

And then the current flows on by and there is no protection to be had

The vox pops about Labour people switching to Reform are bleakly fascinating. The trite assumption is that such people are racist at the root but I don’t think that’s likely for many.

What it suggests to me is *how* people arrive at their final choice matters most. The *what* that they think they’re voting for is secondary

TIL that Labour are so shocked at the drubbing that they’ve received in yesterday’s Local and Devolved elections that a whopping 5% of their Westminster MPs have declared a loss of trust in Keir Starmer.

Good to see such clarity and boldness emerging

/s

It is quite striking that even though Israel has expanded its terrorism from regional genocide and ecocide to now holding the entire world to ransom in pursuit of its plans for Greater Israel – a chokehold which threatens the viability of European societies – the European Council of the European Union cannot bring itself to say anything by way of admonishment except “deep concern” about the death penalty.

Here’s the Council’s press statements filtered by “Israel”:
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/

“The IDF, the world’s leading killer of journalists, was blocking rescue operations.”

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:evgc4ukadedre3gwsiwygkpz/post/3mk4dbingv22m

#Eurovision

It’s been clear for a couple of years, but in 2026 it is especially clear that in supporting Israel’s entry to its contest, #Eurovision is an enabler of terrorism https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yvn036evlo

…The strong implication above is that lithium extraction is fine and just a part of a “transition that must happen as quickly as it can”.

The reality is more uncomfortable.

Renewables (rebuildables) are much more metals intensive than fossil fuels and nuclear. Which, if we are as strategically inattentive as we currently are, carries in it the seeds of its own downfall

https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116351244625787731

This Renew Economy article does a good job of deconstructing the disinformation around cobalt and renewables, pointing out that…

“Nearly every big battery installed in Australia these days uses lithium iron phosphate chemistry, which means no cobalt, and no nickel”

and that…

“cobalt has been used widely in many industries”

…which long predate the current boom for rebuildables.

But it contains a kind of disinformation of its own by omission…

https://reneweconomy.com.au/wild-attack-on-batteries-and-renewables-by-7s-spotlight-program-falls-over-at-the-first-fact-check/