Notices by Jonathan Schofield (urlyman@mastodon.social)

Fuck scaling to match Twitter.
Scale is the problem

Missed opportunities:

The UK has ~30 million dwellings.

I read a while back that the average cost of fully retrofitting a UK home with insulation, heat pump and solar is of the order of £20k.

If that’s right the cost of retrofitting every UK home is in the region of £600 bn.

Funnily enough, that’s roughly the investment gap since 2008 relative to the level that Nicholas Stern said should be invested in decarbonisation.

And instead Labour are investing £0.9 bn per year in CCS

#climateDiary

So many people are really algorithmically addled

…Convenience:

Us humans under capitalism are really astonishingly bad at considering and weighing downstream effects.

If something is convenient – ie it brings us something easily – we’re all in, even if it brings us a world of pain later.

Which is a round about way of me acknowledging a new appreciation for the semantics within the film title

“An Inconvenient Truth”

…With hindsight I realise that I was algorithmically addled until about 15 months ago when I started investing in properly being here.

Mastodon’s greatest gift to digital culture is as a window for people to deprogramme themselves from being constantly manipulated. But it seems a conundrum that those with the greatest need of that are not here

…The general vibe of capitalism is increasingly the expectation that one can get substantially something for relatively nothing

@ekis Ha! What’s ‘special’ about the ‘special’ relationship is shale oil

@rgarner prescience is a thankless gift

@aral

This might be the stupidest sentence I read today, but it’s not 9am yet.

It’s by Keir Starmer:

“Both artificial intelligence and the creative industries – which include news media – are central to this government’s driving mission on economic growth.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/28/keir-starmer-journalism-lifeblood-british-democracy-labour

What’s behind “Spain’s historic flooding” asks the headline.

“Human-caused climate change” is the implied answer. But not really stated unequivocally. Because we can’t be sure, right?

And what’s behind climate change? Well, we can’t get into that because we can’t look. Because that would scare the horses and then where would we be.

So on we go, not looking

#climateDiary

https://www.axios.com/2024/11/04/spain-floods-valencia-climate-change

As Valencia prepares itself for more rain https://mastodon.energy/@Sustainable2050/113417885855937114

the rest of us would do well to understand that we are *daily* pushing ourselves outside what Johan Rockström calls “the corridor of life” – the geological ribbon of the Holocene in which human civilisation has been possible.

The graphic below shows the 14°C average that climate scientists use as the ‘zero’ baseline of the last 3 million years. The Holocene has been within +/- 0.5°C of that.

Until now, when we are +1.45°C

…I also learned that it’s estimated that only 2.6% of the victims of Storm Helene have flood insurance 😢

Reasons not to use LinkedIn:

Musk is probably understood by close to everyone on Mastodon as being a malign force. This is not news.

But listening to the latest episode of the Breeakdown I learned from Waleed Shahid that, as well as crypto bros, the co-founder and Chair of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, are actively throwing vast amounts of money at not only ensuring that no-one like The Squad ever gets elected to Congress, but also trying to unseat them

https://overcast.fm/+BI40oGPMOA

@aral I do that consciously. It’s become a habit. I’m not sure why. It makes me feel like I said ‘fuck’ without actually saying it

Got some offshore capital stuffed in a *British* tax haven to invest, but only on terms that fk over UK people some more?

Get Rubber Stamp Boy to give it the green light.

Got a deranged right wing ethnic cleanser that needs carte blanche to bomb 5 other countries in the last year and counting?

Get Rubber Stamp Boy to parrot whatever armourer Uncle Sam says

Starmer is exactly the kind of prick it was abundantly clear he would be as PM. Well done everyone

@pettter I would love degrowth to be possible as an actual strategy at the level of the state.

My fear is that that is thermodynamically improbable https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/112500670860562086

But on the level of individuals (in WEIRD states) it is not only possible but *vital*, and that can only make new possibilities more legible https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/113338897455453605

@ChrisMayLA6

A small indicator of the level of semantic understanding and accuracy of LLMs:

the number of times autocorrect invokes “it’s” when it should be “its”.

Now imagine that manner of ‘understanding’ being applied to, say, whether you should be considered for an interview or whether your face matches a criminal suspect

#AI

…the image above is drawn from this article about Spruce Pine being flooded
https://www.opb.org/article/2024/09/30/spruce-pine-just-got-hit-by-helene-the-fallout-on-the-tech-industry-could-be-huge/

#climateDiary
Let 6 minutes of James Meadway’s Macrodose (from 1:30 minutes to 7:30) eloquently walk you through how

“Our wildly complex industrial capitalist economy, developed over the last 200 years, and refined – as in the semiconductor supply chain – into systems of exceptional complexity, was built for times of environmental stability and abundant resources. Those times are now coming to an end.“

https://overcast.fm/+8dw9eN_jY