Notices by Jonathan Schofield (urlyman@mastodon.social)

@FediThing

It’s been that way for a long time, by design: https://www.wired.com/story/the-toxic-potential-of-youtubes-feedback-loop/

@cwebber

Qatari airspace
https://mstdn.chrisalemany.ca/@chris/114733621406707994

…Took me a while to re-find this. In mid-2022, CBS Sunday Morning published an excellent 6-minute video called

‘Meet the Fossils’: Ancient life that powers our world

It was written and narrated by Robert Krulwich, and is based on the work of @aatish. The animation was directed and designed by Nate Milton, with music by Buck St. Thomas.

https://youtu.be/SNYxy2rY7fA?t=16

…Apparently, in 2018 there were about 13.4 million commercial flight hours per year: https://web.mit.edu/airlinedata/www/2018%2012%20Month%20Documents/Aircraft%20and%20Related/Total%20Fleet/Total%20Aircraft%20Airborne%20Hours%20-%20ALL%20AIRCRAFT.htm

So that’s about 36.7k flight hours per day.

At 10k litres of kerosene per hour, that’s 367 million litres of a one-time hydrocarbon jackpot pissed into the air each day, never to be seen again.

Totally normal

…Otherwise, just a normal ~100,000 daily flights worldwide, burning > 10,000 litres of kerosene per hour each, in an era of carbon overshoot
🙄

…Here are some highlights (lowlights):

“If you drop all that old life into the container that we call Earth, and burn them, it turns out that what we burn in *1 year* weighs 100x more than everything alive today.

Everything. All the whales, elephants, forests, insects, grass, crops, birds, fish, people, dogs and cats. Add up all the carbon in everything alive now, and still, in one year we burn a hundred times more.”

Update: see the numbers in the thread below

#climateDiary

The promise of web search *was* making content and competing to get search platforms to send people your way.

The future of web search is people mistakenly thinking that’s still the game and instead competing to have search platforms steal it, remix it, and *not* send people your way.

Or at least, send them in such tiny numbers *relative to search impressions* that it will have been better to play a different game entirely

Palantir were one of the most prominent sponsors of Trump’s parade.

And “around a quarter of Palantir’s global workforce are now based in London, helping the government on policing, military contracts – and, crucially, working deep inside the NHS”.

Mandelson, the UK Ambassador in Washington has “long been a vocal supporter of Palantir”

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/health/2025/03/palantir-problem-nhs-andrew-marr

…Portsmouth Historic Dockyard is an *excellent* visitor attraction.

And it costs a fortune to maintain HMS Victory, HMS Warrior, M33, the historic buildings, and soon the Royal Marines Museum. (The Mary Rose Museum is its own separate business, I think.)

It’s a shame it feels it has to scrounge from gurning fascists

Such a noble enterprise, selling the fashioning of old decimated forests, used in HMS Victory, into stocks for exclusive guns, for the spoilt child of Despotus, so Donny Junior can go shoot species whose very existence is precarious.

Portsmouth Historic Dockyard indulging in the arse licking of dick swingers – and the arse licking of arse lickers (Farage) of dick swingers – as the means of sustaining the ‘authentic’ historic experience.

What a Victory :/

https://www.johnrigbyandco.com/john-rigby-co-celebrates-250-years-of-british-gunmaking-aboard-historic-warships/

Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has made €228bn from countries sanctioning its fossil fuel exports, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (@CREACleanAir).

“The lion’s share of that amount, €209bn, came from EU member states.”

That’s about €460 per EU citizen https://mastodon.social/@rvps2001/114595092042017302

@modulux One of the things I understand AI is very good at is cleaning ‘dirty’ data and finding links between disparate datasets. It’s only a matter of time before privacy is effectively dead precisely because of AI. Which doesn’t bode well https://overcast.fm/+HiEapwxUk

@helveticablanc

@modulux we found out in the 1940s what happens when we collect excessive data. And now politics is turning rightwards again. I guess we learned nothing https://bowdoinorient.com/2022/09/30/dr-carissa-veliz-lectures-on-the-ethics-of-data-sharing-cites-privacy-concerns-through-history/

@helveticablanc

It’s important to report what Netanyahu has said in response to the statements from France, the UK and Canada, but it’s vital to put it in context.

This morning the BBC World Service failed to do this. It played his statement in full, with all its distortions and delusions and left it uncommented.

Not good enough

@cy no doubt. Getting longer every day

…In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote discovered the greenhouse effect of “carbonic air” (CO2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_Newton_Foote

And by then, Britain had about 200 years of systematically pumping CO2 into the air from coal use https://www.cumbria-industries.org.uk/a-z-of-industries/coal/

The very next year, in 1857, “the world’s first systematic oil refinery began operation in Ploiesti” https://www.rferl.org/a/romania-oil/31510946.html

Guess which won out: the availability of a one-time energy jackpot or precaution informed by earth sciences?

Clearly we’re not ready to do this and there are no signs that we have any collective enthusiasm for becoming ready.

And that has grave consequences https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/114533157237620518

So you want to upgrade from a recent iPhone to the new one? You don’t need it. Consumerism is killing us. And you’re the mark

In 2021, the Guardian covered the chip industry’s dirty #climatecrisis secret – https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/18/semiconductor-silicon-chips-carbon-footprint-climate – its huge and growing carbon footprint, and that article touched on Taiwan’s on-going drought…

I caught this episode of #allconsuming on microchips yesterday https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001qg04?

I learned quite a bit of detail on the profligate use of water in #chipfab, but the underlying sentiment is that the programme is not really serious about the unsustainability of digital tech.

One of the recurring phrases is “better for the environment” which really just means *less worse*