Notices by Jonathan Schofield (urlyman@mastodon.social), page 4

In which @ntnsndr, in conversation with David Bollier – https://overcast.fm/+YVzymNQfY – does that thing where someone points out a dynamic that should be obvious, but it needs that someone to point it out to you:

Namely, that the client-server model of online infrastructure is inherently antithetical to democratic governance.

In our online lives, “we are in some sense being trained *out of* the democratic practices that have been so essential to practices of political democracies”

“in the 4 years of the [Balkan] war, the international community stood by as Bosnian Muslims were decimated. But these were, primarily, acts of omission. The West did not arm Republika Srpska with its best bombs. Bill Clinton did not fly in to hug Milošević. The slaughter was not accompanied by the constant refrain ‘the Serbian nationalists have the right to defend themselves’.

What we are seeing now [in Palestine] might be the first advanced late capitalist genocide.”
https://birds.town/@lycophidion/112239782903252868

Wonder to what extent battery life is impacted by the metric fk tonne of JavaScript we’re pouring over everything?

@liztai it looks like a container ship? Their weight is off the scale. And I imagine the bridge pillars are engineered for downward stress but very much not massive sideways stress

@liztai watching the vehicles drive over as the moment of impact nears is horrifying https://defcon.social/@SomaFMrusty/112161316200529463

Here, adapted, is the précis I created for the Twitter audience back in 2020:

“This is from pre-COVID times but highly relevant to the court of public opinion when it comes to cars and driving.

Jonas explains that Stockholm, a city of islands and about 976k people, has traffic constrained by 8 narrow bridges.

That’s about 122k people per bridge.

Portsmouth has 3 ‘bridges’. That’s about 72,000 people per bridge…

That screenshot is from a Twitter account I ran for the Portsmouth #activetravel campaign, Pompey Street Space, back in 2020 when, with COVID knocking us all sideways, the prospects for change were tantalising.

At the time, Grant Shapps and Robert Jenrick of all people, were tentative cheerleaders for emergency transport policies.

It wasn’t to be, of course. They would revert to being exactly who they have always been.

Anyway, the Stockholm traffic story is from here https://youtu.be/CX_Krxq5eUI?si=me_1uNc7u8joeGHj

As a UK election nears (ish), and Tories scramble to be “on the side of drivers”, a reminder that people don’t know what’s good for them ahead of positive change, but then are convinced after the fact that they did know all along

…“When Stockholm introduced a low congestion charge for the bridges, traffic dropped by 20%.

Doesn’t sound like much, but because traffic is a non-linear phenomenon, the difference in congestion was marked

The bell curve of ‘not extreme’ is full of bell ends

Reminder that

slavery abolitionists were ‘extremist’,
suffragettes were ‘extremist’,
the trade union movement was ‘extremist’,
civil rights campaigners were ‘extremist’,
anti-apartheid activists were ‘extremist’

@aral @cferdinandi if countries build decades of foreign policy (in the UK’s case over a century) on doing all kinds of fkery to keep the economic windpipe to an energy jackpot open, while saying it’s *only* about something else, eventually the cognitive dissonance fractures everything https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/111754210396689587

@Brendanjones our tech masters are airheads https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/111906676412813181

@Brendanjones this is also very very good https://overcast.fm/+nh1BvrAG8

January is nearly at a close but it’s not too late to plug @kathhayhoe’s 3 resolutions for 2024:

1. Quoting Ed Maibach:
“Discuss your support for climate solutions more frequently with your family, friends, neighbors and co-workers. Doing so is good for you, them, and the climate.” 💬

2. Look at where you bank 🏦

3. Try out some new plant-based recipes 🥬

https://www.talkingclimate.ca/p/can-2023s-climate-catastrophes-trigger

#change

@JackTheCat yep https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/nov/16/firms-agree-scotland-to-england-renewable-energy-superhighway

(an Englishman in Portsmouth)

https://overcast.fm/+nh1BkaZZ4 is a wonderfully clear walk through of Modern Monetary Theory from Steven Hail, interviewed by @PlanetCritical.

It embeds MMT within ecological economics more clearly than my previous exposure to the theory.

Key takeaways:

1. Your (sovereign currency) government doesn’t need your money; it needs you to need its money.

2. A currency-issuing government with low foreign-currency-denominated debt can *always* afford anything that *it has the resources to produce*

Balochistan:

Guess who negotiated the Iran-Pakistan border (Pakistan was India at the time)? The British https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Pakistan_border

Guess who negotiated the Afghanistan-Pakistan border (the Durand line)? The British
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durand_Line

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The UK: never not fkn up places we have no clue about

#climateDiary
We’ve constructed a culture which venerates something we’ve made up – money – and ignores something we’re made of – carbon.

Which makes us less intelligent than frogs.

- - -

“As the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water. If the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so.”

https://archive-srel.uga.edu/outreach/ecoviews/ecoview071223.htm

“Seeing money as the solution to all our problems is a form of capitalist gaslighting.

View the world through money goggles, and they filter out all the non-financial wavelengths. All problems appear as Money Problems. All solutions appear as Money Solutions.

…

If three decades of financial tinkering has resulted in more CO2, it’s delusional to gamble our future on marginally better tinkering.”

#climateCrisis